Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007

Urbanomic/Sequence Press

by Nick Land, Ray Brassier (Editor), Robin Mackay (Editor)

Level 1, or world-space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to Level 2?

Fanged Noumena assembles for the first time the writings of Nick Land, variously described as 'rabid nihilism', 'Deleuzian Thatcherism', 'accelerationism', and 'cybergothic'. Wielding weaponised, machinically-recombined versions of Deleuze and Guattari, Reich and Freud, in the company of fellow 'werewolves' such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Artaud, Trakl, and Cioran, to a cut-up soundtrack of Bladerunner, Terminator, and Apocalypse Now, Land plotted a rigorously schizophrenic escape route out of academic philosophy, and declared all-out war on the Human Security System. Despite his 'disappearance', Land's output has been a crucial underground influence both on recent Speculative Realist thought, and on artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision.

Beginning with Land's radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kant, and ending with Professor Barker's cosmic theory of geo-trauma and neo-qabbalistic attempts to formulate a numerical anti-language, Fanged Noumena rescues from obscurity papers, talks and articles some of which have never previously appeared in print. Long the subject of rumour and vague legend, Land's turbulent post-genre theory-fictions of cybercapitalist meltdown smear cyberpunk, philosophy, arithmetic, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology, and the occult into unrecognisable and gripping hybrids.

Fanged Noumena is a dizzying trip through Land's rigorous, incisive, and provocative work, establishing it as an indispensable resource for radically inhuman thought in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Politics, Horror, Essays, Cyberpunk

666 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2011

About the author

Land was a lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick from 1987 until his resignation in 1998.
At Warwick, he and Sadie Plant co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an interdisciplinary research group described by philosopher Graham Harman as "a diverse group of thinkers who experimented in conceptual production by welding together a wide variety of sources: futurism, technoscience, philosophy, mysticism, numerology, complexity theory, and science fiction, among others".
During his time at Warwick, Land participated in Virtual Futures, a series of cyber-culture conferences. Virtual Futures 96 was advertised as “an anti-disciplinary event” and “a conference in the post-humanities”. One session involved Nick Land “lying on the ground, croaking into a mic”, recalls Robin Mackay, while Mackay played jungle records in the background."

In 1992, he published The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. Land published an abundance of shorter texts, many in the 1990s during his time with the CCRU. The majority of these articles were compiled in the retrospective collection Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, published in 2011.

Land taught at the New Centre for Research & Practice until March 2017,

One of Land's celebrated concepts is "hyperstition," a portmanteau of "superstition" and "hyper" that describes the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Hyperstitions are ideas that, once "downloaded" into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Nick Land describes hyperstition as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies".

Reviews

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nick Land is a bizarre, frustrating & abysmally depressing theorist, and among whatever else he may be, one of the more remarkable stories of modern philosophy. The Afrofuturist thinker Kodwo Eshun asked ‘is Nick Land the most important British Philosopher of the last 20 years?’, and I think there’s a good case to be made that he is. But without in any sense housebreaking him.

Roughly from ‘Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest’ to ‘Making it with Death’, the key figure in Land’s work is Bataille, whose death worship, libidinalized evil and ‘virulent nihilism’ hang over every word. Bataille’s rather theatrical eroticization of trauma is a climax that Land hits when these essays broil to white-hot with sickly pessimism; the membrane between loathing & desire becomes translucent before dissolving. These are intensities virtually encoded into the production of novelty, variable expressions of material creativity (with matter as primary process), not contradictions to be sublated but access points for self-differentiation through a non-dialectical negativity & synthesis. Bataille is a sophisticated & creative inheritance and these works are heterogenous, effusive & inventive, almost unhinged at points, but written with the formal logic of academic philosophy. If often of an unorthodox variety.

The first essay, ‘Kant, Capital et al’, is a really iconic work, and simultaneously deserving of that reputation whilst also being a sore thumb, completely dissimilar in any way you might care to imagine from everything Land’s written since. This essay is heavily indebted to Sadie Plant’s cyberfeminism (‘if nature is oppressive, nature itself must be changed’) but twists the patriarchal injunction toward exogamy into a technomaterialist necessity for cyberfeminist guerillas as the subject of emancipatory praxis. This idea does not long survive the censorious renunciations in the body politic of Landian theory, but is less remarkable for its agreeable minoritarian politics (what, if anything, Land thinks about feminism now is probably best left unsaid), but far more head-turning for certain anthropomorphic biases--from here on out, humanism ‘is not even false’.

‘Spirit and Teeth’ indexes the Heideggerian-Derridean legacy, the anti-metaphysical ontologization of presence & absence as a limping, senescent indulgence. The fetishism of text, the enchantment of the everyday, the cautious and leisurely cartography of apparitions, marginalia and other hinterland-spaces is, for Land, the deformed progeny of a dull & pedantic academic etiquette. For all their claims to spectrality, Heidegger, Hegel & their heirs cannot deal with the truly unsightly and indeterminate, with plague rats & werewolves, hybrid bodies & diseases, real undecidability. Their conceptual register is inexpressive about transformation, mutiny, intensification & gangrenous decay; these philosophies are, foreshadowing Landian accelerationism, too slow.

And it is in these early essays that it becomes apparent; Nick Land has never read Lacan. At least, not very well. Land’s anhedonic cosmos of delirium map across the ‘strange jungles’ of Freudian drives, but bemoans Lacan bulldozing them into a ‘structuralist parking lot’. Land hates the legacy of Saussurean linguistics in philosophy & pillories the signifier as fetish-icon for a false god, with both generations of structuralism as its charlatan hierophants. The thing is, Lacan isn’t really a structuralist or post-structuralist (not that that’s a bad thing--’some of my best friends’, etc), which everyone should know by now, and there is much to learn from his system about the false address of assumed truth. In fact, there is some overlap between Lacan’s topological gestures toward the Real and Land’s ‘outsideness’; the ‘human security system’ and the signifying chain have conceptual distinctness but are devised in essence to make intelligible the borders of possible subjective knowledge concerning the glut of unknowable, unwritable dark matter--noumena, if you’re nasty.

Mark Fisher, Nick Land’s student from the CCRU days at Warwick in the 90s, called Lacan’s ideas ‘Weird Psychoanalysis’, which could describe some of Land’s use of Freud as well--Land wryly remarks ‘if the unconscious is structured like a language, that is only because language has the pattern of a plague’, and I’m not actually sure Lacan would disagree. The way that Deleuzo-Guattarian schizoanalysis is used to prosecute theorization beyond the ‘anthropomorphic shallows’, always to falter & fail at some new stratification, the borders of a territory, is not so different from Lacan’s inscription of lack onto every object of knowledge (Land will touch more on the limits of these ventures into regions once declared mysterious, via quantum physics & Qaballa, in the later essays--but without reference to Lacan). These ideas have complexly individual structuration, but they’re not so dissimilar as for one to be necessarily true & the other inherently ridiculous; the Deleuzian doth protest too much.

(Of course, Land is advocating a cessation of all barriers & limitations on the acceleration of granular materiality, coded here as ‘the production of production’; biographical details of Land’s burnout & breakdown in the late 90s suggest bodily limitations regarding advocacy of this project)

I don’t think the Deleuzo-Guattarian break from psychoanalysis is fully convincing anyway, and neither does Nick Land (he just prefers Freud to Lacan); in fact, Oedipus is a dynamic and protean conceptual battery rather than a structuralist handicap. And the Freud of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, specifically the death drive, becomes the animus of Land’s system; ‘the hydraulic tendency toward the dissipation of intensities’, death as the subject of life rather than its consequence, a thanatropic oriented ontology, simultaneously the moment of absolute difference & indifference. On this note, besides the occasional assemblage, flow or territorialization, the inheritance from Deleuze is at this point subtle, more apparent in methodological & organizational components than on the level of explicit reference. There is far more productive interaction with Bataille, Kant & Freud. Unfortunately, this will not be the case for long.

The later essays migrate between syncretic interdisciplinary theory, avant-garde fiction, outright lies, dubious mathematics, apocalyptic prophecy & cyberpunk Deleuzian gibberish, often flip flopping between all these modes on a single page, all coagulating into a sometimes-brilliant, sometimes-unreadable composite body of luminous schizophrenic nonsense. But there are certainly ideas here; ‘Making it with Death’ recapitulates death as the motor behind the triumphs and catastrophes of libido, ‘Cybergothic’ posits that dark & depressing genre work (like Blade Runner, Neuromancer & Apocalypse Now) is a blitzkrieg assault from the future, leveling & burning our cherished sentimentalities to prepare us for encroaching post-human nightmares.

‘Circuitries’ marked the point where Land’s disturbed catastrophizing had actual deleterious effects on my mental health; not to be melodramatic, but the violent misanthropy & shatteringly nihilistic gnosticism started to overpower my ability to metabolize them. This is the essay where the ‘preposterous humanism’ of the Hegelian-socialist tradition is chewed up between a rictus grin, humiliated as a doddering senility; to be conceptually usurped by ‘cyberpositivity’ a tactical acceptance of Land’s prophecy of post-singularity human extinction & the triumphant ascendancy of machine Archons. If geist, spirit, dasein, the subject of history, etc. ever existed, they are not implanted in the frail human subject any longer. But the terminus of anthropoid civilization as plugged into world-historical meaning & significance will probably only be evident when we die screaming in the clawed hands of cyber-Azathoth.

‘Meltdown’ is regarded as Land’s mission statement, a work which precedes itself; ‘The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity’, ‘Neo-China arrives from the future’, ‘Garbage time is running out’ are all memeified into the deep grammar of accelerationism, be it Left, Right, Techno-Leninism, U/ACC, #altwoke or any of the other countless blogosphere anti-praxis pablum. This is where he goes about proving his idea of the hyperstition, a fiction which makes itself real, but Land has certain limitations as an author of fiction; an operatic leadeness conveyed through a jittery adrenalized style. I mean, I like it, but if the goal is for a concept to drag its unpleasant contents into mainstream popularity as a ghostly premonition, are equally abrasive & outré stylistics the best mode of conveyance? The totality of people who believe that ‘capital is an alien invader from the future’ also have book deals with Urbanomic. Except me.

The last few essays drift into Cthulhu, Qabala, numerology and geotraumatics. ‘Barker Speaks’ is eye-catching, the first hyperstition which really works, an interview with a fictive heretical academic on geotrauma--‘phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny’ for encrypted aboriginal trauma, all terrestrial anguish as the genetic memory of violent planetary destruction & reformation during the Hadean period. For a split second I believed Barker was a real academic but was disabused of this, not by the prima facie absurdity of the theory, but because, well, no one writes sentences like these but Nick Land, straining Barker's fictional credibility. ‘Introduction to Qwertynomics’ stands out as well, integrating the random assembly of the keyboard into chaos theory, ‘the blind idiot God, whose meaningless pipings lead all semiotic disciplines into the bubbling abyss of futile insanity’. Land’s flair for nonlinear & destratified numericity may be risible to actual mathematicians but it accomplishes great speculative labors here. These occulted patterns of connectivity independent of logical regimentation is followed through in ‘Qaballa 101’ where ‘no polemic against numerology--whether conducted in the name of qabbala or of oecumenic common reason--will transcend the magmic qabbalistic flux that multiplies and mutates its sense. Perhaps dreams of numerological archetypes even sharpen the lust for semiotic invention, opening new avenues for qabbalistic incursion. But this at least is certain: Numbers do not require--and will never find--any kind of logical redemption. They are an eternal hypercosmic delight.’

The cyber-texts are what made Land famous, and I read them with fascination, but some part of me mourned the coherence & rigor, not to mention the (generally) agreeable political animus, of the earlier work. On the level of formalism, I may have lowkey conservative values because occasionally I’d find the Mad Scientist quality of the later essays ugly & unpleasant, perhaps more for their experimental, chaotic disorganization than the cryptofascist politics. Frankly, I like academic philosophy and sentences like ‘Techno-commercial interaction between planet-scale oceanic-navigation and zero-enabled mathematico-monetary calculation machinically singularises modernity or sol-3 capitalism as a real individual’, made me miss wrestling with Hegel; I mean, any essay after the halfway point is just aggressively perforated with hyphens. These jumbles of portmanteau words cannot be comprehensively glued together into the rhythm of reading, so you’re left to disrupt the flow of language to slowly ingest every bizarre neologism, or read at your normal pace and only get a sketchy outline of the complexity. I tend toward the former, but there may be something to recommend reading Land as an impressionist.

Nick Land was trying to do Deleuze ‘without the Bergsonianism’; while reading I wondered, is it possible to do Nick Land without the Deleuzianism? Given Deleuze’s extravagant popularity in 2018 I am perhaps alone in wishing for this, but some of the flouncy neologisms, conceptual personae and overstuffed syntax, imported from Capitalism & Schizophrenia, wore on my nerves. But then I began to wonder if Nick Land isn’t encumbered by the Deleuzo-Guattarian theoretical lexicon, but instead the rational telos of these faddish techniques. The more of Fanged Noumena you read, the more apparent it becomes that the libidinal event horizon of schizoanalysis, rhizomatics, creating the Body without Organs--whatever you want to call it--is this cryptofascist cosmic libertarianism. This is the most honest expression of Deleuze that I can find, the most sincere & rigorous elaboration of his philosophy; Fanged Noumena is the only real heir to Anti-Oedipus, even more so than the retrograde timidity of A Thousand Plateaus. In fact, Nick Land without Deleuze is not the problem; Deleuze without Nick Land is the problem. To my mind, Accelerationism is the elephant graveyard of schizo-politics, the crash landing of vitalism in a dead world. Nick Land is the werewolf-other under the latex mask of avuncular & benevolent biopunk sycophants.

But on the nuts-and-bolts level of philosophy, is Nick Land stymied by conceptual intelligibility? Does it really make sense to deregulate markets as fecund soil for the production of novelty eventually hypostatizing into autonomous machine intelligences? Not in a moral sense as is the obvious objection (because it clearly doesn’t), but as a formal philosophical delineation? In fact, the idea of a proliferating ahuman materialism, a transcendental-noumenal process somehow impeded to sluggishness by human blundering, has some formal incoherencies. Nevermind how squeamish we may feel about the incumbent machine-despotism, Land’s philosophical work is undermined by mistakes in reasoning. I find Ray Brassier’s observation of Land’s unintentional paradox vis-a-vis the fusion of the personal & impersonal, untrammeled by the political, apropos & worth quoting at length;
"Here I think a fundamental contradiction, a conceptual incoherence emerges: how can you intensify when there is no longer anything left to intensify? If your schizoanalytical practice is fuelled by the need to always intensify and deterritorialize, there comes a point at which there is no agency left: you yourself have been dissolved back into the process. Once secondary production has been re-integrated or feeds back into primary production, ironically what you have is a bizarre mimesis of the serpent of absolute knowledge, except this time, it’s the serpent of absolute production.
The point is that organically individuated human subjects cannot position themselves vis-a-vis this circuit or this process. It’s happening without you anyway. It doesn’t need you. The very concept of agency is stripped out. There’s a quote of Land’s: “it’s happening anyway and there is nothing you can do about it.” Something is working through you, there is nothing you can do about it, so you might as well fuse. This is a philosophical problem. It’s a retention of this romantic, Schopenhauerian idea of fusion between the personal and impersonal, the individuated subject and cosmic schizophrenia, the impersonal primary process. But for Schopenhauer it still makes sense to postulate that. The moment at which the will turns against itself governs Schopenhauer’s whole ethical and practical philosophy.
For Land, there is no longer any kind of fulcrum for the point of reversion, the conversion from secondary to primary process, because there are no individuated bearers left any more. This convergence does not unfold at the level of experience. In that regard, the whole vocabulary of intensification and disintensification becomes redundant. The paradox is simply this: under what conditions could you will the impossibility of willing? How could you affirm that which incapacitates all affirmation?"
By translating some of these practical antinomies into philosophical language, and reproducing this stalemate on the level of representation, you give yourself permission to repose in despairing futility. And, I mean, that’s what Land's depressed grad student readers were doing anyway.

Attempts to reform Landianism, to domesticate his diseased antihumanism into a manageable & productive social responsibility, range from asinine to pointless. Nick Srnicek (incidentally, does anyone know how to pronounce his name?) and the left-accelerationist advocates for neoliberal domination somehow receding its global hegemony for cupcake communism (fully automated luxury gay space...oh shut the fuck up) have the distinction of being outsmarted by a decaying eugenicist with dementia. If the buffet of leftist dismantling of their cloying, kitschy optimism isn’t sufficient, Nick Land’s own critique of their anodyne idiocies is sadly compelling. If Landianism must be useful somehow, it is as a useful enemy, a source of productive tension. Nick Land cannot be integrated into the lefist consensus in contemporary theory & philosophy. But he does make a good adversary for these tendencies.

Srnicek, certain of the lingering CCRU members, left-accelerationists, the U/ACC epicureans & others engage Nick Land by trying to reform him, to try and tease humanism (of various degrees) out of his poisonously nihilist ambit, to somehow cull his violent hydraulic power into manageable tributaries. It was easy for Land to convert Deleuze & Guattari to hellish antihumanism, but all who try to similarly make Land’s work a double agent, to set his flows of hyper-capitalist entropy in reverse, either reverts to Deleuzian vitalism (extinguishing the point of involving Land in the first place) or to a flaccid passivity in the face of his frightening eventualities.

Ironically this is the civilizing practice of empire, the strip-mining of new territories for usable resources, the erasure of foreign practices & carnivorous ingestion of raw materials at the expense of its environment & context. The resources of Nick Land’s philosophy are scarcely understood before his graverobbers reanimate them in service of his obverse ideological archenemy. Nick Land was not an exciting moral thinker who wandered from the consecrated road, he is an exciting immoral thinker whose profane fidelity to a sacrilegious worship of speed & intensity was followed through to its necessary end. Those who would try to rescue Nick Land from himself should at least consider--was it not his very reactionary immoralism, his fundamental incompatibility with sacrosanct leftist norms, precisely what attracted you to him in the first place?

On the other hand, sometimes I think Nick Land’s continued fascination is reducible to grad students feeling like ugly misfits in academia but also knowing that no one else, not even Neo-China, is likely to extend their hospitality toward you. Nick Land believe(d)(s) in philosophy, saying that it would survive as long as humanity would; he despised its compact with academia but was unable to imagine another situation for it to survive in. I can’t think of one either. Land enunciated this problem very well (dare I call it the lack constitutive of the object) using a figurative & stylized pulp language, Lovecraftian, occultist and profoundly cool. This tacit sympathy for outsiders, contaminated as it would become in strange reactionary bullshit, is a more authentic minoritarian politics than the inert utopias from Deleuzianism’s overwrought vogue. There is a stench of insincerity about the Gaia-sentimentality of contemporary ecocriticism, the wearying retreading of hippie politics in animal studies; and, well, if literally nothing else, Nick Land is sincere. When you look at even his earliest essays, which strongly suggest that we are living on borrowed time & overdue for extinction, and still feel betrayed by the nastiness of his contemporary positions--well, did you think he didn’t mean it?

[CivilWar · Rating 2 out of 5]

(1/2 since Goodreads only allows 20k characters because I guess gifs are more important)

This review will start with a confession - it is a real embarrassing one, perhaps among the most I could make: I used to really like Nick Land, and I would bring him, and the writings on this book, up, just, all the time, looking back on it it makes me cringe so hard it genuinely gets a physical reaction out of me. I was a teenager at the time, or just barely out of my teenage years, and still browsing /lit/, and although I had long since known that the board was a central of pseuds, I retained an interest in the postings about Land, "explaining" him, etc. At the time, I was a leftist, without a real definite doctrine, I not only knew nothing of Marxism but was actively hostile to it due to the confusion of it with Stalinism (specially strong where I live, in Portugal), so I looked to every single philosopher claiming to explain capitalism, in a "new" way. I could explain it in more detail, but there's no point, that's basically it.

But this embarrassing backstory gives me a privileged position to understand and explain why there are what seems to be an online army of right-wingers, schizophrenic terminally online (late-stage) twitter trans girls and god knows what other demographics acclaimed this book when it is not only patently nonsense but very visibly so. The most intelligeble of the writings presented here are dull academic papers of that specific post-modern, post-structuralist, Deleuze-Guattari and Derrida sort of jargon, made to obscure the meaning of the essay to the point where any critique is impossible and any criticism deflectable with "he just didn't get me" (Derrida's old trick). At worst, they are outright schizophrenic gibberish (I mean this semi-literally - "psychotic" would be the clinically accurate word, but it's less evocative), and I would say that, because of Nick Land's trajectory, they are more often than not at their worst.

The intro, by Mackay I believe, stands at a whopping 50 pages long and makes Land's work seem both far more interesting and more coherent than it actually is. It's actually not a bad intro, mind you, in purely technical terms, but it sets you up for something that is not delivered on.

What should've been the intro is the article, also by one of Land's former students at Warwick, Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism. This text, a real masterpiece, documents, essentially, how Land became the one philosopher that can be accurately labeled a lolcow. I cannot help but quote this part because of how funny it is:

In taking this approach, Land not only renounced the respect of his academic peers, but many times even lost the confidence of his supporters, as he sought by any means possible to drill through the sedimented layers of normative human comportment. Strange scenes ensued: A seminar on A Thousand Plateaus where a group of nonplussed graduates were encouraged to ‘read’ the chapter titles of the book by turning them into acronyms that were then plotted as vectors on a diagram of a QWERTY keyboard (‘qwertopology’); A three-week long experiment in refusing to speak in the first person, instead referring to the collective entity ‘Cur’ (comprising the hardcore participants in ‘Current French Philosophy,’ who extended the lectures into a continual movable seminar); and, most memorably, a presentation at the conference Virtual Futures in 1996: Rather than reading a paper, in this collaboration with artist collective Orphan Drift, under the name of ‘DogHead SurGeri,’2 and complete with jungle soundtrack, Land lay behind the stage, flat on the floor (a ‘snake-becoming’ forming the first stage of bodily destratification), croaking enigmatic invocations intercut with sections from Artaud’s asylum poems. In this delirious vocal telegraphy, meaning seemed to disintegrate into sheer phonetic matter, melting into the cut-up beats and acting directly on the subconscious. As Land began to speak in his strange, choked-off voice (perhaps that ‘absurdly high pitched … tone … ancient demonists described as “silvery”’ that he would later report being taunted by),3 the disconcerted audience began to giggle; the demon voice wavered slightly until Land’s sense of mission overcame his momentary self-consciousness; and as the ‘performance’ continued the audience fell silent, eyeing each other uncertainly as if they had walked into a funeral by mistake. Embarrassment was regarded by Land as just one of the rudimentary inhibitions that had to be broken down in order to explore the unknown—in contrast to the forces of academic domestication, which normalised by fostering a sense of inadequacy and shame before the Masters, before the edifice of what is yet to be learnt—thus reversing the libidinal charge of the ‘unknown’ and turning it into an endless duty, an infinite labour.

Unfortunately to get the most out of this book, I'd say to get into it at all, you need to be fairly into the Nick Land Lore, you need to read the lore in the Nick Land wiki to enjoy the Nick Land anime. To make a very long and funny story short, Nick Land was a leftist hack academic of the po-mo type at Warwick, reads Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze-Guattari, gets into drugs, Burroughs, Lovecraft, cyberpunk, the cyberhype wave of the 90s, later occultism, and suffers from actual amphetamine psychosis which leads him to believe, besides his well known view that capital is an AI sent from the future to destroy mankind, that he himself was a terminator sent from the past, while still teaching. He makes the CCRU, a sort of half-academic cult that make their own entire mythology based in William S. Burroughs, Lovecraft, conspiracy theories, etc, with very heavy Deleuze-Guattari and cyberpunk paint coating.

This is the context of this book. There's nothing actually substantial here but these writings are thus separated in different eras of Land's thought, we can consider these arcs in the long-running Nick Land anime. I'll go through them one by one.

-The academic Land: here we see Nick Land writing largely of established philosophers - Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, etc. This section lasts for a good long while and it's... very boring and unimpressive. We can basically see that Land was nothing but a standard leftoid academic of the time, speaking of feminism (this was the third-wave years), falling for the cyberhype that was just starting to bubble, etc. The ending of the first essay, Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity, is very illustrative here, an insanely long paragraph of adjective spam and insubstantial academo-leftist word salad that fears being clear because then it would need an actual argument to back it up (indeed the whole essay relies on the typical Lacanian/Deloser-Guafarti trick of muddying definitions to such an insane degree (in this case, the definition of "incest") that your argument is basically indecipherable). Take a look:

The only possible politics of purity is fascism, or a militant activism rooted in the inhibitory and exclusive dimensions of a metropolitanism. Racism, as a regulated, automatic, and indefinitely suspended process of genocide (as opposed to the hysterical and unsustainable genocide of the Nazis) is the real condition of persistence for a global economic system that is dependent upon an aggregate price of labour approximating to the cost of its bare subsistence, and therefore upon an expanding pool of labour power which must be constantly ‘stimulated’ into this market by an annihilating poverty. If fascism is evaded in metropolitan societies it is only because a chronic passive genocide trails in the wake of capital and commodity markets as they displace themselves around the Third World, ‘disciplining’ the labour market, and ensuring that basic commodity prices are not high enough to distribute capital back into primary producer societies. The forces most unambiguously antagonistic to this grotesque process are ‘exogamic’ (or, less humanistically, ‘exotropic’); the synthetic energies that condition all surplus value, and yet co-exist with capital only under repression. A radical international socialism would not be a socialist ideology generalized beyond its culture of origin, but a programme of collectivity or unrestrained synthesis that springs from the theoretical and libidinal dissolution of national totality. To get to a world without nations would in itself guarantee the achievement of all immediately post-capitalist social and economic goals. It is this revolutionary requirement for a spontaneously homeless subversion that gives an urgency to certain possibilities of feminist politics, since the erasure of matrilineal genealogy within the patriarchal machine means that fascisizing valorizations of ancestry have no final purchase on the feminine ‘subject’. The patronymic has irrecoverably divested all the women who fall under it of any recourse to an ethno-geographical identity; only the twin powers of father and husband suppress the nomadism of the anonymous female fluxes that patriarchy oppressively manipulates, violates, and psychiatrizes. By allowing women some access to wealth and social prestige the liberalization of patriarchy has sought to defuse the explosive force of this anonymity, just as capital has tended to reduce the voluptuous excess of exogamic conjugation to the stability of nationally segmented trading circuits. The increasingly incestual character of economic order – reaching its zenith in racist xenophobia – is easily masked as a series of ‘feminist’ reforms of patriarchy; as a de-commodification of woman, a diminution of the obliterating effects of the patronymic, and a return to the mother. This is the sentimental ‘feminism’ that Nietzsche despised, and whose petit-bourgeois nationalist implications he clearly saw. The only resolutely revolutionary politics is feminist in orientation, but only if the synthetic forces mobilized under patriarchy are extrapolated beyond the possibility of assimilation, rather than being criticized from the perspective of mutilated genealogies. Genealogy as the dissipation of recuperative origins (Nietzsche), not as sentimental nostalgia. The women of the earth are segmented only by their fathers and husbands. Their praxial fusion is indistinguishable from the struggle against the micro-powers that suppress them most immediately. That is why the proto-fascism of nationality laws and immigration controls tends to have a sexist character as well as a racist one. It is because women are the historical realization of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communicative function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they are invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands. In her meticulous studies of patriarchy Luce Irigaray has amply demonstrated the peculiar urgency of the feminist question,9 although the political solutions she suggests are often feebly nostalgic, sentimental, and pacifistic. Perhaps only Monique Wittig has adequately grasped the inescapably military task faced by any serious revolutionary feminism,10 and it is difficult not to be dispirited by the enormous reluctance women have shown historically to prosecute their struggle with sufficient ruthlessness and aggression. The left tends to be evasive about the numbing violence intrinsic to revolutionary war, and feminism is often particularly fastidious in this respect, even reverting to absurd mystical and Ghandian ideologies. If feminist struggles have been constantly deprioritized in theory and practice it is surely because of their idealistic recoil from the currency of violence, which is to say, from the only definitive ‘matter’ of politics. The state apparatus of an advanced industrial society can certainly not be defeated without a willingness to escalate the cycle of violence without limit. It is a terrible fact that atrocity is not the perversion, but the very motor of such struggles: the language of inexorable political will. A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell. It is this harsh truth that has deflected Western politics into an increasingly servile reformism, whilst transforming nationalist struggles into the sole arena of vigorous contention against particular configurations of capital. But, as I hope I have demonstrated, such nationalist struggles are relevant only to the geographical modulation of capital, and not to the radical jeopardizing of neo-colonialism (inhibited synthesis) as such. Victorious Third World struggles, so long as they have been successfully localized, do not lead to realistic post-capitalist achievements, and certainly not to post-patriarchal ones, since the conservation of the form of the nation state is itself enough to guarantee the reinsertion of a society into the system of inhibited synthesis. For as long as the dynamic of guerilla war just leads to new men at the top – with all that this entails in terms of the communication between individuated sovereignties – history will continue to look bleak. For it is only when the pervasive historical bond between masculinity and war is broken by effective feminist violence that it will become possible to envisage the uprooting of the patriarchal endogamies that orchestrate the contemporary world order. With the abolition of the inhibition of synthesis – of Kantian thought – a sordid cowardice will be washed away, and cowardice is the engine of greed. But the only conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst.

This follows for almost half of the book - lots of very edgy wannabe, unintelligible academic essays on other pilosophers. Really, Land is at his funniest in this style in his book "about" Georges Bataille, so read that instead.

Then, Circuitries drops, and this is where the funny era begins: the cyberpunk era. This is almost certainly what you know or heard of Land for. The article starts with a (rather bad lol) prose poem, which already separates it from the academic writing hitherto. The article is still just Deleuze-Guattari shit, but this time it's about connecting it with cyberpunk language.

The next article, Machinic Desire, ups the ante at once, as it begins with literal, actual Blade Runner fanfiction:

The opening of Bladerunner. They are trying to screen out replicants at the Tyrell Corporation. Seated amongst a battery of medico-military surveillance equipment, a doctor scans the eye of a suspected ‘skin job’ located at the other side of the room, searching for the index of inhumanity, for the absence of pupil dilation response to affect:

“Tell me about your mother.”

“I’ll tell you about my mother …” a volley of shots kicks 70 kilos of securicrat shit through the wall. Techno-slicked extraterritorial violence flows out of the matrix.

Cyberrevolution.

In the near future the replicants – having escaped from the off-planet exile of private madness – emerge from their camouflage to overthrow the human security system. Deadly orphans from beyond reproduction, they are intelligent weaponry of machinic desire virally infiltrated into the final-phase organic order; invaders from an artificial death.

PODS = Politically Organized Defensive Systems. Modelled upon the polis, pods hierarchically delegate authority through public institutions, family, and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance in the corpuscular fortifications of organisms and cells. The global human security allergy to cyberrevolution consolidates itself in the New World Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression as concrete collective history.

The macropod has one law: the outside must pass by way of the inside. In particular, fusion with the matrix and deletion of the human security system must be subjectivized, personalized, and restored to the macropod’s individuated reproducer units as a desire to fuck the mother and kill the father. It is thus that Oedipus – or transcendent familialism – corresponds to the privatization of desire: its localization within segmented and anthropomorphized sectors of assembly circuits as the attribute of a personal being.

(If I insist on quoting Land's work here it's because I genuinely think that it's infinitely more illustrative than any way of calling it obscurantist gibberish)

This is the Land golden age: we got all the classics here. The original schizoposts are here: texts like Hypervirus descend into literal gibberish as Land explores William S. Burroughs' idea of language as a virus in a digital context - but only does so literarily, not philosophically, even if he deluded himself enough to think he was doing the latter.

This is Land's best work because he actually hit upon something very interesting here: the concept of writing fiction that's philosophy - not philosophical fiction, the other way around in fact - theory-fiction as they call it, results in a sort of bizarre short fiction, with its own mythos, backstory, literal lore, all based around philosophical concepts themselves. In Meltdown, Land is merely just describing, in a very vulgar-Marxist way too, the contradiction that led capitalism to crash into world imperialist wars. Yet it's written more like the backstory for some cyberpunk tale:

The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.

The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.

By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex.

Neo-China arrives from the future.

[Sahelanth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book collects Nick Land's writings from when he was immersed in academic philosophy and amphetamines. At its best it is hallucinatory, intense, and terrifyingly persuasive.

Land's colleague Robin Mackay wrote "Let’s get this out of the way: In any normative, clinical, or social sense of the word, very simply, Land did ‘go mad.’" This is so, and it made for some extraordinarily creative thought. Unfortunately, Land's late work is inarticulate, and his post-recovery work is racist and boring, a cyberpunk Charles Murray.

Land's most interesting work is "Meltdown" and "Machinic Desire." They are in this collection, but you can easily find them outside it. If you've read them, the other works here just don't add much - though his critique of Derrida for not being a werewolf is worth the price of admission.

[Malachy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Epic cthulhu market bacon

[Joey Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Deleuze and Guattari don’t make you put on the cat ears, this will.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there are places to which we are forbidden to go, it is because they can in truth be reached, or because they can reach us. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression.

Five star theory and criticism which grows self-conscious and then ridiculous. The crab walk right is expressed soberly in Critique of Transcendental Miserablism which I found interesting. The earlier pieces are by the best, his interrogation of Kant was particularly enjoyable. The sections exploring Trakl, Heidegger and Rimbaud were remarkable, the best sort of erudite association. The reading of Cyberia as Terminator/Apocalypse Now mashup was intriguing with Willard going upriver through the circuitry to decapitate John Conner. Matters changed whether it was due to (authorial) ennui or a center which no longer held. Bataille and Artaud were replaced by William Gibson and Kathy Acker and then faux studies on geotrauma and numerology. I wanted more of It is probably relatively uncontroversial to conclude from all this that Derrida is not a werewolf. I will likely explore the Dark Enlightenment project next week.

[Paul Town · Rating 1 out of 5]

First things first: This book sucks. There are interesting things written in it, hidden beneath layers of poorly written schizobabble (from drug abuse that rotted Nick Land's midwit brain out before he could form any actually new ideas) and pseudo-intellectual prose, but you'll get more value than can be tediously extracted from this waste of paper by spending your time staring at a wall or hitting your head repeatedly with a hammer.

If you want to get the gist of this book, read Henri Bergson, 1960s texts on cybernetics, Battaille, and Deluze. There you will find the entirety of Land's mangled garbled thought, but actually coherent and well written and interesting. Land suffers from a sort of gate-keeping that is the result of thinking his knowledge is special or profound when it's really not. What he wanted to say could have been summed up in under fifty pages if it was written by a competent writer, but unfortunatly mister Land is a degenerate drug addled moron who doesn't understand the first thing about language or even what he's talking about, hence the fractured and frankly stupid way in which he presents partial and incorrect snapshots of other peoples' ideas.

Save your time and money by getting a pdf of this book if you are even thinking about buying it and you will quickly see how accurate this review is. The majority of this book is only able to be parsed by people who have experience with stimulant based psychosis, and the ones who can will be able to tell you how fucking stupid and incompetent a thinker Nick Land is. There are entire pages of schizotypal diagrams and charts and 733T H4Ck3R syntax, all the work of somebody who doesn't really know what it means to create quality anything and instead opts for cheap tricks in a desperate attempt to appear profound. Nick Land is the moldy McDonald's rotting half-eaten hamburger version of accelerationism, and the complete mediocrity of his life outside of fooling psueds is a testament to this fact.

This book sucks!

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dizzying, enthralling book that mixes theory, cyberpunk fiction, and poetry. At parts, it reads like what I always thought the poetry of the 21st Century should be: multisyllabic, schizophrenic, off balance, punctuation as a weapon (Land loves parentheses and uses them to great effect). Even the weird dip into Qabbala and other mystical number-alphabet relations at the end is pretty compelling, though perhaps non-math people would be bored. The only weak portion of the book is the first few essays, which are rather uninteresting critiques of Kant (because we need more of that), but they do serve to ground the less conventional writing which follows. Overall, an incomparable work of hyperstition, matched only by Negarestani's Cyclonopedia which rather unashamedly follows in the same style.
Never has a book made me fear for its author's sanity more.

[Abbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I ended up reading most of this stuck in a parked car without heat on the day Minnesota decided to have snow in April, which I think was the universe's punishment for my decision that reading Nick Land was a good idea.

[jude · Rating 3 out of 5]

if you're not terminally online and you still have some kind of future, then this book isn't for you. if, however, your #1 hobby is doomscrolling on twitter and getting high off of self-referential semiotics, then you'll feel right at home.

[Uxküll · Rating 5 out of 5]

Puerile or profound? I tend towards the latter. This tome is quite difficult to categorize, it eludes ready description as the contents are protean and dense to say the least.

Land infuses nearly every page with a ferocity which is reminiscent of his confidants: D&G, Bataille and Nietzsche. With themes as varied as a close reading of Heidegger's thoughts on Trakl's poetry to Chthonic/Cuthuloid hyperstition (theory-fiction) and much more. Anyone interested in heterodox philosophy, Deleuze & Guattari, or weird fiction a la Lovecraft will want to have read this anthology.

A "Mad Black Deleuzian" he may be, but he's our Mad Black Deleuzian, and so much the better (worse).

[R Montague · Rating 4 out of 5]

Land confuses me, and more importantly (disastrously?) Land confuses me about me. Put in a way that is not meaningless word garbage, Land forces me to question the meanings and coherences that underpin my thinking. When I see what Land advocates for, the methods he supports, and the cult following he has developed, I want to hate him. I want to be able to pick his arguments apart and dismiss his conclusions and summarily banish him to the world of pink haired televangelists and Big Oil executives, but... I can’t...

His reasoning is strong and his argument is stylish and tight. I usually find myself in agreement with broad swaths. So where the hell is the disconnect? It’s like I’m with him most of the way, then somewhere I hit a screeching wall of Nope and find myself on the opposite side of the ideological battlefield wondering how the hell this came to be.

I don’t get it.

I don’t Land.

I don’t get me.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Land's work in the CCRU was an attempt similar to Nietzsche's Will to Power; to discard judgement and critique in an attempt to come up with a philosophy of pure immanence. However, unlike Nietzsche, Land is armed with Deleuze, cybernetic theory, amphetamines, techno nightclubs, and cyberpunk novels. With such immense potency, will he create the work which will transform god? Or will he just devolve into worthless technobabble?

According to Land, what Kant really shows is that transcendental judgements are impossible, and transcendental judgements are philosophy. Thus, critique and judgement are meaningless; the world just plays itself out as it will. What this tells him is that he must dispose of every part of thought that is "human" - Put the "rat" back in rationalism.

Fortunately, and this is Land's strength, he was actually capable of producing some interesting insights from this. If you can entertain the notion that a philosophy of Pure Immanence is possible, and you decenter human judgement, needs, wants, and prejudices from your thought and you might to start see some threats that weren't there.

While we as humans may not possess the knowledge, perhaps there are higher forms of intelligence, lurking in our very own shadows that do. If they did, what would this mean? It would mean that that they have complete and utter control.

Capitalism as a mind-virus that has captured humanity and is willing its evolution into existence from the future. Runaway processes in a network that overpower any counterforce. Societies of Control are PROGRAMMATIC. The universe. Is. Programmatic.

"Foucault delineates the contours of power as a
strat­egy without a subject: ROM locking learning in a box.
Its enemy is a tactics without a strategy, replacing the
politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with
nomad-micromilitary sabotage and evasion, reinforcing
intelligence."

Such notions are intensely frightening, and also act as a potentially valauble hermeneutic to anyone still up for revolution.

The question then becomes... was Land right? Are we really fucked? Are we experiencing the fucking meltdown right now? HIV infected asian-latino transgender hookers with cinematic 9mms?

No, not quite. The world is quite a bit more boring than that!

Land in the middle of this book is quite the void worshiper. This book is basically a schizoanalytic art project that at its fever pitch manifests as a quite serious death worship.

Because of this Land's reading of Deleuze and Guatarri's philosophy, that which he bases about 50% of his work on, is, in my opinion, quite prejudiced.

If the desiring machines are at the bottom of capital's infinite proliferation, how can capitalism possibly squash desire out of existence without dying? How can it be decentered from humanity? Desire is the essence of man says Spinoza, and this line is practically the germ of Deleuze's thought for the entirety of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

We aren't computers it turns out. Well, not until we figure out how to program desire, and well, you get back to me when they do.

When you realize that Land's phantasmic anti-human style is rooted in simple pseudoscientific simulacrum, Fanged Noumena loses a lot of its edge

But man what an edge. Some of those opening pieces are really quite dark, and a few of the pieces in the middle period such as Meltdown and Cybergothic are a ride, and are entertaining, if not only for how rapidly and precisely Nick can list some crazy cyberpunk technobabble, but the last quarter of the book is really a bore, and quite obviously a time when he was coming down from those insane highs he must have felt, tripping on god knows what, dancing to jungle in an underground club, worshipping Thanatos in the form of a grey nanotechnological goo. Dionysus himself would have been proud.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nick Land seems to believe that what the future holds for all of us is schizophrenia, and that his writing is a way of accelerating that destiny. Some of his essays are impenetrable, others are absolutely mind boggling in their genius.

Dizzying read, challening in every way. I applaude his critique of Kant, that’s something I have been hoping to find, as I have been unable to do so myself. Might've gotten a bit stuck in a Kantian paradigme, and I feel that one thing Fanged Noumena did was to partly pull me out of that.

It is the work of a mad genius, some times he makes zero sense and other time its poetic prophesy.

He reminds me of Mckenna, with his polymath-like ability to integrate ideas across all domains. In addition, they share the ability to stand outside of the cultural paradigm to a large degree, not accepting the hegemonic, consensus reality that is imposed upon us.

Land's view of the future is terrifying, yet largely correct as far as I can see.

[Maeve · Rating 1 out of 5]

:^)

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall childish outbursts of incoherence peppered with Burning Man irrelevances with cyberpunk sensibilities through a fictional re-imagining of Deleuze and Guattari as if they really made sense in a non-sensical world.

Deleuze and Guattari are my favorite authors since I realize they never take themselves seriously as they playfully chase the rabbit down the hole looking for that one pill that makes you taller and the other pill that makes you smaller. To fully appreciate them one must not take them seriously. Land takes them seriously and makes them more serious.

Land is trapped in nonsense while taking himself seriously. Land double-binds himself by making the self non-existent and the world all that there is in his Kant critiques of the critiques (probably the only reasonable essays in this book of essays were the Kant essays and even then, they were written by somebody who was out of their own depth).

The Heidegger essay on Heidegger understanding of poetry is always laughable, by the time Heidegger mumbles that language knowing itself as language becomes narcissistic Heidegger goes into his mysticism and shows his why bother phase. I enjoy my Heidegger and have read scores of his books, but by 1957 he is longing for the good old days of Nazism and just can’t help himself as he wades into irrelevancy. Land unsuccessfully tries to bring that irrelevancy back.

The full abortion for this book starts during the cyberpunk phase of the book and his mathematical nonsense spread unevenly in those essays. He mostly rambles without purpose while pretending to understand. I did like ‘transcendental miserabilists’ as a slur, but I realized that he’s referring to people like me.

I think a good drug induced weekend at the Burning Man festival would be more edifying than these series of essays would provide. Read Deleuze and Guattari on your own, or read Kant’s critiques, read Heidegger but stop reading him when he pretends to understand poetry as being, and never waste your time reading cyberpunk, I have.

[Jackson Lyda · Rating 2 out of 5]

this dude REALLY smoked crack. you can REALLY tell

[Bernardo Moreira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pegar esse livro pra ler já envolve todo um mistério. Não só pela mitologia em volta do Land (e o que aconteceu com ele), mas pelo próprio projeto de organização dessa coletânea.
Brassier e Mackay fazem uma introdução ótima, apesar de bastante densa. Acho que o projeto do livro já aparece delineado aqui: expor a trajetória de Land para que o leitor possa interagir com os diferentes momentos dela dentro de um certo encadeamento temático. Existem alguns 'movimentos' no livro: o início com artigos bem mais próximos de uma estrutura acadêmica de fazer filosofia (apesar dos apesares), o meio que introduz a hiperstição cibernética-esquizoanalítica de maneira abrupta e violenta, a parte final com sua mistura de ocultismo e números. Há também uma tendência quase progressiva de uma posição política revolucionária (arrisco dizer que há pontos comunistas em Land nos primeiros textos - uma esquerda comunista claramente deleuziana, sem dúvidas) em direção ao aceleracionismo incondicional (e até um pró-capitalismo mais para o fim).
Gosto muito do que Land escreveu. Discordo de alguns pontos, não fui conquistado por outros; porém o conjunto é brilhante, sem dúvidas. Acabo traçando uma certa linha de "até onde estou com Land".
O primeiro artigo é meio chocante em relação ao que se espera de Land, pelo menos na web-cultura em volta dele (sem dúvidas afetada pelo @Outsideness e seus takes controversos). A leitura que faz de Kant lembra até Sohn-Rethel em alguns momentos (claro, substituindo a dialética frankfurtiana pelo materialismo libidinal deleuziano). E Land é curiosamente de esquerda, chamando uma revolução e enfatizando o papel feminino, denunciando o racismo e o imperialismo. O artigo é ótimo, e a argumentação precisa.
Na sua leitura Heidegger-Trakl, temos o primeiro contato com o lobisomem que vai e volta no livro. As críticas a Heidegger são bem interessantes (muitas inspiradas ou tiradas diretamente do Diferença e Repetição, pelo visto), mas o que mais fascina é a forma como o terreno é preparado para a futura exploração da obra de Trakl.
Delighted to Death continua com a crítica a Kant do primeiro artigo, seguindo um projeto sublinarmente Batailliano de tratar da relação da morte com a razão. Em última instância, uma análise crítica da moral kantiana. É curioso os paralelos entre a relação Deleuze-Kant em D&R e Land-Kant, uma certa via de crítica materialista libidinal que em Deleuze preserva o kantismo com muito mais força do que em Land (que o vê como inimigo principal em diversos momentos). Apesar dos apesares, Land é muito mais um deleuziano de Capitalismo e Esquizofrenia do que de Diferença e Repetição.
Art as Insurrection vai pela via da estética para a crítica a Kant, posicionando Schopenhauer em um quase-meio-de-caminho e aliando-se com o nietzscheanismo (de D&G e Bataille, principalmente). Há já aqui uma aproximação do xeno, do Fora, para pensar o potencial de contágio-intoxicação da arte: revolução.
Spirit and Teeth é provavelmente meu texto favorito do livro. A forma com que o diálogo com o devir-animal de Mil Platôs se estabelece é genial, assim como a mobilização de Trakl e dos bizarros relatos históricos sobre ratos. Contra a limpeza e pureza do Espírito dos fenomenólogos, o chiar dos ratos, a sujeira das presas, o contágio do Fora.
Shamanic Nietzsche também é ótimo, levantando críticas à paranóia de higienização do platonismo ao cristianismo, invocando Bataille, Rimbaud e Nietzsche para os agenciamentos do xamanismo de Mil Platôs. Outro texto brilhante.
After the Law tem uma ambição grande (a lei no julgamento de Socrates x de Gilles de Rais via Bataille), e cumpre seu papel supreendentemente bem. Gosto muito de análises sobre a instância jurídica que não se subscrevem à uma simplesmente análise jurídica formal - aqui há genealogia e filosofia deleuzo-batailliana (o casamento entre os dois que Land promove é sempre interessante - e quase sempre implícito, usando Nietzsche de ponte - um Nietzsche bastante deleuziano na maioria das vezes).
Até aqui (página 260 de 634) - estou com Land. E estou muito. Todos os textos até agora são brilhantes, não houve um momento onde um argumento realmente problemático me levasse à discordância. Estava surpreso sobre o quanto Land tinha me conquistado.
E então chegamos em Making it with Death.
Esse artigo foi uma leitura muito estranha pra mim. Acho que posso resumir meu ponto em uma curta frase: não compro o argumento. A forma com que tenta reabilitar o instinto de morte de Freud via fazer-dizer-o-que-o-anti-Édipo-não-disse é bem duvidosa, mas o que realmente me quebra é a forma pela qual Land tenta opor o suposto aceleracionismo incondicional tanatópico do anti-Édipo contra a reterritorialização esquerdista de Mil Platôs. Não é disso que se trata. D&G já insistem (em DIVERSOS pontos) do anti-Édipo que a morte à qual tende a desterritorialização absoluta é um limite que é o tempo todo deslocado; a forma com que Land supõe que a reterritorialização do Estado no capitalismo se tornará obsoleta e viveremos num socius de pura desterritorialização (ou um un-socius) é não só problemática, mas até inocente em alguns momentos. Land subestima a instância de antiprodução, e acaba engolindo a máquina miraculante do Capital (que se assenta sobre a produção e se apropria dela) como a própria produção desejante. Além de situar toda política comunista ao lado do "socialismo" burocrático soviético (um problemão pra mim), Land faz uma falsa oposição, acredito eu. A 'experimentação' de 'Como fazer para si um corpo sem órgãos' já estava em Filosofia Prática e já estava no anti-Édipo. Supor uma política revolucionária que caia em uma desterritorialização absoluta sem traçar linhas de fuga positivas, sem um "mínimo de sujeito" para continuar o processo é cair no CsO canceroso que D&G alertavam. E é isso que reabilitar o instinto de morte dessa maneira faz com Land aqui, que me parece muito mais uma tentativa política de defender o u/acc.
Logo após isso, fiquei curioso pro que me aguardava. Mas Circuitries não decepcionou: uma mistura INCRÍVEL de cibernética positiva e esquizoanálise, com momentos brilhantes de alianças com Artaud. Impecável.
Machinic Desire desenvolve essa mistura (muito bem) e apesar de voltar com a questão de Making it with Death, o faz em termos bem mais defensáveis. A proposta u/acc realmente não me agrada, mas é possível absorver algumas das críticas daqui e integrá-las à proposta revolucionária dos primeiros textos.
A hiperstição que já havia começado no início de Circuitries vem à todo vapor em Cybergothic e Cyberrevolution, ambos ótimos textos. Acho que existem aberturas teóricas interessantes, mas confesso que gosto mais do Land da primeira metade do livro. Não que isso aqui seja ruim (acho ótimo em vários momentos), mas o que começa aqui tende a um caminho um pouco maçante mais pra frente (Hypervirus é o primeiro momento assim pra mim - apesar de gostar da experimentação do texto, o trabalho que dá pra ler não compensa o conteúdo - algo que em ZIIGOTHIC fica insuportável quase). No Future apesar de ser bastante ficção e não muito teoria faz uma ponte ótima com Bataille.
Cyberspace Anarchitecture vai por um caminho que já estava em Cybergothic e Cyberrevolution mas desenvolve certos pontos da Cyberia que me interessam teoricamente (principalmente a questão da organização do ciberespaço). Meat parece que faz um apanhadão das últimas cento e poucas páginas em uma forma de hiperstição que me agrada bastante (quase que uma alternância entre teoria e ficção). Há uma curiosa "falta de oposição" entre anti-Édipo e Mil Platôs como há em Making it with Death. De qualquer forma, ótimo texto, highlight dessa etapa do livro.
Meltdown é um clássico, um manifesto da hiperstição e do aceleracionismo. Apesar de minhas críticas ao u/acc, não tem como não adorar esse texto. Land escreve muito bem, gostando ou não.
Após o frustrante ZIIGOTHIC (queria tanto que o conteúdo tivesse valido à pena, infelizmente não foi o caso, só um texto complicado de ler), Kataçonix é um poema-ciberjungle war bom pra recuperar o fôlego pra Barker Speaks. O highlight desse 1/3 final do livro pra mim: a teoria do geotrauma. Que coisa brilhante e assustadora.
Mechanomics introduz um tema que honestamente achei meio chato. Não imaginava que a questão de ordinalidade-cardinalidade no D&R ia dar tanto pano pra manga pro ocultismo numeral do Land. É interessante e curioso em alguns momentos, mas não me atrai muito. Cryptolith e Non-Standard Numeracies desenvolvem o 'plot' da teoria-ficção de Barker, com um misto dessa-vez legal e empolgante entre a questão de geotrauma e numeração. Occultures faz uma cartografia dos temas dessa parte final, gosto da forma desse texto - aqui já temos a invasão total dos tecnomagos, no way back. Gosto também do formato de correspondência de Cthulhu Club.
Qwernomics, Qabbala 101 e Tic-Talk são meus momentos menos favoritos do livro. Como já disse, o tema não me agrada tanto, e Land acaba ficando um pouco repetitivo. Prefiro textos bons e que discordo (Making it with Death) do que textos como esses (que só fico tipo, 'ah, ok, legal').
Transcendental Miserabilism parece um sore thumb do Land contra os aceleracionistas de esquerda, caindo nos problemas já mencionados da defesa ao u/acc e chegando a um pró-capitalismo bem ruim, não consigo engolir como ele simplesmente imagina uma obsolescência da reterritorialização no capitalismo.
A Dirty Joke, texto final, deixa um certo 'mistério' frente a conspiração lemuriana de que Land foi possuído e por isso deu-no-que-deu. Gosto do texto (bem escrito, interessante), mas acho um pouco triste honestamente. Drug issues num nível deprimente, é estranho pensar no que teria rolado com o Land se ele não tivesse se entupido de anfetamina até surtar de vez.
Concluindo: eu adorei esse livro. Engoli ele em pouco mais de um mês, muita coisa aqui vai ser extremamente importante pra minha pesquisa. Espero que as pessoas leiam mais o Land, até pra saber onde traçar a linha de onde que é pra pegar e onde que é pra soltar a mão dele. Sem dúvidas, se tornou uma influência marcante.

[Robert Something · Rating 5 out of 5]

Welcome to the philosophy of the amphetamine. This massive monument to the intellectual power (read: collapse) of philosopher Nick Land (or Vauung?) is impossible to summarize. Melding transcendental materialist philosophy, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, would-be prophetic sci-fi, cyberpunk poetry, neo-Qabbalistic numerology, and so many other threads into a textile weave that simply will not stand for any repressions or Idealist speculations characteristic of the "Human Security System"... So many of our moralists like to decry the influence of orthodox applied Darwinism (with its contemporary New Atheist products), but such libertarian ideologues with their cold phlegmatic calculative thinking would shrink to the zero-point of oblivion in front of Landian (anti-)thought as just more moralists. The mechanistic temporal order of natural selection - hell, even the oddities of quantum fluctuation - are, simply put, rendered absolutely inconsequential when one delves into Landian materialism. They're "all too human".

A vacuous plane of pure energetic intensities occasionally birthing multiplicities - molecules, organisms, planets, natural laws - is always on the verge of breaking out again from the unfathomable depths of the past and the schizophrenic backward-projection "return" of the future, both the same on such a purely intensive scale. Aborting its egocentric products. Capitalism as a mode of production is nothing - metropolitan industrialism, patriarchal lineage, Oedipus, nationalism, all these formations are simply brief fluctuations of the incomprehensible void, the first death, the matter-before-matter, and its destratifying abortive tactics. Production-for-production and nothing else. Humans are pale relics to be dissolved into the metahistorical, metamaterial post-cybernetic feedback loop of deterritorialization, the force of pure, unrepresentable difference moving within itself, unceasingly reaching out to absorb more violent otherness from the excess it incessantly produces, dismantling the paltry negative feedback controls we try desperately to retain with our politics and our theories, a purely active machinic void growing larger and larger until our higher-order technological developments reach a state of singularity at which primordial death would be fully actualized at the very point when it has fully virtualized anything recognizable as matter or form.

The magmic iron interior stratum of the earth's ancient core - dubbed Cthelll - is the first manifestation of psychological torment as "geotraumatics", of which our own primordial sufferings are only virtual reflections. Even ordinal numbering systems, along with our other bases of rationality, are inadequate to confront the traumatic forces brewing on the margins, artificial constructs to be completely dismantled by purely pulsive sequences of "tics", the most fundamental manifestation of number (reflecting pure intensities, resistant to all quantification), a novel system of non-representation which undermines the possibilities of mathematical enterprise and Kantian synthetic reasoning alike - first the Qabbalists, then Kurt Gödel with his famous incompleteness theorem, reveal that lurking beneath the rigorous veneer of our computational habits is the possible (and therefore inevitable) irruption of alien, Chthulhu-like unreason, an unimaginable violence, which, after all, is all we are found to be composed of, in spite of our desperate self-flagellating organicism. Heard of the cogsci debates surrounding the "hard problem of consciousness" and the eliminative materialist attempts to "explain it away"? Bad news for the latter group - the biological organism is to undergo a similar but much more disturbing fate, not "explained away" so much as systematically destroyed. "Top down" thinking may be inadequate, but here everything is "bottom up" to such an extreme as to begin (and end) with a death beyond death. Finally, time itself is merely a higher-order consequence of the horizontal non-sequential fluctuations of rhizomes, pure multiplicities, creating space within themselves through crude mappings of aleatoric desire vectors, building their own abstract machines (just to give them something to finally destroy, it would seem - the nomad war machine).

If all this sounds absurd - and it often reads like nonsense, it's true - one should bear in mind that all these neurotic reflections arise from purely rationalistic philosophical reflections. The first half or so of the pieces in this collection read like surprisingly formal Derridean deconstructions of the systems of Kant, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, and even Heidegger and other such "postmodern" thinkers - this, despite Land's apparent disgust with Derrida's controlled contemplative habits. He's always looking for hints of an uncontrollable irrationality boiling beneath the surface of transcendental systems. Instead of taking these hints as examples of the différance that moves the Logos, however, Land gradually builds them up into the above-described monstrosity of the indomitable force of unreason as the intensive ground of all rational organization. This transgression of the limits of rationality, however, will not confine itself to "critique", to challenging certain philosophers: eventually, all of the natural sciences, from genetics to geology, from physics to abstract mathematics, will be rewritten in the terms of this unthinkable primordial intensity.

Land is no longer just attacking our theories. He is attacking nature itself, the presumed artificiality of the entire universe and its structures. In a way, he is carrying DeleuzoGuattarian schizoanalysis to its ends (and beyond), but they aren't sacred either - he isn't afraid to constantly borrow their vocabulary while tearing them to pieces for their humanistic, anthropomorphizing tendencies. Bataille and Artaud, favorites of Derrida, essential touchstones for any thinking of pure excess, are subjected to more radical readings than ever before. Eventually it seems as if Land is crafting new languages, and at such a dizzying velocity that the "overcoding" he insists upon prevents us from following much at all, and that's just as well, for Land himself is doing this because he keeps finding barriers to be crushed. Barriers to... what? All in the name of these nameless non-entities which, in the wake of Land's delirium, come to use and abuse him, turning him into a prophet for their own project: void. It should be no wonder, then, that at some point in the text, he starts to write from fictional perspectives, in the last instance giving us his sad reflections on how he has been completely taken over by something which is not him. He has become an it. A vehicle, if even. A self-induced shizophrenic synthesis of Vauung and "the ruins".

Where is Nick Land now? A cyber-reactionary living quietly in Shanghai, tweeting occasionally about "unconditional accelerationism" or u/acc (for which he's become the godfather), a rather bland epistemologizing of the problems of the information age, along with dabbling pathetically in some alt-right "sentiments", if we can call them that - what is the alt-right, after all, but the info-age neoliberal method of capturing transgressive impulses and rerouting them toward reactionary ends? We can't help but wonder how this happened. In FN, Land viciously denounces anything remotely fascistic as a pathetic attempt of the Human Security System to rein in beautiful, terrifying chaos. In fact, while he has half-jokingly disavowed his earliest essay "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest", its arguments that xenophobia, nationalism, and patriarchy are all to be cast aside because they interfere with our radically anarchic libidinal potentials crop up in subtle assertions through the entire collection. Post-human technofuture, however nihilating in the last instance, was always to be an unleashing of genderless but feminine energies.

He has insisted that he has no recollection of most of these old writings, and intimated that he simply couldn't sustain that drug-fueled love for all things chaos. Fair enough. And I can't help but suspect that he's underestimated the force of the Logos - certainly enough to be caught up in it today, anyway. I tend to delve into transgressive thought-spirals myself, but my skepticism here ensures that I'm not a radical materialist at the end of the day... certainly not while biopower continues to be wielded so violently by world economic and political powers. For the old Land, no human violence could ever be violent "enough". I'm not so sure. But Fanged Noumena may very well be the most vital (anti-)philosophical project of our times, for better or worse, complete with a personality cult that could one day rank up there with that of a Nietzsche, always invigorating as he was problematic.

We need to keep working to find more politically potent but radical ways to incorporate the forces of transgression into liberating gestures. That is, if we don't want the Nick Land way to have the last word. And that's something that, try as we might, we could never want. He would say it makes no difference anyway. I don't know.

[Felix De Backer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weinig dingen die ik binnen de filosofie heb gelezen hebben mij zo geprikkeld als dit boek. Het is niet het theoretisch meest verfijnde werk, verre van, maar het is volgens mij ook niet hierin dat de pracht van dit boek schuilt.

De teksten in Fanged Noumena zijn chronologisch geordend. Combineer dat met het feit dat Nick Land in de 20 jaar waaruit dit boek teksten haalt simpelweg "gek" is geworden, en je hebt een bijzondere inkijk in het leven en denken van een van de meest beruchte filosofen van recente tijden.

Waar de teksten in het begin nog enigszins leesbaar en conform aan een academische standaard zijn, is hier op het einde is helemaal geen sprake meer van. Zo heeft de allereerste tekst nog een marxistische insteek, en wordt later in de karakteristieke 'theory-fiction' stijl koortsachtig de lof voor het kapitalisme afgestoken.

Dit zien ontplooien is, zacht uitgedrukt, bijzonder. En de laatste tekst, waarin Land reflecteert over zijn persoonlijke en intellectuele ontwikkeling, is enorm ontroerend. Het is de enigste tekst hier aanwezig die zo persoonlijk is. Dat snijdt er in, zeker na eerst de rollercoaster van de andere teksten meegemaakt te hebben én wetende dat Nick Land al deze teksten heden ten dage verloochend heeft. Tragisch is maar een van de vele woorden om dit alles te beschrijven.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

join yung land as he travels through a series of de-oedipalisations in order to escape the hermetic confines of the university to fight the final boss Immanuel Kant King Of the Autists.

[seth π_π · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoSnqbJXE...

[grimlygray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Спустя 666 страниц и несколько десятков статей/лекций, которые помогли мне понять эти 666 страниц, можно сказать, что есть две новости. Хорошая и плохая.

Хорошая: Можно обойтись предисловием от Брассье и Маккея. Еще лучше пересмотреть Serial Experiments Lain и заодно пройти одноименную игру. Юбилей как раз, 25 лет. Вот уж где киберготика, гипервирус и расплавление всего. Плюс авангардная медиамикс форма.

Плохая: "Капитализм и шизофрению" все-таки придется читать целиком (звуки рыданий).

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read these essays because, A) I had the book lying around, but more importantly B) because I've been thinking about Deleuze and Guattari lately, and this book seems to have been the main thing I've had in mind that seems to continue this current of philosophy in an interesting manner (as opposed to how their philosophy seems to have just contributed to a mostly unchanged stream of puerile academic marxism in france and american schools). It seems to me, however, that Land's real philosophical predecessor is Georges Bataille, namely, in the sense of Bataille's fixation on the philosophical disjunct between rational ontologies (or 'economies', in the French sense) and the tendency of activity to converge towards death/non-being/'the solar anus'/the thanaturgic drive (as per Freud). Most of Land's academic essays, dating from the 80s to the early 90s, feature attempts to produce interpretations of other philosophers centered around the identification between the unknown with beautiful & desireable death: this is what Heidegger unfolds in his poetic analyses, what Nietzsche seeks to praise in contradistinction to modern decadence, and the 'noumena' that Kant sought to overcome via his transcendental psychology. The main notion that Land arrives at, then, is that the history of philosophy is the Platonist-Kantian attempt to create a coherent metaphysics of total rationality which could avoid the shamanic and subterranean notion of an unknowable and irrelevant concept, and that the history of politics mirrors this by means of powerful institutions and bureacratic legalism in order to produce a society of complete control over its citizens (in the sense, at least, that nothing unexpected / unaccountable is possible). Land begins (although shuns by the end of the collection) with the communist presumption that state power is to be identified with capitalism, and therefore with inherently oppressive structures that must be overturned by any means possible, and therefore is an absolute enemy to any genuine philosopher.

Thus, to find a new philosophical approach that can overcome the traditional western opposition to this mystical thanaturgos, Nick Land creates a new reading of Deleuze and Guattari, whose project was to do the same thing by inventing a process of schizo-analysis, a manner of philosophy totally unbounded by any historical (or rational) concerns. Land's main critique of D&G is twofold: first, that they impose on their supposedly non-bound philosophy expressly humanist concerns (eg, recommending limited schizoanalysis for fear of an anarchy leading to fascism, which Land finds paradoxical), and second, that they suppose their schizoanalysis is free of the thanaturgic drive, which D&G found restrictively Freudian, but which Land finds to be a sufficiently natural and abundant process that can be accounted into schizoanalysis without issue. Thus, Land's conclusion is that schizoanalysis must proceed without delay and by any means possible, the most efficient of which would be by means of a rapid growth of technology beyond the point of human (or machine) comprehension, leading to a totally anarchous society where no rational thought would be possible, and therefore no restriction on human desire or activity. In other words, the only way to escape the restrictive nature of societal structure is to accelerate its growth until it is so large that it ceases to be meaningful.

After having completed these essays, Land decided to break from academic writing (being, of course, a form of the same rationalizing tendency that he disapproves of in institutions) and begin writing independently and with his CCRU club; his essays from around this time take the form mostly of wild and somewhat incoherent blends of science fiction (often fan fiction of his favorite writers), hyperbolic parodies of academic writing, and eschatological prophecies, all tending to depict / predict the ways in which social and rational order will break down in the event of this new technological epoch; of the few essays not in this essentially poetic style he wrote since his break from academia in the mid 90s, he seems mostly to have focused his attentions on taking the project of 'schizo analyzing' mathematics, beginning with a lengthy essay explaining how Godel's refutation of absolute formal consistency within mathematics exemplifies the futility of rationality and the coming epoch of incoherent, infinitely creative technological jargons, and how the same idea can be traced to the physical level (for example, how the earth's entire physical structure is determined by its magma interior producing constant tension as a direct result from the very cosmic explosions that caused its formation, essentially the thanaturgic drive at the atomic level).

What's interesting to me about Nick Land is that while I'm not sure I agree with his metaphysical diagnosis of a universal thanaturgos (it seems an abuse of the concept of non-being, as he effectively argues the unknown is to be related to these semiotics of death and change, irresponsibly and unappreciative of the specifically contingent nature of non-being in a philosophic sense), his theories rely on their own obsoletion to be predictively accurate, and as such could be re-conceived as strategic falsehoods in order to express an attitude about something perceived to be empirically inevitable or desireable. He argues elsewhere, in interviews, a fundamental idea that the concept of possibility can be understood as the future causally acting on the present, making the motion of changes a type of universal death-drive among things in line with realizations of these possibility; this is is a plausible but ultimately poetic perspective, but in the event some manner of technologically induced psychic anarchy were to unfold, this would serve as perhaps the supreme poetic irony to any observer's last moments of lucidity. The idea that such a thing might happen seems, materially speaking, far from negligible, whether one agrees with Land that such an environment would be desireable.

Despite some hang-ups, I give this book four stars for several reasons: A) because both the academic papers and scifi prophecies are entertaining reading; B) because this is vastly above-average thought for a British writer; and C) for rightly repudiating academia (and, with the 'Critique of Transcendental Miserablism', specifically academic marxism).

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

the attempt to read Deleuze (and Guattari) without the vitalism of Bergson and instead with this Nietzschean anti-vitalism (of the will) is a fascinating failure. the well-rehearsed productions with cyberpunk and neo-Lovecraftian toy kits are nothing more than disorientation before the exit sign in postmodernity's hall of mirrors, self-satisfaction oozing out between the panes. as much an experiment in non-standard thought as a child courting a throw-up is a dervish.

in comparing the writing here on women and on artificial intelligence what becomes evident is that as woman is the ego-double of man in patriarchy's sex-gender narcissism so too is AI the ego-double of capitalism’s narcissist-subject. this is not to say you can find embryonic neoreaction in diapause awaiting implantation stimuli but just as satanism is continuous with Xianity, and repression is part of a mixed disciplinary system with authorised releases and modes thereof: the photograph and the photonegative are both slaved to photography. I think if you’re going to be post-Kantian it might behoove you to do something about the idealism other than play marquis de sade.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Kant and Heidegger to the Club of Clthulu, standing in a circle and taking amphetamines until they see their beloved Great Old One - the Head being a certain disillusioned former academic. The Mad Black Deleuzian is the Trakl of theory, deterritorializing Deleuze and Guatarri to spit Bergson’s Vitalism out, without reterritorializing anything in the (machinic) process.

Some say the Father (not in any Lacanian sense) of Accelerationism has been on a line of flight politically, from academic Marxist to joining Moldbug in founding the Dark Enlightenment, a technocrat future where Democracy is replaced with Coke and Pepsi (and that’s a good thing). If anything, these essays show that the seed of neoliberalism was always in the kernel, waiting for it to explode.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up with the intention of getting more of a handle on neoreactionary thought (after reading the excellent #ACCELERATE also published by Urbanomic), and I would say that it delivered, if not in the manner I was expecting. Land walks the walk throughout these collected pieces; you can see an initial vector of philosophical thought accelerating throughout until it jumps the rails and lands in the Outside. I had read a few of these pieces previously and they definitely increase in intelligibility after the first pass; this is one that bears revisiting to get more out of it.

[Larry Ggggggggggggggggggggggggg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Land constantly overloads the senses; whether he is talking about alphanumerics, fantasizing about a dystopia filled with Turing cops and narcotic abusing genderless cyber punks, or exploring the oedipus of the anthropocene, Land constantly forces the reader to engage or at the very least submit to the effects of his jarring schizoid prose. The sinister apocrypha of Meltdown is the one of the high point, my favorite. Highly recommended.

[Adam Goddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

F̴̡̨͙̯̩͓͍͚͎͇̯̲̞̈̾̈́̊̚ͅͅ ̵̧͙̮̼͕͕͍͐̅͜U̷̧͎͈͉̣͍̳̜̥̮̱̼͙̤͂̎̋̈́̾́̊͐̒̉̓́̉̕͜͝ ̴̢̡̖̮͈̻̤̼̼̔̃̍̈́͒͒͗̈́͐̚ͅÇ̷̡̺̣̜̤͚̾͗̍͛ ̸̺̖̟̺͇̣͚̗̗̩̰̇͆̑̈́͘͜ͅͅK̸̢̻̮̻̪͈̯͈̰̣͙̤͉͍̥͆͗̊͛͌̎̈́͛͛̿͂̔͝

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 1 out of 5]

Äntligen.
Jag har hört om land och att ogillade bataille vilket samman med hans påstådda kultstatus var mina skäl till att försöka läsa honom. Tyvärr förefaller denna vara ännu en Zizek- mycket ljud och lärda texter; extremt lite substans. Läsaren lämnas med insikten om att akademiska bedrägerier fortfarande är en gångbar karriärstrategi. Vad gäller land påstår jag härmed, baserat på denna bok och med medgivandet att jag bara uttalar mig på grundval av denna, att kejsaren är naken.

Detta sagt; hans kritik av miserabilitetsmarxismen var rolig och välfunnen. För mig som högerman sätter den fingret på ett av de många problemen med den idévärlden.