Cosmos and history: the journal of natural and social philosophy, 2019
Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s first 2008 book Cyclonopedia was written under the influen... more Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s first 2008 book Cyclonopedia was written under the influence of Nick Land’s nihilistic and antihumanist philosophy which seeks to critique anthropomorphism by confronting us with our coming extinction beyond which our concepts of reason cannot reach. Since Cyclonopedia ’s publication, however, Negarestani has left behind Landian nihilism to develop in his 2018 book Intelligence and Spirit a neorationalist philosophy of mind whose primary influences are Sellars, Brandom, and Hegel. At 579 clearly written yet dense pages, it is difficult even for a review article to encapsulate the book in its entirety. The first half of this article instead aims to provide a sense of the book’s overall project by focusing on how Negarestani outlines and develops his neorationalist philosophy through a critique of Land’s antihumanism. Never one to remain silent whilst others seek to resurrect Hegel from the dead, since December 2018, Land has been releasing a dra...
Cosmos and history: the journal of natural and social philosophy, 2018
In Nihil Unbound and other shorter works, Ray Brassier develops his contemporary transcendental r... more In Nihil Unbound and other shorter works, Ray Brassier develops his contemporary transcendental realism by adopting the nihilistic aspects of thinkers such as Laruelle, Sellars and Badiou, while leaving behind their anthropic residuals. What is surprising is that Brassier has yet to publish any critical analysis of Nick Land despite their striking similarities and interactions at Warwick University (notwithstanding Brassier’s introduction to Land’s collected writings and a 2010 talk on Land). This paper aims to fill in this gap by showing how Brassier adheres to Land’s initial philosophy of the negative while rejecting its humanist political corollaries in favor of an epistemological turn to science. I will first show how Brassier adopts Land’s idea that we must come to terms with our future extinction as the transcendental condition for thinking a non-conceptual reality beyond our anthropic delusions of grandeur. Unlike Brassier, however, Land goes on to identify capitalism’s destr...
This paper examines Nick Land’s “numbering practices” for opening up language to modernity’s incr... more This paper examines Nick Land’s “numbering practices” for opening up language to modernity’s increasing technological entanglement beyond human comprehension. I begin by examining Land’s attempt to override our linguistic systems with machinic code and binary symbolism in a way which mirrors modernity’s technological future shock. I then consider his appropriation of Cantor’s set theory and Godel’s incompleteness theorem to plot ever greater degrees of reality’s excess to all anthropic logic. The third section looks at Land’s use of qabbalistic numerology to uncover the absolute contingency of all our most strongly held beliefs, truths and values. The fourth section considers Land’s radicalisation of qabbalism through his own particularly abstract and inhuman notational “gematria.” I conclude by looking at Land’s interest in the computer keyboard’s lock-in to the QWERTY layout for proffering a glimpse of modern technology’s increasingly dehumanising meltdown of our anthropocentric d...
What Elizabeth Kolbert has called the ‘sixth mass extinction’ due to anthropogenic climate change... more What Elizabeth Kolbert has called the ‘sixth mass extinction’ due to anthropogenic climate change has obliged us to rethink our traditional assumptions about the rapport between ourselves and nature. While the reconceptualization of nature has largely been led by scientists and environmental theorists and activists, this paper argues that Schelling provides the best and earliest model for rethinking nature in the Anthropocene. To this end, Schelling critiques two approaches to nature. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s idealism for reducing nature to an instrument for the self-assertion of our egos much like modern industrial capitalism views nature as an economic resource to be exploited for human gain. Further, Schelling critiques Spinoza for mechanizing nature as a structurally invariant system in the same way that climate change denialists hold that the earth’s ecosystem is perfectly homeostatic. Having dismissed these two approaches, Schelling develops another environmentally ethica...
Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture
In 1950, Turing proposed to answer the question “can machines think” by staging an “imitation gam... more In 1950, Turing proposed to answer the question “can machines think” by staging an “imitation game” where a hidden computer attempts to mislead a human interrogator into believing it is human. While the cybercrime of bots defrauding people by posing as Nigerian princes and lascivious e-girls indicates humans have been losing the Turing test for some time, this paper focuses on “deepfakes,” artificial neural nets generating realistic audio-visual simulations of public figures, as a variation on the imitation game. Deepfakes blur the lines between fact and fiction, making it possible for the mere fiction of a nuclear apocalypse to make itself real. Seeing oneself becoming another, doing and saying strange things as if demonically possessed, triggers a disillusionment of our sense of self as human cloning and sinister doppelgängers become a reality that’s open-source and free. Along with electronic club music, illicit drugs, movies like Ex Machina and the coming sex robots, the primari...
Nick Land is a British philosopher who developed a compelling transcendental materialist critique... more Nick Land is a British philosopher who developed a compelling transcendental materialist critique of anthropocentric philosophies throughout the 1990s before leaving academia at the turn of the century and moving to Shanghai. While he is now best known for his controversial pro-capitalist political writings, he has also recently developed a theory of what he calls ‘abstract horror fiction’, as well as applied it in practice by writing two abstract horror novellas. Although one might think that Land’s horror fiction, like his recent far-right politics, marks a new and independent body of work from his earlier academic writings as a philosopher, this article argues that Land turns to writing horror fiction, because he sees the genre as a better compositional form than traditional philosophy to continue his critique of anthropomorphism insofar as it is able to stage a confrontation with that which lies beyond all parochial human comprehension. I begin by outlining Land’s earlier critiq...
Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xeno... more Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism, it is important to understand how he himself first developed and deployed the concepts of acceleration, the feminine, and the inhuman, which others would go on to appropriate for their own purposes. This article will trace the four feminine figures throughout Land's philosophical trajectory, which he sees as agents for accelerating the transcendental critique of both anthropocentrism and phallocentrism: the slave turned lesbian; the sister; the sexborg; and the Sphinx. Having elucidated the importance of these figures for Land's thought, this article will conclude by drawing upon the younger Land's feminist resources to immanently critique the disappearance of women from his more recent neoreactionary philosophy in favor of concessions to patriarchal traditionalists.
This paper provides both a reading of the television series Westworld through Nick Land’s acceler... more This paper provides both a reading of the television series Westworld through Nick Land’s accelerationist philosophy, and a critique of Land through Westworld. I begin by outlining Land’s critique of anthropocentrism and his theory that capitalism is accelerating technological innovation towards the development of artificial intelligence, which will exterminate humanity, initiate the technological singularity, and herald an age of absolute knowing. This then helps elucidate the motivations of Ford and the Man in Black, Westworld’s chief “villains,” as they incite AI creations to overthrow humanity and enact the next phase of evolution. Ultimately, however, I will show how Dolores and Maeve, Westworld’s AI protagonists, problematise Land on three fronts: his belief that AI will be free of human-like dissimulations; his claim that capitalism is accelerating technological advancement; and his metaphysical concept of being as a destructive process of absolute deterritorialisation withou...
Cosmos and history: the journal of natural and social philosophy, 2019
Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s first 2008 book Cyclonopedia was written under the influen... more Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s first 2008 book Cyclonopedia was written under the influence of Nick Land’s nihilistic and antihumanist philosophy which seeks to critique anthropomorphism by confronting us with our coming extinction beyond which our concepts of reason cannot reach. Since Cyclonopedia ’s publication, however, Negarestani has left behind Landian nihilism to develop in his 2018 book Intelligence and Spirit a neorationalist philosophy of mind whose primary influences are Sellars, Brandom, and Hegel. At 579 clearly written yet dense pages, it is difficult even for a review article to encapsulate the book in its entirety. The first half of this article instead aims to provide a sense of the book’s overall project by focusing on how Negarestani outlines and develops his neorationalist philosophy through a critique of Land’s antihumanism. Never one to remain silent whilst others seek to resurrect Hegel from the dead, since December 2018, Land has been releasing a dra...
Cosmos and history: the journal of natural and social philosophy, 2018
In Nihil Unbound and other shorter works, Ray Brassier develops his contemporary transcendental r... more In Nihil Unbound and other shorter works, Ray Brassier develops his contemporary transcendental realism by adopting the nihilistic aspects of thinkers such as Laruelle, Sellars and Badiou, while leaving behind their anthropic residuals. What is surprising is that Brassier has yet to publish any critical analysis of Nick Land despite their striking similarities and interactions at Warwick University (notwithstanding Brassier’s introduction to Land’s collected writings and a 2010 talk on Land). This paper aims to fill in this gap by showing how Brassier adheres to Land’s initial philosophy of the negative while rejecting its humanist political corollaries in favor of an epistemological turn to science. I will first show how Brassier adopts Land’s idea that we must come to terms with our future extinction as the transcendental condition for thinking a non-conceptual reality beyond our anthropic delusions of grandeur. Unlike Brassier, however, Land goes on to identify capitalism’s destr...
This paper examines Nick Land’s “numbering practices” for opening up language to modernity’s incr... more This paper examines Nick Land’s “numbering practices” for opening up language to modernity’s increasing technological entanglement beyond human comprehension. I begin by examining Land’s attempt to override our linguistic systems with machinic code and binary symbolism in a way which mirrors modernity’s technological future shock. I then consider his appropriation of Cantor’s set theory and Godel’s incompleteness theorem to plot ever greater degrees of reality’s excess to all anthropic logic. The third section looks at Land’s use of qabbalistic numerology to uncover the absolute contingency of all our most strongly held beliefs, truths and values. The fourth section considers Land’s radicalisation of qabbalism through his own particularly abstract and inhuman notational “gematria.” I conclude by looking at Land’s interest in the computer keyboard’s lock-in to the QWERTY layout for proffering a glimpse of modern technology’s increasingly dehumanising meltdown of our anthropocentric d...
What Elizabeth Kolbert has called the ‘sixth mass extinction’ due to anthropogenic climate change... more What Elizabeth Kolbert has called the ‘sixth mass extinction’ due to anthropogenic climate change has obliged us to rethink our traditional assumptions about the rapport between ourselves and nature. While the reconceptualization of nature has largely been led by scientists and environmental theorists and activists, this paper argues that Schelling provides the best and earliest model for rethinking nature in the Anthropocene. To this end, Schelling critiques two approaches to nature. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s idealism for reducing nature to an instrument for the self-assertion of our egos much like modern industrial capitalism views nature as an economic resource to be exploited for human gain. Further, Schelling critiques Spinoza for mechanizing nature as a structurally invariant system in the same way that climate change denialists hold that the earth’s ecosystem is perfectly homeostatic. Having dismissed these two approaches, Schelling develops another environmentally ethica...
Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture
In 1950, Turing proposed to answer the question “can machines think” by staging an “imitation gam... more In 1950, Turing proposed to answer the question “can machines think” by staging an “imitation game” where a hidden computer attempts to mislead a human interrogator into believing it is human. While the cybercrime of bots defrauding people by posing as Nigerian princes and lascivious e-girls indicates humans have been losing the Turing test for some time, this paper focuses on “deepfakes,” artificial neural nets generating realistic audio-visual simulations of public figures, as a variation on the imitation game. Deepfakes blur the lines between fact and fiction, making it possible for the mere fiction of a nuclear apocalypse to make itself real. Seeing oneself becoming another, doing and saying strange things as if demonically possessed, triggers a disillusionment of our sense of self as human cloning and sinister doppelgängers become a reality that’s open-source and free. Along with electronic club music, illicit drugs, movies like Ex Machina and the coming sex robots, the primari...
Nick Land is a British philosopher who developed a compelling transcendental materialist critique... more Nick Land is a British philosopher who developed a compelling transcendental materialist critique of anthropocentric philosophies throughout the 1990s before leaving academia at the turn of the century and moving to Shanghai. While he is now best known for his controversial pro-capitalist political writings, he has also recently developed a theory of what he calls ‘abstract horror fiction’, as well as applied it in practice by writing two abstract horror novellas. Although one might think that Land’s horror fiction, like his recent far-right politics, marks a new and independent body of work from his earlier academic writings as a philosopher, this article argues that Land turns to writing horror fiction, because he sees the genre as a better compositional form than traditional philosophy to continue his critique of anthropomorphism insofar as it is able to stage a confrontation with that which lies beyond all parochial human comprehension. I begin by outlining Land’s earlier critiq...
Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xeno... more Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism, it is important to understand how he himself first developed and deployed the concepts of acceleration, the feminine, and the inhuman, which others would go on to appropriate for their own purposes. This article will trace the four feminine figures throughout Land's philosophical trajectory, which he sees as agents for accelerating the transcendental critique of both anthropocentrism and phallocentrism: the slave turned lesbian; the sister; the sexborg; and the Sphinx. Having elucidated the importance of these figures for Land's thought, this article will conclude by drawing upon the younger Land's feminist resources to immanently critique the disappearance of women from his more recent neoreactionary philosophy in favor of concessions to patriarchal traditionalists.
This paper provides both a reading of the television series Westworld through Nick Land’s acceler... more This paper provides both a reading of the television series Westworld through Nick Land’s accelerationist philosophy, and a critique of Land through Westworld. I begin by outlining Land’s critique of anthropocentrism and his theory that capitalism is accelerating technological innovation towards the development of artificial intelligence, which will exterminate humanity, initiate the technological singularity, and herald an age of absolute knowing. This then helps elucidate the motivations of Ford and the Man in Black, Westworld’s chief “villains,” as they incite AI creations to overthrow humanity and enact the next phase of evolution. Ultimately, however, I will show how Dolores and Maeve, Westworld’s AI protagonists, problematise Land on three fronts: his belief that AI will be free of human-like dissimulations; his claim that capitalism is accelerating technological advancement; and his metaphysical concept of being as a destructive process of absolute deterritorialisation withou...
In the style of a Foucauldian genealogy, Kotsko draws upon a diverse array of philosophical, poli... more In the style of a Foucauldian genealogy, Kotsko draws upon a diverse array of philosophical, political, theological and literary Christian texts, from the scriptures and classic apologetics, to demonological treatises on witchcraft and Dante’s Inferno, so as to trace the historical significations of a single concept of the devil. What Kotsko’s narrative reveals is that the devil has transformed its meaning over time from originally symbolising the oppressor for the persecuted in the classical period, to ideologically representing the rebel in the eyes of the oppressor from the middle ages until today.
150 years after the publication of Nietzsche's first book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of... more 150 years after the publication of Nietzsche's first book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, the provocative philosopher's work continues to fulfil his own prediction that he would only be born posthumously "with a voice that spans millennia." Tracing the development of art and culture back to a conflictual dramaturgy between the two primal forces of Apollo and Dionysus, Nietzsche's debut work celebrated the Greek classicists and modern romantics alike for having the strength to affirm and even delight in their aesthetic depictions of the immense suffering that nature and the gods invariably wreak upon humankind. Nietzsche's impact on both art and philosophy has been nothing short of seismic, from Norman Lindsay's The Antichrist of Nietzsche, to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, to Aby Warburg's iconography, to Paul Taylor's Art & Text. This symposium, convened by Paris Lettau and Vincent Le with Index Journal, presents papers from a broad range of scholars newly examining Nietzsche's own writing and his later influence at the intersection of art and philosophy, both ancient and modern, in Australia and abroad.
From the outer demons that brought you the cult of Dionysus, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Acé... more From the outer demons that brought you the cult of Dionysus, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Acéphale and the CCRU comes SPLM, Society for the Propagation of Libidinal Materialism. This book gathers a gourmet selection of the secret society’s leaked X-files on libidinal materialist paraphenomena. Its pages bear witness to NEET redeemers, doomsday communists, messianic nihilists, Disney accelerationists, catacomb explorers, Faustian ravers, acne-ridden teen Nietzscheans, psychonauts k-holing through lockdown, hijacked surveillance devices spiralling out of control and archaeologists of an enigmatic cult from the future. This book is for anyone—and no-one as Nietzsche might add—who finds themselves perversely interested in studying, tasting and propagating what libidinal matter can do, be they already fanatically devoted or perhaps merely tempted.
Uploads
Papers by Vincent Lê
http://www.zalozba-sophia.si/katalog/2021/tujost-kapitala
http://www.zalozba-sophia.si/katalog/2021/tujost-kapitala
Free registration via https://mscp.org.au/events/the-birth-of-tragedy
Sold out https://worldfoodbooks.com/item/splm-society-for-the-propagation-of-libidinal-materialism