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 .   

 

 

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.

 

 

Reflections on a Dead Rat

Portrait of a Dead Rat 

(SA/2026) 

 

'From the point of view of mankind, the rat is an unmitigated nuisance and pest. 

There is nothing that can be said in its favour. Its destructiveness is almost unlimited.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

It's not often Phoevos the Cat manages to catch (and kill) a rat; but that's what he did today. 

 

Not a very big rat, I grant you. But a rat all the same. 

 

And disposing of the body brought to mind two very different essays by two very different authors: a soon-to-be-published work by punk scholar Russ Bestley [2]; and a much older text written by the philosopher Nick Land [3]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Bestley insists on the symbolic meaning of the rat within punk subculture, history and design - or what he terms punk lore. The rat, he says, is something that can be read - although how it might be read is constrained by the fact that it comes with "a range of negative linguistic connotations [that] have persisted for more than 500 years" [4]. 

 

When you think of all the terrible things threatening man and society - disease, decay, degeneration - the rat is associated with all of them and whilst "the negative symbolism of rodents" [5] horrifies most right-minded individuals, it appeals to those "seeking to shock and disrupt" [6] - from Hell's Angels to punk rockers; mad poets to cybergothic theorists like Nick Land ...  

 

 

III. 

 

Like Bestley, Land also has a thing for rats (he likes wolves too, but that's another story). 

 

However, whereas Bestley sees the rat merely as emblematic of counterculture, in his 1993 essay, 'Spirit and Teeth', Land positions the long-tailed rodent as positively anti-historic - a barbarian force of desire that challenges the two things he places himself vehemently in opposition to: academic philosophy and progressive humanism. 

 

Operating in sewers and deep underground tunnels, the rat gnaws away at the lofty speculations and high ideals of enlightened philosophers and old-school theologians upon which Western civilisation is founded. 

 

Indeed, Land wishes to demonstrate that even Heaven "is not without ratholes, its sewage system, an entire impersonal architecture characterised by porous heterogeinity" [7]. Thus, irrespective of his celestial visage, the Lord Almighty "still has ratbites on his ass" [8].

 

For Land, philosophy should be evaluated not just from the perspective of man - which he regards as no more privileged than that of sea slugs - but from the perspective of an uncontrollable swarm. Thus, rather than viewing death, for example, as a tragedy for the individual, he asks us to view it from the perspective of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe: as an impersonal, global event.

  

Land allies himself with thinkers and outsiders he refers to as rat-poets - Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and Georg Trakl, for example. Their work, he argues, is a plague of the spirit, bringing an end to rigid thought structures by descending into formless chaos. He singles out Trakl's superb poem Die Ratten as a text that "functions as a vermin-core for an entire pattern of infestation" [9].

 

 

IV.

 

In sum ... 

 

For Land, rats are not merely symbols or abstract representations of meaning and metaphor; they are engines of chaos that directly impact reality. 

 

Bestley wants to know what rats mean - to read and interpret them so as to make sense of punk imagery. But Land, like Willard, "in a gesture of beautiful treachery against mankind" [10] wants to feed them and breed them and set them free to do their thing, decomposing interiorities and triggering irreversible changes.

 

One final thought ... 

 

In killing the rat, does Phoevos not only express his predatory instinct, but also demonstrate that the cat remains the eternal enemy of the rodent and thus (inadvertently) acts as the guardian of humanity, protecting us and our civilisation from chaos, destruction, and disease?  

 

As Bestley and the other contributors to Punk & the Animal might well ask: Are cats the anti-punk creatures par excellence? 

 

If we need a libidinal rat theory "from beyond representational discourse" [11] on the one hand, then so too do we need a feline politics that recognises their animality in all its cultural and philosophical complexity.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] An adapted quotation from Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (Bantam Books, 1965), pp. 150-151. Cited by Nick Land in his essay 'Spirit and Teeth' (1993) - see reference in note 3 below.   

 

[2] The essay by Bestley - which he has kindly sent me to read in advance of its forthcoming publication - is titled 'Rattus rattus: the Rat in Punk Lore'. It forms chapter 2 in Punk & the Animal: Ethos, Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Laura D. Gelfand and Angela Bartram (Intellect Books, 2026), pp. 25-44.  

      I published a post on TTA in anticipation of this book earlier this month (17 May 2026): 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. This essay was originally published in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. David Wood (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.  

 

[4] Bestley, 'Rattus rattus: the Rat in Punk Lore', in Punk & the Animal ... p. 25. 

 

[5] Ibid., p. 30.

 

[6] Ibid

 

[7] Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 192.

 

[8] Ibid.

 

[9] Ibid. 

    This poem by Trakl - translated into English by Eric Plattner as 'The Rats' - can be read on the All Poetry website: click here. 

 

[10] Ibid., p. 193. 

 

[11] Ibid., p. 200. 

 

 

On Nick Land and Albert Camus: From Hyperstition to Absurdism

Accelerating the Absurd 

(Portrait of Nick Land and Albert Camus) 

(SA/2026)

 

 

 

I. 

 

We closed a recent post on hyperstition by suggesting that Nick Land's theory might be understood as a form of post-irony - a conceptual space in which the virtue of sincerity returns, albeit in a compromised (impure, less naive) form. 

 

This yields an amusingly paradoxical result. It becomes possible to speak of the absurd in all seriousness: "Not because you forgot it was absurd, but because you no longer believe that absurdity disqualifies meaning." [1] 

 

By invoking fictions to manufacture reality, hyperstition ultimately abandons us in a world shaped by indifferent, chaotic forces. And by treating reality as an artificial construct, Landian philosophy builds the ultimate Absurd landscape. 

 

Could it be, then, that Nick Land (inadvertently) returns us to Albert Camus, albeit with a dark, cyberpunk twist? 

 

This is the question we will (briefly) address here ... 

 

II. 

 

This is not a question we would have been permitted to ask during the mid-1990s, when the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was aggressively exerting its quasi-occult influence over the philosophy department at Warwick University. 

 

As a PhD student there at the time, I always found Land extremely polite and personable, despite his Mephistophelian reputation. Yet, to the CCRU's zealous inner circle, Camus was a philosophical enemy and I recall being condemned by one of Land's followers for daring to quote from L'Homme révolté (1951) in my doctoral thesis [2]. 

 

The CCRU wanted to dissolve human agency into the techno-capital matrix. Camus, by contrast, insisted on human defiance in the face of a meaningless void. For the Warwick avant-garde, this made Camus an old-fashioned moral humanist clinging to the dignity of Man.  

 

That might be true. But, whilst I may not have shared all of Camus's politico-philosophical prejudices, the fact is that L'Étranger (1942) remains a far more enjoyable read than William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). 

 

And, well, as Elaine Benes would say, Camus was just so good-looking [3] ...

 

 

III. 

 

In Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942), Camus defines the Absurd as the gulf between the human desire for meaning and the sheer indifference of the universe. 

 

Nick Land's cybergothic philosophy has a similar pessimistic starting point and, like Camus, he strips away the comforting illusion of any logic or purpose. For Land, human intentions, morals, and desires are entirely irrelevant; history is driven by the alien and artificial forces of techno-capital. 

 

There is, therefore, a degree of structural affinity between their respective philosophies. One might even compare the Landian subject - trapped in hyperstitious feedback loops and techno-myths determining reality - with Camus's figure of Sisyphus, forever pushing his rock up the mountain. 

 

Both are obliged to accept their fate over which they have no control (which, in fact, controls and engineers them). 

 

Indeed, both are encouraged to affirm their fate and, in the case of the Landian subject, accelerate the inhuman processes unfolding not in order to be happy, but so that they might be erased, as Michel Foucault famously wrote, "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" [4].        

  

Notes

 

[1] Victor Stones, 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection', medium.com (18 Nov 2024): click here. 

 

[2] My thesis - Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000) - dealt with the political character of Nietzsche's philosophical project and I quoted Camus on several occasions on the question of revolutionary violence, state tyranny, etc. 

 

[3] Seinfeld, season 6, episode 5: 'The Couch' (dir. Andy Ackerman, written by Larry David, 1994). 

      The point is, it doesn't always matter what someone's views are. You can forgive a good deal when someone is attractive and Camus is widely considered one of the most handsome of all philosophers, celebrated for his physical features, his sharp sense of style, and his air of iconic coolness. No wonder Sartre was envious of him and their friendship eventually ended in tears.   

 

[4] Foucault was writing in Les mots et les choses (1966), translated into English as The Order of Things (1971), p. 387. 

      That's the crucial difference between Camus and Land: the former leaves his readers with the thought that Sisyphus ultimately finds a way to be happy (that his task is itself enough to fill his heart with joy); the latter offers no such comfort and doesn't give a damn about the happiness (or survival) of humanity. Land knows that civilisation is ultimately designing the technology that will replace us. 

      A friend of mine once put it this way: Camus recognises life is an absurd comedy but he still hopes man can provide the punchline; Land thinks of things more as a Lovecraftian horror story and chooses to side with Cthulhu.   

 

What's In a Word: Hyperstition

Image of Nick Land by Victor Stones

The Brazilian Mutt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Despite Michael Scott's belief to the contrary, the seven-letter assemblage s-t-i-t-i-o-n is neither an actual word in itself, nor even a suffix as such [2]. 

 

And apart from superstition and interstition, I think even Susie Dent - Countdown's resident lexicographer and etymologist - would struggle to come up with any other terms ending this way. 

 

Unless, that is, she happens to be familiar with the writings of rogue philosopher Nick Land who developed (and weaponised) the term hyperstition in the mid-1990s, when guiding spirit and chief theorist of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, at the University of Warwick.  

 

 

II. 

 

Hyperstition is a rather lovely neologism and a crucial concept within Land's work and the thinking of those who were in some manner influenced by him - such as Mark Fisher and Simon O'Sullivan, for example [3]. It can, surprisingly perhaps, be defined quite simply and clearly: 

 

Hyperstition is the idea that theory, fiction, or memetic ideas can manifest and bring about their own reality via feedback loops and cultural momentum. [4]

 

It is, if you like, a more dynamic and active form of superstition that can materially change things. For example, cyberspace originated as a purely fictional concept in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984). But it inspired engineers, investors, and cultures to build the actual Internet [5].

 

Another example is provided by Bitcoin, which started as a highly technical (if somewhat speculative) proposal posted on an obscure forum. As traders bought into the narrative of a decentralised cryptocurrency, however, their collective belief created the multi-billion-dollar market we see today [6]. 

 

But hyperstition isn't just the science of self-fulfilling prophecy - it's also a way of playing with time; of telling stories about the future in order to retroactively affect the present. In other words, by articulating tomorrow, you change how people act today to make that future happen. This is what gives science fiction its potency. 

 

It all sounds a bit like magical thinking and I'm sure that's how friends at Treadwell's would interpret the theory. But it's not quite that - even if Land himself often discussed hyperstition in occult language borrowed from Lovecraft; he would, for example, call it a coincidence intensifier or speak of invoking the Old Ones [7].  

 

Such framing, of course, serves to highlight the idea that when collective narratives take hold of a society they seem to possess an autonomous life of their own, becoming forces independent of human agency. 

 

And so we arrive at Land's other big idea - accelerationism, or the virulent logic of techno-capitalism. The key point is this: don't fool yourself that mankind is master of events or will determine its own destiny (and don't think all knowledge is empowering). 

  

 

III.

 

In sum: whilst there are many criticisms one might make of Land's theory - it depends, for example, "on a concept he never properly defines: non-human intelligence" [8] - the idea of hyperstition is always going to appeal to those who are searching for a form of post-irony; "a cultural condition in which sincerity returns [...] but returns transformed, self-aware, no longer naive" [9]. 

 

For this has the amusingly paradoxical result that it becomes possible to say something absurd but in all seriousness: "Not because you forgot it was absurd, but because you no longer believe that absurdity disqualifies meaning." [10] 

 

Could it be that Nick Land takes us back to Albert Camus (albeit with a dark twist)? That suggests an interesting post for another day ... [11]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Victor Stones (aka Victor Alfons Steuck) is a Brazilian writer, artist, and musician with a deep interest in philosophy, language, and the evolving role of technology in society. He explores many thought-provoking topics on his website, blending critical thinking with creativity.

      His excellent essay 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection', in which he introduces the concept of metastition as a diffractive counterpoint, can be found on his website linked to above or on medium.com (18 Nov 2024): click here. I will refer to this essay in the main text and quote from it in the notes below. I have also borrowed and adapted (a detail from) the amusing image created by Stones featuring Nick Land (and, originally, Michael Scott).    

 

[2] The sitcom character Michael Scott - played brilliantly by Steve Carell in The Office (US version) utters the immortal line 'I'm not superstitious, but I'm a little stitious', in the season 4 two-part episode titled 'Fun Run' (written and dir. by Greg Daniels): click here to watch on YouTube.

      Interestingly, Victor Stones argues that stition is effectively a real word - even if it has been extracted as a grammatical phantom from superstition - as it refers to the "underlying scaffolding of beliefs that helps us navigate reality" and would include ethical principles and cultural norms. But he also insists that Land's 'stition' is not truer than Michael Scott's; "it is simply dressed in theory" and coined knowingly.   

 

[3] I'm assuming most readers will be familiar with the name Mark Fisher, if only because I have written many posts about his work on TTA: click here. As for Simon O'Sullivan, he's a philosopher and artist working at the intersection of these two practices who regularly writes about hyperstition as an experimental methodology.

      Other thinkers influenced by Land who have developed his theory of hyperstition in their own work include Austrian philosopher Armen Avanessian, who co-directed the documentary Hyperstition in 2016; Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, who, in his seminal theory-fiction book Cyclonopedia, utilised the concept to describe petroleum-based mythologies that alter geopolitical realities; and the Australian xenofeminist Amy Ireland, whose work frequently explores the hyperstitional properties of language, logic, and poetry.   

 

[4] Nick Land helpfully described hyperstition himself as 'an element of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional qualities functional as a time-travelling device'.   

 

[5] As Victor Stones reminds us, in a similar manner "many technologies initially imagined in science fiction, such as Artificial Intelligence or Virtual Reality, have transitioned from speculative fiction into practical innovation because of their hyperstitional power". See his essay linked to in note 1 above. 

      This is why we should not only be careful what we wish for, but cautious about what we dream, fantasise, or imagine.   

 

[6] It is important to remember, however, that for every Bitcoin, "a thousand crypto-narratives collapsed" and one of the criticisms of Land's theory is that it doesn't account for this: "It notices winners and retroactively calls them inevitable; survivorship bias dressed in cybernetics." Empirical claims about how narratives become real should always be treated with caution for as long as they remain untested or are in fact untestable. Again, see Victor Stones, from whose essay I quote here.

 

[7] As Stones says, the CCRU deliberately wrote about "time-warps and Lovecraftian magic" for a good reason; it induced readers of their philosophy to act as if these things were real: "And acting-as-if, for Land, is indistinguishable from reality." 

 

[8] "Land writes as if capitalism or the market 'thinks', processing information, selecting trajectories, and 'manufacturing intelligence' without human direction. Yet he provides no operational criteria to distinguish such intelligence from stochastic noise, homeostatic feedback, or simple anthropomorphic projection."

      Quoted from Victor Stones, 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection' ... See link provided in note 1 above. 

      Stones goes on to accuse Land of being a crypto-theologian when it comes to this question of non-human intelligence; one who has fooled himself (and his loyal followers) into thinking he's making strictly analytical assertions, when he is actually making faith claims or expressing his own ideological preferences. 

      Ultimately, the practice of metastition proposed by Stones is a conscious, reflective intervention into the blind feedback loops of hyperstition and rooted in old school sincerity; strong, but not naive and with nothing post-ironic about it. Politically, it allows for (and encourages) accountability and responsibility, whereas the politics of hyperstition and accelerationism promoted by Land ushers in a radically inhuman future via a post-democratic period he terms the Dark Enlightenment (which I have written about on TTA here).          

 

[9] Ibid.

 

[10] Ibid.

 

[11] That day is now 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.