“Why Nick Land?” is a question — or an accusation — that I must immediately address. The aura of controversy surrounding this name makes it more incumbent upon me than usual to justify this book’s subject. Sure, as even the most dubious sceptic will concede, Land’s earliest writings on the likes of Kant, Heidegger, and Bataille from the late 1980s to the early 1990s did seem to promise a potentially brilliant academic career, albeit one which sadly never came to fruition. After all, the sceptic will persist, did Land not abandon serious academic scholarship when he resigned from his lectureship at the University of Warwick in the late 1990s after publishing only one book and a handful of essays? Even when he was still a professor, wasn’t he that madman who made such outrageous claims as to have returned from the dead, to have been mauled by a werewolf, and to have time-travelled from the future? Isn’t his writing closer to science fiction — teeming as it is with incoherent cybernetic jargon — than rational argumentation and rigorous scholarship? From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, wasn’t he the leader of the quasi-cult calling itself the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), which seriously devoted its efforts to exploring occult absurdities such as H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and Aleister Crowley’s qabbalistic numerology, not to mention even more fringe interests such as UFO abduction conspiracies and secret societies of Illuminati assassins? Didn’t such esoteric practices, combined with his self-professed drug abuse in worship of the “amphetamine God,” eventually lead him to become clinically insane? After falling off the institutional grid of sanity and respectability, didn’t he reappear in Shanghai in the new millennium only to produce fawning propaganda for China’s authoritarian form of capitalism? Is he now not just another alt-right internet troll whose blogging about his hatred for democracy and odes to capitalism’s most authoritarian tendencies are only fit to garner the admiration of the most reactionary, contrarian, and infantile spheres of 4chan and Reddit? What could be more preposterous than to devote an entire book to someone who so readily abandoned real intellectual erudition long ago to dabble in the occult and side with the enemies of democracy, someone who, for all we know, may very well be completely deranged?
Despite living on the margins of academic acceptability in obscure hyperlinks, I want to insist that Land is of interest because he is far more influential on contemporary philosophy, politics, art, and culture than the sceptic might imagine. Land’s charisma, his heterodox thought, and his singular compositional style were able to influence — or rather infect — many figures who would go on to achieve some prominence in their own right.
In philosophy, for instance, Land taught former Warwick students Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier, two of the four founding figures of speculative realism, perhaps the most significant philosophical movement of the 2000s and 2010s in its quest to rid philosophy of its anthropocentric biases in favour of new and strange voyages on the noumenon’s high seas. Moreover, Land’s meteoric impact can be seen in the work of many prominent artists, including the art collective Orphan Drift, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Steve Goodman (or Kode9), all of whom seek, by different means, to liberate culture from its stale humanist prison by finding novel escape routes which lead to an alien “Outside.”
In the political arena, Land is the key influence on accelerationism, arguably one of the most influential and ambitious of contemporary ideologies in its efforts to expand and repurpose technocapitalist processes as a prelude to radical social change. Several cyberfeminists have also taken inspiration from him, such as Luciana Parisi’s account of how cloning, genetic engineering, and other cutting-edge technologies compel us to abandon traditional, patriarchal notions of sex as necessarily oriented around heteronormative reproduction. At the same time, he holds sway among the far-right blogosphere’s neoreactionary and alt-right factions, whose ideologues not only seek to sustain capitalism, but revive older absolute monarchies and other despotic and anti-democratic regimes.
Land’s shadow stretches far and wide over the contemporary philosophical, cultural, and political conjuncture. It was no hyperbole for theorist and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun to have claimed that Land is “the most important British philosopher of the last twenty years.” While Eshun made this claim back in 2013, the Land meme has only gone ever more viral since then. Whether his influence is desirable or not is another question, and indeed one that I must address in time. But, just as Heidegger needed to be understood — despite his flirtations with National Socialism — due to his gargantuan influence on Sartre, Derrida, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and other leading philosophers in the twentieth century, so, too, do we need to read Land as a symptom of the situation we find ourselves in today — whether we like it or not.
Although there have been several blog posts, essays, and chapter-length introductions to Land’s work, this book seeks to provide a comprehensive decoding of his philosophy, from his initial appropriation of death as the organon for the critique of Kantian, phenomenological, and bourgeois anthropocentrisms, to his mature theory of capitalism as tending towards human extinction at the advent of the technological singularity. The book’s guiding question concerns how he could have such a considerable influence on contemporary continental philosophy’s return to metaphysics, materialism, and realism since the 2000s. My hypothesis is that his seemingly contradictory shifts in position are actually derived from the same underlying motive to critique anthropomorphisations of reality by confronting us with the brute fact of our inexorable death beyond which we cannot trespass. Seen in this way, Land’s various shifts in position do not signal a change in his overarching aim, but in what he sees as the best means to effectuate this critique of human narcissism.
A second interconnected question that the book considers is how he can be so positively appraised by both left- and right-wing political and cultural theorists. My hypothesis here is that his efforts to confront humanity with our mortality led him to turn away from the critique of capitalism to its rehabilitation as just such a destructive mechanism for melting all our values into air. More precisely, what I term the young Land, from 1988 to 1992, identifies an insurrection against capitalism as the best way to de-anthropomorphise thought. Conversely, what I distinguish as the mature Land, from 1993 onwards, re-evaluates capitalism’s ceaseless technological innovation as a better means of critiquing anthropocentrism by confronting us with a coming artificial superintelligence, which renders our own intelligence contingent and finite. The book’s key contention is that the underlying ambition across all of his work is to critique anthropocentrism by analysing various philosophers for the extent to which they can recognise their finitude.
As Land is a rather enigmatic figure to whom a wide range of different and even conflicting views have been misattributed, I believe that the best way to approach his philosophy is to trace how it emerges through his critical engagement with much more familiar canonical figures. The book’s basic structure thus traces the development of his thought — from his earliest writings in the late 1980s to his fully formed accelerationist philosophy throughout the 1990s — by providing an exegesis of the major philosophers he engages with, before turning to see how he interprets and uses them. The book is divided into two parts, exploring this intellectual trajectory over the two periods of the young Land and the mature Land. While he is influenced by many philosophers, the eight key figures are Kant, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, and Deleuze and Guattari, as well as the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
In the first chapter, I show how the young Land critiques capitalism and its Kantian ideologues for masking the reality of our mortality by projecting anthropic desires and values of order, stability, and homeostasis onto the hostile cosmos. Chapter two considers how the young Land extends his critique of Kant and capitalism to the hegemonic Heideggerian and deconstructive philosophies of his day, taking issue with their misunderstanding of Georg Trakl’s poetry as a narcissistic exploration of human reason rather than reason’s nihilistic decimation before inhuman cosmic forces. We shall then see in the third chapter how Land forges a different post-Kantian tradition of “libidinal materialists” like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud to build up an armature of nihilistic conceptual resources on the way to developing his own transcendental critique of subjectivist philosophies for disavowing our future extinction. Chapter four shows how the young Land culminates by drawing upon Bataille’s virulently nihilistic philosophy to wage an all-out war against the history of philosophy since Socrates for repressing humanity’s fatal destiny to die as one contingent species among countless others. In the fifth chapter, I trace the mature Land’s emergence through his creative reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which re-envisions capitalism’s destructive processes as the engine of death’s transcendental critique rather than its impediment. The sixth chapter closes out the book by elaborating how Land sees capitalism’s ceaseless technological advancement as tending towards the generation of an artificial superintelligence that will ultimately wipe us out, along with our delusions of grandeur.
Since I am interested in Land as a sociocultural symptom rather than as a person, I will only provide the barest of biographical facts throughout. To do more than this would betray the subject, since Land himself dismisses the notion that a philosopher’s subject history overdetermines their work as precisely the kind of psychologising rationality that he is seeking to overcome:
I have always absolutely detested the human cognitive effort devoted to trying to turn a final form of anything into a psychobiography. It’s not that I’m allergic to ever reading a biography, but the notion that in reading it you’re really getting to the core of something seems to me utterly ludicrous. I cannot recall any interesting figure, where I’ve thought, oh, if only I knew their biography better, I would get them. Nietzsche’s or Deleuze’s or Lovecraft’s biographies are, unless treated very carefully, sadly distracting. Refusal of the psychobiographical temptation is the one thing I do try to hold onto.
What motivates Land’s thought more than the memory of his life is what is outside life; that is, death, non-being, or nothingness:
Death is no longer a speculative problem for me, but a memory belonging to something else, a vestige upon zero. … Crouching deeply broken in this life, which has become the vestibule of an unbearable but delicious horror, I supplicate myself to nothing, and offer up the sacrifice of these words to death.
In his only completed book, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Land claims that his true ancestors are not so much his parents or his intellectual influences, but “vagrants, whores, and killers,” “minds melted” by the irrational, the perverse, the base, and the inhuman. In the book’s bibliography, he similarly notes that “more important by far than most of these names [like Bataille and Nietzsche] have been the saints, shamans, werewolves, vampires, and lunatics with whom I have communed, and whose names are absent from this text, even though their words have infested my own beyond extrication.” Land tells us that his true “ur-mother” was bitten by a vampire in the wilderness such that he inherited her cancerous disease, which thirsts after “an unholy intimacy with death.” The ur-mother about whom he speaks is not his biological mother, but mother nature or the origin of all: the fanged noumenon of nothingness itself. This is also what he is getting at when he unabashedly compares himself to “the Nazarene,” to the extent that both have “returned from the dead.”
Although Land employs the first-person throughout The Thirst for Annihilation, he qualifies that the concepts and arguments he presents are not so much his own as they are impersonal expressions, bites, and wounds reaped by death: “I indulge myself intolerably, although I is also Bataille’s je, because it is not his, or anyone’s.” To the objection that the third-person would be less egocentric and more appropriate to articulate his critique of human narcissism, Land bites back that, while neither are perfect for his purposes, the third-person is even more problematic than the first because it gives a false sense of clinical neutrality associated with the kind of dogmatic metaphysicians who mask their prejudices behind an aura of objective rationality. The third-person thereby betrays their hubristic pretension that humans are able to assume a bird’s-eye view over reality without our ego or I tying us down to a limited, worm perspective. “It is remarkable how degraded a discourse can become when it is marked by the obsessive reiteration of the abstract ego, mixing arrogance with pallid humility.” Land thus proposes to stick to the first-person, if only to confront the I with its demise about which he incessantly writes. “The ‘I’ is not to be expelled, but submitted to sacrififice.” As we read on, we must remember that for Land, if not necessarily for us, his prose only expresses what he himself thinks to the extent that he is able to commune with the thoughtless, impersonal being of non-being itself.
Land was born in 1962 in the UK. All that Land himself ever mentions of his adolescence is that he was always a proud atheist. Even at a young age, he claims to have grasped that humanity was but a sickness, a glitch, or a mere speck of dust in the desert of the real:
I have not been a theist for a single second of my life. In my first assemblies at primary school, when the theistic idiocy was first wheeled out, I remember thinking: it is natural that adults should lie to you, but is it really necessary for them to insult the intelligence quite so much? As for the longing to believe, nothing could be more alien to me, because nothing is more obvious than the fact that humanity — far from being a creation — is a disease.
Land went on to study philosophy at the University of Essex, where he was by all accounts a precocious and brilliant student. After completing his doctorate with a dissertation on Heidegger’s reading of Trakl, he accepted a lectureship at the University of Warwick, where he would garner a reputation for his charismatic and penetrating — if unorthodox — interpretations, ideas, and pedagogical methods, before resigning at the turn of the century. In 1988, he published his first essay, “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity.” The references that he cites attest to the fact that he was already well versed in thinkers as diverse as Kant, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marx and Engels, Nietzsche, Luce Irigaray, and Monique Wittig. What can capitalism, Kant, the anthropology of incest, Marxism, Nietzsche, and French feminism all have in common? This is what the first chapter sets out to uncover.
