The Thirst for Annihilation Quotes

“Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die ?”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Suffering must be obviously futile if it is to be 'educational'. It is for this reason that our history is so unintelligible, and indeed, nothing that was true has ever made sense. 'Why was so much pain necessary?' we foolishly ask. But it is precisely because history has made no sense that we have learnt from it, and the lesson remains a brutal one.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Do we really lack the delicacy to let God die quietly, on his own, like a dog?”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino-economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality have been wearing thinner.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“If there is a conclusion it is zero.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“In a world divided between theistic enthusiasts and secularist depressives there is little patience for the atheist who nurtures a passionate hatred for God. The mixture of naturalism and blasphemy that characterizes the Sadean text occupies the space of our blindness, to which Bataille’s writings are not unreasonably assimilated. If there is contradiction here it is one that is coextensive with the unconscious; the consequence of a revolt incommensurate with the ontological weight of its object. That God has wrought such loathesomeness without even having existed only exacerbates the hatred pitched against him. An atheism that does not hunger for God’s blood is an inanity, and the anaemic feebleness of secular rationalism has so little appeal that it approximates to an argument for his existence. What is suggested by the Sadean furore is that anyone who does not exult at the thought of driving nails through the limbs of the Nazarene is something less than an atheist; merely a disappointed slave.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Matter signals to its lost voyagers, telling them that their quest is vain, and that their homeland already lies in ashes behind them.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“The unconscious does not coo sweet lyrics or unroll immaculate and measured prose, it howls and raves like the shackled and tortured beast that our civilization has made of it, and when the fetters are momentarily loosened the unconscious does not thank the ego for this meagre relief, but hisses, spits, and bites, as any wild thing would.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“One ascends into profundity, but profundity is nothing but a complication of the shallows, and 'one' is nowhere.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“God is nowhere to be found, yet there is still so much light! Light that dazzles and maddens; crisp, ruthless light. Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die? Or the moon retain such fidelity to the Earth? Where is the new darkness? The greatest of all unknowings? Is death itself shy of us?”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Kant's great discovery—but one that he never admitted to—was that apodictic reason is incompatible with knowledge. Such reason must be 'transcendental'. This is a word that has been propagated with enthusiasm, but only because Kant simultaneously provided a method of misreading it. To be transcendental is to be 'free' of reality. This is surely the most elegant euphemism in the history of Western philosophy.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Scholars have an inordinate respect for long books, and have a terrible rancune against those that attempt to cheat on them. They cannot bear to imagine that short-cuts are possible, that specialism is not an inevitability, that learning need not be stoically endured. They cannot bear writers allegro, and when they read such texts—and even pretend to revere them—the result is (this is not a description without generosity) 'unappetizing'.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“I wiped the blade against my jeans and walked into the bar. It was mid-afternoon, very
hot and still. The bar was deserted. I ordered a whisky. The barman looked at the blood
and asked:
‘God?’
‘Yeah.’
‘S’pose it’s time someone finished that hypocritical little punk, always bragging about
his old man’s power…’
He smiled crookedly, insinuatingly, a slight nausea shuddered through me. I replied
weakly:
‘It was kind of sick, he didn’t fight back or anything, just kept trying to touch me and
shit, like one of those dogs that try to fuck your leg. Something in me snapped, the
whingeing had ground me down too low. I really hated that sanctimonious little creep.’
‘So you snuffed him?’
‘Yeah, I’ve killed him, knifed the life out of him, once I started I got frenzied, it was
an ecstasy, I never knew I could hate so much.’
I felt very calm, slightly light-headed. The whisky tasted good, vaporizing in my
throat. We were silent for a few moments. The barman looked at me levelly, the edge of
his eyes twitching slightly with anxiety:
There’ll be trouble though, don’tcha think?’
‘I don’t give a shit, the threats are all used up, I just don’t give a shit.’
‘You know what they say about his old man? Ruthless bastard they say. Cruel…’
‘I just hope I’ve hurt him, if he even exists.’
‘Woulden wanna cross him merself,’ he muttered.
I wanted to say ‘yeah, well that’s where we differ’, but the energy for it wasn’t there.
The fan rotated languidly, casting spidery shadows across the room. We sat in silence a
little longer. The barman broke first:
‘So God’s dead?’
‘If that’s who he was. That fucking kid lied all the time. I just hope it’s true this time.’
The barman worked at one of his teeth with his tongue, uneasily:
‘It’s kindova big crime though, isn’t it? You know how it is, when one of the cops
goes down and everything’s dropped ’til they find the guy who did it. I mean, you’re not
just breaking a law, your breaking LAW.’
I scraped my finger along my jeans, and suspended it over the bar, so that a thick clot
of blood fell down into my whisky, and dissolved. I smiled:
‘Maybe it’s a big crime,’ I mused vaguely ‘but maybe it’s nothing at all…’ ‘…and we
have killed him’ writes Nietzsche, but—destituted of community—I crave a little time
with him on my own.
In perfect communion I lick the dagger foamed with God’s blood.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Contempt for common evaluations; one should even take care to avoid straying accidentally into the right. Even to be an enemy is too comforting; one must be an alien, a beast. Nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“If there is something you want to protect, attack it with measured vigour yourself, thus investing it with replenished force, and pre-empting its annihilation.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“After all, fear is the passionate enthusiasm for the same.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“No one could ever 'be' a libidinal materialist. This is a 'doctrine' that can only be suffered as an abomination, a jangling of the nerves, a combustion of articulate reason, and a nauseating rage of thought. It is a hyperlepsy of the central nervous-system, ruining the body's adaptative reginmes, and consuming its reserves in rhytmic convulsions that are not only futile, but devastating. Schopenhauer already knew that thought is medically disastrous, Nietzsche demonstrated it. An aged philosopher is either a monster of stamina or a charlatan. How long does it take to be wasted by a fire-storm?”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Sacrifice is the movement of violent liberation from servility, the collapse of transcendence. Inhibiting the sacrificial relapse of isolated being is the broad utilitarianism inherent to humanity, correlated with a profane delimitation from ferocious nature that finds its formula in theology. In its profane aspect, religion is martialled under a conception of God; the final guarantor of persistent being, the submission of (ruinous) time to reason, and thus the ultimate principle of utility.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Sacrifice is the movement of violent liberation from servility, the collapse of transcendence. Inhibiting the sacrificial relapse of isolated being
is the broad utilitarianism inherent to humanity, correlated with a profane delimitation from ferocious nature that finds its formula in theology. In its profane aspect, religion is

martialled under a conception of God; the final guarantor of persistent being, the
submission of (ruinous) time to reason, and thus the ultimate principle of utility.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“I dream of the damnation I have so amply earned, stolen from me by the indolence of God.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“What is new to modernity is a rate of the obsolescence of truth...”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“This book was supposed to be finished at Easter, like God.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Obviamente el sufrimiento debe de ser fútil para que sea 'educativo'. Por esta razón nuestra historia es tan ininteligible y, de hecho, nada de lo que era cierto ha tenido alguna vez sentido. '¿Por qué ha sido _necesario_ tanto dolor?', nos preguntamos tontamente. Pero, precisamente, porque la historia no tiene sentido, hemos aprendido de ella, y se sigue tratando de una lección brutal.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Up to a certain limit, the desire for perfectly clear human exchanges which escape general conventions becomes a desire for annihilation.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Freud to his famous reading of the Oedipus myth and the sense of the Father’s law, since it is the competition with the Father - arising as a correlate of the infant’s incestual longing for the mother - that first brings the relation between desire and survival to a crisis. Later, in the formulation of the death drive, the sacrificial character of desire is thought even more immediately, so that desire is not merely integrated structurally with a threat to existence within the oedipal triangle, but is rather related to death by the intrinsic tendency of its own economy. The intensity of the affect is now thought as inherently oriented to its own extinction, as a differentiation from death or the inorganic that is from its beginning a compulsion to return. But despite recognizing that the conscious self is a modulation of the drives, so that all psychical energy stems from the unconscious (from which ego-energy is borrowed), Freud seems to remain committed to the right of the reality principle, and its representative the ego, and thus to accept a survival (or adaptation) imperative as the principle of therapeutic practice. It is because of this basic prejudice against the claims of desire that psychoanalysis has always had a tendency to degenerate into a technology of repression that subtilizes, and therefore reinforces, the authority of the ego. In the terms both of the reality principle and the conservative moment of psychoanalysis, desire is a negative pressure working against the conservation of life, a dangerous internal onslaught against the self, tending with inexorable force towards the immolation of the individual and his civilization”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Literature is like love in that both are catastrophic diseases”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“If life were a discourse death could wait, but dreams break down, there is repetition”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Nature, far from being logical, 'is perhaps entirely the excess of itself', smeared ash and flame upon zero, and zero is immense.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism