The Apocalypse of Our Tongue

In the early months of 2023, then-editor of Compact Magazine Nina Power commissioned British philosopher Nick Land to compose a series of short essays on the English canon. In the first of three, ‘Why We Need the Canon Wars’ (February 21, 2023), Land staged a renewed war of language in the wake of an epochal ‘prophetic slippage’: 

•             The Venerable Bede relates how Pope Gregory I, upon encountering two boys in a slave market, is told they are Angles. This word itself then tells him that they and their people are destined to be ‘coheirs’ of the angels, and through Bede’s ears—or imagination—the prophetic slippage enters history. In this moment, English vindicates itself definitively. Solemn Providence is initially exemplified.
  

In reading this pun (‘Non Angli sed angeli’) as a play upon cold mathematics and messianism, Land begins his elegy for the paradoxical fate of the English people. This destiny is explored through the lens of culture war, specifically the teaching of the ‘Western canon’ in universities. The fundamental inquiry of his essay is expressed in the language of a Fox News broadcast: ‘What the hell is going on in our university literature departments, and downstream from them, in our schools?’ The answer, shrouded in the sonorous occult of his Continental training, is a loss of faith in faith itself: ‘Cultural faith—transcendental faith, it might be said, in the intellectual dialect of the Germans—has collapsed.’ Faith as a world-constituting force is no more. This collapse of cultural faith is ruinous, even ‘biblical,’ for ‘it is common Scripture that makes a people’. The dialectical image of this declining cultural faith flashes and collapses: ‘Scripture is the apocalypse.’ In another of the Compact essays, Land is clearer about this historical telos. Hunting for the origins of Anglophone cultural decline he remarks, ‘Where it went wrong is where it began.’ The English people are born of apocalypse, it is inscribed in their founding documents none the least the King James Version Bible. In light of this ceaseless catastrophe, only one thing is maintained: our language is downstream of Angles. The prophetic slippage justifies Land’s ultimate argument for the sustenance of the Western canon: ‘The canon apprehends religion as culture, and culture as literature.’ The only war is that of language.

Land is throughout these essays esoterically concerned with an ironizing form of critique. As he writes, when the Anglo has accepted that he is engaged in the ‘angelic intercourse’ of prophetic linguistic slippage, ‘Things can turn strange.’ For Land, critique is the aesthetic performance of a people conforming to irrational belief in their constructed canon. It is a devotion to scripture represented as an enactment of a pervasive death drive: ‘To be anti-English is exceptionally English.’ This is also a formal constraint upon writing itself, the logic of a style. In a telling passage, Land contends that ‘within literature, all voices merit ironic detachment, which is only to say that--from the other side--they exceed all subjective credulity.’ Religious expression serves an ironizing function for Land, its power in its evasion of critique. There is only one path the English may take: ‘We shall be unfathomably religious, as we enter into the apocalypse of our tongue.’ 

This form of ironizing critique is a ubiquitous mode of communication among the online right, and may be a condition of digital communication in general. As Leif Weatherby writes in his ‘Irony and Redundancy: The Alt Right, Media Manipulation, and German Idealism‘:

•             If irony is both material and rhetorical, this means that its use is an activation of a potential in the interface between meaning and matter...This could allow, in principle, an intervention into the conditions of signification. In this sense, irony is the rhetorical term for what we could call coding, the tailoring of language to channels in technologies of transmission.
  

This form of irony may exist in the inscription of a text; at the level of the bit; in the coding of a gene; at the space between the word and a people.  Throughout the Compact essays, Land proposes that this apocalyptic religiosity be expressed in the manner of code, this mediation itself a form of ironizing critique. The encoded literary messages of religious devotion correspond to an idiosyncratic form of esoteric numeracy, what Land calls Anglossic. Anglossia was defined by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the turn of the 21st-century as the ‘Language of the angels...the mystical telos of the English language.’ It emerged from theory-fiction the CCRU had written, a compelling story of secret government linguistics researchers who discover an alien form of semiotics in the Arctic. As Land outlines in ‘Qabbala 101’ (2004), Anglossic Qabbala uses Alphanumeric Gematria -- the ancient esoteric system of mapping letter to number -- as its primary tool of expression. It is through this cryptographic manner of writing that Land generated a capitalized form of ‘Solemn Providence’. Returning to ‘Why We Need the Canon Wars’:

•             Amid all our snark and skepticism, this—at least—can be maintained with perfect epistemological assurance: all the properly canonical works of the English language were composed under the exact tuition of some profound Questioning Angel, absorbing all our doubt into itself, with invulnerable Anglossic faith as its residual. It is this that Pope Gregory I understood, through the illumination of Solemn Providence.

Utilizing cipher tools developed by Land’s followers, one may discover the Anglossic significance of the capitalized words: Questioning Angel = 333; Solemn Providence = 333. According to Aleister Crowley, 333 is the numerical sign for Choronzon, the Dweller in the Abyss and ‘demon of dispersion,’ a temporary personification of the raving and inconsistent forces that occupy the abyss. The other term that translates to 333: DARK ENLIGHTENMENT. 

The Dark Enlightenment, or neo-reaction (NRx) has been thoroughly analyzed by journalists as a post-libertarian ideology of hypercapitalism premised upon the rule of a CEO-philosopher king. However, it has rarely been read as a unique form of metapolitics -- a term of art popularized by the French Nouvelle Droite to refer to a strategic form of communication that recognizes the primacy of culture over politics. Today, the Neo-reactionary movement is enacting a new form of linguistic metapolitics in a syncretic and ironic language of computation and Christian apocalypticism, optimized for online virality and the acceleration of information dispersion.

A close reading of Land’s The Dark Enlightenment reveals continuities with his dissertation on Martin Heidegger, ‘Heidegger’s ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht’ and the Cultivation of the Grapheme’ (1987). In his dissertation, Land explores the philosophical implications of the cultivation of graphemes, or meaningful units in a writing system, for the “contemporary perplexities” of kinship, history, and the rise of deconstruction. Through Heidegger’s 1953 essay on the writings of the Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl, Land theorizes the cultivation of the grapheme as a means for re-opening “the conduits of force,” or channels of inscription, determined by a ‘primordial tendency towards cultivation implicit in specificities.’ For Land, the writings of Heidegger and Trakl overwhelm any attempt to explain the cultivation of the grapheme scientifically, as they are themselves ‘organized graphic intensities which evade the appropriative movement of every representational project’ that ‘subversively infiltrate the reason that seeks to master them.’

In The Dark Enlightenment (2012), Land maintains this long-standing attraction to the subversion of signification and its cultural potentials for the intensification of difference. Land now expresses his theory of genealogical difference in a language of irony and a logic of computation inspired by the writings of Neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin and the concept of the meme. Land spends ample time exploring Yarvin’s theory of progressive Universalism as a totalitarian ‘memeplex,’ or network of memes, that casts as taboo any discussion of the dysgenic impact of secular modernity, what he calls ‘democracy’s relentless trend to degeneration.’ Land has stated that there is little continuity between his early work and his current political preoccupations, a speed-induced mental breakdown in the late 1990s marking the divide between his former left-oriented accelerationism and current rightward reactionary turn. Reading The Dark Enlightenment against his early deconstructive approach to writing demonstrates otherwise. Land’s metapolitical project remains the cultivation of the grapheme, now impelling modernity towards a dispersion his language of cultural decline otherwise appears to mourn. 

I begin with a contextualization of Heidegger’s ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht’ essay, first given as a lecture at the Bühleröhe sanitorium and resort the autumn of 1952. I turn then to an overview of the literature on Land’s context: l’affaire Heidegger and the reception of poststructuralism in Britain in the 1980s, told through the publication history of Heidegger/Trakl scholarship and Derrida’s Geschlecht series. I then annotate and analyze Land’s dissertation as a treatise on a form of radical writing he calls the ‘cultivation of the grapheme,’ or the project of cultural transformation carried out through the written trace. Turning then to Land’s The Dark Enlightenment, I argue that it is a continuation of this same theory of writing, now transferred into the register of memetics. Finally, I will situate the manipulation of minimal linguistic units historically as a form of metapolitics, arguing that Land’s esoteric writing methods constitute a form of fascist aesthetics developed by the earlier German reactionary modernist tradition and systematized by the Nouvelle Droite.

In the mid-autumn of 1952, stowed away in the Baden-Baden region of the northwestern Black Forest at the sanatorium and resort Bühlerhöhe, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) gave the second of two lectures on the poetry of Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914). The talk was presented as a part of ‘Wednesday Evenings’ (though often given on weekends), an event series organized by renowned physician and owner of the resort, Gerhard Stroomann. The intention of these events was ‘to serve the spirit [Geist] in a chaotic, deeply imperiled time,’ providing the conservative elite of a young Federal Republic a space for rehabilitation and reflection (Moore, 14). Heidegger had first been invited to lecture in March of 1950, repeating a series of talks he had first given at Bremen in 1949, his first lectures after the war.  

It was with the support of Stroomann and the broader network of writers and patrons orbiting Bühlerhöhe that Heidegger wrote on the poetic work of Georg Trakl. His first lecture, ‘Die Sprache,’ [’Language’] was given 7 October 1950 at a celebration in memory of literary scholar Max Kommerell. The lecture of import to our present study was given two years later, 4 October 1952. The lecture was received warmly by many in attendance, most especially by Trakl’s old patron and friend Ludwig von Ficker, whose own recollections that evening of his departed friend brought Heidegger to tears. 

The essay is both a revealing and concealing of what Heidegger considered to be the message of cultural decay and rebirth encoded in Trakl’s poetry. As Moore describes, ‘nearly every key term [in the Trakl essay] takes on a new and unfamiliar sense, or rather, the putatively proper sense of nearly every key term is resurrected from the ancient tombs of language--the German language above all’ (27). The story Heidegger tells goes like this: All of a great poet’s works are gathered [erörterung; situated, emplaced] at one site [Ort, derived from the Old High German ort, or spear]. The site is that of a unified poem [Gedicht], a body of work sounding of a single Grundton. Repeated as a mantra throughout the essay, a phrase from Trakl’s ‘Frühling der Seele’ [’Springtime of the Soul’]:

•               Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden.

             [The soul is something strange on earth.]

In this phrase, coming in the poem amid the ‘hour of grief,’ Heidegger envisions this departure as being not from the earth but toward it. The soul is ‘ein fram ūf’ [in the Old High German on the way to], the earth. Thus what is meant by ‘strange’ -- Fremd -- is really to be moving ‘forward to somewhere else, under way toward’; the soul at home in its strangeness, the gathered site ‘where it may stay in its wandering’ (H, 163). 

Heidegger follows upon this sense of being at home in one’s strangeness, determining that the site of Trakl’s poetry is die Abgeschiedenheit, or apartness. He writes:

• 
  
•             All saying of the poems of Georg Trakl remains oriented towards the wandering stranger. He is and is called ‘he who has parted’ (der Abgeschiedene). Through and around him the poetic saying is tuned to a single song. Because the poems of this poet are gathered in the song of ‘him who has parted,’ we call the place of his poetry ‘apartness’ (die Abgeschiedenheit) (quoted from Harries, 501)
  

Through this terse esotericism comes soft glimpses of a darker meaning. As Moore writes:

• 
  
•             ...this entire complex of detachment, which is none other than the place of Trakl’s Gedicht, is itself gathered by what Heidegger calls the Ortschaft des Ortes, not the abstract ‘placeness of the place,’ but a specific locale that serves as the center of support...This Ortschaft, namely, the ‘concealed essence of ‘Abgeschiedenheit,’ is, Heidegger declares, the Abendland.
  

Das Abendland was a vision of a medieval Christian West first mobilized by counter-enlightenment intellectuals after the French Revolution. In the postwar moment, this term had come to signify an ‘anti-materialist, anti-liberal and anti-socialist’ vision posed between communist Russia and capitalist America (Forlenza, 263). As Moore notes, however, Heidegger’s Abendland ‘is more primordial and futural than all notions of the West or Occident,’ and accords more to something spiritual than actual, though it connoted the German territories.

The spiritual territory of das Abendland is an imagined site away from the corrupt and decadent Geschlecht [race, sex, nation, type] of Western modernity. The Western Geschlecht has for Heidegger become a decaying type, signifying a declining Western world not unlike Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Heidegger writes:

•             Our [German] language names the human essence that is stamped on the basis of a stroke [aus einem Schlag gepragte] and struck into this type [in diesen Schlag verschlagene] the ‘Geschlecht.’ [. . .] The poet names the Geschlecht of the ‘decayed shape’ [. . .] of the human the ‘decaying’ Geschlecht [. . .].It is set out [herausgesetzt] from the manner of its essence [Art seines Wesens] and for this reason is the ‘displaced’ [’entsetzte,’ less literally, ‘horrified’] Geschlecht. (quoted in Moore 173)

However, in accordance with Heidegger’s reading of Trakl, there was another possible path for the Geschlecht, the path of a more gentle twofold [Zwiefalt] of the unborn and resurrected as opposed to the discord of the sexes [Zwietracht der Geschlechter]. This softer meaning of Geschlecht emerges from Trakl’s ‘Abendländisches Lied’ [Western Song], in which he provides typological emphasis to the word. The poem’s last stanza:

• 
  
•             O, die bittere Stunde des Untergangs,
  
•             Da wir ein Steinernes Antlitz in schwarzen Wassern beschaun. 
  
•             Aber strahlend heben die silbernen Lider die Liebenden: 
  
•             E  i  n Geschlecht. Weihrauch strömt von rosigen Kissen
  
•             Und der süße Gesang der Auferstandenen. 
• 
  
•             [Oh, the bitter hour of downfall,/When we gaze on a stony face in black waters./Yet radiantly rise the silvery eyelids of lovers: One Geschlecht. Incense streams from pillows all roses/And the sweet song of the resurrected.] (translation from Krell, with Geschlecht left untranslated for now)
  

Heidegger finds in Trakl the poetry of this gathering into a more gentle Geschlecht. Our Western Geschlecht, for Heidegger, was to be folded into the return of a primeval time-to-come whose message ‘we’ [Germans] must heed -- ‘the sweet song of the resurrected.’ 

Heidegger considered Trakl to be the ‘poet of [his] generation’ -- though he did not fight in the first world war, he identified profoundly with those who had; and as one of the major philosophical voices whose complacency (at best) with National Socialism will forever color his work, the debt he feels toward Trakl’s work is an underappreciated piece of information for understanding his influence on postwar philosophy.  Strangely, this was his only essay on the subject, and it has received much less fanfare than his other writings on the poet Hölderlin. The essay has, however, produced a genealogy of commentary upon commentary (upon commentary) that trace a unique history of poststructuralism in the English-speaking world. It is this descent to which I now turn.  

Land’s dissertation is in direct continuity with a specific lineage of Heidegger scholars whose work documents the history of Heidegger reception in the Anglophone world. Drawing upon the front and back matter of the dissertation, we may reconstruct a quiet and telling image of this historical moment. 

In the acknowledgements section of Land’s dissertation, he thanks a highly regarded set of contemporary continental philosophers, a number of whom had migrated from America to Britain in the 1970s and 1980s: Heidegger and Levinas scholar Robert Bernasconi was a native; continental philosophy and Adorno scholar Jay Bernstein began at the department in 1975. He saves his greatest appreciation for one figure: the Heidegger and Nietzsche scholar David Farrell Krell, whose energetic dedication to the project Land says encompassed an ‘economy without reserve,’ a reference to Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’ (1967), published in Writing and Difference (1963). 

Since first translating Heidegger while studying under John Sallis at Duquesne University in the late 1960s, David Krell had become widely recognized for his collections of Heidegger’s Basic Writings (1977) and Nietzsche: Volumes 1 & 2 (1979, 1984). Krell had worked closely with J. Glenn Gray, the director of the Harper & Row Heidegger series, to translate Heidegger’s Early Greek Thinking alongside Frank Capuzzi. A ‘reluctant Heideggerian’ (Heidegger in America, 221), Gray was responsible for sponsoring the majority of English translations we now have of Heidegger’s writings; Krell played a large role in this endeavor, and was sent to meet Heidegger on multiple occasions to discuss translation. In 1983, Krell took a position at the University of Essex (Three Encounters, 195). The school was a hub of political action amidst the gray despair of Thatcherism -- Krell and his aforementioned colleagues formed a unique left-leaning milieu of continental philosophers in the British university system. They were complemented one department over, in Ideology and Discourse Analysis, where Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau were founding the Essex school of discourse analysis, drawing inspiration from the work of Antonio Gramsci and his theory of cultural hegemony. 

Alongside his translation work, Krell had been working on Heidegger’s reading of Trakl since 1976-77, first publishing on the subject in an issue of Research in Phenomenology (1977). In the essay, ‘Schlag der Liebe, Schlag des Todes: On a Theme in Heidegger and Trakl,’ later published in Intimations of Morality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger’s Thinking of Being, Krell isolates one theme in Trakl’s lyric, ‘the generation of man, struck by love and death.’ Krell performs a vast etymology of the term Schlag, relating it to the Old High German and Gothic slahan [slaughter] and the verb schlagen [to strike a blow, to beat]. He concludes that ‘one of the most prevalent senses of schlagen is to mint or stamp a coin. Der Schlag may therefore mean a particular coinage, imprint, or type...’ It is in this sense of the type or imprint that Schlag forms the root of a word of great import for Georg Trakl, das Geschlecht (Intimations of Mortality, 165).

Geschlecht is a complex and layered term; its complexity haunts our present undertaking. A translation of the Latin word genus,  ‘das Geschlecht is a group of people who share a common ancestry, especially if they constitute a part of the hereditary nobility’ (165). In this sense, the word becomes constitutive of humankind [Menschengeschlecht], ‘one generation of men, dying to make way for a succeeding generation.’ It is this rhythmic ebb and flow of the mortal wave that will concern us below, as well as the etymological chain from Schlag to Geschlecht -- from the initial blow to its re-mark. 

In 1981, Krell published his second paper on Heidegger’s Trakl, an essay entitled 'The Waves Source: Rhythm in the Languages of Poetry and Thought', in University of Warwick professor David Wood’s Heidegger and Language. In this work, Krell notes Heidegger’s assertion of ‘the wave’ as the form of rhythm in Trakl’s poetry, a motion that wells up and returns to the source of language. For Krell, this is simultaneously the movement of ‘presencing/absencing,’ Trakl the great poet of this (non-)movement of mortality:

•             [Friedrich-Georg] Jünger characterizes Trakl’s poetry as the incantation of vergängliche Erscheinung, ‘transient appearance’ But it is not Platonistic transiency. Behind or above it, beyond time, as it were, stands nothing: Nichts. The source of the wave remains inscrutable: the rhythmic wave of Trakl’s poetry is, as one of his last poems affirms, ‘...the icy wave/Of eternity’ (Heidegger and Language, 43)
  

Krell’s understanding of this icy wave of eternity as a form of rhythmic self-confrontation with the ebb and flow of life and annihilation, birth and death, suffering and justice. It is the rhythm of nothingness, of existential dread and its incantation. This image will return in Land’s dissertation. 

In 1983, upon hearing that Derrida was himself undertaking a project analyzing Heidegger’s Trakl and the concept of Geschlecht, Krell took the liberty of sending Derrida his Schlag article. This convened a years-long epistolary relationship in which Krell would pass comment on Derrida’s Geschlecht drafts, often urging him to take up the darker themes of death (Three Encounters).

Nick Land’s dissertation on Heidegger’s Trakl arrived one month prior to the outbreak of the philosophical scandal known as ‘the Heidegger controversy.’ With the publication of Victor Farías’s Heidegger et le nazisme (1987), French poststructuralists -- especially Jacques Derrida -- were called to answer for their work’s basis in Heidegger’s thought. While Farías’s book was no theoretical feat, it provided the most comprehensive account to date of Heidegger’s complicity with, and enthusiasm for, the National Socialist regime. After its publication, philosophers who had previously turned to Heidegger for his ruthless critique of philosophical subjectivity could no longer do so without acknowledging his vile political affiliations.  

The affair came in the midst of the years-long encounter Derrida was staging between Heidegger’s concept of Geschlecht and the concept of the ‘philosophical idiom’. After the publication of the first Geschlecht essay in the 1983 Cahier de l’Herne -- an edited volume by Michel Haar dedicated to Heidegger -- Derrida folded his continuing analysis of Heidegger’s Geschlecht into a larger seminar series on Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism (1984-88). In this series, Derrida set out to critique the concept of the ‘philosophical idiom’ for the ideologies buried within these meaning-laden expressions and their purported ‘untranslatability’. As he stated in the first Geschlecht essay, the entire series of Geschlecht commentaries was ‘magnetized’ by Heidegger’s ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht.’ In March 1985, Derrida presented Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand at a colloquium at Loyola University in Chicago, where the French philosopher first distributed the 33-page typescript of Geschlecht III. Krell too presented at this conference, and for years after worked from the distributed typescript. The mission of this colloquium, later published as Deconstruction and Philosophy, was to bring Derrida and Heidegger’s work into closer correspondence through the question of ethics and Western modernity. Derrida also presented some of these ideas in a private meeting at Yale, as well as at a colloquium on Reading Heidegger at University of Essex in 1986. Many of these ideas were then published in the book-length De l’esprit (1987), one month after Farías’s book.

In Land’s acknowledgements he thanks Derrida for access to ‘several unpublished papers’ -- this is somewhat evidenced in his bibliography where he cites ‘’Geschlecht III,’ unpublished paper, presented to participants of the Loyola conference in March, 1985.’ There are no other citations of unpublished work. However, Derrida had visited Essex to speak at a colloquium on ‘Reading Heidegger’ in 1986, and it is quite possible that Land received further notes then. While Derrida himself never published his remarks from the colloquium, Krell prepared notes of his remarks as well as a transcription of the ensuing discussion; these were published in the 1987 volume of Research in Phenomenology borne of the colloquium. It is clear from these notes that Derrida’s comments were in large part derived from his forthcoming De l’Esprit. For purposes of time and space, I will consign myself to comment solely on Geschlecht II - III, as it is these lectures that provide the most material for analyzing the question of type and typing. 

[GESCHLECHT II ON TYPE AND TYPING]

Derrida is also concerned in the beginning of Geschlecht III with identifying ‘A type, which is also to say a ‘stroke’ [coup] of reading: not a model, procedure, or method but a typed [type] pathway.’ The French thinker has a very precise meaning for this term, one unrelated to that developed in his Tympan (1973) or Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typographies. Derrida is concerned instead with “what links the tupos [type] to the Schlag, and thus to Geschlecht in Heidegger’s text.” The tuptein, or rhythmic beat, of the tupos relates the tupos to the Schlag, the root of Geschlecht. While recognizing his own concept of type was different from its precedents, to provide substantive context for this complex phrase,Derrida does enters a long footnote on Lacoue-Labarthe’s genealogy of type. We must briefly pass through this dark forest in order to comprehend the political genealogies underlying Land’s dissertation.

In Typography, Lacoue-Labarthe quotes and analyzes one allusion to tupos in Heidegger’s Zur Seinsfrage (On the Question of Being), an essay written in contribution to a 1955 festschrift in honor of the reactionary author Ernst Jünger. In this passage, Heidegger compares Plato’s notion of the tupos as ‘that which imprints’ on the soul to German writer Ernst Jünger’s understanding of Prägung [to imprint], initially delineated in his 1932 treatise Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (The Worker: Dominion and Form). He notes that Jünger too, alongside Plato, thinks of ‘the relationship of form to that which “forms” as a relation of stamping and imprinting.’ However, Jünger now considers imprinting [Prägen] in the ‘modern sense as a conferring of meaning on that which is meaningless. Form (Gestalt) is the “source that gives meaning”.’ Thus the rhythmic marking of the soul is that forming of the mindless worker’s individual subjectivity. 

Derrida notes that it is the slippage in the sense of form that allows Heidegger to utilize Jünger’s expression ‘Menschenschlag,’ or human type, completing the passage from the tupein of the tupos to the Schlag. Herein lies the relation of the Schlag to Geschlecht, of the one to the two in the fold of difference and reference -- the rhythmic striking of the written mark is also the imprinting of the human type. Thus the sense of these words is simultaneously hyper-specific and capable of ‘prophetic slippage’ -- from the register of writing to that of autoeroticism. As Derrida puts it, ‘A type is not only the moment or place of the strike, it introduces the generality of the genus [genre], it remains or produces, it reproduces the same for a series of singularities that thus fall under the same type--which can only be typical on the condition of the same.’ For Derrida, as we shall see for Land, Heidegger’s Geschlecht contains a radicalizing potential in its rhythms, waves, and typologies. 

For decades, seemingly the only person who had retained their copy of Derrida’s Geschlecht III was David Krell. As he recalls, he photocopied Derrida’s DINA-4 typescript onto oversized papers in order to make his own marginalia. He shared this copy with Derrida, and at the time he penned Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida’s Geschlecht (2015) believed this to be the sole copy, as he had found no original manuscript in Derrida’s papers at IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l'Edition Contemporaine). Since the publication of Krell’s book, the full lecture notes of the ninth to thirteenth lectures from the Ghost of the Other (1984-85) part of the Philosophical Nationalities and Nationalisms that would have constituted Geschlecht III have been edited and published by Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo. This has catalyzed a wave of new interest in the work, with two conferences in Princeton and Texas A&M, as well as a special edition of Research in Phenomenology, recentering the Geschlecht series as perhaps ‘Derrida’s most sustained confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Heidegger’ (Geschlecht III, viii). 

[BRIEFLY DESCRIBE THIS NEW PERSPECTIVE] 

In September 1987, doctoral student Nicholas Land submitted his dissertation, “Heidegger’s Die Sprache im Gedicht and the Cultivation of the Grapheme,” to the University of Essex’s School of Comparative Studies, in candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Elements of this work were later published as ‘Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger's 1953 Trakl Interpretation’ in a collection of essays on Philosophers’ Poets (1990, ed. David Wood), and ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’ in the art journal Third Text (1988). However, the dissertation itself lived as a decayed-otherwise -- a blurry PDF uploaded to the archival platform Are.na. The PDF was uploaded in 2021 by the account ‘Antonio Andreas,’ seemingly a pseudonymous play on the Franciscan pupil of Duns Scotus, Antonius Andreas (1280-1320). Their bio reads as a clarion description of our subject: ‘Ερεβος! [Erebus, god of darkness] interested in, Metapolitics, Speculative Realism, Accelerationism, Poshumanism (sic). (e)Bibliomaniac.’ It has since been transcribed and published by Yuxi Liu, a PhD student in Computer Science at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, researching on the scaling laws of large neural networks. 

The dissertation is divided into four parts, all constituted around ‘the differentiation executed by the written sign‘ (1), and arranged as a long migration into the chaos [χάos] of textual and cultural dispersion. All throughout the work, Land’s central concern is the ‘cultivation of the grapheme’, or the development of ‘inscriptive practices’ directed at the ‘intensification of type.’ Land understands type as both the mechanical rhythm of graphematic inscription and a translation of Geschlecht, a term he takes to mean, in its most distilled sense, ‘the general resource of typography’ (FN, 99). As he explains in the abstract, the dissertation will suggest there is ‘a primordial tendency towards cultivation implicit in specificities,’ a drive toward cultural impact detectable at the smallest unit of the written word -- the grapheme. Here I provide an overview before carrying the dissertation’s central tenets forward into The Dark Enlightenment.

Introduction

In Land’s introduction -- the final section ‘”Geschlecht” and the Trajectory of Deconstruction’ -- he ventures a bold definition of Geschlecht, contending with the relationship of the Western alphabetical script to the idea of a single historical destiny. Land defines the term as maintaining properties akin to the signifier as ‘differential consistency,’ invoking the traditions of structuralism and post-structuralism and their response to Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of the signifier (35). What differentiated Geschlecht from the signifier, however, is its refusal to be trapped in questions of totality and transcendence predicated on negation. As Land writes, ‘[Geschlecht] marks the...project of thinking irreducible difference’ (36). 

In Derrida’s double reading of Geschlecht, Land identifies the possibility of moving beyond the reinscription of negativity, Derrida’s new project indicating ‘how generic positivity might be re-thought beyond binarity’ (37). However, he does not believe that deconstruction can yet bring us to this point. In the context of a discussion of Derrida’s first Geschlecht on the question of sexual difference, Land cites a fascinating passage from Heidegger’s 1928 logic lectures in which Heidegger declares that the neutral Dasein is ‘not the indifference of empty nullity...rather, it is the primordial positivity and power of the weft [Mächtigkeit des Wesens]’ (quoted on 38). Land criticizes Derrida’s subsequent focus on the aspect of sexual neutrality and ‘[caution] about speaking of the positive or affirmative,’ arguing that this resistance risks the reinscription of Western metaphysical binarity. For Land, affirmation is not strictly the alternate pole of the negative, but instead something ‘primordially differentiated...from the zero-point of discernible intensities, or chaos’ (42-43). Instead of bodies in their gendered difference or liberatory blur, Land follows Deleuze & Guattari onto the terrain of the body as a stratum of differential intensities, that would lead to ‘thinking Geschlecht as the instituted graphic trace in general’ (42). His critique of deconstruction arrives:

•             Every possible ‘deconstructionist’ move is historically programmed as a reaction that is simultaneously against and within the repression of primordial positivity, since this repression institutes the whole of metaphysics as negational rationality, and as unsustainable construction. Only when deconstruction is able to decipher the text of positivity...will it open a new history, releasing the intensities of its graphic heritage.

The rush of writing must be seized in its primordial positivity; that which resists is mere conformism to the oppressive regime of Western metaphysics and all its binaristic trappings. As Land concludes his introduction, it was the tension between the structuralist notion of the difference-between-signs and Heidegger’s 1928 concept that ‘identity, as a typing of the being, emerges as an effect of the movement of difference’ that defined his study. His argument is that the structuralist definition of the signifier ‘covertly subordinates difference to constituted identities which organize it within a system.’ Land is more sympathetic to Heidegger’s wave-like motion of emergent typing as having an effect, as we shall see. 

I. ‘The icy wave of eternity’: The rhythmizing of discourse and the dissolution of typographical rationality

The first section, ‘The Icy Wave of Eternity,’ is an analysis of the rhythmic movement of difference in Heidegger’s Trakl, specifically the functions of gathering, abandonment [Verlassenheit], and ‘the rhythm of type.’ Land argues there is a ‘primordial risk’ in Heidegger’s initial etymological deconstruction in the first section of his essay of Erörterung as gathering, the essay’s opening vocabulary orbiting a ‘forgotten sign, in which motion and economy can be read together, cryptic and fluctuating’ (50). For Land, this forgotten sign is that of ‘the sister’ -- a key figure of sexual torment in Trakl’s life and poetry whose unwieldy poetic life continually threatens to overwhelm the entire field of linguistic signification. She is throughout Heidegger and Land’s essays associated with the symbol of the ruins of the moon. This symbol that overwhelms the sign field thus escapes containment to the mere body of text, traversing actual bodies and the question of exogamy, or outbreeding. 

Land argues that in order for philosophy to understand how ‘the outside,’ or that which escapes all binary logic, ‘was first received into the inside,’ it must analyze the ‘pure concepts of understanding’ or ‘the categories of logic...within the terms of an aesthetic’ (61). This same section of text was used one year later in Land’s first formal publication, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’ toward radical Marxist ends. (Third Text, 1988). However, whereas in that essay the dissolution of binarity is directed at the political ends of anti-apartheid and feminist revolution, its original context as a critique of reason in the realm of Heideggerian aesthetics clarifies the importance of form -- technique -- over content for Land. An important aspect of Land’s aesthetic conception is rhythm, understood in its broadest connotation as the pulsation and recurrence of temporality. Concluding a larger critique of the Kantian Schematismuslehre, or transcendental determinations of time produced by the imagination, Land writes: “Kant allows temporality and transcendence mutually to guarantee each other, inhibiting the disruptive drift of his insight that temporality facilitates the application of the concept only because it explodes the interiority of reason’ (63). Land argues that Heidegger’s reading of Trakl truly begins with the ‘discovery of the re-inscription’ of the Kantian schematism in Trakl’s ‘Klage.’ The image:

•              ...die eisige Woge
  Der Ewigkeit (quoted on 63)
  

The motion of a frozen wave is ‘communicated to the “text” from the outside,’ poetry being reinscribed by its paradoxical motions (64). Land finds Trakl’s poetry emblematic of this ‘regular and rhythmic recession...like Nietzsche’s great tides of eternal recurrence’ (65), but is unwilling for it to remain mere aesthetic -- writing itself must be made useful. He asks,  ‘What work does this figure [of the icy wave of eternity] do‘ (65)? As Land finds upon a reading of Trakl’s story ‘Verlassenheit,’ the temporal space between the crashing and receding of the wave is an unstable boundary, ‘a point of conjugation rather than a disjunction’ breaching ‘the network of dikes and channels that would determine the site of the poem, pouring through every barrier or exclusion with an irresistible power of repetition.’ A large part of Land’s dissertation is a repudiation of dialectical negation in favor of this more transgressive power of positivistic repetition, transforming Kantian ‘categorization’ into the rhythmic aesthetic of recurrence (75). 

In the final section of Part One, ‘The Rhythm of Type,’ Land turns to Nietzsche’s theory of the rhythmization of discourse [Rhythmisierung der Rede] to explicate his theory of writing. Land explains that Nietzsche’s rhythmized discourse is chiefly superstitious, but that it too ‘traverses the body,’ a discourse being ‘printed...upon (or as) the memory’ (76). There is an aspect of social control to this movement:

•             Rhythm has a mnemotechnical power because it engenders an irresistible desire to consent to it, that is, participatively to attune [einstimmen] oneself to it. It imprints itself as a contagion does, replicating itself within and between bodies. And because rhythm is nothing other than the seductiveness of coming-back it is the energetic basis of recollection; the general condition of all those specific processes summarized as memory (76). 
  

Rhythm breeds obedience. It operates in the manner of a virus, imprinting and replicating among bodies, and coerces the subject into recursivity. However, this compulsive, inscriptive quality of rhythm is also in ‘a profound relation with a dissipative element, which has a tendency towards the discharge of intensities.’ There are thus two motions to the icy wave of eternity -- a desire to consent and the dissipation of energies. 

Rhythm does not play any real role in Heidegger’s reading of Trakl, at least not in the conventional sense of poetic meter and form. Heidegger’s essay is in fact a ‘forceful repudiation of typological rationality’ (79). However, in Heidegger’s Trakl, Land finds the means for ‘an investigation into the very ‘“foundations” of typological/typographical order,’ this forward-slash blurring the distinction between processes of inscription and classification in one stroke. For Land, a single term ‘has become most inextricable from this project’ of the investigation of typology/typography: Geschlecht. In order to isolate and dissect the rhythmic aspects of Trakl’s writing, there must be a ‘precipitation of component and compound strata out of the semiotic medium,’ to which he refers to the ‘precipitation of letters’ from out of ‘words (as signifying unities)’ (81). He cites Derrida’s post-Saussurean linguistics as the impetus for the movement ‘from the phoneme to the phono-grapheme - or occidental written compound,’ which he perceives as a movement into ‘”sub-atomic” semiotic investigation’ (82). His insistence upon the occidental component of this linguistics is notable; for Land, there is already exceptionality awarded to the West, the precipitation of letters out of words having ‘ethno-historical reasons’ he calls ‘exemplary’ (82). In the blur of typology, the mark of the blow will come to bear upon broader questions of generation, reproduction, and cultural fate. 

II. ‘Something strange is the soul on earth’: Ruptures in libidinal economy

The second part of Land’s dissertation continues to trace the path of Heidegger’s essay, opening to the mantra drawn from ‘Springtime of the Soul’: ‘Es ist die Seele ein fremdes auf Erden.’ Land pursues here ‘the complex intertwining of self and other, incest and chaos’ (88) in order to enter the ‘vortex of our most intractable contemporary perplexities.’ What these issues are remains undisclosed -- however, they are the same issues of graphematics ‘underlying each and every system of signification’ (87) and thus any form of shared cultural reality. For Land, strangeness must be read as a ‘migratory process,’ ‘the trace of a procedure which does not circulate on the inside of customary syntax’ (93) but escapes, explodes the interiority of reason that holds language hostage. He turns here to structuralist linguistics, acknowledging that this methodological turn is ‘undertaken only on the basis of a thought of “genus” that has first to be “extracted” from the Traklean and Heideggerian text’ (95). The new concept of Geschlecht Land posits is not one he draws from ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht,’ but rather finds within the ‘convolutions’ of his own post-structuralist reading (95). Land defines Geschlecht as ‘a gathering of likenesses, or common traits,’ noting that there is a ‘kinship of species and translation’ (similar to that of inscription and classification) that emerges when the definition of Geschlecht is expanded to entail ‘a far more fluid and open difference of stratification’ (128-29).

To explicate his method of reading, Land turns to questions of apartness [Abgeschiedenheit] and homecoming [Heimkehr], clearly mnemonics for the movement toward the earth and eternal recurrence from the prior chapter. For Land, Abgeschiedenheit maintains two ‘referential dimensions’ -- one, the apocalypse of history, the departedness on ‘the far side of a catastrophic historical rupture’; the other, its relationship to the libido, with all desire being oriented to return, ‘following the trace of a traumatic rupture’ (101). And while Land views this as ‘a valuable terminological key to the final phase of western culture,’ departure does not simply mean death -- rather, the stranger is summoned into descent [Untergang], a ‘going under’ that is not the end of life but ‘descent in general’ (102). Here Land quotes from Heidegger’s essay: ‘Das Land des Untergangs ist der Übergang in den Anfang der in ihm verborgenen Frühe’ [The land of descent is the transition to the origin of the dawn buried within it] (103). Descent, following Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Freud’s death drive, is thus not a dying but rather ‘a regression or return, a Heimkehr’ (103), a compulsive repetition that maintains an orientation to the morbid symptoms of fate. Land writes:

•             ‘Mortality is the immanent stamp of a species, not a transcendentally instituted limit, because it is only from the specificity of a stock that it becomes possible to define those paths which would lead it away from itself. Dying presupposes a writing - or more precisely a “typing” - which serves as an index of dissolution’ (109). 

• 
  

This dissolution is not negative, but rather ‘a positive dissolution,’ each type attaining to its own ‘primal specificity - “a dawn” or horizon of intensity which it is unable to cancel or determine’ (109). According to Heidegger, the death of the stranger is not decomposition, ‘but rather the abandonment of man’s decomposed figure [das Verlassen der verwesten Gestalt des Menschen]‘ (quoted on 110). Land concludes that in this translation, one might replace Heidegger’s ‘decomposed’ with the term ‘degenerated,’ this reaffirming the untranslatability of the German Geschlecht, ‘to mark a definite failure of English to “reproduce” an alien sign’ (133). In the sections to come, he ventures into what this failure mode may harbor for a specific people. 

III. Degenerations: The revolutionary life of the ‘race inférieure’

In the initial epigraph to Land’s dissertation, he cites a passage from Heidegger’s essay -- here the translation from Peter Hertz’s On the Way to Language: 

•             Is this dreamy romanticism, at the fringe of the technically-economically oriented world of modern mass existence? Or -- is it the clear knowledge of the ‘madman’ who sees and senses other things than the reporters of the latest news who spend themselves chronicling the current happening, whose future is never more than a prolongation of today’s events, a future that is forever without the advent of a destiny which concerns man for once at the source of his being? (196-97)
  

Now in the third section of his dissertation, Land turns to Arthur Rimbaud and Trakl to pose the idea that it is in fact this madman who sees more clearly than all the world, whose sense of temporality overwhelms space and transforms the nature of language itself. 

In part three, Land continues to pursue the theme of degeneration, understood not as negativity but as ‘the space of desire...the longing for self-abolition in perfection’ (140). As will become clear, in resonance with Land’s later writing, he wills this self-abolition on. He asks: ‘how is it possible to become even more inferior, to take inferiority further?,’ longing for a means by which to escape the moral trappings of the present. Land argues that in industrial modernity, the ‘logic of the system,’ decaying and corrupted, could be ‘mapped by to two overlapping images: Nietzsche’s Uebermensch and Rimbaud’s race inférieure.’ Here he realizes the need to contend with the political stakes of this charge. He enters that these concepts were ‘deliberately twisted out of recognition’ by ‘a new epoch of mass warfare, systematic racist ideology, and fascism...until they even seemed to echo the jargon of mass murder.’ MAKE CLEARER ---[As Richard Wolin has argued, this form of argumentation has been a strategy of Heidegger scholars to attempt to distance themselves from his National Socialism while maintaining that Heidegger may be the our best resource for theorizing the Holocaust (The Politics of Being, Preface to 2016 edition)] Land follows this line of reasoning, positing that ‘It is perhaps only with the opening of the project of interpreting Geschlecht that we can recover their active and radical sense’ (141). This argument was very much in line with what Wolin has called ‘postmodern Nietzsche,’ a Nietzsche transformed into an apolitical aesthete whose work can be read out of context and without responsibility for the others who have claimed his philosophy.

For Land, there is a clear relationship between the pursuit of this inferiority and the poetic ‘marks of delirium’ (161). It was the poet Arthur Rimbaud who shattered the regime of traditional signification, Rimbaud who ‘interrupts the sublimation of the letter into the word, and therefore explodes the repression of typography within vocabulary’ (166). Citing a letter Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny in May of 1871 and his poem Voyelles, Land shows Rimbaud to be a poet whose desire for the collapse of alphabetic order committed itself to this explosion of repression on the level of the word itself. Rimbaud in his letter writes: ‘If the feeble-minded put themselves to think about the first letter of the alphabet they would soon rush into madness!’ 

Proceeding from this comment, Land identifies Rimbaud’s poetry as concerned with ‘the violent and unsublimated release of graphic energy,’ a madness that ‘exceeds the symbolic order because it stems from the primordial specificity which is the unmasterable resource of any possible sign system’ (167). For Land, it is this madness that enters into ‘immediate rapport with the thought of Geschlecht’ (167).] ---MAKE CLEARER 

IV. The Protraction of Difference:

In Part Four of the dissertation, Land turns to Gilles Deleuze’s Différence et Répétition to constitute the basis for a theory of difference that does not take recourse in ‘ultimate identity or equalities,’ but rather acknowledges that there are ‘real...differences that are in principle irreducible to mathematical formalism’ (174). The citation of Deleuze emerges in the context of a broader discussion of the image of the ‘ruin of the moon’ and the ‘fading and cooling of stars,’ images that we have also seen associated with the poetic figure of the sister. The reference to Deleuze is drawn from the final chapter of Différence et Répétition, and is in large part a repudiation of a passage from Hegel’s Encyclopaedia. The Hegel passage is worth citing in full:

•             One can admire the stars because of their tranquillity: but they are not of equal dignity to the concrete individual. The filling of space breaks out into endless kinds of matter; but that [i.e. the casting of the stars] is only the first outbreak [Ausschlagen] that can delight the eye. This outbreak of light is no more worthy of wonder than the outbreak of a rash in man, or than a swarm of flies (quoted on 174). 
  

Land writes that ‘What offends Hegel about the stars is the irrational facticity of their distribution; a scattering which obeys no discernible law’ (175). Against this discomfort with dispersion Land poses Heidegger’s Trakl, for whom sentience is threatened not by the Ausschlag but ‘from an ejection of the outbreak from the beginning.’ Land carries this one step further, into a new vocabulary -- ‘It is no longer even that sentience is infected by irrationality; it is rather the very movement of infection’ (176). 

Land then notes passages in which ‘Trakl brings the thought of the sign together with that of stellar dispersion.’ He cites multiple moments in which Trakl’s imagery of signs and stars collide:

•             ‘O, ihr Zeichen und Sterne’ [O, you signs and stars] (177). 
  
• 
  Von Lüften trunken sinken balds ein die Lider/Und öffnen leise sich zu fremden Sernenzeichen. [Drunken with breezes the lids soon subside/And open themselves to strange star-signs.]
  
• 
  Zeichen und Sterne/Versinken leise im Abendweiher [Signs and stars/Sink quietly in the evening-pool]
  

Following the etymology of Stern to its Indo-European root ster-, Land writes of stars as ‘traces of a primordial strewing; an explosive dispersion which in its formlessness defies mathematization or the reduction to order’ (177).  And thus for signs: Land argues that any ordering of signs (and stars) will come through ‘a materialist study of planes of distributed intensities’ that may only be generated through ‘graphic redundancy,’ or the compulsive repetition of minimal written units (178). Like the distinction between information and noise, in Trakl’s consistent rendering of signs and stars as related entities ‘the sites where the distinction between matter and meaning’ are drawn ‘cannot be sustained (179). Once more reason is abandoned and distinctions are collapsed -- those of stars and signs, noise and information, matter and meaning. For Land, the movement of astronomical matter and that of sign systems are co-equal, obeying the same laws of pure immanence and disorder. 

It is important to note that the two texts Land chooses to use in this discussion of a formless dispersion which defies mathematization, he chooses to refer to two of Derrida’s texts known for their typographical experimentation: Glas and Disseminations. Disseminations in particular contains necessary clues for Land’s theory of language. For it was here that Derrida declared that his neologism differánce [to differ; to defer--transformed into ‘a noun designating active non-self-presence both in space and time’ (Barbara Johnson in her translation, 5)] designated a ‘war economy--which brings the radical otherness or the absolute exteriority of the outside into relation with the closed, agonistic, hierarchical field of philosophical oppositions’ (5). Following Derrida’s concept of dissemination as the scattering of signs in a manner akin to the sowing of seeds, and playing upon agricultural metaphors of ploughing and cultivation, Land connects the practice of textual inscription to that which he considers the noble life of manual labor (204). It is here that we find his clearest position on Heidegger’s political affiliations. Following a series of quotations from Heidegger, Derrida, and Nietzsche in which they each compare the act of writing to that of a ploughman furrowing into the ground, Land writes:

•             If Heidegger often seems eager to beat his pen into a ploughshare this is not the simple symptom of a reactionary rural nostalgia. It might even be the case that the thought opened by the rhetoric of the plough first allows us to make sense of the peculiar Germanic version of Arcadian conservatism (with which he is incontrovertibly entangled) in a way that escapes the terms of naive historical progressivism (203).
  

In the midst of arguing for the attainment of power wrought by the unity of matter and meaning in the practice of compulsive graphematic repetition, Land offers an apologetics for Heidegger’s political leanings. He contends that Heidegger’s theory of writing as cutting into the earth was no ‘regional peculiarity’ but rather ‘a crucial historical problem’ entangled with the intersection of historical teleology and ‘the technology of fertility’ (204) -- in particular the incestual nature of Trakl’s poetics of the sister. Land is compelled to assert this reading of Heidegger if he is to utilize his theory to ‘active and radical’ ends, namely the explosion of the interiority of reason by way of the delirious poetics of the race inférieure. Otherwise, the untoward associations of Heidegger’s agricultural metaphorics might prove to be embedded with philosophical conceptions directed toward fascistic ends. Heidegger’s turn to agricultural metaphor is not, then, ‘an incidental association or historical peculiarity,’ but rather the very condition of possibility for the ‘primordial power of propulsive differentiation: the grapheme’ (207). Following the strewing of stars and the movement of information, he writes that

•             What is natural in language is the iron destiny that it must always stray from itself...Culture only exists, therefore, as cultivation, or as the movement which participates in the propagation of graphic energy’ (207). 
  

Cultivation is therefore the ‘intensification of type,’ oriented away from itself and toward ‘a deepened intermixture with alterity,’ drawn in the figure of exogamous conjugation. However, this is not a pure union with otherness -- it is a violent and transgressive movement in which the inside is invaded by the outside. As Land writes, ‘Each intensification is thus associated with a more or less violent eradication of endogamic forces; an “inner” arche-agression whose most basic cultural form is termed “incest prohibition”’ (215). Thus, whereas the intensification of type cannot happen within oneself and must be sought through ‘a positive and non-systematic exogamy’ (216), this exogamy exists in a network of ‘multiple synthetic relations, corresponding to transgressions of the will-to-power, refusals of interation, or “endo-stases” at different levels of intensity. Incest is the autism of the genus’ (216). Land is seeking a form of outbreeding beyond the inner termination of incest prohibition, in the manner of Nietzsche’s übermensch who attains to spiritual powers outside of Enlightenment values of autonomy. Land concludes his dissertation with an image of the cultivation of the grapheme as ‘the hieroglyphic of a lost libidinal history’:

•             If I find Heidegger more appealing as a canal-dredger than as a peasant or village craftsman (and on this point alone I have genuine conviction), it is because he escapes all piety, nostalgia, and chauvinism when, cutting channels through his beloved earth, he is able to make things flow.

Throughout Land’s dissertation, the precepts of Western modernity -- autonomy, responsibility, the social contract -- are challenged by figures of poetic delirium and the abolition of rational models of kinship. In lieu of reason, Land positions a postmodern reading of Nietzsche, a Heideggerian approach to language, and a radical form of Derridean deconstruction as responses to a world with which he is clearly disillusioned. At no point are the ‘perplexities’ of his present described or diagnosed, but the need for the mobilization of a writing practice with the effect of agricultural cultivation -- in other words an aesthetic practice directed at the transformation of reality -- is affirmed in the strongest possible language. 

There is another passage from Derrida’s Disseminations that sums the movement Land sought to radicalize -- the space in which the ‘practice of spacing’ and ‘critique of the dialectics of reading’ are written as the overflowing of semantics by syntax:

•             What counts here is not the lexical richness, the semantic infiniteness of a word or concept, its depth or breadth, the sedimentation that has produced inside it two contradictory layers of signification (continuity and discontinuity, inside and outside, identity and difference, etc.). What counts here is the formal or syntactical praxis that composes and decomposes it.
  

In radicalizing the lexical practice of decomposing and dispersing sign systems; in treating the vibrant and motioned oceans into ice and rock, into the death of things; in willing on Hell in the image of the wolf and calling for a new form of writing predicated on the immanent conjugation of endogamy and an always deferred exogamy, Land strikes the chord of the verwesendes Geschlecht -- of a twofold that neither rests nor releases but is instead ironically abandoned, the mad poet acceleratedly wandering to the site of the mad stranger-sister. Land is uninterested in deferral -- his Heidegger strikes into the soil of the earth and inscribes the abyss, the graphematic weft violently marking the beat of the icy wave of eternity. 

His interest in the space between language, modernity, and reproduction would continue; this territory has been well-covered by other writers. I would like to explore the continuities and discontinuities between this earliest work and The Dark Enlightenment. It is my contention that in tracing his ideas of inscription and reproduction across the demonstrative field of these two texts, new understandings of the communication strategies of contemporary neo-fascism will find stronger historical grounding.  

In January 2017, Land taught a course at the New Centre for Research & Practice entitled “Outer Edges: 21st Century Spatial Metapolitics.” In the course description he cites the principle of Dynamic Geography developed by Thiel-funded entrepreneur Patri Friedman, whose Seasteading Institute sought “to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.” Land defined metapolitics as “the strategic perpetuation of ideological irresolution into (fractured) space,” pushing the question of cultural hegemony beyond the political, and into the very concepts of space and time. While Land rarely referred to Heidegger after the initial publications derived from his dissertation, it is my argument that the writing and reading practices cultivated in these early writings are maintained in the structures of ironic memetics and esoteric numeracy since the CCRU, fused with the racial politics after The Dark Enlightenment. It is also my contention that these practices constitute a metapolitics, a strategy premised on the claim that cultural hegemony precedes the taking of political power. This may appear to be an unnecessary conceit. As critics from Matthew Lyons to Shuja Haider have documented, Land’s writings are explicitly racist and sexist; whether they are fascist is a question Land himself has contested, a contestation to which I will return. But to call the writing racist describes its content -- a reading established upon an understanding of Land’s style as metapolitical describes its form. As our exegesis of Land has shown, reactionary writing expresses encoded messages typologically and rhythmically. Land accelerates the metapolitics of the modern right by situating its reading and writing practices at the level of the grapheme, the bit, the gene. As I will demonstrate, this understanding is necessary for any analysis of the aesthetics of digital fascism. 

“Everything is coded,” Land wrote. “There is not—and can never be—any ‘plain text’” (FN 603).

According to one of Land’s former classmates, philosopher Simon Critchley, Land ‘had the most meteoric and savagely satirical mind’ and an ‘unwavering desire to take thought to its absolute limit and then see how much harder one could push.’