Nick Land Quotes

Artists; those savage beasts that can't get enough of too much.

Do we really lack the delicacy to let God die quietly, on his own, like a dog?

Organs crawl like aphids upon the immobile motor of becoming

You scrape away your face and step into the dark...

The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM. Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided. If you want to find ICE, try thinking about what is blocking you out of the past. It certainly isn't a law of nature. Temporalization decompresses intensity, installing constraint.

Dead labour is far harder to control than the live stuff was, which is why the enlightenment project of interring gothic superstition was the royal road to the first truly vampiric civilization, in which death alone comes to rule.

After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace

Matter signals to its lost voyagers, telling them that their quest is vain, and that their homeland already lies in ashes behind them.

Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes a Christian, among a general confusion of becomings - becoming an animal, becoming a virus, becoming inorganic - just as he was also an antichrist, a poet, a pharmacist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestuous cannibal, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampire, and a werewolf. Just as he became his sister, and also a hermaphrodite. Trakl's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are stained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artillery, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn't simply undead, or in some other way inhuman. It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed, except as a battlefield, a reservoir of disease, the graveyard of a deconsecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated by lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference.

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.

The reality of identity is death, which is why the organism cannot coexist with what it is. On the smooth surface of the body without organs "what" and "is" recoil allergically from each other, opening an inclusive disjunction at the heart of essence.

A monster, in comparison, can be no more than a guide -- unless it fuses (like Yog Sothoth) into the enveloping extracosmic fabric, as a super-sentient concentration of doors.

The soul is the fantasy of a separation from death that persists in death, a kind of corporeal telepresence by which the body projects its servile categories into the unknown.

Punk arises within the culture of universal prostitution and laughs at the death of the social.

It's one of the Filter theories. Absorption into simulations. Cultures swirling out of the universe like dirty water down a plug. Derealization vortices.

I wiped the blade against my jeans and walked into the bar. It was mid-afternoon, very
hot and still. The bar was deserted. I ordered a whisky. The barman looked at the blood
and asked:
'God?'
'Yeah.'
'S'pose it's time someone finished that hypocritical little punk, always bragging about
his old man's power…'
He smiled crookedly, insinuatingly, a slight nausea shuddered through me. I replied
weakly:
'It was kind of sick, he didn't fight back or anything, just kept trying to touch me and
shit, like one of those dogs that try to fuck your leg. Something in me snapped, the
whingeing had ground me down too low. I really hated that sanctimonious little creep.'
'So you snuffed him?'
'Yeah, I've killed him, knifed the life out of him, once I started I got frenzied, it was
an ecstasy, I never knew I could hate so much.'
I felt very calm, slightly light-headed. The whisky tasted good, vaporizing in my
throat. We were silent for a few moments. The barman looked at me levelly, the edge of
his eyes twitching slightly with anxiety:
There'll be trouble though, don'tcha think?'
'I don't give a shit, the threats are all used up, I just don't give a shit.'
'You know what they say about his old man? Ruthless bastard they say. Cruel…'
'I just hope I've hurt him, if he even exists.'
'Woulden wanna cross him merself,' he muttered.
I wanted to say 'yeah, well that's where we differ',

Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.

Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to level-2?

Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino-economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality have been wearing thinner.

The unconscious does not coo sweet lyrics or unroll immaculate and measured prose, it howls and raves like the shackled and tortured beast that our civilization has made of it, and when the fetters are momentarily loosened the unconscious does not thank the ego for this meagre relief, but hisses, spits, and bites, as any wild thing would.

Suffering must be obviously futile if it is to be 'educational'. It is for this reason that our history is so unintelligible, and indeed, nothing that was true has ever made sense. 'Why was so much pain necessary?' we foolishly ask. But it is precisely because history has made no sense that we have learnt from it, and the lesson remains a brutal one.

The arc of history is long, but it bends towards zombie apocalypse.

Democracy and 'progressive democracy' are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state, Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society's informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool.

All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher's yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then - still further - of the unavowable horrors that 'fitness' (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)

Far from being the acme of religion - let alone its telic blossoming - God is the principle of its suppression. The unity of theos is the tombstone of sacred zero, the crumbling granitic foundation of secular destitution.

Space is going to be the greatest genetic quality filter since the dark ages.

The great educational value of the war against Christendom lies in the absolute truthlessness of the priest. Such purity is rare enough. The 'man of God' is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word, gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any proposition passing the lips of a priest is necessarily totally false, excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood. It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or reality.

It is a mere consolation to the timid to imagine that philosophy has died. The fact of the matter is quite to the contrary. Philosophy will be the last of human things; perhaps the efficient impulse of the end.

Enigma, positive confusion (delirium), problematic, pain, whatever we want to call it; the torment of the philosophers in any case, is the stimulus to ecstatic creation, to an interminable "resolution" into the enhanced provocations of art. What the philosophers have never understood is this: it is the unintelligibility of the world alone that gives it worth. "Inertia needs unity (monism); plurality of interpretations a sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the world of its disturbing and enigmatic character". Not, then, to oppose pain to the absence of pain as metaphysical pessimism does, but, rather, to differentiate the ecstatic overcoming of pain from weariness and inertia, to exult in new and more terrible agonies, fears, burning perplexities as the resource of becoming, overcoming, triumph, the great libidinal oscillations that break up stabilized systems and intoxicate on intensity; that is Dionysian pessimism -"refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic"; "the effect of the work of art is to excite the state that creates art -intoxication".

Nature or Nature's God" is not a statement, but a name, internally divided by tolerated uncertainty. It has the singularity of a proper name, whilst parenthesizing a suspended decision (Pyrrhonian epoche, of which much more in a future post). It designates rigidly, but obscurely, because it points into epistemological darkness - naming a Reality that not only 'has', but epitomizes identity, whilst nevertheless, for 'the sake of argument', eluding categorical identification. Patient in the face (or facelessness) of who or what it is, 'we' emerge from a pact, with one basic term: a preliminary decision is not to be demanded. It thus synthesizes a select language community, fused by the unknown.