Psychotic Accelerationism

Instructor: Maks Valenčič Date & Time: January 10, 17, 24, 31 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: Accelerationist philosophy still lacks a proper grounding and systematization of its key concepts such as the Outside, intensification, and acceleration itself. The project of Psychotic Acceleration contends that this grounding can be achieved by synthesizing Lacanian psychoanalysis with Nick Land’s accelerationist thought. Its central claim is that the register of psychosis is the register of acceleration. In other words, the psychotic register—one of the three possible positions a subject can occupy in relation to the Other—provides the structure within which key accelerationist concepts can be explicated and the “accelerationist sensibility” fully understood.
In this synthesis of Nick Land’s accelerationism and Lacanian theory, the Seminar first spells out the distinctive logic of psychotic experience, the structural marker that sets it apart from neurotic and perverse formations. It then draws out the specific implications this difference carries for the accelerationist project. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, a psychotic structure results when the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier that normally anchors the subject’s link to the Symbolic Other, is foreclosed rather than repressed. This foreclosure blocks the subject’s entry into the symbolic order of language, law, and shared meaning, and allows the excluded signifier to return in the Real as hallucination or delusion.
Accelerationist philosophy, in this context, starts from this exclusion. The Other has been foreclosed and now occupies the enigmatic position of the Outside. The Seminar explores the conceptual, epistemological, and ontological consequences that stem from this displacement, focusing on psychotic phenomenology and epistemology. Because of foreclosure, the relation to the Other no longer falls under the dialectical logic that would stabilize it. Instead, it undergoes constant intensification. For this reason, the experience and understanding of the Other in psychosis are fundamentally different, giving rise to a distinctive conceptual logic, which is the logic of acceleration.
Session 1, Foreclosure and the Outside: We introduce psychosis as the privileged register for acceleration. By outlining Lacan’s concept of foreclosure, we contrast psychosis to neurosis and highlight the difference in subjectivity that each relationship to the Other entails. We examine the peculiar nature of the foreclosed Other and its enigmatic status as the Outside, and the specific way the psychotic maintains a relationship with this enigmatic Other. For the psychotic, the truth of the relationship is located entirely outside, as all knowledge is seen to come from there.
Session 2, Intensities and Psychotic Epistemology: This Session tackles psychotic epistemology by addressing the systematization of intensities at the level of psychotic subjectivity. Drawing on Deleuze’s metaphysical reading of differential calculus, we show why the psychotic can traverse the entire dx/dy curve, unbound by any single structuring principle. Because the psychotic never internalizes the Name-of-the-Father, they remain within intensive relations, and the connections they produce unfold along this plane.
Session 3, Cold Empathy and the Logic of the Psychotic Phantasm: We distinguish between emotion and empathy as two modes of relating to the Other. Empathy becomes a psychotic substitute for a failed relationship with the Other. The Other is not felt, as it is for the neurotic, but is sensed through increasingly vivid visualizations. Empathy thus operates as a dream-like solution. The psychotic projects themselves into the Other and simulates it in order to understand it. The psychotic phantasm is therefore more direct and less mediated, since the relation is not veiled by the signifier but experienced immediately, outside any mediating bond.
Session 4, Sinthome as a Subject: We take Jean-Claude Maleval’s maxim—”the sinthome is the subject”—as our point of departure for grasping the psychotic subject. Once the paternal metaphor collapses, what remains is a self-compiling sinthomatic knot that aggregates jouissance at the level of the Real itself. In the Seminar, we show how delusion functions as a suppléance, or substitute for the Symbolic, systematizing the Real without pacifying it and transforming the Joycean sinthome into a machinic compiler of intensities. Discussion will trace how this sinthomatic logic scales from singular subjects to cybernetic markets, offering a final toolkit for thinking acceleration beyond any guarantee of the Big Other.

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