Nick Land - Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007

NICK LAND

Fanged Noumena

Collected Writings
19872007

Edited By
Robin Mackay & Ray Brassier

First published in 2011 in a numbered edition of 1000
by U RBANOMIC T HE O LD L EMONADE F ACTORY W INDSOR Q UARRY F ALMOUTH TR 11 3 EX U NITED K INGDOM S EQUENCE P RESS O RCHARD S TREET N EW Y ORK NY 10002 U NITED S TATES Second edition 2012 This Ebook Edition 2013 Text the authors For the book in this form Sequence Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. B RITISH L IBRARY C ATALOGUING-IN- P UBLICATION D ATA A full catalogue record of this book is available
from the British Library US Copyright Registration TX 7-578-293 ISBN 978-0-9832169-4-0 www.urbanomic.com www.sequencepress.com

CONTENTS

Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest originally appeared in Third Text Vol. 2, Issue 5 (Winter 1988/89), 8394; Narcissism and Dispersion in Heideggers 1953 Trakl Interpretation first appeared in D. Wood (ed.) Philosophers Poets (London/NY: Routledge, 1990), 7092; Delighted to Death first appeared in Pli The Warwick Journal of Philosophy Vol. 3, Issue 2 (1991), 76-88; Art as Insurrection first appeared in K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.), Nietzsche and Modern German Thought (London: Routledge, 1991), 240-56; Spirit and Teeth first appeared in D. Wood (ed.), Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 41-55, copyright 1993 Northwestern University Press; Shamanic Nietzsche first appeared in P. R. Sedgwick (ed.), Nietzsche: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 158-70; After the Law first appeared in A. Norrie (ed.), Closure or Critique: New Directions in Legal Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 101-15; Making it with Death first appeared in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology , 24.1 (Jan. 1993), 66-76; Circuitries first appeared in Pli The Warwick Journal of Philosophy Vol. 4, Issue 1/2 (1992), 217-35; Machinic Desire first appeared in Textual Practice 7.3 (1993), 471-82; Cybergothic first appeared in J. Broadhurst-Dixon, E. J. Cassidy (eds.), Virtual Futures (London: Routledge, 1998), 79-87; Cyberrevolution first appeared in ***Collapse 1 (privately published, Feb. 1995); Hypervirus first appeared in ***Collapse 2 (privately published, May 1995); No Future is a previously unpublished conference paper dating from 1995; Cyberspace Anarchitecture as Jungle-War first appeared in M. Pearce and N. Spiller (eds.), Architectural Design 118: Architects in Cyberspace (London: Academy Group, 1995), 58-9; Meat first appeared in M. Featherstone and R. Burrows (ed.), Body & Society, Vol. 1, No. 3-4 (1995), 191-204; Meltdown, presented at Virtual Futures , Warwick University, May 1994, first appeared in Abstract Culture 1 (first swarm) (Coventry: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit [ CCRU ], 1997); A zIIg o thIc==X=c o DA==(C oo kIngl o bsteRswIthjAkeAnDDIn o s) first appeared in J. & D. Chapman, Chapmanworld (London:ICA, 1996); KataoniX is the text from a collaborative multimedia presentation by ***Collapse , artist collective O(rphan) d(rift>), and D o ghead Surgeri, Virtual Futures 96 , Warwick University, 1996; Barker Speaks first appeared in Abstract Culture: Hyperstition (London: CCRU , 1999); Mechanomics first appeared in Pli The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 7 (1998), 55-66; Cryptolith and Occultures are texts from Syzygy, a collaboration between CCRU and O(rphan) d(rift>), Beaconsfield, London, Feb-Mar 1999; Non-Standard Numeracies is a previously unpublished text; Origins of the Cthulhu Club was published online by CCRU , probably dating from 1998-9; Introduction to Qwernomics, Tic Talk, A Dirty Joke and Critique of Transcendental Miserablism are texts posted online between 2005-7; Qabbala 101 first appeared in R. Mackay (ed.), Collapse vol. 1 (Oxford: Urbanomic, 2006).

The editors would like to thank Michael Carr, Mark Fisher, David Rylance and Reza Negarestani for their help in compiling this volume.

Nick Lands writings inhabit a disordered anarchitecture, a space traversed by rat and wolf-vectors, conjuring a schizophrenic metaphysics. Advanced technologies invoke ancient entities; the human voice disintegrates into the howl of cosmic trauma; civilization hurtles towards an artificial death. Sinister musical subcultures are allied with morbid cults, rogue AI s are pursued into labyrinthine crypts by Turing cops, and Europe mushrooms into a paranoia laboratory in a global cyberpositive circuit that reaches infinite density in the year 2012, flipping modernity over into whatever has been piloting it from the far side of the approaching singularity.

Lands writings fold genre in on itself, splicing disparate sources from philosophy, literature, science, occultism, and pulp fiction (Immanuel Kant, William Gibson, Deleuze-Guattari, Norbert Wiener, Kurt Gdel, Kenneth Grant, Terminator and Apocalypse Now , Antonin Artaud, H.P. Lovecraft ). The result is a dense, frequently bewildering vortex of hallucinatory conjunctions, superposing multiple pseudonyms, cryptic dates, and experimental coding systems: Cthelll, Axsys, Unlife, A-Death, K-Space, Sarkon, Kurtz, the Cthulhu Club, Hummpa Taddum; 4077, 1501, 1757, 1949, 1981; Tic-Systems, Primitive Numerization, Anglossic Qabbala, zygosis Metaphysics dissolves into psychotic cosmogony. The history of life on earth, from bacteria to Microsoft, is the history of suppression. Nameless, the suppressed seethes beneath lifes organized surfaces, locked up in cells, societies, selves, micro- and macropods, yet breaking out spasmodically to propel terrestrial history through a series of intensive thresholds which have been converging towards meltdown. Sole agent of revolution, the Antichrist is not one but many, a swarm of masked infiltrators from the future, poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack mitochondria from your DNA; hooking up desublimated Eros to synthetic Thanatos in order to accelerate the obsolescence of humankind.

*

What has all this to do with philosophy? From a certain point of view one encouraged by Land himself nothing, or as little as possible. Land allied himself to a line of renegade thinkers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille who mocked and disparaged academicism and wielded philosophy as an implement for exacerbating enigma, disrupting orthodoxy, and transforming existence. Land is probably the most controversial figure to have emerged from the fusty culture of Anglophone philosophy during the past two decades; despite, or perhaps because of this controversy, the texts collected in this volume have languished in near-obscurity until now.

Between 1992, the year of publication of his only book, and 1998, when he resigned his lectureship in Philosophy at the University of Warwick ( UK ) and abandoned academia, Land accrued a notoriety remarkable in a milieu otherwise typified by stultifying decorum. A divisive, polarizing figure, he provoked both adulation and execration. His jabs at the holy trinity of continental philosophy phenomenology, deconstruction, and critical theory drew enmity from his more orthodox peers; and while his virulent anti-humanism affronted philanthropic conservatives, his swipes at institutionalized critique earned him the opprobrium of the academic Left. Marxists in particular were outraged by Lands aggressive championing of the sociopathic heresy urging the ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field the acceleration, rather than the critique, of capitalisms disintegration of society. And Lands contempt for orthodoxy was no disingenuous pose struck whilst ruthlessly pursuing advancement. With a complete absence of academic ambition, he willingly paid the price for his provocations, both personally and professionally.

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