Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons

Nick Land and Die Nacht der Amazonen [a]

'We are the Amazons. We are the killers of beasts and men. 

Wild ourselves, we inhabit the wild places. Freedom courses in our blood, 

and death whispers at the tip of our arrows. 

We fear nothing, fear runs from us. Try to stop us, and you will feel our rage.' [b]

                                                          

 

I. 

 

For a thinker who once dismissed politics as "the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind" [c], Land spends an awful amount of time addressing political issues and discussing modern philosophy in relation to capitalism. 

 

And although he was never a traditional leftist even in his early writings, it's amusing to note just how deeply rooted in Marxist analysis, postcolonial theory, radical feminism, and femdom fantasy his thinking was in the late-1980s.   

 

 

II. 

 

In his essay 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest' (1988), Land is at pains to argue that the Sage of Königsberg's philosophy cunningly disguised the violent, exclusionary realities of free-market capitalism, such as racism, by hiding them behind abstract, universal moral ideals:  

 

"Kant was able to remain bourgeois without overtly promoting racism only because he also remained an idealist, or in other words a Christian [...] and identified universality with ideality rather than with power." [d] 

 

Western modernity may portray itself as enlightened and speak of freedom and equality, but it's structurally dependent on class and racial hierarchies in order to exploit labour and foreign resources. Liberals want to reap the benefits of the bourgeois order, but they want to do so without feeling morally compromised by its more brutal aspects and Kant provides them with a way to wriggle off the hook and evade their guilt.      

 

That makes Kant not just a crypto-theologian, but also an apologist for capitalism; someone who enables the liberal elite to preach universal human rights whilst, at the same time, build a global economic system that is radically inhuman and which will eventually do away with mankind altogether.   

 

 

III. 

 

Not that Land objects to the death of man, of course. 

 

In fact, he wishes to accelerate the forces that capitalism itself unleashes by dissolving all borders and boundaries, all structures and identities (particularly national structures and identities). Ultimately, Nick's objection to the bourgeois order is that it never goes far or fast enough toward its own external limit. 

 

Similarly, his objection to old school socialism is that it isn't revolutionary enough; being as it is all too male, pale, and stale it doesn't offer the unrestrained programme born of the "theoretical and libidinal dissolution of national totality" (77) that he longs for. 

 

And so, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, at the end of 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest', Land turns to militant feminists, such as Monique Wittig, for support ...   

 

 

IV.

 

Wittig - a French philosopher and lesbian theorist - is also known for her fictional writings, including the hugely influential novel Les Guérillères (1969) [e].  

 

This term, a neologism, is sometimes translated into English as 'warrior women', but Land has a penchant for the idea of new Amazons, who, in his view, are alone capable of destroying the patriarchal and nationalistic structures that act as brakes on global capitalism, finally unleashing the market's unrestricted flow of desire.

 

Land writes:

 

"The only resolutely revolutionary politics is feminist in orientation [...] It is because women are the historical realisation of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communicative function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they are invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands." (78)

 

Whilst praising Luce Irigaray's meticulous analysis of patriarchal power, Land says the political solutions she suggests "are often feebly nostalgic, sentimental, and pacifistic" (78). It is only Wittig who has "adequately grasped the inescapably military task faced by any serious revolutionary feminism" (79). 

 

Land argues that liberating women from an ethno-geographical identity will result in a revolutionary subversion of the state.  He dismisses liberal feminism and reformism as co-opted mechanisms that simply give women access to wealth while leaving the brutal patriarchal-capitalist system intact.

 

But Land also insists that uprooting the patriarchal endogamy requires a fierce willingness to fight the modern state and he posits feminist violence as crucial. His new Amazons, as schizonomadic agents of feminist chaos, will end the bourgeois order (or Human Security System) not with love and kisses, but bullets and bombs. 

  

He finds it dispiriting that women have historically shown "enormous reluctance [...] to prosecute their struggle with sufficient ruthlessness and aggression [...] feminism is often particularly fastidious in this respect, even reverting to absurd mystical and Ghandian [sic] ideologies" (79).  

 

Land calls this reluctance idealistic recoil and insists that terror and atrocity are "the very motor" (79) of politics and that a "revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell" (79). 

 

This is what Land terms a harsh truth ... 

 

He ends by relating this call to "escalate the cycle of violence without limit" (79) in the name of overthrowing "the contemporary world order " (80), back to Kant, whose philosophy remains for Land at the heart of the problem:

 

"With the abolition [...] of Kantian thought - a sordid cowardice will be washed away [...] But the only conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst." (80) [f] 

 

 

V.

 

So, what are we to make of all this? 

 

Well, if you're a Nick Land fanboy or happen to fantasise about dominant women, then I suppose you'll say he's speaking here with the voice of a "revolutionary and a feminist male who has shifted into hyperaccelerationist mode" and cheer him on as he sides with futural amazons fighting a guerrilla war that "displaces five thousand years of patriarchal endogamy and the rule of androcracies" [g].

  

But if, like me, you wrote your PhD on various post-Nietzschean forms of politics (including the politics of desire, cruelty, and evil), then you might have certain reservations about those who speak in favour of revolutionary violence and justify even the most atrocious acts and echo Deleuze and Guattari's call for caution at all times [h].  

It seems to me that Nietzsche was right to say that whilst revolutionary violence can be a source of stimulation via the resurrection of the "most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages" [i], it can do no more than this. For change of a truly profound nature, it requires something else. Not something noisier or more brutal in character, but, on the contrary, something that administers small doses of change "unremittingly over long periods of time" [j].  

 

In other words, the revaluation of all values involves patience. 

 

Unfortunately, that's probably not a Landian virtue and it might explain why Land fails to give his own philosophy a plausible political identity (although I'm sure he would say that was not something he ever wanted to do). 

 

It might also help to explain how it is Land goes from expressing a desire to escape from all fatherlands to promoting a neoreactionary philosophy based on corporate techno-feudalism and ends up living in Shanghai - which is ironic when one recalls that Nietzsche often characterised Kant as Chinese [k].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] While the Amazon shown here is an illustration for the 1937 programme for Die Nacht der Amazonen by Albert Reich, this is not to imply that Land would have been anything other than horrified by the open-air Nazi propaganda and variety event held annually in Munich during the period 1936-39. 

      It may have delighted thousands of German spectators with its mix of mythology, racial ideology, and near-naked showgirls dancing or parading on horseback, but I can't imagine it would have been Nick's cup of tea and, as we will see in this post, his Amazons are of a very different kind to those lusted after by the leaders of the Third Reich. 

 

[b] Anne Fortier, The Lost Sisterhood (Ballantine Books, 2014), p. 3. 

 

[c] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 197.

 

[d] Nick Land, 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), p. 72. 

      Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post between round brackets.

 

[e] Les Guérillères is today considered a pivotal text for feminist and lesbian thinkers around the world. It was first translated into English by David Le Vey in 1971 and published in a recent edition by the University of Illinois Press, 2007. Wittig clearly had an influence on Land - particularly the idea of Amazonian women leading a violent revolution. Also, for Land, heteronormative lifestyles are one of the major brakes on capital and so Wittig's lesbianism is valued in and of itself. 

 

[f] This invoking of new Amazons is similar to Nietzsche's calling upon a new breed of barbarians who come from the heights and combine spiritual superiority with an excess of physical well-being. See The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), IV. 899-900, pp. 478-479. 

 

[g] S. C. Hickman, 'Nick Land: Amazons and the Post-Capitalist World', The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and the Digital Arts (16 December 2016): click here. 

 

[h] In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write: "Staying stratified - organised, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever." See ATP, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 161. 

      Land of course violently repudiates Deleuze and Guattari's warnings against the dangers of going too far, too fast and the need to exercise caution. In Land's eyes, this is "a lamentable step backwards from Anti-Oedipus' most audacious innovations, and fatally lays open the latter's unequivocal declaration of war on the strata to the classic compromise-formations and policing of desire that they [D&G] had previously so effectively challenged". - Mackay and Brassier writing in their 'Editor's Introduction' to Nick Land's Fanged Noumena ... p. 30.

 

[i] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 463, p. 169. 

      Admittedly, this is Nietzsche writing in one of his calmer periods and one can find plenty of examples - even in the same work - of him offering support for grand politics and "the greatest and most terrible wars" - HAH, I. 8. 477, p. 176.  

 

[j] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), V. 534, p. 211.

 

[k] Nietzsche called Kant the 'Chinaman of Königsberg' because of the latter's rigid, dogmatic, bureaucratic moralism. See, for example, Beyond Good and Evil § 210 and The Anti-Christ § 11. 

 

 

For the first post in this series of posts on Nick Land's writings in Fanged Noumena (2011), please click here .   

 

 

Haddaway, Man! An Open Letter to Peter Wolfendale

Hi, my name is Pete, 

and I’m a systematic philosopher [1]  

 

 

I. 

 

Hello Pete, my name is Stephen Alexander, and I mistrust all systematisers and would normally seek to avoid them [2]. In your case, however, I'll make an exception ... 

 

For like you, I'm an independent scholar - which you amusingly suggest is merely a fancy way of saying unemployed with a Ph.D - who is less than impressed with the "ossified social cliques" [3] that control academia and although I live in Essex, my roots, like yours, are in the North East of England; my father was from Gateshead and my mother from Whitley Bay. 

 

We also both came out of the philosophy department at Warwick: I note that you completed your doctoral thesis on Heidegger in 2012; I finished mine, on Nietzsche, in 2000. 

 

So we have some things in common. 

 

 

II. 

 

However, I also note that you consider yourself "a heretical Platonist, an unorthodox Kantian, and a minimalist Hegelian" [4], and whilst I'm pleased to see you qualify your Platonism, Kantianism, and Hegelianism in this manner, I'm still troubled that these are the three thinkers you name as your primary sources of inspiration. 

 

And whilst we both have a wide range of interests, I'd say my curiosity is motivated more by hate than by love and, actually, I think you're mistaken to say it's all good at the end of the day. 

 

As for your "trinity of dialectical virtues" [5] - sincerity, explicitness, and consistency - well, I had to smile as these are possibly the three things I most try to avoid on Torpedo the Ark, where I never mean what I say or say what I mean and couldn't care less about whether my text is haunted by the spectre of logical contradiction [6]: I am Monsieur Teste in reverse! 

 

III. 

 

Two confessions: 

 

Firstly, I haven't read your 2014 book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, even though I probably should have. For whilst I was never in with the OOO crowd, I did read a good deal of Graham Harman's work and found a lot of it resonated with my own (rather more material and less metaphysical) interest in objects. 

 

It was only when Harman started promoting his version of OOP as a new theory of everything and boasting of how he had become a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" - and had even "captured the notice of celebrities" - that I grew tired of him and his flat ontology [7]. 

 

Secondly, I'm not sure your new book is going to feature on my list of Christmas reading either. 

 

That's mainly because as someone who is still very much committed to Nietzsche's reverse anthropocentrism - i.e., his attempt to translate man back into nature and demonstrate how virtue itself is animal in origin - I suspect I'm just the sort of thinker whom you are seeking revenge against in the name of Reason unbound from all such petty naturalism. 

 

What I am going to do, however, is follow your advice and start by reading your newer blog writings (those classified as Phase 3) and then read one (or more) of your interviews, in the hope that I can better understand what you mean by rationalist inhumanism and Promethean socialism; neither of which I very much like the sound of [8]. 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] This line of greeting from Wolfendale - and the photo - are taken from his blog, Deontologistics: click here. 

      For those readers who might not know, a systematic philosopher - such as Wolfendale - is one who seeks to develop a logically coherent and comprehensive body of knowledge based upon fundamental principles in order to explain the world we live in. To create such a perfect system - or metanarrative - has been the (insanely ambitious and inherently oppressive) dream of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. 

      As for the term deontologistics, this is a neologism coined by Wolfendale to describe his own research project into the nature and limits of reason and his aim to establish a system of philosophy of the kind described above. 

      In moral philosophy, deontology is the idea that an action should be based solely on whether it is right or wrong according to a set of fixed principles, with no consideration given to the consequences of that action. In other words, it's a form of fundamentalism; insisting that one's duty or obligation is always to uphold the letter of the law and stick to the rules no matter what. 

 

[2] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Twilight of the Idols ('Maxims and Arrows', 36), who then goes on to add: "The will to a system is a lack of integrity." See the Hollingdale translation (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 35. 

 

[3] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[4] See the short biographical note on Wolfendale on the Urbanomic website: click here. He is one of their authors and his debut book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, was published by Urbanmomic in 2014. His new book, The Revenge of Reason, is forthcoming at the end of this year; a work in which he ponders the fate of Reason in the 21st century and lays out his vision for neo-rationalism as a distinctive philosophical path towards an inhuman destiny. 

      Ray Brassier obviously thinks highly of him, as he wrote a postscript to the former and supplied a preface to the latter. Details of both works are available on the Urbanomic website. 

 

[5] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[6] When it comes to sincerity, explicitness, and consistency, I side with Nietzsche, Wilde, and Roland Barthes (even at the risk of falling into what Wolfendale terms unrestrained irony). Barthes famously rejects the ideology of clarity (or explicitness) in Critique et vérité (1966), just as he mocks the idea of logical consistency in Le plaisir du texte (1973), from where I borrow the idea of M. Teste in reverse. 

      For my thoughts on (in)sincerity, see the post dated (9 July 2018): click here. 

 

[7] I'm quoting Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin Books, 2018), p. 8. For my thoughts on this book, see the post published on 24 March 2018: click here. 

 

[8] From what I understand at this point - without having done much reading in the area - rational inhumanism seems to intersect with (or emerge from) Ray Brassier's idea of transcendental nihilism and is an attempt to liberate reason from human biology, psychology, and cultural history. 

      As for Promethean socialism, I believe this refers to the deliberate re-engineering of ourselves and our world on a more rational and egalitarian basis. In other words, it's a kind of left-leaning accelerationism that affirms techno-scientific progress and the overcoming of natural limits. 

      One can't help feeling we've heard all this before and that, ultimately, if you strip Wolfendale's work of its complex and sophisticated philosophical theorising, one's left with just another fevered dream of a future utopia.

 

 

A Philosophical Reflection on Getting Older

Portrait of the Artist as a 

Darkly Enlightened Philosopher

(SA 2025) [1]

 

"Darling, am I looking old? / Tell me dear I must be told ..." [2]

 

I. 

 

You know you're getting older not just when another birthday looms on the horizon - each candle on the cake essentially another nail in the coffin - but when, following the presentation of a short paper at Kant's Cave [3], a young woman approaches not to discreetly slip you her phone number or ask for your email address, but to inform you of the fact that you remind her of her father.

 

Still, as a friend said with a smile, at least she didn't say grandmother ... 

 

 

II.

 

Many people like to believe that there are advantages to growing older; that experience makes one a little wiser, for example. But this is bullshit: and even if it were true, who wants a smidgen more wisdom when you can't see, can't run, can't breathe, and your hair has fallen out?

 

The fact is, most great works of philosophy were produced by thinkers in their mid-to-late 30s - Heidegger, for example, was 37 when Sein und Zeit was published - and whilst there are of course exceptions - such as Kant and his three Critiques - we can confidently say that there are very few works of significance written by thinkers over the age of 55 [4].  

 

As I'll be 62 next week - the same age as Wittgenstein when he died - that means I'm now way over the philosophical hill ... Still, at least I'm not buried beneath it.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The photo was taken on February 3rd 2025 at Kant's Cave (see note 2 below). I'm not sure if I look darkly enlightened, as intended, or simply like an old punk; one person described me as resembling a flamboyant East End gangster - i.e., a Kray brother dressed by Vivienne Westwood. 

 

[2] Lyrics from the X-Ray Spex song 'Age': click here to listen to it on a Peel Session (recorded 6 Nov 1978 and broadcast on the 13th of that month). 

 

[3] Kant's Cave is a monthly meeting organised by Philosophy for All and held in a first floor function room at the the famous Two Chairmen pub, in Wesminster. The paper addressed the question: What is the Dark Enlightenment?

 

[4] See the post by Eric Schwitzgebel analysing the question of what the average age is when philosophers complete their most influential work: The Splintered Mind (12 May 2010): click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism

Nick Land (Gargoyle Philosopher)

Immanuel Kant (Architect of the Cathedral)

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], the dominant faith of the modern world is Universalism ...

Which is ironic, because if you examine the idea closely - historically - you'll discover that it's a very particular way of looking at the world that merely "asserts its own universal significance whilst ascending to a state of general dominance that approaches the universal".

 

In other words, Universalism - which determines the direction and meaning of modernity - is revealed "as the minutely determined branch or sub-species of a cultic tradition, descended from 'ranters', 'levelers', and closely related variants of dissident, ultra-protestant fanaticism". 

 

It owes very little to philosophers and their model of reason, which is why the Enlightenment can be understood more as a religious event than a philosophical one. 

 

Or, as Land notes, the world's ruling creed - radically democratic and egalitarian in character - is something that emerged amongst a specific people at a particular time and then spread "along identifiable historical and geographical pathways, with an epidemic virulence that is disguised as progressive global enlightenment". 

 

Land finds this all very amusing: "The unmasking of the modern 'liberal' intellectual [...] as a pale, fervent, narrowly doctrinaire puritan, recognizably descended from the species of witch-burning zealots, is reliably - and irresistibly - entertaining."

 

Not that he sees many others laughing; in fact, as the Cathedral extends and tightens its grip upon everyone everywhere, the response it triggers is often anything but humorous:

 

"More commonly, when unable to exact humble compliance, it encounters inarticulate rage, or at least uncomprehending, smoldering resentment, as befits the imposition of parochial cultural dogmas, still wrapped in the trappings of a specific, alien pedigree, even as they earnestly confess to universal rationality."

 

The Muslim world, for example, doesn't often stop to appreciate the irony of the situation. For them, Universalism is Western imperialism and they don't like it; they don't find the truths being foistered on them to be as self-evident as we do. "How could anybody who was not already a believer be expected to consent to such assumptions?", asks Land.  

 

Of course, those sophisticated globalists of the Cathedral are embarrassed when obliged to admit that their progressive political agenda has a religious origin; they pride themselves on their secularism and desperately seek to direct attention away from "the ethnically specific, dogmatic creedal content at its core".

 

As Land writes in a brilliant line: "Paleo-puritanism must be derided in order for neo-puritanism to flourish ..." [2]

 

 

II.

 

Obviously, I'm sympathetic to Land's neo-reactionary nominalism directed against the Cathedral and its project of Universal Enlightenment. In a sense, that's what the phrase torpedo the ark might be understood to mean; i.e., a rejection of the ideal fantasy that the entire human race might be caught up in single becoming: One World, One People, One Law.   

 

I instinctively hate this line of thinking and always have. 

 

One of the reasons that the notion of a dark enlightenment attracts is because it rejects the myth of progress (or the internal teleology) at work in the philosophy of those such as Kant and Hegel and opposes any attempt to centralise into oneness, encouraging rather what D. H. Lawrence would describe as "a vivid recoil into separateness" [3].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nick Land, the Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the fourth and final part of this online version.

 

[2] Similarly, as Land goes on to note, neofascists of the New World Order can't be vocal enough in condemning white nationalism and other forms of what they call 'far-right extremism': 

      "Just as the ratchet progress of neo-puritan social democracy is radically facilitated by the orchestrated pillorying of its embryonic religious forms, so is its trend to consistently neo-fascist political economy smoothed by the concerted repudiation of a 'neo-nazi' (or paleo-fascist) threat. It is extremely convenient, when constructing ever more nakedly corporatist or 'third position' structures of state-directed pseudo-capitalism, to be able to divert attention to angry expressions of white racial paranoia ..."

[3] D. H. Lawrence, ‘Future States’, in The Poems, ed. Cristopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 526.

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present

Nick Land contemplates taking an exit provided 

by the photographer Florian Reinhardt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

According to Foucault, Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way; as an exit, a way out, or an escape route from the past, which he thinks of as marked by darkness, barbarism, and man's immaturity [2].

Funny enough, although Nick Land thinks of his own neoreactionary philosophy as an intrinsic contradiction to the process of enlightenment, he too is looking for ein Ausgang - only he wants an exit from modernity and from the age of Enlightenment [3]. 

 

Realising, however, that there can be no turning back, Land says that any form of conservativism is thus pre-emptively (and ironically) condemned to paradox – i.e., destined to become a kind of retrofuturism; projecting something vital - but also something lost, or forgotten, or denied that existed in the past - into the future.

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence, who also sought an exit from the 20th-century and wished to step away from the light, understood this paradox better than most. His novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), for example, attempts to loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [4] and find some clue as to how we might live yesterday tomorrow.

 

Nietzsche too provides philosophical justification for taking what he calls a retrograde step once man has attained a certain level of enlightenment and emerged from superstitious fears and religious concepts. In other words, he has to recognise the importance that resided in old ideas and traditions and that "without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best mankind has hitherto produced" [5].    

 

Good people - the enlightened, who are afraid of the dark - will say this lapsing back into old life-modes that have been surpassed is a form of evil. Whilst that mightn't worry a Nietzschean, Lawrence was at pains to stress that this wasn't a "'helpless, panic reversal'", [6] but was, rather, something performed consciously and with care.

 

And, to reiterate: it's not a return so much as an exiting of the present into the past in order to enter the future.   

 

 

III.

 

Returning to Land, we find a contemporary thinker who is prepared to express his disillusionment with the "direction and possibilities" of the democratic political order born of the Enlightenment. For Land, as for many neoreactionaries and libertarians, freedom - in the classical liberal sense - is no longer compatible with democracy and the expansion of a voracious welfare state. 

 

And many of these people have ceased to care; for them, "democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself" and they are now searching for "something else entirely: an exit".  

 

When you risk being eaten alive in what Land thinks of as a coming zombie apocalypse, then flight becomes the ultimate imperative. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] During a period of almost ten years, German filmmaker and photographer Florian Reinhardt snapped over a 1000 pictures on his iPhone of exit signs all over the world. Readers who are interested can find them in a book entitled Exit published byHatje Cantz (2021). Click here for further information on Reinhardt and his work; or here to visit his exit.art website. 

 

[2] See Michel Foucault's essay 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32-50, in which he discusses Kant's 1784 essay 'Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?' (usually referred to in English simply as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’).   

 

[3] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting here from the first part of this online version.  

[4] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix. 

[5] Nietzsche, Human, all Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 1. 20, pp. 22-23. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 138.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.  

Will Absence Make My Heart Grow Fonder of Byung-Chul Han? (Part 2)

 

Cover of the original German edition (2007) [a]

 

 

I.

According to Byung-Chul Han: "Anti-gravity is the fundamental characteristic of the Western soul, even of Western thinking." [48] 

 

Hegel, for example, is bored by inertia and hates the heaviness of matter: "Anti-gravity is the fundamental trait of Hegel's 'spirit'." [49]

 

And even Zarathustra was opposed to the Spirit of Gravity and wished to see young people become light of foot like dancers and for dancers to become birdlike, so that they may experience the incredible sensation of taking flight [b]. Weighed down by the Spirit of Gravity, they are prevented from ever loving themselves and discovering their own goodness, says Nietzsche. 

 

Of course, this all goes back to Plato who conceived of the human soul as striving towards the divine and infinite: "Its feathered wings allow it to shed its heaviness and float upwards towards the gods [...]" [50]

Far Eastern thinking, by contrast, "is pro-gravitational [...] insofar as it seeks to accomodate itself to the weight of the world" [51], rather than inciting resistance. Keep your feet on the ground seems to be the message.

 

 

II. 

The sea was angry that day my friends ... But that's okay, because maritime adventure is another popular metaphor in Western philosophy: "Conquering stormy seas is seen as a heroic undertaking." [56] 

 

Both Hegel and Nietzsche love to compare thinking to setting out on an endless ocean; for the former - perhaps the most hydrophobic of all philosophers - this requires real courage; for water is the most mendacious of all elements "because it permanently changes its form, because it does not have a form of its own at all" [57] [c] and fails, unlike solid ground, to offer stability (an important aspect of essence):

 

"Western thinking has its source in a desire for solid ground. It is precisely this compulsive desire for permanence and clarity that makes every deviation, every transformation, look like a threat." [58]

 

Kant also relies on a metaphor of seafaring to illustrate his concept of thinking; he trusts in a good captain to navigate with knowledge and to keep the boat clear of dangers: 

 

"The Kantian art of helmsmanship conquers the sea by framing it with a system of principles and fully charting it with coordinates." [58]. 

 

Reason will triumph over the darkness of the oceanic depths, tame the wild waves, and keep the ship off the rocks. Even Heidegger subscribes to this, although he argues for the importance of exposing thought to the abysmal sea.

 

This is not a very Chinese way of thinking: for Chinese philosophers the mind is as great as the sea and in fact they form a unity. Thus, the sea is no threat to man: "Someone who is as big as the world will not be hindered or impeded by anything in the world." [62] 

 

There's no angst in the Chinese model; it's far more carefree and effortless: "You are effortless when you do not set anything against the world, when you fully unite with it." [62] 

 

Thus, as Han concludes: "Chinese thinking involves an altogether different relationship to the world; it is characterized by a deep trust in the world" [63] - and a love of water, in which is seen the highest goodness:

"Because it lacks all solidity, water does not exercise any coercion. It is yielding and flexible. Thus, it does not encounter any resistance. As it does not assert itself, does not resist anything, does not oppose anything, it does not compete in strife." [64] [d]

 

Water, we might say, seduces, although this is not a term that Han uses. He concludes this interesting chapter on land and sea (and ways of thinking) with a convenient summary of what has been discussed:

 

"For the Chinese, the sea is not a symbol of chaos or the abyss, nor is it a mysterious place that lures adventurers. It is neither the sea of Odysseus nor that of Kant and Hegel. It is a place of in-difference, of the unbounded and inexhaustible. In the Far East, the transition from land to sea is not experienced as a transition from a firm ground to an unstable support. It is a transition from the limited to the inexhaustible and comprehensive, from difference to in-difference, from fulless to emptiness, from presencing to absencing, from holding fast to releasement (Gelassenheit). This is true not only of Daoism but also of Zen Buddhism. The moment of satori (illumination) is one of a great transition that leads to an oceanic feeling." [68-69] [e] 

 

Han continues:

 

"For the Chinese, water, or the sea, is the symbol for a thinking or a behaviour that, from moment to moment, adapts and snuggles up to the transforming world [...] The world is not abysmal. It is merely manifold in its manifestations. It is not a being but a path that permanently changes course. Far Eastern thought does not circle around identity. Transformations and change are not felt to be a threat. They just represent the natural course of things, to which one needs to adapt." [69]

 

The Chinese sage does not feel the need to set sail and conquer the world - he's happy just to snuggle up to the latter and be shaped by it ... One is almost tempted to say: Like a woman [f]. 

III.

 

Because we are so caught up in grammar - the metaphysics or presence of God within language - it makes it very hard for a Westerner ever to really think or speak or see the world like someone from the Far East. 

 

Han's native Korean, for example, doesn't presuppose an active subject - in fact the subject is often left out of things altogether, which is problematic for Westerners who find it hard to conceive of a subject-less happening; we have to have an actor behind every action (be it a human actor or a god) [g]. 

 

Han writes: "The subject is a slave who is under the delusion that he is master." [81] What would be noble, from a Buddhist perspective, would be to escape this delusion (and subjectivity) entirely.    

 

Would it be noble also to remain silent? Confucius often wished to remain silent. But Han is at pains to point out that Confucius's silence "does not aim at the unsayable, the mystery that cannot captured by language" [82]. Nor does he want to remain schtum because he thinks language is insufficient "and cannot signify its object adequately" [82]. 

 

In fact, the unsayable - that which escapes language - "is not a theme in Far Eastern thinking" [82] - it's a Western thing: "Language is renounced in favour of a remainder that can be expressed only in song" [82], for example. Or silence is affirmed as the only thing that can do justice to this extralinguistic residue (be it metaphysial, asthetic, or ethical in character). 

 

The silence of Zen masters is an empty silence; it does not refer to anything, but is designed to make others think about the reality of the world, which just is as it is, neither secret nor mysterious; "there are no murky depths" [83] for philosophers or psychoanalysts to uncover or root around in like pigs in search of truffles.   

 

 

IV.

 

The final chapter of Han's book is on greeting and bowing, i.e., forms of friendliness - although, interestingly, he suggests that originally to greet someone "must have involved emitting a dark, gutteral, threatening sound" [90], as, etymologically, the word means to attack, provoke, or unsettle.

 

Somehow, even as a (slightly shy but also somewhat cheeky) three-year old, I already knew this; which is why I was not just being friendly when I stood on my front garden wall and greeted strangers passing by [h].   

 

Han writes:

 

"Initially, the other represents a possible threat and danger to my existence. The other has an usettling effect. The gutteral sound of gruozen is probably an immediate reaction to the primordial threat posed by the other, another human being. By emmitting a gutteral, threatening sound I challenge the other to fight." [91]  

 

Eventually, once there's a degree of mutual recognition, the greeting becomes more of a form of reassurance; it tells the other that they are accepted and that you mean no harm to them. But, crucially, both parties remain separate; a greeting does not instantly or automatically create intimacy; the greeter greets the other across a pathos of distance and from within their own essence. 

 

Offering a friendly greeting lets the other be in their essential otherness - it's not aiming at some form of merger; it says I'm me and you're you. But the Japanese do not verbally greet with a grunt, they bow ...

 

According to Han, bowing is all about absencing oneself from the scene; there's no exchange of gaze or mutual sizing up. In a deep bow, parties form a flat plane between them, levelling out difference. Neither party bows to the other, they bow rather into the empty space between them. Technically speaking, no one is greeting or being greeted; and no one is subjugated or subjugating. 

 

Han writes: "A deep bow does not mediate between persons, does not reconcile anyone with anyone else. Rather, it empties and de-internalizes those involved into absencing individuals." [98]

And that's why bowing is so philosophically important; it's not just a form of politeness, but a way of negating essence and identity [i].

Notes

 

[a] I am using the English translation of this work by Byung-Chul Han, translated by Daniel Steur as Absence, (Polity Press, 2023) - all page numbers given in this post refer to this edition.  

 

[b] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'On the Spirit of Gravity'. 

      Readers who are interested might also like to see my post entitled 'On Dance as a Method of Becoming-Bird' (10 Oct 2015): click here.

 

[c] Later, Han will note that whilst water may not have a form of its own, "it is anything but 'amorphous'. It always has a shape, because it takes the form of the other in order to unfold. It is friendly because [...] it snuggles up to any form." [64]

[d] This way of thinking isn't entirely unknown in the West - one thinks, for example, of Henry Miller's insistence on loving everything that flows - but, on the whole, it's undoubtedly true that we in the West prefer things to be dry and solid. Readers who are interested might like to see the post published on 7 June 2013: click here.

[e] Again, this line of thought is not entirely alien to Western thinkers; Zarathustra, for example, tells his followers that in order to be overhuman they must become a sea so as not to be defiled by the polluted rivers of the all too human world, although, admittedly, that's not not quite the same thing as the oceanic feeling of oneness that Far Eastern philosophers champion and Han concludes that Nietzsche - for all his attempted reversal of Western metaphysics - "remained a Western thinker" [70]

      Interestingly, Freud - another great Western thinker - argues that (if it exists) the oceanic feeling is a primitive form of egoism preserved from infancy.     

[f] I'll let readers decide whether that's a  good or bad thing, but would remind those in need of reminding that even Nietzsche toyed with the supposition that truth might be a woman; see the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil. If that's the case, then that pretty much changes everything; no phallogocentic certainty; no solid foundations or fixed forms, etc. (Again, I'll let readers decide whether this would be for better or for worse.) 

[g] Han notes: "For Asian aesthetic sensibility, something that happens without a subject being involved, without the imprint of a doing, is both noble and beautiful. The imprint of a subjective act is a typically Western motif." [84] 

      Nietzsche, of course, attempted to think deeds without an actor, but, says Han, he was unable to "turn from the philosophy of doing and power to the philosophy of happening" [85], which is why he remained very much a Western thinker and "more or less attached to subjectivity" [85].

      As for Heidegger, whilst he "may have repeatedly allowed himself to be touched by Far Eastern thinking" [88], he also remained in many respects a Western thinker attached to the idea of essence. And if he frequently used the trope of the way, his way "differs from the way as dao" [88]. Ultimately, Heidegger's being is a bit more mysterious and withdrawn than the being-so of Eastern thinking, which is what we might call everyday immanence.   

[h] See the post entitled 'Say Hello Then!' (3 Aug 2018): click here.

 

[i] I'm pretty sure Roland Barthes recognised this in L'Empire des Signes (1970), though I'm not sure Larry David fully appreciated this in episode 7 of season 8 of Curb Your Enthusiasm (2011). See the post entitled 'Shit Bow: Larry David and Roland Barthes on the Art of Japanese Etiquette' (26 Oct 2017): click here. 

 

 

To read part 1 of this post, please click here. 

Will Absence Make My Heart Grow Fonder of Byung-Chul Han? (Part 1)

(Polity Press, 2023)

 

 

I. 

 

Although Daniel Steuer's English translation of Byung-Chul Han's book Absence was only published last year, the original German text appeared back in 2007 [a], and so we can rightly think of it as one of his early works; more philosophical and less political in tone as it explores the Western obsession with essence in contrast to the Eastern (and deeply foreign) notion of absence.    

 

As Han rightly says: "The concept of 'essence', which unites identity, duration and inwardness, dwelling, lingering and possessing, dominates occidental metaphysics." [1] From ancient Greeks like Plato to German idealists like Kant, essence is the key and be yourself the melody. What is outside and inessential can stay there and remain that way.

 

Even Heidegger, argues Han, "despite his best efforts at leaving metaphysical thinking behind [...] remained a philosopher of essence" [4]. In wanting to let things be he wants things to remain true to their own essence. Ultimately, Dasein both dwells and endures. It does not wander too far from itself (even if it explores the odd woodpath from time to time). 

 

But in Daoism, the wise man is without fixed abode and never stops wandering; evading all substantive determination and having no stable identity, he leaves no trail or name behind him. Daoist wandering may not be the same as Zen Buddhist non-dwelling, "but the negativity of absencing connects the two" [5]. 

 

Ultimately, the "fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but the way [...] The way lacks the solidity of being and essence, which is what leads to the emergence of traces" [5]. Westerners talk about finding the way, but by that they really just mean finding themselves; the Eastern wanderer, however, becomes the way and doesn't hope to find anything (walking with neither intention nor direction). 

The Western philosopher wants his soul to blossom; the Eastern thinker, like the flower, doesn't have a soul (and remains nameless). They also remain rooted in the material world and care for the body; eating when hungry, sleeping when tired. Oh, and they also remain silent, still, and inactive.  

 

I have to admit, all of this appeals to me very much - and I say that as someone who has been hostile to (and dismissive of) Eastern thought in the past. It seems to me to that absence and emptiness and meaninglessness may very well lead "not to nihilism but to a heavenly joy [...] being without direction or trace" [13]. 

 

Kant - and those idiots who think happiness is all about being stuffed-full and satiated; all about having purpose and direction - wouldn't like this, but I do. Like Laozi, I'm happy to lead a life "without sense and goal, without teleology and narration, without transcendence and God" [14] - to be, as the Sex Pistols once sang, pretty vacant [b] and to find in this freedom, not spiritual deprivation [c]. 

 

 

II.

 

This is interesting: 

 

"Of course, postmodern thinkers also oppose ideas of substance and identity. [...] The negativity of these thinkers brings them closer to absencing and emptiness, but [...] Far Eastern thinking [...] is alien to them [...] The Far Eastern thinking of emptiness leaves deconstruction behind in order to achieve a special kind of reconstruction." [16]

 

This special kind of reconstruction is worldly immanence - "the 'this-is-how-it-is' of things" [16]. 

 

To be fair, I think Deleuze gets this when he transforms no-where into now/here. And when Derrida insists il n'y a pas de hors-texte - for isn't that similar to the Daoist notion that there is nothing above, beyond, or outside of the immanence of the world ...?

Anyway, the point is this: immanence is a crucial concept - as is "the painful charm of transience" [19] which allows for the development of an art and poetry of blandness, in which things fade out and blow away (again, this reminds me somewhat of Roland Barthes's theory of neutrality). 

 

 

III.

 

If essence is difference and a way of keeping things clear cut, then absencing is a form of indifference; one that un-bounds and makes indistinguishable. It's hard to see the outline of a white flower against a snow-covered backdrop (or a black cat in a coal cellar as others would say). 

 

The East is messy - things flow into each other: "Nothing imposes itself. Nothing demarcates itself from other things. Everything appears to retreat into an in-difference." [22-23]  The West, by contrast, likes strong boundaries and distinctions and closure.

 

Han continues:

"In-difference also fosters an intense side-by-side of what is different. It creates an optimal degree of cohesion with a minimal amount of organic, organized connection. Synthetic composition gives way to a syndetic continuum of closeness in which things do not come together as a unity." [23-24]

The cathedral is a space that is perfectly enclosed; even stained-glass windows are designed to keep the natural daylight out, which is why D. H. Lawrence preferred them in a state of ruin, exposed to the elements, etc. [d]

 

Han, however, seems to prefer a Buddhist temple that is "neither fully closed nor fully open" [26]. The spatiality of the latter "effects neither an inwardness nor a being-exposed" [26]. Doors of white rice paper are preferable to colourful stained-glass windows and standing light without direction is preferabe to a divine radiance from above that is intended to illuminate everything:

 

"The standing light, which has become fully indeterminate, in-different, does not emphasize the presence of things; it submerges them in absence." [27]    

 

It's almost as if white standing light brings a special type of darkness. You don't get that with modern glass architecture which marks the triumph of transparency. 

For Han, then, the Buddhist temple is preferable to the Christian cathedral; the Greek temple; and the shiny American skyscraper of glass and steel. It's not just a question of spatiality and light, but asymmetry; "an aesthetic principle of Zen Buddhism" [29] which "breaks up presence into absencing" [29].

 

I suppose some might say that it's all a question of how one sees things. And this brings us on to the question of eyes:

 

"According to Hegel's philosophical physiognomy, the eyes should be surrounded by the elevated bones so that 'the strengthened shadow in the orbits gives us of itself a feeling of depth and undistracted inner life'." [30]

 

But Eastern eyes, of course, are flat:

 

"Hegel would explain this in terms of a lack of inwardness, that is, an infantile spirit that has not yet awoken to subjective inwardness and therefore remains embedded in nature." [30]

 

But what does Hegel know about the beauty of the absencing gaze ...?

 

 

IV.

 

D. H. Lawrence thought there was nothing more bourgeois than the unfading flowers of heaven. But the Kantian lover of the beautiful would probably delight in such; their "imperishable splendour would most likely [...] make him happy" [33].

 

For sure, he'd not like it if they were revealed to be fake flowers - their artificiality depriving them of "their teleological, even theological, significance" [33] - but their everlasting nature would only intensify his love for them. Plato too dreamed of a divine form of beauty that "neither emerges nor vanishes, neither increases nor decreases" [33]. 

 

But for someone who views the word from a Far Eastern perspective, the most beautiful thing of all about a flower is its transience; the fact that it loses its petals without any hesitation and is content to disappear. For such a person, the bare stem or twig is as beautiful as a flowering plant or tree in full bloom. 

 

In other words: 

 

"In the sensibility of the Far East, neither the permanence [Ständigkeit] of being nor the stability [Beständigkeit] of essences is part of the beautiful. Things that persist, subsist or insist are neither beautiful nor noble. Beautiful is not what stands out or exceeds but what exercises self-restraint or retreats, not what is solid but what hovers. Beautiful are things that carry the traces of nothingness [...] not full presence but a 'there' that is coated with an absence [...]" [33-34]   

 

The Japanese call this wabi-sabi - the art of impermanence that "combines the unfinished, the imperfect, the transient, the fragile and the unassuming" [34]. Even your favourite Clarice Cliff milk jug is made more beautiful by a tiny crack or chip; and every silver bowl is improved when it loses its sheen and begins to darken [e].    

 

Han writes: 

 

"Satori (illumination) actually has nothing to do with shining or light. This is another point on which Eastern spirituality differs from occidental mysticism, with its metaphysics of light. Light multiplies presence. Buddhism, however, is a religion of absence." [35]

 

In the West, people almost want to be blinded by the light; a light either from some transcendent source or an inner light that emphasises the presence of things. Han - like Tanizaki - seems to admire the magic light of absence; a light that does not disturb or dispel the darkness; a friendly light. 

 

 

V. 

 

Finally, a few brief notes on (i) food, (ii) flower arranging, (iii) rock gardens, and (iv) theatre ...

 

(i) It's funny, but one of the complaints of English people is that Chinese food leaves them feeling empty inside five minutes after eating. Han provides a possible explanation: "Emptiness and absence also characterize the cuisine of the Far East." [39] Rice is the perfect example of this; lacking colour, lacking taste, offering no resistance (providing nothing to chew).

 

"Far Eastern cuisine appears empty also because it does not have a centre [...] The meals lack the centre or weight of a main dish and the closedness of a menu." [40]  

 

Further, in the West we like to cut food up with a knife and fork; in the East they assemble food with chopsticks.

 

(ii) The Japanese art of flower arranging is known as Ikebana - which means bringing flowers to life: 

 

"It is, however, an unusual kind of invigoration, because the flower is cut off from its root [...] The flower is invigorated by dealing it a mortal blow. [...] This raises it above the process of slow withering, its natural death. The flower is thereby removed from the difference between 'life' and 'death'. It shines with a special vitality, a flowering in-difference  [...] that has its source in the spirit of emptiness." [40-41]

 

The flower radiates with an unnatural (and transient) vitality; the shining of absence. 

 

(iii) If you have ever walked round a Japanese rock garden, you might have come away feeling a bit disappointed that there wasn't much to see. But that's the point; they are designed as gardens of absence and emptiness. 

 

However, despite their absence and emptiness, "they radiate", says Han, "an intense vitality" [41] and visitors must learn to appreciate the flow of the lines raked into the gravel and the darkness of the rocks. 

 

The Japanese rock garden is another method of paradoxical invigoration: "It invigorates nature by completely drying out its soul" [42] and placing it in a state of satori. 

 

(iv) Traditional Japanese puppet theatre (Bunraku) is also radically different to the world of Punch and Judy, showing that the latter is not the only way to do it. The Western puppet theatre animates characters via funny voices; in Bunraku it's all about the gesture and the puppets remain soulless figures.    

 

Similarly, Noh theatre is a theatre of absence: the costumes and masks worn by the living, human actors are designed to make them look like puppet figures. Even when an actor appears on stage without a mask, "the uncovered face is expressionless and empty" [44]. 

 

And the narrative composition of Noh theatre also adds to the sense of absence; its hard to tell what is real and what is dream - what is past and what is present - things appear only to then disappear once more (probably best not to worry too much about the plot in such cicumstances) [f].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The German edition was published as Abwesen: Zur Kultur und Philosophie des fernen Ostens (Merv Verlag, 2007). In this post, page numbers refer to the English edition (Polity Press, 2023).  

[b] 'Pretty Vacant' was the third single released by the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to watch the official video for the song (which was shown on Top of the Pops) and/or here to read my post written on the track and published on TTA on 30 July 2108.   

[c] Is this also Han's view? It's hard to know. For whilst here he writes that the world "has no narrative structure" and is therefore "resistant to the crisis of meaning" [14], sixteen years later he will publish a book entitled Die Krise der Narration (2023) in which he seems to argue strongly in favour of narratives that anchor us in being and subscribe to a form of Catholicism informed by Martin Heidegger. Anyway, readers who are interested can click here to access the first part of a three-part post on this recent text. 

[d] See the post 'Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargolyle ...' (16 April 2019) in which I discuss Lawrence's thoughts on religious architecture: click here.

[e] Han at this point refers us to Tanizaki's famous essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows (1933). I have mentioned this work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark (click here, for example) and it partly formed the basis for a paper delivered at Treadwell's Bookshop in September 2023 on occultism in the age of transparency (an extract from which can be read by clicking here). 

 

[f] For the record: I find all theatre irritating and tedious; I do like the tranquility of a Japanese rock garden, but enjoy also the colourful chaos of an English wildflower meadow; and, if obliged to choose, I'd prefer to have steak and chips for dinner than a bowl of egg-fried rice. 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.