Okay, so it's not super organised, it might go in lots of different ways. But, I mean, what I want to talk about really is to talk about Nick Land, probably in relation to what had preceded him, and the kind of canon of thought that was kind of excavated and repotentiated in the 90s, and then the relation of that to now, in terms of Nick Land's re-emergence, as I think, doing a highly controversial one recently, with, you know, featuring a telegraph blog. The telegraph blog. being denounced as a fascist on the telegraph. I mean, you know, the sheer oddness of that. But I mean, but also, I mean, I think that not just as a historical exercise, but something that will actually give us an interesting angle, I think, on some of the impasses of political thought, particularly on the left, I think, really.
And I think the idea of Nick Land as a kind of just simple fascist or techno-fascist is always highly reduxed, I think. I actually would provocatively say that he's more anarchist than possible. And, well, the idea that he's, and also the idea of neoliberal, I think, is problematic as well. I think he's more of a neoliberitarian. But, I mean, this is the headline, I guess, to my coming. It's a libertarianism, but a libertarianism of matter itself. Or cosmic libertarianism, as I recall. And part of the reason I think this is significant is because I think it's a theoretical temptation at the moment. and underscores what I would call neo-anarchism. And neo-anarchism as a kind of vague tendency, a vague but pervasive tendency in anti-capitalism,
which is anti-hegemony, anti-destate, etc., etc. And I think what underscores that, what underscores certain forms of neo-anarchism, or perhaps all of them, is the kind of cosmic libertarianism, cosmic libertarianism being somehow that structuration as such is oppressive. Structuration as such is oppressive There is a Capacity of matter In themselves Whatever that would mean Which are inhibited as soon as there's any kind of Organisation And the slogan from this is Nick's slogan, Organisation suppression Which was an interview he did For UK Wildnigh And that's a kind of suggestive Organisation suppression And for Nick Land at that time
you know organized that this suppression that was not merely suppression was not merely an anthropomorphic matter it was only a matter of human beings suppression goes right down into the structure of matter itself and so there's and i was going to say it's a kind of analogy between the way that the organism works and the way of kind of stratifying stratificatory powers seem to work but i think part of the the claim of this thought and it's the claim that really goes back quite strongly is the idea that this is more than metaphorical, the kind of abstract self-similarities which can be tracked across scales. So you're not just talking about, not making an analogy between the way the organism suppresses the potentials of matter and the way the state does it. At some
level there's an abstract, there's an abstract machine of similarity between those two things. So I mean what strikes me as the key statement then of cosmic libertarianism is this quote from a sort of, I would say, not quite early, kind of transitional text of Lance from the 90s. I mean, I kind of treat his work as if it was finished, which is a bit odd since he's still producing stuff. But I guess I treat his work of the 90s as being a kind of something, a kind of verve in itself, as it were. You know, beginning with his work on the tie, which was brought together in the book First Annihilation. But for me, it was always more interesting was the latest kind of cybertext, which was short. There was a series of short texts,
which were only 3,000 to 4,000 words long, and which formed this kind of canon around which a theoretical position, well, a theory fictional position was articulated. So they developed, the course of that was really from the early 90s through to around about 2000. This text, this quote, this first quote is from a text called Making in Depth, which I think is a transitional text from the early focus where Bataille was the key figure to a focus on where Deleuze and Bataille become the key figures. It's a very peculiar take on Deleuze and Bataille, which, as we see from this section, is heavily inflected through Freud, but not as he construed the Oedipal Freud,
but the metapsychological Freud and the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. And partly what I want to explore tonight, and I can only see it's a crazy ambitious scheme of set, which I won't cover even a quarter of a problem, is to explore the way in which that Landian moment of the 90s was then a rediscovery of a moment in the 70s, which was also about the Freudian death trial and the role of death trial. But if we see here that this first paragraph then is from Making the Death, the second is from, it follows on from the inner text, which is a quote from Freud from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. So the death drive is not the desire for death, the rather hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensity. In its primary dynamics it is utterly alien to everything human,
not least the three great pettinesses of representation, egoism and hatred. The death drive is Freud's beautiful account of how creativity occurs without the least effort, how life is propelled into its extravagances by the blindest and simplest of tendencies, our desire is no more problematic than a river's search of the sea. So I think that quite clearly states what I would call these sort of libertarian tendencies there. Somehow there's a propensity of creativity to just emerge. It will just emerge. If the blockages which obstruct it are removed without the least effort. And this text is interesting because it's a reading of, it's partly a reading of fascism, a different account of fascism.
And in Making of a Death, the reading of fascism, yes, comes from Dilos and Guattari, and it's problematic. The relationship, or the text, is really about the problematic account of the death drive from Nick Lannes' point of view at this time. Because, as you know, if you're familiar with Thousand Plateaus, the account of fascism, which then really is more about narcissism, actually, specifically. Viva Virilio is about seeing narcissism as fundamentally a desire for death, a desire for kind of total immolation, which is going to be problematic from Lance's point of view, I think, given his, you know, he's written a book called The First Reconciliation at this point. So, I mean, apparently he says, no, this is not what fascism is about. It's not a desire for death. it is really a desire it is really about structure structuration a kind of rigidity and he leans on
the work of class table art at this point do you make so you make familiar table i wrote two books called male fantasies which were based on kind of extraordinary books really based on readings of texts produced by and about the fricor these kind of proto-nazi group of kind of paramilitaries and for Tavelline, the key thing about the Freikor, you know, that came across was a certain phobia about flow, about, yeah, about flow, liquid, etc. of this kind of loathing, this gendered loathing of flow, which then manifests itself in a kind of phobic rigidity. You know, the rigid kind of, the rigid upright body
is to be opposed to that kind of red flow, which is this kind of delirial condensation of kind of misogynistic loathing of women and also of kind of, which also packs into its kind of theory and the good and stuff, the outside, et cetera. So, I mean, it's this, and I should say, of course, the table is himself, strongly influenced by Deleuze-Bewahton. So it's this account of fascism, really, in terms of this kind of masculinist rigidity as opposed to flight, but first part of colouring this. And so then he quotes from Freud, and this is from Beyond the Pledge of Prince. And here we go. So the hypothesis of self-preservative drives,
such as we attribute to all living beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that the life of the drives as a whole serves to bring about death. Seeing this like the theoretical importance of the drives for self-preservation, power and prestige diminishes greatly. There are component drives whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its path to death and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence, other than those which are imminent to the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism's puzzling determination so hard to fit into any context to maintain its existence, its own existence, in the face of every obstacle. I think this is the greatness of Freud, the real greatness of Freud, is the fact that he turns things around to such a degree
that it becomes puzzling as to why an entity would want to persist in its own existence. But what are we left with is the fact the organism wants to die in its own way. Thus, these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death. Myrmidons of death. Hence, the paradoxical situation, the organism's struggles most energetically against events, dangers and facts, which might help to attain its life's aim rapidly by kind of short circuit. Such behaviour is, however, precisely what characterised purely drive-based as opposed to intelligent efforts. I mean I think we can see that really the kind of immense complexity of what Freud is kind of posting in the Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I mean I think part of the attraction of the Beyond the Pleasure Principle to theorists and in the 70s I guess the key ones were
the leotard, leotard of the libidinous economy. In other words, leotard is closest to Deleuze and Guattari in lots of ways with leotard and Baudrillard both in particular fascinated by drawn back towards this account of the death crime. I mean, partly because of the way in which Baudrillard actually uses this term, there's a deconstructive dimension to the hypothesis of the death crime. And he doesn't mean in a Derrida way in particular, but he does mean it in terms of something somewhat Derrida, in the sense that it's about the impossibility to stage binary oppositions. So what we see with Bonner Pleasure Principles is Freud trying to, in lots of ways trying to give an account of initially of death as opposed to life which
in the later when he revisits the kind of death drive becomes thanatos versus eros eros isn't really there by name i don't think it is they're not they're not already given those familiar names from mythology at this point but i mean but it's then about really the instability of these oppositions that you can't oppose life to death because death life is simply the process as we see here life is simply a subject of life in a way is death uh you know so death uh and it's just a question then of speed in lots of ways uh this is something a leader in a later discussion brings out that you know the difference between life and death becomes one of one of speed that life is just a kind of delaying of death,
but it's still a process of death in lots of ways. It's just a kind of flip that Nick Land takes from this, that there are organisms that die. Organisms are just a stage of death, as it were. And then this then is... And so what is it that defines an organism is not its positive predicates in lots of ways, but its own style of death. and you know there's a you know it's a major philosophical problem still about what it how to define life that's all what i mean i had said many years ago really only thing that you can say about life living things they die but this then means that then this the other key opposition that's
in play here is which is also deconstructed it is that between the organic and the inner band and you know those of you know who'd be on the person principle familiar with this astonishing kind of retro speculative fiction that freud produces in the text whereby he gives an account of the emergence of interiority as such you know what how did how did the basic distinction fundamental to organisms and therefore to the organic between inside and outside arise in the first place and for you know for we can't we can't assume this distinction at all it only emerges with the organic but the further phrase of the further phase of that is what makes the inorganic possible what makes interiority possible is the inorganic is the inorganic at lots of levels it
is the baking through of a uh the baking of a kind of outer layer i mean freud imagines as it where it's kind of proto-life, as the series of vesicles, or bladders, which are then cooked by the energy of the external world, such as they then form a crust on the inside. A crust, skin, shell, whatever. The shell is the basis of interior. It's only because it's a hard shell that it's possible for there to be an interior. It's possible for there to be something inside. But that means that there's a kind of becoming inorganic of the organism in the very formation of the organism itself. And only because there is this outer shell can there be anything that we'd call an organism.
And only when there is the outer shell, and therefore the inside, is there a distinction between the organic and the inorganic. So there's at least two forms of the inorganic, you could say. There's maybe more. But certainly there's the inorganic that precedes life in a world before there was before there was organism then but then's the inorganic that passes through life as well if and this kind of this delusian concept of the fold may be kind of helpful instead of instead of seeing this the the organic as opposed to the organic you can see a really a folding of the inorganic and this gives us the figure of a great sort of figure that starts off leotard's book the vegan economy of the greater camel skin skin have folded in on itself
in lots of ways. So the action of folding is what produces the distinction between inside and outside. That distinction is in some ways arbitrary, and your perspective in lots of ways. What Leotard and what I think Nick Land, following on from Leotard, was to do with this was to see everything in terms of this topology of folding rather than in terms of these already constituted organisms with a clear inside and outside. It's a kind of attempt to do it, they're imminent really, tend to think imminently. So instead of saying, you know, so we see matter as just a series of foldings. Right, so we can still really see how complicated this is already. So I'll come to another big headline, I suppose,
about this, what kind of interests me about it now. I mean, it is really about the collapse of antivitalism, intervitalism, in that if we're conceiving of desire as a, you know quasi hydraulic force and it's quite explicit in this passage that's why i like that if you know if you see it as a kind of hydraulic pulsion to use the kind of the term coming from if you see it in that way if we posit this kind of inherent tendency of desire to escape from structuration as it were then it doesn't make a lot of difference whether we're talking about life or death actually you know in many ways you know the so the nick land kind of rhetoric about death is in a way functionally flat with the kind of thing you get from the lures or negri
when they talk about life and the creativity of life it doesn't really matter that much i think that whether you call it life or if you're positing this kind of this force antithetical to you to structuration as such you should try to burst out of any kind of any kind of boundaries that are placed around it. But just read a bit of this one because I don't want to attempt to read this out. I think there's a tension, but I think there's a tension in Nick Land's account of desire and which kind of echoes a tension, I think, which is in the Los and Guattari themselves. And the Los and Guattari themselves are never cosmic libertarians in any simple sense, I don't think. But it's a... Inigo. It's a... I think it's a temptation in their work that hovers over their world.
And probably that, I mean, I think Reich is probably the key attractor there, I'm not surprised. You know, Reich's idea of this kind of reservoir of libido, organs ultimately, when he tries to cash out in terms of an actual kind of material quantifiable, a theory of quantifiable mash, in a way. I think Reich, in a way, is probably the closest precursor of this full-on kind of cosmic libertarianism. But for him, it takes the form of an explicit kind of vitalism, as it does with Negri, I think. But as I say, I don't think, once we have this kind of cosmic libertarianism, would you call it life or feeling? Would you call it life or would you call it death? It kind of doesn't matter that much. But just, I don't want to read all of this, but I think it's a tension between that model of desire,
that kind of sheer pulsion that the idea of desire is trying to break out of any kind of boundaries whatsoever, and this idea of the desired machines are the following formative machines whose very machines are functional and whose function is indiscernible from their formation. Chronogenous machines engage in their own assembly. So the next paragraph, desired machines are assemblage to the flows, switches and loops, connective, disjunctive and conjunctive syntheses implementing the machine unconscious as a nonlinear pragmatics of flux. Now this is from a slightly later essay, this is from machine for Zaya, all of these are in the Van Neumann and the Collective Rites. I think there's a different emphasis in this one. You know, an emphasis of, you know, loops, switches,
flows, but there's also loops, switches, and connective kind of apparatuses. That then suggests, you know, as the name, Zaya machines, and strongly implies then that that desire is produced, it's manipulable, it is not just there as some kind of force of anti-stratulation in itself. For me, this account of desire is more interesting than the other one. I think the other one is really problematic. The other one, in a way, we can go back to that, I think, a lot of the problems of the 60s counterculture, which in many ways we can see, I think we can see a relation between Nick Lansworth and that 60s counterculture in lots of ways,
And a lot of the tension between, more than tension, open antagonism of, you know, in Nick Land's work to Marxism, in many ways a restaging of that conflict between, that confrontation between, you know, the politics of desire, the counterculture, and traditional Marxism. And neither were right, I think that's the quote. But, yeah, so that's in a way what I just wanted to start off with, was at least there's two different models of desire. One of desire as a sheer pulcher, we can say. The other of desire as a field which can be manipulated and machined. Now, I think one of the interesting things is, in Nick Land's work, is really the influence of Schopenhauer, actually, on his work. I mean, Schopenhauer rarely gets directly quoted in a lot of his work,
but, you know, particularly, I think, in the earlier texts, there's many more explicit references to Schopenhauer. And interestingly, Freud says, in the course of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we will unwittingly steer that course in the harbour of Schopenhauer's philosophy. For him, death is the true result, and to that extent, the purpose of life, while the sexual instinct is the embodiment of the world's elix. Which is a bit odd, as we see from this quote here, from, let's say, on Schopenhauer and Freud. He's a little curious. Schopenhauer never married sexuality in the self-preservation, the way Freud is now doing. Secondly, he never posited a positive drive to die. It was bad enough for him that death was the end of the result of living. did not think anyone actually saw it. In short, Freud at first acknowledged the parallels between his drive theory and Schopenhauer's theory only at the point where no largely ceased to exist. It's kind of interesting as to why Freud reached back
for Schopenhauer in this form. I mean, there clearly is a Schopenhauer antenna to the other pleasure points of one, even if they're not in those specific points. And I think Schopenhauer's account of will in some sense gets taken over by and relayed by Nick Land in these 90s texts, not in a simple way. There was a reworking of the concept along with this relabeling. So that, you know, Schopenhauer's will to life, that will, in a way, the will of life itself becomes a death right in lots of ways in Nick Land's work at this time. But, I mean, I think one of the things that happens to Schopenhauer's will is a kind of historicisation of it. That kind of gets, I guess, also kind of merged with the kind of a Hegelian Marxist narrative of a progression of history,
or rather, not progression is a term that sits ill with these texts, it's time, but nonetheless, there is a trajectory to history, a trajectory which, you know, is sketched out in anti-Egyptus, really. The tendency, you know, towards capitalism, capitalism then understood as a system which is in tension between the these, which is fundamentally and irreducibly defined by tension between de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. I mean, for me, my big problem with Nick Land's work is the way he deviates from this basic kind of Delers and Vitari story, where he treats capitalism as if it was the same as schizophrenia. In other words, he treats capitalism as if it was a force of pure de-territorialisation, as if it was a force of, in his terms, complete meltdown,
dealing questions where you know all codes all territorial entities all identity subjectivity everything is is taken to pieces but this is not what's a losing what are we ever saying but you know as i said before i think it's they make a word not saying but it's that i mean what makes capitalism is avoidance of that state but you know capitalism is an improvisation system unlike you know unlike the systems which you preceded it such as as they call the territorial or the primitive territorial machine and the great despotic states, which had certain symbolic commitments which they couldn't give up on. You know, they're in other words sacred. These previous forms of sociality had a sacred which was irreducible and which you couldn't really gainsay, whereas capitalism is defined by its...
There's no necessary sacred. Certain things or certain points are forbidden, but those can drop in and out. There's nothing in capitalism itself which says anything, you know, what goes and what doesn't go. And then so it becomes this improvisational, you know, this improvisational practice where it's skirting the line of this total disintegration into what they call schizophrenia. But that schizophrenia is a resource effectively to capitalism. And so it has to be mobile. Capitalism, by its nature, can't be a static system. It has to be mobile. So that's why it needs these kind of schizophrenic energies. but he can't collapse into them because of densities to be capitalism. That's the Billowson-Guitari account. I think having freed up cosmic libertarianism from D&G,
I think then with a lot of Nick Land's texts, you get falling into that temptation of treating capitalism as if it was schizophrenia. And that's where I think a lot of the neoliberal work, some of the time, said in one retrospect, and more might say it was the neoliberal dimension of Nick Land's work is in treating capitalism as if it was this liberatory force. But I think, to repeat what I said earlier, the problem with construing this as neoliberalism is that what is the subject of this process, actually? That for neoliberalism, there has to be about individuals. It has to be about human individuals. Neoliberalism is, in that sense, a true liberalism.
At least if we take it on its own terms. We take it on its terms as a philosophy rather than a political project. We take it as a political project, as a class project, which uses the rhetoric of individualism in order to push it quite a different agenda. We take it on its own terms, you know, as then it would be about individuals. But of course, for Nick Land, what's being liberated is not human individuals at all. Human individuals, you know, are puppets of this process, this planetary deterritorializing process, being run by this kind of technologically upgraded version of Chopin Harry and Will, which is kind of indifferent, you know, indifferent to human interests fundamentally. That's what I say. So I think elements there with will, which is, you know, the Schopenhauerian will, which is characterised by its, you know, its insatiability, it's, you know,
it's kind of, it's blind fixation. Well, it's those two things together, I think, which is key with the Schopenhauerian life will, which can be seen as both a will to life, but as a will of life itself. but a life then exceeding the organic life it's a combination of that with this kind of via marxist narrative of ever greater destracification the world becomes more and more capitalist and when i mean so then i think what negland took from deleuzzi and katari is you know openly heretical and a very sort of reading of it you know was that was that idea of you know the from our toe as well haven't we talked about but the idea of the end of judgment of God really that nothing is fit everything that seemed fixed
everything that seems fixed to previous human civilizations and to philosophers I mean Kant is also a key kind of antagonist antagonist and kind of ally in lots of ways with Nickland's work that what for Kant for instance seemed like fixed forms or categories such as time and space of course it's complicated for cam but he's not really there he's saying as far as we're concerned we have to take in terms of time and space you know these are apparent fixities for become radically plastisable you know of course there's a promethean dimension to this so i think this is what i'm trying to say is difference between then the shop and harry the shop and harry on will is essentially kind of cyclical repetitive there's
no history to it whereas this is that this is kind of and you know time matters but time itself like time space everything else becomes reprogrammable that's the key thought there's nothing that you know as there's nothing which has to stay fixed at all including as i've said the so-called transcendental qualities such as time and space so another way of saying that's everything becomes machinable according to this narrative now as i said then the question i thought seems to be a question about whether we're talking about vitalist impuls or anti-vitalist impuls. It doesn't really make any difference. Whether we're talking, whether we call it life, or whether we call it death rise, it doesn't seem to matter at this point. So as a Guattari, we have a broadly hostile relationship to death rise, which sometimes translate as death rise,
sometimes translate as death instinct. Nick Lamb makes a point of saying that it's important to to use the term drive rather than instinct, because instinct implies some quasi-biological entity. Whereas, you know, what is it, what's interesting to him, at least in certain formulations of the death drive, you know, is this machining dimension. You know, drive, you know, I think this is then in that second sense of desire, sense of desire involving loops, switches, et cetera, rather than that first sense where desire is compared to sin. As we see, desire is just kind of just there and wants to be free, you know, in a way that's, you know. So this kind of rhetoric went into, it's kind of flat with hacking rhetoric, information wants to be free, that kind of notion. But D&G themselves, this is a quote that Nick Land does use, he quibbles a lot of their account, but death is not desired,
there is only death that desires, by virtue of the body without organs or the immobile motor, and there is only life that desires by virtue of the working organs. There they are, again, I think that's not fully satisfactory from an Andy point of view, because they're given too much due to life, as it were but perhaps if we can spend a bit of time looking at Leotard so Leotard's text The Beatle Economy from 74 was in some ways more interesting than Antiochus certainly formally certainly in terms of its kind of style I mean the first chapter was just one long sentence the influence of kind of modernist poetics Joris etc very strong also there's a quality of kind of it seems to anticipate the kind of effective tone of punk a few years a few years later in the UK maybe it's kind of what we can with anti-edipus we can still feel the we can still feel the residue
of the 60s with with the economy of leotai you can feel the feel the full height of the 70s but just to talk about the role that death thrive plays here then so very early on this is the first quote here these are two from two separate sections of the book no need to do a critique of metaphysics or of political economy which is the same thing since critique presupposes and ceaselessly creates this very theatricality rather be inside and forget it that's the position of the death run so for leotard that the death drive then being invoked as as it is in i think for nick land in a different way a kind of principle of imminence the critique presupposes transcendence a presuppose a distance from the object and that presupposes a kind of libidinal distance as much
anything else whereas the death drive implies this kind of postional flatness and a part of this was i mean part of this was to do with leotard's at that time highly antagonistic relationship to virtually every marxist group whatsoever i mean the i mean the difference between leotard of 74 and leotard of 79 is quite astonishing and very symptomatic of cultural shifts in the Leotard of 79, in the Leotard of the Postmodern Condition, a very sort of measured, sober text. In the beginning of the economy, measured and sober aren't where Zoola's nosecate is. That's one of them. But I think part of why these texts are important, and it's also, I think, why Atlanta's texts are important,
are the kind of challenges they pose to leftist thought around the question of desire, which has still not been adequately answered. I mean, it's not that I don't think Nick Land has the answers either. And I think it's a, ultimately, I think an incoherent account of desire. But the question of desire in relation to politics, I think, you know, is crucial. I think, you know, at this point, the text is marked by a kind of impatience. And the key chapter in that, from the point of view, sort of Marxism, is the chapter of desire named Marx, where this is where Leotard and that basal was formed from his distances himself, or even those two as closest to him at the time, and where he makes the famous claim about the English prudence. They enjoyed it in the mines. They enjoyed it. They enjoyed eating the, you know, they enjoyed eating, you know,
crappy sausage pateau. They enjoyed their anonymous pubs at dusk. You know, whatever we think about that, I think the question he's posing, though, is, well, I think there's a number of things which are significant about that claim, one of which is, you know, to totally denaturalise the working class. And this is something he draws out very interestingly in this text and in Duchamp's Transformers, which is from a similar sort of time, is this parallel the Lyotard makes between the working class and the avant-garde. The working class constructs themselves as this kind of mutant figure, and particularly in terms of noise, as you discussed in the Bidem economy, the noise of factories, this unprecedented level of noise which had never been had on earth before,
certainly that form of noise, which then these bodies were subject to every day, and they effectively, it's kind of the avant-garde of the organism, and also the limits of the body rather than the organism, I think, because the organism, and a lot of these works following on from this revisiting of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the organism becomes seen as this kind of heavily hierarchical and stratified kind of form of corporeality. Whereas, you know, the body is much more radically open. And yet, so the Italian cat, the working class then, in the 19th century, in the mines, in the factories, is of bodies that were stretched, stretched the capacities of bodies. We didn't know the bodies could do this until they were subject to these kind of pressures.
But I mean, that's one dimension. But I think the other dimension of it, is simply the problem of desire, which, you know, for Libertar and I think, but it's a good time, it can't be answered by a simple question of false consciousness. You know, at least, I mean, I think at least as a starting point, you know, we have to say, people desire capitalism, desire something that capitalism produces. Why do they desire that? Why? We can't simply pretend that, I mean, this is the point of a polemical and as Lieta himself can say, scandalous kind of intervention where he's talking about the English quote, they're enjoying everyone, enjoying their mind, enjoying alienation, is that we can't simply act as if capitalism is just something imposed on people and that it doesn't solicit us via design.
The problem with avoiding this question of design, I think, is it allows the right or neoliberal right particularly to seize it. you know they if we if we go for asceticism and you know kind of we say okay we capitalism you know there's a desire for capitalism but that's all bad and you know desire itself is problematic we take that long then it just opens the way for you know capitalism to just claim desire for itself and i mean i think this was key this is key to what actually happened you know in the wake of the counterculture. A lot of these texts then, as I just said before, can be seen as coming out of the failed relationship of counterculture and Marxism in lots of ways. It's failed up until this point. Which is the famous story about the way the 60s led to neoliberalism. But I don't
think it's inevitable. It's not the only way that could have gone. It was just that the account of The politics and theories never worked to bring them together. The rights was just much more effective with, to use the phrase from the Lesley-Groes-Narie, apparatus of capture, you know, captivation, where some of the energies that emerged from the counterculture were seized upon and converted by neoliberalism. And neoliberalism then seen as a broad project involving not only explicit kind of political theory, but I think more importantly what I call libidinal engineering via, you know, advertising, PR, branding, etc. Which is, you know, assume an increasingly important role in everyday life during the time of neoliberalism. A kind of, you know, blitzing of our sensorium
via these kind of mechanisms. But then just to come back to actually, it's our text. And so here we see his, you know, his attempt to engage with the depression of the death rowing, again, or his version of death rowing. It's not the case that Eros is the producer of whole systems, compositor or master binder, and that the death drives, on the other hand, are destroyers of systems, deconstructors, the unbinders. It's not the case. I think, you know, everything to notice in all of these takes on the death drive, as I sort of said at the start, is the role that, I think what fascinates those thinkers is the way in which it undermines simple binary oppositions. It posits them, but undermines them. When on the hysterics body, fragments of the great band are circumscribed and excluded from the regulated circulation of affects, placed outside normal intensity.
Anesthetized, when the muscles contract and remain torn, the respiratory tracts are choked, provoking asthma. These are little propulsional dispositifs, a fragment of the organically respiratory system, a piece of the organic system of striated or smooth musculature, which form totally self-dependent holes. Will it be said that it's Eros, insofar as he is the maker of holes, who is responsible for this, or rather death because these holes are jammed? They're jammed in relation to what? To which normality? Dora, the organics respiratory system, is jammed. Dora, the hysterics respiratory system, works wonderfully. It's a very nice phrase that. And there is no need to seek a secondary benefit for her troubles. The benefit is immediate. There is no benefit.
There is a postural machinery put in place which functions on its own account. And this machinery does not work according to death or according to errors, but according to both. So partly then it's about trying to adopt this perspective of kind of postional imminence, as we say, that as it were, that it's the conscious, it's the organic. It's from the perspective of the conscious kind of subject or from the organic that there is a distinction between, a distinction in kind between the conscious and the unconscious or between the organic and the inorganic. from the other side there are just differences in intensity and so i mean so i think this is a nice passage in terms of you know what leotard's trying to do with the whole concept of
the economics here that there we can't just see hysteria then as a deviation from stereo or the other kind of psychopathologies which before he talks about you can't just see them as a deviation from some normal functioning of things you know what is it that defines what that normal is, in which case the hysteria would be a failure or inadequacy. The hysteria is also, isn't this one of the great lessons of Freud, that there are logics to conditions and that these logics aren't, there is no irrational in Freud. Even things which seem to be purposeless, self-destructive, etc., there is a logic to it. And, you know, from the point of view of that logic, you know, who is to say the logic of hysteria, which has, you know, which seizes hold of certain organisms, certain tissues, certain muscles in the body.
You know, who is to say that logic is inferior to the sobal normal running of things? So, I think then with Leotard, this whole question of the Beatle economy then is an attempt to collapse. Questions of desire emerging out of psychoanalysis, emerging out of the kind of desire evolution of the 60s into politics and say that there is no distinction between the two. that's why he says you said at the top you know the critique of metaphysics is the critique of political economy but that you know they're useless because what really matters is kind of the beaten dynamics of things rather than a philosophical position in respect of philosophical position in respect of things is only ever can only ever be transcendent and it's an interesting conversation with the attack that he had in 99 where he basically argues that
The key thing is, again, it's not dualistic. Beyond the pressure principle is not dualistic, despite Freud's overt claims. What is in question is, in fact, rhythm, says earlier at this point, or rather the question of these two elements of drive is the question of rhythms in the blur. Here we turn to the framework of our discussion, energy. What are these rhythms, in order to maintain a metastable state of the organism, of the system, there are two possible levels of quiescence. The first is that which is compatible with life, this is eros. The second is that which runs directly to absolute quiescence, which is death. Hence why 4 equals death drive. The difference then, as I said before, is a question of speed. Death will have, as it were, the last word, but eros resists, opposing to it lovable,
consistent totalities in which desire can take place. Whereas again, this death drive is a drive which hastens to be over with everything to obtain everlasting peace. Death drive is a problem of haste. This is new for the Freud of beyond the pleasure principle, although he never developed it in depth. This means that the death drive in this relationship to the drive of life poses a problem, and the problem is that of the temporality of the drives as such. I'm not sure how that fits in with the account that the death drive gives in the early text before he even notices ostensibly comes with this discussion with Richard Beardsworth that you can find online is very interesting. And I think there's also a tension there between this and the kind of Zizekian, kind of the Kainian account
of the death trial. And I think also with this, I was going to have a previous account where when Zizek revisits the death trial via Lackon, he's saying that it's not all about Puyessence at all. He's saying that there is a Nirvana principle, which is precisely this thing of releasing all tension And that's one way of seeing the death drive is, you know, the elasticity of life. Life is a kind of elasticity held in tension and that the kind of tension itself is the death drive. And it's kind of that desire to be, that tension to be dissipated as well. That would be the kind of simplest model, I think, of the death drive, where I think then the, you know, this is part of the immense kind of rich complexity of the concept, the ambivalence of it.
is that four affected up by Lacombe is the exact opposite. The death drive is that which complicates things, which kind of avoids quiescence actually. So there are kind of two forms of death. There's the desire for quiescence coming and then there's the avoidance of homeostasis which is how Shizek takes it up. And I think actually with Nick Land's work, I think it oscillates between because as it were if the death drive was if the death drive was simply a matter you know a impulse towards quiescence then you know you might as well just you might as well just die straight away and then this doesn't you know this doesn't seem to be what mick lander's interested in when he's talking about the death drive when he's trying to perform this kind of synthesis
between the work of teresa batari you know and freud you know and this synthesis of course is deeply problematic because you know that they as i said they're openly hostile to the very concept that's right okay well that's the kind of theorist one to lay out and it's not really drawing any strong conclusions about it more more to say that i think that you know it's kind of the the questions raised around this issue of political desire as i say a very pressing one i think particularly this problem of cosmic libertarian and that way of conceiving a desire leads into all kinds of issues. I think, you know, I guess to conclude what I'm going to say for opening up the discussion, I think that what I'm saying is these attempts to commence your politics
of desire, to articulate politics of desire, all failed a different way. But I think we can't abandon the project of a politics of desire. We have to approach it in a way that is kind of more cold, I suppose. It's colder, less about the heat of a desire which will just... a desire which just wants to be free. If we don't, if we, I think the other side of psychoanalysis, you know, the idea of drives as composed, as manipulable, as the fact that there are precisely drives and no instincts. I think this is an important thought. You know, if there are instincts, things are kind of hopeless, in lots of ways, because, you know, they will keep reasserting themselves. If there are drives, then they are reprogrammable. And capital knows this. This is the key thing. Capital knows this, and capital knows that desire can be produced,
manipulated, captured, channeled, etc. That is why it puts so much energy and resources into libidinal engineering. That's why it's so difficult. That's one of the reasons it's so difficult to struggle against capitalism, because we don't have the same resources of libidinal engineering at our disposal, at least in the space of it. All right, well, I just leave... Thank you. Thank you.