Text page
McKenzie Wark - The Thirst for Annihilation; Georges Bataille and Virtulent Nihilism
"McKenzie Wark - The Thirst for Annihilation; Georges Bataille and Virtulent Nihilism" belongs to the early/middle Land archive where philosophy, theory-fiction, and inhuman modernity are still tightly entangled with the Warwick scene.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because it belongs to the phase of Land most tightly bound to Warwick, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, and the emergence of the CCRU's conceptual atmosphere. Later blog-era politics are not yet the main organizing frame.
These texts work through philosophical compression, polemical scene-writing, and theory-fictional intensity. Abstraction, annihilation, and anti-human thought are made to operate through form as much as doctrine.
That matters because early Land is central to several later archive problems - accelerationism, numogrammatics, cybernetics - but is never reducible to any one of them. The section keeps this phase historically and conceptually distinct.
How to read this text
Read for the problem that organizes the page - nihilism, abstraction, philosophy-fiction, or inhumanism - before trying to relate it to later public myths about Land.
Keep the page beside the reception and interview materials. The strongest reading path is primary text and later framing in sequence, not isolation.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 2
A good companion to Richardson is Nick Land's extraordinary Thirst for Annihilation. Land tries to do justice to the radical heterogeneity of Batallle's texts and the truly transgressive form of his thinking. He puts him in the company ofthe pessimists, principally Freud and, in an inspired move, Schopenhauer. - McKenzie Wark lAne, Richard, TheGolden AgeofAustrallan Radlo J)rama, 1~3-1960,MeOxn"."e University Press, 1m.
Definition · paragraph 2
It runs the risk of making him just a little too acceptable, but he's a better introduction to Bataille than Denis Hollier's whimsical book Against Architecture. A good companion to Richardson is Nick Land's extraordinary Thirst for Annihilation.
Definition · paragraph 2
Phenomenologies of perception and recognition have been outof vogue during the long(ish) reign of semiotics and screen theory, but with screen based media being edged out by interactive video games and the like, we may have need to investigate these problems afresh. Richardson, who has also edited a collection of Bataille's surrealist era writings for Verso, offers a conventional and conventionalising account of Bataille.
Definition · paragraph 2
Richardson, who has also edited a collection of Bataille's surrealist era writings for Verso, offers a conventional and conventionalising account of Bataille.
Definition · paragraph 2
A great many misunderstandings about Hegel find their way into contemporary thinking via poststructuralist (rnisjreadings of Bataille on Kojeve on Hegel. The reason this matters is that Hegel's phenomenology of recognition is perhaps the first philosophy of communication chat treats communication as a problem rather than a given that is premised on a dialectic with the ocher. and hence does not lapse into solipsism.
Appears in sections
Nick Land Before the Break Primary section
Early philosophy, Warwick-era writing, and the phase of Land most central to the CCRU's emergence.