Part II: Speculative Absolutism contra Landian Cybernetics (Polemic Against Nick Land)

In the first part of this polemic, I challenged Nick Land’s recasting of Kantian critique as a static apparatus of cybernetic control. Land could have countered with several core arguments drawn from both his early and late philosophy: that Kant really is a philosopher of closure and dominance (as Land insists), that Kant’s own theory of genius in the Third Critique vindicates an inhuman outside which Land merely follows, that Land’s break from Deleuze and Guattari in favor of cybernetic capitalism marks a legitimate embrace of immanence, and that any appeal to navigation or rational agency is futile in the face of self-augmenting techno-capital feedback loops. In this second part, I will explicitly refute Land again and these possible defenses. To do so, I enlist Gabriel Catren’s Pleromatica as a theoretical fulcrum. Catren’s work offers a reconstruction of transcendental philosophy that both criticizes transcendental relativism and articulates a new speculative absolutism. 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.