Okay, so, um, it's not super organized, it might go in a lot of difficult, but I mean, what I want to talk about really is to talk about Nick Landon, partly in relation to what had preceded him, and the kind of canon of thought that was kind of excavated, repotentiated in the 90s and then the relation of that to now in terms of Nick Land's re-emergence as a thinker in a highly controversial way recently featuring the Telegraph blog being denounced
as a fascist on the Telegraph blog the sheer oddness of that but I mean but also I mean I think that not just as historical exercise but as something that will actually can 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 simple fascist or techno-fascist is always highly reductive, I think. I actually would provocatively say that he's more
anarchist in a way. And, well, the idea that he's, and also the idea that he's a neoliberal I think is problematic as well. I think he's more of a neoliberitarian, but, I mean, this is the headline, I guess, of tonight. It's a libertarianism, but a libertarianism of matter itself or cosmic libertarianism as I would call it and part of the reason I think this is significant is because I think it's a theoretical temptation at the moment and it underscores what I would call neo-anarchism 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 Neonichism, or perhaps all of them, is a kind of cosmic libertarianism.
A cosmic libertarianism being somehow that's 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 Wide Magazine, and that existed. And that's a kind of suggestive phrase, organisation suppression. and for Nick Land at that time this 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 I was going to say there's a kind of analogy between the way that the organism works and a way of kind of stratifying, stratificatory powers seem to work. But I think part of the claim of this thought, and it's a claim that really goes back to Deleuze and Guattari quite strongly, is the idea that this is more the metaphorical, the kind of abstract self-seminarities which can be tracked across scales. so we'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 transitional text of Lanz from the 90s 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 oeuvre in itself as it were beginning with his work on Bataille which was brought together in the book First Renihilation but for me it was always more interesting was the latest kind of cyber text which was short there was a series of short texts which were only 3,000 to 4,000 words long at most 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 early 90s through to around about 2000. This text, this first quote is from a text called Making of Death, 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. But 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 it the Edible 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 it probably 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 riot and the role of death riot
but if we see here that this first paragraph then is from making it with death the second is from what follows on in the text which is a quote from Freud from Beyond the Pleasure Principle so the death drive is not a desire for death but rather a hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensities 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,
how desire is no more problematic than a river's search for the sea. So I think that quite clearly states what I would call these sort of libertarian tendencies. 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 with a different account of fascism and in making of a death
the reading of fascism comes from Dilos and Guattari and it's problematic the relationship or other text is really about the problematic account of the death right from Nick Lann's point of view of 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 via Virilio is about the seeing narcissism as fundamentally a desire for death desire for a kind of total immolation which is going to be problematic from Nick Land's point of view
I think given his you know he's written a book called First For Immolation at this point so I mean partly 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 Klaus Tevela to this point, who you may, some of you may be familiar with. Tevela wrote two books called Male Fantasies, which were based on, which are kind of extraordinary books, but he based on readings of texts produced by and about the Freikor, this kind of proto-Nazi group of paramilitaries.
And for Teberlind, the key thing about the Freikor that came across was a certain phobias about flow, 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 could say. The rigid, upright body is to be opposed to the kind of red flow, of the kind of
which is this kind of delirial condensation of kind of misogynistic loathing of women and also of kind of which also compacts into its kind of theory immigrants at the outside etc so I mean is this and I should say of course the table is himself strongly influenced by Deleuze and Guatengh so it's this account of fascism really, in terms of this kind of masculinist rigidity as opposed to flow, that's partly colouring this. And so then
he quotes from Freud and this is from Beyond the Pledge of Principle 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. Seen in this light, 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. 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 that the organism struggles most energetically against events, dangers, in fact, which might help to attain its life's aim rapidly by a kind of short circuit. Such behaviour is, however
precisely or characterised, purely drive-based as opposed to intelligent efforts. I mean, I think we can see now 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 Lyotard Lyotard of the big economy and now there was Lyotard at least closest to Deleuze and Guattari in lots of ways. was Lyotard and Baudrillard both in particular fascinated by or drawn back towards this account of the death crime I mean partly because of the
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 Derridean way particularly but he does mean it in terms of something somewhat in a sense that it's about the impossibility to stage binary oppositions. What we see with God and Pleasure Principle is Freud trying to, in lots of ways, give an account initially of death as opposed to life which is later, when he revisits
the kind of death drive, becomes Hercophanatos versus Eros. Eros isn't really there by name I don't think at this point. They're not already given those familiar names from mythology at this point. But it's then about really the instability of these oppositions. That you can't oppose life to death because life is simply the process as we see here. Life is simply a, the subject of life in a way is death. You know, so death, and it's just a question then of speed in lots of ways. This is something that Leotard in a later discussion brings out, that, you know, the difference between
life and death becomes one of speed. Life is just a kind of delaying of death, but it's still a process of death in lots of ways. This is the kind of flip that Nick Land takes from this. That there isn't organisms that die. Organisms are just a stage of death as it were. And then this then is and so what is it that gives, what is it that defines an organism is not its positive predicates in lots of ways but its own style of death you could say. and there's a major philosophical problem still about how to define life that's all I mean
I said many years ago the only thing you can say about life living things is that they die lots of problems but this then means that the other key opposition that's in play here which is also deconstructed is that between the organic and the inorganic and those of you know beyond the pleasure principle will be 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 how did 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 Freud, we can't assume this distinction at all. It only emerges with the organic. But the further phase of that is what makes the inorganic possible, what makes interiority possible, is the inorganic at lots of levels. It is the baking through of a the baking of a kind of outer layer Freud imagines as it were this kind of proto-life as the series of vesicles as he calls them bladders which are then
cooked by the energy of the external world such that they then form a crust on the outside a crust skin shell whatever the shell is the basis of interiority it's only because there's a hard shell that it's possible for there to be inferiority, possible 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 would 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 in our supplies so there's at least two forms of the inorganic you could say there's the maybe more but there's the there's the inorganic that precedes life you know the world before there was before there was organisms then but then is the inorganic that passes through life as it were and this kind of this delusian concept of the fold may be kind of helpful instead of instead of seeing the the organic as opposed to the inorganic you can see
really a folding of the inorganic and this gives us the figure the great sort of figure that starts off Leotard's book Libidical Economy of the Great of animal skin, skin folded in on itself in lots of ways. So that the action of folding is what produces the distinction between inside and outside. But that distinction is in some ways arbitrary, depends on your perspective in lots of ways. What Leotard and what I think Nick Land following on from Leotard was going 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 at imminence really. Attempt at thinking imminently. So instead of seeing, you know, so we see matter as just this series of foldings. Right. But you can still really think about that, how complicated this is already. So I'll come to my other 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 you could say. In that if we're conceiving of desire
as a quasi-hydraulic force and it's quite explicit in this passage there, that's why I like that one. If you see it as a kind of hydraulic pulsion, to use the term coming from Freud, 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. In many ways, the Nick Land kind of rhetoric about death is in a way functionally flat
with the kind of thing you get from Deleuze 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 death, if you're positing this kind of force antithetical to to structuration as such we 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 attention
I think which is in Deleuze and Guattari themselves and Deleuze and Guattari themselves are never cosmic libertarians in any simple sense I don't think but it's a it's a it's a it's a I think it's a temptation in their work that hovers over their work and probably that I mean I think Reich is probably the key track for them in some ways you know, Reich's idea of this kind of this kind of reservoir of libido organs ultimately when he tries to cash out in terms of an actual kind of material quantifiable or theory of quantifiable matter in a way. I think Reich in a way
is probably the closest precursor of this full-on kind of cosmic libertarianism in the most of the times but for him it takes that it takes the form of an explicit kind of vitalism as it does with Negri but as I say I don't think that once we have this kind of cosmic libertarianism, would you call it life or call it 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, the idea of of desire as trying to break out of any kind of boundaries whatsoever. And this idea of the desire 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, desire machines are assemblages of flows, switches, and loops, connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses, implementing the machine unconscious as a nonlinear pragmatics of flux. Now, this is from a slight later essay, this is from Machining for Zaya. All these are in the fact name and other collective writings of Nick Rand. But I think there's a different emphasis in this, right? You know, an emphasis of, you know, loops, switches, flows, there's flows but there's also loops switches and connective
kind of apparatuses that then is suggests as the name desire machines strongly implies that desire is produced it's manipulable it is not just there as some as some kind of force of anti-straturation 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 Land's work and that 60s counterculture in lots of ways and a lot of the tension between the modern tension open antagonism in Nick Land's work to Marxism is in many ways a restaging of that conflict between confrontation between the politics of desire of the counterculture and traditional Marxism and neither were right I think that's the problem but that's in a way what I just wanted to start off with
at least these two different models of desire one of desire as a sheer culture you can say the other of desire as as a field which can be manipulated and machined. Now, I think one of the interesting things 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 particularly I think in the earlier text there's many more explicit references to Schopenhauer. And interestingly Freud
says in the course of Beyond the Pleasure Principle we have unwittingly steered our 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 will to live. Which is a bit odd as we see from this quote here from an essay on Schopenhauer and Freud. He was a little curious. Schopenhauer never married sexuality in the urge to self-preservation in 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 inevitable result of living. He did not think anyone actually thought it. In short, Freud first acknowledged the parallels between his drive theory and Schopenhauer's theory only at the point where they largely ceased to exist.
Which is kind of interesting as to why Freud reached back for Schopenhauer at this point. I mean, there's clearly a Schopenhauerian tenor to be on the pleasure principle even if we're not in those specific points. And I think Schopenhauer's account of will in some sense gets taken over by and relabelled by Nick Landon in these 90s texts. Not in any simple way, there is a reworking of the concept along with this relabelling. So the Schopenhauerian will to life, in a way the will of life itself, becomes a death rite in lots of ways
in Nickland's work at this time. But I think one of the things that happens to Schopenhauer's will is a kind of historicisation of it. Or that kind of gets also kind of merged with the kind of Hegelian Marxist narrative of a progression of history or rather progression is a term that sits ill with these texts this time but nevertheless there is a trajectory to history a trajectory which is sketched
out in anti-Egapus, really. The tendency towards capitalism, capitalism then understood as a system which is in tension between these, which is fundamentally and irreducibly defined by a tension between de-territorialization and re-territorialization. I mean for me my big problem with Nick Land's work is the one he deviates from this basic kind of Delers and Guattari 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 purely territorialisation as if it was a force of in his terms complete meltdown dealing with questions where all codes, all territorialities, all identity subjectivity, everything is taken to pieces this is not what Deleuze and Wattari ever say as I said before I think they make a point of not saying that what makes capitalism capitalism is avoidance of that state. But, you know, capitalism is an improvisational system
unlike, you know, unlike the systems which have preceded it such as, as they call the territorial you know, the primitive territorial machine and the great despotic states, which had certain symbolic commitments which they couldn't give up on. You know, they, you know, in other words, are 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 at certain points are forbidden but those can drop in and out there's nothing in capitalism itself which says anything, 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 for 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 these schizophrenic energies but it can't collapse into them because it then seems to be capitalism that's the Lezant-Guitari account I think that 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 the a lot of the neoliberal what some of the time said and what in retrospect more might say was the neoliberal dimension of Nick Land's work is treating capitalism as if it was this liberatory force 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 it 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 if we take it on its own 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 a quite a different agenda. If we take it on its own terms, then it would be about individuals. But of course, for Nick Landon, what's being liberated is not human individuals at all. Human individuals are puppets of this process, this planetary deterritorializing process being run by this kind of
technologically upgraded version of the Chopin, Harry and Will, which is kind of indifferent you know indifferent to human interest fundamentally that's what I think it has elements then of the will which is you know the Schopenhauerian will which is characterized 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 are perhaps 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 Hegelian Marxist narrative of ever greater de-stratification the world becomes more and more capitalist and when I mean, so then, I mean, think what Nick Lant took from Deleuze and Katari is, you know, an openly heretical and abarrent sort of reading of it. You know, was that was that idea of, you know, the from our toe as well, I haven't really talked about, but the from the idea of the end of judgments of God really, that nothing is fixed, nothing is fixed, everything that seemed fixed
to everything that seemed fixed to previous human civilizations and to philosophers I mean Kant is also a key kind of antagonist for antagonist and kind of ally in lots of ways with Nick Land's work that for Kant for instance seemed like utterly fixed forms or categories such as time and space of course it's complicated for Cam that he isn't saying they're really there but he's saying as far as we're concerned we have to think in terms of time and space you know these are paradoxical become radically plastisable you know there's a Promethean dimension to this
so I think this is what I'm trying to say, the difference between the shop and Harry on will is essentially kind of cyclical, repetitive there's no history to it whereas this is kind of aggregative and time matters but time itself like time, space everything else becomes reprogrammable that's the key thought I think 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 everything becomes machinable
according to this narrative. Now, as I said, there seems to be a question about whether we're talking about Vitalist impulse or anti-vitalist impulse doesn't really make any difference. Whether we call it life or whether we call it death drive doesn't seem to matter at this point. Deleuze and Guattari have a broadly hostile relationship to the death drive and which sometimes translate as death drive
sometimes translated as death instinct Nick Lamb makes a point of saying that it's important to use the term drive rather than instinct because instinct implies some quasi-biological entity what's interesting for him at least in certain formulations of the death drive is its machining dimension drive I think this is then a second sense of desire the sense of desire involving loops switches etc rather than that first sense where desire is compared to the sin as we see desire is just there and wants to be free 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 I mean 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 the Landian 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 Lyotard so Lyotard's text Libidon Economy from 74 was in some ways more interesting than Antiochus I think certainly formally certainly in terms of its kind of style I mean the first chapter is just one long sentence the influence of kind of modernist poetics, Joyce etc very strong also the there's a quality of kind of it seems to anticipate a kind of
affective tone of punk a few years later in the UK really. With Anti-Oedipus, we can still feel the residue of the 60s. With the B.P. economy of Leotard, you can 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 from two separate sections of the book. No need to do a critique of metaphysics or of political economy, which is the same thing, said Lyotard, since critique presupposes and ceaselessly creates this very theatricality.
Rather, be inside and forget it. That's the position of the death ride. So for Lyotard, the death ride then being invoked, as it is, I think, for Nick Landlietem in a different way as a kind of principle of eminence. Critique presupposes transcendence. It presupposes a distance from the object. And that presupposes a kind of libidinal distance as much as anything else. Whereas the death drive implies this kind of pulsional flatness. and a part of this was to do with
Lyotard's at that time highly antagonistic relationship to virtually every Marxist group whatsoever I mean the difference between Lyotard 74 and Lyotard 79 is quite astonishing and very symptomatic of cultural shifts within the 70s Lyotard 79 is a the post-mortal condition, a very sort of measured, sober text. In the beginning of our economy, measured and sober aren't words you'd associate with it at all. But I think part of why these texts are important, and it's also, I think, why Lance's texts are important,
and there's kind of challenges that pose to, challenges they pose to leftist thought around the question of desire really which has still not been adequately answered I mean it's not that I don't think Nick Ladd has the answers either and I think it's a it's a ultimately I think an incoherent account of desire but the question of desire in its relation to politics I think is crucial I think that this leotard at this point the text is marked by a kind of impatience a polemical impatience and the key chapter from the point of view of Marxism
is the chapter the desire named Marx where this is where Leotard lambassled his former friends distances himself from even those two closest to him at the time and where he makes the famous claim about the English proletariat enjoyed it. They enjoyed it in the mines, they enjoyed eating crappy sausage pate, they enjoyed their anonymous pubs at dusk. Whatever we think about that, I think the question he's posing, well I think there's a number of things which significant about that claim, one of which is
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 that Lyotard makes between the working class and the avant-garde. The working class constructs themselves as this kind of mutant this kind of mutant figure and particularly in terms of noise which he discussed in the Bidman economy, the noise of factories, this unprecedented level of noise which had never been heard on earth before, certainly that form of noise which then these bodies were subject
to every day and they effectively kind of the avant-garde of the organism. And also advised that 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 inherently hierarchical stratified kind of form of corporeality. Whereas, you know, the body is much more radically open. And yet, so 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 Leotard I think can't be answered by a simple question of false consciousness you know at least I think at least as a starting point you know we have to say people desire capitalism desire something that
capitalism produces why did they desire that? why? we can't simply pretend that, and this is the point of that polemical and as Leotard himself can say a scandalous kind of intervention where he's talking about the English pro-territory enjoying it, enjoying the 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 it doesn't solicit ours via desire the problem of avoiding this question of desire I think is that it allows the right
or the neoliberal right particularly to seize it if we go for asceticism and you know 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 if we take that line then that 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 and 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 was inevitable. It's not the only way that could have gone. It was just that the politics and theories never worked. to bring them together and the rights was just much more effective with use the phrase from apparatus of capture and a captivation where some of the energy 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 libido engineering via advertising PR, branding etc. Which assume an increasingly important role in everyday life during the time of neoliberalism. A kind of blitzing of our sensorium via these kind of mechanisms. but then just to come back to the actual leotard text so here we see his attempt to engage with the the question
of the death drive again his version of the death drive here it's not the case that Eros is the producer of whole systems composter or master binder and that the death drives on the other hand are the destroyers of systems, the deconstructors, the unbinders, is not the case now. I think, you know, looking 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 pulchral dispositifs, a fragment of the organic 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. There's a very nice phrase there. And there is no need to seek a secondary benefit for her troubles.
The benefit is immediate. There is no benefit. there is a postional machinery put in place which functions on its own account and this machinery does not work according to death or according to eros but according to both so I mean so partly then it's about trying to adopt this perspective of kind of postional imminence you could say that's a word that it's 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 I think this is a nice passage in terms of what Leotard's trying to do with the whole concept of Libidian economics here that we can't just see hysteria then as a deviation from hysteria or the other kind of psychopathologies which Freud talks about we can't just see them as a deviation from some normal functioning of things what is it that defines what that normal is
and 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 to be purposeless, self-destructive, etc. There is a logic to them. And from the point of view of that logic, who is to say the logic of hysteria, which seizes hold of certain organisms,
certain tissues, certain muscles in the body, you know who is to say that that logic is inferior to the so-called normal running of things so I think then with Lyotard this whole question of libidal economy then is an attempt to collapse kind of the 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 said at the top, the critique of metaphysics is the critique of political economy, but they're useless, because what really matters is kind of libidinal dynamics of things rather than a philosophical position in respect of them. A philosophical position in respect of things can only ever be transcendent. And it's an interesting conversation with Liatar that he had in 1999 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 to this point. Or rather, the question of these two elements of drive is the question of rhythms in the plural. 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 Freud calls it the death drive the difference then is 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 the gainly so-called death drive is a drive which hastens to be over with everything to obtain everlasting peace. The death drive is a problem of haste. This is new for the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, although he never developed it in death. this means that the death drive in its relations 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 he gives in the early text even though this is ostensibly a kind of, 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 a kind of Zizekian kind of the Kainian account of Death Drive and I think also in his previous account where you know when Zizek revisits the Death Drive via Lacan he's saying that it's just not about quiescence 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 the elasticity of life, life is a kind of elasticity which held in tension and that the kind of tension itself is the death drive and it's kind of that desire to be, for that tension to be dissipated as it were and that would be the kind of simplest model I think of the death drive where but I think then this is part of the immense kind of rich complexity
of the concept, the ambivalence of it is that for when Zizek takes it up by Lacon it's the exact opposite, the death drive is that which complicates things which kind of avoids pre-essence, actually. So there are kind of two forms of death. There's the desire for pre-essence to come in, 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 the two. Because, as it were, if the death drive was simply a matter of an impulse towards quiescence,
then you might as well just die straight away. This doesn't seem to be what Nick Land is interested in when he's talking about the death drive, when he's trying to perform this kind of synthesis between the work of Dereza Gattari and Freud. And this synthesis, of course, is deeply problematic because, as I said, they're openly hostile to the very concept of the death rite. Okay, well, that's the kind of fear I just wanted to lay out. and it's not really drawing any strong conclusions about it,
but more to say that I think that, you know, the questions raised around this issue of politics of desire, as I say, are very pressing ones, and I think particularly this problem of cosmic libertarianism, and that way of conceiving a desire, leads into all kinds of issues. But I think, you know, I guess just to conclude what I'm going to say for opening up the discussion, I think that, you know, what I'm saying is that these attempts to commensurate a politics of desire with,
to articulate politics of desire all failed in different ways. but I think we can't abandon we can't abandon that we can't abandon the project of a politics of design we have to approach it in a way that is kind of more cold I suppose it's colder less about the heat the heat of a desire which will just a desire which just wants to be free if we don't 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 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. And that's why it's so difficult. That's one of the reasons it's so difficult to struggle against capital. Because we don't have the same resources of libidinal engineering at our disposal, at least on the face of it. Alright, well I'll just leave it there.