Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Urbanomic/Sequence Press)

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He obtained a PhD in the University of Essex under David Farrell Krell, with a thesis on Heidegger's 1953 essay Die Sprache im Gedicht, which is about Georg Trakl's work. [9] If I insist on quoting Land's work here it's because I genuinely think that it's infinitely more illustrative than any way of calling it obscurantist gibberish) Land pays a high price for escaping from a philosophical persona bound to its own consistency. It is not just the subject that loses even a relative and unstable identity. Everything does. Materialism can now only be the unknown itself, and which can never be known. “Unlike the docile creature modernist science demands, base matter twitches and spits, self-assembling neo-verminous swarms.” (393) The poets expose themselves to contagion by it but cannot work in or on it. Because of this Land's reading of Deleuze and Guatarri's philosophy, that which he bases about 50% of his work on, is, in my opinion, quite prejudiced.

Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007 - Goodreads Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007 - Goodreads

Puerile or profound? I tend towards the latter. This tome is quite difficult to categorize, it eludes ready description as the contents are protean and dense to say the least. When you realize that Land's phantasmic anti-human style is rooted in simple pseudoscientific simulacrum, Fanged Noumena loses a lot of its edge Land sees labor as complicit with phenomenology, rather than a displacement of it. “There can be no conception of work that does not project spirit into the origin, morally valorizing exertion…” (287) But this need only apply to the early Marx, not the later, where, as Wendling shows, a thermodynamic conception of work is starting to trouble Marx’s Hegelian praxis of spirit humanizing the world. The other path there is to reverse it, to see work not as the human spiritualizing the world but as the world materializing labor, an incomplete project of opening through labor toward a world that remakes species-being as nothing special, as one organization of matter, energy and information among others. One could read Haraway as taking this turn. Capitalism as a mind-virus that has captured humanity and is willing its evolution into existence from the future. Runaway processes in a network that overpower any counterforce. Societies of Control are PROGRAMMATIC. The universe. Is. Programmatic.Heidegger's 'Die Sprache im Gedicht' and the Cultivation of the Grapheme (PhD Thesis, University of Essex, 1987) Circuitries’ marked the point where Land’s disturbed catastrophizing had actual deleterious effects on my mental health; not to be melodramatic, but the violent misanthropy & shatteringly nihilistic gnosticism started to overpower my ability to metabolize them. This is the essay where the ‘preposterous humanism’ of the Hegelian-socialist tradition is chewed up between a rictus grin, humiliated as a doddering senility; to be conceptually usurped by ‘cyberpositivity’ a tactical acceptance of Land’s prophecy of post-singularity human extinction & the triumphant ascendancy of machine Archons. If geist, spirit, dasein, the subject of history, etc. ever existed, they are not implanted in the frail human subject any longer. But the terminus of anthropoid civilization as plugged into world-historical meaning & significance will probably only be evident when we die screaming in the clawed hands of cyber-Azathoth. There is a door at the end of a silent corridor. And it's haunting Harry Potter's dreams. Why else would he be waking in the middle of the night, screaming in terror?

Fanged Noumena by Nick Land - Penguin Books Australia Fanged Noumena by Nick Land - Penguin Books Australia

The great educational value of the war against Christendom lies in the absolute truthlessness of the priest. Such purity is rare enough. The 'man of God' is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word, gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any proposition passing the lips of a priest is necessarily totally false, excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood. It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or reality.” Far from being the acme of religion — let alone its telic blossoming — God is the principle of its suppression. The unity of theos is the tombstone of sacred zero, the crumbling granitic foundation of secular destitution.” Beginning with Land’s early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. Harman, Graham (2011). The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. re.press. ISBN 978-0980668346– via Google Books.K-tactics. The bacterial or xenogenetic diagram is not restricted to the microbial scale. Macrobacterial assemblages collapse generational hierarchies of reproductive wisdom into lateral networks of replicator experimentation. There is no true biological primitiveness – all extant bio-systems being equally evolved – so there is no true ignorance. It is only the accumulative-gerontocratic model of learning that depicts synchronic connectivity deficiency as diachronic underdevelopment. Land had the most brilliantly seductive and meteoric mind, endlessly imaginative and capable of adopting, inhabiting and discarding any philosophical position. With him - and rightly so - philosophy infected every area of life, and sheer vitality of life reverberated in his thinking.