Accelerazione

My book is finally out! (Well, it dropped at the end of last month, but it has been a hectic past couple of weeks, so I’m just now getting around to making the blog announcment).

It’s only availabe in Italian at the moment—there is an English edition that should come someday, but when that someday will be hasn’t be nailed down quite yet.

In the meantime, Nero on Theory has published on their website a portion of the chapter on cyberpunk: “From Dreamachine to Cyberpunk”. I’m happy that this is the bit they chose; a zig-zagging back and forth from the Decorder film to Burroughs to proto-cybernetic brain research to William Gibson to Krautrock, this chapter was both the most fun to write and also structured differently from the rest of the book, which stays more in a linear (micro)historical mode. Check it out!

The always-great Enrico Monacelli has also written a review of the book at Dinamopress: “The Gloomy Chaos of the 2000s: On ‘Acceleration’ by Edmund Berger”.

Berger’s book is, in other words, an anti-dialectical chain of dirty enthusiasms, of desperate joys dedicated to all the turmoil consumed in the miasma of counter-revolution and stagnation, taken as such and without their failure or, worse, their reactionary turn diminishes or reinforces their liberating effect. Accelerazione is a love letter written in tears, dedicated to the flashes and enthusiasms extinguished by boredom, boredom and the evil infinity of a stagnant world.