The Enchanted Biopolitics of Dark Cosmism

Within the last decade, there has been a rise in publications—particularly within Western academia—focused on a constellation of techno-theological ideas relating to resurrection, immortality, geo-engineering, and space travel developed in Russia at the turn of the 20th century. These ideas have retroactively been collated and labeled as "Russian Cosmism." While most of these recent studies have been nuanced and critical, many shy away from the glaring appropriation of cosmist ideas by overlapping groups of Silicon Valley capitalists and "neo-reactionary" (NRx) philosophers. Rather than claiming a direct trajectory between Russian theorists in the 20th century to Silicon Valley technologists in the 21st, I instead illustrate how cosmist techno-utopian, futurist, and other-than-human discourse exist as Weberian "elective affinities" within diverse ecologies of the imagination, transmitting a variety of philosophies and political programs throughout trans-temporal, yet philosophically bounded, communities. I dissect how different groups of philosophers and technologists interact(ed) with cosmism—as well as how seemingly disparate communities (re)shape and deterritorialize cosmist political theology in an attempt to legitimize their constructed crypto-fascist imaginaries.