The progress unto death:

acceleration and self-destruction in Nick Land and Thomas Pynchon

Abstract

In this article, there is an attempt to describe the accelerationism of Nick land in the form of a sexual drive towards death, in order to compare and contrast it to the sexual fantasies of technical acceleration contained in the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (1973). Disagreeing with Benjamin Noy’s statement in Malign Velocities that the book can be read under a accelerationist key, the article attempts to retrace retraces the colonial and ecological blindspots of Land’s vision of acceleration in order to oppose it to Pynchon’s sustained criticism of Imperialism as a historical form of domination with economic, energetic and sexual dimensions. What Pynchon demonstrates in his fiction ”” an extensive paranoid satire of masculine neuroses of technical dominion ”” is that we can conceive of different diagrams of sexual and creative appetite that are beyond the modern circuits of appetition towards death.