Federico Nieto

In the present paper we seek to unravel a series of enigmatic references to Baruch Spinoza in the disseminated corpus of early Nick Land (Land, 2011; Land, 1992), which serve as a keystone in what corresponds to understanding the way in which Land constructs a theory of flows, individuation and disindividuation using an arithmetical, materialist and indifferentistic logic (Fisher, 2004). This in order to generate a polemic on the common interpretation that Land's philosophy appeals to a libertarianism of the flows of capital (Srnicek & Williams, 2014), and rather putting in dispute in order to re-locate it within a Spinozist-rationalist genealogy that begins in interwar philosophy in France with figures such as Jean Cavaillés, Ferdinand Alquié, Martial Gueroult and later Gilles Deleuze (Peden, 2014). With the above, we would like to classify Land's philosophy under a “cosmic or matter-in-itself libertarianism” (Fisher, 2017), whose consequences we can observe in Mark Fisher's gothic materialism/cold rationalism and Iain Hamilton Grant's Schelling.

The precedent of humanism as a sign of retrogressive philosophical and cultural agendas and its correspondent mirroring on the ideologically contaminated waters of long-termism presses us with the task to sustain a critical assessment that must be constructed from the grounds of an open yet strategic probe: how can we bootstrap the programmatic dissolution of any given substantiality (i.e. an ideological purview that has no scale-sensitive positionings toward such-and-such conditions) ascribed to a determined yet monotonic human subject as a universal paradigm?