Terrorists and tech bros alike view accelerationism as a revolutionary weapon. Nick Land, their favorite philosopher, glimpsed something more sinister.
Meet THE ECSTATIC PHILOSOPHER OF HUMAN EXTINCTION who preached in Silicon Valley
The following text is a text for the "pros" It brought back to my memory the names of all the French philosophers I ran away from when I was at the Sorbonne which felt like a cemetery.
No wonder 'death, after all, says Nick Land, "marks the absolute negation of (limited, miserable, deplorable, defective) subjectivity" . Like Kant’s unknowable noumenon, death is that which thought cannot reach. It is proof that reality exceeds what we can think of it.
"Humanity is destined to die." This fact, Land writes, ‘is amongst the most basic thoughts, and no more than the most elementary qualification for philosophy, since to think on behalf of one’s species is a miserable parochialism.’
"Herein lies Land’s solution to overcoming post-Kantian phenomenology: make death the criterion for judging every philosopher’s credibility. No one can claim to have truly grasped reality if they have not acknowledged the finitude of their own thought. Instead of Kant’s transcendental idealist critique of thought’s attempts to go beyond itself (by subsuming the things in themselves under the concepts of reason), Land proffers a transcendental materialist critique. He criticises most philosophers for failing to look beyond their own reflection. He does this by anchoring philosophy in a material reality that thought cannot fully subsume – namely, death, which marks the complete cessation of thinking."
Ready for the "terrorists and tech bros cult of accelerationism" with some Kool-Aid?
That is, Lang continues, "to understand reality, we must eagerly embrace death with open arms. The title of Land’s first book, The Thirst for Annihilation, is a crude but fitting description of libidinal materialism: annihilation is the sole route to truth beyond our anthropic distortions of reality."
I make it short (you can read the entire argument here in Aeon: Vincent Lê . The No-Human Future")
Land’s commitment is not to human prosperity or even bare survival. It is to the absolute knowledge of the real"
Artificial Intelligence is Coming "The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary technosentience reservoir, into ‘dehumanised landscapes … emptied spaces’ where human culture will be dissolved.
I felt like chanting "Praise the new God and let's get rid of our imperfect body" . But I suppose the old Lord was good. These were the years one could meet Umberto Eco . The somber corridors of the Sorbonne resonated with our laughing . Philosophy was back. For more on Umberto Eco.