Abstract

Giorgio Fazio, Estelle Ferrarese and Stefano Petrucciani discuss Hartmut Rosa's "Alienation and Acceleration". The authors present Rosa's main theses and critically analyze them. Fazio deals with the author's theory of social acceleration, focusing on its methodological presuppositions. Ferrarese traces Rosa's relation to the first Frankfurt School (Adorno in particular). Petrucciani shows some limits of a diagnosis based on one unique principle - i.e., acceleration - and maintains that two sources of alienation can be identified: capitalistic competition and the hypertrophy of bureaucratic systems.