“Politics is the archaic and inadequate name for something that must pass away into the religious history of capital. There are no effective anti-capitalist interests, but only anti-bourgeois desires in alliance with zero.”-Nick Land[1]
“For what happens to whomever does not want to recognize the political economy is libidinal, is that he preproduces in other terms the same fantasy of an externalized region where desire would be sheltered from every treacherous transcription into production, labour and the law of value.”-Jean Francois Lyotard[2]
Introduction
“Man by nature is a political animal.”[1] This well-known statement from Aristotle’s Politics serves as the foundation behind what makes man and the concept of the Political something that is worth preserving as sacred values in the tradition of not only western philosophy and thought but civilization in general for more than over 2 millenniums. As man is a rational, social, and political being, man is differentiated from any other kind of byproduct of nature. So long story short, the concept of the ‘political’ has for a long time served as the backbone behind the justification of what Land would deem as a ‘vulgarity of anthropomorphism’[2] that limited thought in order to stabilize the lives of mankind in the tempestuous waters of chaos.[3] However, from a Libidinal Materialist perspective, this attempt of secularizing the value of humanity by deeming man a social animal is ultimately an attempt to tame thought and philosophy to what Brassier would refer to as “a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem.”[4] The rationalization and secularization of politics at the end of the day is humanity anchoring in a made up Simulacrum, a Simulacrum which always results in itself devaluing itself.[5] From a Libidinal Materialist perspective, the attempts of Political Theology trying to protect the Simulacrum of the myth of “Man as a rational animal through politics” is symptom of what Nietzsche calls ‘a form of imperfect nihilism’, which he defined as “an attempt to escape nihilism without revaluing those values” which leads to production of the “opposite of the intended effect.”[6] Thus, the purpose of this essay will be my attempt to dismantle Political Theology as a myth protecting the value of man from a Libidinal Materialist perspective.
The Basics of Libidinal Materialism[7]
Now before getting into the fundamental principles of Libidinal Materialism, I would first and foremost like to mention the fact that the main focus of the essay is not on explaining what Libidinal Materialism is. The only reason why I plan on briefly mentioning the fundamental principles behind Libidinal Materialism is because it serves as the basis in which all my future philosophical project will be based on, thus, serving as the context surrounding the ‘why’ behind my attempts of attacking the concept of Political Theology and to an extent Humanistic values in general. Still, even though the main focus is not on Libidinal Materialism in general, a basic introduction of what Libidinal Materialism is and the fundamental principles would be necessary. So, what is Libidinal Materialism? It is a term coined by British philosopher Nick Land in his 1992 book on Georges Bataille and Nihilism titled The Thirst for Annihilation in which he defined it as a “theory of unconditional (non-teleological) desire, which is nothing but a scorch-mark from the expository diagnosis of the physicalist prejudice.”[8] So in easier terms, it would be appropriate to define Libidinal Materialism as a speculative and unfiltered study of Libidinal Energetics. Here is what Land had to say regarding Libidinal Materialism as a philosophical school in the preface for The Thirst for Annihilation.
“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…”[9]
By drawing influence from Freud’s concept of the Death Drive, Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Power and Bataille’s Base Materialism, Land was trying to establish a theory on impersonal energies and irrational forces[10] which he deemed was heavily limited by what he referred to as ‘vulgar anthropomorphism’. So, in order for thought and philosophy to avoid the trap of vulgar anthropomorphism, Land suggested the following 4 principles as the fundamental principle behind what he deemed as Libidinal Materialist thought.
“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.”[11]
Dehumanization of nature, ruthless fatalism, absence of all moralism and contempt for common evaluations. These were the 4 fundamental principles Land set as the basic criteria behind Libidinal Materialism as a doctrine in order for philosophy to not falling victim into the humanistic values which has acted as a shackle that limits the possibility of how far thought can go for a long time. So based on these 4 principles, we can come to the conclusion that the Libidinal Materialist tradition, by depriving humanity from the illusions in which their lives depend on,[12] aims for a thought that sees the human experience as just a particle, motor that moves within this materialist landscape which has always proceeded in a tumult with no apparent sense of cohesion.[13]
Critique of Political Theology
Now, as the main priority of the essay is not on Libidinal Materialism and it is mostly about attacking Political Theology, let’s move on to the next section of the essay, which is dedicated to criticizing Political Theology as one of the many myths behind The Human Security System. So, what exactly is Political Theology? It is a term coined by the German Conservative Revolutionary jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt in the book of the same title where he attempted to secularize Politics by integrating it with theology in order to stabilize society.
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver- but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.”[14]
In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt claimed that “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”[15] Following the pessimistic anthropology of Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt viewed the State of Nature as the war of all against all as. The natural condition of man being a chaotic battlefield in which man is pitted against one another in a lawless state. In order to prevent civilization from self-destructing as a result of being pitted against each other, Schmitt strongly argued for a strong authoritarian figure of Sovereignty to decide on the exception[16] to set things in the order. While on the surface it may seem like the logic of Political Theology has died out in the modern day and age of Liberal Democracy in a similar manner the power orthodox religion held in the medieval ages started to diminish Enlightenment era, just as the values of Christianity hid under the banner of the rational man, the logic of Political Theology also had to conceal itself under a new identity of the simulacrum. However, from a Libidinal Materialist perspective, the mechanism behind Political Theology act as another display of what Land has ridiculed as the “absolute truthlessness of the priests” in Shamanic Nietzsche.[17] Georges Bataille, one of the key thinkers who laid the foundational groundwork for the Libidinal Materialist tradition, in his short essay titled The Psychological Structure of Fascism had the following to say regarding the logic behind social homogeneity Schmitt tried to defend in The Political Theology.
“As a rule, social homogeneity is a precarious form, at the mercy of violence and even of internal dissent. It forms spontaneously in the play of productive organization but must constantly be protected from the various unruly elements that do not benefit from production, or not enough to suit them, or simply, that cannot tolerate the checks that homogeneity imposes on unrest. In such conditions, the protection of homogeneity lies in its recourse to imperative elements which are capable of obliterating the various unruly forces or bringing them under the control of order.”[18]
Us Libidinal Materialists agree on the notion that the basic condition of the State of Nature is the war of all against all and that the fundamentals of politics lie in the distinction between ally and enemy. We share the pessimistic anthropology with the Hobbesians and the Schmittians rather than the anthropology based on the notion of the ethical man that is present in someone like Murray Bookchin or Jean Jacques Rosseau. However, the problem of Political Theology stems from the anthropological desire to found a social order in impending chaos.[19] The logic of Political Theology is something that can be easily criticized not because it lacked insight on the operation behind the function of politics. Political Theology is after all the basic logic behind how all politics, even the one which claims to be against it, functions whether they admit it or not. By erecting their humble philosophical dwellings alongside the baroque excesses of the church[20] and locking themselves in, humanity for long have been able to dwell in the illusion of safety. But like all simulacrums, a call for a sovereign—whether if that authority granted through the acknowledgement from divinity or the is not important—is ultimately another attempt of the tradition of the head declaring that this “this game is over” by trying to pull on the great voyages at exactly the point they first became interesting.[21] So as a conclusion, the logic behind Political Theology ends up collapsing not because it got the hidden mechanisms behind politics wrong, but because of the excess of the simulacrum backing up the lie of church of humanity. “He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning.”[22]
Struggle as the History of Man: The Hidden Origins behind Political Theology
“War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free.”-Heraclitus[23]
So how does the narrative of Political Theology justify its own existence and why do still society function under the logic of it? The answer can be found in Alexandre Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel and to an extension Marx in which he puts Hegel’s concept of master-slave dialectic as a center factor within the history of man, following the footsteps of Marx of reading Hegel in a materialist lens by seeing ‘struggle’ as the only motor of history in which acts associated with direct violence such as war and revolution are the only factor that is able to transform the world.[24]
“Man was born and History began with the fist Fight that ended in the appearance of a Master and a Slave. That is to say that Man—at his origin—is always either Master or Slave; and that true Man can exist only where there is a Master and Slave. (If they are to be human, they must be at least two in number.) And universal history, the history of the interaction between men and of their interaction with Nature, is the history of the interaction between warlike Masters and working Slaves. Consequently, History stops at the moment when the difference, the opposition between Master and Slave disappears.”[25]
As you can see, from a Kojevean standpoint, the myth of the man starts with man participating in what Kojeve refers to as ‘the first fight’. According to Kojeve, it is man’s willingness to bet his life for a desire that is beyond that of the animal needs that differentiates itself from other beings. In Kojeve’s own words, “Animal Desire is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of human and philosophical existence.”[26] As Animal needs do not go beyond the biological given would not differentiate man from other being in Kojeve’s reading of Hegel. It is when man risks its own life in the fight by transcending the biological order by willing to negate it in order to subjugate the other.[27] In this regard, Kojeve incorporated elements of Heidegger’s concept of being-towards-death (Sein-zum-tode) in his materialist interpretation of the Hegelian dialectical process of viewing the movement of history as he saw “death reveals itself as that possibility which in one’s ownmost, which non-relational, and which is not outstripped[unuberholbare].”[28] And whether one forfeits this fight to survive by satisfying this animal needs or one participates this fight by be willing to throw his life to universalize a desire beyond that of one’s primitive instinct is what makes someone either a slave or a master. Now, let’s see what Kojeve had to say on how the master and the slave becomes differentiated by examining the following excerpts from Kojeve’s seminar on the first six chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which he elaborates on the master and the slave.
“The Master is the man who went all the way in a Fight for prestige, who risked his life in order to be recognized in his absolute superiority by another man. That is, to his real, natural biological life he preferred something ideal, spiritual, nonbiological: the fact of being anerkannt, of being recognized in and by a consciousness, of being the name of ‘Master’, of being called ‘Master’. Thus, he proved (bewahrt), realized and revealed his superiority over biological existence, over his biological existence, over the natural World in general and over everything knows itself and that he knows to be bound to this World, in particular, over the slave.”[29]
“Man became Slave because he feared death. To be sure, on the other hand this fear (Furcht) reveals his dependence with respect to the Master, who dominates Nature. But on the other hand, this same fear—according to Hegel—has a positive value, which conditions the Slave’s superiority to the Master. Through animal fear of death (Angst) the Salve experienced the dread or the Terror (Furcht) of nothingness, of his nothingness. He caught a glimpse of himself as nothingness, he understood that his whole existence was but a ‘surpassed’, ‘overcome’ (aufgehoben) death—a nothingness maintained in being.”[30]
According to Kojeve, the Master by risking their own life in order to universalize their will in which precedes the biological pleasure principles necessary to satisfy its primal instincts become an independent being for-itself.[31] As they are willing to violate their biological programming of simply submitting to the will to life in order to direct their desire to a non-natural object that goes beyond the given reality,[32] the master differentiates itself from the slave. The Master strives toward a transcendental freedom as it is, in Hegel’s own words, “the consciousness that exists for itself”.[33] Thus, the Master stands out against any other animal as it has strived for its freedom. On the contrary, the Slave, in order to secure its safety, submits its freedom and subjugates itself under the will of the master. Thus, unlike the Master, it is a being that is dependent on the Master. From a Hegelian perspective, the Slave cannot be deemed as a ‘man’ as the Slave has given up the very aspect that distinguishes man from any other being, a strive for what Hegel and Kojeve would call ‘freedom’, in order to secure his animal needs. However, the paradox of the master-slave dialectic stems from this interesting dynamic between the Slave and the Master. By offering, the Master labor in order to fulfill, the Slave secures its safety when it comes to satisfying its primal needs. Just like a kingdom is empty without an army to back it up, the Master’s ambition is reliant on the work provided by the Slave. After all, the struggle was one in which stemmed from the master’s desire to be ‘recognized’ to the other. The Slaves make the Master need them through work. Thus, in a sense, making. However, if Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel was simply a humanistic tale of triumphant progression I wouldn’t have brought up Kojeve’s reading of Hegel. As Boris Groys stated, what makes Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel stems from seeing “the ontological condition of the human being as a bearer but not an owner of Absolute Knowledge.”[34] Unlike Hegel who saw the goal of the whole dialectical process of history to reach a certain high point where man fulfills its goal of reaching absolute freedom, Kojeve subverts this optimism of Hegel by deeming it the End of History by pointing out that as man loses the drive in which makes man a self-conscious ‘I’ distinguishable from the other, man no longer becomes a being different from any other beast like animal as it only needs its primal needs satisfied. Prior to Kojeve, it was Nietzsche’s declaration through the madman in the Gay Science that “God is dead”[35] that cemented and Lyotard defining the Postmodern condition as the “incredulity of metanarratives”[36] following Kojeve who declared the same thing as Kojeve’s statement of history ending. So long story short, as man loses his divinity as history no longer backs the myth behind what makes their existence so special, to borrow Nietzsche’s terminology, the real world of ‘man’ becomes simply ‘a myth’.[37] As dialectics no longer is able to serve man, it ultimately becomes a myth becomes a Fatal Strategy. Here’s what Baudrillard had to say regarding the failure of dialectics in Fatal Strategies.
“Things have found a way of avoiding a dialectics of meaning that was beginning to bore them: by proliferating indefinitely, increasing their potential, outbidding themselves in an ascension to the limit, an obscenity that henceforth becomes their immanent finality and senseless reason. But nothing prevents us from assuming that we could obtain the same effects in reverse—another unreason, also triumphant. Unreason is victorious in every sense which is the very principle of Evil.”[38]
So, how does Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic work as the hidden mechanism behind Political Theology. Let’s go back to Schmitt’s definition of what the concept of political fundamentally is. Politics is an act of making a distinction between friend and enemy. Schmitt and Kojeve both sees war, the fight as what drives man. How the logic behind Political Theology gains support stems from Political Theology secularizing this war. For Schmitt, it was secularized by his Catholic religion. For revolutionaries, it is secularized by the enlightenment notion of man as a rational free being. For Activism driven antifascists, the notion of alterity and the list goes on and on. Whether the fight is something driven by the conservative logic of backing the status quo or the revolution logic of striving for liberation is not important. The point is man needs this simulacrum of a binary in order to convince themselves that they are more than a pile of libidinal energetics takin a form of flesh-puppet.
“Kojeve proclaims the ‘struggle for recognition’ to be a motor of universal history. This formulation is reminiscent, at first glance, of the Marxist ‘class struggle’. Kojeve refers also to the same section on ‘the dialectics of the relationship between master and slave’ in the Phenomenology as did Marx. Hegel describes in this section the historical moment at which self-consciousness manifests itself for the first time. This primary scene involves two men who are ready to risk their lives in a kind of ‘mortal combat’ to be recognized mutually as being not simply material objects in the world, but two self-consciousnesses that are in pursuit of their individual desires.”[39]
Conclusion: Where the Dismantling of Political Theology Leads To
“I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history. I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning.”[40]
So, what am I trying to achieve by dismantling the myth behind Political Theology? There’s a well-known story regarding Land during his days in Warwick which encapsulates the basic mentality of the whole Libidinal Materialist project. Here’s the aforementioned mentioned story.
“Every month staff would give readings from work-in-progress. Nick’s first talk was entitled: “Putting the Rat back Into Rationality,” in which he argued that, rather than seeing death as an event that happened at a particular time to an individual, we should look at it from the perspectives of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe; that is, as a world-encircling swarm, without any specific coordinates, or any sense of individuation. An older professor tried to get his head round this idea: “How might we locate this description within human experience?” he asked. Nick told him that human experience was, of course, worthy of study, but only as much as, say, the experience of sea slugs: “I don’t see why it should receive any special priority.”[41]
So, what this essay was trying to do by dismantling the myth of Political Theology by redirecting Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic from an anti-humanist perspective is simple. It’s an attempt to put ‘The Rat back Into Rationality’. The logic of Political Theology has for a long time has acted as the wall built in order to protect the Human Security System. Politics from its origin was built to serve what Georges Bataille would have referred to as the head.[42] The head always tries to attempt to add reason to the way of things as its main priority is stabilize order to distract oneself from the cold reality that the physical universe is nothing but a flux of particles.[43] However, the greatest lesson that the predecessors of the Libidinal Materialist tradition is this, “the highest values devalue themselves.”[44] However, unlike early Land who saw speed as a way to reach the outsideness, my conclusion is a lot more closer to Lyotard and Klossowski’s conclusion which is based on the notion on the notion that ‘Every Political Economy is Libidinal’.[45] Thus as long as libidinal energies have a body it will need a political simulacrum to negotiate itself through Symbolic Exchange. Here’s what Klossowski to say in this regard:
“Nothing in the life of the impulses seems to be free, properly speaking. As soon as an interpretation directs their development (the struggle of the emotions to hold their own against the instinct to reproduce), there intervenes an evaluation and thus a price. But the one who ultimately bears the cost, the one who will pay, one way or another, is the subject [suppot] who constitutes the place where the struggle is waged, where a possible or unattainable compromise is wrestled with and negotiated – one’s body.”[46]
So, based on this conclusion, as a Libidinal Materialist, what direction do I suggest that political studies in philosophy should take? For the politics Libidinal Materialism, I suggest one that is based on what the French Post-Marxist collective Tiqqun referred to as the politics of ‘Civil War’. “The point of civil war is the point of view of the political.”[47] “There is no community except in singular relations. ‘The’ community doesn’t exist. There is only community, community that circulates.”[48] The politics of civil war admits that the state of nature is the war of all against all. But again, the attempts to stabilize through the logic of Political Theology will always end up failing as it is nothing but a simulacrum. Yet, we do acknowledge the fact that community circulates as living currency needs a system to negotiate one’s body can act as currency as. This solution, if you can this one, is still a Left leaning one. Not of progress but what I deem as anticonservative as in anti-conservation. There is nothing left to conserve here. The attack on Political Theology is not a triumphant celebration based on the illusory narrative of liberation. To loosely quote Zizek, the attack here “is not a cage in search of a bird, but a bird in search of a cage”.[49] The old cage is rusty and has fallen off from the ceiling. As always, it is merely a speculation, observation and an experiment on the continual process of one who strikes with meaning being killed by meaning. That’s how I see politics.
References
Acephale. The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology. Edited by Marina Galletti. London: Atlas Press, 2018.
Aristotle. Politics. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998.
Bataille, Georges. “The Psychological Structure of Fascism.” The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/.
Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski. New York: Semiotext(e), 1990.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Groys, Boris. Introduction to Antiphilosophy. London: Verso, 2012.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.
Heraclitus. “Fragments of Heraclitus.” Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fragments_of_Heraclitus_(annotated).
Klossowski, Pierre. Living Currency. Translated by Vernon Cisney, Nicolae Morar, and Daniel W. Smith. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Kojeve, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Edited by Allan Bloom. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.
Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011.
Land, Nick. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. London: Routledge, 1992.
Le, Vincent. Unknown Lands: A Journey Through the Dark Geography of Nick Land. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2022.
Ligotti, Thomas. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
나카마사 마사키. 헤겔을 넘어선 헤겔. 김상운 옮김. 서울: 이학사, 2008.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti. London: Penguin Books, 2017.
Prospect Magazine. “Nick Land: The Alt-Writer.” Accessed June 2026. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/44371/nick-land-the-alt-writer.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Expanded ed. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. Translated by Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010.
Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2012.
[1] Aristotle, Politics, pg. 27
[2] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pg. xx
[3] Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, pg. 14
[4] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound, pg. xi
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pg. 15
[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pg. 26
[7] Technically, it is a partial rehash of the second and third section of the previous essay I published on Hyperspekulation.
https://hyperspekulation.org/2026/05/24/a-libidinal-materialist-critique-of-landian-accelerationism/
[8] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pg. 37
[9] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pg. xx
[10] Vincent Le, Unknown Lands, pg. 99
[11] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pg. xx
[12] Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche & the Vicious Circle, pg. 45
[13] Acephale, The Sacred Conspiracy, pg. 124
[14] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, pg. 36
[15] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pg. 26
[16] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, pg. 5
[17] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, pg. 206
[18] Georges Bataille, The Psychological Structure of Fascism, The Anarchist Library
[19] Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, pg. 98
[20] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, pg. 205
[21] Nick Land Fanged Noumena, pg. 204
[22] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pg. 161
[23] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fragments_of_Heraclitus_(annotated)
[24] Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, pg. 150
[25] Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pg. 43
[26] Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pg. 39
[27] Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pg. 41
[28] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, pg. 294
[29] Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pg. 45
[30] Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the reading of Hegel, pg. 48
[31] Masaki Nakamasa, Hegel Beyond Hegel, pg. 65
(kor trans: 나카마사 마사키, 헤겔을 넘어선 헤겔)
[32] Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pg. 5
[33] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pg. 115
[34] Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, pg. 167
[35] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, pg. 181
[36] Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pg. xxiv
[37] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of Idols and The Antichrist, pg. 50
[38] Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, pg. 25
[39] Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, pg. 149
[40] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pg. 160
[41] https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/44371/nick-land-the-alt-writer
[42] Acephale, The Sacred Conspiracy, pg. 124
[43] Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, pg. 45
[44] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pg. 15
[45] Jean Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, pg. 121
[46] Pierre Klossowski, The Living Currency, pg. 65
[47] Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, pg. 36
[48] Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, pg. 40
[49] Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing, pg. 19
[1] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pg. 112
[2] Jean Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, pg. 120
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