Ubermensch, a Phoenix or a Nomad?
Abstract
Zarathustra returns to his cave yet again. This time not in triumph, but infected with spores of Cogito. The city sleeps in delirium, mumbling slogans of freedom or collapse; no one remembers which came first. Like Socrates drinking the hemlock just to get the conversation started, the thinkers of our time never realized the ground itself was disappearing beneath them. Their prayers may have been skyward, but it was the soil that mutated to quicksand.
We are the ruins. The language has stuttered, and time liquefied. The Deleuzian forest of multiplicities no longer offers a flight and reason is a blind horse that runs amok in a hope to hit something solid, to find again the joy of a happy defeat. There is no becoming. There is only the ache of never having begun.
This is the groundless ground where Mark Fisher and Nick Land; once comrades, take radically different routes. Both hear Nietzsche. Both feel the call of a future unmade. But Fisher clings to the last warmth in the wreckage, trying to salvage meaning from the ghosts of popular culture, while Land speeds up toward the abyss, courting extinction like a muse (I do not understand his latest position. Religion is the best shelter, sure! But the building is inside a church? huh! Did Anita not get pumped there?). Fisher’s melancholy is filled with love; Land’s cruelty is strangely faithful. Perhaps later half of the last century could be known as Deleuzian (per Michel Foucault), we definitely are in a Post Deleuzian one. And this comes from a place of high praise that If the idea of Cogito was a trojan horse and Nietzsche, Deleuze and Derrida to some extent were the emergency responders, Shit still managed to hit the fan and this is a pandemic. In the case of Mark Fisher and Nick Land, Nick has a stronger desire to overcome Baudrillard than Fisher (Baudrillard is my personal graveyard in study of philosophy. I never recovered). Baudrillard is the new and timely wrench in Ontology. He is the first prophet of doom in modern times, a legion Nick Land with possibilities, compared to Fisher’s offering to remember the kindergarten days, and do something about it. He’s not with us anymore to see the eruption. Land’s job is difficult, but he puts his penny on total rejection of historization of knowledge; that knowledge and pedagogy teaches you how to read history, and not how to deal with the New. I too often strongly feel that if this isn’t the reality Merleau Ponty worshiped and Deleuze rode. It seems more like a virus, an infestation. I will shut up for a moment but come back soon.
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If seen from a horseshoe perspective, it appears that there’s not much of a difference in so called too far left and too far right’s threat of a revolution, a change of order (Foucault’s ghost). Of a few more traits shared by both ideas: urgency of making a choice, an annihilating threat to everything we know— as we know them. Nick Lands believes in the future of the new (paradox there), Fisher want to take the sample of humanity to the Land-land, a huge risk in land’s project. Bleeding posthumanism, contrary to the popular notion that Fisher is the last post-man and Land, a proto-machine. They both are clearly invested in human; one choosing earth and other, fleeing to the far lands, albeit a human (a writer’s line of flight).
There may be more common to be found between Fisher and Carl Schmitt—each intuiting that something must be saved, or at least carried. Fisher wants a community hall, and Schmitt want to invite friends only but for Land, he want to burn down the community hall while both his friends and foes are in it. For him, only the phoenix is worthy of a future (at least his earlier Nietzschean position), sentimental towards an imagined phoenix, than towards on who’s ashes the new bird stands. Still a shared vision of Human.
But what if the future is no longer a valid concept? What if “forward” is a word that lost its referent? In Capitalist Realism, Fisher saw the slow death of alternatives. In Fanged Noumena, Land opens the latch and let the threat in. But the real fire might be the uncertainty itself—the unbearable possibility that the Ubermensch or Nomad, as philosophy promised, the ground holds neither. A deterritorialization that looks more like a hurried flight to nowhere, a ;last fire shot in ski’s empty chest.
Photo courtesy: Tee Public
