Nick Land Quotes

Nick Land is an English philosopher, short-story horror writer, blogger, and "the father of accelerationism".

His writing is credited with pioneering the genre known as "theory-fiction". A cofounder of the 1990s collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, his work has been tied to the development of accelerationism and speculative realism.

Most recently, Land has been a primary theorist and the namer of the Dark Enlightenment, a "neoreactionary" philosophy that opposes egalitarianism and is sometimes associated with the alt-right or other right-wing movements. Shuja Haider notes, "His sequence of essays setting out its principles have become the foundation of the NRx canon."

✵ 17. January 1962
Nick Land: 58   quotes 3   likes

Famous Nick Land Quotes

“Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level-2?”

"Meltdown" http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm (1994)

“When a unit group is destroyed, a real individual is ‘killed’ above and beyond whatever human losses are incurred. The destruction of a feature group, in contrast, whatever the cultural loss, is not any kind of killing beyond the mass murder of human individuals.”

"Kinds of Killing" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032625/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1008/kinds-of-killing (2011) (original emphasis)

“Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die?”

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 5: "Dead God", p. 60 (original emphasis)
Context: God is nowhere to be found, yet there is still so much light! Light that dazzles and maddens; crisp, ruthless light. Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die? Or the moon retain such fidelity to the Earth? Where is the new darkness? The greatest of all unknowings? Is death itself shy of us?

“Neo-China arrives from the future.”

"Meltdown" http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm (1994)
Variant: Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

Nick Land Quotes about time

“Although Postmodernism was certainly a fad, it was also a zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. It meant something, despite its own best efforts, at least as a symptom. The disappearance of reality that it announced was itself real, as was the realm of simulation that replaced it.”

"Suspended Animation (Part 5)" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032650/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1524/suspended-animation-part-5 (2011) (original emphasis)

“The current time is a period of transition, with a distinctive quality, characterizing the end of an epoch. Something – some age – is coming quite rapidly to an end.”

"Time in Transition" https://web.archive.org/web/20121113235339/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/777/time-in-transition (2011)

Nick Land Quotes about nature

“Nature, far from being logical, 'is perhaps entirely the excess of itself', smeared ash and flame upon zero, and zero is immense.”

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 6: "The rage of jealous time", p. 73

Nick Land: Trending quotes

“Rituals of belonging (ordeals, oaths, rites of passage) are designed to disambiguate membership.”

"Kinds of Killing" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032625/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1008/kinds-of-killing (2011)

“It might be argued that civilization is nothing else, that is to say: the tendency of personal authority to decline towards zero.”

"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" https://web.archive.org/web/20140327090001/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/articles/12321 (2013) (original emphasis)

Nick Land Quotes

“(…) anything that systematically enhances moral hazard is simply manufacturing craziness.”

"Suspended Animation (Part 5)" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032650/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1524/suspended-animation-part-5 (2011)

“All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order.”

"‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land" https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-an-interview-with-nick-land/ (2017)

“A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell.”

"Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest" (1988–9), in Fanged Noumena, p. 79

“What appears as disaster postponed is, in virtual reality, disaster expanded.”

"Suspended Animation (Part 5)" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032650/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1524/suspended-animation-part-5 (2011)

“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”

"A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/ (2017) (original emphasis)

“I dream of the damnation I have so amply earned, stolen from me by the indolence of God.”

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 4: "Easter", p. 56

“Among complex systems, stability is typically meta-stability, which is preserved through cycling, whilst growth and shrinkage are often components of a larger-scale, cyclic wave.”

"Eternal Return, and After" https://web.archive.org/web/20110718030428/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/index.php/article/detail/269/eternal-return-and-after (2011)

“Dead labour is far harder to control than the live stuff was, which is why the enlightenment project of interring gothic superstition was the royal road to the first truly vampiric civilization, in which death alone comes to rule.”

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 7: "Fanged noumenon (passion of the cyclone)", p. 79

“Kant's critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.”

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 1: "The death of sound philosophy", p. 1

“Only proto-capitalism has ever been critiqued.”

"Machinic Desire" (1993), in Fanged Noumena, p. 340 (original emphasis)

“Scholars have an inordinate respect for long books, and have a terrible rancune against those that attempt to cheat on them. They cannot bear to imagine that short-cuts are possible, that specialism is not an inevitability, that learning need not be stoically endured.”

They cannot bear writers allegro, and when they read such texts—and even pretend to revere them—the result is (this is not a description without generosity) 'unappetizing'.
Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 2: "The curse of the sun", p. 25 (original emphasis)

“As a mathematical object, the constitution is maximally simple, consistent, necessarily incomplete, and interpretable as a model of natural law. Political authority is allocated solely to serve the constitution.”

There are no authorities which are not overseen, within nonlinear structures. Constitutional language is formally constructed to eliminate all ambiguity and to be processed algorithmically. Democratic elements, along with official discretion, and legal judgment, is incorporated reluctantly, minimized in principle, and gradually eliminated through incremental formal improvement. Argument defers to mathematical expertise. Politics is a disease that the constitution is designed to cure.
"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" https://web.archive.org/web/20140327090001/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/articles/12321 (2013) (original emphasis)

“Bitcoin accelerates the advance of monetary theory into cybernetic fundamentalism. It’s turtles – or, more precisely, feedback dynamics – all the way down.”

"‘Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy’ §5.741" https://etscrivner.github.io/cryptocurrent/ (2018)

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