The Apocalypse of Our Tongue

In the early months of 2023, then-editor of Compact Magazine Nina Power commissioned former philosopher turned online sycophant Nick Land to compose a series of short essays. In the first of three, ‘Why We Need the Canon Wars’ (February 21, 2023), Land pled for a renewed war of/on 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.
  

The fundamental inquiry of the essay goes on to be 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 , is a loss of faith in faith: ‘Cultural faith—transcendental faith,, it might be said, in the intellectual dialect of the Germans—has collapsed.’ The notion of faith as a world-constituting force is no more. This collapse of cultural faith is ruinous, ‘biblical’ -- for ‘it is common Scripture that makes a people’. For Land, then, the dialectical image of this cultural faith flashes, collapses: ‘Scripture is the apocalypse. Already, we inhabit it,’ always already collapsing within as our totems fall. In this catastrophe,only one thing can be maintained: our language is downstream of Angles. ‘The canon apprehends religion as culture, and culture as literature.’ 

Land is throughout these essays esoterically concerned with critique. As he writes, when the Anglo has accepted that he is engaged in an ‘angelic intercourse,’ ‘Things can turn strange.’ His engagement with critique, however, is ironic. For Land, critique is the performance of a sovereign people conforming to irrational belief in their constructed canon, devotion to scripture as an enactment of a culturally pervasive death drive. This is also a formal constraint upon writing itself, a description of a style: ‘Within literature, all voices merit ironic detachment, which is only to say that--from the other side--they exceed all subjective credulity...We shall be unfathomably religious, as we enter into the apocalypse of our tongue.’ These encoded literary messages, for Land, might be expressed in a form of ‘Sublime’ Anglossic.

Anglossia is defined by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the turn of the century as the ‘Language of the angels...the mystical telos of the English language.’ 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 generates what he now modulated into a capitalized (ironized) form of ‘Solemn Providence’: 

Leif Weatherby writes in his ‘Irony and Redundancy: The Alt Right, Media Manipulation, and German Idealism‘ regarding the function of tweets:

•             ‘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.’ In this manner, ‘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 exists in the inscription of a text; at the level of the bit; in the coding of a gene. It is also this irony that establishes a permission structure for the scientific racism the Compact essay expresses in the language of metapolitics. If Scripture makes a people, and these people ‘are here called the English’, then there can be no space for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the canon: ‘On this note, it has to be admitted, realistically, that no core English canon will be remotely ‘diverse and inclusive’ in the dominant contemporary usage of these terms. ‘Equity’ is more alien to it still.‘ This commutation of faith in the English culture is achieved through the formal expression of religion as culture as literature, of the manipulation of language towards the end of days. ‘What the Bible says does not depend upon what it means, but only the inverse. Its cultural authority, or canonicity, is solely grounded in the former and not the latter.’ All is form, form is derived from the KJV, and form is that which is ‘taught, prior to any interpretation,’ a devotional training in the apocalyptic faith of the English people. 

As I will explore, even in his earliest writings Land had registered the importance of this spiritual training as extant in the smallest units of language. In 1987 he referred to this practice as the ‘cultivation of the grapheme’.

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. According to one of his 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.’ Heidegger was also in the air. As historian Stefanos Geroulanos notes, 1987 ‘was a prolific year for Heidegger studies,’ even before the publication of Chilean writer Victor Farías’s Heidegger et le nazisme. At Essex, a cadre of young professors sought to buttress a radical poststructuralist edge against the conservatism of their philosophy department in the midst of labor strikes and protests against South African apartheid. Robert Bernasconi, David Farrell Krell, and collaborators such as David Wood and John Sallis; this contingent of philosophy professors sought to explore the relation of deconstruction to Heidegger’s thought, or, raise the question with which John Sallis introduced the publication of the 1985 conference at Loyola University on ’Deconstruction and Philosophy’, 

The acknowledgements Land makes in the front matter of his dissertation belie his total immersion in this philosophical milieu, noting his deep gratitude for Bernasconi and critical theorist Jay Bernstein’s assistance. He continues, however, that his ‘most extensive thanks are due to my supervisor, David Farrell Krell, for the countless hours of discussion, reading, and thinking which he so recklessly squandered on this project, in a true ‘economy without reserve’.’ Krell is most certainly the decisive influence on Land’s dissertation: the subject itself has been his central concern for decades. Krell is a scholar of Heidegger and Nietzsche, highly regarded for his edited volume of Heidegger’s Basic Writings (1977) and his four-volume translation of Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures. Krell had been working on Heidegger’s reading of Trakl since 1976-77, when he first published on the subject in ‘Schlag der Liebe, Schlag des Todes: On a Theme in Heidegger and Trakl,’ in Research in Phenomenology (1977). In this essay, Krell isolates one theme in Trakl’s lyric, that of ‘the generation of man, struck by love and death.’ Schlag der Liebe, Schlag des Todes. Krell enters the heart of his essay by performing the etymology of the term Schlag:  

It is this final definition, of der Schlag as type, that concerns us here, and that we must maintain as we follow the etymological chain. Krell turns to his next etymological layer: ‘It is by virtue of this sense [of coinage, imprint, type] that Schlag forms the root of a word that is very important for Trakl, das Geschlecht.’ Geschlecht is a complex and layered term, and it is this complexity which so doggedly haunts our present. 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.’ In this sense, the word becomes constitutive of humankind, ‘one generation of men, dying to make way for a succeeding generation.’ It also maintains a sexual connotation, serving as the root for words meaning genitals (Geschlechts-trieb), sex drive (Geschlechtsverkehr), and sexual intercourse. 

It was not until two years later that Krell became truly immersed in the work of Jacques Derrida, upon being given his Éperons: Les styles des Nietzsche by John Sallis. Krell and Derrida struck up a correspondence in September of 1982, and in 1983 Krell took the liberty of sending him his Schlag writings, understanding Derrida to be working on a series of lectures under the title Geschlecht. The first of Derrida’s Geschlecht essays, subtitled ‘Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’ appeared in a collection of essays on Heidegger for the Cahier de l’Herne in 1983. The text was later translated for Research in Phenomenology (1983) Today, it appears in the English translation of Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Psyche: Inventions of the Other). In this first essay, the French philosopher provides a preliminary definition of Geschlecht, and an indication of the direction his analysis is compelled:

The work to which Derrida gestures was to become Geschlecht III. At the time of Land’s dissertation, this essay remained an unpublished typescript of a 1984-85 lecture given under the title The Phantom of the Other -- the first in a series of four seminars under the general title Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism (1984-85). In March 1985, Krell had presented at a colloquium at Loyola University in Chicago, where the French philosopher first distributed the 33-page typescript as an addendum to his Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand.  Land’s access to this lecture most likely came by way of his adviser. However, he does note his thanks to Derrida himself for access to unpublished typescripts in the acknowledgements of his dissertation. 

Derrida is concerned in the third Geschlecht essay 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: he does not intend the use of type in the sense of his Tympan (1972) -- a work of Surrealist typography and an exploration of the inner ear -- nor that of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography, in which the relationship between the stamp (Stempel) and the impression (Prägung) is conceived as an onto-typology, or fictioning of political beings. Derrida’s concern is directed instead towards “what links the tupos [type] to the Schlag, and thus to Geschlecht in Heidegger’s text.” The tuptein, or rhythmic beat, of the tupos (type) relates the tupos to the Schlag (mark), the root of Geschlecht. While Derrida sets these important textual lineages aside, or permits them to linger in the margins, we must not; the references to Lacoue-Labarthe’s genealogy of type provides information necessary for understanding Land’s own concept of the “word and the ‘thing’,” Geschlecht and its mechanisms. 

Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on typography receives attention in a fascinating footnote regarding the passage from tupos to Geschlecht, essential for recognizing the political implications of Land’s dissertation. In Typography, Lacoue-Labarthe quotes and analyzes an 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 Ernst Jünger. In this passage, Heidegger compares Plato’s notion of the tupos as “that which brings to the fore” or “that which imprints” to German writer Ernst Jünger’s understanding of Prägung (to imprint), delineated in his 1932 novel 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,” but that 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’.’ In Derrida’s note, he continues that this ‘modern sense’ of Prägen as ‘giving meaning’ is the same development of individual subjectivity that constitutes the modern subject. Derrida notes that it is this 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.  

Land’s central concern in his dissertation is the ‘cultivation of the grapheme’, or the development of ‘inscriptive practices’ directed at the ‘intensification of type’. He theorizes ‘a primordial tendency towards cultivation implicit in specificities,’ and suggests that an active reading practice attuned to these specificities could ‘re-open the conduits of force connecting Heidegger’s Trakl interpretation to our contemporary perplexities.’ Land theorizes the connotations of Geschlecht as micro-compulsions generated in the cultural sphere upon the striking of minimal linguistic units. The strike of the blow carries with it the form of Jünger’s Der Arbeiter, the fascist figuration of an ideal human type prepared for total mobilization. Land elides this genealogy, yet runs the same ontotypological program four decades later. Menschenschlag is now the people of the English language taught ‘without interpretation’ the codes expressed in the KJV. In a later comment on Schlag and its relation to the unleashing or mitigating of dissemination, Land writes: ‘The ‘stamp’ (coup, Schlag) ordering textuality is to have the ‘form’ of conjugal regulation; which is ultimately the manipulation of genealogies.’ In this double blow of the mark, this dissemination of writing, Land maintains the two simultaneous characteristics of Geschlecht: ‘it is not only proliferated in the opening of culture, but is also the originary proliferation whose disorder provokes the cultural enterprise.’ It is both the irrational overcoding of text and the exogamic reproduction in contradiction to the preservation of the genus. Land’s conception of culture is of a natural process that is both the creation and dissolution of arbitrary order, the cultivation of the grapheme ‘the coursing of desire through the sign,’ the ‘propagation of graphic energy.’ Culture cannot be an artificial representation, for it is itself an accelerated process of dissemination that is ‘both the condition of possibility of the sign system and the pool of arbitrariness which the sign is designed to obliterate.’ Land proposes that writers might harness this frozen image of culture through graphematic reproduction and rhythmic manipulation.  

In Geschlecht, a term connoting any range of bordered belonging, Land finds the elements of the accelerationist writing practice that guides his work through the present. In the ‘rhythm of type’ -- or the compulsive repetition of graphematic units whose ‘sub-atomic’ elements contain ‘ethno-historical’ meaning -- Land theorized a method for escape from the illusion of ordered modernity. Land’s analysis of Arthur Rimbaud in the third section of his dissertation is the moment in which he engages most clearly with the cultivation of the grapheme as an operable writing practice for enacting this graphematic exit. Land is attracted to Rimbaud’s delirious poetics, for his work ‘interrupts the sublimation of the letter into the word, and therefore explodes the repression of typography within vocabulary.’ 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.’ Here there is no rhythmic order save for that of the icy wave of eternity – this is the place of the pure mark of madness, the departure from the world, the collapse of modernity into violent and liberatory chaos through the manipulation of the written sign and genealogy.