The Thirst for Annihilation by Nick Land

Author:Nick Land
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

just as before things existed God had the power of not giving them existence, and thus of not creating, so also once they are created he has the power of not continuing to uphold them in existence; they would then cease to be. That is annihilation [Quod est eas in nihilum redigere] [A XIV 49].

Annihilation or—more precisely—the return to nothing, is related to two interconnected concepts of decisive importance to scholastic theology; those of creation and conservation. The nihil of annihilation is the nothing from which creation brings forth the being, since ‘what is created comes out of nothing [ex nihilo]’ [A VIII 41]. Creation both draws the being out of nothing, and holds it out of nothing, or conserves it. The perpetual conservation of the being is a positive and incessant causation that relates it immediately to God, so that ‘[w]ere God to annihilate, it would not be through some action, but through cessation from action’ [A XIV 51]. Annihilation is thus a release from action’, a relapse that has a merely negative relation to God. It is the being’s own tendency that leads it to annihilation, as soon as God ceases to interfere in the creature’s relation with absolute death (which is alien to God, since his relation to nothingness is purely inhibitive). In one sense the being of the creature communes with God as its cause, but as a difference from the nihil the tension of the creature relates only to death, and God’s participation is that of a third party incidentally impinging upon a communication that escapes him. God and the nihil squabble over creation as jealous rivals fight over a shared lover, except that the creature—however much it might respect God—is torn by its desire in quite the other direction, whilst the nihil has all the tantalizing indifference that naturally flows from incomparable powers of seduction.

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