Unknown Lands: Decoding Nick Land's Accelerationist Philosophy
Described as “the most important British philosopher” of our time, Nick Land is an enigmatic figure shrouded in controversy, rumour, and myth. Too heretical for the academic establishment, Land has had a meteoric impact on contemporary philosophy, politics, and culture. His striking insights and singular prose have left their mark on leading philosophers such as Mark Fisher and Ray Brassier, inspired artists like Kode9 and Jake and Dinos Chapman, and even shaped the mindset of Silicon Valley kingmakers like Marc Andreessen. His prophetic thought has helped give rise to major philosophical and cultural movements, from speculative realism and cyberfeminism to accelerationism and neoreaction.
Unknown Lands is the essential introduction to Land’s radical and often cryptic philosophy, providing a comprehensive decoding of his labyrinthine writings. The book takes us through his earliest inventive readings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Bataille, which he wields to critique the likes of Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida for repressing the brute fact of our mortality. It goes right up to his seminal remixing of Deleuze and Guattari, cybernetics, and cyberpunk in his account of capitalism’s race towards human extinction at the advent of the technological singularity.
Making sense of ideas that have long circulated in cult obscurity, Unknown Lands presents perhaps the most apocalyptically nihilistic and yet powerfully ecstatic vision of the world. It is unlikely to leave readers’ preconceptions—or sanity—fully intact.
