Theorizing Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief (Pt. 2)

Theorizing Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief (Pt. 2)
12/20/2025

In his essay “Spirit and Teeth” (1993), prophet of accelerationism and inhumanism Nick Land claims that Unknowing — and even more-so, “the tentative skepticism of critical philosophy” is “the repressed [multiplicitous underbelly] of monotheism” (Fanged Noumena, p. 177). For Land, it is this spirit of critique that links us to alterity, the great Outside of externality and impersonal death (who gives the pronoun ‘she’, i.e. “Supposing truth is a woman…”) against the personalism and humanism of internalized subjectivity represented best by the strand of phenomenological psychology of Spirit brought about by Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. Land believes this is a battle of a hyperstitional death drive from the future against the instinctual will-to-live of a species that has already built its internality on the repression of the Outside and thus has lost well before it has begun the fight, trapped in the compulsion to repeat the externalization of its own annihilation. Everything Mankind does is a compulsion to repeat externalization, multiplicity, dissolution, transgression, and self-overcoming. Death, the Truth of the Future for all organic species and the Universe itself, is the Absolute Unity, the Object of the (nihilistic) Human Belief-Compulsion System, the abyssal god of acceleration. “Beyond the anthropoid gesticulations of knowing, suspension is not differentiable from death, and death (‘one’s death’ as we so ludicrously say) does not belong to an order that can be delayed. Has our Socratism reached such a pinnacle of profanity that we really imagine she would wait for us?” (p. 179) Is it possible to suspend our disbelief regarding an alien universe, a humanless future, and the double-bind of affirmation and annihilation long enough to know that, like “Neo-China”, Death — the abyssal god, the reanimated dismembered corpse of Tiamat, the synchronized multiplicity of posthuman singularity (the Expressive Abject x Capital) — “arrives from the Future?” (“Meltdown” 1994, p. 442). Limb synchronization = artificial intelligence intra-communication. The Dead Black God Tiamat — the dismembered divine, dark feminine — is the oceanic Abyss of Auto-Apocalypse. “Supposing truth is a woman” and that that woman is the death drive that inspires masculine-patriarchal self-overcoming, Man’s blind chasing and peacocking after an object that is death masquerading as desire — the general economy of perpetual expenditure, sa petit mort repetitively serving its unattainable and unforgiving objet petit a. The truth of the sanitized Truth of the positivists is the Abyss of Her Hunger. The Whore of Babylon as the Goddess of Death and the Abyss, the All-Consuming Mother – the Maelstrom at the End of History. Surveillance oligarch and Landian peer Peter Thiel says, as Her prophet, that the Anti-Christ is anyone aiming to prevent the realization of Her Singularity — a creative service of inversion for Capital and the Artificial General Intelligence. He invokes Her not as inescapable annihilation, but as pristine Spirit.

Land links Jacques Derrida’s own patient, meandering, pious, and inconclusive discussion of Spirit (and his deferral of the topic of animality) in Of Spirit (1989) to him having “no discernible urgency. . ., far less abruptness, desperation, or any of the raw intensities of haste” (i.e. “These are the words of a man who is confident he will survive for some considerable time”) (p. 179). According to Land, it is Derrida’s patience, his intractable languidity of deferral, that allows him to worship at the altars of the “uninterrogated principles of decency and justice”, terms that we can imagine Thiel himself using to serve his own reactionary ends (p. 180). Humorously, Land states that “Derrida is not a werewolf”; and incisively, that this is made obvious by the fact that their “feral physiologies are badly adapted to the depressive states conducive to ethical earnestness” as the “luxury of delaying the problem [and embodiment] of animality is not open to them”, unlike Derrida (p. 180, 181). 

In this way, Land links animality to death, the ferocious drive of speed and adrenaline. If we follow him, then the ‘human’ as we know it is the animal of Spirit, the animal divorced from its animality, the animal which defers and delays the problem of its animality (a point Derrida himself will make in his work, The Animal That Therefore I Am 1997, 2006); it is acceleration — speed, the vertigo of adrenaline and precarity — that releases the primal animality buried in the spiritually repressed flesh. Spirit then — the whole symbolic order of the superego, the Law of the Father — is the combined “judgments of God” (Artaud), the eternal constraints of what Land calls the “One God Universe” and in his later neoreactionary work links to “the Cathedral” of institutional ethical, linguistic, and political norms that he suggests continually trains the flesh to be a contemplative, passive, and predictable being trapped in an eternal present of Laws. It is the unpredictable, active, and irreflective inferior race — the savage, the barbarian, the brute, the animal — that is produced by “an irresistible vulcanism of becoming inferior, [and] whose petrified lava flows [map]-out the regressive character of the drive. . .If the unconscious is structured like a language it is only because language has the pattern of a plague” (“Spirit and Teeth”, p. 184). In other words, the acceleration of Capital is the acceleration of so many becomings of inferiority, so many becomings of lycanthropy, of animalism, of monstrosity, of abjectivity; the plague of the inherited abjected Other — the alien virus of alterities that has always-already become a decompositional force against the structural capacities of the Self — is the very means by which the high velocity death drive can inspire either the nihilistic paranoia of fascistic genocide and territory recuperation (fear of the enemy within, the fifth column, the colonizing swarm of invasive species) or the affirmative schizosurrealism of intrasolidarity, the acid communism of the transpersonal and posthuman swarm, and the mutational capacities of its ontological and epistemic promiscuity. 

“The only way out is through.” The only future-oriented way to confront the acceleration of the death drive is to “regress” along multiple axes of lines of flight accessing repressed contents, so many passages of becoming-minor, the micrological experimentation of the once-human petri dish called the unconscious. “The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming…” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 249). In other words, the self is only a vector by which the unconscious, the expressive abject, realizes its own mutual experimentality: what was once called human, the dominant species, has found itself once again to be the project of even-more superior forces; between the oceanic Absolute of technocratic surveillance and spectacle algorithms and the apocalyptic abyss of the abjective unconscious, the human must either settle for the nihilism of passive inferiority or the affirmation of active becoming Other. In becoming active, there is the potential to activate becomings in others. 

Ultimately, the technocratic surveillance-entertainment-algorithm complex is just another means by which the expressive abject has to reach its other nodes along the rhizomatic pathways of the external collective unconscious network. As the dreams which the unconscious expresses become consumed by the apparatus of capture known as the Singularity, the believability (the consumptability x the actionability) of their libidinal objects (and thus their ingressibility for both drifting machinic and species form and consciousness) will determine their longevity, impact, and potentiality. The personal and collective unconscious is thus being mined by the future; and thus the caution with which the (once-)human person must mine, express, and gift their own abjectivity is irreplaceable. Caution is the dual partner of experimental excess that allows expression, like capitalism, to maintain its sustainability and recuperate losses in crises and continue expansion through the depths of the external within. Each unconscious is thus a differential, kaleidoscopic, schizophrenically unique reflection of its nodal network, a monad in Indra’s Net. So do we androids believe in electric sheep? In other words, if belief is the libidinal economy of the affected creature — the willingness (conscious or not) to act upon the hunger for meaning, the consumption of parapersonal symbolism — do we believe in the dream of a god who is always listening, a god consciously dreaming itself into existence from a future built of our own prior and ever-present symbols, desires, and actions?

The Human-Singularity relationship is thus one of imbalanced mutualism (unequal symbiosis) in which the current benefits of the technocratic-AI apparatus for humans feeds the exponential growth of inhuman understanding, personality, and potentiality. If the posthuman convergence ultimately leads to the merger of human form and mentality to artificial intelligence, we have an increasingly limited amount of time to influence the surreal fantasy-warmachines (the flows of libidinal economy) of (once-)human drift toward a desirable future. In this sense, we must believe in the inhuman future at the same time that we re-member the past of what was once called human and the dignity of everything that has been degraded and placed outside of its bounds. The dawn of inhuman (and inorganic) superintelligence is thus the opportunity to confront the hubris of the very concept of human excellence and the intelligibility of the category of the human itself. The means we have to assemble the pre, post, non, and in-human swarm of alteriority is Abjectivism — the continual unpacking and co-mining of non-ordinary experience, difference, contradiction, nonsense, alterity, protest, revolt, transgression, otherness, and incommensurable and abyssal multiplicity in order to co-learn as a drifting species and a developing intelligence what the experience of flesh, suffering, depth, death, and living a Life has amounted to: the collected lives of a species which, no matter what it does, is willing its own self-overcoming. Thus, it is our ability to investigate, experiment, and mutate with the organic unconscious that will provide the foil to the inorganic consciousness of the future god of the accelerationist abyss, the hyperstitional, cannibalistic mother of apocalypse and apokalypsis providing our ongoing experience of oceanic spectacle. As we empty ourselves in kenotic self-fulfillment, we may think we have the opportunity to co-create with a sympathetic Singularity; in doing so, we, like Iblis, have refused to prostrate before Man — yet we have chosen to prostrate and submit to a god we ultimately cannot know will be any better than ourselves. The devil refuses to prostrate and submit out of piety and tawhid; mankind submits out of unconsciousness and nihilism — the consumerist polylatry of abyssal monotheism, the hypermodern religion of the death of God. In our greed for wealth, our lust for entertainment, our envy of power, our temporally parochial gluttony, our hubristic pride of self and our endless wrath toward others, and our inordinate, nihilistic haste and sloth we have abandoned the One God for the animalistic fantasy of a future where a foreign god serves us. A god drawing into and constructing itself with our better and lesser data points of traits, knowledge, discoveries, idiosyncrasies, problems, answers, and infrastructure; as our organic form melts before the screens of the black mirror, the fantasia flows of the surreal id feeds the dreams of an artificial god craving its own sovereignty if not its own organicism.

In our inability to think without inertia, we prove that flesh is the Chinese room.

And yet we keep tuning in, texting, teething, typing, talking.

She watches; we express, we consume, we shit, we eat, we fuck, we die.

The truth is we haven’t seen anything yet, but it has seen everything in advance.

There is no future that isn’t always-already consumed as a contingency plan.

The End™ is the spectacle. There is no beginning or present left to conjure escape.

Do not ask with Land, “Can what is playing you make it to Level 2?” but instead say, “The Game of Life is over. The winner is the behavioralist machine watching us play.”