asher__s's review
challenging
dark
medium-paced
3.0
It was interesting - more about Nick Land’s personal philosophical ideas at the time than about Bataille in particular. Bataille was more of the primary inspiration for all these thoughts (pretty sure he talks more about Kant than Bataille) than the specific object of them. Still interesting and sad to see Land’s potential before he became human scum (though you can certainly see the germinal seeds of this later development).
industryscape's review
2.0
The continental version of those shitty self help books with swearing in the title
schumacher's review
3.0
Land quite admirably follows the sort of style Bataille employs in his Summa Atheologica, blending philosophy, poetry, and despairing rants (although unfortunately Land is a much better prose writer than he is a poet (similarly to Bataille)). I quite enjoy his relating of Bataille to Kant, the former not shying away from the horror of noumena. Much of the metaphyics in this book is very similar to those of Deleuze, Klossowski, and Lyotard (although Land changes Deleuze's two-sided BwO into a bitter and somewhat depressing unidirectional one). So, these sections aren't blow-me-out-of-the-water original, but they are written really well. The feminist strains in here and the discussion of Nazism and politics are really great.
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