Over a decade ago, I picked up an interesting-looking book on Bataille in the library of UCP Marjon and browsed a few pages while waiting to be interviewed for a postgraduate position they were, in the event, sensible enough not to award me.
I got as far as:
Not that this book makes any special pleading for itself, it has scratched about for needles in the most destitute gutters of the Earth, cold-turkey crawling on its knees, and begging the academy to pimp it ever deeper into abuse.
and thought, "oh, do come
off it...". For years afterwards, I remembered the book (although not its title, or the name of its author) as something that had singularly
appalled me - a truly egregious example of frustrated academic libido pouring itself into sensationalist prose...
An extraordinary lucidity, frosty and crisp in the blackness, but paralysed; lodged in some recess of the universe that clutches it like a snare. A wave of nausea is accompanied by a peculiarly insinuating headache, as if thought itself were copulating unreservedly with suffering. A damp coldness, close to fog, creeps through the open window. I laugh, delighted at the fate that has turned me into a reptile.
I put the book back on the shelf. My loss. I wasn't able to see how screamingly funny it was, or how intently serious. "Base sexuality, sickness,
religion, and intoxication entwine about each other in these texts, as withered creepers and roots might do as they cascaded into a chasm full of bats" - the simile extended just that little bit too far, into parody, into the gothic, performs - egregiously, appallingly - what it describes.
As I read Nick Land's
The Thirst for Annihilation now, improperly for the first time, it's mediated for me by a series of texts by writers whom Land infected, of which Reza Negarestani's
Cyclonopedia is only the most recent. I seem to have been exposed to a later, much-mutated, variant of the Landian mind-virus, having failed to contract it in the antiseptic confines of the UCP Marjon library: it's all over the place now. Of Land himself little seems to remain - he appears with almost minimal intensity in the theoretical hot zone he spawned, which seems fitting really. Perhaps his disappearance took the form of a lurch to the "right", the traditional "leftist" ritual of self-ejection from polite company. The crazy Qabbalism of his piece in the first Collapse indicates another line of flight - nobody wants to be
that guy: the one who went too far, got too much into it, started believing in his own fantastifications. Whatever he is now, I doubt he's a fascist in any meaningful sense of the word...
