The second installment from Part 1.
By reconceiving modern science and the immanence of life itself, Catren develops what he calls a phenoumenodelic realism—a view in which the totality of experience and reality (the pleroma) is grasped without positing any transcendent beyond, yet without renouncing the “infinite ideas of reason” (Truth, Beauty, Justice, Love) that oriented the Enlightenment. Through Catren’s concepts of disligation (the modern disconnection or unbinding of meaning) and religation (a re-binding of thought to the absolute immanence of life), I will show that Land’s position—from his Kantian nihilism to his accelerationist fervor collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. Catren’s speculative absolutism illuminates a path beyond Land’s deterministic cybernetics and supposed ontological nihilism, preserving a space for reason, value, and orientation within an immanent “fullness” of reality.
Land infamously portrays Kant’s transcendental subject as a tyrannical mechanism that domesticates all alterity in advance. In his reading, the a priori forms of sensibility and understanding are likened to a mercantile grid that makes the other commensurable—a preconditioning of experience analogous to the reduction of singular values to a universal exchange medium. As Land himself put it, “Kant’s object is … the universal form of a relation to alterity; that which must of necessity be the same in the other in order for it to appear to us. . . it is the ‘exchange value’ that first allows a thing to be marketed to the enlightenment mind.” (Land, 67) On this view, Enlightenment reason appears as a grand inflector of the different into the same, a transcendental capture-system not unlike a colonial regime or a marketplace subsuming qualitative diversity under quantitative equivalence. Land’s early critique thus casts Kant as the ultimate guarantor of what we might term transcendental relativism: every subject imposes an invariable frame onto experience, sealing itself off in a hall of mirrors where genuine alterity (the Outside) is forever subordinated or erased.
However, this picture distorts Kant and the critical project. Far from establishing a closed world immune to disruption, Kant’s philosophy introduced a profound openness at the heart of the knowing subject—a recognition of the limits of any given framework and the inevitable horizon of something beyond it. Kant himself conceded in the Critique of Judgment that nature might harbor an “infinite multiplicity of empirical laws” so heterogeneous that no finite understanding could ever encompass them within a single system. In other words, the very thinker accused of legislating reality in advance was acutely aware of a surfeit of empirical richness that escapes totalization. The critical philosophy, properly understood, does not deny the outside; it circumscribes our knowledge to make room for an indefinite Beyond of which we can have no final concept.
Land seizes upon this “beyond” only to misidentify it as something hostile to reason as such, rather than as a provocation to reason to transform itself.
Catren helps us reframe this issue. He notes that modern thought has undergone multiple “relativizations ungroundings”—from the Copernican decentering of Earth to the Darwinian contingency of our species-being to the crisis of foundational certainties in mathematics and physics—all of which suspend any pre-modern idea of a fixed Archimedean foundation. Kant’s own critical turn is one such suspension: the transcendental subject is not an absolute substance but a functional nexus whose structures can be revised and expanded. What Land decries as Kant’s rigid closure is in fact the starting point for a dynamic process of self-correction and openness. In Part I, I argued for a “transcendental cybernetics” wherein reason operates as an open-ended, self transformative system of constraints and feedbacks—a lighthouse sweeping a foggy coast rather than a fortress locking everything down. This vision resonates strongly with Catren’s project: instead of exploiting the modern ungrounding to justify epistemic despair or wild irrationalism, Catren urges that we embrace it as an opportunity to renew the transcendental enterprise on immanent grounds. He defiantly refuses both “unrestrained contingency” (the notion that anything goes, associated with postmodern or Landian nihilism) and any “arbitrary refoundation” of absolutes. In place of Kant’s purported closure, Catren articulates a transversal conception of reason—one that is “expanded” to include insights from the natural sciences, arts, and other truth procedures, and that acknowledges no a priori limit to its revision of itself.
Rather than a relativistic captivity within our own categories, we get a speculative absolutism: an insistence that reason can strive toward the absolute precisely by continually transcending and reinventing its own limits. In short, where Land sees Kant’s legacy as the prison of representation, Catren sees a pathway beyond representational finitude from within, through immanent critique. The transcendental is not a static jailer but a “moving target”—a ”self-surpassing structure open to the plenitude of the real.
It is no doubt comforting to speak of ‘the genius’ as if impersonal creative energy were commensurable with the order of autonomous individuality governed by reason, but such chatter is, in the end, absurd. Genius is nothing like a character trait, it does not belong to a psychological lexicon; far more appropriate is the language of seismic upheaval, inundation, disease, the onslaught of raw energy from without. One ‘is’ a genius only in the sense that one ‘is’ a syphilitic, in the sense that ‘one’ is violently problematized by a ferocious exteriority. One returns to the subject of which genius has been predicated to find it charred and devastated beyond recognition. (Land, 152-53)
A key historical point in Land’s trajectory was his rejection of Deleuze and Guattari’s more affirmative politics in favor of an unconditional embrace of capitalist technics. Early Land, much like DG, celebrated deterritorialization—the unbinding of desire from molar structures, the escape of flux and “machinic” processes from traditional stratifications. But whereas Deleuze and Guattari tempered this with an ethic of creativity and an eye toward new modes of organization (they famously asked how to deterritorialize and connect in new assemblages), Land took deterritorialization to be a value in itself, identical to the vector of modern capitalist acceleration. In effect, Land broke from the Spinozist vitalism of DG—their sense that life and desire have their own immanent aims—and substituted a vision of capital as the only real agent of liberation.
Land’s later philosophy (often dubbed accelerationism) thus portrays the market-tech apparatus as a kind of impersonal genius or gnosis that is leaving humanity behind. In his words, “The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.”(Land, 441) This feverish pronouncement conveys the crux: what began with Enlightenment navigation and rationalization has triggered an irreversible, self-propelling process (auto -sophisticating machine runaway) that renders human intentionality obsolete. The consummation of immanence, for Land, is a system in which Capital itself—a virulent abstract intelligence—fully deterritorializes every limit, even the human organism, resulting in a post-human future. In this narrative, any attempt to resist or guide the process is either reactionary or futile. Land explicitly ridiculed the humanistic idea of steering our collective destiny, noting that as markets evolve toward an AI singularity, “politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip”—a hopeless endeavor. (Land, 441)
But Catren responds: the true Enlightenment attitude is neither to cling to outdated charts nor to scuttle the ship, but to continuously update our maps and instruments in light of immanent feedback.
We indeed have no external God to guarantee our course; our only “north” is the yet-to-be-realized potentials of reason and life. But that is enough. By holding fast to the regulative ideals—not as dogmas, but as guiding hypotheses—we enact a form of collective genius that is far from Land’s blind techno-daemon. It is a speculative navigation of the “worldless daydream” in which we find ourselves.
In concrete terms, this means actively engaging technological and economic developments with a mindset of religation rather than resignation. Catren’s work suggests that we do not have to simply watch capital become “free from humans” in a nihilistic consummation of history. Instead, we can strive to free the human within the immanent process—not the old human, the isolated liberal subject, but a new figure of humanity embedded in the impersonal, capable of channeling inhuman forces ethically. The Enlightenment’s mistake was to think of reason as a detached legislator; Land’s mistake is to think that, once detached, reason must perish. The speculative absolutist alternative is reason as a participant—a finite mode of the pleroma that is nevertheless oriented by an infinite task.
That task is essentially religious (in the etymological sense of re-ligare, rebinding): to bind ourselves to the absolute immanence of life in all our practices.
This is a self-surpassing endeavor, one that constantly sheds its own assumptions (much as scientific paradigms do) and is open to being transformed by encounters with the new. It is, importantly, an endeavor that acknowledges finitude—even mortality and error—as integral.
Rather than Land’s fantasy of a headlong rush into an AI omega point, Catren’s vision is a kind of asymptotic approach to truth and enlightenment, forever unfinished but also far from meaningless. It is optimistic in a fundamental way: not in expecting a utopia, but in refusing the glamour of absolute doom.
Catren’s speculative philosophy allows us to mount a decisive refutation of Land’s core positions. First, against the Kantian straw man of totalizing closure, we find that critical reason can be rethought as an open system entwined with the very “outside” it seeks to know—turning transcendental relativism into a gateway to absolutism rather than an endpoint. Second, what Land celebrates as the irruption of genius and the death of the subject can be reconceived not as a terminal crisis of reason, but as reason’s renewal through contact with the impersonal forces of the pleroma. The subject is not immolated for nothing: it is relativized and humbled, yes, but thereby connected to a richer transindividual life.
Third, the supposed choice between Deleuzo-Guattarian vitalism and technocapital is a false dichotomy—the immanence of life (and desire) need not contradict the advances of techno-science, except if one assumes (as Land does) that only capitalist exploitation can mobilize immanent forces. Catren’s pleromatic vision, marrying Spinozist substance to Kantian critique, refutes that assumption by showing that intelligibility and life grow together in a nonzero-sum way. Finally, regarding navigation: Land’s dismissal of “navigation” stems from a picture of history as an inevitable singularity where human agency evaporates. But if we accept Catren’s premise that we are in a “suspension”—a shipwreck with neither absolute foundation nor total chaos—then navigation becomes our remaining vocation: a religation that steers by immanent stars.
In sum, Catren provides what Land and the accelerationists lack: a metaphysics of immanence that is neither an intoxicated plunge into dissolution nor a reactionary grasp at bygone certainties, but a speculative Enlightenment that carries forward the spirit of critique. This spirit neither denies the dark discoveries of modernity (the death of God, the decentering of man, the prospect of AI) nor cedes them the final word. It relegates them into a broader understanding—one in which the absolute is not a static beyond or a predestined singularity, but the living horizon of our collective experimentation. Land’s early rallying cry was for an escape from the “Human Security System” and a voyage into the Outside. Ironically, Catren shows us a deeper Outside that does not require the abolition of meaning and value. The pleroma—the fullness of being that is at once fact and dream—invites an explorer’s reason, not a suicide’s leap. It beckons us to “build new lighthouses, not to abandon navigation altogether.” In answering Land’s challenge, we do not retreat to old comforts; we venture further, guided by a light that Land himself, in his despair, could not see: the immanent light of reason fueled by love, endlessly transfiguring as it illuminates the fog of the unknown.
In this sense, the Landian posture falls short not only of a viable politics but even of a genuinely philosophical project. It is a symptomatic flight into jouissance, a willful unbinding which remains content to mistake its own exhilaration for truth.
[1] Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). Trans. N. K. Smith. London: Macmillan, 1929.
[2] Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
[3] Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Eds. R. Mackay and R. Brassier. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011.
[4] Catren, Gabriel. On Pleromatica and its Harmonics. 2023.
:: DIFFRACTIONS :: 