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The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism
A sociologist, philosopher, literary theorist and fiction writer, who referred to himself as ``a saint, perhaps a madman,'' George Bataille made a habit of exploding the categories which we use to order our business of everyday life. This strange yet lucidly written book
is not so much an interpretation of his style of thought and ideas, but rather, a no-holds barred attempt to pursue Bataille's ideas to their conclusion. The result is an analysis of Bataille through the application of his style of thought and ideas rather than through more conventional
methods of academic argument. Addressing such deviance, political and legal theory, the history of religion or poetry, Land proves that to write discursively about Bataille it is sufficient to be a scholar, but to spread the virulent horror of his writings, it is necessary to be an
uncompromising devotee of Bataille's thought.
181 pages, ebook
First published July 2, 1992
105 people are currently reading
6389 people want to read
About the author
Nick Land
45 books766 followersLand 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".
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".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
October 10, 2016
The overall argument is very much bullshit backed up by several (and I assume) deliberate misreadings of Heidegger, Derrida, Nietzsche and Bataille. That allows Land to show off as a major badass, while secretly implementing a rather naïve faith in reason and scientific concepts while pretending to affirm a radically nihilist ethics. In this sense, he completely misses the spots where Bataille picks up on Hegel, precisely that the circular image of time (further extended through Nietzsche) allows him to avoid the catechontic trap of viewing time as a (Kantian) linear line of progress, the empty moralism for which Land still indirectly falls.
Yet to be fair, some of the discussions and problems posed in the book are not entirely worthless, and despite Land's neo-reactionary stance that dismisses certain major philosophical problems (of phenomenology, metaphysics, and most importantly [and related to Nietzsche and Hegel above, of the subject]) all the way without even bothering with considering the bodies of questions that justify them, responding rather superficially, the remaining sidewards movements and concepts may still have some value when detached from their primary orientation. Last, some marginal details from Bataille's œuvre are rather spot on, so it's not entirely a failure. What we have here is then a kind of frozen meal served, while, to put it gently, it still needs at least a little microwaving.
Yet to be fair, some of the discussions and problems posed in the book are not entirely worthless, and despite Land's neo-reactionary stance that dismisses certain major philosophical problems (of phenomenology, metaphysics, and most importantly [and related to Nietzsche and Hegel above, of the subject]) all the way without even bothering with considering the bodies of questions that justify them, responding rather superficially, the remaining sidewards movements and concepts may still have some value when detached from their primary orientation. Last, some marginal details from Bataille's œuvre are rather spot on, so it's not entirely a failure. What we have here is then a kind of frozen meal served, while, to put it gently, it still needs at least a little microwaving.
January 11, 2015
Bataille is badass. Land is badass. Land on Bataille is badass. Nuff said.
June 12, 2016
My girlfriend was on the fence about having an abortion. But it was bit late to do so and we were worried. Then I got my hands on a copy of this shit right here, had her read it and VOILA! Foetus Deletus! Clean annihilation! This shit is magic and I recommend all sexually active males to retain a copy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 24, 2017
"Edgy" overblown obscurantism about a creepy guy, written by a creepy guy
September 1, 2018
‘The dissipation of the soul would not relate to thought as an object of theoretical representation. There would be something almost touching about Hegel’s clutching for philosophical Auflösung if it were not so pitifully stupid. It takes only the most rudimentary psychology to know that for as long as ‘I think’ theory will be merely a brutal jest; a way of baiting the nervous system into an apoplexy. Whatever is thought in the grim mode of responsibility can only be registered as a grating aggravation, because it is precisely the ego which is unable to dissolve itself into thinking; clattering with its chains through labyrinths of confession, transforming energy flux into representation, into frustration. When we speak it rattles like a jagged stone in our throats. A little over two millennia ago we began to cough up strange new words with our blood and bile and in certain quarters the excruciation of libido began to be called philosophy.’
‘Space echoes like an immense tomb yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die?’
Before the CCRU, before Meltdown, waaaaay before The Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land wrote a book about Bataille. The bats in the attic atop his later stuff. The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism is significant as Land’s only book-length writing to date--especially given that anything of similar length authored by @outsideness would be of seriously diminished interest. If you want a fully elaborated book of philosophy from the mutant prophet of accelerationism, this is as good as it’s going to get. So I want to say at the outset that lock, stock & barrel Thirst For Annihilation is an entrancing book. A hypnotic read with a vertiginous sense of purpose.
Nick Land’s antireligious stuff evinces only ants in the grass, though. The book dawdles too long striking flint about theology which induces only a great big yawn. I wonder if Nick Land had a religious upbringing like Nietzsche and Bataille before him. Who else hates religion so much except the formerly religious? The Thirst for Annihilation is indented with choleric paroxysms aimed at monotheism, the entire middle portion is a reading of the Nietzschean-Bataillan death of God (replete with risqué theory-fictional experiments in iconoclasm), atheistic rants which come across as adolescent and slightly hysterical. The book lingers incessantly tossing pebbles at the ‘vulgarity, gracelessness and complete destitution of intelligence’ in Augustine. I mean...Augustine? Seriously? Who fucking cares?
Muddying the sacred with filth and profanity is the least interesting part of Bataille. The blasphemous stew of monotheistic austerity admixtured with penises, excrement, filth and gross-out humor is so lame. And oddly mainstream now, if it wasn’t in at this book’s publication in 1992 (although I think it was), as our supposed Judeo-Christian values are greased with a patina of revulsive vulgarity again and again through a meaningless cycle of countercultural commodities. The point that worship and transcendence requires a kind of castration, a discontinuity from our primordial flesh, is fine, I guess, but only enticing so far as it grounds further theoretical elaborations. Anyway, the idea that eternal life in heaven is an illusory interdependency, a severance from the profound excitation of animalistic joy & truth, is only compelling if you believed in heaven in the first place. Bury the hatchet, dude.
Am I being too hard on him? After all, Nick Land is Dark Prince Edgelord of philosophy. What else do you read him for? Anyway, the slightly juvenile rivalry to theology notwithstanding, Land’s ‘libidinal materialism’ is very compelling. And disturbing. You’ll bite your fingernails until they bleed from the edge of your seat.
The death of God commands attention only so far as Christianity (and the like) is the paradignamic sentimentality obviating Landian realism. The instantiation of religious inertia, which may now have a materialist garb (God may have died but he has many consumerist descendents), overcodes the flow which Land would liberate; ‘libidinal materialism’. Matter, for Land, is primary process in agony, the molecular tendency toward a writhing & convulsive swarm of proliferating heterogeneity which can be scaled up to the cosmic leviathan of consumption and expenditure as a feedback process. It insinuates its way into the imbricated machines of libido and thanatos perforating through the human subject. And seems to have sovereignty over the nonhuman as well, the magma flows of liquid energy which perspire through every discreet object enthralled to one another under a bleak solar tyranny. Matter is a process ontology becoming-nothing, locked into atelological assembly by these positive feedback loops; ‘Matter signals to its lost voyagers, telling them that their quest is vain, and that their homeland already lies in ashes behind them.’ There is more going on here than a scorching of the earth through the entropic ‘tendency toward disorder’ coded into the quantum level of reality. For reference;
‘Libidinal materialism is not, however, a thermodynamics. This is because it does not distinguish between power and energy, or between negentropy and energy. It no longer conceives the level of entropy as a predicate of any substantial or subsistent being. In contrast to the energy of physical thermodynamics, libidinal energy is chaotic, or pre-ontological [...] Where thermodynamics begins with an ontology of energy, of particles, of space/time, and then interprets distributions and entropy levels as attributes of energy, libidinal materialism accepts only chaos and composition.’
The way that we think about chaos, as a disorganizing or disaggregating strike of lightning does not encompass the untotalizable delirium of the real. Land (and Bataille) can only show glimpses of the outside through abrasive and unpleasant poems and (meta)fictional experiments which are cold to the touch. I can’t help quoting these passages over and over again; ‘Survival dissolves as a frangible dam does--eroded to bits by the tumult of energetic rage--so that sexual craving is the howl of nature’s fringe pounded into trash by the sun’. Most of my notes from this book are just word-for-word transcriptions of Land’s mesmeric style.
As Land’s late-90s Deleuzo-Guattarian cybertexts rarely namedrop D&G, here Bataille is invoked conservatively. I think there are more firsthand references to Kant, Nietzsche and Freud (although I didn’t count). The logic of this book is, however, very Bataillian. He’s on every sentence like a rash. Even during a long digression about the transcendental as a philosophical category we are reminded why Kant’s ‘critical philosophy’ is merely one plane of Bataillian (libidinal) materialism; ‘Bataille does not refer merely to matter, but to base matter; a materiality so alien to the epistemological framework that it is utterly without dependence upon the form of the object (the thing)’ The point here is about strata, scales and (dis)continuities, about drilling through sediemented layers of perception in the labyrinth of being. The influence of Bataille is not only the refusal to accord eminence to any single floor stacked-up into the transcendental skyscraper, but to acknowledge them as moving parts, their moments of intensity reaching toward one another with famished excitation. Materiality as possessing a differentiation defined through libidinal interrelation. This account is equal parts estranging and tempting, spans virtual infinities but preserves the enigma of the world. Top marks.
Just skim past the weird limericks about how God is stupid. The lame tussle with religion is worth enduring to receive one of the most affecting (or perhaps afflicting?) works of philosophy I’ve read to this day.
‘Space echoes like an immense tomb yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die?’
Before the CCRU, before Meltdown, waaaaay before The Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land wrote a book about Bataille. The bats in the attic atop his later stuff. The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism is significant as Land’s only book-length writing to date--especially given that anything of similar length authored by @outsideness would be of seriously diminished interest. If you want a fully elaborated book of philosophy from the mutant prophet of accelerationism, this is as good as it’s going to get. So I want to say at the outset that lock, stock & barrel Thirst For Annihilation is an entrancing book. A hypnotic read with a vertiginous sense of purpose.
Nick Land’s antireligious stuff evinces only ants in the grass, though. The book dawdles too long striking flint about theology which induces only a great big yawn. I wonder if Nick Land had a religious upbringing like Nietzsche and Bataille before him. Who else hates religion so much except the formerly religious? The Thirst for Annihilation is indented with choleric paroxysms aimed at monotheism, the entire middle portion is a reading of the Nietzschean-Bataillan death of God (replete with risqué theory-fictional experiments in iconoclasm), atheistic rants which come across as adolescent and slightly hysterical. The book lingers incessantly tossing pebbles at the ‘vulgarity, gracelessness and complete destitution of intelligence’ in Augustine. I mean...Augustine? Seriously? Who fucking cares?
Muddying the sacred with filth and profanity is the least interesting part of Bataille. The blasphemous stew of monotheistic austerity admixtured with penises, excrement, filth and gross-out humor is so lame. And oddly mainstream now, if it wasn’t in at this book’s publication in 1992 (although I think it was), as our supposed Judeo-Christian values are greased with a patina of revulsive vulgarity again and again through a meaningless cycle of countercultural commodities. The point that worship and transcendence requires a kind of castration, a discontinuity from our primordial flesh, is fine, I guess, but only enticing so far as it grounds further theoretical elaborations. Anyway, the idea that eternal life in heaven is an illusory interdependency, a severance from the profound excitation of animalistic joy & truth, is only compelling if you believed in heaven in the first place. Bury the hatchet, dude.
Am I being too hard on him? After all, Nick Land is Dark Prince Edgelord of philosophy. What else do you read him for? Anyway, the slightly juvenile rivalry to theology notwithstanding, Land’s ‘libidinal materialism’ is very compelling. And disturbing. You’ll bite your fingernails until they bleed from the edge of your seat.
The death of God commands attention only so far as Christianity (and the like) is the paradignamic sentimentality obviating Landian realism. The instantiation of religious inertia, which may now have a materialist garb (God may have died but he has many consumerist descendents), overcodes the flow which Land would liberate; ‘libidinal materialism’. Matter, for Land, is primary process in agony, the molecular tendency toward a writhing & convulsive swarm of proliferating heterogeneity which can be scaled up to the cosmic leviathan of consumption and expenditure as a feedback process. It insinuates its way into the imbricated machines of libido and thanatos perforating through the human subject. And seems to have sovereignty over the nonhuman as well, the magma flows of liquid energy which perspire through every discreet object enthralled to one another under a bleak solar tyranny. Matter is a process ontology becoming-nothing, locked into atelological assembly by these positive feedback loops; ‘Matter signals to its lost voyagers, telling them that their quest is vain, and that their homeland already lies in ashes behind them.’ There is more going on here than a scorching of the earth through the entropic ‘tendency toward disorder’ coded into the quantum level of reality. For reference;
‘Libidinal materialism is not, however, a thermodynamics. This is because it does not distinguish between power and energy, or between negentropy and energy. It no longer conceives the level of entropy as a predicate of any substantial or subsistent being. In contrast to the energy of physical thermodynamics, libidinal energy is chaotic, or pre-ontological [...] Where thermodynamics begins with an ontology of energy, of particles, of space/time, and then interprets distributions and entropy levels as attributes of energy, libidinal materialism accepts only chaos and composition.’
The way that we think about chaos, as a disorganizing or disaggregating strike of lightning does not encompass the untotalizable delirium of the real. Land (and Bataille) can only show glimpses of the outside through abrasive and unpleasant poems and (meta)fictional experiments which are cold to the touch. I can’t help quoting these passages over and over again; ‘Survival dissolves as a frangible dam does--eroded to bits by the tumult of energetic rage--so that sexual craving is the howl of nature’s fringe pounded into trash by the sun’. Most of my notes from this book are just word-for-word transcriptions of Land’s mesmeric style.
As Land’s late-90s Deleuzo-Guattarian cybertexts rarely namedrop D&G, here Bataille is invoked conservatively. I think there are more firsthand references to Kant, Nietzsche and Freud (although I didn’t count). The logic of this book is, however, very Bataillian. He’s on every sentence like a rash. Even during a long digression about the transcendental as a philosophical category we are reminded why Kant’s ‘critical philosophy’ is merely one plane of Bataillian (libidinal) materialism; ‘Bataille does not refer merely to matter, but to base matter; a materiality so alien to the epistemological framework that it is utterly without dependence upon the form of the object (the thing)’ The point here is about strata, scales and (dis)continuities, about drilling through sediemented layers of perception in the labyrinth of being. The influence of Bataille is not only the refusal to accord eminence to any single floor stacked-up into the transcendental skyscraper, but to acknowledge them as moving parts, their moments of intensity reaching toward one another with famished excitation. Materiality as possessing a differentiation defined through libidinal interrelation. This account is equal parts estranging and tempting, spans virtual infinities but preserves the enigma of the world. Top marks.
Just skim past the weird limericks about how God is stupid. The lame tussle with religion is worth enduring to receive one of the most affecting (or perhaps afflicting?) works of philosophy I’ve read to this day.
September 23, 2021
Land is right. The name "Bataille" should stick out like a sore, gangrenous thumb in the academic industry. Here is a thinker of contagion as communication. To write a book about Bataille is to already spit on his grave. After all, what is 'knowledge' all but a torturous, labyrinthine digression from the inexorable slide to maximal disorder? Must not all meaning, intentionality and transcendence, drunk on solar excess, hemorrhage into intensive zero? Yet Land has ambitions to persist in this performative contradiction (as Bataille did). And in the sordid communion that ensues we are exposed to the vector of atheistic libidinal materialism coursing through Schopanhauer, Nietzsche and Bataille. Having paid his philosophical dues, Land in the final moments of the book sets out on a weeping, giddying meditation on love, authorial presence and death, which reaches its feverish apogee in the declaration that "Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown".
Now, there is something to be said about Land's mild abuse of the second law of thermodynamics and complexity science, an error which is repeated and adapted into a slogan without the original traumatic bite in so-called 'unconditional accelerationism'. A more scientifically minded reader might be worried if 'negentropy' has any real empirical purchase and not merely a productive misunderstanding of entropy and thermodynamics.
Bearing in mind these technical flaws, the text is nonetheless a remarkable exercise in treating writing as an occasion for convulsive thought, unbound from the compulsion to serve the interest of life and living, to crash on the shores on the unknown. Nick Land is dead. Long live Nick Land.
Now, there is something to be said about Land's mild abuse of the second law of thermodynamics and complexity science, an error which is repeated and adapted into a slogan without the original traumatic bite in so-called 'unconditional accelerationism'. A more scientifically minded reader might be worried if 'negentropy' has any real empirical purchase and not merely a productive misunderstanding of entropy and thermodynamics.
Bearing in mind these technical flaws, the text is nonetheless a remarkable exercise in treating writing as an occasion for convulsive thought, unbound from the compulsion to serve the interest of life and living, to crash on the shores on the unknown. Nick Land is dead. Long live Nick Land.
August 7, 2009
Great, Great Stuff here. This is the type of philosophy that should be taught to rebellious adolescent boys. Nine Inch Nails on steroids, doing a close reading of the Marquis De Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georges Bataille. This book epitomizes the state of philosophy in the 1990's, a nihilistic malaise.
September 12, 2018
God this is woke
June 1, 2011
Insane.
Perverse, occasionally hilarious, massively engaging anti-humanism.
Needs to be read (and reread).
Perverse, occasionally hilarious, massively engaging anti-humanism.
Needs to be read (and reread).
June 11, 2022
what a supremely weird and infinitely interesting piece
i cant stop thinking about this book weeks later
i cant stop thinking about this book weeks later
October 13, 2012
I don't have any kind of philosophy background, but I do have an addiction to Bataille. So the dense philosophical discussions of Kant and Heidegger etc. I can't pretend to have understood fully, but there were great moments of recognition throughout. The section on Henry Miller is fantastic. The way the prose sometimes devolves into raving poetry, the detestation of academic convention, and the general delirium of the book appealed to me. Through reading reviews I guess there are apparently some problems with his reading of Aquinas and some other things, but like I said I'm not well read enough in these areas to comment. But as a book on Bataille this is one that's truly in the spirit of the man himself, which is better than most banal academic analysis on a writer like him.
April 28, 2022
entiendo el punto pero no hace falta ser tan petao
December 31, 2020
Whatever we may feel about Land's despicable trajectory, it cannot be denied that this book displays a fierce and uncompromising intelligence. Let us not beat around the bush. Even in this early book, Land does not shy away from challenging discussions of Nazism and eugenics, citing Schopenhauer's suggestion that pederasty was a form of racial hygiene and arguing that German officers were more “profoundly caged” than the victims of the concentration camp. Whether these and other ominous signs point to his later reactionary position is nevertheless ultimately a false question. The overall thrust of this book is distinctly left-libertarian, seeking to escape from all forms of servitude: “Docility in respect of the law is quite different from a surrender, in exactly the way that moralists are different from mystics. Surrender is a deeper evil than any possible action.” Land teases out of Bataille's work the “mixture of nausea and fear” where every word is a “desperate scrabbling for escape (from isolation).”
Land's flight from servility extends to some of the most elementary philosophical ideas, rejecting freedom out of hand and claiming that an ontology of time is impossible. He is especially suspicious of synchronicity, which presupposes the metaphor of a “scroll upon which creation's unfolding is inscribed.” This metaphor “corresponds to the servility of God; to his proper function and cosmic duty as book-keeper of the universe.”
Land rebels against Romanticism, arguing for the extermination of one's sentiment:
“It is of particular importance that all traces of tenderness - that most dangerously blissful affect – be ground rigorously into the dirt. Life must be stripped down to its bare frame, and there is always something to be eliminated that one had mistakenly thought was architectural, but which was in fact quite different: merely a reinforcement. For it is only in being allowed to fall that a structure discovers its emaciated erectness – its spine.”
Notably, the rediscovery of the architecture beneath the flabby reinforcements reproduces the attitude of moralization of upright posture. It is surprising that Land doesn't see the connection between this erectness and the moral rectitude that underpins fascistic hygiene.
Land's comments on psychoanalytic topics are perceptive, and his discussion of the way drives become compartmentalized in images is insightful:
“scopophiliac investments are not libidinal tropisms like any other, but compromises; coaxing drives into the domesticated state associated with representation, and by this means constraining them to teleology. For desire to occupy the schema of approximation to a condition that is represented as its telos is consequential upon the visualization of its activating irritation. Impulse is thus lured into the trap of negativity, aspiration, and dependence upon the reality principle; exactly the complex which Bataille summarizes consistently as transcendence.”
This transcendence complex is contrasted with an immanence of cybernetic assimilation:
“The φ or communication tendency accentuates the various 'interactions' between biological matter and its 'outside', and is thus equivalent to a lowering of the organic barrier threshold, essential to photo-reactivity, assimilation, cybernetic regulation, nutrition, etc. This is the complex of organic functions which Bataille associates with primary immanence. The ψ or isolation tendency is the inhibition of exchange, a raising of the barrier threshold that generates a measure of invariant stability, the conservation of code, controlled expenditure of bio-energetic reserves, etc.”
Land is at his best in his virtuosic engagements with religion. In what is perhaps the strongest argument in the book, Land unsettles the perennial ontological problem of the one/many:
“To set up the question of difference as a conflict between the one and the many is a massive strategic blunder - the Occident lost its way at this point - the real issue is not one or many, but many and zero.”
For Land, god is omniphallic and omnibanal “in whom reason, being, authority, and the good coincide.” Monotheism “rests upon hypostatizing the differential element of the human animal... When confronted by the gothic intimidation synonymous with Western culture it is hard to re-excavate the fact that one is merely dealing with a beast advantaged by a measure of superior cunning, a hypertrophic facility for the transfer of information, and an opposable thumb.” The cunning “defence mechanism of this cult” is that it is “too uninteresting to fight.” Building on Lyotard, Land suggests that
“Christianity should not be attacked but abandoned, since atheism merely perpetuates the memory traces that foster the depressive states of ressentiment and disgust... the thought of the death of God merely dampens libidinal intensities if it is treated as anything other than a matter of indifference. God should bore us into forgetting rather than provoking us into revolt.”
Land unearths an intriguing heresy, annihilationism, where sinners escape the eternal torments of hell as their soul is exterminated when they die. Land penetrates the fantasmatic motivation for this doctrine:
“Utter dissolution is offered as a lure, but safely imprisoned in a system of ethicological exclusion processes; permeable only to that inarticulate ardour which springs from the repressed materiality of the human animal. The taint of evil, or of divine (paternal) disapproval, serves as one barrier screening the ego from the non-image of death.”
For all its fearsome clamour, Land's assault on religion is ultimately inhibited by a strange affinity for the sacred/profane binary. Oddly tender.
Land's discussion of death is poetic and moving, insisting that death cannot be reduced to “ceasing to be” and wonders rhetorically whether there is such a thing as 'mere death.' The answer to that question, as far as I'm concerned, is affirmative. To truly overcome Romanticism, it is necessary not to get seduced by the pathos of death; death is simply passing to a degree of appearance =0.
In the process of escaping from the desire for confinement, Land makes the fatal error of affirming logical intolerance:
“The real context for being's logic (ontology) is famine. It is in this sense that Spinozism provides such a decisive paradigm for the theoretical decompression of intensity, since it is programmed by the meticulous refusal of being's logical intolerance (a necessity for one writing of deus sive natura). It is perhaps only here that Spinoza succumbs abjectly to the tradition, blinding himself to the vertiginous modal skewing which attests to the psychosis of God, and impresses itself upon materialist thought as violence and crime.”
The argument for intolerance presupposes scarcity. It is an advantage of Spinoza's position that he starts instead from abundance. Land's critique of the impression left by Spinoza is the most parochial, and bizarrely sentimental aspect of the text. Land's argument here succumbs to disappointing anti-enlightenment enthusiasm, another soft moment. The second charge is more nuanced. Fair enough: Spinoza decompresses the intensity of thought. To argue that this is an abject submission to tradition, however, is to massively caricature Spinoza's thought. Let us provisionally accept that Spinoza's god is psychotic, dispensing with any transcendent master signifier as so much fuel for the causa sui. As soon as this is acknowledged, the charge may be reversed: why is Land so keen to preserve a place for transcendent mastery? Has he not yet heard the good news that no one is the master in is own house?
Land's flight from servility extends to some of the most elementary philosophical ideas, rejecting freedom out of hand and claiming that an ontology of time is impossible. He is especially suspicious of synchronicity, which presupposes the metaphor of a “scroll upon which creation's unfolding is inscribed.” This metaphor “corresponds to the servility of God; to his proper function and cosmic duty as book-keeper of the universe.”
Land rebels against Romanticism, arguing for the extermination of one's sentiment:
“It is of particular importance that all traces of tenderness - that most dangerously blissful affect – be ground rigorously into the dirt. Life must be stripped down to its bare frame, and there is always something to be eliminated that one had mistakenly thought was architectural, but which was in fact quite different: merely a reinforcement. For it is only in being allowed to fall that a structure discovers its emaciated erectness – its spine.”
Notably, the rediscovery of the architecture beneath the flabby reinforcements reproduces the attitude of moralization of upright posture. It is surprising that Land doesn't see the connection between this erectness and the moral rectitude that underpins fascistic hygiene.
Land's comments on psychoanalytic topics are perceptive, and his discussion of the way drives become compartmentalized in images is insightful:
“scopophiliac investments are not libidinal tropisms like any other, but compromises; coaxing drives into the domesticated state associated with representation, and by this means constraining them to teleology. For desire to occupy the schema of approximation to a condition that is represented as its telos is consequential upon the visualization of its activating irritation. Impulse is thus lured into the trap of negativity, aspiration, and dependence upon the reality principle; exactly the complex which Bataille summarizes consistently as transcendence.”
This transcendence complex is contrasted with an immanence of cybernetic assimilation:
“The φ or communication tendency accentuates the various 'interactions' between biological matter and its 'outside', and is thus equivalent to a lowering of the organic barrier threshold, essential to photo-reactivity, assimilation, cybernetic regulation, nutrition, etc. This is the complex of organic functions which Bataille associates with primary immanence. The ψ or isolation tendency is the inhibition of exchange, a raising of the barrier threshold that generates a measure of invariant stability, the conservation of code, controlled expenditure of bio-energetic reserves, etc.”
Land is at his best in his virtuosic engagements with religion. In what is perhaps the strongest argument in the book, Land unsettles the perennial ontological problem of the one/many:
“To set up the question of difference as a conflict between the one and the many is a massive strategic blunder - the Occident lost its way at this point - the real issue is not one or many, but many and zero.”
For Land, god is omniphallic and omnibanal “in whom reason, being, authority, and the good coincide.” Monotheism “rests upon hypostatizing the differential element of the human animal... When confronted by the gothic intimidation synonymous with Western culture it is hard to re-excavate the fact that one is merely dealing with a beast advantaged by a measure of superior cunning, a hypertrophic facility for the transfer of information, and an opposable thumb.” The cunning “defence mechanism of this cult” is that it is “too uninteresting to fight.” Building on Lyotard, Land suggests that
“Christianity should not be attacked but abandoned, since atheism merely perpetuates the memory traces that foster the depressive states of ressentiment and disgust... the thought of the death of God merely dampens libidinal intensities if it is treated as anything other than a matter of indifference. God should bore us into forgetting rather than provoking us into revolt.”
Land unearths an intriguing heresy, annihilationism, where sinners escape the eternal torments of hell as their soul is exterminated when they die. Land penetrates the fantasmatic motivation for this doctrine:
“Utter dissolution is offered as a lure, but safely imprisoned in a system of ethicological exclusion processes; permeable only to that inarticulate ardour which springs from the repressed materiality of the human animal. The taint of evil, or of divine (paternal) disapproval, serves as one barrier screening the ego from the non-image of death.”
For all its fearsome clamour, Land's assault on religion is ultimately inhibited by a strange affinity for the sacred/profane binary. Oddly tender.
Land's discussion of death is poetic and moving, insisting that death cannot be reduced to “ceasing to be” and wonders rhetorically whether there is such a thing as 'mere death.' The answer to that question, as far as I'm concerned, is affirmative. To truly overcome Romanticism, it is necessary not to get seduced by the pathos of death; death is simply passing to a degree of appearance =0.
In the process of escaping from the desire for confinement, Land makes the fatal error of affirming logical intolerance:
“The real context for being's logic (ontology) is famine. It is in this sense that Spinozism provides such a decisive paradigm for the theoretical decompression of intensity, since it is programmed by the meticulous refusal of being's logical intolerance (a necessity for one writing of deus sive natura). It is perhaps only here that Spinoza succumbs abjectly to the tradition, blinding himself to the vertiginous modal skewing which attests to the psychosis of God, and impresses itself upon materialist thought as violence and crime.”
The argument for intolerance presupposes scarcity. It is an advantage of Spinoza's position that he starts instead from abundance. Land's critique of the impression left by Spinoza is the most parochial, and bizarrely sentimental aspect of the text. Land's argument here succumbs to disappointing anti-enlightenment enthusiasm, another soft moment. The second charge is more nuanced. Fair enough: Spinoza decompresses the intensity of thought. To argue that this is an abject submission to tradition, however, is to massively caricature Spinoza's thought. Let us provisionally accept that Spinoza's god is psychotic, dispensing with any transcendent master signifier as so much fuel for the causa sui. As soon as this is acknowledged, the charge may be reversed: why is Land so keen to preserve a place for transcendent mastery? Has he not yet heard the good news that no one is the master in is own house?
October 7, 2016
While there are kernels of some interesting ideas in Land's early work, his more recent ventures into neckbeard Libertarian territory and advocacy of cognitive elitism thoroughly tarnishes any enjoyment I may have once gotten out of books like this.
October 16, 2024
Nick Land’s Thirst for Annihilation is a daring philosophical meditation, an intricate tapestry woven from Georges Bataille’s obsession with death, eroticism, and the limits of human experience. At its heart, the book is a profound confrontation with the notion of self-dissolution, the collapse of meaning, and the annihilation of subjectivity. It is both a homage to Bataille’s thought and a radical extension of it, challenging the reader to consider not just the boundaries of philosophy but of existence itself.
Land’s approach is at once bold and disorienting. His writing dances with Bataille’s key themes—excess, transgression, and the sacred—and infuses them with an accelerationist current that is both intellectually stimulating and deliberately unsettling. The concept of the “headless” or acephalic catastrophe, capital’s blind rush towards annihilation, is one of Land’s more striking insights, underscoring his deep engagement with both Bataille’s abyss and contemporary capitalism’s destructive momentum.
However, the book’s brilliance is often obscured by its impenetrable prose. The text is densely packed with philosophical jargon, references to psychoanalysis, and opaque allusions to everything from Nietzschean nihilism to Deleuzian schizoanalysis. While this undoubtedly serves to deepen the intellectual engagement for the well-versed reader, it alienates those who are not already intimately familiar with the landscape of continental philosophy. In this sense, Thirst for Annihilation can feel less like a coherent work of theory and more like a series of theoretical provocations, each fragment challenging the reader to stay afloat amidst a sea of abstraction.
Moreover, the book’s relentless preoccupation with death, ruin, and dissolution can feel overwhelming, as if it were intent on leaving the reader in a state of existential exhaustion. There is little in the way of relief or resolution; Land offers no easy answers, no way out of the labyrinth of annihilation he constructs. His deep commitment to Bataille’s notion that the only possible response to life’s absurdity is a radical embrace of its transgressive excesses is admirable in its consistency, but it leaves the reader adrift, with few touchstones of meaning.
Land’s work also engages with the problematic allure of fascism, capital, and violent dissolution, navigating these dangerous waters with an often-unnerving detachment. His treatment of these ideas is more reflective than prescriptive, yet one cannot help but feel the looming shadow of Bataille’s darker impulses hovering over every page. While Land acknowledges the horror embedded in such trajectories, there remains an ambivalence in his analysis that may discomfort even the most seasoned readers of critical theory.
Land’s approach is at once bold and disorienting. His writing dances with Bataille’s key themes—excess, transgression, and the sacred—and infuses them with an accelerationist current that is both intellectually stimulating and deliberately unsettling. The concept of the “headless” or acephalic catastrophe, capital’s blind rush towards annihilation, is one of Land’s more striking insights, underscoring his deep engagement with both Bataille’s abyss and contemporary capitalism’s destructive momentum.
However, the book’s brilliance is often obscured by its impenetrable prose. The text is densely packed with philosophical jargon, references to psychoanalysis, and opaque allusions to everything from Nietzschean nihilism to Deleuzian schizoanalysis. While this undoubtedly serves to deepen the intellectual engagement for the well-versed reader, it alienates those who are not already intimately familiar with the landscape of continental philosophy. In this sense, Thirst for Annihilation can feel less like a coherent work of theory and more like a series of theoretical provocations, each fragment challenging the reader to stay afloat amidst a sea of abstraction.
Moreover, the book’s relentless preoccupation with death, ruin, and dissolution can feel overwhelming, as if it were intent on leaving the reader in a state of existential exhaustion. There is little in the way of relief or resolution; Land offers no easy answers, no way out of the labyrinth of annihilation he constructs. His deep commitment to Bataille’s notion that the only possible response to life’s absurdity is a radical embrace of its transgressive excesses is admirable in its consistency, but it leaves the reader adrift, with few touchstones of meaning.
Land’s work also engages with the problematic allure of fascism, capital, and violent dissolution, navigating these dangerous waters with an often-unnerving detachment. His treatment of these ideas is more reflective than prescriptive, yet one cannot help but feel the looming shadow of Bataille’s darker impulses hovering over every page. While Land acknowledges the horror embedded in such trajectories, there remains an ambivalence in his analysis that may discomfort even the most seasoned readers of critical theory.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 19, 2025
*Read for my thesis*
I don't really think this book is comprehensible unless you have a PhD in philosophy. Nick Land really took the whole "assume your reader has background knowledge" and ran with it. THANK GOD I am in two philosophy classes right now because without those I think this entire book would have flown straight over my head, and I can only imagine how much I missed. I also know nothing about Bataille, so that didn't really help. And I probably would have enjoyed this more if I didn't have to google every other word, but hey, if my vocabulary was that big I would also write like that.
That all being said, this book is a tremendously commendable work. I think Land gives a very interesting (albeit perhaps incorrect) interpretation of Nietzsche and I think with the book I now understand the Deleuzian/left-wing appropriation of Nietzsche a lot better. Land capitalizes on the work of all these authors to make a case for anarchy and the death-drive, and has an interesting interpretation of the potlatch and abundance/overflowing. It is curious to me how he uses Nietzsche's attachment to war and rejection of rationality to make the case for a rejection of order entirely. The way he reinterprets the will-to-change as a death drive is also slightly dubious but something to think about.
Land seamlessly merges philosophy with culture in this work, and I certainly can't say I was expecting to see prolific references to Sade in this but there they were and dare I say they were interesting. I used to be pretty fascinated by the concept of the abject and transgression generally but I think ultimately I've decided that there are some things that just shouldn't be allowed and to a certain extent we should embrace censorship (because once you say anything is allowed you end up with an anarchic state where Sade's writings are valorized and seen as beautiful instances of the individual's refusal to acknowledge the subjectivity of any other and that is probably where I disagree with Land the most in this).
Overall I think Land is pretty cool and although I don't think I really agree with him on all that much philosophically (culturally perhaps a little more), I think the way he does philosophy is incredibly commendable and he shouldn't be immediately written off. The man is really a genius and it is upsetting and honestly horrifying that he is lumped into other groups of thinkers that don't even have advanced degrees. The man wrote his dissertation on Heidegger for christ sake.
I don't really think this book is comprehensible unless you have a PhD in philosophy. Nick Land really took the whole "assume your reader has background knowledge" and ran with it. THANK GOD I am in two philosophy classes right now because without those I think this entire book would have flown straight over my head, and I can only imagine how much I missed. I also know nothing about Bataille, so that didn't really help. And I probably would have enjoyed this more if I didn't have to google every other word, but hey, if my vocabulary was that big I would also write like that.
That all being said, this book is a tremendously commendable work. I think Land gives a very interesting (albeit perhaps incorrect) interpretation of Nietzsche and I think with the book I now understand the Deleuzian/left-wing appropriation of Nietzsche a lot better. Land capitalizes on the work of all these authors to make a case for anarchy and the death-drive, and has an interesting interpretation of the potlatch and abundance/overflowing. It is curious to me how he uses Nietzsche's attachment to war and rejection of rationality to make the case for a rejection of order entirely. The way he reinterprets the will-to-change as a death drive is also slightly dubious but something to think about.
Land seamlessly merges philosophy with culture in this work, and I certainly can't say I was expecting to see prolific references to Sade in this but there they were and dare I say they were interesting. I used to be pretty fascinated by the concept of the abject and transgression generally but I think ultimately I've decided that there are some things that just shouldn't be allowed and to a certain extent we should embrace censorship (because once you say anything is allowed you end up with an anarchic state where Sade's writings are valorized and seen as beautiful instances of the individual's refusal to acknowledge the subjectivity of any other and that is probably where I disagree with Land the most in this).
Overall I think Land is pretty cool and although I don't think I really agree with him on all that much philosophically (culturally perhaps a little more), I think the way he does philosophy is incredibly commendable and he shouldn't be immediately written off. The man is really a genius and it is upsetting and honestly horrifying that he is lumped into other groups of thinkers that don't even have advanced degrees. The man wrote his dissertation on Heidegger for christ sake.
July 15, 2025
I haven't really read much philosophy so I was reading this more in the sense of prose, and managed to enjoy most of it, especially from the chapter 'fanged noumena' onwards. The chapter on space, drawing on Bataille's concept of the labyrinth and thinking it through the model of a menger-sponge, was insanely difficult but also super fascinating. There is a level of care that Land seems to exhibit when dealing with concepts from science, especially entropy.
Land's reading of various philosophers seem to make sense, and as an introduction to Bataille I found it helpful. His criticism of some like Derrida might be too sweeping and inaccurate (as others have pointed out), so it's best to always retain a sense of skepticism while reading him.
It's very easy to simply surrender oneself to Land's prose (to be invited to a dissolution into the filth of prose), but a more rewarding reading experience might come from learning how to oscillate between such lures into self-abandonment and moments of distance (like post-nut clarity somewhat - after all I don't really see how I can have the stamina to sustain an orgasmic level of ecstasy throughout the entirety of this text). That being said, it is worth appreciating how Land seems to modulate his writing in accordance with such an oscillation, I think. Unlike what he claims this text to be doing - a taking of Bataille's practice to its very limit (which would mean zero regard for readability at all, I assume) - Land fortunately provides moments to comment on what he and Bataille are doing. The reader is not left in the complete dark, abandoned to wade and flounder without orientation (I know texts like that but this text is not of that sort). At least in this respect - in the generosity (no matter how little) that it shows to the reader in wanting to at least teach them a handful of things - Thirst for Annihilation is not as antihumanistic as it makes itself out to be.
(Perhaps a rewarding angle would be to think Land's work alongside Simondon and/or Stiegler, along the notion of individuation.)
Land's reading of various philosophers seem to make sense, and as an introduction to Bataille I found it helpful. His criticism of some like Derrida might be too sweeping and inaccurate (as others have pointed out), so it's best to always retain a sense of skepticism while reading him.
It's very easy to simply surrender oneself to Land's prose (to be invited to a dissolution into the filth of prose), but a more rewarding reading experience might come from learning how to oscillate between such lures into self-abandonment and moments of distance (like post-nut clarity somewhat - after all I don't really see how I can have the stamina to sustain an orgasmic level of ecstasy throughout the entirety of this text). That being said, it is worth appreciating how Land seems to modulate his writing in accordance with such an oscillation, I think. Unlike what he claims this text to be doing - a taking of Bataille's practice to its very limit (which would mean zero regard for readability at all, I assume) - Land fortunately provides moments to comment on what he and Bataille are doing. The reader is not left in the complete dark, abandoned to wade and flounder without orientation (I know texts like that but this text is not of that sort). At least in this respect - in the generosity (no matter how little) that it shows to the reader in wanting to at least teach them a handful of things - Thirst for Annihilation is not as antihumanistic as it makes itself out to be.
(Perhaps a rewarding angle would be to think Land's work alongside Simondon and/or Stiegler, along the notion of individuation.)
January 3, 2023
at least this is better than nothing - a slogan that some Leibnizian demon has probably scrawled above the gates of hell.
I dream of the damnation I have so amply earned.
personality was not a reason for celebration, but rather a wound, or a gore-spattered cell in which the futile horror of existence was exhibited as squalid suffering, and occasionally, in a few select specimens, as tragedy. The notion of a personal God was therefore a monstrous perversion born of egoism and blindness, an attempted justification of individuated conscious existence that pandered to the miserable vanity of those in flight from the only possibility of redemption: the annihilation of self.
Spirit must abandon itself to its noumenal extinction in the confidence that it cannot be identified with its perishable pupal stages, but instead finds eternal life in the thinkability of death.
God should bore us into forgetting rather than provoking us into revolt.
a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving towards the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms towards the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then returning home to the simple out of this abundance…without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself—do you want a name for this world?
I dream of the damnation I have so amply earned.
personality was not a reason for celebration, but rather a wound, or a gore-spattered cell in which the futile horror of existence was exhibited as squalid suffering, and occasionally, in a few select specimens, as tragedy. The notion of a personal God was therefore a monstrous perversion born of egoism and blindness, an attempted justification of individuated conscious existence that pandered to the miserable vanity of those in flight from the only possibility of redemption: the annihilation of self.
Spirit must abandon itself to its noumenal extinction in the confidence that it cannot be identified with its perishable pupal stages, but instead finds eternal life in the thinkability of death.
God should bore us into forgetting rather than provoking us into revolt.
a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving towards the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms towards the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then returning home to the simple out of this abundance…without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself—do you want a name for this world?
January 13, 2024
Zzz que fiasco, primera incursión a Land a través de esta lectura y me voy pensando que es un rematado imbécil, tiene algunos planteamientos interesantes y momentos de lucidez como pasa con sus compañeros de la CCRU de la universidad de Warwick, pero me voy sintiendo que hemos leído a dos Georges Bataille muy diferentes y el suyo y él habitan en el universo de Fallout New Vegas
Mal Nick Land mal, que me compré con el hype que llevaba el libro en papel 😡
4/10
Redux:
Lo leí mal y sin ganas en su momentos, con unas orientaciones de por medio le encuentro ahora la gracia y potencia a este texto jajaja. Está un pelín trastornado Land, pero tiene una violencia y fuerza al escribir que me ha terminado calando, además compartimos pasión por Bataille.
7/0
Mal Nick Land mal, que me compré con el hype que llevaba el libro en papel 😡
4/10
Redux:
Lo leí mal y sin ganas en su momentos, con unas orientaciones de por medio le encuentro ahora la gracia y potencia a este texto jajaja. Está un pelín trastornado Land, pero tiene una violencia y fuerza al escribir que me ha terminado calando, además compartimos pasión por Bataille.
7/0
August 17, 2025
This book was Nick Land's attempt to write a study of Georges Bataille, and therefore would hypothetically serve as a good resource for informing Land's thought (as he begins all his work with the Bataillean conceptions of erotic death, non-being, economic ontology, etc as axiom). However, much of what Land writes about in this book is illustrated in other, more concrete ways in the essays making up the first half of Fanged Noumena, and which he presents in a much more rigorous, logically clarified way; after a point, Land decided to revolt against the academic writing style, and before he developed some of his more prose-poetic or fictitious forms of writing (exemplified by Meltdown and the Geo-trauma essays, respectively), he attempted to write this rambling monologue in an attempt at a lofty style, but succeeds only in sounding like an aggressively anxious adolescent complaining semi-coherently about the fakeness & injustice of society. As I find it much easier to evaluate the arguments and ideas as they are presented in Fanged Noumena, I see really no reason for there to be a tract such as this, and as such I only recommend it to those who are somehow hypnotised by this god-awful attempt at writing prose.
March 25, 2020
This is -by design- a very strange book to say the least. Parts of it would probably classify as philosophy , others as literary criticism and others as literature οr even poetry. The philosophical parts are certainly incomprehensible if you are not familiar with continental philosophy, as he doesn’t bother explaining them at all. In general, he goes more for style than intelligibility and that makes it almost impossible to follow his thought at times. It’s a pity because I find the underlying philosophy very interesting but it’s just too much effort and I admit speedreading the last few chapters, as I am not really moved by his poetics or his rants. Maybe I will reread it in the future, but after I know more about Bataille and continental philosophy. Maybe I ‘ll give it 5 stars then, but for now, I can only rate my reading experience.
Read
April 27, 2022One day I will find a work that succinctly elaborates the thought of Georges Bataille .... One day.... This work was not it ...
The writer has many distracting digressions which I didn't find helpful in understanding Bataille ... For instance sometimes he has cut and Paste huge passages from Nietzsche into his digressions... Like was this necessary? couldn't you have put that in your End Notes? Almost like an Undergrad who is trying to pad the word count of his essay.
Also sections where he uses the First Person Pronoun A lot ... Obviously some sort of different and experimental academic writing (I remember hearing that this work was controversial before reading) which is fine I guess... but his different style didn't help me to learn more about Bataille.
Half way through I just started to flick through until the end.
The writer has many distracting digressions which I didn't find helpful in understanding Bataille ... For instance sometimes he has cut and Paste huge passages from Nietzsche into his digressions... Like was this necessary? couldn't you have put that in your End Notes? Almost like an Undergrad who is trying to pad the word count of his essay.
Also sections where he uses the First Person Pronoun A lot ... Obviously some sort of different and experimental academic writing (I remember hearing that this work was controversial before reading) which is fine I guess... but his different style didn't help me to learn more about Bataille.
Half way through I just started to flick through until the end.
October 29, 2023
Como ocurre muchas veces con Land, el libro se descompone al final en una serie de fragmentos delirantes sobre la muerte y el sexo que en un punto hacen más justicia a Bataille que el grueso del texto, pero también hacen perderse el aporte original del libro. En fin, un muy buen trabajo de cuando Land todavía podía escribir sin tener un brote, que que muestra las señales de lo que se viene después en su pensamiento.
March 28, 2022
He should have quit while he was ahead
November 23, 2024
I think it was Nietzsche who said that all philosophers try to be the new beginning and establish their own standards creatively. One could excuse him by appealing to hindsight, but I think the untruth of that statement is more generally applicable: the untruth being that it often seems that philosophers do not try to begin anything but rather try their best to end philosophy and to say a final word in it. There's been so many attempts to end philosophy, to call it into question, an amount rivalled only by the number of introductions to phenomenology, that this tendency should be clear. Interestingly, it also showcases power in the mode of asserting one's self not through the unique creativity of the self but through a brute act of will that does not so much display one's power/creativity/personality as it does establish it with the very action. Land here largely subscribes to the Nietzschean philosophies, but sees mostly naiveté in the perpetual dream of the completion of physics and probably in the concept of a Theory of Everything, as well. However, instead of Bataillean excess, this tendency could also be interpreted as drive to make physics lesser, to thwart, to ossify, to replace the free development of a phenomenon with one's own decision. The tendency of the primitives to separate the flesh from the bones would then not be an act of aversion but that of affirmation of the will to grind vital flesh down to non-animate bone. If one insisted on interpreting all this through the notion of drives, this approach would be equally plausible.
One wonders then why is this alternate path almost never taken? Can it really be because Fludd's ilanot does not have a path from Strength to Wisdom? In contrast to the path through Binah advocated by Crowley or path from Chesed advocated by vitalist revolutionaries, the path straight from Gevurah to Chokhmah seems to be the less accepted version of the same development to non-discursive thinking (what Land calls 0). It is redolent of the concept of sovereign decision and its will to power would not be creativity but thwarting, due to the influence of Gevurah. In this way, Lurianic ilanot, which in a makes more sense re: Sefer Yetzirah than the Fludd tree, makes room for a darker strain of development in relation to the philosophies of Will; perhaps apparent in Land's intellectual development, but also constantly lurking beneath the healthily revolutionary forms of expression and shy flirtations with unreason alike.
While the Fludd tree is known for the "Place of the Cross", Lurianic ilanot traces a pentagram in its place. One effect of this besides adding unsavoury elements is to add balance but also choice. There's now literally a left-hand and right-hand path, with Gevurah or severity somewhat unexpectedly representing the left hand path usually associated with anti-authoritarian attitudes. If you look past the surface, though, you'll see that Chesed or Mercy is far more malleable than Severity and so through Severity one can resist the outside influences better. The only problem is that in the "path of the sword" between Severity and Mercy there is less active leadership or Netzach and so it corresponds to less creativity, excess or overflow: instead it is highly concerned with the uhh...executive side. So there is no "active content" to Severity, no original genius which Nietzsche connects to Will to Power, no overflowing of revolutionary energy, but rather: to thwart and reduce others.
Land, of course, is much more connected with Netzach-energies: it does not seem that the point is to organize but rather it's related to some kind of dark efflorescence of base materiality, revolutionary inspirations for its own sake. The problem is that the more unpleasant alternatives are sneakily rejected even if the claim to total amorality and hatred/rejection of morality and God seems perpetually immanent. The discussion on Gilles Des Rais is informative in this regard, both by Bataille and Land: while Land sees Des Rais's crimes as "inane" and devaluative of the sense of touch, Bataille can only see in him a tragedy, though he couches it in a provocative embrace of the berserker ideal exemplified by the nobles when they were still in their proper confines, but ah, then came the degeneration... There's no real reason for this, though: it is only evidence of a smuggled, dishonest morality masquerading as a victory over the idea of morality. Honour morality, after all, is a type of morality and a particularly insidious one in that it never reveals its cards: it plays shy and does not readily display itself as morality, unlike true guilt.
Basically, it all turns around Schopenhauer who ossified the fantasy of the drive so as to forever etch it into the consciousness of all men after him. While he failed to understand the sublimity of expressive human faces frozen in sculpture, one might argue that he did much the same for Will. It seems impossible to escape this looming conception of Nature, of the Savage, of the Filth, after efforts by Schelling and Schopenhauer. Bataillean ethics turns around the concept of filth and disgust which means that it is a sub-type of honour morality. The concept of filth is at bottom a normalization that can be used all-too conveniently to pre-emptively categorize possibilities as obviously out of bounds. Later, it resurfaces as a linear progress towards transgression, in a pyramidical form, but transgression by itself is an empty concept. What I mean by this is that if you aim for transgression or waste, there rises a question of transgressing the set of values under which you are imagining your supposedly obvious transgressions, which re-orients the movement towards the spirit. The locus of interrogation cannot be mere honour on this higher level since you are now the sovereign lawgiver - herein lies the genius of protestantism, in a deeper radicalization of ethical possibilities that Catholicism would have fade away into the nostalgic honour conception of the nobles. Instead of the shame returning as grey depression over one's lack of sufficient hatred towards society, we have virtue returning as the omnipresence of sin and the impossibility of extricating yourself from Gilles Des Rais with the excuse of disgust.
Paganism in Catholicism lends itself to pantheistic conceptions, as per Gemistos Plethon. The concept of Nature becomes a monomaniacal dumping ground of anal phase-neuroses in direct correlation to the diminishing of a transcendent God. In a way, then, absolutely nothing has been gained except a lessened understanding of the extent of one's worship. Nature, after all, is always The Obvious and we are really not allowed to have thoughts about Her unless we wish to hear her petulant accusations of resentment, in a strategic plea to dupe her opponent into complacency of naiveté. Even the mathematical tricks of modernity attest to this glorification of folds and holes, even though angular interpretations of non-Euclidean spaces could be equally possible by a geometry of torn papers, cut papers, multiple arrays of papers or "spaces", stripes made thereby and their connections, holes in spaces with "stripes" undulating in between the holes. The possibilities, given the initial stroke of innovation, are endless but the fold hypnotizes its audience into believing it is the only real content by virtue of its suggestivity alone: this is what Lovecraftian "base materialism" ultimately reverts to. But we might just begin the moral revolution all over again: hmm, what are these drives? Let's have a genealogy of the notion of drives etc. And then you are back to morality: as if denying it would have been incredible for a long time.
To transcend the honour predicament, Bataille and Land would have to travel the Path of the Ape, from Mercy to Understanding, or the Path of Duality, from Mercy to Wisdom. In the Path of The Ape, there is a passage-way pseudo-sephira called Daath, by which you can enter the qliphotic side of the tree. If Binah is understanding and Chokmah is "will", Daath could correspond to intuition. Here begin the analogies of perception, the revelations of the limits of intuition: and Kant is obviously a Daathian figure, but possibly going through the Path of the Sword instead of the Path of the Monkey. Land talks a lot about the sin of ossifying flux into permanence but there's just as well flux as a confused perception of permanent objects, as indicated by Charles Howard Hinton and many others. This idea can be extended far further than time, refusing to consider anything based only on an unreflected conception of Nature-in-itself, which a phantasm as much as God, but as having some definite source. This way, the morality, the good-evil axis which one can't stop talking about, would be morality for us but not to the residents of the corresponding dimension.
Monotheistic religion is itself a criticism and a revelation of something taken for granted but this next criticism was merely to criticize this higher criticism of not corresponding to the determinants of the lower form of morality where everybody could comfortably think Gilles Des Rais "inane"; where every peasant can rave about a media-brained conception of berserker vikings without taking note of the contingency of their application of the label "bad" to Gilles Des Rais, or suspecting their friends of being much worse than the Vikings, in the current moment. Monotheism displays sacrifice as painful and makes no bones about the character of its God, while Bataille is attempting to put a positive spin on transgression by considering Gilles Des Rais as a mere degenerate case. Because, of course, he is after all....shit! Shitty human being! At any rate, the overall impression of this incredible "revolution" is that of a small child smiling defiantly at his parents after having soiled himself. Morality is, in the end, the more radical idea and far from a "panic attack", Kant's work stands at a far higher degree of moral development than this.
One wonders then why is this alternate path almost never taken? Can it really be because Fludd's ilanot does not have a path from Strength to Wisdom? In contrast to the path through Binah advocated by Crowley or path from Chesed advocated by vitalist revolutionaries, the path straight from Gevurah to Chokhmah seems to be the less accepted version of the same development to non-discursive thinking (what Land calls 0). It is redolent of the concept of sovereign decision and its will to power would not be creativity but thwarting, due to the influence of Gevurah. In this way, Lurianic ilanot, which in a makes more sense re: Sefer Yetzirah than the Fludd tree, makes room for a darker strain of development in relation to the philosophies of Will; perhaps apparent in Land's intellectual development, but also constantly lurking beneath the healthily revolutionary forms of expression and shy flirtations with unreason alike.
While the Fludd tree is known for the "Place of the Cross", Lurianic ilanot traces a pentagram in its place. One effect of this besides adding unsavoury elements is to add balance but also choice. There's now literally a left-hand and right-hand path, with Gevurah or severity somewhat unexpectedly representing the left hand path usually associated with anti-authoritarian attitudes. If you look past the surface, though, you'll see that Chesed or Mercy is far more malleable than Severity and so through Severity one can resist the outside influences better. The only problem is that in the "path of the sword" between Severity and Mercy there is less active leadership or Netzach and so it corresponds to less creativity, excess or overflow: instead it is highly concerned with the uhh...executive side. So there is no "active content" to Severity, no original genius which Nietzsche connects to Will to Power, no overflowing of revolutionary energy, but rather: to thwart and reduce others.
Land, of course, is much more connected with Netzach-energies: it does not seem that the point is to organize but rather it's related to some kind of dark efflorescence of base materiality, revolutionary inspirations for its own sake. The problem is that the more unpleasant alternatives are sneakily rejected even if the claim to total amorality and hatred/rejection of morality and God seems perpetually immanent. The discussion on Gilles Des Rais is informative in this regard, both by Bataille and Land: while Land sees Des Rais's crimes as "inane" and devaluative of the sense of touch, Bataille can only see in him a tragedy, though he couches it in a provocative embrace of the berserker ideal exemplified by the nobles when they were still in their proper confines, but ah, then came the degeneration... There's no real reason for this, though: it is only evidence of a smuggled, dishonest morality masquerading as a victory over the idea of morality. Honour morality, after all, is a type of morality and a particularly insidious one in that it never reveals its cards: it plays shy and does not readily display itself as morality, unlike true guilt.
Basically, it all turns around Schopenhauer who ossified the fantasy of the drive so as to forever etch it into the consciousness of all men after him. While he failed to understand the sublimity of expressive human faces frozen in sculpture, one might argue that he did much the same for Will. It seems impossible to escape this looming conception of Nature, of the Savage, of the Filth, after efforts by Schelling and Schopenhauer. Bataillean ethics turns around the concept of filth and disgust which means that it is a sub-type of honour morality. The concept of filth is at bottom a normalization that can be used all-too conveniently to pre-emptively categorize possibilities as obviously out of bounds. Later, it resurfaces as a linear progress towards transgression, in a pyramidical form, but transgression by itself is an empty concept. What I mean by this is that if you aim for transgression or waste, there rises a question of transgressing the set of values under which you are imagining your supposedly obvious transgressions, which re-orients the movement towards the spirit. The locus of interrogation cannot be mere honour on this higher level since you are now the sovereign lawgiver - herein lies the genius of protestantism, in a deeper radicalization of ethical possibilities that Catholicism would have fade away into the nostalgic honour conception of the nobles. Instead of the shame returning as grey depression over one's lack of sufficient hatred towards society, we have virtue returning as the omnipresence of sin and the impossibility of extricating yourself from Gilles Des Rais with the excuse of disgust.
Paganism in Catholicism lends itself to pantheistic conceptions, as per Gemistos Plethon. The concept of Nature becomes a monomaniacal dumping ground of anal phase-neuroses in direct correlation to the diminishing of a transcendent God. In a way, then, absolutely nothing has been gained except a lessened understanding of the extent of one's worship. Nature, after all, is always The Obvious and we are really not allowed to have thoughts about Her unless we wish to hear her petulant accusations of resentment, in a strategic plea to dupe her opponent into complacency of naiveté. Even the mathematical tricks of modernity attest to this glorification of folds and holes, even though angular interpretations of non-Euclidean spaces could be equally possible by a geometry of torn papers, cut papers, multiple arrays of papers or "spaces", stripes made thereby and their connections, holes in spaces with "stripes" undulating in between the holes. The possibilities, given the initial stroke of innovation, are endless but the fold hypnotizes its audience into believing it is the only real content by virtue of its suggestivity alone: this is what Lovecraftian "base materialism" ultimately reverts to. But we might just begin the moral revolution all over again: hmm, what are these drives? Let's have a genealogy of the notion of drives etc. And then you are back to morality: as if denying it would have been incredible for a long time.
To transcend the honour predicament, Bataille and Land would have to travel the Path of the Ape, from Mercy to Understanding, or the Path of Duality, from Mercy to Wisdom. In the Path of The Ape, there is a passage-way pseudo-sephira called Daath, by which you can enter the qliphotic side of the tree. If Binah is understanding and Chokmah is "will", Daath could correspond to intuition. Here begin the analogies of perception, the revelations of the limits of intuition: and Kant is obviously a Daathian figure, but possibly going through the Path of the Sword instead of the Path of the Monkey. Land talks a lot about the sin of ossifying flux into permanence but there's just as well flux as a confused perception of permanent objects, as indicated by Charles Howard Hinton and many others. This idea can be extended far further than time, refusing to consider anything based only on an unreflected conception of Nature-in-itself, which a phantasm as much as God, but as having some definite source. This way, the morality, the good-evil axis which one can't stop talking about, would be morality for us but not to the residents of the corresponding dimension.
Monotheistic religion is itself a criticism and a revelation of something taken for granted but this next criticism was merely to criticize this higher criticism of not corresponding to the determinants of the lower form of morality where everybody could comfortably think Gilles Des Rais "inane"; where every peasant can rave about a media-brained conception of berserker vikings without taking note of the contingency of their application of the label "bad" to Gilles Des Rais, or suspecting their friends of being much worse than the Vikings, in the current moment. Monotheism displays sacrifice as painful and makes no bones about the character of its God, while Bataille is attempting to put a positive spin on transgression by considering Gilles Des Rais as a mere degenerate case. Because, of course, he is after all....shit! Shitty human being! At any rate, the overall impression of this incredible "revolution" is that of a small child smiling defiantly at his parents after having soiled himself. Morality is, in the end, the more radical idea and far from a "panic attack", Kant's work stands at a far higher degree of moral development than this.
November 16, 2022
“beauty alone…renders tolerable the need for disorder, violence, and indignity that is the root of love”
ok deci the thirst for anihilation nu este o carte despre bataille, bine de stiut pentru data viitoare! Cand am inceput-o sincer nu intelegeam prea bine, nick land avea foarte multe asteptari de la mine, sa ma treaca prin atatia filosofi si singurele referinte din care simteam ca inteleg ceva erau cele la nietzsche ( cu hegel mai ales nu aveam nicio sansa).
Apoi mi-am dat seama ca intentia lui era mai degraba sa comenteze pe niste teme din opera lui bataille si sa urmareasca cum s-au dezvoltat ele (inclusiv la ceilalti autori pe care ii pomenea).
Pe parcurs devine mai personala, intelegi ce a insemnat bataille pentru gandirea lui nick land si cum s-a ajuns la cartea asta, si incepand cu a doua treime mi-a placut mult, am umplut-o de sublinieri. Si referintele au devenit mai pentru mine (de exemplu cele la Rimbaud fix de la sfarisit yum).
Ca teme se leaga de soare (un simbol pe care bataille iubeste sa il foloseasca - ok n-am citit eu atata de la el dar va garantez ca e peste tot…), de sacrificiu si fascinatia pe care oamenii o au intr-un fel sau altul fata de violenta, moartea lui Dumnezeu (capitolul 3, transgression m-a facut sa nu renunt la cartea asta si ce bine a fost dupa), de poezie si modul in care bataille foloseste cuvintele.
si nu stiu cat de in masura sunt sa explic ce contine cartea sau daca ar trebui sa ii dau o nota avand in vedere cum ma simt fata de prima treime dar chiar mi-a placut si am avut de invatat din asta!
( si asa ati ajuns sa ma vedeti cum salvez in fiecare zi in lista inca ceva de bataille…)
ok deci the thirst for anihilation nu este o carte despre bataille, bine de stiut pentru data viitoare! Cand am inceput-o sincer nu intelegeam prea bine, nick land avea foarte multe asteptari de la mine, sa ma treaca prin atatia filosofi si singurele referinte din care simteam ca inteleg ceva erau cele la nietzsche ( cu hegel mai ales nu aveam nicio sansa).
Apoi mi-am dat seama ca intentia lui era mai degraba sa comenteze pe niste teme din opera lui bataille si sa urmareasca cum s-au dezvoltat ele (inclusiv la ceilalti autori pe care ii pomenea).
Pe parcurs devine mai personala, intelegi ce a insemnat bataille pentru gandirea lui nick land si cum s-a ajuns la cartea asta, si incepand cu a doua treime mi-a placut mult, am umplut-o de sublinieri. Si referintele au devenit mai pentru mine (de exemplu cele la Rimbaud fix de la sfarisit yum).
Ca teme se leaga de soare (un simbol pe care bataille iubeste sa il foloseasca - ok n-am citit eu atata de la el dar va garantez ca e peste tot…), de sacrificiu si fascinatia pe care oamenii o au intr-un fel sau altul fata de violenta, moartea lui Dumnezeu (capitolul 3, transgression m-a facut sa nu renunt la cartea asta si ce bine a fost dupa), de poezie si modul in care bataille foloseste cuvintele.
si nu stiu cat de in masura sunt sa explic ce contine cartea sau daca ar trebui sa ii dau o nota avand in vedere cum ma simt fata de prima treime dar chiar mi-a placut si am avut de invatat din asta!
( si asa ati ajuns sa ma vedeti cum salvez in fiecare zi in lista inca ceva de bataille…)
January 29, 2023
El peor texto de Land. Se nota que es su primer libro y que aún arrastra la escritura performática del CCRU que, quizás, es útil para manifiestos y textos cortos pero que hace ilegible la inmensa mayoría del libre. La manipulación de textos de Nietzsche, Kant, Platón o Hegel es constante y, lo peor, es que el texto es muy pedante. Me alegro mucho de que Land abandonase este estilo por uno más sobrio que, aunque sigue siendo sentenciador y algo soberbio, invita a tomárselo en serio.
Me ha costado horrores pasar las páginas de este libre y no porque sea un libro de especial complejidad. Tiene razón cuando, en el prólogo, avisa que este no es un libro sobre Bataille. Su utilidad es únicamente doxografica (para entender el origen de la obsesión landiana por el tiempo, el cero y la crítica a la razón ilustrada) y para entrenarse con algunos de los desvaríos de Bataille como el de la economía solar. Por lo demás, obra completamente prescindible.
Me ha costado horrores pasar las páginas de este libre y no porque sea un libro de especial complejidad. Tiene razón cuando, en el prólogo, avisa que este no es un libro sobre Bataille. Su utilidad es únicamente doxografica (para entender el origen de la obsesión landiana por el tiempo, el cero y la crítica a la razón ilustrada) y para entrenarse con algunos de los desvaríos de Bataille como el de la economía solar. Por lo demás, obra completamente prescindible.
January 21, 2022
The only things redeeming this book were chapter 9, and the quote "At its root literature is writing for nothing; a pathological extravagance whose natural companions are poverty, ill-health, mental instability, and all the other symptoms of a devastated life that is protracted in the shadow of futility." Which is perfectly proven in this book and seemingly in Bataille as well.
This book has also convinced me that Nietszche was the last philosopher worth reading.
This book has also convinced me that Nietszche was the last philosopher worth reading.
July 15, 2025
Soms staat er onzin in over andere filosofen. Veel gehuil over God. Wel funny geschreven en je leert ook echt iets over Bataille.
Zou het alleen als secundaire literatuur over Bataille wikt lezen op een edgy manier.
Zou het alleen als secundaire literatuur over Bataille wikt lezen op een edgy manier.
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