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De quoi Nick Land est-il le nom?

Thinking again with Heidegger about what I called artificial horizons, as in my last post, I was wondering whether metaphysics - the dispensation of being through presence - is actually engendered by the parricide. Severino's claim is that Parmenides made no sense of the intelligibility of nothingness precisely because there being was more than merely appearing. As a consequence, being was more than presence. Presence was brought about by the idea that beyond what is in the horizon there's nothing - and therefore that things dive into nothingness when they are not present. An artificial archive became then an urgency - an archive that will keep things from lapsing into nothingness. The parricide made this archive the central urgency for thought. Severino's claim is that by reclaiming the idea of a horizon as a place of Ereignis, no place would be left for an artificial horizon from an artificial archive. In other words, the urge to capture the intelligence of what exists so that it becomes available not only for us but to whoever wants to make it happen (artificiality) is a consequence of the metaphysics of presence and therefore of the terrifying possibility of nothingness. Without the parricide, there is an abundance in being in everything - nothing is in lack, nothing is at risk, nothing is requiring of additional care.

It is perhaps hard to think beyond the endeavor of understanding, and explaining, and making the essence of something available to whoever comes. It seems like extracting the intelligence is precisely what will bring improvement in life. The opposite view is one perhaps endorsed by Heidegger according to which things should be left to their own devices. In other words, death has a physis, poverty has a physis (Pasolini held that communists go astray when they starts conceiving poverty itself as the main enemy to fight). The defense of those causes is rarely found - the left defends the physis of humanity while endorsing progress and takes understanding as the crucial relation one should have with the world while the right appeals to land, blood and tradition while implementing what interests capital, the extraction of intelligence of more and more things. Development - the current name of the old metaphysical project of intelligence extraction - is the hidden agenda one knows it is too hard to fight. This is the event Nick Land names - the hard rock of capital which shows its strength in the weaknesses of its representatives. (The scary, non-ridiculous element associated with Brazil's Bolsonaro is that one reckons the forces behind the phenomenon, and they are more powerful than the circumstances.) We are geared towards understanding as extracting intelligence. We were prepared to deal with the world as what deserve a treatise and never a treaty. Metaphysics, far from being under attack, has consolidated itself without rivals in the last few centuries. It seems like it can now even afford to go back to its original broad ambitions. Nothing seems to stop us from delivering an artificial horizon.

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