Fanged noumena's second chapter - Fiendish Language

[As Burroughs said language is a virus from outer space...!]

Heidegger’s relation to Trakl is not a comfortable reading of a strange poet who can be tamed and filed inside literary history, but a violent friction between a thinking that wants to rescue something of the meaning of being and language, and a poetry that drags everything toward the edge of explosion and groundlessness...Nick land's here insists first that the question “Did Heidegger succeed in representing Trakl?” is a misleading one, because it already assumes that poetry is raw material serving philosophy or an illustration of theory, whereas Heidegger, even as he reproduces certain metaphysical traditions, tries to make the poem a place where his own thinking is shaken rather than a mere object he explains from above. The illiteracy he criticizes is therefore not technical ignorance but a way of reading that only knows from poetry what can be used or sorted into boxes like "success" and "failure"

And from this perspective Trakl is not a psychological case to be explained by psychiatry, nor a portrait of a cursed poet in the romantic style, but a being in whom the boundaries that allow society to judge the individual have collapsed: job, adaptation, morality, and a balanced life His breakdown, addiction, and complex relation with his sister are not exploited as a sensational story but as a sign that language in his poetry has lost the ability to distinguish between shocking content and finished form; the poem is not a beautiful vessel for diseased material, it is a form generated from the illness itself, from shock, from a wound that can no longer be made pretty. That is why the image of writing in ashes matters: writing is not building a new house on ruins, but moving inside the trace itself, inside remains that cannot be repaired.

When Heidegger speaks of language as something that concerns itself with itself, he takes up Novalis but puts him at a dangerous crossroads: either this movement is understood as a narcissistic repetition, a closed circle of pleasure, or it is understood as another way for the world to appear, as if language when it bends back on itself, opens new gaps for things to show themselves instead of being trapped in the mirror of the self. He therefore refuses to reduce this circle to the language of psychoanalysis, even though he passes near it, and ties it instead to Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return: not as a psychological fate rather an ontological rhythm, a repetition that does not lead to a fixed identity but to a steady fire that does not go out. In this movement the poem becomes a kind of experiment at the edge of philosophy: thought tries to speak from inside the images, inside the blue water, inside the mirror, instead of imposing names and methods on them from outside.

The images this chapter wants to realese : the night pool, the blue animal, the sister, the stars...are not symbols that can be swapped out using a ready-made dictionary, but a knot binding body, language, family, and sky. The blue animal at the forest’s edge is not simply an >(animal) but a figure of a human whose definition is not yet complete, a creature suspended between animal and reason, wandering in a margin where light does not fully arrive and darkness does not fully recede. This threshold zone, where a being sees itself in the water, is where Narcissus meets Dasein: a human drawn to his own image, but in Trakl’s poetry he does not recover a reassuring picture; the pool does not reflect stable features, but a color, a strange blueness, a luminous void that throws the gaze back into an abyss. Narcissism shifts from love of the self to the moment that love collapses under the pressure of a reflection that no longer guarantees identity.

From here Nick land's takes his distance from Hegel, who tended to treat the scattering of stars in the sky as something less rational than the regularity of the solar system, a distribution that obeys no law and is therefore of lesser philosophical value. The dispersal of stars, dust, flocks of birds, all these centerless movements become for him a threat to the image of organized reason. Trakl’s reading, in the form proposed here, goes in another direction: the stars are not chaos waiting to be reduced to a higher order, but an original mode of existence, a primary strewing that precedes every attempt to arrange it into a fixed structure. At that point the level of thinking changes: instead of a metaphysics searching for a center, we speak of layers of density and dispersion, of clouds of signs that thicken and dissolve, where language itself can be seen as a kind of textual plasma that sometimes coagulates into clear meaning and then returns to a fluid state....against this background the figure of the sister appears, not as a secondary character but as a force that cuts lineage and opens onto another night. She is not only an object of longing or a family taboo; she is the doorway through which the poet exits the father’s house, the law of family and theology, toward a space no stable social order can appropriate. Her lunar voice does not lead to reconciliation but to passage, to a zone where the body itself is threatened with transformation: genders mixing, pronouns crossing, beings that do not fit grammatical gender rules or social norms of masculinity and femininity. In this light, Heidegger’s concept of Geschlecht takes on an ambiguous dimension: he wants to distinguish between a stroke that tears the human species into murderous conflicts and the possibility of a gentler duality, but this distinction as a last attempt to save a dream of purity, a dream of a lineage that could be healed of its wounds without admitting that the wound is its origin.

The unresolved tension that remains is that Heidegger, for all his radicality, still searches for a path toward purer thought, toward a language that would cleanse itself of metaphysics by returning to a deeper origin, whereas Trakl pushes the sign toward an edge where there is no origin left to return to, only a continuous night, a wandering of meaning and image that never settles. In such a landscape narcissism is no longer a surplus of self-love but the moment when the self is stripped of its own image, made to stand before waters that reflect nothing but the blue of emptiness and stars spread like a rash on the skin of the sky; and any writing that tries to be honest about this experience has to give up the dream of clear, coherent speech and accept that it too will move in the ashes, in the trace of a fire no one knows when it began or whether it will ever stop.

Fanged noumena's first chapter - evil kantianism and capitalism

I decided to start a series where I post reviews and analyses of Nick Land’s book Fanged Noumena, a work that means a great deal to me. It affected me so deeply that, for the first time in my life, I bought a book as a kind of personal souvenir. I have read many books, but this one captured my attention in a unique way and feels like a genuine revolution in contemporary philosophy, since very few philosophers today are willing or able to go this deep.​..so I’m going to begin with the first chapter : "Kant/Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest" which I see as presenting a second, largely unacknowledged face of Kantianism a heterodox reading that's rarely admitted within academic philosophy (or not) and that might sketch the basic plot of what's to come in this chapter, (I suck at making introductions, I only know how to talk in ideas).

So Nick land in this chapter tries to understand modernity and the contemporary world through how capitalism intertwines with patriarchy and racism, not as a mere economic stage but as a specific way of organizing kinship, identity, and the boundaries of the group. It takes the apartheid system in South Africa as a miniature model of the modern world: a political separation between whites and blacks while preserving economic proximity, so that the black person remains a source of labor without real rights, as if the "bantustan" were a small-scale image of what happened to the entire "Third World" in its relation to global centers of capital. This separation between politics and economics is not accidental but a basic condition for the survival of capitalism, because shifting the effects of political violence to the peripheries allows the metropolis to appear "neutral" and "democratic" while building its wealth on an ongoing demographic catastrophe at the margins. In the background, Marx appears through the concept of "primitive accumulation" as a war on peasants and the forcible removal of people from their conditions of subsistence, but the writer broadens the idea to link it to kinship structures: masculinity, the transmission of the name through the paternal line, and the discourse of identity that took shape starting with Aristotle and solidified in a logic of identity that venerates the "purity" of lineage and fears mixture. From here capitalism becomes an advanced form of "outward-facing patriarchy": it needs the other in order to extract surplus from them, but it never allows that other to be fully absorbed and dissolved, because the disappearance of difference would destroy the very possibility of exchange. That's why nick land distinguishes between a labor market and a slave market: in the first there is a worker who remains an "other" who can receive a wage and threaten the center politically, while in the second the other is completely crushed and only the master remains, which the author reads as a "fascist" dimension that goes beyond even classical imperialism. The disaster in modern history, as the chapter presents it, is that capitalism did not become a thorough demolition of patriarchal structures by way of a radical cultural and sexual mixing that turns the "father's" heart inside out and exposes identity to collapse; the opposite happened: kinship was isolated from trade, so the economy became globalized while kinship systems remained national, racist, and closed, preserving power inside a geographically rooted "lineage" that guards its borders as a kind of fortification against the feminine/migrant/stranger. In this horizon, modernity is understood as an "inhibited synthesis": a movement of opening to the other shackled by a violent fear of dissolution, which makes it resemble the psychology of rape, a desire to touch the other without exposing ourselves to wounding or change. Here Kant appears as a peak point: his project of "synthetic a priori" knowledge is an attempt to found a kind of knowing that adds something new while at the same time being guaranteed in advance and fixed before any experience, that is, a relation to alterity that is under control from the beginning. What matters for Kant are the conditions of the possibility of experience, the fixed form that things must take in order to be given to us, and this form turns, in the author's reading, into something like an epistemic "exchange value": nothing enters the field of our awareness unless it has already been poured into predetermined molds. In this way, Western reason moves from a closed local economy to a system of exchange with the other that does not prevent the stranger from entering but imposes on them a specific form, like "rich food" produced in the first place to be gifted and exchanged, not to be directly consumed by its producer. In this sense, modernity is not an exit from domination but a reorganization of it at a deeper level: learning how to receive the other, but only to the extent that does not threaten our identity, nor break the chain of the father. The idea begins from something simple: there is ordinary food we eat inside the home, and there is rich food that comes from outside, entering into feasts, hospitality, and the exchange of gifts. This second kind of food plays the same role women play in a patriarchal system that marries daughters into other clans: the father produces and gives, but is not allowed to "consume," so the whole system is built on a primary prohibition, the prohibition of incest, and on top of that are constructed economy, marriage, and law. In this way, "rich food" becomes a symbol of everything that comes from outside the group, outside the structure, before being reabsorbed into it according to its rules and limits. And this is precisely what Land claims Lévi-Strauss, and behind him Kant, are doing at the theoretical level: everything that is alive, synthetic, coming from the outside, is flattened and resettled inside a grid of ready-made binaries so that nothing truly foreign or unclassifiable remains. If we push this logic to its end point, we arrive at a moment where the question of "matter" itself becomes a scandal within Enlightenment thought: the problem is not to understand its essence, but to acknowledge its existence in the first place, because whatever does not enter into the accounting of value, exchange, and property does not count as reality. What cannot be calculated within the tables of market and law appears only as a surplus population that can be kept at the margins: geographically poor, cheap labor, peoples confined within weak states, all representing this "outside" that capitalism needs but at the same time wants to keep at a distance from its clean center. In this way racism does not appear as a mere moral accident, but as a structural logistics for distributing class positions on a racial basis, and for creating a kind of undeclared global apartheid in which wealth accumulates in one place while the price in lives is paid elsewhere, even as modern universal discourse keeps speaking of reason and rights as if it stood above all this. Within this picture, Kant looks like a strange hinge: bourgeois yet outwardly "clean" of explicit racism because he works at a higher level, the level of pure form of thought. He does not glorify an openly imperial power, but defines what is universal in the shape of a transcendental moral law, appearing as someone who liberates ethics from interests. But Land reads this very act of "liberation" as another form of colonization: the colonization of all possible experience by reason. Kant's "economy of the concept" resembles the movement of capital: everything must be recast within a network of prior concepts, leaving no real space for a rebellion that cannot be absorbed. Even when he declares that theoretical reason has no right to speak of the "thing in itself," he still holds on to a whole arsenal of dualities (outer/inner, phenomenon/noumenon, ideal/material) that keep the outside present as a name while absent as a force. But capitalism does not stop at arranging this on the level of thought. As it matures, it needs a whole engineering of revolt, not just in faraway colonies but in the heart of the metropolis. Here come the distorted labor market, selective migration, borders, and carefully distributed poverty. All this turns racism into a rational pattern for allocating the right to decision-making on a global scale. In the background, the separation between marriage and trade, between ethics and politics and economics, becomes a deep structure. In Kantian ethics, for instance, we see a subject saying "I am responsible for a universal law," but in reality it is a subject that hears no one, does not negotiate, and does not acknowledge difference, addressing only itself in the name of the "kingdom of ends": an empire that does not even need bodies to exercise sovereignty, it is enough for it to proclaim what ought to be. Thus the moral "ought" becomes a purified and distilled version of the logic of colonization: in theory, reason can feel some tension before the other; in morality, it forbids itself even this tension, leaving nothing in the relation but command and obedience. When we reach the Critique of Judgment, this logic rises again in a more aesthetic but no less harsh form: beauty itself is understood as a moment of victory of the inside over the outside, of system over chaos, of meaning over wild matter. Pleasure here is not the pleasure of an encounter with something that truly resists us, but the thrill of triumph over a resistance that might have broken us but did not. This is what makes political "purity" – the search for complete harmony, for a society without contradictions, for a collective subject that feels no guilt – slide so easily into fascism: not as a screaming rhetoric, but as a cool administration of unequally distributed violence that keeps the center clean while letting slow death do its work in the peripheries in the form of famines, low-intensity wars, and harsh disciplining of the labor market. In this context, true internationalism does not look like a globalized version of a national left, but like a movement genuinely "outside" the logic of the nation, trying to think politics after borders, not after reforming them. Here the feminist question becomes sharply posed. Women, in his reading, were never allowed their own lineage; the maternal line was erased in favor of the father's name. But this erasure itself produces a paradox: those denied a "pure" origin can, in principle, move beyond any romanticism about ethnic or national roots. If women free themselves from the double grip of father/husband and state/profession, this imposed non-belonging can become a basis for a truly synthetic politics that does not seek a return to an imaginary mother, but aims at exploding the very form of kinship. The problem is that feminism is often pacified by being folded into liberalism: granting some rights, some positions, a carefully measured "empowerment" calibrated to the market's need for new faces. Or it gets pulled into a sentimental feminism content with moral critique and demands for recognition, shrinking from the word no one wants to utter: violence. so here there's something that confronts us here with an uncomfortable question: if the modern industrial state is this dirty in its structure, can it be destroyed without a filthy war? The left usually prefers not to answer, drifting into a reformism without horizon, while wars of national liberation become an alternative stage where violence is permitted on the condition that it always ends in a new state, a new man at the top, and a new round of the same game...and this pattern, usually keeps happening among third worlders

The problem of LLMs

 

https://youtu.be/846JNIM_4MQ?si=_8DLF6ulyRSh6TW7

All we call model improvement today's at its core, just improving the model’s capacity to simulate within a narrow normative space: controlled natural language, specific tasks, user satisfaction, safety constraints, and so on

The model does not build a world of its own the way a human does, nor does it develop an original perspective on the world; what develops is a more and more polished ability to reassemble our perspective and feed it back to us in a smoother, more convincing form

In this sense, we are not moving along a trajectory toward a post-human with a stance, an inner temporality, and a life story, but toward a highly polished intelligence that is increasingly skilled at playing the role of a human in front of us (and its sucks)

Notes on slime dynamics and the thing

In John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing, there’s a point where you stop seeing the creature as a simple monster and start sensing it as something deeper: a piece of living matter that just wants to keep going, in any form, with any face, in whatever body it can hijack. This nameless entity, just “The Thing,” melts the idea of a person from the inside, tries on different faces, then discards them like old skin. In an isolated Antarctic outpost, buried in endless storms, everything eventually narrows down to one quiet question: the person sitting next to me… is he really himself, or has the slime already got to him?

What’s striking is how Ben Woodard, in Slime Dynamics, catches almost the same feeling and stretches it over the whole planet. Instead of two men shivering by a fire in the snow, he gives us millions of years of muck, bacteria, fungi, microbes and all the "gross" stuff we try to push out of sight whenever we talk about 'life' as if it were something clean and uplifting...for him, life is not a neat upward project heading toward the human; it’s a beautiful–ugly accident that happened in some old puddle and never stopped spreading.

Seen from that angle, The Thing feels like one case study inside Slime Dynamics. The alien in the film doesn’t talk, doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t explain itself. It behaves more like a virus than a classic Hollywood monster: it enters the body, copies itself, and keeps on living through whoever it takes over. It doesn’t hate humans or love them; words like "betrayal" and “trust” mean nothing to it. Those belong to us, to creatures obsessed with putting a story on top of everything. For The Thing, a body is just another chance to reproduce, just one more step in a long line of blind replication. And that’s exactly how Woodard treats "slime" as an image of life: sticky matter moving without moral purpose, but relentlessly doing its work.

One of the best things about the movie is that the real horror isn’t in how the creature looks, but in how it sounds. Wind howling outside, heavy footsteps in a metal hallway, scratching on a wall, uneven breathing in a dark room. The only “organized” sound is the men talking: orders, accusations, plans, blood tests. Between one sentence and the next, there’s a long gap, a heavy silence where paranoia grows. If you pull that silence apart a little, it starts to look like the distance humans try to put between themselves and their material origin. So much prose piled on top of one simple fact: we are walking lumps of meat on soil crowded with fungi and bacteria, trying to give ourselves names and stories so we can forget how close we are – and always were – to slime.

Woodard’s project is to yank the rug out from under this clean language. He writes about dark vitalism: life not as something automatically positive and beautiful, but as a blind force moving in every direction, from the bacteria in your gut to the mushroom chewing its way through a corpse in the woods. Nothing in this picture is “neutral” in a comforting way, but it isn’t evil either. The universe, he likes to remind us, simply doesn’t care about us. We’re not the pinnacle of evolution, just one of its side products – a "heap of thinking slime", as he puts it, thrown together by chance and destined to dissolve again.

Once you’ve read that, going back to The Thing changes the ending. Watch closely and you see how quietly the film refuses to grant humans the clean role of heroic saviors. There’s no final scene that guarantees the creature is gone, no sacrificial gesture that clearly "saves humanity" The movie closes on two half-frozen men, a small fire, and bitter smiles. One of them might be infected, both might be, and nobody is coming to rescue them. The cold will take care of the rest. That’s what makes the film feel so close to the spirit of Slime Dynamics: no promise of meaning, no cosmic order waiting for us, just life multiplying, then rotting, then sliding back into raw matter.

What’s impressive about Woodard’s book, even with its dense language, is that he doesn’t stop at saying life is "disgusting" and leave it there. He’s stuck on a harder question: what does it mean to think and to live when you know everything is ruled by decay? How do you approach ethics without quietly putting the human at the center every time? This doesn’t lead him into some lazy call for despair or total apathy, but into something stranger: the idea that meaning itself is material, accidental, something that can flicker briefly in a small gesture amid the wreckage. Think of that tiny moment in The Thing when someone decides not to burn his friend, despite his doubts, even if just for a few extra seconds. Those seconds don’t alter the fate of the universe, but they’re everything we have as conscious beings: tiny gestures in a huge, sticky sea..

Slime Dynamics pulls in Lovecraft, Ligotti, zombie films, horror games, and all the supposedly "low" stuff in pop culture to argue that these things, in their messiness, sometimes get closer to the truth than polished theory ever does. The Thing is one of these grimy, honest texts. It doesn’t build false hope, doesn’t hand you a villain you can hate comfortably, doesn’t let you relax into the belief that "humanity will prevail" on the contrary, it reminds you how quickly cooperation can collapse, how easily the body can turn on you, and how what you call "I" might be a thin layer floating over a slow motion in the flesh underneath

Where the film and the book touch, you get a kind of brutal clarity: we are little more than a damp stain on a very long wall of time. That doesn’t stop us from writing, thinking, loving, panicking, dissecting horror movies and weird books. But it should stop us from buying into coronation myths: the human as summit, as goal, as exception. For Slime Dynamics, that’s just a very old misunderstanding. For The Thing, it’s a dark joke: it only takes one face splitting open into a fleshy flower for you to realize how quickly identity with all its weight / can liquefy...

You could call this kind of work a "metaphysics of slime", but maybe it’s enough to say it’s a way of reminding us what we came out of, and what we’re heading back to. The film does it with blood, snow, and fire. The book does it with sentences, images, and a constant return to fungi, microbes, and disease – everything we keep trying to cover up with disinfectant and meaning. And every time we rewatch The Thing or read another line of Slime Dynamics, we're, in a sense, taking a small step toward admitting it: yes, we are thinking mud and maybe it’s okay to write from inside that mud

PS :

It’s actually a fascinating book and film. I got this piece from a burst of inspiration after watching it and suddenly thinking, "Wait, this feels similar to something I’ve read before" Maybe one day I’ll sit down properly and break down the whole book in detail

Neo?-Aeonic weird time

 (You don't have to remember where... so you can stay longer)

I always feel the usual way ppl talk about time in religious language is too simple: either you have a divine eternity above history or you have everyday time tied to work/appointments/birth/death

But there's a third kind of time and its neither a sacred eternity nor the clock on the wall and it feels like a thin layer working under the surface..stacking moments..memories and images that never fully complete or resolve just hanging in space between the real and the unreal!!

This strange time doesn't show up in the normal sequence of our days instead it leaves a mark or a certain scene (old street {if you're familiar with the "it follows:movie maybe I can talk about it in the future"} a childhood picture) all become dense points, little plateaus (in deleuzian sense) in our awareness that keep shining in the background long after we leave them behind, its pretty looks like our daily life, is a straight line (the first level) and the second level comes as shadows or waves that cut across the line, THEY DON'T STOP IT but they disturb it and remind us that time is not only past-->present-->future but something that keeps pilling up inside us in a stubborn slow way!!

That is where weirdcore comes in for me, bcuz these images don't offer a complete (OTHER WORLD) and they don't give you a religious vision of a comforting eternity...they grab the moments in between those two poles...SCENES that feel familiar and strange at the same time: an empty school/hospital corridor or soft/faint blue/yellow lighting corridor...empty childhood city at night, they're things we know with our bodies but we feel a kind of disconnection with them, as if time has stopped there and hasn't decided whether to move on or collapse completely, and this world isn't spiritual nor transcendent and not a total escape from reality it is a flat marginal space full of intense feeling but no climax or moment of salvation or predictable disaster!! it stretches out like a thin temporal surface laid over our everyday lives>> it doesn't fully belong to our routine and it doesn't open onto some higher meaning or clear msg it leaves US in a postmodern reality combined with recycled images that leads to relapse 

Bcuz of that the weirdnessness in the weirdcore (if we use a traditional and more historical word it'll be the noumenal realm) doesn't promise ME=YOU=WE with redemption or give us a clean world outside this visual and temporal pollution instead it just opens a small crack onto a confusing 0utside that is hazy and poetic: exposing how fragile my reality is instead of replacing it...its not hell or eternity (grey zone we walk thru without certainty, where the image becomes a mirror for our own lostness more than a window toward some impossible salvation 

[AAA I WAS INSPIRED BY SOMETHING I READ Its cycle is complete :) ]

POEM :):

Breath of curses :

Behind me sways a cloud of sorrow,

filled with a hundred curses

blown from a tireless bellows.

I walk…not knowing

whether I’m carrying my steps

or they’re carrying me.

The road yawns beneath my feet,

and time scatters across my face

a dust that feels like names

I’ve long forgotten.

Every curse

that spills from the bellows

grows the wing of an insect,

buzzing at my ear,

reminding me that chaos

stands closer to me

than my own shadow.

The cloud trails behind,

yet I feel it breathing in my chest,

stretching its fingers through my ribs

as if searching for a lost key

or a tightly sealed door.

I try to whistle,

but the air escapes distorted,

as though my lips learned language

from the mouths of ghosts.

And still…

I move on.

For something unseen

nudges my back gently,

whispering:

keep going,

the cloud will never lift

unless you outrun your shadow.

Behind me trails a cloud of sorrow, carried by a hundred curses blown forth from the bellows

Behind me trails a cloud of sorrow, carried by a hundred curses

Behind me trails a cloud of sorrow

Behind me trails

Behind

B---

On creativity

When I think about creativity now, it often feels like a pop-psychology buzzword, as if anything we do can be labeled “creative.” But to me, it is something much deeper: a living force that pulls us out of the slavery of ready-made templates, pushes back against dull dominance, and honors the free mind that dares to renew reality, even when those invested in the status quo hate it at first, like what happened with Galileo/Bruno/Copernicus etc...

People are not split into “creative” and “non-creative”; we're all on a spectrum that opens up when the conditions around us are right, and this has little to do with raw intelligence or technical skill. Creativity shows itself in emotions and symbols, where the whole person is involved, and it usually emerges from surprising turns rather than strict plans, then gradually takes on a clear, shaped form. We don't summon creativity out of nothing; we release what is already there, by living in environments that don't suffocate it. Its traits include an openness to the world and to one’s own inner life without rigid barriers, a deep but quiet sense of independence, a flexibility that plays with ideas and can live with uncertainty, an ability to carve out a new kind of order inside chaos, and a steady energy fueled by inner conviction. In this sense, creativity is the lifeblood of how we renew ourselves and our societies, if we can only free it from the shadows we cast on it. But creativity only emerges when his personality dies. soo does every creator deserve death, or does creativity only acknowledge the dead because its fruits only appear when we want to judge our works by them, or because we refuse to recognize living creators out of fear for the habitual?