Text page
Slave, Sister, Sexborg, Sphinx Feminine Figurations in Nick Land's Philosophy
"Slave, Sister, Sexborg, Sphinx Feminine Figurations in Nick Land's Philosophy" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Slave, Sister, Sexborg, Sphinx: Feminine Figurations in Nick Land’s Philosophy VINCENT LE Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism, it is important to understand how he himself first developed and deployed the concepts of acceleration, the feminine, and the inhuman, which others would go on to appropriate for their own purposes.
Definition · paragraph 1
This article will trace the four feminine figures throughout Land’s philosophical trajectory, which he sees as agents for accelerating the transcendental critique of both anthropocentrism and phallocentrism: the slave turned les- bian; the sister; the sexborg; and the Sphinx.
Definition · paragraph 2
Finally, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Philosophy” develops a left accelerationism through a critical engagement with Land’s conflation of the driving motor of acceleration with the dynamics of capital accumulation (Srnicek and Williams 2014a; 2014b).
Definition · paragraph 10
THE SEXBORG If the mature Land’s first major thesis is the transvaluation of capitalism as the agent of an inhuman excess rather than its impediment, it is ultimately because of his second major thesis that capitalism’s constant revolutionization of the produc- tive forces is leading to the creation of a technological singularity, which will deterritorialize any remaining humanistic residuals.
History · paragraph 2
Fellow feminist Luciana Parisi has also explicitly drawn upon Land’s work to develop her theory of future technology’s potential to abstract sex from reproduction (Parisi 2004). Finally, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Philosophy” develops a left accelerationism through a critical engagement with Land’s conflation of the driving motor of acceleration with the dynamics of capital accumulation (Srnicek and Williams 2014a; 2014b).
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.