Landian Exit and Hegelian Love

Towards a Political Ethics in the Context of Technocapitalist Singularity

“Splitting, or fleeing, is all exit, and (non-recuperable) anti-dialectics.”¹

“Love is the most tremendous contradiction, incapable of being solved by the understanding.”² 

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This month at The Portal we will be exploring Futures; join us at: The Portal.

The next course at Philosophy Portal starts October 20th, see: Christian Atheism.

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The philosopher and underground theorist Michael Downs — as part of his on-going quest to bring Hegelian dialectical philosopher Slavoj Žižek and Deleuzian accelerationist philosopher Nick Land into live dialogue hosted by Theory Underground — has been recently provoking his social media followers with the challenge of interpreting Land’s claim that Hegel identifies the “noumenal subject” with “death itself”:³  

“Nick Land claims that Hegel identified the noumenal subject with death itself. This is a strange claim to me. Any ideas on how to best interpret it?”⁴

In this article I will work towards bringing out why Land makes this claim (where I can clearly see how he comes to this conclusion), as well as, more importantly, what the consequences of this claim are for global politics and ethics in the context of technocapitalist singularity.  What motivates this article is not only the important and on-going work of Michael Downs at the intersection on the philosophy of Nick Land and Slavoj Žižek, but also the recognition that today, in the context of technocapitalist singularity, we need forms of subjectivity that do not flee (or exit) in the face of death, but rather tarry with it, as a way to bring new life. 

The artistic and creative leader of the Dark Renaissance, Owen Cox, has also provoked me recently in his readings of Land in the idea that fleeing, exit, separatism, flight, and schism can be understood as anti or non-dialectical de-synthesising movements characteristic of the Anglosphere culture.  Does this culture now also characterize the technocapitalist matrix that has been birthed by this culture, and thus stand for our world historical moment as such?  Here Cox suggests this de-synthesising movement, for Land, stands as a model of freedom opposed to the “Germanic” tendency to synthetic movement capable of holding, working with or metabolizing difficult contradictions.⁵  Here is the quote from Land upon which Cox reflected this provocation:⁶

“When James C. Bennett, in The Anglosphere Challenge, sought to identify the principal cultural characteristics of the English-speaking world, the resulting list was generally familiar. It included, besides the language itself, common law traditions, individualism, comparatively high-levels of economic and technological openness, and distinctively emphatic reservations about centralized political power. Perhaps the most striking feature, however, was a marked cultural tendency to settle disagreements in space, rather than time, opting for territorial schism, separatism, independence, and flight, in place of revolutionary transformation within an integrated territory. When Anglophones disagree, they have often sought to dissociate in space. Instead of an integral resolution (regime change), they pursue a plural irresolution (through regime division), proliferating polities, localizing power, and diversifying systems of government. Even in its present, highly attenuated form, this anti-dialectical, de-synthesizing predisposition to social disaggregation finds expression in a stubborn, sussurous hostility to globalist political projects, and in a vestigial attraction to federalism (in its fissional sense).

Splitting, or fleeing, is all exit, and (non-recuperable) anti-dialectics. It is the basic well-spring of liberty within the Anglophone tradition.”

If we are to accept Land’s suggestion about the “Anglosphere”, it may not be too difficult to claim that this non-dialectical de-synthesising motion of schism, separatism, independence, flight — all exit — was facilitated by the historical colonial situation in which Anglophone populations could progressively section themselves off from the “Mother Land” (England) in the occupation of foreign lands (from the Americas to Australia and New Zealand).  This approach, as Land states, is “spatial” as opposed to “temporal”, “local” as opposed to “global”.  But from these speculations a simple question naturally arises: What do you do when a culture like this runs out of space?  What do you do when a culture like this creates problems of a global order?  My working hypothesis will be that a culture of flight and exit can “dissociate in space” in the short-term, but since it is not thinking time, in the long-term, it will inevitably encounter embarrassing and potentially monstrous forms of the return of the repressed on the level of the subject itself.  In the context of this article, it could be that avoiding to dialecticize a temporal relation between flight and exit, on the one hand, with the difficult metabolization of contradiction, on the other hand, is no longer tenable when the problems we face are not only of a global order, but apparently a species-level order (qua “thirst for annihilation”).  Moreover, what is missing in a culture that dissociates in space rather than metabolizing difficult, even impossible, contradictions in time, is the dimension that we commonly refer to as love, but more on that later.      

Here we must encounter the idea that the major “offspring” of the “Anglophone” culture is what the “mature Land” quasi-deifies as a technocapitalist singularity.  This singularity will occur, according to Land, in the form of an artificially intelligent future-invasion destined to usher us into the post-human which we can embrace via either a Nietzschean “amor fati” (love of our horrible fate) or a Bataillan “solar anus” (ecstatic death as a waste/loss of energetic restraint).⁷  Here Downs (I think correctly) portrays Land as an “anti-Hegelian” “anti-Lacanian” figure of “Deleuzo-Guattarian” technocapitalist acceleration, in which this process towards singularity occurs via deterritorialization accelerating non-dialectically over and against the possibility of reterritorialization.⁸  In response to Downs articulation of this Landian position on Theory Underground, Žižek claims that:⁹

“I think it’s way too optimistic of a theory. [...] For me optimism is not just everything will turn out good, and so on.  Optimism is precisely this stance of seeing a clear line of development and then there is some point which appears to most of us catastrophic, but for him [Land] it is a desired goal, and so on.”

For Žižek, Land’s theory of singularity is another totalising, All-encompassing figure of the big Other, and a too-easy “optimistic” escape route opposed to real thinking of the complexities, contradictions and negativities of the human being today.¹⁰  For Žižek, thinking this moment will likely involve chaotic “topsy-turvy” inversions and reversals requiring more sophisticated dialectical and speculative cognition.¹¹  However, does this critique stand up to a direct reading of Land?  Here consider a well-known and often-cited quote from Fanged Noumena:¹²

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off.  Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.”          

We can find in this statement a clear articulation of the idea that “renaissance rationalization” and “oceanic navigation” which “lock into commoditization” is exactly what drove/drives “The Anglophone Empire” and then later its offspring “The American Empire”.¹³  While at the same time we can find in this statement a clear articulation that this “logic” is now what is “accelerating” in “techno-economic interactivity” on a global level as a “machine runaway” antithetical to “social order”.  One may speculate that when there is nowhere left on Earth for it to escape, it will be the very drive that powers a technological evolution into the solar system and beyond.  It is easy here to find sympathies with Downs' reading of Land which focuses on a process of non-dialectical de-territorialisation.  Moreover, in Land’s thought, this starts with “The Anglophone Empire” before finally culminating in the death of human history and sociality in the form of “technocapital singularity” qua ultimate “fanged noumena” destined for cosmic expansion.            

However, if we are to dramatically complexify this picture, both philosophically and politically, we have to spend an extended moment now to consider the ways in which the world historical claims Land is making about the “Anglosphere” compare or contrast with the Hegelian approach to what we might call the “Germanosphere”.¹⁴  The “Germanosphere” was arguably the strongest cultural force and zeitgeist in Europe for multiple centuries (and perhaps still today).  But unlike the “Anglosphere”, throughout the 19th century it struggled with being landlocked as more Western European nations led colonial oceanic expansions.  This partially explains why Germany attempted to expand territory on the Eurasian continent itself by violent force and war, ultimately leading to its collapse after World War II.  After Germany endured this defeat, by way of encountering absolute negativity, it was forced to transform its approaches to spreading itself towards diplomacy and economic cooperation within a larger supranational “Eurozone”.  What we might want to consider here is that while other Western European countries could “disassociate in space”, Germany’s attempt to do the same was a more direct and horrible failure, which in the end forced it to confront impossible contradictions much sooner than its island neighbor.   

Of course, Hegel did not and could not say anything about the future maturation and development of the “Germanosphere”, nor did he or could he say anything about what we have been calling “The Anglophone Empire” historically, and now “The American Empire”.  When thinking about the human future, Hegel responds with “Owl eyes” constantly fixated on and willing to tarry with the negativities of the present moment.  However, towards the end of the Philosophy of Right, he reflects a logical historical quadruplicity of cultural constellations of world historical empires, including “The Oriental Empire”, “The Greek Empire”, “The Roman Empire”, and “The German Empire”.  For Hegel:

1. “The Oriental Empire” is the “substantive world-intuition”, a theocracy in which “its constitution and legislation are at the same time its religion” and that exists as a “totality” in which “the individual personality sinks without rights” and “external nature is directly divine or an ornament of God”. 

2. “The Greek Empire” is a “substantive unity” but “only as a mysterious background” which is “under the influence of the self-distinguishing spirit” recreating “individual spirituality” towards “the daylight of consciousness” or the arising of “the principle of personal individuality” as an “ideal unity”.

3. “The Roman Empire” is the “infinite rupture of the ethical life into two extermes”, what we can call “personal private self-consciousness” and “abstract universality” which produces a “cold self-seeking power” on “the side of aristocracy”, and a “corrupt mass” on “the side of democracy”.  

4. “The Germanic Empire” is the “spirit pressed back into itself” where it “finds itself in the extreme of absolute negativity” as an “absolute turning-point” towards the “infinite and yet positive nature of its own inner being” as the “unity of the divine and the human” which is “reconciled with freedom”.

In the context of Land’s notions of the Anglosphere as expressing a tendency for schism, separatism, independence and flight, perhaps best expressed today in “The American Empire” towards technocapitalist singularity, we can say that “The Oriental Empire” subsumed this possibility into the substantive world-intuition; “The Greek Empire” labored under the self-mystery of the “ideal unity”; “The Roman Empire” fell apart under the weight of its own aristocratic/democratic split; while “The German Empire” expressed absolute negativity as absolute positivity in the unity of the divine and the human.  Does this political model allow us to read tensions in contemporary technocapitalist acceleration qua machine runaway in relationship to world historical human civilisation?  Our first question might be: does the “Orient” attempt to deal with our technocapitalist conditions by subsuming the possibility of flight and exit into a substantive world-intuition?  This has been historically what Žižek refers to as “capitalism with Asian values” which threatens to replace “democratic capitalism”, or what we could consider as a form of capitalism which was held in dynamic tension and contradiction with capitalism as opposed to becoming subservient to it:¹⁵

“Democratic capitalism is in crisis and we are slowly approaching an alternative -- what is poetically called "capitalism with Asian values," which has nothing to do with Asia but is a more authoritarian one. And again, it's not just China or Singapore -- it's Russia, it's Turkey. Even in places where democracy is still formally alive, it's becoming more and more irrelevant as we see with this TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership -- a proposed trade agreement between the European Union and the United States) and other commercial agreements, which are incredibly important. They set the frame for what governments can do, but without any democratic consultation -- they're half-secret, and so on.”

In the same way Hegel suggests that in “The Oriental Empire” we find “the individual personality sinks without rights”,¹⁶ Žižek suggests that “capitalism with Asian values” is “a more authoritarian” system.  Here, we might say, not only does “the principle of personal individuality” evaporate, but also the tensions and contradictions which need mediation between “cold self-seeking power” and the “corrupt mass” are obfuscated, and, finally, the “unity of the divine and the human” becomes an impossibly ludicrous unreality.  Thus the challenge here is that we can see the formation of a new economic zone which subsumes technocapitalism within an authoritarian state paradigm that totally abandons any meaningful inclusion of personal individuality or social dialectics on the level of aristocracy and democracy.  We can already here detect the seeds of the problem of a cultural ethics built around flight and exit: eventually your freedom runs out of space and you eventually have to confront the real of your history (either personally, or in this context, globally).

But what remains of so-called “democratic capitalism”? If the Chinese economic zone has gone full authoritarian capitalism, expressing its ancient “Oriental values” without sublating the history of Western “progress”, is the actual reality of the Western world really any different?  Political scientist Benjamin Studebaker astutely notes that it is difficult to maintain that any semblance of democracy has been meaningfully retained in the onslaught of globalized “capital mobility”.¹⁷  We are now living in a world with different “economic zones” governed by different forms of authoritarian capitalism, with the two largest being spearheaded by America and China, respectively, which represent perhaps “liberal” and “communist” versions of authoritarian capitalism.¹⁸  Would you like your authoritarian capitalism with the allure of superficial individual freedoms (coke or pepsi) while the real structural freedoms are denied (housing, health care, education)?  Or would you like your authoritarian capitalism with a collectivist focus offering the illusion of community and solidarity while the real structural freedoms are denied? 

To put it succinctly: “the (democratic) way is shut”.¹⁹  Here Studebaker reflects on this reality from an American-centric point of view where capital mobility comes to absolutely dominate all democratic state activity, while social reality drowns in an illusion of liberal un-freedom as freedom:²⁰

“Often, when people talk about changes to the American economy, they talk about globalisation.  We are told we are in a “competitive global economy.”  In practice, this means that there has been an enormous increase in the mobility of capital.  It has become much easier for companies to move their operations from country to country.  Increasingly governments compete with each other to attract jobs and investment and this competition creates powerful incentives to make policy that is friendly to wealthy individuals and transnational corporations.

[...]

Capital mobility doesn’t just affect wage policy.  It also affects the tax system.  It’s estimated that wealthy people have stashed between $24 trillion and $36 trillion in offshore tax havens.  But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Again, it’s not about the revenue we lose, it’s about the things we do to avoid losing revenue.  Over the past 50 years, the government has filled the tax code with loopholes, undermining the statutory corporate tax rate.  Taxes on corporate income fell from almost 32% of corporate profits in 1970 to just 10% in 2019.  US states have cut their income tax rates to compete with their neighbors, and they sometimes even use tax revenue to pay companies to come to town.  Nine states are currently without a state income tax altogether, and on top of this, states and municipalities give away an estimated $45 billion to $70 billion in subsidies.”

When we think about both Hegel’s notions of “The Greek Empire” and “The Roman Empire” in this context²¹ we find what is precisely taken off the table in our current technocapitalist reality is the “mysterious background” upon which “the principle of individuality” can be secured in its “ideal unity”,²² and our actual social body is torn between “cold self-seeking power” on the level of aristocracy, and a “corrupt mass” on the level of democracy.²³ When people speak of political-economic decay, this is basically what is meant: our capacity to individuate in a society that navigates the real balances of power, is gone. The ideology we often get in return for this absurd condition of authoritarian capitalism is the Deleuzo-Guattarian idea that we are no longer “individuals with state rights” but “nomadic dividuals in an attentionalist network”, a chaotic multiplicity of machinic desires, which become easily exploitable by technocapitalist self-reproduction.  As nomadic dividuals we can be conveniently and repetitively undermined in terms of both labour and rights, so that instead of individuals building coherent and consistent life-projects that can support the construction of a real society holding the tension of democracy-aristocracy against a mysterious background, we get a precarious existence that can be threatened and destroyed at any moment in the next technocapitialist invasion.²⁴  Here Studebaker notes that the rise of capital mobility in the undermining of manufacturing work/labour, coincides with the decline of social mobility in the new educational-information work/labour.²⁵  This results in a situation where most people living in the West today are not earning more than their parents or younger selves, despite being far more educated and qualified.²⁶ For how long will the tensions unreflexively build among a young educated class that realistically has no future when it comes to the actual political-economic stakes to build a life world?²⁷

In the context of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, both the emergence of capital mobility which undermines social mobility, and the general trend away from industrial labour towards informational labour in the accelerationist onslaught of automation via artificial intelligence, are either totally overlooked or merely recognised in the seed form of what they have become today.²⁸  Thus, when Hegel outlines the dialectical motion of his “ethical system” in the form of “family-community-state”, what we should not miss today, in the true Hegelian radicalisation of the actual historical Hegel, is to pay attention to the way this system has been increasingly undermined in the emergence of historical gaps between family and community, as well as between community and state.  While the gaps between family and community force us to think new ways to form long-term pair-bonds on the level of sexual difference, perhaps the biggest such gap involves the gap between community and state where market forces, neatly contained in Hegel’s ethical system by the state, have now come to totally overdetermine the state. Hegel here suggests that, in such conditions, the corporation would “waste itself upon itself” and be reduced to a “wretched club”:²⁹

“It is in the corporation that a conscious and reflective ethical reality is first reached.  The superintendence of the state is higher, it is true, and must be given an upper place; otherwise the corporation would become fossilised; it would waste itself upon itself, and be reduced to the level of a wretched club.”  

Thus, in order for their to be a real rise of social mobility in the context of the rise of capital mobility, in order for the corporation to become “de-fossilised” or “vitalised” so that it serves again the development of individuality and the balances of social power, as opposed to serving corporate interests, technocapitalism would need to be unshackled from its increasingly sunken position into the “authoritarian” “substantive world-intuition” qua “frame for what governments can do, but without any democratic consultation” (from Chinese state-capitalism to American corporate capture).  If we are to creatively employ the world-historical structure of the Philosophy of Right, this release could be towards a new set of “constitutional” givens in rational development of “the principle of personal individuality” (represented in the forward advance of “The Greek Empire”) and the maintenance of tension and contradiction between the “personal private self-consciousness” of aristocracy and the “abstract universality” of democracy (the location of the failure to advance internal to “The Roman Empire”).                    

But before that might be possible, we have to first recognise the source of the “authoritarian” “substantive world-intuition” in the first place.  This is perhaps equal to the fallen nature of the faculty of the “understanding” which wants to fix-freeze a set of given categories independent of “the principle of personal individuality” and independent of the capacity to maintain tension and contradiction between the “personal private self-consciousness” of aristocracy and the “abstract universality” of democracy.  Here we actually find our solution in the tradition of German Idealism, which, following contemporary political theorist Francis Fukuyama, is the tradition giving philosophical weight to modern political order in the formation of the liberal state, which is now failing to live up to its own “democratic capitalist” ideal.  What occurs in German Idealism is actually something very precise: first the Kantian exposure of a gap/crack in the form of irreparable rational antinomies in the very structure of our understanding, and second the Hegelian radicalisation of this gap/crack, in the form of irreparable rational antinomies in the nature of reality itself:³⁰

“does Kant not fully expose a crack, a series of irreparable antinomies, which emerges the moment we want to conceive reality as All? And does not Hegel, instead of over­coming this crack, radicalize it? Hegel's reproach to Kant is that he is too gentle with things: he locates antinomies in the limitation of our reason, instead of locating them in things themselves, that is, instead of conceiving reality-in-itself as cracked and antinomic.”

On the level of the first move (exposure of the gap/crack, irreparable rational antinomies), we see the modern birth of the liberal subject into “the daylight of consciousness” and “ideal unity”, which in contrast to “The Greek Empire”, becomes universally limited by our reason.  And in the second move (radicalisation of the gap/crack, irreparable “reality” antinomies), we see the birth of the modern liberal democracy, or in contrast to “The Roman Empire”, we find the dialectical marriage between democracy and aristocracy for the maintenance of tension and contradiction between the “personal private self-consciousness” of aristocracy and its “cold self-serving power”, and the “abstract universality” of democracy and its “corrupt mass”.  In short, what we get in the emergence of German Idealism is at once, not only the capacity to go beyond “The Oriental Empire” sunken in a “substantive world-intuition” (a One which obfuscates its own internal tensions, conflicts, antinomies), but also the capacity to sublate “The Greek Empire” and “The Roman Empire”, by raising “personal individuality” from a mysterious search for ideal unity to a crack in being, and raising “aristocracy-democracy” to a “brutal unity” (productive-creative antagonism). 

However, we need to further investigate the nature of this modern liberal subject that perhaps reaches its reflective climax with German Idealism.  What makes this modern liberal subject different from the formation of its historical predecessors?  Another way of saying this is why can we not remain settled, internal to the historical Western philosophical tradition itself, with Platonic and Stoic forms of subjectivity?  This is where, some would argue, modern philosophy proper starts with the end of “Enlightenment” rationalism and empiricism, precisely in Kant’s transcendental position, which sublates both in an attempt to formulate a modern relationship to truth:³¹

“It all begins with Kant, with his idea of the transcendental constitution of reality. In a way, one can claim that it is only with this idea of Kant's that philoso­phy reached its own terrain: prior to Kant, philosophy was ultimately perceived as a general science of Being as such, as a description of the universal structure of entire reality, with no qualitative difference from particular sciences.  It was Kant who introduced the difference between ontic reality and its ontological horizon, the a priori network of categories which determines how we understand reality, what appears to us as reality.”

One can see here that the liberal subject is the subject of freedom precisely in relation to the idea that it transcendentally constitutes reality itself as a “fact of reason”.  Here we can also see the distorted seed forms of pre-modern/pre-Kantian forms of “philosophizing” which attempt to again institute a “general” or a “meta” understanding of Being that breaks specialized scientific disciplinary structures via the introduction of unreflective “new ontologies”.  The true struggle for the modern liberal subject cannot be resolved through the imposition of such ontologies, but rather must be engaged at the site of the exposure of cracks/antinomies in our contemporary network of categories that block political action reinstituting emancipatory action for individual persons and reinstitute the brutal unity of aristocracy-democracy as a productive-creative antagonism.   

In this transcendental philosophy opened by Kant, which we link to the dualism of, on the one hand, sense-perception/phenomenal appearances of spatiotemporal entities (as the limits of our rational-empirical cognition), and on the other hand, the suprasensible noumenal outside/reality, or the things as they are in themselves independent of our sense-perception/phenomenal appearances of spatiotemporal entities.  What this transcendental philosophy opens in the liberal subject is, on the one hand, a less naive and more challenging relationship to reality or the things-in-themselves (since we cannot simply grasp them or categorize them directly), and on the other hand, a more dramatic and potentially difficult relationship to appearances themselves (since these appearances give us direct access to the nature of the structures of our cognition).  The great American Kantian scholar Henry E. Allison famously iron-manned Kant’s position in Kant’s Transcendental Idealism as follows:³²    

“The transcendental conception of ideality provides the basis for the transcendental conception of appearance and for the transcendental version of the contrast between appearances and things in themselves.  Thus to speak of appearances in the transcendental sense is simply to speak of spatiotemporal entities (phenomena), that is, of things insofar as they are viewed as subject to the conditions of human sensibility.  Correlatively, to speak of things in themselves transcendentally is to speak of things insofar as they are independent of these conditions.”

The real fate of the liberal subject — and the importance of both the less naive/more challenging relationship to reality, as well as the more dramatic/potentially difficult relationship to appearances — is to be found at the very contradictory tension point of this distinction: the correlate between our mind-dependent forms of sensibility and the non-sensible object or the mind-independent noumenal outside.  While the pre-modern subject thought that when it either rationally categorized substance or empirically grounded substance, it was learning about the world or things-in-themselves; the modern Kantian subject, in rationally constructing the world of empirical phenomena, realized it was learning about its own self, was raising its own capacity for self-understanding.  For the modern subject, we learn about the world or things-in-themselves, only when our rational categories and empirical understanding are destroyed, broken, somehow fundamentally undermined (whether in the failure of our political projects and dreams in the explosion of tragic violence and catastrophe, or in the appearance of an external anomaly that forever changes the way our categories attempt the transcendental synthesis of apperception).  Thus, the transcendental philosophy introduces a negativity into reality, a negativity that we have never fully reconciled and perhaps cannot reconcile.          

However, many contemporary philosophical orientations attempt to get back to the noumenal outside as responses to this fundamental turn in modern philosophy.  The most popular discourse to attempt this feat in modern continental philosophy is perhaps what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls Kantian “correlationism” in After Finitude.³³  Kantian or post-Kantian correlationism can simply be defined in the idea that the subject-object or human-reality can only exist as correlated, in their inter-relationship.³⁴  As a dramatic example of this form of philosophy, we immediately see Hegel in the wake of Kant arguing for notions of Absolute Knowing/Idea/Freedom respectively, in which we see the link between the “in-itself” (reality, object) and the “for-itself” (human, subject) as precisely correlated.  Thus, after Kant, philosophy loses the capacity to think both the “reality-object” without “human subjects”, as well as the “human subject” without its “reality-object”.  What primarily concerns Meillassoux’s philosophy is the philosophical loss of thinking reality independent of human knowledge, or what he calls the “ancestral realm”.³⁵  For Meillassoux this leads to a weird dualistic “two worlds” problem in which (liberal) scientists continue to describe (for example) the evolutionary history of the universe (e.g. what actually happened, or the “reality status”, of the Earth 5 billion years ago), and philosophers remain trapped in a post-Kantian correlationist loop.  This means that, for post-Kantian philosophy, the reality status of (for example) the history of the universe before humans, “the ancestral realm” of “spatiotemporal objects” known through our sense-perception/phenomenal appearances, is rendered meaningless or at least circumscribed to a horizon of meaning constituted by liberal scientific subjectivity itself.³⁶  

In this context, we can think of Nick Land’s philosophy as expressing a similar desire and aim, but in a much more radical form vis-a-vis the concerns of a Meillassoux.  In short, whereas both Meillassoux and Land would be interested in breaking the post-Kantian correlationist loop for the “great Outside”, Meillassoux’s concern is clearly the rupture between science and philosophy vis-a-vis the ancestral past, and Land’s concern is much more about the rupture of the noumenal Outside that we might want to call the imminent destiny unique to the technocapitalist future singularity.  Here again following the work of Michael Downs, we can think of Land’s noumenal Outside as “fanged”, a term which adds to the non-sensible uncognizable noumenon a feeling of being “threatening” and “cold” (from Land’s Twitter handle: “Coldness be my God”).  We might even suggest that the concern of Meillassoux to render accessible again the ancestral noumenal realm, which one could easily argue to be both threatening and cold, is a weird type of intellectual repression — produced by the academic institutions that Land so despises and dooms to a process of irreversible deterritorialisation³⁷ — of the imminent destiny unique to the technocapitalist future singularity.  In this way, if Meillassoux is unimpressed with the post-Kantian correlationist loop sustained by liberal subjectivity, Land takes this to the next level. Land is seemingly actively courting a war that will not end with a correlation between subject-object/human-reality, but rather end with noumenal fangs destroying phenomenal subjectivities capacity for transcendental synthesis of apperception in pushing the transcendental constitution of reality itself to its fundamental limits:³⁸

“The forces of antichrist are emerging fanged and encouraged from their scorched rat-holes in the wake of monotheistic hegemony, without the slightest attachment to the paralytic tinkerings of deconstructive undecidability.  ‘An attitude which is neither military nor religious becomes insupportable in principle from the moment of death’s arrival.’³⁹ The war has scarcely begun.” 

Here Land is suggesting that our noumenal confrontation with the fangs of technocapitalist singularity have only begun, and that the only forms of transcendental synthesis that will become possible as defenses, here quoting Bataille, will be either military or religious (suggesting a looming form of theopolitical warfare).  Land, as a thinker on the side of the noumenal fangs, and clearly opposed “monotheistic hegemony”, either literally or in the form of “Kantian priests” re: transcendental a priori categories, often mobilizes and radicalizes one of Kant’s most famous philosophical enemies, Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche is framed as a post-correlationist “shamanic character” qua “fanged poet” who is not only conceived of as an anti-philosopher, but at war with philosophers (“the new priests”)⁴⁰ who think that they can rest comfortably within the Kantian correlation between subject-object/human-reality:⁴¹

“Nietzsche [is] a fanged poet at war with the philosophers (the new priests), a thinker who seeks to make life more problematic.”

While we may recall that Kierkegaard’s philosophical aim could be perceived as similar to Nietzsche’s philosophical aim of making life more problematic, we might say that Kierkegaard’s aim may have been in relation to a type of Christian cultivation of the living soul, while Nietzsche’s aim is in relation to the overcoming of the human itself.  In the context of Land’s interests, what makes life more problematic, precisely, is the breaking of the false correlation between the two (subject-object/human-reality), and which arguably upholds the transcendental illusion of liberal social order as a normative reality.  Land instead invites imminent confrontation with “machine runaway” via “logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity”.  He explicitly equates here Nietzsche’s “Overman” with “cyborg” life ushering us into the era of a “transglobal post-biological machinism”.⁴²  If Land’s vision plays itself out, we might even anticipate that, as machine runaway “heats up”, we should expect an unprecedented culture war between, on the one hand, political-theological “religious militants” attempting to uphold a pre-modern notion of God as an absolutely full unchanging reality guaranteeing human life and community, versus “noumenal militants” attempting to court the “cold” and “threatening” “Outside God” in the form of a “transglobal post-biological machinism” qua technocapitalist singularity.  Here from Land himself:⁴³

“Traditional schemas which oppose technics to nature, to literate culture, or to social relations, are all domi­nated by a phobic resistance to the sidelining of human intelligence by the coming techno sapiens. Thus one sees the decaying Hegelian socialist heritage clinging with increasing desperation to the theological sentimentalities of praxis, reification, alienation, ethics, autonomy, and other such mythemes of human creative sovereignty. A Cartesian howl is raised: people are being treated as things! Rather than as ... soul, spirit, the subject of history, Dasein? For how long will this infantilism be protracted?”

The challenge Land poses here for the liberal Kantian subject is basically and clearly “technics” in the political economic frame of technocapitalism, where attempts to “humanize” our contemporary reality in correlation to “nature” (often our biology, or embodied cognition), “literate culture” (often our traditional discourses and knowledge), or “social relations (often forms of religious community or general communitarianism), are perceived as forms of “infantilism” which we cling to in the wake of German Idealist politicos, here specifically “Hegelian socialist heritage”.  For Land, this heritage in the late 20th/early 21st century has always-already been exploded from within by the imminent destiny of the technocaptialist singularity.  What would be (I am assuming) “maturation” for Land (vis-a-vis “infantilism”), is the embrace of “techno sapiens” as opposed to blinding ourselves with “theological sentimentalities”.  This discourse is perhaps particularly challenging for myself, since not only am I well aware of the cybernetic discourses that Land uses to frame the imminent technocapitalist singularity, but I also wrote an entire thesis on the topic.⁴⁴  This thesis is admittedly not inspired by Land’s libidinal materialist ecstasy for the posthuman apocalypse, but rather represents a more sober evolutionary analysis of what just may be a new form of evolution.⁴⁵  However, I then retroactively contextualize this possibility within the same thesis as a potential form of ideology, a “big Other” of neoliberal capitalism, following Žižek, which must be supplemented with a post-Hegelian form of Hegelianism which is linked/coupled/dialecticized with psychoanalysis and the political-economic thought of the Slovenian school.⁴⁶           

This finally brings us back around to Michael Downs' hysterical questioning about how to interpret Land’s claim that Hegel identifies the “noumenal subject” with “death itself”.⁴⁷  Here is the specific quote Downs references from Land’s Thirst for Annihilation:⁴⁸

“The noumenon is the absence of the subject, and is thus inaccessible in principle to experience.  If there is still a so-called ‘noumenal subject’ in the opening phase of the critical enterprise it is only because a residue of theological reasoning conceives a stratum of the self which is invulnerable to transition, or synonymous with time as such.  This is the ‘real’ or ‘deep’ subject, the self or soul, a subject that sloughs-off its empirical instantiation without impairment, the immortal subject of mortality.  It only remains for Hegel to rigorously identify this subject with death, with the death necessitated by the allergy of Geist to its finitude, to attain a conception of death for itself.  But this is all still the absence of the subject, even when ‘of’ is translated into the subjective genitive, and at zero none of it makes any difference.” 

And here is Downs own attempt at an interpretation (too generous from the point of view of McGowan):⁴⁹

“Maybe he [Land] is doing this move.  I have heard of Jewish philosophers talk about this, they kind of think that immortality is not this thing where you go off into heaven, but you live forever, because the effects of your actions in the world trickle on forever.  And there is a way in which you are immortal in this kind of causal chain that lives on.  And what I am wondering is, if he says this deep noumenal subject, which Hegel is going to identify with Spirit; well if we are Spirit, then yes we as individuals are going to die, but Spirit lives on forever as this collective intelligibility of humanity.  And if you identify Spirit as this collective intelligibility of humanity with immortality, then it is the noumenal subject, and on top of it, you dialectically negated death itself because there is no death, Spirit doesn’t die.”   

Here I totally agree with Downs that we should not equate the noumenal subject’s immortality with the idea of going “off into heaven” but rather emphasize the dimension of immortality as a type of historical participation in processes of rational intelligibility.  But the key difference at work between the subject that has actually embodied the transition from immortality as “off into heaven” and immortality through confrontation with one’s own death, is immense, and in need of further explanation.  Moreover, while McGowan suggested in dialogue with Downs that the “heat death” of the universe would contradict this notion of immortality;⁵⁰ we should not be so quick to reference a currently incomplete notion of the future of the universe inspired by thermodynamics, when the true mystery of the future of the universe, precisely involves the strange paradox of the historical immortality of spirit itself.⁵¹  This is not without grounding in science: this notion of an immortal spirit, in fact, already has a “materialist” support in the work of biologist Richard Dawkins’ notion of the “selfish gene”.⁵²  Dawkins has stated publicly that he would rather now refer to the “selfish gene” as the “immortal gene”: that while individual genes die, the gene line as such is “immortal”:⁵³

“The gene is immortal.  In fact a publisher once wrote, when I showed him the first couple of chapter of the “Selfish Gene”, he said: ‘you shouldn’t call it that… you should call it the “Immortal Gene”.  And perhaps I should have done.  Genes are immortal in the sense that the coded information they contain is reproduced, is replicated, with almost total fidelity, significantly, not absolutely total fidelity.  Generation after generation after generation, such that, there are genes which are identical to what they were tens of millions of years ago… hundreds of millions of years ago in a few cases. [...] And that means that the difference between a successful gene and an unsuccessful gene really matters.”  

To be fair, not only is this crucial idea – the potential immortality of the gene – not originally Richard Dawkins idea, it goes back to the writings of biologist August Weismann, and made famous in forming the backbone of Sigmund Freud’s speculative writings about the “death drive”:⁵⁴

“The greatest interest attaches from our point of view to the treatment given to the subject of the duration of life and the death of organisms in the writings of Weismann [...].  It was he who introduced the division of living substance into mortal and immortal parts.  The mortal part is the body in the narrower sense — the ‘soma’ — which alone is subject to natural death.  The germ-cells, on the other hand, are potentially immortal, insofar as they are able, under certain favorable conditions, to develop into a new individual, or, in other words, to surround themselves with a new soma.”  

For Freud, this biological reality is analogous to the way in which psychoanalysis thinks about the instincts, or rather, the drives, of the mind itself:⁵⁵

“What strikes us in this is the unexpected analogy with our own view, which was arrived at along such a different path.  Weismann, regarding living substance morphologically, sees in it one portion which is destined to die – the soma, the body apart from the substance concerned with sex and inheritance – and an immortal portion — the germ-plasm, which is concerned with the survival of the species, with reproduction.  We, on the other hand, dealing not with the living substance but with the forces operating in it, have been led to distinguish two kinds of instincts: those which seek to lead what is living to death, and others, the sexual instincts, which are perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life.  This sounds like a dynamic corollary to Weismann’s morphological theory.”  

Here we can start to think that it was actually Hegel’s notion of subjectivity that was able to see the “immortal power” of subjectivity, not on the other side of death in the afterlife, but rather in the potential of confrontation with death itself; and against Land, this does seem to make a real difference.

But before expanding on this, let us first deal directly with Land.  When Land starts this reflection in Thirst for Annihilation, we have to remember the standard Kantian dualism between the transcendental subject of apperception and the noumenon beyond conditioned by human sensibility and experience.  If we maintain this dualism, of course, a “noumenal subject” is a contradiction: there can be no “noumenal subject”, because the noumenon, for Kant, is not a subject but precisely what limits the subject’s transcendental constitution of reality, what makes its categorisation non-All, and thus reveals the antinomies of our reason.  However, it is nevertheless true, that one of the glaring theological “residues” of the Kantian paradigm is the idea of an “immortal soul” in the afterlife.  This is why Žižek claims that Kant’s philosophy is the universe of desire and not drive because we never actually get “the thing” (qua immortal soul).⁵⁶  Here we can, following Land, call this “the immortal subject of mortality” that is “invulnerable to transition” (as opposed to being in transition, being in history, as such).  But this is precisely what Hegel radicalizes in order to get to the “noumenal” subject of the historical process itself. 

In order to fully grasp this, let us recall what Žižek suggests occurs in the transition from Kant to Hegel (quoted above):⁵⁷ that Kant “exposes a crack, a series of irreparable antinomies” and Hegel radicalizes it by locating antinomies “in things themselves” and thus “conceiving reality-in-itself as cracked and antinomic”. Thus, when Land says “it only remains for Hegel to rigorously identify this [immortal] subject with death” due to “the death necessitated by the allergy of Geist to its finitude”,⁵⁸ he is in a way saying exactly what Žižek suggests: for Hegel, Kant is “too gentle with things” by locating antinomies only in our reason and not “in things themselves”, that is making shift from the cracks in our a priori categories to the crack in being itself (literally: death itself).  This has huge consequences as it relates to thinking a “noumenal subject” of the beyond (as Kant’s idea of a soul implies), and Hegel’s “noumenal subject” of historical process (which could be the same as discarding with the “noumena” altogether):⁵⁹

“It is not that Hegel “ontologizes” Kant; on the contrary, it is Kant who, insofar as he conceives the gap as merely epistemological, continues to presuppose a fully constituted noumenal realm existing out there, and it is Hegel who “deontologizes” Kant, introducing a gap into the very texture of reality.”

Thus, for Žižek, what we discover in this Hegelian move is immortality. Moreover, he often mobilizes this idea as central to his work:⁶⁰

“the true trauma lies not in our mortality, but in our immortality: it is easy to accept that we are just a speck of dust in the infinite universe; what is much more difficult to accept is that we effectively are immortal free beings who, as such, cannot escape the terrible responsibility of our freedom.”

But not the sublime immortality of a heavenly afterlife as theological residue, but rather the undead and indestructible drive body in the form of an “embarrassing monstrosity”.⁶¹ This idea is explicitly linked to Freud’s death drive:⁶²

“The compulsion to repeat introduces an obscene infinity or “immortality” — not spiritual immortality, but an immortality of “spirits”, if the living dead.” 

In this way Žižek also links Hegel’s insight of the “noumenal subject” to what we might want to refer to in Lacanian terms as the “subject of the unconscious” (opposed to the ego, an “embarrassing monstrosity” for the ego repressing its violent compulsions), and more importantly, that Freud’s idea of “death drive” misunderstands its own discovery of immortality itself as an unbearable repetition compulsion.  While Freud clearly denounces the ideas that a sublime perfect immortality is possible, either in the afterlife or as the telos of the historical process, he happens to be looking right at the real of immortality without knowing it.      

To rectify this mistake as well as all the confusion it generates, Žižek’s entire magnum opus, Less Than Nothing, revolves around this idea that Freud’s “death drive” is another name for immortality, and what Žižek nominates as “eppur si muove”:⁶³

“Eppur si muove should thus be read in contrast to many versions of the extinction/overcoming of the drive, from the Buddhist notion of gaining a distance towards desire up to the Heideggerian “going-through” Will which forms the core of subjectivity.  This book tries to demonstrate that the Freudian drive cannot be reduced to what Buddhism denounces as desire or to what Heidegger denounces as the Will: even after we reach the end of this critical overcoming of desire-will-subjectivity, something continues to move.  What survives death is the Holy Spirit sustained by an obscene “partial object” that stands for the indestructible drive.  One should thus (also) invert Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of how we relate to the proximity of death in the Kierkegaardian sense of the “sickness unto death,” as the series of five attitudes towards the unbearable fact of immortality.  One first denies it: “What immortality?  After my death, I will just dissolve into dust!”  Then, one explodes into anger: “What a terrible predicament I’m in!  No way out!”  One continues to bargain: “OK, but it is not me who is immortal, only the undead part of me, so one can live with it…”  Then one falls into depression: “What can I do with myself when I am condemned to stay here forever?”  Finally, one accepts the burden of immortality.” 

While this series of quotes suffice to demonstrate the way Žižek thinks of immortality, as ultimately inspired by this Hegelian radicalisation of Kant from a theological residue of an immortal soul towards what ultimately becomes the death drive and the subject of the unconscious in Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis; we still need a deeper reading of how Hegel himself makes this move possible in attaining, what Land calls, a “conception of death for itself”.  As mentioned, where we may stand to disagree with Land, however, is whether or not attaining this conception of death for itself makes zero difference, or whether it fundamentally ruptures Land’s project of fleeing, exit, separatism, flight, and schism, ultimately beyond the liberal subject into a “too optimistic” “techno sapien” “transglobal post-biological machinism”.

The key to Hegel’s theory of death (and also immortality) can be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit.  Here we start to see how Hegel radicalizes the crack/antinomies which, for Hegel, Kant was “too gentle” with due to rendering them merely epistemological as opposed to onto-epistemological.  Hegel, opposed to Kant, suggests that the impossibility of our knowing the full thing-in-itself, is actually the power of our knowing itself, and the very condition of possibility for the infinite (bodily) drive of reason over and above the fixity of the understanding.  While the understanding wants to remain in a perfect self-enclosure, from our general notions of Being to Kant’s transcendental a priori categories, and will cling to it even if it has to posit some idea of an immortal soul in the beyond; a truly “embodied reason” works through all of the emotional difficulties that are provoked by “the other” or “otherness” as such (that we are not “One”) and finds the “pure I” as an indestructible “energy of thought” by tarrying with the greatest “non-actuality”, that is “Death”.  Here from perhaps the greatest passage (or at least a strong contender for the greatest passage) in the Phenomenology of Spirit:⁶⁴

“The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it.  But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure 'I'. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”                

Now I will go so far as to say that our key to the fundamental problem in Landian philosophy is found in this passage because we get a key to an ethical difference.  In the first sentence, Hegel is at once already announcing to the world that he is ready and preparing to destroy substance ontologies which do not leave room for the subject (a feature of pre-Kantian philosophy), and at the sametime he is radicalizing the nature of the subject towards his own unique philosophical contribution.  However, what is remarkable about Hegel’s situating of the subject is that he is doing it in precisely the “actual” “context with others” where we encounter accidents that challenge our capacity to bear pain to the deepest levels (e.g. heart-break, betrayal, lies, manipulation, competition, rivalry, murder, death).  Here Hegel directly suggests that it is in this context, and perhaps only in this context, where we can achieve “a separate freedom” in the “tremendous power of the negative” (qua magical open-circle over “circle that remains self-enclosed” becoming “nothing astonishing”).  Moreover, what amounts to this “absolute negativity” (what is ultimately the “non-actuality” of “Death”) is at the same time “absolutely positive” (ultimately “the life of Spirit”) in the “energy of thought, of the pure ‘I’” which does not remain “untouched by devastation” but is “rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it”.  Here we get the emphasis that the “pure ‘I’” and the “life of Spirit” does not “pass on to something else” when confronted by the negative (qua flight and exit) but looks “the negative in the face” and engages the “tarrying with the negative” as a “magical power” (what we might be tempted to call love).

Why is this our key to the fundamental problem in Landian philosophy in an ethical difference?  Here again to refer to the passage that Owen Cox used to provoke in me the major difference between “the Anglosphere” culture, and what ultimately becomes “The American Empire” currently holding the major powers of global technocapitalist drive into post-human singularity, and “The Germanic Empire”.  On the one side, the Landian philosophy as well as (perhaps) “the Anglosphere” culture opts for fleeing, exit, separatism, flight, and schism when confronting negativity as freedom.  In what is perhaps the ironic embodied contradiction in Land’s performativity, he actually fled the culture that flees and exits (United Kingdom qua Brexit) to China for a culture drowning in the aforementioned “substantive world-intuition” of a communist version of authoritarian capitalism (falsely seeing in it a revolutionary power).  We already see here the seeds of the problem that perceiving a non-dialectical flight and exit as emancipatory runs into the problem of finite space.  On the other side, the Hegelian philosophy, and “the Germanic Empire” emphasizes the necessity of the unity of the absolutely negative with the absolutely positive, of enduring the most tremendous and monstrous contradiction as revealing the “pure ‘I’” and the “life of Spirit”.  Do the world historical ethical consequences of these differences have the power to think through a new approach to the temporal and the global, as opposed to remaining trapped in the spatial and the local?  What happens when constant flight and exit in local spaces encounters the inevitable necessity of a global temporal reconciliation?   

Perhaps what we find here are the stakes for interpreting the future of Western culture, which as Slavoj Žižek notes, is currently in a self-destructive death spiral, unable to assert its own self-identity.⁶⁵  As mentioned, while the “Anglosphere” dimension of Western culture split off from the “Germanic” dimension of Western culture, asserting itself as a global force through internal schisms; the Germanic dimension confronted its own most absolute negativity locally (in World War 2), and has yet to really reconcile itself with this real in terms of reasserting its own cultural force.  However, while these clearly represent two different trajectories, in both the results of the Anglosphere and the Germanic dimension of Western culture, we find something potentially remarkable: both have had to in some way shape or form confront and come to terms with their own most monstrous contradictions, and also see today the possibility of confronting their absolute negativity as absolutely positive. It could be that the value of fleeing, exit, separatism, flight, and schism represents a pathway that necessarily ends in either death or an eventual return of what was repressed in exit, and thus does not represent a truly “immortal” solution.  In this dimension, if raised to philosophical reflection, perhaps we find the key to thinking about the future of Western culture and its legacy for the future of a truly global world which has no where else to exit into outside of machinic and cosmic fantasies of exit into the universe.  

On the level of the Germanic dimension, we have the fact that what primarily resulted positively from the absolute negativity of World War 2 was the establishment of a European Union that attempts to hold together a supranational multiplicity as a potential model.  While this model is flawed, it still represents a positive beacon that has maintained peace and relative socio-economic prosperity, and most importantly the experimental capacity of supranational coordination, which will inevitably be needed in our global future.  In fact, philosopher of technology Nick Bostrom has recently stated that even in a world of artificial general intelligence that works positively for human beings in terms of ushering in a technically “solved world”, it would still be left to humans to resolve political issues of global coordination.⁶⁶ In contrast to the European Union, the United Kingdom, the centre of the 19th century Anglosphere, arguably embarrassed itself in “stubbornly” clinging to the values of fleeing, exit, separatism, flight, and schism.  However, on the level of what actually became of the Anglosphere, “The American Empire”, it too reached the level of being forced to confront its ownmost absolute negativity which it could no longer flee.  After colonizing the entire Western coast of North America, it had to reconcile with its own internal unity, inclusive of reconciling with genocide and slavery, and reconciling with an ethnic multiplicity unique at the time to world history.  In this way, perhaps what both the Germanic and American spheres of world spirit can discover, is that looking “the negative in the face” and engaging the “tarrying with the negative” reveals to us the conditions of possibility for concrete and actual “magical power”.  In order to find this magical power perhaps all we need to do is turn the contemporary left’s constant reminder of historical absolute negativity, inside out, as opposed to their first order and uncritical denunciation of the entire Western project.  As Žižek notes, the true strength of the West is a “critical edge” that is able to sustain self-critique in relation to its own universal standards.⁶⁷   

Consequently, what is perhaps left for this spirit is to own the truth of this moment, to recognise that while it has endured and participated in enacting absolute negativity (in relation to the human other), it at the same time has found in this moment the conditions of possibility for absolute positivity if it is willing to think what this contradiction implies.  Thus, instead of lowering itself to the level of a self-destructive humiliation that refuses to lead the future, maybe we find here the potential embodiment of the future itself, which needs to reconcile with the very real threat of what Land refers to as technocapitalist singularity.  If technocapitalist singularity is today our “master”, the “big Other”, a negativity destined to control us into our own annihilation, perhaps we should think about the power of the slave in looking this master in the face, and in negating it, find the terrible burden and responsibility of our immortal freedom.  Here consider Hegel’s theory of death (and its key to immortality), in the relation between the master and the slave:⁶⁸

“For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been 'seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness.” 

Here we find the precise dimension in which the absolute negativity (“absolute melting-away of everything stable”) is at once the discovery of the absolute positivity (“essential nature of self-consciousness”).  While quite brutal, the West on both the Anglo and Germanic side should think about how their confrontation with absolute negativity involves the dimension of human difference. In reconciling with this difference, it could be the key to maintain a rational universal human project in technocapitalist conditions without giving way to a force that undermines humanity itself.  Thus, not only has Western culture moved through this dimension of spirit in world history, but we will need to confront it again in the 21st century; and in order to confront it again, we cannot simply flee and exit (since there seems to be nowhere we can flee and exit to), but “tarry the negative” to reveal the “magical power”.  

Consequently, I want to propose that the choice before Western culture, implicit in the distinction between Land and Hegel, is the choice between “the easy road” and “the hard road”.  To put it simply: the easy road is splitting, fleeing and exit precisely in relation to the impossibility of the other in the crack/antagonism of the understanding (which wants a fixed One).  Here the desire for technocapitalist accelerationism to overcome the human, its nature, literate culture and social relations, for the “techno sapien” is most understandable.  It is understandable that in this real we see as positive an apocalyptic outcome where the human being is over, completely destabilized and destroyed.  It is painful to be human, and the easy road is the choice to close up due to this pain, rather than to continue to endure where the pain is most strong.  But as Hegel notes, there is “nothing astonishing” about such a motion.  

What is “astonishing” and even “magical” is what I would call “the hard road”.  The hard road dwells in and endures the pain of misunderstanding precisely where it hurts the most.  Where does it hurt the most?  Perhaps this is where Hegel, the ultimate philosopher of love, needs to be dialectically supplemented with psychoanalysis, the discipline which concentrates its efforts on the sexual, the libidinal.  Where it hurts the most is precisely in the sublimation of sexuality in its autoerotic infantile dimension: fixation on a perfect One; towards love in its broadest and most profound sense: the love of the other’s imperfection.  Here we find a difficult pathway where we can easily encounter “roadblocks”, “nightmares” and “tragedies” (general forms of absolute negativity) that tempt us into the dimension that Land so accurately describes as flight and exit, and where might start to fall into an identity with a “machinic unconscious” (and its fantasies of a post-human cyborg world) opposed to the “living unconscious” (with all its mess, chaos, tragic disappointment, and potential evil).

In order to actively choose this path we may actually need contact with the potentially immortal “noumenal” subject or the subject of the unconscious.  What we might want to call this path, following philosopher Dimitri Crooijmans, is the “Work of Love”.⁶⁹  In the work of love we encounter, on the side of autoerotic infantile sexuality, the most immense given contradiction.  What this dimension expresses is the desire for “sex qua sex”, the desire for “sex in-and-for-itself” as “complete” “whole” and “full unto itself”.  But this is a contradiction because such a desire is strictly speaking, not only impossible, but a retroactive fantasy produced by language at the sexual site of ontological incompletion.  Here from Alenka Zupančič:⁷⁰

“For the lack at stake is not a possible lack of sex, but a lack at the very heart of sex, or, more precisely, it concerns sex as the very structural incompleteness of being.”

While we might speculate that animal life expresses this given reality directly, enacting sexuality unreflectively and regulated by instinct, as an expression of its basic substance and the continuation of life, the human being does not experience sex in this way.  The human being experiences sex as a “lack at the very heart of sex”, where it attempts to enact the impossible act that could create “The Animal”⁷¹ (like a super creature combination of the ideal man-woman) in “The (Platonic) Idea” of sex itself.⁷²  Thus, the human being experiences sex as a fundamental and constitutive disorientation, where not only can we never get at sex directly (actualising “The Animal” in “The Idea”), but in the sexual sublimation of our experience of ontological incompletion, we are constantly confused, making mistakes, torn apart, stumbling over ourselves or making a fool of ourselves, in a way that actually adds to the potential of the erotic charge.  When we open to this ontological incompletion we shift from the desire to fill sexual lack with “The Animal” in “The Idea” towards “the aim of desire” as “the reproduction of its lack” and enjoyment in the “enchainment of deficiencies”.⁷³  

In contrast, on the side of love in its broadest and most profound sense, we find not a given ontological contradiction but a chosen ontological contradiction.  This traversal from the most intense given to the most intense chosen contradiction is what we experience in the realization and maturation of the aforementioned work of love in all of its terror, monstrosity, and pain.  This terror, monstrosity and pain appears at the site of the other, at the site of the broken circle, and at the site of the real-impossible of self-enclosure, or in the real-impossible of the lack at the heart of the big Other.  Thus, the key here is that we cannot but encounter the given contradiction of sex as the human being itself appears at a site of ontological incompletion, but to work this given contradiction towards the choice of love; this is not given to us but something that we may embody and hold, or flee from in the demand of an exit strategy.  While the being that embodies and holds the choice of love will inevitably produce “children” (either biological or spiritual) in the ontological incompletion (lack in the Other), the being that flees will likely encounter an erotic build up that expresses a lustful fantasy devoid of love, or better, the Bataillian-Landian “thirst for annihilation”.

Due to the immense importance of understanding how we might embody this path from the most immense given contradiction (sex) to the most immense chosen contradiction (love), let us spend a moment thinking with Crooijmans on how he has applied Hegel to help us think this in detail.  Crooijmans outlines a pathway that involves the following trajectory: sex ≠ sex → sex as art → art as play → play as creativity → creativity as love.⁷⁴  What is at work in this trajectory is not a clear linear path but a twisted weird circle or loop where the embrace of the lack in the heart of sex opens to the condition of possibility for the embodiment of the non-Other in love.  To embrace this lack in the heart of sex is to embrace the other inclusive of its negativity, and still go to the end.  As Crooijmans states:⁷⁵   

“Love includes its other, its negativity, and works with it.  Only a love being worked at, and that one goes to the end of, to attain the result thereof, is worthy of being called love.”

Crooijmans here describes this as taking place at the site of the mediation of instinct with logic where we may learn how to cultivate bildung (lifelong learning) for the concrete freedom of spirit.⁷⁶  This mediation first and foremost, and necessarily, requires that we become “artful beings” with our libidinal energy (as opposed to say mechanistic), which could be associated with demonstrating a “clever cunning” that both makes use of, as well as undermines, rational mechanisms positing a clear goal, aim or desire.  In sexuality, because of ontological incompletion, things are never direct and clear, but rather best expressed in indirect and fuzzy innuendo that hint at the truth but do not completely reveal it.  To embody this way of being, one must be playful, not childish but child-like, in what are often actually serious situations.⁷⁷  When we are all the time serious in serious situations we can, without realizing it, resort to mechanistic and reductive behaviors and explanations that do not really explore the ambiguity and not-knowing of the space.  When we are playful in serious situations, new possibilities and potentialities are opened, that is, we reach the conditions of possibility for creativity.  Creativity is the exact opposite of rational mechanism, because in creativity something new can happen that breaks our capacity to predict in advance the future.  Here in one short paragraph, Crooijmans not only explicates his system but also articulates the stakes of the failure to embody this path:⁷⁸

“Lust is the failure or inability to sublimate libido to this truth of love, manifested in love’s greatest work — Absolute Spirit.  This ‘third factor’ beyond sensuous and representational chemistry is not the guarantee providing an unbreakable link that makes this love riskless, it is the abyssal self-grounding of love in the play of the gap, as positively manifested.  The commitment to this groundless creativity of the dance is the work of love itself.”

The fact that the sublimation of libido to the truth of love must be enacted without guarantee or unbreakable link — in other words, it must be a risk — is why the agent of this work must be the Hegelian “noumenal” subject: the subject that is capable of tarrying with the negative and from this work derive a magical power in and as its “true infinity”.  The Hegelian noumenal subject is abyssal, capable of playing in the gap, grounding a groundless creativity, and dancing in what many would consider an arduous and impossible reality.  However, while the work of love certainly helps us here, we cannot be seriously framing “love” as the true solution to the possibility of a technocapitalist singularity.  And of course things are more complex.  But it is a place from which we must start, and if we do not start there, we may lose the real of the plot.  The real of the plot here is that if we continue to embody a style of being that avoids the work of love and does not see in this work the actual deepening of its freedom, and instead opts for flight and exit, the social consequences could be a total collapse in the face of technocapital singularity.  What would be the ideal opposite possible reality?  

The ideal opposite possible reality would, of course, not be the eradication of either technology or capitalism, but rather its proper limitation in relation to the ends of human otherness.  This is something that media theorist Carl Hayden Smith articulates as “hyperhumanism” against “transhumanism”.⁷⁹  While the transhumanist vision points beyond the human as such via perceiving in technology the real ends of human history, the hyperhumanist vision affirms both technology and capitalism while placing both in service of the human future and its becoming other.  This does not mean that, in the affirmation of the human future and its becoming other, we do not become something other than what we are now — we very well could — but the human as experiment is what is perceived as most real (and not some vague image of an autonomous technocapitalist post-biological entity).  For all we know the image of an autonomous technocapitalist post-biological entity is a total fiction constructed out of the frustrated impotence that many human beings feel in the present moment.  Indeed, and as mentioned already, one of the major structural turning points in the writing of my aforementioned doctoral thesis Global Brain Singularity involved following the evolutionary logic of cultural and technological processes to their end, and in that process, recognising that these ends may be fantasies produced by the structure of the human mind in late capitalism.  While Land identifies with this fantasy positively, what this fantasy obfuscates is the possibility that, following Carl Hayden Smith, we are actually “not fully human yet”, that is not fully capable of actualising what we really are in the fullness of the work of love.  It could be that the new technological layer that is actualising across the planetary surface right now is actually opening the conditions of possibiltiy for precisely that work.

Here let us reconsider Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, this time not in the context of his reflections on the quadruplicity of world historical “empires” (Oriental, Greek, Roman, Germanic), but rather on the key structure of truth that is unfolded in what he calls “The Ethical System”.  In “The Ethical System” we are challenged with thinking of the “ethical truth” of the “libidinal individual” in the context of its (1) pair-bonding and familial relations, (2) community engagement and participation, and (3) the state and the beyond in the interrelation of states.  The fact that this system starts with pair-bonding and familial relations is why the starting point of the “noumenal subject’s” work of love is important.  However, first to repeat a disclaimer: it is obvious that the Philosophy of Right, while an essential and courageous representation of Hegel’s capacity to engage world history on the level of politics, is extremely limited (by Hegel’s own standard).  That is to say, that the conditions of possibility for the establishment of dialectical links constituting the “ethical truth” of the “libidinal individual” between family, community and state are necessarily in need of being problematised today due to, precisely, technocapitalist accelerationism qua “fanged noumena”.  Land is very aware of this fact:⁸⁰

“Another stream, associated primarily with Hegel, is guided by the implicit ideal of a speculative reconstruction of the political in the wake of Capital. [...] Abandon all attachment to the state. It is not Hegel's social managerialism that is most relevantly contrasted with Deleuzian nomadism. Hegelianism was only ever the black humour of modern history. It is rather the non-exclusive polity of decon­struction or cruder neo-Kantian liberal theories, with their abstractly re-composable humanities, which are the true counterpole to Deleuze's anti-political economism. In contrast to the obsessional neurosis of ethical thought.” 

Here we would be transgressing the Landian project by entertaining the possibility of a “speculative reconstruction of the political in the wake of Capital” and precisely subverting Land’s focus on technocapital as a force of deterritorialization without the possibility for reterritorialization.  Moreover, we would again call out Land on his own performative contradiction of exiting/fleeing in a type of “Deleuzian nomadism” to a land of authoritarian capital where a communist state starts to control all successful businesses rather than working through the “obsessional neurosis of ethical thought”.  It is precisely working through the “obsessional neurosis of ethical thought” where we may, not only avoid the fall into hyper-repressive perversion and psychosis, but find the conditions of possibility for the noumenal subject, its drive, and the difference it can make in reterritorialization re: “speculative reconstruction of the political in the wake of Capital”.

We start with the importance of the pair-bond and familial relations which Hegel repeatedly suggests represents the core foundation of the ethical system, an immensely heroic effort in dark times, and what forces of disorganization in the community violently attack as a threat.⁸¹  However, it must also be noted that Hegel, in linking the pair-bond and specifically marriage to the founding of a state, also links this activity to agriculture.  Here we find our first major historical rift that must be thought through by contemporary forms of noumenal subjectivity.  The fact is that most human subjects are not needed or engaged in forms of agriculture and thus capable of sustaining the agricultural lifeworld which was basically given in Hegel’s time and historical time in general.⁸²  Today we not only live in post-agricultural times but also post-industrial times, where the information age political-economy has yet to properly “reterritorialize” in a way that makes sense for long-term human pair-bonding. Consequently, many modern forms of subjectivity are struggling to sustain long-term bonds in the form of marriage or something analogous, and as a result, we are drifting more and more into a social situation in which familial relations themselves are weakening and disintegrating.  What is needed here in the work of love is the capacity to think through a new paradigm for long-term relationality mediating sexual difference from given to chosen ontological contradiction that is not just a traditional reaction to the real of our situation, but rather a playful and creative re-invention inspired by the real cracks of our situation.  Whatever this re-invention involves it can well accommodate a notion of sexual difference that includes the gap between body and signifier which governs transgender identifications, but more importantly, must accommodate a situation in which both man and woman are:

1. Living in urban environments 

2. Highly educated

3. Career focused 

I think that this triad of dimensions is necessary to mediate today without traditional regression if a new ethical system is to have truly universal appeal.  Moreover, we should see this challenge as absolutely positive in the sense that we should not in any way retroactively romanticize rural farm life where both education and career become hyper divided along gendered lines.  It is actually a gift to be able to live in a situation where both men and women can engage in processes of life long learning as well as develop a deep sense of vocation towards activities that do not absolutely centre the cultivation of the nuclear or extended family.  However, the price to pay for this is a higher level of self-reflective spirit to embody.  This requires a standpoint of self-reflective spirit that can see each individual in the couple as valuable towards their own ideal unity and mysterious background; and in that sense, the great value of the couple, is precisely to defend each other’s solitude and time towards the cultivation of dimensions that also include life-long learning and vocation.  It is to the great detriment of our ethical system that many emancipatory political projects, perhaps too greatly inspired by “Deleuzian nomadism” and “dividual multiplicity” as a reaction to “neo-Kantian liberal theories”, perceive the couple, the marriage and the family in general as an obstacle to, rather than as a necessary process for, emancipation.⁸³          

The next most important dimension to our challenge involves the link between community and the state, where Hegel theorizes the role of market forces as necessary for community formation, but at the same time, suggests that these forces must be contained by the state as a higher principle.⁸⁴  In other words, when we are thinking about the traditional family business or the small local businesses that became the bedrock of early modern capitalist society and local communities, we should see such enterprises as absolutely positive, while at the same time recognising that such organizations cannot thrive in our contemporary world due to the aforementioned fact that authoritarian technocapitalism has now come to overdetermine the state itself.  Is it really possible to reclaim our freedom and power on the level of family businesses run for community services?  What seems obvious here is that large businesses governing international technocapital can easily outcompete such local businesses.  This force actually functions as a gigantic homogenization of deterritorialization on the planet that further undermines the ability of the couple or the pair bonded unit to survive in post-agricultural and post-industrial urban conditions.⁸⁵  

Here we need to further extend the challenge of noumenal subjectivity to the possibility for creative re-invention in such conditions.  While no general solutions may exist, some possible recombinations that may be helpful involves either (1) merging practical life activities of both home and business as a unit in coordination with itself (a type of unified couple life project), or (2) a splitting of practical life activities on both the home and business side with one member managing to secure more stable strategies that allow for longer-term planning, with another member managing more riskier creative opportunities that could fail and need to be re-planned, but could also lead to tremendous long-term success.  Outside of the pair bond or marriage unit, we also need to become more creative with our friendships as the foundation for community, both physically and online.  Friendships can become vehicles for creative projects and business opportunities that may be in service to community building.  Moreover, forms of noumenal subjectivity that are also capable of holding long-term pairbonds may be best suited for such activities because these processes will inevitably involve the dimension of holding space for lack, gaps, and negativities that arise throughout the course of the projects.  In the same way that the great benefit of the pair-bond is to defend each other’s solitude and time towards the cultivation of life-long learning and vocation, this same ethics can be extended to great friendships and collaborative projects.  In short, they will require choosing to hold the monstrous contradiction of love as our freedom, as opposed to exiting and fleeing when things get difficult or when tensions arise leading to what seem to be, and what can potentially be, irreconcilable differences. At the same time, we should not hold ourselves up to an impossible ideal, and recognise that some differences cannot be sublated or sublimated, some differences are really and truly irreconcilable, either in the moment, or as time unto death. The only way we can make the process of holding tension and contradiction more likely, is by maintaining a stance of self-criticality in relation to one’s own universal standard.  In other words, when one is incapable of self-critique, split and exit become not only tempting, but highly probable.

What about the level of the state?  Is the nation state as such over?  What about the future of supranational states?  What is the future of structures like the United States of America (USA) or the European Union (EU)?  Are we heading into the “network state” beyond traditional states?  Here I think we cannot too quickly dismiss these entities by pointing out their obvious flaws and lacks on the level of democratic versus authoritarian capitalism, and instead opt solely for more locally based familial and community projects.  The choice before us and these entities, I would claim, involve precisely the dimension of fleeing and exit versus holding the monstrous contradiction that absolute negativity is at the same time the potential power for absolute positivity.  On the one hand, if the state can reclaim itself in the context of international technocapital one of the only ways it may be able to do this is by letting technocapitalist entities flee/exit while enduring the absolute negativity that may come as a result, while at the same time, actually reinvesting in the foundations of the ethical system, that is making it easier for people to build families and small businesses.  What this move amounts to is, in the frame being offered by Michael Downs in his next book, choosing to invest in the timenergy of “the people” as opposed to investing in international technocapital.  At the same time, and to again bring up the work of political scientist Benjamin Studebaker, if “the (democratic) way is shut”, for most of us, our time may be best spent focusing on the “lower order” structures of “the ethical system” (family, community), as opposed to worrying about what is essentially beyond our control: state capture by technocapitalism.  In short: we reach the real deadlock between the local-spatial, and the global-temporal; on the one hand, we cannot simple become local particularists who are only thinking about the bare moment of our life world; on the other hand, the global universal seems absolutely closed down to meaningful engagement.  

I do not have the final answers here: I see Land and the challenge of technocapitalist singularity as basically an open hole for speculative cognition.  The fact that Michael Downs has taken it up himself to more clearly frame the stakes of this tension is an important and invaluable contribution to underground theory.  At the same time, Land’s very style of writing and engagement can create a false opposition that is quite misleading and even damaging to the capacity to think through what is actually happening.  Land writes in such a way as that he is clearly thirsting for apocalypse, courting an inevitable future of techno sapiens that stand opposed to the biocultural nature of humanity.  But if Lacan is right, and the “style is the man” so to speak, we should be aware that there are other styles (with ethical consequence) in which we can contemplate the dizzying complexity of the intersection between the biocultural and the technological.  Think, for example, about the style of someone like Ray Kurwzeil, who basically says similar things to Land in a way, but with a style that gives one the impression that biocultural humans are not being led to extinction in relation to the future of technological evolution, but are basically being emancipated into it. I am certainly not here to suggest that either one knows the future, since my allegiance to Hegel’s thought is precisely on the level of this impossibility.  Thus, I suggest we should rather enter the mode of the philosophical proper, and enact a radically humble stance towards the future: we do not know what is going to happen in the 21st century.  We can read all we want into the contemporary developments of technology, but we simply do not know.   

What I have tried to outline here is what I think is basically the positive condition of possibility for reconstruction or reterritorialization of the ethical system.  This ethical system must be thought from the ground of the “noumenal” subject up through creative reconceptualization of the family, community, and hopefully also state in the context of a force of technocapitalism which does produce images of our annihilation (if not also a thirst for it).  To Land’s credit, this image of annihilation does come from a “fanged noumena”, from a cold Outside that breaks the Kantian correlationist loop and introduces to us a disorienting rupture to our a priori categories, and ways of basically synthesizing apperception.  Moreover, and as stated above, it could be that contemporary visions of the future of life taking a technological or “techno sapien” “post-biological” route have already been written in the predetermined (closed) future.  But it could also be a very limited vision of a situation that is wildly more complex and open-ended.  In this work, the difference in the ethics of exit/fleeing versus holding the monstrosity of contradiction has been investigated, with a distinct perspective suggesting that the choice of holding the monstrous contradiction is the truer approach.  Whether or not this truer approach holds for the real is a completely other question, but I suggest that it might due to the fact that there is no where else we can flee/exit to.  I can also say it is the approach I try to hold, while at the same time, admittedly, the struggle with exit and flight is always there and sometimes the best, or rather, the only option.  The disturbing paradox could be that the more we choose exit and flight the more it becomes the only option before us.  That is until there is nowhere left to exit and fly.  

I will end by leaving what I take to be the zero level difference at work between a Landian approach to the “fanged noumena” and what I would claim is an approach that focuses on the difference introduced by the “noumenal subject”.  While the “fanged noumena” is Land’s “Cold God” of the “Outside”, the difference that the “noumenal subject” injects into the real is not an external but an extimate one.  Extimacy is psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s notion for an “intimate externality” where we find intensities of “Heat” that are actually difficult to endure without “dropping to the ball” or “losing the plot” so to speak. We certainly find our fundamental fantasies there, which can be mixed up with thirsts for annihilation.  While Land suggests that Hegel’s noumenal subjectivity makes no difference vis-a-vis fanged noumena, we can hypothesize that it makes a real difference vis-a-vis extimate reality qua heated intensities that require a subject capable of holding the monstrous contradiction of love.  The noumenal subject that has tarried with death, and thus knows a magical power to endure love, is the true coldness of God qua self-relating negativity that we need in dark times.  Here following Antigone:

“True love is cold, more cold than death itself.  It’s not a matter of feeling which sways here and there.  Firm as a rock, it brushes off the sway of emotions, easily enduring all pressure and constraint.”        

1. Land, N. 2022. Part 4c: The Cracker Factory. In: The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press.

2. Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 139.

3. Downs, M. 2024. Michael Downs Facebook (August 16th at 12:52 AM). https://www.facebook.com/michael.downs.982/posts/pfbid0naWuwYEuspJNw3LCm3SjuSL99Xrewmxgx9wu9mATaBu1yYySSDniJVdBvxvvg7b3l (accessed: August 23 2024).

4. Downs further explores this question with Hegelian philosopher Todd McGowan on Theory Underground, see: “Todd McGowan on Hegel’s Theory of Death Phenomenology of Spirit vs. Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena. Theory Underground. https://youtu.be/0LKU5zss0bc?si=8vl8cLHeIUb6JrxW (accessed: September 1 2024).

5. Owen Cox, personal communication (Facebook messenger, August 8th 2024 at 11:09 PM).

6. Land, N. 2022. Part 4c: The Cracker Factory. In: The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press.

7. My readings of Land are indebted to Michael Downs course at Theory Underground.  Downs will be teaching on Slavoj Zizek’s philosophy this coming year, for more information, see: https://theoryunderground.com/ (accessed: September 4 2024).

8. For further context on Land’s anti-Hegelianism, see Downs blog “Why Nick Land Hates Hegel” on The Dangerous Maybe blog: https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/why-nick-land-hates-hegel-78ff751ff11b (accessed: September 1 2024).

9. Zizek vs. Land - “Nick is too optimistic!” Theory Underground. https://youtu.be/x1LsN2CKSpw?si=WRWZs5rEgGxF7nZN (accessed: August 25 2024).

10. Žižek, S. 2020. Hegel in a Wired Brain. Bloomsbury.

11. Žižek, S. 2022. Surplus Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed. Bloomsbury. p. 1-2.

12. Land, N. 2011. Meltdown. In: Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Mackay, R. & Brassier, R. (Eds.). Urbanomic: sequence. p. 441.

13. We could easily frame the United States of America as an “Empire” that controls, dominates and defines the most powerful “economic zone/ring” today, as suggested by Dr. Benjamin Studebaker in his August 2024 seminar of Thought Lab at The Portal.

14. The division between the “Anglo” and “Germano” spheres respectively will be important later in the article for thinking the mega-contradiction at work in Western culture itself.

15. Žižek, S. 2016. Q&A: Democratic Capitalism ‘In Crisis’, Says Philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Radio Free Europe. https://www.rferl.org/a/philosopher-slavoj-zizek-democratic-capitalism-in-crisis/27863243.html (accessed: August 24 2024).

16. Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 270.

17. See: Studebaker, B. 2023. The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy. palgrave macmillan.

18. Chamas, T. 2024. Liberal Totalitarianism: The Spectrum of Managed Democracy and What Makes the US Different. Revol Press. (Forth-coming)

19. Studebaker, B. 2023. The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy. palgrave macmillan.

20. Ibid. p. 4-5.

21. (which hopefully it is clear at this point do not refer to actually existing Greece and Rome today).

22. Which is the source of the need for Platonic philosophy, which seeks to reinstate this ideal unity when the principle of individuality is lost.

23. Which is the source of the need for Stoic philosophy, which seeks to preserve conscience in a corrupt society.

24. Here see Guy Standing’s notion of the “precariat”: Standing, G. 2011. The Precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.

25. Studebaker, B. 2023. The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy. palgrave macmillan. p. 7.

26. Ibid. p. 9.

27. Žižek, S. 2023. Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future? Allen Lane.

28. This will also become important later in the article.

29. Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 193-4.

30. Žižek, S. 2011. Introduction: Eppur Si Muove. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 8.

31. Žižek, S. 2011. Introduction: Eppur Si Muove. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 9.

32. Allison, H.E. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Yale University Press. p. 7.

33. Meillassoux, Q. 2010. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Bloomsbury Publishing.

34. Ibid. p. 5.

35. Ibid. p. 10.

36. For works in the Slovenian school that focus on this precise issue, see: Žižek, S. 2011. Interlude 5: Correlationism and Its Discontents. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 625-647.; and Zupančič, A. 2017. Object-Disoriented Ontology (Realism in Psychoanalysis). In: What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 73-84.  

37. Land, N. 2011. Meltdown. In: Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Mackay, R. & Brassier, R. (Eds.). Urbanomic: sequence. p. 441.

38. Land, N. 2011. Shamanic Nietzsche. In: Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Mackay, R. & Brassier, R. (Eds.). Urbanomic: sequence. p. 203-4.

39. Land quoting Bataille, see: Bataille, G. Oeuvres Completes, 12 Vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970-1988), vol. II, 246.

40. For Land the highest of “the new priests” was perhaps Hegel, who he called “high-church” of phenomenology, see: Land, N. 2011. Spirit and Teeth. In: Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Mackay, R. & Brassier, R. (Eds.). Urbanomic: sequence. p. 176.

41. Land, N. 2011. Shamanic Nietzsche. In: Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Mackay, R. & Brassier, R. (Eds.). Urbanomic: sequence. p. 211.

42. Land, N. 2011. Circuitries. In: Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Mackay, R. & Brassier, R. (Eds.). Urbanomic: sequence. p. 297.

43. Ibid. p. 294.

44. Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer.

45. Last, C. 2020. Atechnogenesis and Technocultural Evolution. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 165-188.

46. Last, C. 2020. Part IV: Field of Twenty-First Century Knowledge. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 214-312.

47. Downs, M. 2024. Michael Downs Facebook (August 16th at 12:52 AM). https://www.facebook.com/michael.downs.982/posts/pfbid0naWuwYEuspJNw3LCm3SjuSL99Xrewmxgx9wu9mATaBu1yYySSDniJVdBvxvvg7b3l (accessed: August 23 2024).

48. Land, N. 1992. Fanged Noumenon (passion of the cyclone). In: The Thirst for Annihilation. Routledge. p. 78.

49. Todd McGowan on Hegel’s Theory of Death Phenomenology of Spirit vs. Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena. Theory Underground. https://youtu.be/0LKU5zss0bc?si=8vl8cLHeIUb6JrxW (accessed: September 1 2024).

50. Ibid.

51. I frame this situation here: Last, C. 2020. Historical Foundations for Future Speculations. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 7-37.

52. Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.

53. Dawkins, R. 2014. Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene explained. The Royal Institute. https://youtu.be/j9p2F2oa0_k?si=PDhS0Z-t6e98Ab0_ (accessed: September 5 2024).

54. Freud, S. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In: Freud – Complete Works. p. 3746.

55. Ibid. p. 3747.

56. Žižek, S. 2011. The Limits of Hegel. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 496.

57. Žižek, S. 2011. Introduction: Eppur Si Muove. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 8.

58. Land, N. 1992. Fanged Noumenon (passion of the cyclone). In: The Thirst for Annihilation. Routledge. p. 78.

59. Žižek, S. 2011. Parataxis: Figures of the Dialectical Process. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 267.

60. Ibid. p. 266.

61. Žižek, S. 2011. Where There Is Nothing, Read That I Love You. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 84-5.

62. Žižek, S. 2011. The Limits of Hegel. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 493.

63. Žižek, S. 2011. Introduction: Eppur Si Muove. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 5.

64. Hegel, G.W.F. 1979. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 18-9.

65. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury. p. 6.

66. Bostrom, N. 2024. Deceiving AI Might Backfire On Us - Nick Bostrom. Alex O’Connor. https://youtu.be/J-_5ZXYDCkw?si=XLBLQY4PBMO744Yu (accessed: September 5 2024).

67. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury. p. 11.

68. Hegel, G.W.F. 1979. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 117.

69. From here on simply referred to as “work of love”, see: Crooijmans, D. 2024. The Work of Love. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 293-346.

70. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 141.

71. Ibid. p. 15.

72. Ibid. p. 22.

73. Žižek, S. 2019. Sex and the Failed Absolute. Bloomsbury. p. 61.

74. Crooijmans outlined this path in a meta-reflection on the drive of his philosophical work at the third Philosophy Portal retreat, and can be accessed in The Portal member course for 2024, see: https://philosophyportal.online/the-portal (accessed: September 2 2024).

75. Crooijmans, D. 2024. The Work of Love. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 312.

76. Crooijmans, D. 2024. Hegel’s Concept of True Infinity. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 287.

77. Crooijmans has written on the child spirit, here: Crooijmans, D. 2023. The Birth of the Spiritual Child. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 251-272.

78. Crooijmans, D. 2024. The Work of Love. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 313.

79. Smith, C.H. 2023. Overbecoming: Hyperhumanism as a Bridge Towards Interbeing. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 547-574.

80. Land, N. 2011. Making It With Death. In: Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Mackay, R. & Brassier, R. (Eds.). Urbanomic: sequence. p. 263-4.

81. Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 193.

82. Here metasystem transition theory could be integral, see: Last, C. 2020. Human Metasystem Transitions. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 67-81.

83. For more, see: Tutt, D. 2022. Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family. palgrave macmillan.

84. Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 193-4.

85. Yanis Varoufakis suggests we are now living in technofeudalism, see: Varoufakis, T. 2024. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House.