Speed and Micropolitics Bodies, Minds, and Perceptions in an Accelerating World

"Simon Glezos is one of our foremost thinkers on the relationship between speed and politics. In this book, he argues that social acceleration can be both destructive and energizing for democracy. Examining embodied experiences of speed in canonical thought and contemporary neoliberalism, Glezos masterfully illuminates affective practices that can best address the perils of acceleration in our time." - Elisabeth Anker, The George Washington University

"Even locked in our houses with nowhere to go we are beset by the need for speed. Bandwidth for telecommuting, wait estimates for grocery and toilet paper deliveries, guarantees of vaccines in unprecedented time, all promises or disappointments of a faster future. In this moment of anxious temporality Simon Glezos offers us a phenomenology of speed at the scale of the body rather than the supply chain or the fiber wire. Against the technical questions of fast and slow, Glezos redirects us to our experience of embodied, radically unsettled perceptive interchanges-feelings of speed. For Glezos this is the pressing philosophical provocation of our contemporary moment. Speed and Micropolitics is a gorgeous adventure following speed's trail through the thinking of Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Wendy Brown and Maurice Merleau-Ponty among many others. In each supple reading we find openings for meaningful reflection and even the possibility of ethical encounters amidst the hemorrhaging resentment of our accelerating times." - Jarius Grove, Associate Professor of International Relations, The University of Hawai'i at Manoa