Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007
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. I see Fanged Noumena as a kind of righteous revenge. Nick was dismissed by professional philosophers because they simply didn't want to think and preferred their turgid academic complacency. I always admired him for his unwavering desire to take thought to its absolute limit and then see how much harder one could push. --Simon CritchleyThis is theory as cyberpunk fiction: Deleuze-Guattari's concept of capitalism as the virtual unnameable Thing that haunts all previous formations pulp-welded to the timebending of the Terminator films. Land's machinic theory-poetry parallelled the digital intensities of 90s jungle, techno and doomcore, anticipating 'impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dance-floor'. --Mark Fisher (K-Punk)These texts are bite-marks quite different from those left by any academic species of cross-bred monstrosity: Surgically well-placed, covered with rainbows of infectious bruises, asymmetrical, whilst at times they suggest intimate playfulness, they are profusely saturated with acidic secretions. It is hard to imagine how a noisome beast like this could slip away under the nose of both literature and philosophy at the same time, largely unnoticed. Land generates synthetic strains of thought in which theory and fiction relentlessly problematize one another. Land s geotraumatics, constructed by gluing Freud and Reich to Deleuze and Guattari, proceeds on the basis of theory-fiction, with the earth as a plot where cosmic twists take shape. In the field of geotraumatics, not only the geological history of the earth but also its biological, cultural and economic evolutions can be subjected to forensic psychoanalytical profiling. Yet even more importantly, the earth and all its terrestrial narratives can be analyzed on the basis of their convoluted traumatic syntheses toward the abyssal outside. Land s work is rife for misunderstanding, but this is essential since it forces us to recalibrate his weapons and to reevaluate our capacities as humans while we renavigate minefields at the outer frontiers of thought (and praxis). All in all, here is Nick Land as the 'patient zero' of speculative thought for the 21st century. --Reza Negarestani