Description
At the time that The New Reaction was published in 2015, Rachel Haywire was considered one of the brightest – and most unique – voices amongst the American dissident avant-garde. With her electrifying prose, she exposed many of us to the mysterious contours of intellectual perversion, and artistic defiance hidden in spaces not too far from the battlements that marked the frontlines of our ongoing war against the modern world.
Rachel Haywire wandered the forest enjoying her solitude, only just recently emerging with a better appreciation of her unique voice as it sings the siren of the Art Right: a call to restore nature’s beauty and brutality to the ways we think, act, and create. Equal parts Futurist theater, affective art project, and hushed late-night conversation with knowing friends in the darkest corner of an after-hours speakeasy, this new and expanded edition of The New Reaction is Rachel Haywire at her best. With nine essays not included in the first edition, three of which debut here and speak of the radical potential of the Art Right, The New Reaction is a reminder that polished stones still ache to be thrown through windows. No longer a statement of uneasy belonging, The New Reaction is instead a call for the explosive creation of a new people: of “aristopunks,” “homo futura,” a “dark Bohemia;” and to make of ourselves “living works of art.”
– Mark Dyal, author of Hated and Proud: Ultras Contra Modernity (Arktos, 2108)
The New Art Right: A New Reaction for 2018, takes us back to a time before the woeful dominion of contemporary politics – a time when art served as the impetus to drive political forces, not the vulgarity of the masses nor banal populism. It also points toward possible futures, such as transhumanism, and higher forms of humanity.
The New Art Right is not just a second edition of The New Reaction, it is the culmination and the final refinement of Haywire’s thought. The New Art Right sets itself squarely against the vulgarity of modern America, a place where both the Right and Left have devolved to into a state of perpetual squabbles and a race to the bottom. Haywire savages the bourgeois Left and the Right with equal disdain, often in the form of satire and sardonic wit.
The New Art Right, however, does not take us into the ‘safe’ realms of art. Instead, it leads one on a dark journey, through the underworld towards the enlightenment of Dark Bohemia. Along the wayside, Haywire attacks both the intellectual inadequacies of the feminist Left and the patriarchal Right, leaving no ‘safe spaces’ left behind.
Haywire does not draw her philosophy from within the isolation of the ivory towers of academia, her wisdom is one of the real world, and she takes inspiration from her vast experiences in music, art, and American counter-culture.
Rachel Haywire is also the author of Acidexia.
