well it's 6.30 so I guess we should get started okay yeah so thanks for coming again especially given the kind of proto-apocalyptic heat conditions although it might seem it's going to be pretty hot I reckon for the rest of this course so although it might seem that that's sort of a drag on our ability to grapple with this kind of material I think this quotation to Don DeLillo's novel White Noise that Nick Land cites in his essay Meltdown. I think it suggests that maybe actually proto-apocalyptic heat is precisely the best conditions to engage with the critique of everything comforting and human. So yeah, I'll just read it out because I think it's a nice prologue.
Heat, this is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tore buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It's always 15 degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers. The entire infrastructure is based on heat. Desperately uses up heat. Breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway, and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness. So, you know, I guess, in other words, if we think it's, like,
things are already sort of not to our liking in terms of the weather, you know, what land tells us by way of Don De Lillo is, you know, we haven't seen anything yet. Things are just going to get much, much hotter. Yeah. Okay, so, all right. so yeah other than Immanuel Kant whom we looked at last week the young land's other kind of arch nemeses are phenomenologists who for land include more kind of heterodoxical figures like Hegel and Derrida as well as more standard phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger and that's because he sees them all as more or less recapitulating Kant's anthropocentric hubris over the past two centuries so today we're going to examine
Land's critique of the phenomenological tradition from Hegel's phenomenology of spirit briefly and all the way to Derrida's deconstruction and particularly focusing on Heidegger's what Land sees as Heidegger's misreading of the Austrian poet George Trackel's work specifically it's a misreading because it mistakes Trackel's various images of animality, irrationality and death as rather narcissistic symbols of spirit, reason, and even the divine. So yeah, again, it's in two parts. So we might take a break this week as well, in between. But okay, let's just jump straight in. Yeah, okay, so Land's somewhat idiosyncratic conception of phenomenology
as a fundamentally post-Kantian tradition means that he believes it to commence with Hegel. now there's sort of many ways into Hegel I'm only going to be very brief here one possible characterisation of what Hegel's project is doing is it's trying to reconcile, perhaps symphysise various kind of contradictions and divisions in both Kant and post-Kant the immediate kind of post-Kantian thought so divisions between for example the phenomena, the noumena the things for us and the things in themselves and also divisions that we saw last week between free moral agents like ourselves and a mechanical nature, or subject and object, subject and nature. So, yeah, so that's the division I'm going to focus on
just briefly here, is that there's an immediate division in some post-Cantia thought, like Fichte and a certain late Schelling, where there's this clear division between the free subject and, you know, who's a moral agent and so on, and then a seemingly mechanical, deterministic nature. So for Hegel, we're able to actually combine subject and nature into one concept of the absolute. They don't need to be opposed, provided that we begin to re-envision nature not as opposed to the subject, but as always already structured like the free subject. So this is from, I think, Hegel's first book. He says, Fitter's writings and their reception indicate the need of a philosophy
that will recompensate nature for the mishandling that it suffers in Kant and Fitter's systems and set reason itself in harmony with nature not by having reason renounce itself or become an insipid imitator of nature but by reason recasting itself into nature out of its own inner strength. So very briefly the idea is that by transposing reason onto nature Hegel holds that we can account for how free subjects emerge out of what is actually a rather similarly structured rather than incongruous ground. So in the phenomenology of spirit, one of Hegel's kind of masterworks, Hegel proceeds to reimagine nature, as he puts it, quote, not only a substance but equally a subject. So the phenomenology details reason's triadic structure or triadic movement to be itself as
free self-consciousness by paradoxically negating itself in order to become an object of its own thought. Now, while there are many kind of sub-dialectical triads upon triads in the phenomenology, the takeaway point for our purposes is that for self-consciousness to be, qua the thought of itself, that's what self-consciousness is, consciousness has to paradoxically kind of alienate, externalise, or negate its pure self-identity as an other of itself so that it can therefore think itself and take itself as an object. So Hegel puts this in jargon field terms The living substance is being which is in truth subject or what is the same is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself.
So for Hegel nature is really nothing but spirit's own self-negation to paradoxically commune with itself as an object or other of its own thought. now according to Land's brief tarrying with Hegel in The Thirst for Annihilation Hegel saw Kant's idea of an actually existing yet inaccessible noumena as a threat to any kind of unified system of the absolute and so Hegel's way of mitigating this noumenal excess that we looked at last week is to show how the noumenal excess is imminently generated by reason as a way for reason to think itself, to be reason as self-consciousness so yeah Land says Hegel considered Kant's basic failing to be an inability to see that the limits of reason
are self-legislated so that when intelligibility is absolutely consummated the ethical order is recognised as commanding for nature finitude is only possible through a spiritual production transcending and comprehending it as a necessary moment of itself so yeah if Hegel marks what he calls an absolute idealism rather than merely Kant's transcendental idealism, it's because Hegel eliminates Kant's notion of the thing in itself for failing to see that this supposed limit concept or boundary of reason in itself is actually reason's own self-legislation. We'll come back to Hegel when we look at Heidegger in a bit, but just to keep going. So it's of course Hercel who really founded the 20th century
phenomenological tradition proper when he sought to save philosophy from the reign of the sciences by bracketing off what Husserl called our natural attitude to believe in the independent existence of objects of our experience and also making what Husserl called a transcendental reduction of the object of philosophical study to the phenomena of our experience without regard for this kind of Kantian idea of a numeral reality. So Husserl himself says, the exclusion of nature was for us the methodical means for initially making possible the turning of regard to transcendentally pure consciousness. Okay, now in light of this bracketing of the natural attitude in favour of this transcendental reduction to the confines of the subjective, Land argues that herself's phenomenology
essentially reprises Kant's transcendental idealism inasmuch as both bracket nature to assert the primacy of the eye over its supposed negation in the object, in nature. Yeah, so Land says in the second point, if in the Hegelian mode of philosophizing, alterity is reduced in a collective auto-generative knowing, in the Hercelian mode it is reduced into a monadic transcendental ego for which the Kantian Numenon is bracketed as a transcendent or naturalistic postulate. So, yeah, as per Hegel, Hercel certainly acknowledges that there are objects that seem to be opposed to the subject right um but as per hegel again at least on land's reading uh herself argues that the objects appear to be opposed to us only because all experience
is intentional intentional in the sense that our self only finds itself outside itself as the consciousness of objects that's what intentionality is it's consciousness or consciousness is always consciousness of something um yeah so land puts this pretty kind of caustically uh rigorous phenomenology of the Heselian type, whereby all questions of reference are replaced by an analytic of intentionality, leads straight to idealism and solipsism, and thus as Schopenhauer persuasively suggests, to the madhouse. So yeah, as far as phenomenologists from Hegel to Hesel are concerned, this kind of numinal alterity is simply the means for the becoming of the transcendental subject by this subject intentionally taking itself as an object of its own thought. okay now at first glance it might seem as if herself former student Heidegger might provide
the very critique of this earlier phenomenology that Land himself is seeking to provide you know after all Heidegger famously begins his magnum 1927 magnum opus being in time by raising anew the question of the meaning of being which he claims that western philosophy has essentially all but forgotten. And this is because the history of philosophy as Heidegger sees it has always conflated being with what Heidegger calls presence at hand, that is what is present at hand to us, you know, whether it's Plato's theory of transcendent ideas based on our values of what's good, true and beautiful, and Descartes, you know, cogito, or whether it's Kant's transcendental concepts of reason or Hegel's absolute spirit, right? Yeah, Heidegger says, by looking at the world theoretically we have already dimmed it down to the uniformity of what is purely present at hand
to thought so yeah whether it's through this kind of more traditional kind of uh onto theology of god of an anthropic god or in a more secular cunning guise of the transcendental phenomenological subject philosophy has simply too often attempted to conflate the being what he did cause the being of all beings with one particular, essentially, bipedal, mammalian being. So Heidegger contends, if being is not what is present at hand, it can only be that which withdraws from or refuses to be present. In being and time, Heidegger commences this analysis of the true meaning of being by beginning with humans, or it's slightly different, but what he also calls Dasein.
and he begins with this because Dasein is the only being that's even capable of raising the question of being in the first place now while he analyzes Dasein in many guises it's particularly in being struck by the possibility of its own death that Dasein grasps that being is more than it's present at hand to it because it comes to recognize that its own being can just as well be and not be and with it everything that is present to it so Heidegger says at the bottom there Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence in terms of a possibility of itself to be itself or not itself so yeah it's Dasein's sense of its own potential of being other than it is or even of just not being at all what Heidegger calls our being towards death
it's this which portrays the fact that there is a greater reservoir of being beyond what is present to us and which is able to say no and refuse our desire to go on living, refuse our values and pretensions. So by coming to understand that its authentic being is more than its presence at hand when it shows concern for possibilities for itself to be other than it is, Dasein is able to make this transcendental distinction or what Heidegger calls the ontological difference between being as such and being such as it is present at hand. Now on first impressions, Heidegger's critique of presence by way of Dasein's being towards death might sound like an improvement on Kant and herself's transcendental idealisms. As far as land is concerned however Heidegger is still too egocentric
to the extent that he only actually ever talks of being in terms of the human being. Even when Heidegger speaks of our being towards death it is always a death that is a phenomenal correlate to that which lives, to the living. You know, this is, Heidegger himself says this quite clearly, he says, Death does indeed reveal itself as a loss, but a loss such as is experienced by those who remain. In suffering this loss, however, we have no way of access to the loss of being as such which the dying man suffers. So being towards death is actually not something that happens, that strikes and annihilates us from without. It's merely a phenomenon that Dasein thinks. and given that Land sees the fundamental nature of dogmatic metaphysics
as an inability to think death, as we'll see in more detail an inability to think death except from the point of view of the living Heidegger remains, for Land, caught in a metaphysical thinking which can only think death phenomenologically rather than factually or biologically. So this is from Land already had this critique in his 87 dissertation, PhD dissertation where he says, metaphysics is unable to follow such a thought because it interprets dying as a process undergone by a subject who dies. It fails to pursue the erosion of the subject even when the question of the subject is displaced by that of the Dase sign. Okay. Now that's a pretty kind of brief and schematic
outline of a certain phenomenological tradition that Land is going to try and demolish. So what I want to do now is sort of narrow it in on a specific, more detailed case study of how this plays out. So in Land's 1990 essay, Narcissism and Dispersion, in Heidegger's 1952 Trackel Interpretation, Land focuses on Heidegger's reading, or misreading, of Trackel's poetry as a way to sort of demonstrate what is exemplary about Heidegger's and phenomenology's anthropocentrism. Now, as other commentators have noted, other Trackelian scholars, Land accuses Heidegger of very selectively choosing, distorting,
and reshaping the poems that he analyses to impose his own philosophy through Trackel as a kind of port parole. And as Heidegger himself contends, Trackel's poetry is allegedly so systematic that Heidegger only needs to synthesise it into what he calls a single unspoken poem to capture the whole of Treckle's thought. Heidegger says, The fact that every one of Treckle's poems points with equal steadiness, though not uniformly, to the statements of one site is evidence of the unique harmony of all of his poems in the single key of his statement. For Land, however, Heidegger's unspoken poem simply just reduces Trackel's extremely dispersive and varied thought to one instance among many others.
Heidegger's attempt to systemise Trackel already betrays Trackel, the poet's eclecticism, insofar as Trackel's art, his poetry, is, like his life, profoundly unsystematic. Far from living a kind of orderly, conventional, routine life, Trackel was unemployed, an alcoholic, a drug addict, died of a cocaine overdose, was probably in an incestuous relationship with his sister, and most definitely obsessed with death. So just as Trackel's life was anything but conventional, so does his poetry express a drive towards dispersion and dissolution that undermines any attempt to master, unify, and systematise his words. So Land says, The evolution of Trackel's style,
if it is still possible to write coherently of such a thing, is a drive towards the dissolution of every criterion of evaluation, the last thing we would want is for Heidegger to master these traumatised signs. To learn from Treckel is to write in ashes. Okay, so as we're going to see, Heidegger's reading of Treckel essentially betrays a profound narcissism which violently imposes his thought onto Treckel's poetry in much the same way as we saw last week the Kantian imagination violently impose itself on animal sensibility. Okay, now Land proceeds to argue in the essay that if we focus on Trackel's poem Spiritual Twilight, the one poem that Heidegger strategically chooses to analyse in any detail, we can see
that Heidegger completely misreads its natural images of dispersion and dissolution for anthropic images of spiritual harmony and rational order. so since we're going to be looking at this poem in detail i'll just read it out in full this is the full poem um yeah so this is spiritual twilight silent by the forest edge dark game is encountered by the heel the benign breeze gentle dies the blackbirds lament for silent and the soft flutes of autumn are at peace in the reeds upon a black cloud you travel drunk with poppy seed the night dark pond the starry heavens sister's moon-like voice ever sounds through the sacred night now on Heidegger's reading
in the first line this dark game or beast the German wild could be translated as either this dark beast is one and the same with the blue beast that Trackel mentions elsewhere in many of his other poems the colour blue in Schrakel is typically linked to spirit or reason so as Schrakel succinctly puts it at one point in a different poem a blue moment is nothing but soul okay now if the dark beast is one in the same with the blue beast as Heidegger contends the beast in question is none other than the human animal the rational animal Heidegger says the blue game is an animal whose animality presumably does not consist in its animal nature but in that thoughtfully recalling look for which the poet caused
this animal, the thinking animal, animal has here now is man so Land uses Heidegger's conflation of Trackel's dark and blue beasts in the first line as just an initial example of the way that Heidegger is going to misrecognise animal savagery for human rationality consistently in a way which subsumes the feral alterity of nature into our mirror reflection. And we can already see, I think, from the citation to Heidegger that he envisions the essential nature of the blue human beast as the ability to reflexively take itself as an object of its own thought, to have rational self-consciousness. So since Heidegger interprets the dark beast as the rational animal,
he also reads the night dark pond in the poem as symbolising humanity's rational essence insofar as looking into a pool of water returns our reflection. Heidegger says, The waters, which are sometimes black and sometimes blue, show to man his countenance, his countering glance. So again, here is with the Dark Beast, Land argues that Heidegger transposes a natural image in Schreckle's poem into an instrument for reasons, self-reflection. And in fact, Heidegger's reading of the Dark Knight Pond here is even more megalomaniacal than his reading of the Dark Beast, insofar as it superimposes the image of humans alone over the entire starry heavens that are reflected in the Dark Knight Pond in the next line. The Dark Knight Pond, the starry heavens, right? So this is what Land means when he says,
Heidegger first turns to the pool itself, beside which humanity lies, lost in narcissistic reverie. Here humanity gazes upon itself. So for Land, what he calls Heidegger's post-Kantian thinking of nature only in terms of our own possible objects of experience portrays a still-too-metaphysical, or what Heidegger called ontotheological, commitment at the core of Heidegger's reading of Trackel, which would reduce being to what is present at hand to us. So Lamb says, These concerns are bound up with Heidegger's pursuit of that reflection which yields an image of human transcendence and therefore marks a firmly established separation of Dasein from the psychology of animals. This pursuit is perhaps the aspect of Heidegger's work which is closest to the concerns of the unto-theological tradition,
the point where he's thinking is most human or too human. So the idea is that far from disclosing being as that which withdraws from all presence, Heidegger reduces a kind of animal alterity and even the entire cosmos, the starry heavens, to tools of the subject's narcissistic gaze. so what high diggers i think what we could call delusions of grandeur overlook is that trackle's pond does not return our own familiar reflection in the obscurity of the twilight night but rather precisely a dark night void the dark night pond there's no suggestion that there's a reflection there and and that is the real meaning of the title of the poem spiritual twilight right
as twilight falls, night falls, the pond is darkened and our own reflection obscured. So what the dark night pond at night returns is nothing but nothingness itself, a dark and fluid abyss. The reflection in the pond, or lack thereof, is actually closer to the dark skies at night than it is to any image of Homo sapien. So consequently, Trackel's compound image of the dark night pond followed by the starry heavens does not attest to the primacy of reasons as it does to actually reasons finitude before nature which kind of indifferently nullifies our pretensions to exhaust it. So yeah, Land
says, in the darkened pool the gaze does not return in a familiar form. It reveals instead an abyssal twilight blue which colours both the dawn and dusk of the spiriting night. The image of no thing returns. Reflection is shattered against the impersonal, against the impassive shade of a pure opening or cleft in beings. So what Heidegger's interpretation of the Dark Knight Pond and the Dark Beast as the blue spirit, rational animal, overlooks the land is that the nightfall that Tracl is tracing in spiritual twilight is precisely the nightfall or the twilight of spirit itself. Okay, now Trackel follows up the image of the starry heavens
with that of the moon, or more precisely, the sister's moon-like voice, with this sister figure recurring throughout Trackel's poetry quite frequently. Now here, as before, Heidegger interprets the sister's lunar voice as a symbol of the illumination of reason that Trackel's poem supposedly traces. So Heidegger says, the lunar coolness of the ghostly night's holy blue rings and shines through all such gazing and saying its language becomes a saying after it becomes poetry as with the dark beast in the dark night pond Heidegger is again anthropomorphizing the sister's lunar core as the voice of reason rather than as the moon itself the call of the night itself whereas the sister's lunar voice on Heidegger's reading marks the becoming of spirit's self-reflection
Land argues that this ignores the fact that Trackel often uses lunar images as precisely symbols of lunacy, madness, disease and sickness Land says the Trackelian night is as we have seen the time of derangement consonant perhaps with the mania that stems like moon and mind from the Indo-European road it's no accident that the moon in Trackel's poems is often accompanied by dark beasts which do not denote rational animals but rather wolves or even more precisely sub-human werewolves, humans becoming wolves. Land says the moon is also the companion of lunatics and werewolves, figures with whom the reader of Trackel is certainly familiar. So where Heidegger reads the sister's lunar voice as a call of spirit
to commune with itself, Land instead conjoins the sister's lunar voice to spirit's exact opposite. It's spirit's becoming animal, which is to say base, wild, deranged, perhaps even, as we'll see, murderous. Now Land finds further textual support for his reading of Trackel as a poet of spirit's twilight dispersion in the final lines of another poem titled Dream and Derangement. So in this poem, another figure travelling at night for comes upon his father's house, only to find it abandoned, a broken mirror inside, and his sister tempting him further into the mad siblinghood of what Chakul calls an accursed race of dark beasts.
So just to quote the key passage from the poem, Chakul writes, At evening he came upon the wasteland, escort to a dead man into the dark house of his father. A purple cloud wreathed his brow, that he fell upon his own blood and image in silence, a moon-like countenance. It only sank into a void, when in a broken mirror there appeared a dying youth, his sister, night swallowed up, the accursed race. On Land's reading of this poem, the broken mirror, like the dark night pond in the other poem, refers to the way that the traveller does not return home to find his father's house in the state it had been in when he left. On the contrary, the traveller now finds a place that he does not recognise and where
he cannot even recognise his own countenance. and nor does the mirror return his own image it instead returns the image of a stranger something familiar that has become strange namely his dying sister Sir Land writes it is the night pool with its subtly differentiated luminosities a series of intensities which defy resolution within any dialectic of presence and absence that flood into the mirror with the sister shattering every power of representation without any coordinates, familiar coordinates to find his way through the twilight house the traveller at the end of the poem is once more swallowed up by the sister's core to tread ever deeper into the night and join her accursed race now here's elsewhere
the incestuous figure of the sister marks the transgression of the patriarchal law in so far she guides the traveller away from his father's house which in any case the deceased patriarch has abandoned. So, you know, this... Land's reading of the sister figure in Shackle, it might sound familiar, because I think it's very similar to the way he analyses the kind of lesbian warrior women that we looked at last week, right? Yeah, so, for example, Land says, she no longer obeys the law of the boundary by mediating the family with itself, sublimating its narcissism. Instead, she breaches the family by opening it onto an alterity which has not been appropriated in advance to any deep structure or encompassing system. So yeah, in both dream and derangement and in spiritual twilight,
what Land is trying to show is that Trackel is doing the exact opposite that High Digger imagines, right? Not reinforcing reason's narcissism, but animalising, shattering, cursing and deranging it. Now, at this point in the essay, Land digresses to analyse a passage from Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. Okay, so back to Hegel for a bit. Now there's already an obvious affinity, I think, between Hegel and Heidegger here, to the extent that Heidegger reads natural objects in Trackel's poetry as the means of spirit's return to itself, and that's in much the same way that Hegel sees the object as the subject's way of relating to itself in order to become self-conscious, by paradoxically negating itself as an object of its own thought. But what Land is particularly interested in here
is Hegel's argument in the philosophy of nature that cosmology and astronomy should focus on the orderly and well-choreographed arrangement of the planets and how they move around the sun rather than focusing on the disordered and poorly arranged stars which Hegel compares to a rash, the German Oschlag or an insect, a dark beast. So this is from, I think this is the passage Land is talking about. So, yeah, Hegel says This eruption of light, Lichtorschlag is as little worthy of wonderment as an eruption on the skin or a swarm of flies The multitude of stars in immeasurable space means nothing to reason This is externality, the void
the negative infinitude to which reason knows itself to be superior So reason is apparently superior to the cosmos in Hegel Okay, so according to Land what draws Hegel's eye here is the way that the stars are randomly dispersed in such a way as to possess seemingly, obviously they do, but seemingly no rational principles for their constellations. And it's in this sense that they resemble an outbreak of disease which occurrences the orderly sky's smooth functioning. Land says, What offends Hegel about the stars is the irrational facticity of their distribution, a scattering which obeys no discernible law. He expresses his disdain for its distribution and his anxiety before it in a word that is also both a powerful description and an acknowledgement,
which can mean swing or deflection, but in this context means outbreak in a sense of a rash. So in other words, what Hegel fears here is an outbreak of the irrational which would infect spirit and sap its strength to subsume and synthesize nature into the means for its own becoming. okay now if land digresses to address hegel's comparison of dispersed stars to a disease it's because trackle uses the same word oschlag to refer to both the affliction of lepers and also the flight of animals particularly birds and ravens as they disperse there is nonetheless a really crucial difference in hegel and trackle's understanding of this this term oschlag which I'm sure I'm mispronouncing
awfully but in any case whereas Hegel sees disease as a kind of defect or privation of absolute spirit Trackel envisions disease as reason's subversion by nature's greater animal sensibility in Land's terms yeah it is no longer even that sentience is infected by irrationality it is rather that sentience has dissolved into the very movement of infection becoming a virulent element of contagious matter. For Trackel, the irrational is not simply the negation of spirit without any reality of its own. It's rather nature's positive plenitude which spirit cannot fully comprehend. Given then that Oschlag captures the essence of nature for Trackel,
Lann suggests that it is highly problematic for Heidegger to never mention leprosy in his discussion of Trackel. although Lamb notes that Heidegger does have a space specifically allocated to disease in his reading, Lamb concludes that this supplement to Trackel's text is disappointingly repressive on the issue and this is because Heidegger reads Trackel's concept of madness as a very limited and controlled madness a gentle madness that amounts to thinking differently from others and particularly thinking differently from the dogmatic metaphysicians of the past, while still subsuming all things under the concept of Geist, of spirit. So this is how Heidegger characterizes madness in Schreckle. He says, Madness here does not mean a mind filled with senseless delusions.
The madman's mind senses, in fact, as no one else does. His madness may be called gentle, for his mind pursues a greater stillness. Okay, in the same vein, Heidegger does not read Schreckle's frequent images of the dead as denoting real death, but instead he reads death and trackle as ghostly, and hence as death's exact living and spiritual opposite, right? So here are some examples. Heidegger says, ghostly means what is by way of the spirit, stems from it and follows its nature. The dead one lives in his grace. He lives in his chamber so quietly and lost in thought. So in the final analysis of Heidegger's essay,
He reads the track The Stranger's Night Journey in Spiritual Twilight as if it meant ascending from the wild and the animal to self-reflection and ultimately what Heidegger calls the holy blue of absolute spirit. Yeah, so Heidegger says, The language that his poetry speaks stems from this transition. Its path leads from the downfall of all that decays over to the descent into the twilight blue of the holy. And Heidegger goes on, how shallow is our thinking if we regard the singer of the Occidental Song as the poet of decay his poetry sings of the destiny which cast mankind in its still withheld nature that is to say saves mankind it's ultimately Heidegger's misrecognition of Tractian images here
of leprosy, dispersion and even death as merely way stations on the way to absolute spirit, spirit's self-revelation it's this which for land most clearly betrays Heidegger's kind of cryptic commitment to the metaphysics of presence. On the contrary, for Land's trackle, it's precisely such moments of disease and dissolution that regionalise reason when confronted with nature's greater cosmic abyss of irrationality, animality, matter, and non-sentience. If we read his poems in this way, Trackel's focus on the star's dispersions over the orderly arrangement of the planets
effectuates a kind of reassessment of the classical metaphysical hierarchy, namely, what's going on here is that instead of cohering all of nature as so many inferior instances of reason, of absolute spirit, of the divine, Trackel conceives of reason as the inferior instance of nature's true ineffable chaos. Sir Land writes, the stars are traces of a primordial strewing, an explosive dispersion, which in its formlessness defies mathematisation or the reduction to order. It is the shockwave of this metaphoric which sweeps through Trackel's specifications of the song, and it is perhaps for this reason that Trackel writes of ruination in this context. So instead of following Trackel to the end and doing away with metaphysics once and for all,
Heidegger does approach this dispersion of presence, of metaphysics, only to sort of recoil from its complete decimation at the last minute. And Land is clearly seeing this as a similar thing to what Kant does with his conception of the noumena as a limit concept as well, right? That we looked at last week. Namely, much as Kant did when he critiqued metaphysics, only to restore its fundamental metaphysical claims through practical reason and faith, so is Heidegger merely providing what Land calls a gentle critique of metaphysics as he limits nature's contagion which Heidegger himself initially let loose at the point where Heidegger realises that this contagion can only lead to reasons complete
an utter decimation. So this is Land at the end of the essay he writes Heidegger is engaged in what we could legitimately describe as a gentle critique of the history of metaphysics a grotesque recapitulation of Kant's compromise with ontotheological tradition. It is according to this deeply rooted logic of purification and transcendence, the most insidious trope of a decomposing theology, that the eruption of ecstatic difference refuses the name Orsatz, and Heidegger, exhausted and uncomfortably feverish, lays down his copy of Trackel's poems and closes his eyes. So contrary to Heidegger's reading, land is adamant that the poetic voice which summons trackle is none other than death, the twilight of spirit and the surpassing of the metaphysics
of presence once and for all. Okay. Alright, I'll begin the second part because it's a bit longer and then we can take a little break. Okay. Now, at the end of his Narcissism and Dispersion essay, Land suggests that Derrida's deconstructive approach is subject to the same critique he's making of High Digger's gentle compromise with ontotheology. And Land particularly expands upon this claim, and he briefly mentioned in Narcissism and Dispersion, Land expands upon it in both The Thirst for Annihilation and also his 1993 essay, Spirit and Teeth.
So just to give a bit of background here, In Of Grammatology, published in 1967, among other works, Derrida argues, much like Heidegger, that the history of philosophy has too often amounted to a metaphysics of presence, from the Greek philosophy of the logos and the medieval Christian concept of a rather anthropomorphic god to the contemporary phenomenological concepts of the subject. Now, Derrida names metaphysics of presence, or what Derrida also calls logocentrism, This kind of thinking which privileges a particular being, usually one directly accessible to us, as the fundamental being of all things as such, of all reality. Now, Derrida's issue with logocentrism is that it denigrates everything
that differs from an allegedly absolute presence. It denigrates everything else as a secondary inferior copy without any reality of its own apart from that which it copies and imitates while simultaneously corrupting. and Derrida's most famous example of logocentrism is the way in which Ferdinand Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other figures all tend to reify speech, speaking, as a natural, direct and spontaneous expression of the speaking subject's thoughts, the logos so what particularly draws Derrida's eye here is how such an understanding of speech, which confers presence to speech, delegitimates writing as natural speech's
inferior, calculated, artificial, and secondary translation. So in order to deconstruct this particular logocentric metaphysics of presence, Derrida focuses on how Saussure's structural linguistics imminently betrays the fact that not only writing, but also speech, and all forms of discourse, are founded upon a primal difference, which is actually constitutive of presence, rather than the inverse. Even as Saussure himself does claim at times that at least phonetic signs gravitate around a fixed kind of external reference, a kind of presence, Derrida notes that So elsewhere acknowledges that written signifiers
arbitrarily refer to other signifiers or words to denote meaning. So we can think of it, if you need to look up the meaning of a word, you look it up in the dictionary, and other words are used to define that word. So all Derrida really has to do here to abolish presence is to generalise all words or signifiers, be they spoken or written, as only presenting any meaning by referring to and differing from the traces of other words and signifiers. And further, Derrida continues that these other words, these other signifiers used to define the initial word, are not themselves some kind of primal referent or presence, but those words must also refer and differ from other words in order to get on a meaning, right?
So if you look up one, you need to look up one word in the dictionary, you look up that word, it refers and differs from other words to define itself, but then if you look up those words, those words also use other words to define themselves and so on. There's no way out. this, right? You know, as Derrida famously puts it, there is no outside text. That is, there's no ultimate point of reference outside this differential play of one signifier's difference from another. So yeah, what Derrida shows is that every signifier is always already corrupted by this kind of differential signifying movement, what Derrida calls at various times Archie writing or difference spelt with an A, so difference. Now, while acknowledging in his dissertation that Derrida's critique of Heidegger
generally moves in the right direction, Land goes on to argue that Derrida nonetheless makes a similar mistake of failing to affirm difference all the way, insofar as Derrida comes to see difference is actually presupposing its opposite of presence. yeah so in the same breath that Derrida's deconstruction seems to undermine the metaphysics of presence Derrida does qualify that he's not seeking to valorise the differed and neglected term in any kind of dualism this is because for Derrida doing so would just merely recapitulate the metaphysics of presence is privileging of a single signifier over all the others even if it is the opposite term to the term reified in traditional metaphysics.
In reality, for Derrida, even the opposite term is itself constituted by still other terms and so on ad infinitum. So when we look at it in this way, there's no outside of presence any more than there is an outside of difference. Derrida says, this is the third point, there is no transgression if one understands by this the pure and simple installation in a beyond of metaphysics. Even the concept of excess or transgression will become suspect. Yeah, so the idea is that we can never really affirm or approach a difference beyond our presence. Rather, every deconstruction of presence is itself appropriated by a new regime of presence. Yeah, this is, again, the first quote to Derrida. He says, Difference does not resist appropriation.
It does not impose on it an exterior limit. It began by undermining alienation, and it finishes by letting reappropriation undermine until death. Difference produces that which it prohibits, renders possible even what it renders impossible. On Land's reading then, deconstruction certainly displaces phenomena ray fighters' presence by demonstrating how they presuppose an absent term. But rather than pursue difference to the end in a way which would obliterate all presence altogether, Derrida shows how even the absent term presupposes a form of presence. So far from displacing or presence by showing how absence is implied and foundational, Derrida displaces absence by showing that presence can be equally presupposed.
So difference for Derrida is never the absolute negation of presence, it's just merely a temporary suspension. And if this is problematic for Land, it's because he sees deconstruction as actually delaying rather than affirming the negation of presence through a constant undecidability, that's Derrida's word, an undecidability that sees every negation of presence as recuperable by the very presence it undermines. So again, by displacing presence without going all the way to its utter annihilation, Derrida maintains a kind of dualism between presence and absence, narcissism and dispersion, hope and disappointment, being and non-being, life and death. Yeah, so in the last quote there, Land says, it is precisely because Derrida will refuse to underwrite such a discrimination
that he turns instead to a re-inscription of continuities that are able to encompass and partially assimilate the ruptural aspect of his own work, reassigned to a structurally necessary inadequacy in the prosecution of deconstruction. Seen in this way, Derrida's deconstruction still expresses a typically Heideggerian desire for an uncontaminated presence as it deconstructs every presence only to assimilate that rupture back into presence. Again, I realise I've said presence a lot here, and it's a very abstract term, so I'm going to give a concrete example now. So, in Land's view, the clearest example of Derrida's gentle compromise with presence is the way that he refuses to fully identify as an atheist. And this is because Derrida sees atheism as presupposing the very religiosity
that atheism seeks to oppose, inasmuch as atheism has to differ from religion in order to affirm itself, right? So, for example, in a short essay of Derrida's called Circumfessions, written, I think, quite notably in response to the death of his mother, Derrida goes so far as to say that even as he, quote, rightly passes for an atheist, his deconstructive approach addresses itself as a prayer to God. Derrida says, yeah, I'm addressing myself here to God, the only one I take as a witness. I pray as I have never stopped doing all my life, and I pray to him. when asked at a conference why Derrida cannot simply say that he is an atheist in a straightforward
sense Derrida says that he must maintain this kind of infinite series of qualifications and concessions he says I would answer these questions with an endless number of protocols and that's what my life is made of sounds fun so for Derrida to say that God does not exist immediately presupposes God does exist, at least in a practical sense, since every refutation is dependent and grounded upon that which it refutes. Yeah, Derrida says again, if I say God doesn't exist, I would immediately say the opposite. God exists even if, and especially if he doesn't exist, because how powerful this non-existence should be to produce such extraordinary phenomena in what is called man. So it's because Derrida continually displaces the death of God, that theologians, many theologians, have been
able to actually align deconstruction with at least radical theology's own ceaseless displacements of a pure divine presence into the mysterious beyond. There are many theologians, particularly negative theologians, who are highly influenced by Derrida's deconstruction, you know, John D. Caputo being probably the most notable. but yeah so this is the kind of you know kind of priestly collaborationism that Land is taking issue with here so yeah Land says even if Derrida were subject to an anti-theistic inclination he could only be driven by his philosophy to search for that which institutes the difference between the presence and absence of God something like Schelling's absolute or
Heidegger's being a search which is scarcely distinguable from moves long familiar to radical theologians. So again, just to sort of link it back to last week, Land's idea is that much as Kant saved theology by attacking its metaphysical basis only to re-establish it on practical, transcendental grounds, so does Derrida undermine the metaphysics of presence only to end up resuscitating it on deconstructive grounds. Land says, the strategy adopted in both cases is essentially Kantian. If there is something you want to protect, attack it with measured vigor yourself thus investing it with replenished force and preempting its annihilation deconstruction is like capital managed and reluctant change yeah this is the ontotheological logic
that Land is getting at when he says that deconstruction cannot ever really negate presence since it sees every negation again it's presupposing the very presence it supposedly obviates yeah so I've got I just have that painting there because I think the prodigal sun is basically a that's a nice kind of parable of deconstruction really okay now so instead of repudiating difference in favor of a restored presence what we're going to look at after the break is that land wants to argue that we need to cultivate further this kind of logic of the traits of difference keep cultivating it until we reach a kind of absolute primordial difference from whence we could critique not only metaphysics but also Heidegger's ontology and Derrida's deconstruction
as merely Kantian sidesteps on the way to the Injunum outside. Are there any questions at this point? Take questions. Yeah. I thought maybe a little bit on Ian and I didn't hear you on the same as how he's reading about a particular meaning of this. He took that as a voice of poetry and behind that he was reading it and he was saying sort of calling it a reason.
Yeah, thanks. yeah so I think yeah so yeah I think there are kind of different senses of reason going on here amongst all these figures right to some extent yeah so I mean like it would depend on yeah it would depend on
what are the so for example if poetry is dependent on some kind of language right and if we have a conception of reason that sees language as one of the necessary conditions for the possibility of reason then maybe the critique works but I mean like more broadly I think yeah I mean my main issue I think there's some issues with like Land's reading here but my main issue is that I think Land ignores what's called the turn in Heidegger I think quite significantly so yeah I think there is a moment in Heidegger basically where there is a move from, rather than thinking being from the point of view of Dasein or us or whatever you want to call it Heidegger makes a turn where he
says we should start thinking from the point of view of being itself and this happens I think most notably in Heidegger's I think 1937 work, Contributions and it's really interesting to see Land doesn't mention that text or the turn, but I think there Heidegger approaches a very close land position because so yeah Heidegger has this idea thing from the point of view of being itself and Heidegger also specifically talks about being towards death in that book and he sort of has a slightly different conception to what's going on in being in time I think because he starts saying well being being towards, he actually critiques his concept of being towards death in being in time he says that was too much again from the point what Land is saying from the point of view from a kind of transcendental point of view
instead we need to think as death is that which nullifies, this kind of absolute. But yeah, and because the Heidegger's trackle essay is written after the turn, I think sort of taking into account the turn and then going back to read Land's reading of Heidegger, I think that complicates things a bit. yeah that was a slightly maybe loose and deranged response to your question but it's probably the best I could really do yeah similar question is what we're finding from this investigation
that the overall connection between what he's saying and what the original philosophers are saying, which seems to be the possibility of what we're doing, is to qualify Heidegger in this case, Or is it merely to... a pure negative to just say, Hyderabad is wrong, as in this instance, is there a Landian alternative way of thinking
to the one that he's criticised in Hyderabad? And I'm thinking particularly as a person interested in poetry, with the abstract sort of symbolistic poetry which has been used, to give, if the one argument is what he says comes from this poetry is wrong, then the argument that what I say comes from this poetry, I say that he's wrong. Is Lan saying, he's wrong because I'm right, I know him better than him? And I'm wondering how that can be in the interpretation of this very abstract and
the symbolic poetry. You're just using symbols, which of course can stand around. Okay, well... Or in Catecourt, you've got to use a similar one. Yeah. As we'll see, in the second half, we're still going to be looking at Land's engagement with Trackel, and he does develop, I think, a constructive kind of project and philosophy that's to substitute for the kind of Heidegger's abortive philosophy for him. But in terms of... at the same time it's not Land wouldn't I don't think Land would say it's his philosophy right because it's not reducible to his thought he's saying the reason that
his interpretation would be perhaps more valid than Heidegger's is that he's actually appealing to something in Tracker's text that cannot be refuted that you can't argue against which is death which is you can't if Tracker was talking about death that's just it's just a war that we can't It refuses any objections and refutations, as we'll see, I think. Maybe to be a bit clearer. Isn't that like the point of... Like how did he come down with a fever in the last line of the essay? Yeah, exactly. Like, despite what he says, he's still susceptible to the fever, or to the left of the fever. So in a way, it's like nature doesn't need to explain anything. It's just doing everything. So in a way...
This is what we're going to find when we get to the end of the episode. Yeah. Well, at the end of the episode, we just dig right away. I'm looking forward to it. Maybe, like, one more question, if anyone has. Probably, if not. Okay. Do people want to take a break? Like, a five-minute break? Yeah? All right, let's do it. Okay, I guess, I think everyone's back in. So, we'll start off again. Okay, so, yeah, although Land's 1993 essay, Spirit and Teeth, also seeks to kind of wage a virulent critique of Derrida's deconstruction, and particularly Derrida's reading of Heidegger's
reading of Trackel, it's also, I think, the earliest essay where Land, or one of the earliest essays, where Land develops a clearly more kind of, you know, constructive or positive of philosophy of his own by drawing upon certain conceptual resources that he finds in trackle. So yeah, in the rest of this lecture, I want to show how land draws upon kind of images of death, wolves, and rats, specifically in trackle's poetry, in order to develop what something that I'm calling here a threefold hermeneutic of reading with things. A reading which essentially critiques a discourse by confronting it with the brute fact of its mortal and irrational ground at ever more obliterating scales
of intensity. So yeah, I think there's kind of I'm going to go through all of these in detail as we work through the essay, but just to kind of give an outline to start with. So yeah, there's three aspects to this reading with Fangs. So the first approach I think models reading on an autopsy by critiquing a philosopher's failure to recognise their own The second approach then infects the philosopher's text with what I'm calling a lycanthropy that undermines the text's rationality by showing how it actually presupposes a repressed animality. and a final technique modeled on rodentology the study of rats reassesses a philosopher's kind of hierarchization of irrationality animality and matter as kind of inferior instances of reason
it reassesses these these three moments as actually ever more intensive encounters with a primordial inhuman reality so land doesn't actually use these terms these three terms but there's a kind of Nietzsche says of Schopenhauer that Schopenhauer is the great simplifier of Kant. And so just what I'm trying to do here is some kind of, more kind of rigorisation or simplification of what I think the kind of methodology that Land is using to critique Derrida and Heidegger and so on. Okay, so, yeah, the title of the essay's introductory section, A Preliminary Postmortem, I think immediately indicates the way that Land proposes to model his reading of philosophers on an autopsy.
So Land begins the essay by lamenting the way that Hegel and his disciples, as we have seen, have turned spirit, reason and the concept into the cosmic principle of all things which they oppose to animality, irrationality and brute matter. In the words of the essay's title, it's a matter of reifying spirit to the denigration of teeth and the bite marks that teeth can inflict. In what is, I think, quite interestingly, Land's first use of cybernetics and artificial intelligence to critique metaphysics, Land notes that modern science, and particularly AI research, specifically research into how we can create life and consciousness, all of this has exposed the way that spirit is reducible to physical processes of, I guess, informational processing.
So Land says, Spirit has been inflated by Hegel into the cosmic medium of transaction before finally succumbing to an irreparable marginalisation by the scientific advances of experimental and behavioural psychology, neurology, neuroanatomy, cognitive science, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence. So, you know, despite the kind of falling of spirit into rebuke due to the modern sciences, if Land still finds it necessary to lament this kind of Hegelian absolutisation of spirit in our own time, or in his time, in the 90s it's because he sees this kind of Hegelianism as persisting throughout the 20th century specifically in the guise of, as we've begun to see,
phenomenology, and what Land calls phenomenology what he calls prolonged refusal of the impersonal so again in this essay Land says Now we've begun to see that in Land's own time he sees Derrida's dominant deconstructive approach as particularly championing Heidegger's endless questioning into the meaning of being beyond presence, not so as to do away with ontotheology and metaphysics, but actually to delay their eventual demise.
Far from marking humanity's highest wisdom, then, Land argues that the history of at least Western philosophy, since at least Hegel, has largely been a rather primitive parochialism that projects ourselves onto the cosmos as if the cosmos were forever beholden to what is merely a brief anthropic instance, a caprice of natural selection in the cosmos' greater becoming. So Land says, Let us not forget that philosophy is also primate psychology, that our loftiest speculations are merely picking through a minuscule region of the variegated slime encrusting a speck of dust. Now, above all, Land takes issue with how phenomenology is what he calls the mark of a clownish incompetence at death.
And this is to the extent that a crucial corollary of phenomenology's reification of spirit is that death, the ultimate exteriority, becomes unthinkable and even impossible. He says, Land says, the entire current gradually implies an attempted proof of the impossibility of death, an ontological conflation of access to reality and ownership, a perpetually reformulated spiritualism. The idea is that, you know, much as primordial kind of myths of anthropomorphic gods were concocted, at least in part, to console early humans when confronted with a chaotic and hostile world, so does even modern, supposedly more scientific philosophy betray the same kind of primitive effort to comfort us by displacing the brute fact of our finitude through so many reifications of spirit.
each one seemingly more complex and intricate but yet also more desperate and naive than the last. Now Land argues and this is really a crucial point if thought cannot grasp reality's radical alterity without reducing it to a thing for us then perhaps the only way to access the real is at the limit or even death of thought itself. death after all marks precisely the cessation of subjectivity and so like Kant's numina, death is precisely that before which thinking falls silent it's thus death that marks the ultimate testament to the fact that reality exceeds what we can think of it as Lann puts it
beyond the anthropoid gesticulations of knowing suspension is not differentiable from death one's death as we so ludicrously say and death does not belong to an order that can be delayed. So yeah, given that death marks the brute fact of a reality without us, Land argues that the goal of any philosophy sincerely committed to the love of wisdom, philosophia, ought to also be committed to the love of death, necrophilia, right? So, and I think therein lies Land's solution to overcoming post-Kantian anthropocentrism. Namely, transfigured death into the transcendental condition by which we judge every philosopher's claim to grasp the real as valid only to the extent that they can confess and affirm their own finitude,
the limits of their own thinking. I think Land actually best puts this in another 1993 essay we will look at later on, an essay called Making It With Death. And I think this quote is actually maybe the most important line in all of Land in order to understand his entire project from the 80s till today even. So Land says, death is the impersonal subject of critique and not an accursed value in the service of a condemnation. Death is the impersonal subject of critique and not an accursed value in the service of a condemnation. So again, just to put it in terms that I did last week as well. Instead of a transcendental idealist critique of thought's attempts to go beyond itself
by subsuming its understanding of the absolute under the concepts of reason, Land proposes a transcendental materialist critique of attempts to limit thought to itself by showing how thought presupposes and yet represses the inevitability of its own future extinction in order to constitute the concepts of reason. So seeing from this kind of skewed Caligarian sort of angle, Land's interest in Shrackle is not so much as a person or even a poet, but as someone who was able to trace and sketch at the margins of our all-too-human language the morbid intensities of the inhuman outside. Trackel's poetry does not stem from his own thought, but rather from the disruptions of his thought
as death infected him, obsessed him, wounded him, and ultimately finished him, all the while also thoroughly delighting him. And this is what Land is getting at, I think, when he says, quote, it is perhaps more precise to say that trackle never existed except as a battlefield, a reservoir of disease the graveyard of a deep consecrated church what Landon is discovering in trackle is this critical insight that mortality is not a fact to be bemoaned or repressed, instead death is to be championed as an instrument as the organon for the critique of all anthropocentric philosophies so as to set the stage for realities, you know, recession from the clutches of our concepts.
Okay, and that's exactly why I'm proposing here to characterise Land's reading of philosophy as a kind of methodological autopsy. Now, you know, one possible, I guess, definition of an autopsy would be something like, an autopsy is a surgically precise dissection and rigorous examination of a corpse in order to determine the cause and manner of its death, both for educational purposes of understanding, but also juridical purposes of seeking justice in the case of criminal cases into suspected murder cases. So yeah, I think we can identify four essential elements to the autopsy, right? Its surgical precision, the determination of the cause of death, and the twofold aim of seeking truth and delivering justice.
so to model hermeneutics or interpretation on an autopsy would therefore i think involve reading the surgical dissection of the corpse as a rigorous philosophical critique of a dying or dead corpus with an eye to identifying the corpus's cause of death right and here the corpus's cause of death has two significations one positive i guess and one kind of negative so on the one hand uh it's negative sense signals that the aim of a post-mortem hermeneutic is to critique or precisely kill off the corpus that it's analysing, to precisely cause its death. And on the other hand, its positive sense involves showing how the corpus is constituted as a kind of sublimated response to its true ground of death in order to repress and delay
death's traumatic impact. Consequently, the pedagogical function would be to try and garner an understanding of the reality of death by stripping away and subtracting anthropocentric qualities which philosophical corpuses too often project onto death. And finally, the juridical purpose would be to develop a kind of new non-Kantian categorical imperative that no longer submits everything to reason's unconditional law. On the contrary, a post-mortem imperative would stipulate that if reason wishes to maintain its rather dubious pretensions to love wisdom, it will have to unconditionally affirm our own death and by doing so disclose a greater reservoir of non-being beyond life and thought.
So according to this post-mortem hermeneutics, it's only in searching for humanity's demise that philosophy can escape from the dominant anthropocentrism, again, by confronting us with a world without us. Okay, now the second section of Spirit and Teeth is entitled Wolves, and it's prefaced with an epigraph from Derrida's book of Spirit, where he promises to patiently read Heidegger's use of the word spirit in Heidegger's trackle paper, before eventually moving on to address the question of animality. So this is the Derrida quote. As I continue to study this text elsewhere with a more decent patience,
I hope one day to be able, beyond what a conference paper permits me today, to render it justice in also analysing its motions, its mode or its status, its relation to philosophical discourse, to hermeneutics or poetics, but still what it says of Geshe-let, the word Geshe-let, and also of place as of animality. But for the moment I will follow solely the passage of spirit. now here Land argues that Derrida's seemingly humble hermeneutic here actually betrays a profound arrogance to the extent that such a patient close reading acts as if Derrida were practically immortal and you know therefore had the time to devote an entire book to Derrida's to Heidegger's use of just one word in just one of Heidegger's smaller works Land says these are the words of a
man who is confident he will survive for some considerable time. There is no discernible urgency here, far less abruptness, desperation, or any of the raw intensities of haste. And, you know, moreover, given that Derrida prioritises his reading of spirit before that of animality, Land suggests that the careful, painstaking, deconstructive exegesis is not so much motivated by a love of wisdom, detail, and sophistication, as it is by fear of the real yet crude fact of our morbid animal essence that the very order of analysis is designed to postpone. According to Land, Derrida's deconstruction of Heidegger's Trackel text is particularly egregious because such a kind of patient and performatively idealist hermeneutic is
prejudiced from the beginning against the real sense of urgency and impending doom that permeates Trackel's poetry. Land says, an evasion that is perhaps constituted of hermeneutical decency is exemplified when, by taking one's time over interpreting Trackel's poetry, one avoids succumbing to the pestilence it communicates. So on the contrary, Land's own reading of Trackel's poetry focuses on precisely the recurring and frequent images of animals that Derrida ignores, and particularly animals like rats, ravens, and even more particularly wolves, animals which invoke fright or are associated with disease and death. Even more specifically, Land focuses on Trackel's recurring descriptions of people who are transformed into wolves,
or what Land reads as werewolves. Here Land's not only referring to Trackel's explicit references to wolfmen, dark beasts, but to the way that Trackel's poetry in general amounts to what I'm calling a becoming werewolf, right? Far more deranged than DeLiz's becoming animal. yeah so like his life Trackel's poetry was feverish jarring indecent brutish and short a true Hobbesian kind of jungle right whether it's from his early drug addiction and his regular brothel visits until his cocaine overdose when he was only 27 you know Trackel is also a member of the 27 club but he's often repressed from membership so it's in this sense that land characterises Trackel's
art as a becoming werewolf Land says, Trackel's writings are lycanthropic vectors of impatience, of twitch disease, because they are the virulent relics of an indecent precipitation, an abortion, a meteorite impact. Trackel took very little time over anything. So given that Derrida's gentle reading of Heidegger's Trackel essay omits any mention of this lycanthropic meteor and rhyme, Land argues, quite bizarrely, that Derrida is not a werewolf, where werewolf denotes precisely trackles becoming animal, feral, deranged, impolite, jagged and crude at every full moon without decision, indecision or delay. Land says, Werewolves are dissipated within a homo-lupic spiral
that distances them utterly from all concern for decency or justice. Creatures of epidemic rather than hermeneutics, werewolves tend to be crude, but then they don't live as long as deconstructionists. The luxury of delaying the problem of animality is not open to them. Whereas Derrida apologises for even the slightest textual impoliteness as what Derrida says, precipitating in an indecent fashion, trackles accursed race of wolfmen have no such sense of politeness or restraint or etiquette of manners, right? Now, at one point, Land notes that werewolves become accursed by being bitten by other werewolves, of course. And he makes this, he notes this so as to seg into a brief discussion
of the great French poet Arthur Rambeau just as trackle has bitten land so was trackle bitten by Rambeau's poetry which profoundly influenced or more precisely infected his own work land thus briefly digresses to look at Rambeau's own writing only to discover that Rambeau also claims to have been bitten by a werewolf and shapeshifted into a brother of the accursed race Rambeau says I have always belonged to an inferior race my race never rose up except to pillage like wolves tearing at the animal they have not killed for Rambo as for land and trackle then the true goal of poetry is to mutilate the soul and derange the senses by sort of abandoning it in the wilderness far from civilization where it can only become
feral and deranged and accursed and you know this is this is probably Rambo sort of famously explains this how the soul must be made monstrous as he puts it in what is probably his most famous quotation. He says the poet makes himself a seer by a long gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessence. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith. Every superhuman strength where he becomes among all men. The great patient the great criminal the one accursed and the supreme scholar because he reaches the unknown. Like Land then, Rambeau not only envisions the love of wisdom
as a becoming werewolf but as inextricably tied to a perverse infatuation with sickness, decay and death. Okay, although Land notes other avenues in both Trackel's poetry and in other poets' works, such as that of Rambeau, he ultimately focuses on In the East, a poem that Trackel wrote in response to hearing about an attack on a city during the First World War. Just to point out, just as a side note, The Company of Wolves, based on Angela Carter's book, is easily the best cinematic depiction of becoming a werewolf. It has the best, as you can see, the best transformation from the human into the werewolf in all of painting, all of cinema.
So I highly suggest checking that out. Anyway, that's just a little digression from the film critic here. But, okay, let's turn back to In the East. And it's the last stanza that's most important for us here. So I'll just read it out. So Tracker says, Thorny wilderness girds the city. The moon hounds frightened women. From bleeding steps, wild wolves burst through the gate. now according to land the city here symbolizes the civilization order and reason that is constantly menaced and girded by the thorny wilderness outside its walls if the moon can also be said to frighten to hound frightened women it is because the moon again symbolizes
the ferocious lunacy of the outside of nature which is also then embodied by the wild wolves that burst through the city gates. Land says, an indeterminate multiplicity of wolves affect a rupture in the boundary of the city, transmitting its positive exteriority into its kernel. Blood, the moon, and women are coagulated by an intensive menstrual seismic which shatters the proper difference between life and death. Given that the wolf attack here is precipitated by the hound of the moon, Land imagines these wolves to be actually the city dwellers themselves, becoming werewolf as the wilderness creeps up over the city limits. So the war of which this poem is about is actually a civil war
within one and the same body politic, torn inside out. Here the werewolf is the antithetical image to the city because it subverts everything that holds civilisation together. As Nietzsche's genealogy of morals showed, unlike humans, animals cannot submit time to the order of making promises and hence succumb to the morality of keeping one's intentions for fear of punishment. So the time of the werewolf is not a logical, rational time of anterior causes and after effects. It's a time of chaos, surprise, brutish insensitivity and a certain physical jaggedness. Land says, such as trackles a cursed race as well as Rambos, communicating its dirty blood in wilderness spaces
of barbarian inarticulacy, incapable of making promises even to themselves, they are excluded from every possibility of salvation. On Land's reading of In the East here, what Trekl is doing is waging a war against reason, civilisation and even basic human decency by overrunning the city with the lunacy of the moon that makes werewolves out of us all. Irrational, indecent, uncivilised, inhuman, to put it bluntly yet in this case, or too fittingly. Okay, now, in his critique of Derrida's failure to take into account Trackel's sort of feral metre and jagged rhyme, Lann develops the second aspect of his hermeneutic that I'm terming here
lycanthropy or becoming werewolf. So lycanthropy is an extremely rare psychiatric syndrome whereby the affected patient or person believes that they are able to shapeshift into animal and other non-human forms. So lycanthropy is named precisely after the figure of the werewolf, also known as the lycanthrope. In particularly severe cases, the patient can lose all sense of reason and even the ability to articulate normal speech as they resort to primitive growls and howling. the syndrome can also affect the patient's motor sensory skills as they revert to crawling on all fours like a quadruped and in some cases lycanthropes can become aggressive towards humans
even turning on their once familiar family and friends so if Land's reading of Derrida and other philosophers can be seen as a kind of methodological lycanthropy it's because he precisely critiques the pretensions to rationality and moral decency by sort of illuminating them under the full moon where their kind of repressed irrational animality can be seen in full light. So lands like canthropic readings amount to the transcendental critique of philosophy for anthropomorphizing the cosmos out of a fear of being unable to tame its base, its true material base of irrationality and animality, tame it in accordance with the concepts of reason. so whenever Lange shows how Derrida
amongst other philosophers displaces animality in favour of patiently and politely studying spirit he's biting into the deconstructive discourse with materialist fangs in order to infect it with a sense of its truly barbaric ground which the displacement of animality and the protracted discussion of spirit is designed to domesticate and tame okay in the essay's final part called rats Land draws upon the figure of the rat in Schreckle's poem of the same name a poem that Land again rebukes Heidegger for never mentioning and Land's interested in this poem on rats in order to develop this third and final aspect of his reading with things the rodentology
yeah just as a side again so the image from Pixar's Ratatouille it's not actually meant to be a joke it's meant to be a serious claim that this film has the best again lots of superlatives but the best cinematic depiction of the kind of artistic genius, Trackel as an artistic genius or what we'll see next week it has the best depiction of the Kantian concept of creative genius to the extent that it shows precise it's literally a film about how a simple dish hand can become the greatest chef in all of Paris by being puppeteered beyond his control by literally a rat. So it develops an inhuman conception of creative genius. And in that sense, it's a profoundly morbid and disturbing film. So again, check it out.
Yeah, okay. Anyway. So Trackel's Rat's poem initially depicts an idyllic scene of a white and shining moon and a serene and calming silence before it is quickly perturbed by the sight of rats scuttling out of the sewers. As these rats dart about all over the place, the purity of the white moon assumes a more kind of lupin and eerie glow as the image of spirit instead becomes that of a ghost. So just to read the poem. This is the full poem. Into the yard the autumn moon shines white. From the roof's edge fantastic shadows fall. In empty windows silence dwells. The rats then quietly steal to the surface, and dart whistling hither and thither, and a horrid vaporous breath wafts after them out of the sewer, through which the ghostly moonlight trembles.
now in interpreting Chackle's figure of the rat Land draws on Hans Zinser's book on rats life and history to argue that humans have always hated and hunted rodents as carriers of disease which reaped widespread death and destruction particularly across western Christendom most notably rats were central to spreading Europe's three major plague epidemics which fittingly came from the mysterious other world of the east to successively strike at both the Roman Empire, then medieval Christendom, and then modernity itself, each with a greater ferocity and death toll than the last. So this elucidates why killing rats was viewed very early on as a service to God that protected the sanctity of civilization
from the barbarism of a supposedly kind of putrid and deadly Orientalism. At the same time, Land observes that since rats were repressed in Western civilisation, they also came to be symbols for repressed desires. This is what Freud captured in the 1909 case of the so-called Ratman's compulsive neurotic dreams, dreams of an oriental punishment where rats are poured into the anus of the bound victim. And this is to say nothing of Freud's other case of the Wolfman. But in any case, sticking to the Ratman. Freud's own diagnosis was that the rats in the dream represented the unconscious, a kind of repressed libidinal force that ate away at the rat man's everyday, waking life through symptomal bite marks
and hisses. So Land says, in the very moment of prowess, the imperial interpretative gesture is taken par derriere from behind, by an impersonal libidinal force from beyond representational discourse, whether logico-psychiatric or orientalist. Here is with Trackel's Wolves. what land is doing again is seizing upon the rat as another symbol of feral animality that haunts civilization only in portentous traces such as nibbled furniture, scratch marks and squeaks, hisses and fecal droppings. So much as trackle does not flee but rather feeds the rats in the twilight yard in the poem, to trace these symptomal footprints of the outside
on the inside, Land models his final hermeneutical technique on the science of rodentology, the study of rhodes. Here, Land aims to subvert the classical Aristotelian and Christian hierarchy of beings, whereby rational creatures like humans and angels are held to incarnate the divine being, the absolute spirit, to the denigration of animals, non-sapient organisms, and, of course, inert brute matter, as ever lowlier privations of this absolute spirit. So just to use St. Augustine's version, the hierarchy of beings traditionally has three levels. So the lowliest appetitive level consists of all things which desire their self-preservation,
be they sapient like humans or sentient like plants. Even plants sort of stretch towards the light, right? As if seeking preservation. The second sensitive level refers to all living things, from animals to humans, which have the ability to sense-perceive their external environment and examine it, investigate it in such a way as to pursue their needs. And finally, the rational level is exclusively comprised of humans, also actually angels, insofar as we alone have the capacity to rationally think about ourselves. So Augustine says, That by which humans are marked above animals, whatever it is, be it more correctly called mind or spirit or both, if it dominates and commands the rest of what a human consists in, then that human being is completely in order.
Note that inert base matter is excluded entirely from Augustine's hierarchy insofar as he sees it as nothing other than nothingness itself, then it's just a pure privation of spirit, of being, when we become ensnared in the temporal world through sin. So, yeah, Augustine says, disease is not a substance, but a defect in a fleshy substance, that is, privations of the good which we call health. So it's precisely this kind of ever greater denigration of inert matter, irrationality and animality in favour of spirit and reason that lands in a Trachlian kind of hermeneutics is designed to counteract. Rather than envision the animal and the irrational
as inferior degrees of beings, highest instance in the spirit of reason land reconceives them as ever more intensive incursions of the true being of you know non-being of the irrational and the animal and the sensible so again seen from this skewed angle it's the repressed, the lowly and the base or what in Trackel's terms you know the marsupial and the sewer dwellers it's these figures which will most intensively instantiate the real and on the other hand it's precisely spirits fallacious self-aggrandizing to the exclusion of anything that cannot be synthesized by it it's this which becomes the privation of nature by submitting nature's greater totality to a single anthropic instance
and land actually already anticipated this reassessment of the classical hierarchy of beings in the second part of the essay when he took note of the bleeding steps in trackles poem in the east that the wolves leave behind, with these steps being just one example of the recurring images of steps in Trackle's poetry, steps which always lead to madness and into nature, away from the city. So there's many steps, for example, steps of madness, mossy steps, ruined steps, steps of the wood, lots of steps in Trackle. So according to Land, these steps should be interpreted as ever more intensive excursions into the wilderness beyond the polis's protective walls.
That's the idea. Land says, It is a language of gradation degree abster form. Heterogeneous strata of intensity which involve irresolvable complexity, diversity, indefinite protectability in both directions, the default of absolute thresholds, an economics of incommensurability, and a compulsively recurrent abortion of the concept. here humanity's becoming werewolf should not be seen as a regression to a kind of primitive inferior stage of nature or evolution it should be seen as rather an even more intensive kind of libidinal charge of impersonal energy before which spirit becomes the true inferior principle of a very partial kind of individuation as Len stresses inferiority is not any kind of lack or impoverishment but a
positive libidinal charge potentiating spiritualizations. So turning on its head the bloody steps as degrees of impersonal intensities emanating from the outside, the city of God, the polis, becomes a partial, an extremely partial and secondary sublimation of reality's true lupin becoming when the city sort of, you know, fixates the real into discrete orders of stasis. Something like that. you know, discrete orders of stasis which are purported to exhaust all of being. Yeah, so Land says, the work of the city has never been anything but a mendacious retranscription of the real metamorphoses which re-emerge in lycanthropic becoming.
Again, the idea is that far from totalizing the truth of being, ontotheology's notion of spirit, or philosophy in general's notion of spirit, is simply one falsely absolutized, falsely reified intensity, of libidinal energy among many other far less inhibited variants. Now it's in the essay's final section that Land fully articulates this notion of degrees of intensive becomeings with reference to Trackel's routes. Here Land uses the image of a house as a metaphor for the hierarchy of beings where the room in which the humans live are considered the most important, of course, while the basement is denigrated as a place
to store unwanted and forgotten things, and then the pipes and sewer system in between the walls, out of sight, are just forgotten altogether. Although the chamber of pipes, where the rats dwell, notably, is hidden from view, Land notes that they constitute the house's smooth functioning for its human inhabitants. At the same time, it's precisely because they permit us to go about our everyday lives that this kind of realm in between the walls and among the pipes is only ever drawn to our attention when something breaks down. A pipe is clogged or rats nibble away at a wire, turning the lights up. According to Land's kind of inverted hierarchy of degrees of being, just as the house is both constituted and disrupted
by this realm of the rodents inside the walls, so too is spirit grounded upon the very animal materiality that it represses, paradoxically represses to affirm itself as the height, the apotheosis of being. Land says, heaven is not without its rat holes, its sewage system, an entire impersonal architecture characterized by porous heterogeneity. It seems likely that God would insist upon air conditioning and a dumb waiter. Irrespective of his celestial visage, Xiaowei still has rat bites on his arse. Disputing Derrida's thesis that it's impossible to ever really hone in on a difference without re-establishing it as a new regime of presence, Land uses this perverse hierarchy to argue that we can move step by step up,
or actually rather down, to locate ever more intensive traces of a primal difference from the irrational in the animal to the inert and ultimately to death itself. So if I propose to characterise Land's tracing of libidinal intensities as a rodentology, it's because he draws on Zinser's classification of species of rats to articulate this method of cognising the uncognisable. Land is particularly interested in Zinser's discussion of the distinction between ratus ratus, the black rat, or house rat, and ratus neurovegicus, the grey or brown sewer rat. Although the Black Plague, the Great Mortality,
that spread across Europe and was reaped on the backs of black rats is better known, Zinza notes at one point that the brown rat's subsequent entry into Europe proved to be far more devastating. Its plague was far worse. Here Lent uses the black and brown rat as an example of two different intensive invasions of the outside. Lent is quick to note that these two types of rat should not be seen as two sides of a metaphysical Manichaean dualism. They're rather two relatively distinct gradations of one and the same libidinal energy. After all the differences between black and brown rats, shades of the same colour spectrum, not polar opposites, black and white, for example. Sir Lamb says,
there are two varieties of rats, but this should not be taken as a gift for our metaphysicians or supposed anti-metaphysicians who are constantly in search of dichotomic conceptual opposition a logical differentiation, black and brown not black and white yeah, by the same token the attempt to localise different intensities of this feral animality should not be seen as a way of unifying these various intensities into one all-encompassing order on the contrary, like rats, intensities are swarms, they come in swarms of multiplicity, you know, just as rats scurry in packs, right? And even if we just take a singular rat on its own, that singular rat is still a multiplicity, specifically, you know,
to the extent that the rat harbours a swarm of fleas, right? And each flea is in turn a swarm of, you know, viral cells and so on. So its multiplicity is all the way down. Okay, now according to Land, it was Trackel's great merit to have sense that there are different intensities without anyone alone capturing the absolute fullness of libidinal energy. This is precisely why Trackel was constantly conjuring up ever new libidinal figures, some of which we've seen, you know, from the sister and the wolfman to rats, ravens and birds, and even Christians and priests, but also Satanists and criminals. Land says animality is not a state, essence or genus
but a complex space cross cut by voyages of all kinds the animality which Trackel finds has its dead ends and stagnant stomps, it has its humanistic and theological becomeings but it also has its channels of open flow becoming multiple, fluid, unpredictable becoming an enemy of mankind lupin and murin becomeings of all kinds even the plague doctor assumes a beak the plague doctor itself is also a becoming plague, a becoming animal so if Land is particularly interested in Trackel's rats above all these other libidinal figures it's because they best articulate this inverted hierarchy of being by which we're able to localise ever greater intensities of libidinal energy if we follow the bleeding steps
descent into decay and dissolution and we can see I think from the the last citation's notion of humanistic and theological becomeings, that even religion, civilization and humanity do not comprise a kind of distinct principle or order to the savage outside in what would ultimately amount to establishing the outside in terms of strict Manichean dualism. On the contrary, even the metaphysics of presence is one not particularly intensive instance of the wilderness, one which we falsely conflate with all of the wilderness, even as it continues to express itself in many different and contradictory and hostile guises.
So yeah, therein lies how Landy is able to explain why Trackel appears to believe at times that divine redemption is possible, why Trackel becomes a Christian while still being a virulently nihilistic atheist. Tracu's sort of Christian sense of redemption in some poems does not contradict his other poems that we've looked at like In the East and Rats which trace a kind of unilateral one-way descent into decay and disintegration for Tracu as for land the Christian can be affirmed so long as one understands that it is one possible and hence contingent sublimation of an inhuman individual energy whose other figures equally include Trackel's recurring cast of characters
like the criminal, the stranger, the cannibal the incestuous sister the leper, the satanist, the drug addict and the wolfman yeah so in the second quote Lan says at times he becomes a Christian among a general confusion of becomeings becoming an animal, becoming a virus becoming inorganic Shackle's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monothiism just as they are stained by narcotic fluidities gnawed by rats, crated by Russian artillery shard and pitted by astronomical debris the idea is that when seen from this outside spirit becomes one contingent materialisation of an animal energy
that's so voracious that it even cannibalises itself until it expresses itself as its exact opposite in the form of the city of God, the polis, order, reason. Okay, so what Land, Spirit and Tief essay ultimately develops, I think, is not just a specific critique of Derrida still too phenomenological or too human critique or philosophy, but also it develops more generally a hermeneutic of reading philosophers by submitting them to this three-famed assessment. So in the first instance of autopsy, Land's reading caused into question the extent to which a philosopher can recognise the finitude of their own thought before the brute fact of their future demise through a second
interpretative practice of lycanthropy Land critiques the philosopher's reification of reason for masking the primordial ground of irrational animality and base matter and finally Land affects a rodentology that reverses the philosopher's denigration of the irrational, the animal and the dead, as ever greater localisations of an inert yet intensive exteriority to all reason and life. By modelling his Trachlian reading of philosophy on an autopsy, lycanthropy and rodentology, what Land is essentially doing is appropriating the brute fact that every living thing, including even the holy blue spirit, will one day die as the condition for the possibility of critiquing philosophies, self-projections onto the world in a way which
reduces all of reality to a mere fragment in what is really nature's awesomely barbarous becoming. Okay, so having critiqued Kant and his phenomenological offspring for masking the reality of this death for far too long, and most egregiously in Heidegger's reading of Trackel and Derrida's deconstructive approach, what we're going to see next week is that Land's going to go on to trace an entirely different philosophical tradition with an eye to developing a more constructive philosophy of his own for tasting, encountering, confronting, and being confronted by a base matter's wild and impersonal forces at the sublime edge of our humanity. But yeah, we'll leave it there for this week.
But yeah, are there any questions? We've got five minutes or so. yeah Could you put on knowledge as you say, yes, you could acknowledge that reason comes from sort of animality, rational animality, but still at the same time, there's something there to it as well? Yeah, what is the something? Yeah, I know. Because land certainly acknowledged this, there's a formal distinction between life reason and, I guess, death or brute matter. otherwise you wouldn't even need the critique
he's developing, you would just have direct intellectual intuition of matter so he's certainly acknowledging there's this normative order that emerges out of nature but the project the focus on on death and irrational and so on is designed to limit the pretensions of that normative order to legislate for nature as Hegel puts it yeah yeah and yeah Nietzsche's like man is something to be overcome yeah next week we're going to look at precisely
so this I kind of just anticipated this other philosophical tradition that lands actually appraises positively and that's the tradition of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille and so on. And I think out of all those figures, Nietzsche is the most important thing ultimately. So yeah, I definitely think there's really strong resonances here with Nietzsche. But yeah, we can look at that next week as well. Yeah, any other questions? Yeah. This is an older way of talking. I think what I'm hearing from your description of land is something to do with Freud's essay, Civilization is Discutaneous. The fact that young men, young in philosophy, have
entered philosophy with a strong critique of previous philosophy, including the sort of group you've created, what's his name? Life is... Nietzsche? No, no. Way back. I'm losing names there. Life is cruel. Hobbes. Hobbes. Hobbes. Life is pointless. And then you've got Shacklin. there's no life is pointless and then you have nature's original negative
thing about life. It does seem to me that you can't get over the fact that these are human beings talking out of their humanity and to actually posit the non-human or other than human as a human... I need to get to dismiss the whole idea of humans being able to understand themselves and that being the main point of thinking, of philosophy if you like.
but I'm still interested in where it goes from here. You're suggesting that he doesn't remain in this rather, with completely negative and I think dismissal of... Oh, he can't say I'm writing as a human to say that Humanity is not important, but I don't know if I'm making that clear. Yeah. Is it valid to say this is a sort of outpouring of a young man's discontent with civilisation
and then it has to progress into something positive? And the important. Yeah, I mean the clear kind of problem with that kind of reading would be the fact that Land is now 56 and he hasn't changed his views at all and you know the whole project comes out of Kant's first critique and Kant wrote his first critique quite late in life or when he was middle-aged I think so it's not necessarily like a young man's or even a man's game here right philosophy. It's far more than any kind of youthful excess or something like that. I think it... Land's project is simply just this
immense kind of fidelity to critique. Critique understood as the critique of dogmatic metaphysics and anthropomorphism. And he's not saying that we shouldn't study our minds, the conditions of possibilities for mind. He's not... He knows that he himself can't stop people from living, pursuing preservation and so on. It's a specific project. It's a philosophical project. When philosophy is understood as nothing other than endless radicalization of transcendental critique. It's not trying to limit us from understanding ourselves. It's actually trying to limit our understanding of ourselves
from conflating itself with everything. It's big. Yeah, sorry. I look forward to the next one. Do you have a question? Oh, yeah. I kind of feel, or a bit of a suspect, but there's another rat running around that is really exciting methodology for a job. Some of you have not heard of the human society So, you can see that in our region as well. That's weakly a subtle rule. So, you go back to Plato's defense of the Socratic trial, or the apology. Socratic philosophy, deeply noted by the demon, is actually a necrophilia, isn't it? It's a preparation for the myth.
And it's actually a love of it. So, the Sofiel is really one of them. You know, it's a wisdom. It's a negating... The negating is what we know of ourselves. Because what we know of ourselves is, is death. So that's the thing that all have wanted to correct the Asian form and the Asian form to accept death. Now, the last person, I mean, the last person called Liberian, or they were a likeness to it. I was curious about whether there is some kind of to land's nephilium actually might include something like the Socrates because the demon is the thing that he was telling Socrates and he didn't forget they were actually saying what that is. Yeah. I think you're definitely
on the right track here and in actually is it next yeah next week actually the second half is going to be about land's reading of Socrates and Bataille's reading of Socrates and specifically the trial because so land has a kind of ambiguous relationship to Socrates and Plato and he does think that Socrates goes again part of the way through this kind of modelling of philosophy as a preparation for death Socrates' critique of the Athenian judges' use of death as a punishment as if we can know that death is going to be bad or something like that so he does see certain what Land calls sceptical openings for critique in Socrates and at the origins of western philosophy but at the same time he also thinks
as we'll see, I don't want to pre-empt too much but next week in the same kind of analysis of Socrates Land also sees Socrates as actually recoiling in a similar way to Derrida and Heidegger recoiling from that insight when he sort of goes on to reify our values of the good, the true and the beautiful onto as the cosmic ideas governing all things Yeah, right. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, there's... Yeah, so I mean, yeah, so there's... Socrates is really going to be one of the strong focuses next week, yeah.
and the contradiction what land sees is the contradictions between yeah this kind of morbid necrophiliac kind of Socrates and then a Socrates who also believes in the immortality of the soul and these kinds of things yeah and that also and through yeah we'll see that through his land's reading of Socrates and also briefly the pre-Socratics he actually to come back to what land's actually interested in he actually sees this kind of philosophy this Kantian modern conception of philosophy as critique, he actually sees it as the origins of pre-Costocratic philosophy itself. So it's a... Yeah, next week we'll go much further back to the origins. Yeah, but I guess we're out of time.