Zohar posted:

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.