Reviews for The Shock of Men: Homosexual Hermeneutics in French Writing

The average rating for The Shock of Men: Homosexual Hermeneutics in French Writing based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-11-04 00:00:00 Ryan Straub Here's the deal: While I by no means doubt Land's stunning virtuosity or great knowledge in regards to continental philosophy, he has made a name for himself in less 'sophisticated' ways. I feel that it is important to point these out since a select minority of very intelligent people are smitten with this work (and his other book as well) and I feel that the majority of these people are fundamentally ethical, altruistic people who are perhaps unaware of Land's more recent endeavors. Here are a few links: Nick Land, it would appear, is intimately involved in (and a founder of) a group that (deny it as hard as they want) would appear to be neo-fascist (read the comments on some of these and you will realize that the people sympathetic to this type of shit are disgustingly racist, homophobic misogynists.) So, whereas Land undoubtedly knows his philosophy, and is no faker on that front, I think I'll stick with Kant and all of those 'oh so terrible' Enlightenment virtues: equality and liberty. I've had enough of trite adolescent nihilism.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-07-19 00:00:00 Kim Mills The overall argument is very much bullshit backed up by several (and I assume) deliberate misreadings of Heidegger, Derrida, Nietzsche and Bataille. That allows Land to show off as a major badass, while secretly implementing a rather naïve faith in reason and scientific concepts while pretending to affirm a radically nihilist ethics. In this sense, he completely misses the spots where Bataille picks up on Hegel, precisely that the circular image of time (further extended through Nietzsche) allows him to avoid the catechontic trap of viewing time as a (Kantian) linear line of progress, the empty moralism for which Land still indirectly falls. Yet to be fair, some of the discussions and problems posed in the book are not entirely worthless, and despite Land's neo-reactionary stance that dismisses certain major philosophical problems (of phenomenology, metaphysics, and most importantly [and related to Nietzsche and Hegel above, of the subject]) all the way without even bothering with considering the bodies of questions that justify them, responding rather superficially, the remaining sidewards movements and concepts may still have some value when detached from their primary orientation. Last, some marginal details from Bataille's œuvre are rather spot on, so it's not entirely a failure. What we have here is then a kind of frozen meal served, while, to put it gently, it still needs at least a little microwaving.