Reza Negarestani

Given Land’s opposition to Hegel, one might expect that his most effective critic would be one who finds a way to bring Hegel back into the picture. Indeed, this is what we see with Reza Negarestani, who to a large extent serves as the Hegel to Land’s Schopenhauer*. Just as Hegel’s critique of Kantianism hinges on a refusal to accept the fixed nature of the human subject presented in Kant’s critiques, Negarestani’s critique of Land also accuses him of missing a central contingency in human nature.

As mentioned above, Negarestani regards Land’s anti-humanism as paradoxically conservative because it falls back on a fixed picture of human nature in which the mind does not have the agency to fundamentally alter itself through cognitive processes. For Negarestani, failing to recognise reason as able to remake itself leads to *“the fetishization of natural and technological intelligences in the guise of self-organizing material processes, or to the teleological faith in the deep time of the technological singularity”*. A pretty apt description of where Land has ended up.

Land here is not conservative at all. In fact it is Negarestani who has a narrow humanist view of cognition, characterising it as able to change only by moving around in the space of thinking and rational discourse. For Land on the other hand, the Blockchain demonstrates a kind of post-cognitive intelligent process that operates entirely beyond the narrowly human “socio-semantic” space.