Text page
Negarestani-2011-Drafting the inhuman
A transition text that drafts the inhuman as a constructive project rather than an anti-human slogan.
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
These pages matter because they give the clearest account of Negarestani's mature inhumanism. The human is treated as revisable and constructible, and philosophy becomes a labor of transformation rather than an elegy for lost essence.
The mechanism is explicitly constructive. Conceptual engineering, revision, and rational navigation replace both nostalgic humanism and Landian anti-philosophy as the dominant way of thinking the inhuman.
That matters because this cluster marks one of the archive's most important departures from its own darker inheritances. It shows how post-CCRU theory-fiction can mutate into a demanding rationalist program without losing conceptual intensity.
How to read this text
Read for the verbs of construction, revision, and engineering. Those are the quickest route into how Negarestani is changing the meaning of the inhuman.
Track where the page explicitly distances itself from anti-humanism as doom, finitude, or exteriority-worship. That is where the distinctiveness of this line is clearest.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 5
Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy 186 1. To what extent does the Freudian appropriation of Capital—tipped by Deleuze and Guattari and fully fashioned by Nick Land through the polit- ico-economic unbinding of Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression—as an antihumanist yet emancipative conception shatter the illusive sovereignty of the human and ally itself with the inhumanism that it claims to be the har- binger of?
Definition · paragraph 19
The energetic sun-earth axis has become a burdening chain for the terrestrial image of thought insofar as it constitutes the exclusivist model of death and dissipation 23. For more details on an equivocal conception of the void, see: Reza Negarestani, ‘Differential Cru- elty: A Critique of Ontological Reason in Light of the Philosophy of Cruelty’, Angelaki, vol.
Definition · paragraph 6
Reza Negarestani 187 In The Thirst for Annihilation and later in his numerous essays, Land introduces an inhumanist model of capitalism through a reappropriation of Freud’s energetic mod- el of the nervous system. The reason for Land’s emphatic recourse to Freud’s ener- getic model is that the extremity and terrestrial generality of Freud’s account of the death-drive are able to universally mobilize capitalism beyond its historic and partic- ular conditions.
Stakes · paragraph 2
Reza Negarestani 183 ence between the inhumanist conception of capitalism and speculative thought’s more extreme attempts for precluding all anthropomorphic predications so as to understand the limits of a politics nurtured by the outcomes of speculative thought.
Stakes · paragraph 1
182 13 Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy Reza Negarestani ‘And beyond all this we have yet to disturb the peace of this world in still another way..’. 1 Quod exitus sectabor iter?
Appears in sections
Reza Negarestani and Inhumanism Primary section
Negarestani, inhumanism, and the philosophical afterlives that extend beyond shorthand accelerationism.