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Well, Nick Land laid out the definitive systematisation of "the dark enlightenment" in his eponymous essay and to a large extent it's a logical upshot of some aspects of his earlier thinking. He's probably singlehandedly the most influential force in defining them as a single "thing". Like you said his earlier philosophy is fascinating and occasionally brilliant -- there's a reason he was so enormously influential in certain circles of British philosophy. He does actually still sometimes write interesting things, like his booklet from this November on templexity is a decent read I think, though not exactly stellar philosophy. I would say he's probably the only genuine intellectual in their camp, though even then most of his current output is garbage. What's really gone on with him is hard to say. Accepting his turn against the traditional left, which is obvious from pretty much the beginning of his writings, it still seems contradictory to the point of surreality that someone so invested in breathless acceleration would support self-proclaimed reactionaries (though the example of Marinetti is, I guess, telling). The most attractive explanation, I think, is that he's put it on for show -- maybe in the nietzschean way of weakening your opponents by supporting them with stupid arguments. In reality though he probably just self-identified too naively with his favourite hobbyhorses of neodeleuzian schizophrenia, antihumanism, and the bataillean defence of evil and is acting out in an increasingly vapid way his fantasy of being an ~evil genius~. I'd love to write in more depth about him actually since he's someone whose development I'm really interested in analysing as part of my broader academic research at the moment but my laptop has shat the bed so I'm stuck on mobile at the moment.
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Dec 13, 2014 02:06
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Sure I agree that's the impulse: does that make him a bad person though? Part of at least the pretence of this type of deleuzianism is that 'schizophrenia' and deterritorialisation are paths to radical liberation. I would invert your evaluation, since to me it's a much more intellectually interesting and authentic reaction to the problem of radical discontent than the warmed-over technics of the bargain basement fascism of someone like Moldbug. Not just Land, but catastrophic thinkers throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries (what my research focuses on). When Land was pursuing this line of thought properly I do think there were real philosophical fireworks involved even if it's not something we agree with -- I take Mark Fisher's line on that basically -- but now he's descended into boring bullshit about race and so on. E: to be clear I don't want to start sounding like whoever that guy was in the bitcoin threads that would talk about what a massive and serious threat bitcoin is 'but I'm not a supporter of it I promise guys'. Land is the only one of these guys I'm even marginally inclined to take seriously and even then I've probably been really overly generous to him already since, yeah, most of the time he acts like a bog-standard reactionary idiot now. Zohar has a new favorite as of 03:07 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 02:58
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It's a completely legit concept, anyone familiar with a place like Singapore can easily see how infantilisation can work as a technology of producing compliance to authoritarianism. Both the cupcake article and that post are good, and people seem to be missing the forest for the trees on the cupcake one in particular (it's not about cupcakes).
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Oct 2, 2015 13:31
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Woolie Wool posted:Is this Leftist Philosopher Mad Libs or something? I'm going cross-eyed trying to parse this rambling nonsense. It's not that hard to understand. The Vosgian Beast posted:It's this annoying thing where you pretend that everything you have a personal or aesthetic dislike for ties together with political views you're against. Like you can't just find something gross or annoying, it has to be evil. Except the adoption of twee signifiers of middle-class Britishness does, in fact, go hand in hand with right-wing opinions. e: If it helps any, the American analogy is that pointing out that driving SUVs and waving Confederate flags is a product of and feeds into right-wing ideology in the United States is not trying to turn a personal or aesthetic dislike into political argument, it's observing a fact. Zohar has a new favorite as of 17:39 on Oct 2, 2015 |
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Oct 2, 2015 17:36
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coyo7e posted:You first said the cupcake thing was easy to read, and then you write this Yeah?
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Oct 3, 2015 13:22
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uber_stoat posted:so wtf is "bioleninism"? just been seeing some DaRk EnLigHtEnMeNt type people talking about it and also folks who follow such people with a critical eye wondering wtf are they talking about. The claim is that Leninism split into formal Leninism (ie actual Soviet style stuff) and biological Leninism, and formal Leninism puts a limit on the leftist "ratchet" because it's obviously in power and doesn't need to pander to the lower classes any more, whereas biological Leninism never ends because it can always present itself as counterestablishment and there are always people who are biologically inferior who can be riled up to support the secret leftist power centre If you can be bothered with this stuff the original, meandering post about it by Spandrell is here: https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/leninism-and-bioleninism/
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Apr 11, 2018 08:53
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Relevant Tangent posted:Nick Land is the dumbest of these people in the sense that he had actual academic status and threw it away so he could do tweets, link to Jacobite, and make approving gestures in the direction of Jordan Peterson. Yud has never and will never achieve anything, but Land had something for a brief moment. He left academia in the early 00s because Warwick was losing patience with him and his group and he wanted to dick around in China instead. Becoming a genocide dad on Twitter over a decade later was maybe a consequence of him being cut out, it wasn't the reason he left (also linking jacobite and approving of Jordan Peterson are hardly why he's persona non grata now, lol)
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Aug 19, 2018 03:03
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