<nettime> Achim Szepanski

[Pit Schultz via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Achim Szepanski has logged off, 23. September 2024

It took a while to find words. He was a friend of critical thought. We
wanted to meet next time. Now he is dead.

It is hard to explain one of the most influential people, modest as he was,
made in Frankfurt, slightly detached from Berlin, to those who did not know
him; he was such a reliable voice, a given figure, that it is hard to
imagine not reading his postings, articles, comments any more.

When we met on the roof of the HKW after a radio interview and agreed on
the need for a blog, one of the most valuable sources of texts later
appeared, very much curated as the electronic music label FORCE INC,
influential, forward-looking, uncompromising.

Rarely has there been a person I missed so much, even if the signs were
expected, whenever DFW was mentioned, and the recent open-ended
investigations into Baudrilardian simulacra and quantum theory, one could
see it coming, his final transition into ultra black.

We discussed some of its aspects, the need for a Deleuzian Marx, not only
post-material but post-digital, facing quantum capitalism as a
revolutionary implosion, recapturing his long lectures at B-books in
Kreuzberg and the beers afterwards.

There may be disagreements on certain aspects, such as the RAF, riots or
COVID, because it's natural for freethinkers to look at the stronger
agreements on the more important tendencies.

Achim's way of looking at a whole field of theory production was the same
way he looked at club culture and techno, running one of the most
influential labels of the 90s alongside the classics from Detroit, there
was hardly a person I could agree more with on a philosophy of technology,
he was probably the closest to understanding how different fields from
music to art to philosophy and political activism are actually just ONE.

His readings of Adorno, Dark Deleuze, Baudrillard and Marx have always been
some of the most inspiring and enjoyable I have ever experienced. Now it is
time to continue the journey.

We will now have to find ways to emulate Achim, to run him as a large
language model, he has been in a hurry to produce books and texts lately,
we still have a long while to feed from his output, while treating him as
an entity to take for granted as before, keeping him alive by continuing to
think and live along his way, as a comrade in the coming revolution.


https://non-milleplateaux.de/
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