The Philosophy of Nick Land: Anglotheosophical Oblique Escalation

Hey y'all,

This week Nick is hosting the topic on the philosophy of Nick Land! Here's the write-up below:

The Philosophy of Nick Land: Anglotheosophical Oblique Escalation
“How many suns are there?
This is how it cuts.
Katarsun makes two at least.
Arising Ra-reverse Osiris. Earth-station.
When they count O or One-tags two.
A as Three-tags five.
Aosys twin-faults squash something.
They lock an alien entity into Solar systematics.
The schizophrenic Sun has an inner night sticking it
together…” (Nick Land, “KataςoniX”, 1996)
“’Contradiction’ is mechanically dynamized as stabilization within a negative control loop, or as escape momentum in a positive one.” (Nick Land, “Note on Diagonal Method”, 2021)
Hey all,
This week I’ll be presenting someone whose work will likely be fairly new to most of you: the British philosopher Nick Land. Land is best known for his time at the University of Warwick in the 90’s, where he co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit alongside Sadie Plant, and befriended and worked with Mark Fisher. Nowadays, Land is best known as the name behind “accelerationism”, a word that has since the 90’s entered the zeitgeist mostly as various schisms of political ideologies downstream (speaking generously) from Land’s work. And while much of his current image paints him in a contrarian light, I think that it’s worth taking a look at Land as a philosopher in his own right, and in his own words.
However, a full dive into Land’s forty years of active philosophical work; traversing denseessays, cybernetic theory, occult-adjacent speculation, crypto-economics, horror theory-fiction, gematria, and his quite active X account; would be too much to chew on in our formal hour. For this reason, I’d like to focus specifically on Land’s most recent formulation of his thought, which he sums up in the phrase “Anglotheosophical Oblique Escalation”.
What captured my interest about Land over a decade ago is the very specific way in which he writes and thinks. His style is quite dense and self-referential, chock full of ruthless neologismsand light in explicit definition, more often than not to the point that it resists comprehension in favor of specificity. It took me years to break into it in earnest.
In my presentation I’ll be attempting as best I can (and I make no guarantees with Land) to flesh out Land's very specific notion of acceleration as it is explicated through his newer coinage of Anglotheosophical Oblique Escalation. And we’ll do this both by breaking down etymologically the constituent parts of this quite opaque phrase as far as they have meaning within Land’s system of thought, as well as working with one of Land’s more recent texts, “Note on Diagonal Method”,which I believe is central to understanding both his notions of obliqueness and of escalation, and thus is needed to understand exactly what might be meant by acceleration in its ontological sense. We’ll use Kant’s synthetic/analytic and a priori/a posteriori concepts as illustrations of conceptual parallelism, orthogonality, and diagonality; and we’ll talk a little about thermostats too. Hopefully, by the end of it, we’ll have a functional understanding of what Land means by Gnostic Calvinism, or die trying.
A pdf of Land’s “Note on Diagonal Method” will be attached to this writeup, and it can also be found on his Zero Philosophy Substack if that’s more accessible for any of you(https://zerophilosophy.substack.com/p/note-on-diagonal-method).
Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts, as always.