No Lives Matter: Resisting Nihilism, Recuperating the Human

ABSTRACT

Taking the slogan “no lives matter” as a starting point to diagnose the nihilism of our contemporary political culture, in this essay I tie the rise of nihilism to the resurgence of far-right political movements, chiefly the neo-reactionary thought of Nick Land. Following my discussion of Land and the culture of apocalyptic nihilism, I elucidate a Black feminist and decolonial perspective that, I argue, resists this creeping nihilism, and instead offers avenues of engaged political praxis for recuperating the politics of personhood. Using Sylvia Wynter’s work as an exemplar of such a perspective, I perform a rhetorical criticism of Land’s essay “The Dark Enlightenment” through the lens of Wynter’s understanding of the human. Critiquing his arguments, I argue that Wynter’s work offers a radical alternative to Land’s apocalypticism and antihumanism, one that maintains a commitment to reimagining the human rather than disavowing it.

KEYWORDS:

• Apocalypticism
• decoloniality
• Nick Land
• nihilism
• Sylvia Wynter
• zombie

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ For more on these shifts, see Mackay and Brassier’s “Editors’ Introduction” to Nick Land, Fanged Nouemena. The reader can also see these shifts—and the descent into madness and obscurantism they perform—by reading Land’s collected essays firsthand.

² Land’s influence can be seen in the academy as well, particularly in his uptake by speculative realists, transcendental nihilists, and object-oriented thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Reza Negarestani. See Sundvall on the “dark politics” of object-oriented ontology.

³ This argument is one that is central to Cloud’s thought and is developed elsewhere. Specifically, see her essay (“The Matrix and Critical Theory’s Desertion of the Real”) on The Matrix and postmodern critical theory.

⁴ For a different reading of decolonial theory and the potentials of humanism in rhetorical studies, see Rowland.

⁵ Jackson offers a powerful critique of plasticity, referring to it as “a mode of transmogrification whereby the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter” (3) in order to also move beyond political humanism.