Fanged Noumena

Author: Nick Land
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 095530878X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 678

Book Description
A dizzying trip through the mind(s) of the provocative and influential thinker Nick Land. During the 1990s British philosopher Nick Land's unique work, variously described as “rabid nihilism,” “mad black deleuzianism,” and “cybergothic,” developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of “continental philosophy” —a route that was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land's work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British “speculative realist” philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers—writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers—who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision. Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. Fanged Noumena gives a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker's work, and has introduced his unique voice to a new generation of readers.

Fanged Noumena

Author: Nick Land
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0983216940
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 680

The Thirst for Annihilation

Author: Nick Land
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113493565X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Book Description
An important literary and philosophical figure, Georges Bataille has had a significant influence on other French writers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. The Thirst for Annihilation is the first book in English to respond to Bataille's writings. In no way, though, is Nick Land's book an attempt to appropriate Bataille's writings to a secular intelligibility or to compromise with the aridity of academic discourse - rather, it is written as a communion . Theoretical issues in philosophy, sociology, psychodynamics, politics and poetry are discussed, but only as stepping stones into the deep water of textual sacrifice where words pass over into the broken voice of death. Cultural modernity is diagnosed down to its Kantian bedrock with its transcendental philosophy of the object, but Bataille's writings cut violently across this tightly disciplined reading to reveal the strong underlying currents that bear us towards chaos and dissolution - the violent impulse to escape, the thirst for annihilation.

Writings 1997–2003

Author: CCRU
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1915103134
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

Malign Velocities

Author: Benjamin Noys
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1782792996
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Book Description
We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. Another, stranger, story is told here: of those who think we haven’t gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, /Malign Velocities/ tracks this 'accelerationism' as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism - the Italian Futurism; communist accelerationism after the Russian Revolution; the 'cyberpunk phuturism' of the ’90s and ’00s; the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines; the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis; and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism - suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.

The Making of the October Crisis

Author: D'Arcy Jenish
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0385663277
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
A definitive, mind-changing history of the October Crisis and the events leading up to it. The first bombs exploded in Montreal in the spring of 1963, and over the next seven years there were hundreds more bombings, many bank robberies, six murders and, in October 1970, the kidnappings of a British diplomat and a Quebec cabinet minister. The perpetrators were members of the Front de libération du Québec, dedicated to establishing a sovereign and socialist Quebec. Half a century on, we should have reached some clear understanding of what led to the October Crisis. Instead, too much attention has been paid to the Crisis and not enough to the years preceding it. Most of those who have written about the FLQ have been ardent nationalists, committed sovereigntists or former terrorists. They tell us that the authorities should have negotiated with the kidnappers and contend that Jean Drapeau's administration and the governments of Robert Bourassa and Pierre Trudeau created the October Crisis by invoking the War Measures Act. Using new research and interviews, D'Arcy Jenish tells for the first time the complete story—starting from the spring of 1963. This gripping narrative by a veteran journalist and master storyteller will change forever the way we view this dark chapter in Canadian history.

A Methodology of Possession

Author: James Ellis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Book Description
Garbage time never ends."A Methodology of Possession is a philosophical Hellraiser narrating Ellis's ego-shattering journey to the outside of time following the demonic guidance of accursed philosopher Nick Land. No writer has followed Land so far into the abysmal labyrinths of templexity and returned to tell the tale. At last a philosofiction worthy of its diabolical mentor." - John Cussans, author of Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex

Spinal Catastrophism

Author: Thomas Moynihan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029638
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology. Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and “organic memory” that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from “railway spine” to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history.

#Accelerate

Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 095752952X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Book Description
An apparently contradictory yet radically urgent collection of texts tracing the genealogy of a controversial current in contemporary philosophy. Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies. #Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike. On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own “Prometheanism,” and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century. At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment, and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of “reasonable” contemporary political alternatives.

Going Real: The Value of Design in the Era of PostCapitalism

Author: Giovanni Innella
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1622737407
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Book Description
In the age of post-capitalism, what is the value of design? Is value defined by economic potential? Or is it something far less tangible? Now more than ever design has the ability to engage us in economic, political and cultural debate, to actively resist the monotony of daily life, and to counteract the precarious situation on which modern society seems to rest. Positioning itself as a lens through which to view the world, design allows us, and in some cases, even forces us to reflect on the many aspects of the societies in which we live. Divided into three chapters, GOING REAL positions itself in relation to the works of Marc Jongen, Maurizio Lazzarato, Adam Greenfield and Tiziana Terranova, among others. However, unlike the abovementioned authors, this book draws on the works of selected designers and artists to reflect on the economic, political and cultural aspects of our post-capitalist societies. Beginning with an in-depth case study of Detroit during the downfall of the industrial era, this volume moves on to a timely and provocative insight into the human crises surrounding current migration trends with a particular focus on Calais. Finally, in the third chapter, the human body itself is laid bare as the authors analyse how and why the most personal of ‘spaces’ became not only the ultimate marketplace for businesses but also an object of control for governments.