NICK LAND MEETS THEORY UNDERGROUND (w/ Michael Downs and David McKerracher)
In this conversation, Michael Downs and David McKerracher of Theory Underground outline the motives and purposes behind a course focused on Nick Land. Downs emphasises that it is important for left-leaning intellectuals to engage right-wing reactionaries like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, the relation between left-right cannot be resolved if we operate with a simplistic “right/wrong” “good/bad” point of view. The importance of Land is that he has become a meme as influential as philosophers like Slavoj Zizek, however, whereas Zizek is the inheritor of a tradition that includes Hegel and Lacan, Land is the inheritor of a tradition that includes Nietzsche and Deleuze. Land’s philosophy is an anti-humanist focus on machinic processes with a future-focused on speculations on a world beyond the human. Consequently, one cannot understand the contemporary fascinating with accelerationism, nor the reality of contemporary technological processes, without some engagement with Land’s philosophy.