Amy Ireland

Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it—only to realise that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself.

Joining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.

Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.

Traversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs…glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realise that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do.

Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil’ textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the kawaiizome: nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.

Bezna is darkly glowing dead thinking, cosmic pessimism, hairy autonomy, inner reptilians, limbo sighs, horrendous pink volumes, underground nematodes, happy dismemberment, haunting prehumanism, compassion crises, glowing horror, sinister moods, aesthetic autophagia, postspectacle shelters, eternal stillness, future plague, decomposing knowledge, ouroboric moves, idiot nonknowing, shadow bodies, netherworld excavations, imperceptible evil, hyperbolic specters and news from Cioran.

Bezna's first issues were edited by Florin Flueras, Veda Popovici and Arnold Schlachter, the last ones by Florin Flueras, Irina Gheorghe and mainly by Alina Popa, in the memory of which this anthology is published.

'Bezna' in Romanian means consistent darkness + diffuse fear

Edited by: Alina Popa, Florin Flueras, Irina Gheorghe, Veda Popovici, Arnold Șlahter, Claudiu Cobilanschi

Contributions by Roi Alter, Aparat Security, Aulos, Brynjar Abel Bandlien, Emil Cioran, Ciumafaiu, ClaudiuCobilanschi, Octavian-LiviuDiaconeasa, Valentina Desideri, Bogdan Draganescu, Ion Dumitrescu, Florin Flueraş, Irina Gheorghe, Amy Ireland, Sarah Jones, Anastasia Jurescu, Kroot Juurak, Deanna Khamis, Mihai Lukacs, Nicola Masciandaro, G.A. Neagu, Dorothee Neumann, Cosima Opartan, Paradis Garaj, Alina Popa, Veda Popovici, Arnold Slahter, Taulipang Indians of Guyana, The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, The Presidential Candidate, Eugene Thacker, Stefan Tiron, Dylan Trigg, Tea Tupajic, Akseli Virtanen, Ben Woodard.

A collection of anti-capitalist poetry, philosophy, cultural analysis, legal studies, manifesto and critique spanning 1996 to the present by Alenka Zupančič, Alexander Kluge, Amy Ireland, Anne Boyer, Aurelia Guo, Bini Adamczak, Carolyn Lazard, Chi Chi Shi, Denis Ekpo, Feminist Judgments Project, Gili Tal, Houria Bouteldja, Huw Lemmey, Keziah Craven, Marina Vishmidt, Nat Raha, Sarah Lamble, Teflon and Vanessa Place.

Divided we fall, but where do we land? This collection explores some of the grounds on which thinking and writing can begin again.
– Sadie Plant