In this arresting and extraordinary book the reader is not offered a secondary text, a book about Bataille, in the usual sense. But it is a book of which Bataille would have been proud: untamed, impassionate and fearless.

An important literary and philosophical figure, Georges Bataille has had a significant influence on other French writers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. Written as a "communion", this book looks at Bataille's theoretical issues in philosophy, sociology, psychodynamics, politics and poetry. Cultural modernity is diagnosed down to its Kantian bedrock with its transcendental philosophy of the object, but Bataille's writings cut violently across this tightly disciplined reading to reveal the strong underlying currents that bear us towards chaos and dissolution - the violent impulse to escape, the thirst for annihilation.

A dizzying trip through the mind(s) of the provocative and influential thinker Nick Land. During the 1990s British philosopher Nick Land's unique work, variously described as "rabid nihilism," "mad black deleuzianism," and "cybergothic," developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of "continental philosophy" -a route that was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land's work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British "speculative realist" philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers-writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers-who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision. Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s-long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)-in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. Fanged Noumena gives a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker's work, and has introduced his unique voice to a new generation of readers.