Alienation and Acceleration

Hartmut Rosa

Alienation and Acceleration. Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality

2010 Nordic Summer University Press

Publisher’s Description: Modern life is speeding-up, incessantly. Strange as it is, while the art of saving time reaches unprecedented heights through the introduction of ever-new technologies of communication and production, it nevertheless feels like we are running out of time. In all western societies alike, time-famine is rising and individuals report the impression that they have to run faster and faster each year – not in order to get somewhere, but just to stay in place! This book presents an analytic framework to identify the causes and effects of the various sped-up-processes which define modernity – and it develops a critical theory of late-modern temporality. Crucial for this is the idea that acceleration in the end leads to monstrous forms of alienation from time and space, from things and actions – and from self and others.

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