Following the Guardian’s call for an acid freudianism, we start the year proper with another woefully amnesiac call to revolutionary arms that betrays an insufficient engagement with the last 100 years of philosophical and political thought.
Over at Commune Mag, you can read “Life Finds a Way“, a manifesto for a Vitalist International. We’ve really got to stop cherry-picking vague concepts for political manifestos.
A number of others have already challenged the manifesto’s message on Twitter. What’s funny to me is that this sort of “radiant vitalism” just reminds me of John Carpenter’s The Thing, specifically that famous scene in which the crew test their blood for contamination from an alien vitalism:
The manifesto’s authors write:
Vitalism is radiant intuition. The coordination of the human body with bodies of thought, bodies of water, with bodies of buffalo charging at police, of life forms with art forms. This is our calling.
It is The Thing at worse (or maybe that’s at best). At best (or maybe that’s at worst), it’s little more than the vitalist equivalent of that Pepsi advert.
On a related note: here is an old post on vitalism and mechanism as they appear in Mark Fisher’s PhD thesis, Flatline Constructs.