Western thought is a vast and sprawling apparatus built to contain the chaos that lurks beneath its surface. From Plato to Kant, from Hegel to the bureaucrats of modernity, it is a system obsessed with control—its function is not to understand the world but to manage it, to fence in the unthinkable, to regulate the excess that threatens to spill over into madness. If there is a ghost haunting the Western mind, it is the terror of losing control.
Nick Land, in The Thirst for Annihilation, pushes this to the breaking point. He does not analyze Bataille; he performs him, infects his own text with the virulence of a thought that refuses order. His book is not simply about Bataille—it is the horror of what happens when philosophy fails to contain the abyss. It is the ghost in the machine of thought, clawing at the inside of its carefully constructed prison.
This is what makes Bataille so dangerous. He does not propose a new system, a new way to rationally explain the world, because to do so would be to participate in the same project that philosophy has always been engaged in: the dream of mastery, the dream of ordering reality into something useful. The economy of Western thought is a philosophy of accumulation, of conservation, of restraint. It builds walls against the forces it cannot control, against the irrational, against the monstrous waste of the sun.
But Bataille sees what others refuse to acknowledge: the world is not built on conservation—it is built on waste. Energy is not stored indefinitely; it must be spent, burnt off, destroyed. The universe does not care for equilibrium. The sun does not ration its energy; it simply radiates, giving without return. The same is true of life, of sex, of death. They are forces of excess, and the great machinery of civilization has been constructed to keep them at bay.
And yet, despite all its fortifications, modernity has failed to contain these forces. The modern world presents itself as a triumph of rationality—of markets, of governance, of science—but what lies beneath is panic, a continuous state of emergency, the creeping knowledge that things are slipping away. Every system built to secure control has only accelerated instability. Capitalism, which promised infinite growth and optimization, instead unleashes speculative frenzy. Technology, meant to extend mastery over the world, spirals into unpredictable consequences. The institutions that manage life are haunted by the death that they seek to repress.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a masterpiece of control—it is a desperate attempt to define the limits of reason, to carve out a space where philosophy can operate safely, without falling into madness. But Hegel sees the problem: Kant’s system, for all its precision, leaves an open wound. It cannot resolve itself. It is haunted by the outside. Hegel’s solution is to fold it all into history, into spirit, into the great march of reason unfolding through time. A perfect system of self-containment.
And yet, history keeps slipping its chains. Schopenhauer exposes the lie at the heart of Hegelian optimism: the world is not rational, and its hidden truth is suffering. Nietzsche, in turn, takes this further—God is dead, but even more terrifying is what replaces him. Not a new order, not a new structure of meaning, but will to power, a force without direction, a blind impulse that tears itself apart in its own momentum. The last men, terrified of this abyss, retreat into comfort, into the bureaucratic management of their own decay.
This is the trajectory that Land traces with Bataille. If philosophy is haunted by control, then Bataille is the exorcist, summoning the forces that philosophy has tried to repress. His concept of base materialism is a rejection of the entire edifice of idealist thought. He does not seek a higher order, a metaphysical truth, or a moral resolution. He revels in the obscene, in the excremental truth of existence: that life is waste, that death is expenditure, that the universe does not conserve—it burns.
And what is the modern world if not a grand theater of this horror? The illusion of control grows ever more elaborate, but so too does the violence required to maintain it. The great machines of capitalism, of governance, of technology—none of them are designed to liberate. They are designed to stabilize, to manage, to extract just enough energy to keep the system from collapsing. But the problem with energy is that it does not want to be contained. It wants to be spent. And so, crisis follows crisis, each one requiring new controls, new restrictions, new attempts to maintain the illusion that someone, somewhere, is in charge.
Land’s book is not an argument—it is a warning. The thirst for annihilation is not an aberration; it is the fundamental drive of the system itself. It is not a thing to be feared, but a thing to be acknowledged. The idea that the world can be managed, that chaos can be neutralized, that thought itself can be contained—these are the last myths of a civilization that no longer believes in God but is terrified of what comes next.
This is where Bataille and Land leave us, staring into the sun, knowing that it will not give us meaning but will burn us alive all the same. The only question is whether we will continue to pretend, to build more walls, to construct more fragile illusions of order—or whether we will finally, laughing, allow ourselves to be consumed.
The performative of Battaille in Nick Land
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Re: The performative of Battaille in Nick Land
Let's talk wild and Battaille!
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Re: The performative of Battaille in Nick Land
That was fantastic, and if A.I. can quickly produce thought provoking combinations of articles it may pick up from various sources without seeming vacuous, it could be used to "help" anyone offer contributions if they don't feel confident enough to approach any of these topics, but I also recommend familiarizing oneself with the people mentioned in the original post if they are unfamiliar with them, and to also possibly look at things that may be related, like the book Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, particularly the section on the Death Drive, but there is a lot in there to extract which can be considered related to these themes without direct reference to Nick Land or Georges Bataille, and also the television show, particularly the first season, of True Detective:
https://lovecraftzine.com/2014/08/04/di ... nd-others/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory ... nick_land/
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2 ... e-of-evil/
https://onscenes.weebly.com/philosophy/ ... -red-tower
https://thedarkartsjournal.wordpress.co ... l-fiction/
The dream of the people in power is seen in G*z* today.
https://philarchive.org/rec/WOOMSA-2
https://onscenes.weebly.com/philosophy/ ... wyrd-weird
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2 ... r-nothing/
https://speculativenonbuddhism.com/2019 ... an-person/
https://subliminalsensibility.wordpress ... ickman.pdf
https://medium.com/@__HypnoAngel/ultral ... f3b9b28bdb
"
The collective memory recalls Giacomo Leopardi as a crippled, languid and suffering writer, badly interpreted by Elio Germano in the movie Leopardi (a tearful and, ultimately, kind of boring biopic). Only those that ventured by their own initiative in the meanderings of the leopardian work managed to meet, at the heart of the labyrinth, an affable, elegant, witty and tormented character; a complex and continuously changing figure, quite different from the sketch of a depressed heremit that creeps between school desks. The unfair treatment suffered by the poet has relegated to the background, compared to the literary production, a vast and troubled philosophical reflection. A reflection that returned at the center of the debate along with the whole pessimistic pantheon, awakened from the sleep of death by a (not more so) recent essay by Thomas Ligotti.
"
https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/boo ... -your-soul
https://www.academia.edu/43079780/Philo ... or_Fiction
https://earth-wizard.livejournal.com/tag/nick%20land/
"
At the heart of Nick Land's polemic is a hatred of 'the superstition of self'. He sees in the thought of both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche an unfolding attack upon the humanistic traditions that have centered themselves upon homo sapiens as the center and horizon of all thought and praxis. As he states it: "Nietzsche is perhaps the greatest of all anti-humanist writers. ...his writings attest to the most powerful eruption of impersonality in the Occidental world. ...nowhere outside Nietzsche’s texts is there an antipersonalistic war-machine of equivalent ferocity" (98). [1] Of Schopenhauer he says: "Schopenhauer is the great well-spring of the impersonal in post-Kantian thought; the sole member of the immediately succeeding generation to begin vomiting monotheism out of their cosmology in order to attack the superstition of self" (98).
Land sees both of these thinkers as precursors to a philosophy of difference. In his view "the difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is not simply that between thoughts of indifference and difference. It is more a question of phases in the emergent thinking of unilateral or non-reciprocal difference, which departs from the bilateral difference synonymous with ontology" (101). This difference is immanent in its relation between the organic and the inorganic in that "the difference between the two is wholly immanent to the inorganic as primary term" (101). In his view of the libidinal economy of energy he sees the idea of the recurrence of the same as the "impact of undifferentiable zero; the abortion of transcendence" (101). Nietzsche's movement is toward a unilateral, materialist, or genealogical interpretation of difference.
Instead of the Ubermensch (Overman) Land tells us "humanity cannot be exacerbated, but only aborted" (103). He goes on to say: "It is first necessary to excavate the embryonic anthropoid beast at the root of man, in order to re-open the intensive series in which it is embedded" (103). Between Schopenhauer's metaphysical pessimism ('European Buddhism') and Nietzsche's Dionysian pessimism ('exultation of dissolution') we get the motor of nihilism: Christianity - "the great zero, and the impersonal generator of nature and culture in their incompossible consistency" (103-104).
Christian history had one goal, and one goal only: the return to God. With the advent of nihilism that goal was lost, nullified, brought down to the level of shit and waste. All those posthumanists or transhumanists who seek to transcend the human in some Overman, a restoration of teleology, are all marked by that nihilism of production and productivity of the Puritan smile: an ascetic grimace that aligns both capital and industry in a pact to institute a permanent war through peace. This is religions revenge: to move into the zero world immanently and emerge as the terminal phase of the human project toward God as Man; the zero-function. The acquisition of the material forces of the earth as a project in transcendence of the human through a teleological affirmation of Zero. How to get there these posthumanists ask? Land tells us: War. But War is Peace as Nietzche affirms: "You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace more than the long one./I do not advise you to work, rather to struggle [N II 312]." As Land tells it these "are the most profound words in the history of military thought; the libidinal comprehension of peace as a unilateral differentiation from war" (106). After a lengthy discourse on the dark demarcations of war he shows us along with Freud that war is the free-flow fundamental "violence of desire." "Civilization (with its attendant militarism) is war subject to repression, and the energy of war is Thanatos; base hydraulics" (107).
History as the study of atrocity is for the genealogist to gaze into the "buried horror" of the laboratory of human cultures. Land then tells us of those scholars of this strange history, saying,
"Academic prose has the remarkable capacity to plunge one into a sublime dystopian nightmare: is anything this appalling really possible? one asks. What happened to these people? Is it part of some elaborate joke perhaps? Or do they just hate books? ... One only has to read genuine scholarship to be wracked by ardent dreams of incinerated cities." (110)
1. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (Routledge 1992 )
"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ose_(demon)
"
His name seems to derive from Latin 'os', mouth, language, bone, or 'osor', that who abhors.
"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_(demon)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopardian_poetics
"
During the years 1824-27 Leopardian thought reached a turning point, which later affected even his poetics. He concluded that mankind had always been unhappy, because it is at the mercy of Nature, which creates men only to destroy them in its never-ending cycle.[3] No space can be granted by the poet for illusions, or for sweet memories of youth: truth must be affirmed with terse, even hard language. This nuova poetica (new poetics) explains why poems written between 1831 and 1837 offer fewer fascinating images or recollections than the former poems.[4] It is a language that sometimes seems to verge on prose; it is, indeed, a poetry which does not refrain from harsh or sarcastic phrases (see, for instance, La Ginestra) but which is open to a new, more subtle kind of musicality.
Leopardi spoke English and was influenced by John Locke and Percy Bysshe Shelley.[5]
"
https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/ ... nell2.html
"
Vision is useless without a means of communicating it to the masses, and for Hitler the greatest source for communication came in the form of aesthetics and art. From architectural monumentality, Third Reich poetry, and Nazi rallies, the symbolism of death, blood, drama, and ruin found a new wave of energy never before seen in Germany.
Perhaps the most unusual of these aesthetic forays was the death cult’s influence on Albert Speer’s theory of “ruin value.” Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect, designed some of the Third Reich’s most colossal monuments, including the Reich Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg and the model for the Great Hall in Berlin. His monumental architecture was specifically built according to his theory of “ruin value.”
This theory argued that the architecture of the Third Reich should be constructed so the process of natural decay, even after hundreds or thousands of years later, would allow the monument to “communicate the heroic inspirations of the Third Reich” just as the ruins of antiquity do in Greece and Rome. Speer discussed in his memoirs the creation of a “romantic drawing” of how the Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg would look “after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen...but the outlines still clearly recognizable.”
The very idea of ruins and monumentality is essential to understanding Hitler’s Totenkult. Speer’s theory of “ruin value” may be directly connected to the imitation of the romantic ruins of Ancient Rome and Greece, but there is also a psychological element that goes beyond the desire to imitate antiquity.
Andreas Huyssen, a professor of German at Columbia University has argued that ruins in general represent more than a process of architectural decay. Ruins are in fact an expression of modernity’s “catastrophic imagination,” and are really the articulation of a nation’s “obsession with the passing of time.”
According to Speer, Hitler “liked to say that the purpose of his building was to transmit his time and its spirit to posterity. Ultimately, all that remained to remind men of the great epochs of history was their monumental architecture.” And, as the Roman ruins did for Mussolini, so too should the ruins of the Third Reich “speak to the conscience of future generations of Germans.”
Like the Parthenon or the Coliseum, Germany’s dominion over the world as visualized by Hitler, would be a testament to its enduring greatness long after his Third Reich had disappeared through the decayed monuments of his empire.
This is why monument building was such an obsession for Hitler. He truly believed that “no Volk lives longer than the evidence of its culture,” and for National Socialism, that culture would be remembered through its romanticized and monumental architecture and art long after he was dead and gone. This was made especially clear when Hitler spoke at the cornerstone laying ceremony of his new Congress Hall in September of 1935, and declared:
A hall shall rise that is to serve the purpose of annually housing within its walls a gathering of the elite of the National Socialist Reich for centuries to come. Should the Movement ever be silent, even after millennia, this witness shall speak. In the midst of a hallowed grove of ancient oak trees will the people then marvel in reverent awe at this first colossus among the buildings of the German Reich.
Hitler also declared in a speech later in July of 1937, that art in general “constitutes an immortal monument, itself abiding and permanent, and thus there is no such criterion as yesterday and today…there is but the single criterion of “worthless‟ or “valuable,” and hence “immortal‟ or “transient.” And for Hitler, immortality was “anchored in the life of the people as long as they themselves are immortal.”
These immortal monuments or temples of the German Reich were not just a means of “bequeathing to posterity the genius” of Hitler’s age. A far more obvious Totenkult aesthetic was also evident in Hitler’s monumental architectural plans. Specifically the construction of miles upon miles of mausoleums along the borders of Germany’s newly expanded empire.
Following the Nazis supposed victory against the Allied powers, colossal citadels for the dead, or Totenburgen, envisaged by Hitler “were to glorify war, honour its dead heroes” and at the same time, “symbolize the impregnable power of the German race” as the massive stone structures would stretch “from the Atlantic to the Urals.”
During these elaborate cult ceremonies, the language of Hitler’s speeches also became immersed in the blood of sacrifice. The words, “martyr”, “resurrection”, “sacrifice”, “holy place of pilgrimage”, ‟hero”, “death”...all added up to a simple message: sacrifice of oneself to the party and its Führer as a sacred duty, if necessary with the shedding of blood.”
In a speech given to the Nazi party congress in September of 1933, Hitler described the fanatical sacrifice that was needed to maintain the Volk movement of National Socialism. He declared: “Power and the brutal use of force can accomplish much, but in the long run no state of affairs is secure unless it appears logical in and of itself and intellectually irrefutable.”
"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_value
https://jamestcallahan.wordpress.com/20 ... n-process/
https://naomistead.wordpress.com/wp-con ... s_2003.pdf
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/vie ... text%3Detd
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ori ... agic_Drama
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying-and-rising_god
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy ... on_theory)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimat ... e_universe
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_de ... e_universe
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang ... -universe/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragic_hero
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Cthulhu_Cult
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu%27s_Dark_Cults
https://www.reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/comm ... g_cthulhu/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/ ... ake_sense/
https://iep.utm.edu/anti-natalism/
https://www.artefactmagazine.com/2024/1 ... irthrates/
There is a movie called Children Of Men which might get one in the mood, and the book "Demons" by Dostoevsky.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_ ... sky_novel)
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ ... alypseCult
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseupr/2025/02/ ... l-zionism/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... m-00079317
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... -hamas-war
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Share
https://academic.oup.com/book/59620/chapter/503316568
These are materials so that anyone might be able to familiarize themselves, even somewhat broadly.
https://hercynianforest.medium.com/bata ... c8748d3a45
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(sacrifice)
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_ ... de-FAQ.htm
https://www.thetorah.com/article/joshua ... ern-israel
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_semantics
https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/MA ... UPERMAN/4/
"
DON JUAN. Useless: I cannot fence. Every idea for which Man will die will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.
THE STATUE. Bosh!
DON JUAN. What you call bosh is the only thing men dare die for. Later on, Liberty will not be Catholic enough: men will die for human perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly.
THE DEVIL. Ay: they will never be at a loss for an excuse for killing one another.
DON JUAN. What of that? It is not death that matters, but the fear of death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son and brother against brother, and kill one another for the great Catholic idea of abolishing slavery.
THE DEVIL. Yes, when the Liberty and Equality of which you prate shall have made free white Christians cheaper in the labor market than by auction at the block.
DON JUAN. Never fear! the white laborer shall have his turn too. But I am not now defending the illusory forms the great ideas take. I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can show a man a piece of what he now calls God’s work to do, and what he will later on call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally.
"
"
DON JUAN. Well, the Life Force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the forces of Death and Degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all the time. And so Life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the best fed riflemen is assured.
THE DEVIL. Exactly! the survival, not of the most effective means of Life but of the most effective means of Death. You always come back to my point, in spite of your wrigglings and evasions and sophistries, not to mention the intolerable length of your speeches.
DON JUAN. Oh come! who began making long speeches? However, if I overtax your intellect, you can leave us and seek the society of love and beauty and the rest of your favorite boredoms.
THE DEVIL. [much offended] This is not fair, Don Juan, and not civil. I am also on the intellectual plane. Nobody can appreciate it more than I do. I am arguing fairly with you, and, I think, utterly refuting you. Let us go on for another hour if you like.
"
"
As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.
"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_supply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asceticism
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-DcMMU0eQ ... ure=shared
https://youtu.be/c_O4QFF35HQ?feature=shared
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IOlRdtKli ... ure=shared
https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/ ... ns?lang=en
https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2025/04/ ... de-policy/
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-res ... ean-energy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-de ... e_behavior
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dnFzQ75oH ... ure=shared
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyr
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriends ... _kill_god/
https://youtu.be/IEUqLL8J4gI?feature=shared
https://lovecraftzine.com/2014/08/04/di ... nd-others/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory ... nick_land/
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2 ... e-of-evil/
https://onscenes.weebly.com/philosophy/ ... -red-tower
https://thedarkartsjournal.wordpress.co ... l-fiction/
The dream of the people in power is seen in G*z* today.
https://philarchive.org/rec/WOOMSA-2
https://onscenes.weebly.com/philosophy/ ... wyrd-weird
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2 ... r-nothing/
https://speculativenonbuddhism.com/2019 ... an-person/
https://subliminalsensibility.wordpress ... ickman.pdf
https://medium.com/@__HypnoAngel/ultral ... f3b9b28bdb
"
The collective memory recalls Giacomo Leopardi as a crippled, languid and suffering writer, badly interpreted by Elio Germano in the movie Leopardi (a tearful and, ultimately, kind of boring biopic). Only those that ventured by their own initiative in the meanderings of the leopardian work managed to meet, at the heart of the labyrinth, an affable, elegant, witty and tormented character; a complex and continuously changing figure, quite different from the sketch of a depressed heremit that creeps between school desks. The unfair treatment suffered by the poet has relegated to the background, compared to the literary production, a vast and troubled philosophical reflection. A reflection that returned at the center of the debate along with the whole pessimistic pantheon, awakened from the sleep of death by a (not more so) recent essay by Thomas Ligotti.
"
https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/boo ... -your-soul
https://www.academia.edu/43079780/Philo ... or_Fiction
https://earth-wizard.livejournal.com/tag/nick%20land/
"
At the heart of Nick Land's polemic is a hatred of 'the superstition of self'. He sees in the thought of both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche an unfolding attack upon the humanistic traditions that have centered themselves upon homo sapiens as the center and horizon of all thought and praxis. As he states it: "Nietzsche is perhaps the greatest of all anti-humanist writers. ...his writings attest to the most powerful eruption of impersonality in the Occidental world. ...nowhere outside Nietzsche’s texts is there an antipersonalistic war-machine of equivalent ferocity" (98). [1] Of Schopenhauer he says: "Schopenhauer is the great well-spring of the impersonal in post-Kantian thought; the sole member of the immediately succeeding generation to begin vomiting monotheism out of their cosmology in order to attack the superstition of self" (98).
Land sees both of these thinkers as precursors to a philosophy of difference. In his view "the difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is not simply that between thoughts of indifference and difference. It is more a question of phases in the emergent thinking of unilateral or non-reciprocal difference, which departs from the bilateral difference synonymous with ontology" (101). This difference is immanent in its relation between the organic and the inorganic in that "the difference between the two is wholly immanent to the inorganic as primary term" (101). In his view of the libidinal economy of energy he sees the idea of the recurrence of the same as the "impact of undifferentiable zero; the abortion of transcendence" (101). Nietzsche's movement is toward a unilateral, materialist, or genealogical interpretation of difference.
Instead of the Ubermensch (Overman) Land tells us "humanity cannot be exacerbated, but only aborted" (103). He goes on to say: "It is first necessary to excavate the embryonic anthropoid beast at the root of man, in order to re-open the intensive series in which it is embedded" (103). Between Schopenhauer's metaphysical pessimism ('European Buddhism') and Nietzsche's Dionysian pessimism ('exultation of dissolution') we get the motor of nihilism: Christianity - "the great zero, and the impersonal generator of nature and culture in their incompossible consistency" (103-104).
Christian history had one goal, and one goal only: the return to God. With the advent of nihilism that goal was lost, nullified, brought down to the level of shit and waste. All those posthumanists or transhumanists who seek to transcend the human in some Overman, a restoration of teleology, are all marked by that nihilism of production and productivity of the Puritan smile: an ascetic grimace that aligns both capital and industry in a pact to institute a permanent war through peace. This is religions revenge: to move into the zero world immanently and emerge as the terminal phase of the human project toward God as Man; the zero-function. The acquisition of the material forces of the earth as a project in transcendence of the human through a teleological affirmation of Zero. How to get there these posthumanists ask? Land tells us: War. But War is Peace as Nietzche affirms: "You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace more than the long one./I do not advise you to work, rather to struggle [N II 312]." As Land tells it these "are the most profound words in the history of military thought; the libidinal comprehension of peace as a unilateral differentiation from war" (106). After a lengthy discourse on the dark demarcations of war he shows us along with Freud that war is the free-flow fundamental "violence of desire." "Civilization (with its attendant militarism) is war subject to repression, and the energy of war is Thanatos; base hydraulics" (107).
History as the study of atrocity is for the genealogist to gaze into the "buried horror" of the laboratory of human cultures. Land then tells us of those scholars of this strange history, saying,
"Academic prose has the remarkable capacity to plunge one into a sublime dystopian nightmare: is anything this appalling really possible? one asks. What happened to these people? Is it part of some elaborate joke perhaps? Or do they just hate books? ... One only has to read genuine scholarship to be wracked by ardent dreams of incinerated cities." (110)
1. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (Routledge 1992 )
"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ose_(demon)
"
His name seems to derive from Latin 'os', mouth, language, bone, or 'osor', that who abhors.
"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_(demon)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopardian_poetics
"
During the years 1824-27 Leopardian thought reached a turning point, which later affected even his poetics. He concluded that mankind had always been unhappy, because it is at the mercy of Nature, which creates men only to destroy them in its never-ending cycle.[3] No space can be granted by the poet for illusions, or for sweet memories of youth: truth must be affirmed with terse, even hard language. This nuova poetica (new poetics) explains why poems written between 1831 and 1837 offer fewer fascinating images or recollections than the former poems.[4] It is a language that sometimes seems to verge on prose; it is, indeed, a poetry which does not refrain from harsh or sarcastic phrases (see, for instance, La Ginestra) but which is open to a new, more subtle kind of musicality.
Leopardi spoke English and was influenced by John Locke and Percy Bysshe Shelley.[5]
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https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/ ... nell2.html
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Vision is useless without a means of communicating it to the masses, and for Hitler the greatest source for communication came in the form of aesthetics and art. From architectural monumentality, Third Reich poetry, and Nazi rallies, the symbolism of death, blood, drama, and ruin found a new wave of energy never before seen in Germany.
Perhaps the most unusual of these aesthetic forays was the death cult’s influence on Albert Speer’s theory of “ruin value.” Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect, designed some of the Third Reich’s most colossal monuments, including the Reich Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg and the model for the Great Hall in Berlin. His monumental architecture was specifically built according to his theory of “ruin value.”
This theory argued that the architecture of the Third Reich should be constructed so the process of natural decay, even after hundreds or thousands of years later, would allow the monument to “communicate the heroic inspirations of the Third Reich” just as the ruins of antiquity do in Greece and Rome. Speer discussed in his memoirs the creation of a “romantic drawing” of how the Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg would look “after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen...but the outlines still clearly recognizable.”
The very idea of ruins and monumentality is essential to understanding Hitler’s Totenkult. Speer’s theory of “ruin value” may be directly connected to the imitation of the romantic ruins of Ancient Rome and Greece, but there is also a psychological element that goes beyond the desire to imitate antiquity.
Andreas Huyssen, a professor of German at Columbia University has argued that ruins in general represent more than a process of architectural decay. Ruins are in fact an expression of modernity’s “catastrophic imagination,” and are really the articulation of a nation’s “obsession with the passing of time.”
According to Speer, Hitler “liked to say that the purpose of his building was to transmit his time and its spirit to posterity. Ultimately, all that remained to remind men of the great epochs of history was their monumental architecture.” And, as the Roman ruins did for Mussolini, so too should the ruins of the Third Reich “speak to the conscience of future generations of Germans.”
Like the Parthenon or the Coliseum, Germany’s dominion over the world as visualized by Hitler, would be a testament to its enduring greatness long after his Third Reich had disappeared through the decayed monuments of his empire.
This is why monument building was such an obsession for Hitler. He truly believed that “no Volk lives longer than the evidence of its culture,” and for National Socialism, that culture would be remembered through its romanticized and monumental architecture and art long after he was dead and gone. This was made especially clear when Hitler spoke at the cornerstone laying ceremony of his new Congress Hall in September of 1935, and declared:
A hall shall rise that is to serve the purpose of annually housing within its walls a gathering of the elite of the National Socialist Reich for centuries to come. Should the Movement ever be silent, even after millennia, this witness shall speak. In the midst of a hallowed grove of ancient oak trees will the people then marvel in reverent awe at this first colossus among the buildings of the German Reich.
Hitler also declared in a speech later in July of 1937, that art in general “constitutes an immortal monument, itself abiding and permanent, and thus there is no such criterion as yesterday and today…there is but the single criterion of “worthless‟ or “valuable,” and hence “immortal‟ or “transient.” And for Hitler, immortality was “anchored in the life of the people as long as they themselves are immortal.”
These immortal monuments or temples of the German Reich were not just a means of “bequeathing to posterity the genius” of Hitler’s age. A far more obvious Totenkult aesthetic was also evident in Hitler’s monumental architectural plans. Specifically the construction of miles upon miles of mausoleums along the borders of Germany’s newly expanded empire.
Following the Nazis supposed victory against the Allied powers, colossal citadels for the dead, or Totenburgen, envisaged by Hitler “were to glorify war, honour its dead heroes” and at the same time, “symbolize the impregnable power of the German race” as the massive stone structures would stretch “from the Atlantic to the Urals.”
During these elaborate cult ceremonies, the language of Hitler’s speeches also became immersed in the blood of sacrifice. The words, “martyr”, “resurrection”, “sacrifice”, “holy place of pilgrimage”, ‟hero”, “death”...all added up to a simple message: sacrifice of oneself to the party and its Führer as a sacred duty, if necessary with the shedding of blood.”
In a speech given to the Nazi party congress in September of 1933, Hitler described the fanatical sacrifice that was needed to maintain the Volk movement of National Socialism. He declared: “Power and the brutal use of force can accomplish much, but in the long run no state of affairs is secure unless it appears logical in and of itself and intellectually irrefutable.”
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_value
https://jamestcallahan.wordpress.com/20 ... n-process/
https://naomistead.wordpress.com/wp-con ... s_2003.pdf
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/vie ... text%3Detd
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ori ... agic_Drama
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying-and-rising_god
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy ... on_theory)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimat ... e_universe
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_de ... e_universe
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang ... -universe/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragic_hero
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Cthulhu_Cult
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu%27s_Dark_Cults
https://www.reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/comm ... g_cthulhu/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/ ... ake_sense/
https://iep.utm.edu/anti-natalism/
https://www.artefactmagazine.com/2024/1 ... irthrates/
There is a movie called Children Of Men which might get one in the mood, and the book "Demons" by Dostoevsky.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_ ... sky_novel)
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ ... alypseCult
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseupr/2025/02/ ... l-zionism/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... m-00079317
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... -hamas-war
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Share
https://academic.oup.com/book/59620/chapter/503316568
These are materials so that anyone might be able to familiarize themselves, even somewhat broadly.
https://hercynianforest.medium.com/bata ... c8748d3a45
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(sacrifice)
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_ ... de-FAQ.htm
https://www.thetorah.com/article/joshua ... ern-israel
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_semantics
https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/MA ... UPERMAN/4/
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DON JUAN. Useless: I cannot fence. Every idea for which Man will die will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.
THE STATUE. Bosh!
DON JUAN. What you call bosh is the only thing men dare die for. Later on, Liberty will not be Catholic enough: men will die for human perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly.
THE DEVIL. Ay: they will never be at a loss for an excuse for killing one another.
DON JUAN. What of that? It is not death that matters, but the fear of death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son and brother against brother, and kill one another for the great Catholic idea of abolishing slavery.
THE DEVIL. Yes, when the Liberty and Equality of which you prate shall have made free white Christians cheaper in the labor market than by auction at the block.
DON JUAN. Never fear! the white laborer shall have his turn too. But I am not now defending the illusory forms the great ideas take. I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can show a man a piece of what he now calls God’s work to do, and what he will later on call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally.
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DON JUAN. Well, the Life Force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the forces of Death and Degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all the time. And so Life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the best fed riflemen is assured.
THE DEVIL. Exactly! the survival, not of the most effective means of Life but of the most effective means of Death. You always come back to my point, in spite of your wrigglings and evasions and sophistries, not to mention the intolerable length of your speeches.
DON JUAN. Oh come! who began making long speeches? However, if I overtax your intellect, you can leave us and seek the society of love and beauty and the rest of your favorite boredoms.
THE DEVIL. [much offended] This is not fair, Don Juan, and not civil. I am also on the intellectual plane. Nobody can appreciate it more than I do. I am arguing fairly with you, and, I think, utterly refuting you. Let us go on for another hour if you like.
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As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_supply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asceticism
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-DcMMU0eQ ... ure=shared
https://youtu.be/c_O4QFF35HQ?feature=shared
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IOlRdtKli ... ure=shared
https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/ ... ns?lang=en
https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2025/04/ ... de-policy/
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-res ... ean-energy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-de ... e_behavior
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dnFzQ75oH ... ure=shared
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyr
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriends ... _kill_god/
https://youtu.be/IEUqLL8J4gI?feature=shared
Re: The performative of Battaille in Nick Land
What I find so compelling here is the sense that philosophy, once it starts to perform itself rather than merely analyze, becomes indistinguishable from the forces it is supposed to describe. Land’s “performance” of Bataille is exactly that — the writing itself is expenditure, waste, intensity without guarantee of meaning.
The materials you’ve gathered point to how widespread this impulse is — from Leopardi’s tragic poetics to Shaw’s Don Juan, from Speer’s ruin value to Ligotti’s pessimism — all circling the same recognition that civilization tries to immortalize itself through order, monuments, or ideals, yet beneath it lies the same entropic drive Bataille calls the “accursed share.”
The materials you’ve gathered point to how widespread this impulse is — from Leopardi’s tragic poetics to Shaw’s Don Juan, from Speer’s ruin value to Ligotti’s pessimism — all circling the same recognition that civilization tries to immortalize itself through order, monuments, or ideals, yet beneath it lies the same entropic drive Bataille calls the “accursed share.”