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ralowe's review against another edition
2.0
if taken as the spur to a tremendously prodigious literary production modality, i can actually identify with the annihilation that accompanies art practice. this however fails to compensate with the more practical applications of nihilism, for those actively devoted to being assholes. is it necessary to trot out bataille confirming the widely held belief that certain kinds of creative people, driven inexorably to, thirsty for, excellence in technical proficiency, are of necessity sociopaths. but maybe this was just the bitchy review i was dying to give when nick land cropped up in a achille mbembe lecture as a supposed influence upon kodwo eshun's *more brilliant than the sun.* this was the first time i ever heard mbembe graze proximate to hip hop studies, so i felt obliged to explore how "nihilism" related to eshun's amazing work on musical marronage. i just get stuck on this fatal misnomer, because if nihilism is a line of flight rather than a total erasure, then you're just being obnoxious. i don't get this conflation of marronage with nihilism. again, it would be a different thing all together if dispossessed social minorities advocated "nihilism." what would it mean for the descendants of slaves to consider ancestors at igbo landing who chose drowning over bondage? survivorship is a mess as articulated in this text, which is what this is really about, about how whites in the west survive themselves, and i don't really care.
mbembe lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkqmAi1yEpo
mbembe lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkqmAi1yEpo
zurvanite's review against another edition
2.0
The continental version of those shitty self help books with swearing in the title
asher__s's review against another edition
challenging
dark
medium-paced
3.0
It was interesting - more about Nick Land’s personal philosophical ideas at the time than about Bataille in particular. Bataille was more of the primary inspiration for all these thoughts (pretty sure he talks more about Kant than Bataille) than the specific object of them. Still interesting and sad to see Land’s potential before he became human scum (though you can certainly see the germinal seeds of this later development).
schumacher's review against another edition
3.0
Land quite admirably follows the sort of style Bataille employs in his Summa Atheologica, blending philosophy, poetry, and despairing rants (although unfortunately Land is a much better prose writer than he is a poet (similarly to Bataille)). I quite enjoy his relating of Bataille to Kant, the former not shying away from the horror of noumena. Much of the metaphyics in this book is very similar to those of Deleuze, Klossowski, and Lyotard (although Land changes Deleuze's two-sided BwO into a bitter and somewhat depressing unidirectional one). So, these sections aren't blow-me-out-of-the-water original, but they are written really well. The feminist strains in here and the discussion of Nazism and politics are really great.
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