Fanged Noumena: To Learn from Trakl is to Howl at the Moon

Messrs. Land & Trakl

 

'Two wolves in the sinister Wood / We mixed our blood in a stony embrace  

And the stars of our race fell upon us.' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

I once published some notes on the case of the Aquarian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl in which I praised his love of silence and admired the blueness of his twilight [2]. No one can deny that there are many arresting - and disturbing - images in his work, as he sets about exploiting the often uncanny ambiguity of the German language. 

 

Wittgenstein was an admirer; Heidegger was an admirer; and Nick Land is also a fan, although he responds in very much his own manner to Trakl whom he regards as an archetypal poète maudit - one who embraced his own lycanthropic nature and thus made a radical break from humanity and its ovine idealism. 

 

 

II. 

 

In his essay 'Spirit and Teeth', Land celebrates the fact that Trakl offers no hope of redemption - neither in his writings nor in his actual life, which is short and not particularly pleasant, involving incest, depression, and a fatal drug-overdose aged 27. 

 

He condemns Heidegger (and Derrida) for trying to spiritualise Trakl and ignore the libidinal tension in his work; the fact that to write as Trakl writes is to write in blood and with rabid impatience: "Trakl took very little time over anything." [3]      

 

Like Rimbaud, Trakl belongs to an inferior race outside of civilisation; a race that is "irresponsible and nomadic" [4], but which possesses sharp teeth with which to bite. 

 

 

III. 

 

Land also wrote an earlier text on Trakl, based on his PhD work at Essex [5]. Titled 'Narcissism and Dispersion', it's a reading of Heidegger's 1953 interpretation of Trakl and it arguably provides justification for Land's war against Heidegger's circular hermeneutics and his "repugnant obstinacy and piety" [6].  

 

I mentioned that in 'Spirit and Teeth' Land rejects Heidegger's efforts to spiritualise and pacify Trakl. Well, in 'Narcissism and Dispersion' we witness how Heidegger attempts this by treating language like a closed (narcissistic and masturbatory) loop; something that only ever concerns itself with itself. 

 

Land counters this with an idea of dispersion [Zerstreuung], insisting that what's important about Trakl's poetry is that it allows language to unravel or decompose and leak into a material Outside.  

 

Whilst Heidegger desperately tries to defend Trakl's verse from being read as a symptom of a degenerating, fragmented ego so as to relocate Trakl back into a grand gathering of Geist, Land is having none of this. 

 

For Land, Trakl is not the poet of home sweet home, but of nomadic wandering and his language does not reflect upon itself in quiet isolation; it rapidly spreads like a rash or buzzes like a mad swarm of flies. 

 

For Heidegger, the blueness of twilight indicates a time of peace when the beast has been tamed; for Land, the latter is forever untameable and wild blueness is akin to what, as a Lawrentian, I would term chaos (the desire for which forms the very essence of poetry) [7].

 

 

IV.

 

So, on the one hand, we have Heidegger's reading of Trakl ... one that sanitises the latter by downplaying the drug-induced mania and seeks to pass off the work as a (mystical) affirmation of Being in order to reinforce his own philosophy.   

 

On the other hand, we have Land's reading of Trakl ... one that celebrates the latter by emphasising its feral character and seeks to pass off the work as a (filthy and furious) affirmation of base materialism in order to reinforce his own philosophy. 

 

Heidegger suggests that Trakl’s language is essentially singing the song of a homecoming - the movement of humanity away from its current alienated, fallen state and toward a primordial beginning.

 

Land says it's a werewolf's howling.

 

The question is: Would Trakl have preferred Heidegger's reading of his work, or Nick Land's?   

 

Obviously, we can never know the answer for sure - and it's highly probable he would have disliked both - but I like to believe that, if forced to choose, Trakl would prefer the latter and recognise himself a little better in Land's reading which, whilst highly theoretical, nevertheless contains something of the ecstatic nihilism that characterised his writing.

 

Having said that, Trakl scholars almost universally prefer Heidegger's reading over Land's and Heidegger's work is treated as foundational (even if problematic and at times deeply flawed). Land remains seen (at best) as an eccentric, peripheral figure by the Academy. 

 

The fact that his interpretation of Trakl is highly regarded within certain marginalised circles and subcultures (and on blogs like this) only confirms their idea of Land as someone who arouses fellow lunatics but has very little to offer serious scholars within the field of German literary studies who, much like Heidegger, after reading Trakl's poems are able to simply lay down their books, close their eyes, and enjoy a good night's sleep [8].  

 

 

   

Notes

 

[1] Georg Trakl, 'Passion', in Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Alexander Stillmark (Northwestern University Press, 2005), p. 302. 

      These lines are quoted by Land in his essay 'Spirit and Teeth' (1993), see note 3 below. 

 

[2] See the post 'Drinking the Silence: Notes on the Case of Georg Trakl' (17 Dec 2018): click here.  

 

[3] Nick Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 175-201. The line quoted is on p. 181.

      This essay was originally published in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. David Wood (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.  

 

[4] Nick Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 183. 

 

[5] Land received his PhD in 1987 from the University of Essex under the supervision of David Farrell Krell. His thesis focused on Martin Heidegger's 1953 essay 'Language in the Poem' [Die Sprache im Gedicht] and its interpretation of the poetry of Georg Trakl.

 

[6] Nick Land, 'Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger's 1953 Trakl Interpretation', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 118. This essay first appeared in Philosophers' Poets, ed. David Wood (Routledge, 1990), pp. 72-90.  

 

[7] I'm thinking here of Lawrence's essay 'Chaos in Poetry' - much loved by Deleuze and Guattari - which served as an introduction to Harry Crosby's poetry collection Chariot of the Sun (Black Sun Press, 1931).

      The essay can be found in D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116.

 

[8] I'm paraphrasing Land's ending to 'Narcissism and Dispersion'. Land regarded Heidegger as an exhausted and ageing philosopher with Platonic instincts who "felt nauseous at the thought of losing control, and perhaps still believed in God". Fanged Noumena, p. 121. 

 

 

Fanged Noumena: Amuse-bouche

 

Urbanomic / Sequence Press (2011) 

 

'Nick Land's writings inhabit a disordered anarchitecture, 

a space traversed by rat and wolf vectors, conjuring a 

schizophrenic metaphysics.' [a]

 

 

I. 

 

What the above quote warns is that Land's work isn't exactly an easy read, nor something one can just dip in and out of on a Sunday afternoon. 

 

In fact, one is tempted to say of his philosophy what Bertrand Russell famously said of Heidegger's: "extremely obscure and highly eccentric in its terminology" - an irresponsible running riot of language [b].  

 

Of course, that's no reason to dismiss or downplay the importance of Land's thinking - and, for some of us, the excitement and allure of the work lie precisely in its libidinal occultism or what Ray Brassier later termed mad black Deleuzianism [c].  

 

 

II.

 

Published in 2011, Fanged Noumena is an anthology of writings from the twenty-year period 1987 - 2007. Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, it covers various philosophical and aesthetic obsessions and, with a cover featuring a coloured etching by Jake and Dinos Chapman [d], it has since acquired cult status. 

 

Although I was one of the first to buy the book [e], it has taken me until now to finally learn how to engage with it. Even so, there remains a good deal of material which I still don't know how to approach. That's not due, I hope, to a lack of intelligence on my part, but rather a lack of patience to think through qwernomics, or try and make sense of a Ziigothic X-Coda [f]. 

 

Life's too short, as Larry David would say. 

 

 

III. 

 

Before discussing Land's writings in the later posts in this series, I'd like to first examine the Editor's Introduction and briefly sketch a portrait of Land, a much mythologised and much demonised - some would say hugely overrated - figure. 

 

By paying particular attention to his time at Warwick and involvement with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), I'm hoping to gain a better understanding of the manner in which the texts gathered in Fanged Noumena went from being complex but fairly standard works to almost impossible to read by the late 1990s. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Mackay and Brassier - both graduate students in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s - rightly emphasise that Land's work "folds genre in on itself, splicing disparate sources" (1) in order to create a "dense, frequently bewildering vortex of hallucinatory conjunctions" (1-2). 

 

They intend for the volume to infect a new generation of readers interested in furthering the collapse of orthodox metaphysics into psychotic cosmogony and accelerating the "obsolescence of humankind" (2). 

 

It's philosophy, Jim - but not of a kind that Bertie Russell would recognise, nor one that many of Land's more orthodox colleagues approved of. Rooted in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bataille - i.e., renegade thinkers who "mocked and disparaged academicism" (2) - Fanged Noumena is a violent assault upon conventional wisdom.

 

In brief, Land was a type of punk philosopher - albeit one closer in spirit to the darkly humorous nihilism of the Sex Pistols than the social worker ethos of The Clash [g]. I suspect that is why, although he and I were never close, I always enjoyed my few brief meetings with him to discuss the progress of my own research project at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s [h].      

 

However, once Land resigned his position at Warwick (in 1998), "academic orthodoxy quickly and quietly sealed the breach inflicted in its side by his ferocious but short-lived assault, so that within the first few years of the new century, he had become an apocryphal character, more or less forgotten in philosophical circles" (4). 

 

And yet, his writings continued to inspire a small number of people; "particularly among artists and writers" (4).  

 

 

V. 

 

This is key: Land's libidinal re-materialisation of critique "reconfigures questioning as exploration, whose orienting vector runs from the known towards the unknown, rather than from the unknown to the known" (15). 

 

What that means is Land looks to venture outside the gate, rather than enclose the outside - which for Land is a fully material realm - within the framework of knowledge. Thus, there's nothing to learn by studying Land's philosophy - and much to lose (including your mental health and professional career).  

  

 

VI. 

  

Some readers will, not unreasonably, already be wondering if Land's assault on "reason, truth, and history" (21) isn't predestined for a "collapse into romantic irrationalism" (20). 

 

Mackay and Brassier think not. Conceding that his work is not entirely free of elements that are both romantic and irrational, they also argue that it resists easy reduction to such, thanks in no small part to his nomadic numbering practices (or schizonumerics) and his appeal to an alien (or machinic) intelligence that plays out within human culture but is "unattributable to human agency" (22).

 

Land may be unreasonable and irrational, but he's not crazy. And certainly not stupid.  

 

 

VII. 

 

As well as everything else, Land is a political philosopher - albeit one who dismisses politics in the traditional sense as "the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind" [i]. 

 

Like Marx, Land is obsessed with capitalism; particularly "the most extreme possibilities of techno-capital" (26) which he wishes to accelerate beyond all internal limits (whatever the consequences for man and planet). It's here that his thinking becomes increasingly fictional and speculative (or hyperstitious) in character and he leaves behind the "established norms of academic discourse" (26).   

 

Things become deterritorialised, delirious, and deathly (or thanatropic). Rejecting Deleuze's vitalism, Land radicalises Freud's death drive and posits death as the zero-degree of an absolute deterritorialisation and the primary productive matrix:   

 

"Thus, remodelling the schizoanalytic programme in line with his own militant and fervidly anti-vitalist objectives, Land violently repudiates A Thousand Plateaus' sage warnings against the dangers of a 'too sudden destratification' [...] To Land's eyes, A Thousand Plateaus' newfound caution [...] 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 had previously so effectively challenged." (30) 

 

Land is the exterminating angel called for by Deleuze and Guattari, but he's not quite as they imagined him and he has no interest in preserving organic existence.   

 

 

VIII.

 

For Land and his disciples, cyberpunk - or, encoded in their own jargon, k-punk - wasn't just a literary subgenre, it was a "textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future" (33). In other words, it provided a model for their own theory-fictions and hyperstitions [j].

 

I remember that one of the books I was persuaded I simply must read after entering the philosophy department at Warwick in 1994, was William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). A seminal and quintessential cyberpunk text, it remains second only to George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) on my list of most boring novels I have ever had to slog through.

 

My negative reaction to this book was only matched by my aversion to the headache-inducing jungle beat of darkcore and a preference for the Schwarzenegger movie Twins (1988) over The Terminator (1984). Together, these aesthetico-intellectual shortcomings were probably enough to ensure I would never be considered a suitable candidate for Nick's inner circle or invited to participate in the CCRU ...     

 

  

IX. 

   

"The inception of the amorphous and short-lived Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) - established at Warwick University in 1995, shortly before Land's departure from academia, but immediately disowned as an undesirable parasite by the institution to which it was precariously affixed [...] - marks yet another important phase-transition in Land's work." (39)

 

And the key term of this phase-transition: geotraumatics - a concept via which Land makes an "audacious attempt [...] to characterise all terrestrial existence, including human culture, as a relay of primal cosmic trauma" (39).   

 

Pop-reggae specialists UB40 were worried that the earth might die screaming, but Land is here to tell us that, actually, it was born 4.5 billion years ago in absolute fucking agony. 

 

The retraction of its molten outer surface and its "subsequent segregation into a burning iron core" (39-40) is described by Land as "the aboriginal trauma whose scars are inscribed, encrypted, throughout terrestrial matter, instituting a register of unconscious pain coextensive with the domain of stratified materiality" (40) beyond anything that Freud - or even Deleuze and Guattari - ever imagined.     

 

For Land, all structure is repressive and everything - from the smallest cell to the largest terrestrial body - is seeking a release from its organisation: "Nothing short of the complete liquidation of biological order and the dissolution of physical structure can suffice to discharge the aboriginal trauma that mars terrestrial existence." (41)

 

Some will see this as a radical furthering of pessimism; others - like Brassier - will speak of nihilism unbound. Either way, it's a pretty challenging and uncompromising way of thinking - and entirely logical. It's also one of the reasons that I still find myself attracted to Land, despite our many differences. 

 

Like Sid Vicious, he just never saw a red light, only green, and no one can accuse Land of not having taken his mad, bad and dangerous project "as far as he possibly could" (53).     

 

 

X. 

 

Critics - and he has many (particularly on the miserabilist left) - will say that Land's philosophy was always going to terminate in neoreaction and/or a "puerile capitulation to neo-liberal 'realism' shrouded in mysticism" (51). 

 

Everything in his writings that "falls outside the parameters of disciplinary knowledge can and will be effectively dismissed by those who police the latter" (54) 

 

But as Mackay and Brassier conclude:

 

"The challenge of Land's work cannot be circumvented by construing the moral dismay it (often deliberately) provokes as proof of its erroneous nature, or by exploiting the inadequacies in Land's positive construction as an excuse to evade the corrosive critical implications of his thought." (53)

 

Land's thought-experiments have made crucial contributions to "the diagnosis of the cosmic, biological, evolutionary, and cultural genealogy and nature of the human" (53). And, more than this, he has given us the tools - and weapons - with which to launch future assaults "against the Human Security System" (54), should we choose (or dare) to do so.  

  

  

Notes

 

[a] Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, 'Editor's Introduction' to Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007 (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), p. 1. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post between round brackets.   

 

[b] Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West: A Historical Survey of Western Philosophy in its Social and Political Setting, ed. Paul Foulkes (Macdonald, 1959), p. 303. 

 

[c] Mackay and Brassier explain what's meant by this in their 'Editor's Introduction' to Fanged Noumena: "Land seized upon Deleuze-Guattari's transcendental materialism [...] and subjected it to ruthless cybernetic streamlining, excising all vestiges of Bergsonian vitalism to reveal a deviant and explicitly thanatropic mechanism." (5)

      Despite this, it's important to remember that at the core of Land's thought "are the works of Immanuel Kant" (6) - something which is, I think, often overlooked or not understood by those readers who think everything starts with Nietzsche or only come for the Lovecraft.   

 

[d] The cover image by Jake and Dinos Chapman is from Disasters of War IV (2001); a hand-coloured etching with watercolour (24.5 x 34.5 cm).

 

[e] The book was originally published in a 1000 numbered copies; mine is 278. 

 

[f] Critics suggest that even Land didn't really know what he was trying to say - or, if he did, didn't mean it - but that seems unfair and mistaken. Nevertheless, it's amusing to note Land's initial response to Mackay's request to republish his old writings: 

      "'It's another life; I have nothing to say about it - I don’t even remember writing half of those things … I don't want to get into retrospectively condemning my ancient work - I think it's best to gently back off. It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead amphetamine god.'"

      See Robin Mackay, 'Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism', (2013): click here.  

 

[g] For readers who want a more detailed explanation of the difference between the Sex Pistols and The Clash (and why my allegiance is to the former rather than the latter), see the post dated 2 August 2018: click here.   

 

[h] I was doing my PhD in the philosophy department at Warwick between 1994 and 2000, and Land was assigned as my Graduate Progress Committee member during my first year. 

      I have to confess, however, that I had no real interest in what the CCRU were up to. My thinking on Nietzsche was far more influenced by Keith Ansell-Pearson's work than Nick's (Keith being my supervisor). That said, I did appreciate Nick's career advice, which encouraged me in the view that it was better to flip burgers from the back of a van than pursue a position in academia.    

 

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

 

[j] See my post of 18 May 2026 in which I discuss the term (and concept) of hyperstition: click here. 

 

 

For the first post following this taster - on 'Nick Land and the New Amazons' (1 June 2026) - click here.

 

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: A Little Bit More Politics (Sections VII - XIII)

Марк Фишер: Кислотный коммунист

(SA/2026)

 

Note: All page references in this post are to Mark Fisher's k-punk: 

The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), 

ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018). 

 

 

VII. 

 

Fisher may have hated D. H. Lawrence, but perhaps he might have appreciated Lawrence's idea of a democracy of touch [a], as one of his criticisms of the smartphone and other forms of touchscreen technology is that they involve touch devoid of any sensuality: 

 

"When the fingers encounter the glassy surface of the iPhone, everything they touch on the screen feels the same. The fingers are effectively acting as extensions of the eye and the brain - an eye and brain that have now been radically re-habituated by cyberspace." (487) 

 

Fisher thinks it astonishing that this line of thought was anticipated by Baudrillard in the 1980s - but even more remarkable is the fact that Lawrence foresaw all this in the 1920s. 

 

And like Tanizaki, Lawrence also wrote in praise of shadows, which, rather surprisingly, Fisher calls for the cultivation of in addition to the carving out of spaces "beyond the hyper-bright instant" (487). I so much prefer this poetic-philosophical Mark Fisher to the one who bangs on about politics and the financial crisis of 2008. 

 

 

VIII. 

 

The phrase that best sums up Fisher's utopian phase - his acid communism - is red plenty (a phrase he borrows from Francis Spufford's 2010 book of that title). It refers to the collective capacity of the People to "produce, care and enjoy" (510) and is the thing which, he says, capitalism is set up to block: 

 

"The attack on capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about 'wealth creation', capital necessarily and always blocks our access to this common wealth." (510) 

 

In a post-capitalist future, technological advancements and the communist re-ordering of society will provide abundance for all: "Everything for everyone" (510), including bread and roses. Gone forever will be the days of artificial scarcity. 

 

Further, everyone will feel a sense of red belonging - a sense of belonging that has nothing to do with faith, flag, or family and cannot be "reduced to the chauvinistic pleasures that come from being an insider in any group whatsoever" (510-511). 

 

It is, rather, a "special sense of involvement that promised to transfigure all aspects of everyday life in a way that, previously, only religion had promised to, so that even the dreariest task could be imbued with high significance" (511). 

 

The great promise of red plenty and red belonging is that it doesn't matter "where you come from or who you are" (511), you will be cared for unconditionally. 

 

It's clear how this line of thinking might feed into the open borders movement. What's not quite so clear is how such thinking relates to Fisher's own mental health; frankly, I can't see how anyone can promote such ideas without being in some sort of delirium (similar to the mystical state experienced by those who suddenly find God) [b]. 

 

I know some of his more ardent supporters believe that Fisher's speculative nostalgia and hallucinogenic politics is the best way to confront capitalist realism, but for those looking for a rather more practical strategy for transitioning from neoliberalism to a democracy to come, Fisher's work is essentially worthless. It also seems somewhat at odds with his own more pessimistic views and criticism of the moralising left. 

 

In sum: whilst I'm all for the creation of new narratives and conceptual frameworks - and maybe even a little bit of libidinal engineering - Fisher's acid communism fails to convince and red plenty leaves me hungry for something more. 

 

 

IX. 

 

And back to the topic of consciousness-raising ... A practice (or range of practices) that Fisher believes to be of crucial importance to molecular revolution: 

 

"Consciousness-raising opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective experience. It can give us the resources to behave, think and act differently [...]" (514) 

 

For Fisher: 

 

"The roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings, especially their feelings of misery and desperation, and together attributing the sources of these feelings to impersonal structures [...] mediated by particular figures to which we must attach populist loathing" (514). 

 

These figures would include, for example, landlords and entrepreneurs, whom Fisher brands as parasites. We might, I would suggest, see this as a succinct definition of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment and which is central to slave morality. 

 

Fisher claims that the aim of consciousness-raising is to produce more compassion "for others and for ourselves" (514), but I worry that his proposed method of consciousness-raising will only generate class hate and make people feel pretty rotten about themselves too; has knowing that others feel as desperate as you do ever really helped? [c] 

 

 

X.

 

Fisher is grateful to Francis Spufford for reminding us all that "when communism was defeated, it wasn't just a particular ideology that disappeared" (518). 

 

No, the demise of communism - and he's thinking here of the USSR - was also "the disappearance of modernism's Promethean dream of a total transformation of human society" (518). 

 

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that's a good thing. For this dream became a dystopian nightmare, did it not? Surely Fisher knows the history of the Soviet Union - and, indeed, he might also be expected to know what happened to Prometheus (for those who don't recall their Ancient Greek mythology, it ended even worse for him than for Trotsky).    

 

Is Fisher really falling back into what Nick Land would call a sentimental indulgence - i.e., the hope that a political revolution will lead to "new productive, perceptual, cognitive and libidinal possibilities" (518). 

 

I don't want to be a postmodern killjoy who radically lowers expectations and crushes dreams, etc. But, really, c'mon! Knowing, Mark, that there's no way back to old school communism [d], why pin your hopes on renewing (and resuming) class solidarity and the building of radical machineries of desire? 

 

 

XI. 

 

I mentioned above how, for Fisher, "the roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings" (514). 

 

And yet, in another text from 2015, titled 'Anti-Therapy', Fisher acknowledges that the idea that "talking about our feelings could be a political act seems counterintuitive" (521) and that this new emotionalism seems closely linked to capitalist realism - born of Tony Blair's "manipulation of the extraordinary grief jamboree that ensued in the immediate wake of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales" (521). 

 

Fisher rightly says that the new emo-politics enforced by New Labour "went far beyond mere mood-setting" (522) - now we all had to possess the right feelings and share them in the approved manner. Blair "led the way in normalising the emotional self-exploitation that was necessary for the final phase of neoliberalism in Britain" (522) - a phase that Fisher amusingly calls spincerity (the public performance of an emotion you may or may not genuinely feel). 

 

It's enough to make one wish for the return of traditional British restraint and resolve; of stiff upper-lips and stoical detachment. However, Fisher sees this as reactionary and posits in contrast a third way (if I can use such a phrase); one based on his reading of Spinoza. 

 

For Spinoza's philosophy "makes the management of emotions central to its project" (524) and aims not to repress feelings, but engineer joy via the use of reason. This, for Fisher, makes Spinoza "a thinker whose work is an indispensable resource for any progressive project" (524) - a view that is not uncommon amongst neo-Marxist thinkers (particularly those influenced by Deleuze and Badiou) [e].  

 

Get Spinoza on board, says Fisher, and talking about our feelings can become a radical political act; "part of a practice of consciousness-raising that makes visible the impersonal and intersubjective structures that ideology normally obscures from us" (530).  

 

  

XII.  

 

This seems at first a rather disingenuous thing to write: 

 

"It's somewhat ironic that theories of the 'Event' have come to the fore [...] at just the moment in history when it has become clear that events in and of themselves don't change anything." (531)

 

For Fisher surely knows that the Event (as conceptualised by philosophers) is extremely rare and has little to do with the events covered by the news media, such as Live Aid, for example, or the G20 protests. The Event - at least as I understand it (inspired by Lawrence) - is a rent in the Great Umbrella; something that allows a glimpse of chaos and the discovery of a new world via the destruction of fixed forms [f].  

 

But perhaps Fisher was thinking of something said by Zarathustra to the effect that what matters more than noisy, violent events are those changes that take place in us in our stillest hours: "'The world revolves, not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values: it revolves inaudibly.'" [g] 

 

Heidegger picked up on this idea after the War, when he attempted to purge his notion of Transzendenz - Dasein's ability to start over and transform the world - not only from its conventional ties to metaphysics but to the idea of action. What was required, Heidegger argued, was not some great event, but a form of silent waiting. 

 

What seems most to worry Fisher is that events often result in euphoric outbursts of feeling "followed by depressive collapse" (531) - but the same could be said of love, no? 

 

Still, if events are the be-all and end-all - if change doesn't happen through them alone - "there are nevertheless moments which function as thresholds, opening up a new terrain of struggle, and allowing different collective emotions to propagate" (532). 

 

Which is basically saying things can still happen out of the blue ...   

 

 

XIII.  

 

Finally, we come to the two short texts, both from 2016, with which part four of k-punk closes; firstly, 'Cybergothic vs Steampunk' and, secondly, 'Mannequin Challenge' ...

 

In the former, Fisher argues that the global terrorist network ISIS "holds up a mirror to twenty-first century capitalist nihilism" (544). A form of nihilism that is essentially a type of existential poverty. We might not like to admit it, but ISIS offer a solution to this (albeit a horrifically false solution). For like criminal gangs and religious cults, ISIS offer those who join fellowship and meaning.    

 

Perhaps more interestingly, Fisher describes ISIS in relation to his concept of the cybergothic:

 

"There are no 'pure' archaisms, nothing ever repeats without difference, and ISIS is properly understood as a cybergothic phenomenon which combines the ancient with the contemporary (beheadings on the web)." (546)

 

And whilst he is obviously not a supporter of ISIS, Fisher - a bit like Foucault, who greeted the Iranian Revolution in 1979 with warm enthusiasm [h] - is excited by "the rising tide of experimental political forms in so many areas of the world at the moment" (546). 

 

And that's because, for him, this shows that "people are rediscovering group consciousness and the potency of the collective" (546).     

 

I can't help wondering whether, if he were alive today, Fisher (like Foucault in his late work) would find it necessary to rethink questions central to the Enlightenment and to liberalism. To concede, for example, that whilst the individual is a political fiction, it's nevertheless a useful one which needs vigorously defending; as does secular society when threatened by militant religious fascism. 

 

In the latter piece, Fisher comments on Donald Trump and his successful campaign in 2016 to become President of the United States. 

 

In contrast to Clinton and her team of "political robots playing out an exhausted programme" (547), Trump's campaign "was possessed of a sense of effervescing excitement, of anarchic unpredictability, the feeling of belonging to a building-movement" (547). 

 

Fisher understands how Trump caught the mood of popular dissatisfaction with capitalist realism and performed with a certain libidinal freedom that was attractive not only to his supporters, but to many who wouldn't vote for him in a million years and were appalled by his rhetoric and immoderation. His campaign may have been ugly, but at least it wasn't boring. 

 

In brief, like many other commentators of a certain generation, Fisher recognised that Trump was the punk candidate (what this tells us about the latter is an interesting question we might discuss one day).   

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written several posts referencing this Lawrentian idea; see, for example, the post dated 14 May 2014 - 'Towards a Democracy of Touch' - click here. 

      Note that the word 'hated' is used deliberately here; Matt Colquhoun confirmed to me in a recent email (7 May 2026) Fisher's visceral hostility toward Lawrence.

 

[b] Normally, I would not comment on someone's mental health. However, since Fisher and his followers make such a point of politicising depression - arguing that it is a social phenomenon heavily influenced by capitalism rather than a purely chemical or biological issue - I feel justified in doing so.

      Note, however, that my use of the term delirium is not simply intended in the narrow clinical sense, but more in the philo-political sense deployed by Deleuze and Guattari, for whom delirium is a way the unconscious invests in the social field, sometimes opening up revolutionary lines of flight. I suggest that Fisher's vision of acid communism operates as this precise kind of political delirium; an elaborate, idealised alternative reality constructed to escape the immense psychological claustrophobia of capitalist realism. Such a vision of utopia functions as a temporary, internal flight mechanism from profound depression. Suddenly, the world feels meaningful and loving once more. 

      However, as a political strategy, this hallucinogenic clarity borders on a mystical state rather than practical materialist organising. And, unfortunately, such states seldom last; when the speculative fantasy dissolves, the individual comes back down to earth with a bump, resulting in renewed depression. Fisher, as most readers will know, tragically committed suicide less than two years after writing the text discussed here.

 

[c] Historically, of course, it has. In the second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups of the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, sharing personal experiences of isolation, shame, and subjugation was precisely what allowed women to see that their private misery was structural and political. This collective realisation was a vital catalyst for solidarity and agency. 

      However, my contention with Fisher is that his specific formula for consciousness-raising risks short-circuiting this therapeutic transformation. Rather than moving from shared misery to structural agency, Fisher's explicit demand for populist loathing targeted at parasites paves a direct line toward Nietzschean ressentiment. It risks trapping the participants in a permanent state of reactive anger and class hate, which ultimately toxicifies the self and breeds a new form of psychological misery. 

      Of course, Fisher himself is aware of this danger, which is why he later refers readers to Wendy Brown's essay 'Wounded Attachments' (1993) - an essay in which she diagnoses the psycho-libidinal origins of an identity politics and what those on the right call wokism. 

      Fisher writes: "Drawing on Nietzsche's account of resentment [...] Brown wrote of a political subjectivity which 'becomes deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuge the pain of its powerlessness through its vengeful moralizing, through its wide distribution of suffering, through its reproach of power as such'" (526-527). And Fisher concludes that today "the mixture of moralizing aggression and investment in impotence has proliferated in a political atmosphere now substantially shaped by the online environment" (527).

      Brown's essay can be found in Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (August 1993), pp. 390-410. It can be accessed via JSTOR by clicking here.  

 

[d] Fisher says as much: "I don't believe that the old signifier 'communism' can be revived [...] It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the twentieth century" (520). Funnily enough, however, a few months later he names his new politics of desire emerging from the future ... acid communism.  

 

[e] As a Lawrentian, I have my reservations about Spinoza and his rationalism. Nevertheless, his work is useful in exposing the myth of the autonomous individual at the heart of the liberal tradition which drags with it notions of free will and responsibility.   

 

[f] See the post titled 'on Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella' (10 June 2013): click here.  

 

[g] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 153-154.  

 

[h] Writing in an Italian daily newspaper (Corriere della Sera), Foucault praised the Iranian Revolution as an authentic anti-imperialist movement and a spiritual revolt against Western-imposed modernity, rather than just a religious coup. See my post dated 14 August 2014, in which I discuss this: click here. 

 

 

This post is a continuation of my previous post on Fisher's political writings in the book k-punk (2018): click here. 

 

And for earlier thoughts on Fisher's political writings in the above work, please click here.

 

  

Reflections on Two Recent Poetry Collections by Simon Armitage 2: New Cemetery (2025)

Simon Armitage: New Cemetery (Faber & Faber, 2025) 

Cover Image: Insecticide 24 (2008) by Matt Collishaw 

 

'In this collection, if the poems concern themselves with one kind of mortality, 

then the moths relate to another: death within nature.' 

 

 

I. 

 

Armitage opens his new collection with a preface entitled 'Moths': "Because moths / bring word / from the dead" [a]. A moth also features on the front cover of the book; a powerful image by contemporary British artist Matt Collishaw [click here to visit his website].  

 

And so, we're off to a good start: for moths are one of the privileged creatures on Torpedo the Ark - click here - and unlike Armitage, I do not think they are drab and dull in comparison to butterflies [b]. 

 

Armitage explains that a new cemetery was recently built near to his moorland home in West Yorkshire and that rather than object to this development, he decided to make "peace with the dead" (xi) and accept them as his new neighbours. And I think he's right; better to look out over the dear departed than a car park, shopping centre, or a new housing estate (see the poem '[Dark Brocade]', pp.4-5).   

 

And, as it turned out, the cemetery proved a source of poetic inspiration and Armitage produced a significant number of new verses; I've not counted, but there must be over fifty or sixty poems collected here, written "in short-lined tercets linked with/by intermittent rhymes and half-rhymes" (xii). 

 

That's a size and structure I'm personally very fond of and I loved the fact that Armitage describes the process of writing the poems and assembling them into a book as like "threading daisy chains or stringing shells" (xii).  

 

What I didn't love, however, was Armitage's confession that, in the end, he "fell back on a fairly conventional approach" and that he belongs to a school of thought "that believes the best way of enclosing the lifespan of a written sentence is with a capital letter and a full stop" and that finally admitting to this has provided him with "a kind of grammatical relief" (xiii). 

 

That offends me not just as an admirer of E. E. Cummings [c], but as a Nietzschean, who regards grammar as the presence of God within language, i.e., its metaphysical component subscribed to by theologians as well as pedants, pedagogues and, apparently, our present Poet Laureate [d].     

 

Enclosing language with capitalisation and periods is an impossibility in an intertextual universe; you can no more do that than you can permanently enframe being within technology. Any logical stabilisation or relief gained can only ever be temporary.   

 

Still, I'm happy for now to overlook this compromise with grammar - which arguably mirrors his making peace with the dead - and move on to the poems themselves, which are intriguingly named (but not titled) after a species of moth, 

 

In a lovely passage, Armitage explains his thinking: 

 

"Any relationship between a specific moth and the specific subject of the poem is at best ambiguous, and at times accidental. Instead, their inclusion is a form of honouring and memorialising. They are the dedicatees of the poems, and if it is stretching a point to claim that each three-line stanza should be thought of as two wings and a body part, in my mind there is something intentionally fragile, diminutive and moth-like about their construction and design." (xiv)

 

 

II.  

  

The collection opens in Armitage's shed, where it seems he likes to (if not exactly bury) then at least busy himself with his writing: a "stripped-back world / of a wooden chair, an old desk" (3). 

 

One thinks of Heidegger's hut; but also of Van Gogh's bare little room in the Yellow House. And perhaps even of Jesse Pope, as played by Mark Williams in The Fast Show, coming out of his shed to announce that this season, he will be mostly writing poems about moths and the recently deceased.  

 

It is followed by '[Dark Brocade]', mentioned above, which is one of my favourites in the book, dripping as it is with contempt for the living and preference for the company of the dead who "shore up the good earth" (5). 

 

I rather like the idea that, in some ways, the deceased are more vital than obese consumers and weed-killing gardeners.   

 

 

III.  

  

Sometimes, the writer can sit so still at the desk, lost in contemplation, that they might almost be mistaken for one of the dead by an electronic device: "a sensor detects / no movement, /no signs of life, and turns out /the one light bulb" '[Blossom Underwing]' (7).  

 

I think it was the American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein who said: 'Stillness is our most intense mode of action. In stillness, the human being becomes a poet or most resembles an angel' [e]. Or a moth. 

 

 

IV. 

 

In its modern sense, the word smug refers to someone who is self-satisfied and shows excessive pride in their achievements; not quite arrogant, but moving in that direction. 

 

Poets are not immune - even Armitage with his cheeky-chappie grin and boyishly annoying haircut - might be found a little smug by some readers on occasion, including me (not least when he consents to having the title Poet Laureate printed under his name on the covers of his books) [f].  

 

But the universe, despite being the totality of all space, time, matter and energy, is not smug and nor does it possess a face and to suggest otherwise - as the poem '[Speckled Yellow]' suggests - is profoundly annoying. I do wish Armitage would abandon his attempts at humour - can't someone at Faber take him aside and speak to him about this ...? 

 

His bathos, vulgarity, and anthropomorphism may be very knowing, but it simply isn't funny.     

 

 

V. 

 

I like '[Vapourer]': for one can never tire of descriptions of mummification. 

 

And I like '[Pine-Tree Lappet]' for its "undying loyalty / to simple things" (20); wristwatch, comb, leather belt, shaving brush, wallet, boots, and pen. We remember the dead best of all by the objects they handled [g].        

 

And I really like '[Figure of Eight]' - it seems to me that Armitage really ups his game when it comes to writing about foxes (even dead vixens which he's obliged to bury); perhaps they're his totem animal, who knows? [h]    

 

Some of the poems, however, I don't really understand, or see how they belong in the collection; '[Reddish Light Arches]', for example. 

 

And it transpires that many of the poems did, in fact, appear elsewhere originally - including the latter, which was "commissioned by Aberdeen Performing Arts, for an exhibition of poetry and illustration for the reopening of Aberdeen's Music Hall (2018)" (vi) ... So what has it to do with the new cemetery on the outskirts of Huddersfield?   

 

  

VI. 

 

The annoying thing is, when he wants - and when he resists the urge to play the joker - Armitage is capable of writing some really lovely lines, full of powerful and evocative imagery. Lines like these from '[Lunar Thorn]':

 

 

But at night

            the false moon 

                        of the moth trap

 

bloomed and bloomed,

            the unwordly glow

                       of the 'black light'

 

drugging the air,

            the lawn and flower beds

                       under your window 

 

steeped in an ultraviolet brew. (42)

 

 

I would like a little more of that. 

 

But then perhaps I'm one of those readers that Armitage lampoons in the poem '[Brown-line Bright-eye]' (47); i.e., one who wants shrivelled chestnuts, rusty apples, and human gravediggers shovelling dirt; one who cannot accept plots being dug by heavy machinery and litter being strewn on graves.

 

Perhaps when it comes to death I remain Romantic ...

 

 

VII. 

 

'[Reed Leopard]' is a meditation on a millipede that ends with a terrible thought: if humanity could be vanished with just one magic word leaving the world / to the world, would you / say it? Would you / sing it out loud?" (51) 

 

Armitage doesn't answer: but we know how Rupert Birkin would respond and his reassuring fantasy of a posthuman future expressed in Women in Love is a vision that is shared by several groups on the radical fringes of deep ecology whose members believe, like Birkin, that mankind is an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and that only man's self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous and non-human [i]. 

 

I have to admit, I'd also find the temptation to whisper the word almost irresistible.  

 

 

VIII. 

 

Is the narrator-poet of '[Heath Rivulet]' the same as the poet-author and did he really call an exterminator "in T-shirt and shorts / to pump white dust / under a roof tile" (52)?

 

That is to say, did he really arrange for the destruction and removal of a wasp's nest in his attic? 

 

I find that more than a little disappointing: readers familiar with Torpedo the Ark will recall my battle with moths in the summer of '22 and how my reluctance to spray them ultimately won out over my bourgeois desire to protect a new carpet. See the post 'Insouciance Über Insecticide' (31 July 2022): click here.     

 

Were the lines in the preface mourning the rapid and shocking decline of insect numbers over the last twenty or thirty years [j] just so many words?  

 

 

IX.

  

Another verse I love: '[Maiden's Blush]' ... off-white moths and ghostly barefooted women - what's not to love? 

 

One is almost tempted to credit Armitage with having established a zone of proximity [k]. Almost.   

 

Another verse I hate: '[Burnished Brass]' ... here's an additional anagram we can (almost) make with the author's name: I am a monster ego [l]. 

 

What is the point of this lipogrammatic exercise; is he trying to say his name is legion and that the unified subject is a convenient fiction (that the 'I' contains a multiplicity of selves)? Or that the living are all the names in history as they embody the molecules and memories of the dead? [m] 

 

Maybe. 

 

But this seems an overly generous (and overly philosophical) reading in my view. And the one thing I have discovered reading this book is that Armitage loves to see himself reflected in his own verse and play with his own literary persona - he's worse than Lawrence (though perhaps not as narcissistic as I can be).

 

 

X. 

 

Speaking of Lawrence, the fat brown trout  "hammocked in amber water / next to St Oswald's church" (62), reminded me of the shadowy fish that "slide through the gloom of the mill-pond" at the beginning of his debut novel The White Peacock (1911) - even though these fish were neither fat nor brown, but "grey descendants of the silvery things that had darted away from the monks, in the young days when the valley was lusty" [n]. 

 

It's funny the connections that the mind makes. Not just between literary fish, but rainbows too; cf. Armitage's "Cheap rainbows everywhere" (69) with the vast rainbow that Ursula Brangwen observes and which fills her heart with anguished hope. 

 

For she saw in the rainbow "the earth's new architecture [...] the world built up in a living fabric of Truth" - even as realises that "the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still" [o]. 

 

And when Armitage writes: "Think of / your hand or arm / brushing / actual skin" (73), who doesn't reacall Lawrence's idea of the democracy of touch and by which he refers to:

 

"The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love." [p]   

 

Armitage has admitted to being an admirer of Lawrence and often turns to his work for inspiration. But I wonder if he ever wishes he could write like him - or would that be admitting too much for a professional writer and Poet Laureate?   

 

 

XI. 

 

The fact that Armitage's father died when he was about to finish New Cemetery certainly adds a level of poignancy: 

 

"I had been ready to draw a line under the collection early in 2021, but my dad's sudden death that year provoked further poetic responses, less abstract this time, driven and informed by deep personal loss." (xiii)  

 

One wonders if it always takes the loss of a loved one - a parent, a partner, a child - to really bring home the visceral reality of death. And if that's so, what does this tell us about the limits of art and philosophy?  

 

(Having said that, I can't stand those people who value experience above everything else and boast that they are graduates of the University of Life.)    

 

 

XII. 

 

'[Straw Dot]' and '[Grey Chi]' are two further poems worth a mention and worth a read, although they require no further commentary, except to say that Armitage's direction and cinematography are at their best in the latter and his humour at its most charming in the former.   

 

And the line in '[Coronet]' "Here he isn't again," (94) brilliantly captures the absent presence of someone recently departed. When you enter the home of your dead mother or father, you do expect to see them rise from their chair to greet you.

 

It's pointless saying one doesn't believe in ghosts when the dead so obviously leave a presence of some kind. Whether we best think of this in spiritual or tangible terms is really the only point of debate; is it an emotional trace or memory left behind, or is it something a bit more like the mucous trail left behind by slugs and snails?  

 

Either way, I find it more comforting than disconcerting to experience this presence of a loved one. And whilst I clearly have certain issues with Armitage as a poet, I'm grateful to him for this collection in which he reminds us of the important truth that although the dead are "unable to love", they are "capable still /of being loved" (100).  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Simon Armitage, '[Scotch Annulet]', in New Cemetery (Faber and Faber, 2025), p. 78. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post.  

 

[b] To be fair, Armitage goes on to concede that, upon closer inspection, one sees within the somewhat sombre colouring of moths "arrangements of dazzling complexity and hypnotic intricacy" (xiv). 

 

[c] The 20th century American poet E. E. Cummings is known for his modernist free-form verse and much of his work uses idiosyncratic syntax and lower-case spellings in order to strip "the film of familiarity" from language and from the world, as Norman Friedman notes.   

[d] In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche famously writes: "I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar ..." I'm quoting from Hollingdale's translation (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 48. For those using other editions, see the section 'Reason in Philosophy' (5). 

      You can tell grammar is ultimately a matter of faith by the fact that Armitage says he believes in it - that his use of it is not simply a preference or a question of convenience.    

 

[e] I'm paraphrasing from memory, so note that this might not be entirely accurate. I'm sure readers who wish to can track down the actual quotation.  

 

[f] No doubt Armitage was persuaded by the marketing people at Faber that this would be a good idea, but one assumes he gave permission for this. He is, of course, fully entitled to use the title Poet Laureate, but, like Foucault, I would welcome a time in which books were published in complete anonymity so that they could be judged on the contents alone and not the author's name, reputation, or title. 

      See Michel Foucault, 'The Masked Philosopher', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (Semiotext[e], 1989), pp. 302- 307. 

 

[g] See the post 'Notes on the Material Remains of My Father' (6 June 2016): click here.  

 

[h] Armitage wrote a poem with the title 'The Fox' which can be found in Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking At a Poem (Vintage, 2004), p. 138. See also his fox poem 'Den', in the collection titled Dwell (Faber & Faber, 2025), pp. 12-13. 

 

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 127-129. See also my post on the movement for voluntary human extinction (12 Oct 2013) - click here - and my post 'Birkin and the Ichthyosaur' (7 Mar 2023): click here. 

 

[j] Insects in the UK have experienced a severe (and ongoing) decline throughout the 21st century. Studies indicate a drop in numbers of over 60% between 2004 and 2023. See my post 'Insecticide and the Eco-Apocalypse' (21 Oct 2017): click here. 

 

[k] A zone of proximity is a concept used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe a chaotic space wherein distinct forms, subjects, or species - such as human and insect - lose their boundaries and become indistinguishable (thus they sometimes refer to it as a zone of indiscernibility). It is such zones, in other words, that allow the process of becoming to unfold.

      The reason that I hesitate before saying such is what Armitage establishes in his poem is because he shows little inclination to think in such terms and I don't want to simply map alien concepts and personal concerns on to his work. Needless to say, however, it would add a good deal of interest and philosophical depth to his poetry were he to do so.

 

[l] This only works if I am kindly given permission to swap an unwanted 'i' for an additional 'a' and 'e'.    

 

[m] See the post 'Even the Dead Don't Rest in Peace' (2 July 2013) - click here - in which I argue that, thanks to the conservation of mass, the carbon atoms of the departed are forever recycled and reincarnated and in this way the souls of the dead might be said to re-enter and pervade the souls of the living. 

      See also the related post: 'Atomic: the D. H. Lawrence Memorial Post' (1 Mar 2021): click here.  

 

[n] See D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 1. The poem by Armitage I'm quoting from is '[Shining Marbled]'. 

 

[o] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 458-459. The poem by Armitage I'm quoting from is '[Mother Shipton]'.   

 

[p] D. H. Lawence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323. 

 

 

For my thoughts on another recent collection of poems by Armitage - Dwell (2025) - please click here.