Andrew Culp, PhD

Andrew Culp, PhD, serves as the Director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at CalArts, where he teaches Media History and Theory in the School of Critical Studies. He earned his doctorate in Comparative Studies from Ohio State University in 2013.

Culp’s work intersects media, technology, politics, and philosophy in journals such as Radical Philosophy, parallax, symplokē, and boundary 2 online. He has contributed to various books and actively engages contemporary thought through interviews, essays, and dialogues.

His first book, Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), offers a new, revolutionary understanding of Gilles Deleuze’s thought, adapting it to our media-saturated era. It has been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, Japanese, German, Greek, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Persian.

In A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal (University of Minnesota Press, March 2022), he challenges conventional political thinking. He creatively explores guerrilla warfare, anarchist infowar, queer outlaws, and black insurgency, providing insight into political movements that reject traditional labels and solutions.

In his newest manuscript, Antinomia, he presents a withering critique of power, employing the philosophical method of anarcheology to dissect the foundation of politics. Through an interdisciplinary archive, he navigates cybernetic governance, biopolitical membranes, the clockwork state, and other deformations of sovereignty.

As a member of The Destructionist International, he creates film and other media. He is co-director and co-writer of Machines in Flames (2022, 50 min), he uncovers a secret history of computational destruction in 1980s Toulouse. It has been screened more than 50 times across the globe.

Classes he has taught at CalArts include Contemporary Political Thought, Contemporary Aesthetic Theory, Feminist Surveillance Studies, Another End of the World is Possible, Cyberpunk, Evil Media, and Introduction to Radical Politics.