A Libidinal Materialist Critique of Landian Accelerationism

Nowadays, Nick Land is mostly well known for his radical political theory of ‘Accelerationism’ especially with an increase in interest surrounding discourse on theory related to Cybernetics and Technology started to surface on the internet as the radical influence technology has on political events has become much more apparent in recent years after the pandemic. But what followed as a result of this mainstream overexposure of Land was ultimately a flanderization of his theory where his roots as a philosopher first and foremost have been downplayed significantly for a more political and social purpose, which is mostly noticeable with Accelerationism now being mostly associated with the Neo-Reactionary/Dark Enlightenment movement. Even when Land’s earlier works during his days as a professor in Warwick and as the leader of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) prior to his reactionary transition is brought up on the table, it is mostly brought up by Leftists as an attempt take his theory of Accelerationism towards a more ‘progressive’ and ‘liberatory’ purpose to fight against the oppressions of Capitalism or Fascism. However, when you look deep into the evolution (or rather, devolution in this case) of Land’s philosophy, you can notice a radical change happening within his theory much earlier than him moving towards a more reactionary direction as his focus shifts from Libidinal Materialism to Accelerationism and Cybernetics theory. And this transition not only marks a shift in focus within Land’s theory but also results in Land to an extent going against some of the key principles of theory of Libidinal Materialism, which is an aspect of Land many seems to overlook and overall result in many mistakenly viewing his radically nihilistic theory of Libidinal Materialism to be the main reason behind his reactionary turn when it is in fact the opposite. So, what this post is trying to do is a critique of Land’s political project of Accelerationism (which will include some of his later texts in Fanged Noumena as it is a broader critique than it simply being ‘reactionary’) from the perspective of Land’s early philosophy of Libidinal Materialism/Virulent Nihilism.

The Basics of Libidinal Materialism

So, what exactly is Libidinal Materialism as a philosophical school of thought? I think the most direct definition we get from Land is probably the following sentence in the first chapter of The Thirst for Annihilation in which he refers to Libidinal Materialism as a “theory of unconditional (non-teleological) desire, which is nothing but a scorch-mark from the expository diagnosis of the physicalist prejudice.”^[1] So, in easier terms it would appropriate to call it a study of Libidinal Energetics through an unfiltered and speculative perspective. Although, even though this brief definition of Libidinal Materialism would be a huge oversimplification of what Libidinal Materialism is in general, I am not going to get into the details of what Libidinal Materialism in detail as that deserves its own separate post. What’s really important in the post is that we first and foremost elaborate on the key characteristics and criteria Land set as the basics of Libidinal Materialism as a way of thought in The Thirst for Annihilation and some of his earlier texts in Fanged Noumena then follow up on how his later Accelerationist philosophy contradicts violates these fundamental principles of his earlier works. And now to get into the details of what type of thinking is required to dive into the Libidinal Materialist project, I’d like to first of all start off with directly quoting what Land says in the preface for The Thirst for Annihilation to give you more of a brief idea of what type of Libidinal Materialism in general.

“Libidinal Materialism is the name for such a philosophy, although it is perhaps less a philosophy than an offence. Historically it is pessimistic, in the rich sense that transects the writings of Nietzsche, Freud, and Bataille as well as those of Schopenhauer. Thematically it is ‘psychoanalytical’ (although it no longer believes in the psyche or in analysis), thermodynamic-energeticist (but no longer physicalistic or logico-mathematical), and perhaps a little morbid. Methodologically it is genealogical, diagnostic, and enthusiastic for the accentuation of intensity that will carry it through insurrection into anegoic delirium. Stylistically it is aggressive, only a little sub-hyperbolic, and—above all—massively irresponsible…”^[2]

From this direct quote from Land, we can see that Land is explaining what Libidinal Materialism by first of all dividing the definition of Libidinal Materialism into 4 different, but interconnected perspectives— a philosophical definition, thematic definition, methodological definition and a stylistic definition.

Philosophically it is a fundamentally pessimistic and nihilistic philosophy following the tradition of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Georges Bataille, with other notable influences from thinkers like HP Lovecraft, Marquis De Sade, Jean Francois Lyotard and (partially) Gilles Deleuze^[3] making up this pessimistic tradition of thought. It is fundamentally deemed pessimistic in the same sense that Lovecraftian Cosmicism as it sees truth and thought as something that not only have interests that do not coincide with those of living, but also as they can and have been pitted against the latter.^[4] Unlike the public consensus, the laws of Libidinal Materialism is not simply against the human in the sense that acts as an ‘oppressive phallogocentric narrative’. It is ‘Anti’-Human in the sense that the survival of man is insignificant in the grand scale of things. As not only god but also man dies, everything becomes lawful!^[5]

Thematically it is psychoanalytical as it puts the logic of the death-drive at the center of its materialism. Or rather, it would be more appropriate to call it schizoanalytical with schizoanalysis not necessarily being pitted against psychoanalysis, but a critical succession of psychoanalysis by shifting its discoveries made regarding desire and the unconsciousness to a direction of magpie ruthlessness^[6], seeing the destructive nature of desire as no more problematic than a river’s search for the sea.^[7] This critical succession of psychoanalysis can also be said that it is an analysis viewed from a thermodynamic-energeticist lens rather than a logico-mathematical one as it sees desire as libidinal energy that is subject to a moving chaos without beginning or end.^[8]

Methodologically it is genealogical, diagnostic, and enthusiastic. It is a critical breakdown of the process of how the highest values end up devaluing themselves.^[9] By tracking down the origin of the morals, traditions, values and the principles behind what is considered the backbone of our civilization, we are able to diagnose the fundamental fragile nature of these principles and values that has long protected what Land calls the Human Security System. It is an autopsy performed to the rotting corpse of God and requires an enthusiastically cruel and Sadistic^[10] method as it is an attempt to analyze and experiment with the aftermath of its decay to its absolute limit. What the genealogical diagnosis of Libidinal eventually shows us that one way or another, he who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning.^[11]

And as a result, it is stylistically aggressive as the study of Libidinal Materialism is an unfiltered deep dive in to the study of force and decay. Thus, just as Land already stated, Libidinal Materialism ends up being more of an ‘offence’ than a ‘philosophy’ in a traditional sense as it is an attack on what he calls ‘sound philosophy’ (represented by a phenomenological tradition of philosophy which is characterized by its fetish of awareness^[12]).

The Fundamental Principles of Libidinal Materialism

Now, moving on to the fundamental principles of Libidinal Materialism. The following 4 fundamental principles are what Land set as the basic criteria underlying what he considers Libidinal Materialist thinking as a way to avoid philosophy from succumbing to what he calls ‘the vulgarity of anthropomorphism. The 4 fundamental principles consist of,

“1. Thoroughgoing dehumanization of nature, involving the uttermost impersonalism in the explanation of natural forces, and vigorously atheological cosmology. No residue of prayer. An instinctive fastidiousness in respect to all the traces of human personality, and the treatment of such as the excrement of matter; as its most ignoble part, its gutter…

2. Ruthless fatalism. No space for decisions, responsibilities, actions, intentions. Any appeal to notions of human freedom discredits a philosopher beyond amelioration.

3. Hence absence of all moralizing, even the crispest, most Aristotelian. The penchant for correction, let alone vengefulness, pins one in the shallows.

4. Contempt for common evaluations; one should even take care to avoid straying accidentally into the right. Even to be an enemy is too comforting; one must be an alien, a beast. Nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked.”^[13]

Philosophers who are heavily influenced by Land’s early philosophy such as Ben Woodard, Vincent Le, Iain Hamilton Grant and even Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani prior to their Neo-rationalist transition all for the most part follow these 4 principles, even though do not strictly refer to themselves as ‘Libidinal Materialist’, as they all try and attempt to establish a speculative and materialist philosophy which is not bound by humanistic values. The famous quote from Land from one of his early lectures in Warwick where he argues that we should “put the ‘Rat’ back in Rationality” is a conclusion Land came to as a result of his philosophy being backed these 4 principles against the aforementioned vulgar anthropomorphist that he thought was limiting thought. The human experience is just a particle, motor that moves this materialist landscape. They are worth studying as movement of energy, as a simple pawn moving on a chess game, only as much as (in Land’s own words) the experience of sea slugs.^[14] After all, Land’s materialism is a materialism that is heavily rooted in Cosmic Nihilism/Indifferentism similar to the fashion of someone like HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The physical universe itself has no malice other than it being a flux of particles that result in a virulent phenomenon^[15] and us losing our shit in the process is just a mechanical reaction of what happens when our repressional mechanisms break down^[16] alongside our self-deception shuttering its windows. However, as Land’s theory geared more toward Accelerationism, Land seems to have violated his own laws that he set as a Libidinal Materialist for this theory of Acceleration and Outsideness. Now we will see how his Accelerationist theory even before his association with the Alt-Right movement seemed to have violated all of the 4 principles of Libidinal Materialism by getting into the detail of which aspect of Landian Accelerationism seems to end up going against each principle.

1. Dehumanization of Nature

From an interview with David McKerracher of Theory Underground and my mentor figure Mikey Downs of The Dangerous. Maybe, Zizek criticized that Land’s metaphysics was ironically “too optimistic.”^[17] This is a criticism regarding Land in which I have to agree with as it pinpoints a crucial flaw within Landian Accelerationism. Ironically, Land’s framework of Accelerationism suffers by overly putting emphasis on the human, which is a violation of rule number 1 of Libidinal Materialism, ‘dehumanize nature’, treating it as simply a movement of libidinal energy. However, within Landian Accelerationism, there is a clear protagonist and an antagonist in this story of acceleration. Here, the protagonist is Capital and the antagonist the human. Even prior to his reactionary turn, we can see this special treatment of Capital in texts like Circuitries in which he praised Capitalism as a ‘universal schizophrenia’ beyond sociality whose evacuation from history appears inside history.^[18] Land saw Capital as a schizoanalytical non-stopping machine of deterritorialization. Thus, an agent of acceleration ‘dismantles everything’ what he saw as serving “the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstructing critique by replacing the syntheses of the impersonal unconscious”.^[19] Land was so fixated on Capital and Cybernetics being this main source of deterritorialization against the totalizing force of anthropocentrism, it ended up being the main reason why it backfired, as it lead him to fail to devalue the value of ‘Human’ as it merely redirected it’s importance to the antagonist, with Capital (and to an extent Cybernetics as it is what drives Capital as Artificial Intelligence) filling the gap the vacated throne of ‘man’ once stood. Which is connected to how Landian Accelerationism violates the second principle of Libidinal Materialism.

2. Ruthless Fatalism

Returning to Zizek’s critique of Land’s thought, his theory of Accelerationism being naively optimistic. This is what Zizek had to say about Land’s theory of Acceleration in the third chapter of Against Progress which is appropriately titled, ‘Acceleration’.

“It is its naivety about process which makes accelerationism all too optimistic: before the post-political Singularity can be reached, we–humanity–have to confront much more immediate self-destructive catastrophes and global war to social chaos, where politics at its most forceful will have to intervene. Even if this longed-for state of Singularity is achieved, it is immanently false: what it presents as a post-human future is a fantasy which remains rooted in our (human) finitude and mortality, its emergence is predicated upon us remaining finite moral beings. To put it in speculative philosophical terms: humanity’s historical existence is not the ultimate reality, it emerges out of a (pre-) ontological gap called by Martin Heidegger ‘ontological difference’, and by G.W.F. Hegel ‘self-relating negativity’. Any vision of Singularity just avoids or obfuscates this gap, it doesn’t really abolish or overcome it. Of course humanity can annihilate itself in many ways, but what will follow can’t be anticipated. Hopes to contrary are merely wishful thinking, wistful projections into the abyss.”^[20]

Daniel Tutt also shared a similar skeptical take on Accelerationism truly being ‘nihilistic’ as he sees Capitalism to be a system that can be a stagnant as much as any other system. So, for someone like Tutt, Land’s Accelerationism seems more like a new Kantian A priori set by Land putting political agency on speed and capital by transcendental value on it.^[21] And I agree with both Tutt and Zizek’s criticism of Land in this regard as it ultimately seems like Land’s capitalophilia seems more like Land trying to find a teleological sense of epiphany of embracing death and welcoming this transcendental artificial intelligence to take our place as the new world order. The ruthless fatalism of early Nick Land stems from his materialism leaving no room for a religious narrative of moral escape as our actions and intentions have no power to alter a world that is utterly indifferent to our desires, wants, and needs.^[22] Acceleration will not lead us to a transcendental outside or a state of liberation. Only a repetition of failure and collapse. Funnily enough, in this aspect, my criticisms directed towards Land’s Accelerationist philosophy mirrors the Klossowski’s criticism towards Bataille and his obsession with Transgression as an act that’s leads to a liberatory outside as he viewed Transgression to ultimately be another form of Simulacra since the act itself relies on the existence of the Simulacra it tries to 3.

“In Bataille, separated from the apparent rationalism of Sade by more than a century of Hegelian reflections, the identification of language and transgression is intensified. The carnal act is attractive only and precisely if it is a transgression of language by the flesh and of the flesh by language. This transgression is lived as ecstasy; if the flesh truly knows [connaît bien] ecstasy in orgasm, this ecstasy is nothing compared to the spiritual orgasm which, in fact, is only the consciousness of an event, but one that is past at the very moment when the mind believes that it grasps it in speech. However, there can be no transgression in the carnal act if it is not lived as a spiritual event, but in order to grasp the object within it, one must seek out and reproduce the event in a reiterated description of the carnal act. T h is reiterated description of the carnal act not only provides an account of transgression, it is itself a transgression of language by language.”^[23]

3. Against Attempts of Moralization

“Nothing could be more politically disastrous than the launching of a moral case against Nazism: Nazism is morality itself, heir to Europe’s respectable history: that of witch-burnings, inquisitions, and pogroms. To want to be in the right is the common substratum of morality and genocidal reaction; the same desire for repression – organized in terms of the disapproving gaze of the father – that Anti-Oedipus analyzes with such power. Who could imagine Nazism without daddy? And who could imagine daddy being pre-figured in the energetic unconscious?”^[24]

“Nazism is morality itself.” This is a direct quote from Land in his 1993 essay Making It with Death where he makes it clear that the fundamental problem of fascism is not something that stems from a fascist regime lacking any sense of ethical direction but a side effect of set regime attempting to protect or build up any values that support a system of morality or ethics in the first place. Land’s early philosophy of Libidinal Materialism follows a Nietzschean tradition of judging morality to be the principal ‘metaphysical virus’ of thought and science.^[25] The concept of morality as a whole is something that originated from our attempts to stabilize our lives, to protect the illusion of being official and authentic self in the tempestuous waters of chaos.^[26] Fascism and overall Conservatism in general relies on this logic of anchoring towards an authoritarian father like figure to act as a guiding light as they cannot bear the truth that they are nothing but a pile of flesh-puppets endlessly floating around this space of indifference. The Dark Enlightenment and right-wing Accelerationism on the surface may seem like an amoral political system at first glance as it advocates for the eradication of the human race and back up a Social Darwinist logic within their politics. It is after all the reasoning behind why Land tried to cut ties with his Leftist influenced foundation as he deemed it as a ‘depressive guilt culture’^[27] as even the more pro-violence left-wing or post-left political movements have a tendency to cling on to an ethical secularization of values such as ‘liberation’, ‘solidarity’, ‘call for action’ and ‘the fight against oppression’. It is understandable where this distaste for not only left-wing political movements but any type of political movements clinging on to ethical notions such as liberation, solidarity, compassion, progress and even the basic notion of survival or self-preservation as Land’s philosophy is a philosophy of absolute apathy in the face of the coldness that annihilates all sense of meaning. As Brassier stated, Land’s early Accelerationist theory which is present in Fanged Noumena was an attempt to kill politics,^[28] the very basic concept backing the idea of man as a being that is worth protecting. However, Land made a crucial mistake. Although Land calls Capital an amoral agent of schizoanalysis, he ended up moralizing capital and artificial intelligence as the protagonists we shoot root for in this narrative of acceleration and the human as an evil that should be eradicated under the cruelty of the cold god. Schizoanalysis loses its fangs when a single central territorializing force takes over control of the process of schizoanalysis. Ironically, this is something that Land was also aware of in his early texts as in Making It with Death, he explicitly states that “Capital cannot disown schizoanalysis without de-fanging itself.”^[29] However, what Land overlooked was that while Capital did not succeed in disowning schizoanalysis entirely, it succeeded pacifying de-fanging itself and using it’s de-fanging of Capital use the image of deterritorialization to mask itself that is in actuality a centralizing and territorializing force. Land was too trusting of Capitalism to be a system because he overlooked the fact that the way capitalism has survived was by deeming itself flexible, letting schizoanalysis breakdown the authority just enough to sell the illusion of ruthless change. For someone who claims that philosophy should be against moralization, Land by setting a centralized agent of schizoanalysis (while again, schizoanalysis and the term centralized may seem contradicting on the surface it is what Land is trying to do here) through capital and artificial intelligence rules out the two things that should have been devalued alongside other centralizing forces of territorialization. Land’s Accelerationism resulted in not the concept of moralization dying but it merely shifting towards it where humanistic values shifted towards which ultimately gave an excuse for neo-reactionary figures like Thiel and Moldbug. Capital should have lost its transcendental value and act as just another force of intensity which can eventually end up devaluing itself like any other force of intensity. If it were really against any attempts of moralization, Land should have left no room for authority figures, Social Darwinistic criterias, transcendental gods or even a road that leads to an escape towards an outside. “We invent nothing. That’s it.”^[30]

“The position of the CCRU, despite its radicalized antihumanism and inhuman immersive promise of capitalism exploding its own limits, resonates with these contemporary ideological claims that capitalism wasn’t really allowed to follow through. In this narrative, the acceleration of capitalism was held back by State spending and State regulation (focused, in the UK, often on ‘health-and-safety’, as in the trope of ‘health-and-safety gone mad’). It was a ‘left’ failure of nerve to go all the way to capitalism (and not all the way to the left…), that leaves us in the situation we find ourselves in.”^[31]

4. Contempt for Common Evaluations

“Heraclitus, son of Bloson or, according to some, of Heracon, was a native of Ephesus; he flourished in the sixty-ninth Olympiad. He was exceptionally haughty and disdainful, as is clear from his book, (…) At last, having become a misanthrope, he departed for the mountains, where he lived on grass and herbs. But when this diet gave him dropsy, he returned to town and asked the doctors, enigmatically, if they could produce drought after heavy rain. When they failed to understand him, he buried himself in a cowshed, hoping that the heat of the cow dung would draw the fluid out of him. But as even this had no effect, he died at the age of sixty.”^[32]

If there is one principle that Land seemed to have not violated within the four principles of Libidinal Materialism, I guess the final principle of having contempt for common evaluations is something that he was still able to. If there was one thing in Land’s philosophy that remained consistent throughout the years, whether it was his early thought or his later thought, it would be his absolute antagonistic relation with even the slightest smell of humanistic values and the common good supported by the masses. It is something that I still think is one of the few things that is admirable about Nick Land as a philosopher. He prioritizes his thought over and is willing to ruin his entire reputation (and again, I am not being sarcastic and I am genuinely saying this as a compliment) to continue on his project of Acceleration and war against humanist hegemony that has been holding back philosophy and thought in favor of a comforting narrative for a long time. But, if I had to be bit nit-picky regarding my critique of Land’s later Dark Enlightenment philosophy, he does seem to be fixated on making some kind of change in the socio-geopolitical realm through his theory of acceleration and seems to supporting powerful authority figures like Thiel and Moldbug in recent years. which seems closer to aim towards being more of an ‘enemy’ towards humanity rather than it being closer to something that is beast-like or alien as he claimed in the preface of The Thirst for Annihilation. But again, it’s mostly a nit-pick from my part. Maybe it is his own way of attempting to distance his thought from what he deems as human.

The Future Direction of Libidinal Materialism

“With the true world, we have abolished the apparent world. When the true world (the Platonic, Christian, spiritualist, idealist, transcendental world) that serves as the point of reference for the apparent world disappears, then the apparent world disappears aw well. The apparent world cannot become the real world of positivism: the world becomes a fable, the world as such is only a fable. ‘Fable’ means something that is narrated and that exists only in narration, The world is something that is narrated, a narrated event, and hence an interpretation. Religion, art, science and history are so many diverse interpretations of the world, or rather, so many variants of the fable.”^[33]

So, now that we analyzed how Landian Accelerationism seemed to have violated each of the basic principles behind Libidinal Materialism, what direction should Libidinal Materialism as a school of thought head toward in the future? Should we fully reject the Accelerationist project all together in the process? The Klossowski quote excerpted from his 1963 essay Nietzsche, Polytheism and Parody pretty much sums up the where I think the future direction of Libidinal Materialism as a philosophical movement as a sub-philosophy of Speculative Realism should be headed towards. And by Speculative Realism I am going to use Ben Woodard’s definition of the term using it to label as a philosophy that is “not positional but somewhere in between a method and a comportment. A dissatisfaction with certain dominant trends while also pointing towards fields where we think philosophy should go. Viewing Kant as a legitimate target and a taste for H.P. Lovecraft.”^[34] So, what I am trying to do is basically taking Libidinal Materialism as a basic metaphysical framework when studying the movement of libidinal intensities/energies. And even with all the criticism I’ve thrown towards Landian Accelerationism in this post, I don’t plan on disowning Accelerationism as a theory but acceleration will not be and will only be analyzed as a phenomenon that is worth studying rather than seeing it as a solution or a political movement as my reading of Libidinal Materialism will always. Unlike Land’s Libidinal Materialism, my succession of it will be more Klossowskian than Bataillean in the sense that it will acknowledge the limitations transgression and acceleration has as “nothing in the life of impulses is free.”^[35] I also plan on amping up the influence HP Lovecraft and JG Ballard had on the theory-fiction genre up to an eleven following as it is by turning the real world into a fable, into a fiction^[36] that we can truly speculate on how we add nothing to the nothingness of the world.^[37] So to an extent, my take on Libidinal Materialism will also follow the materialist hermeneutics tradition of Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Zizek but always with a Baudrillardian twist rather than it being a Hegelian-Marxist reading of historical progression. And ultimately, the direction I plan on taking Libidinal Materialism is a study and an experimentation of libidinal energies. I do not care about reaching a transcendental outside like Land as this post suggested his fixation on accelerating towards an outside what lead him to degrade into a reactionary former shell of him. And this also includes the more Leftist oriented usage of Land’s theory aimed toward reaching a more liberatory future. The well-being of others are the least of my concern when as such noble intentions only act as an obstacle that slows me down from doing proper theory. I simply plan to observe, accept, and assume the immense process of libidinal energies contribute to the repetition of destroying meaning.^[38] For now, that’s probably it. Will someone criticize me in a similar fashion to how I did Land in this post? Probably, because as Land said, “No one could ever be a libidinal materialist” because “like all ‘-isms’, libidinal materialism is a parody at best.”^[39]

References

Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime. Verso, 2008.
Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Ray Brassier. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Diogenes Laërtius. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Nick Land. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Urbanomic, 2011.
Nick Land. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. Routledge, 1992.
Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Penguin Books, 2018.
Jean‑François Lyotard. Libidinal Economy. Bloomsbury, 2015.
Michael Downs. Capital VS Timenergy. 2023.
Friedrich Nietzsche. The Will to Power. Penguin Books, 2017.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Penguin Classics, 2003.
Benjamin Noys. Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism. Zero Books, 2014.
Vincent Le. Unknown Lands. Index Press, 2025.
Pierre Klossowski. Living Currency. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Pierre Klossowski. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Pierre Klossowski. Such a Deathly Desire. SUNY Press, 2007.
Slavoj Žižek. Against Progress. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

Online Sources

^[1] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pg. 37

^[2] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pg. xx

^[3] Especially apparent in his comments regarding Deleuze in Making It with Death. “The time of Deleuze’s text is a colder, more reptilian, more German time, or at least a time of the anti-German Germans of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in particular for whom millennia were to be scanned with scorn.” (Fanged Noumena, pg. 261)

^[4] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound, pg. xi

^[5] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karmazov, pg. 103

^[6] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, pg. 262

^[7] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, pg. 283

^[8] Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche & The Vicious Circle, pg. 62

^[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pg. 15

^[10] Sadistic-written in capital as it is a double entendre on sadism as an attitude and the philosophy of the Marquis De Sade

^[11] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pg. 161

^[12] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pg. 16

^[13] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pg. xx

^[14] https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/44371/nick-land-the-alt-writer

^[15] Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, pg. 45

^[16] Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, pg. 217

^[17] https://youtu.be/8CPGc8Q2gMg?si=mE9dmTfznuFqisuZ

^[18] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, pg. 305

^[19] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, pg. 322

^[20] Slavoj Zizek, Against Progress, pg. 24

^[21] https://youtu.be/xVKxyv0yjQI?si=SkK2GNKS9yfM5VpM

^[22] Vincent Le, Unknown Lands, pg. 99

^[23] Pierre Klossowski, Such a Deathly Desire, pg. 67

^[24] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, pg. 286

^[25] Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche & The Vicious Circle, pg. 6

^[26] Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, pg. 14

^[27] Michael Downs, Capital VS Timenergy, pg. 73

^[28] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in

^[29] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, pg. 265

^[30] Jean Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, pg. 273

^[31] Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities, pg. 56

^[32] Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, pg. 436

^[33] Pierre Klossowski, Such a Deathly Desire, pg. 102

^[34] https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/dark-vitalism-and-lovecrafts-philosophy-of-nature/

^[35] Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency, pg. 27

^[36] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilights of Idols and Anti-Christ, pg. 50

^[37] Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, pg. 11

^[38] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pg. 160

^[39] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pg. xxi