Unknown Lands - Lecture 1

Okay, so we might begin, if that's cool. Okay, so welcome to the course, Unknown Lands, Introduction to Nick Land's Accelerationist Philosophy. So, my name's Vince. Here's my contact details if you need to email me, if you want to ask any questions. The way these lectures are going to be structured is, for each hour, I'm going to sort of talk for about 45, 50 minutes, and then that'll leave some time each hour for some questions, a bit of a discussion. But if you don't have time, if we run out of time for questions, then feel free to ask me after or email me if questions arise at other times, especially for distance enrolment students listening to this recording.

Yeah, so that's my contact details. Okay, I think we're just going to jump straight in because there's a lot to get through. okay so although I'm sure most of you by nature of being here at least think that there's some merit in him I think that any course such as this one given the controversy surrounding his name ought to begin by simply asking the question why study Nickland okay so you know the reason we need to ask this is because, well, I think even the most dubious sceptic would at least concede that Land's earliest kind of writings on figures like Kant, Heidegger and capitalism from the

late 1980s to the early 1990s, at least Land's early writings did seem to promise a potentially brilliant philosophical career, albeit one that the sceptic would claim never came to fruition. And, you know, this is because, the sceptic would argue, Land seemed to just abandon serious academic philosophy when he resigned from his lectureship at Warwick University in 1998 after publishing only one monograph and a handful of academic book chapters, articles and essays. And, you know, even when he was still a professor, this imaginary sceptic might argue, wasn't Land that madman who made such ridiculous and outrageous claims, such as to have returned from the dead, to have been moored by a werewolf or a vampire, or to have time-travelled from the future.

And even the sceptic would argue that even Land's most philosophical academic writing is actually still closer to science fiction, teeming, as it is, with cybernetic and cyberpunk jargon, more so than rational argumentation. and scholastic rigour. And, you know, between 1997 and 2003, Land was also, again, according to this sceptic, the leader of the quasi-cult, calling itself the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which seriously devoted its efforts to seemingly occult absurdities such as H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, Alastair Crowley's Karbalistic Numerology, not to mention even more absurd

and fringe interests such as UFO conspiracy theories and secret societies of quasi-illuminati assassins, right? So, and, you know, ultimately, wasn't it precisely these kind of esoteric practices combined with land's own self-professed drug abuse in worship of what he called the amphetamine god, wasn't it this that ultimately led to him at the turn of the century to become, by many accounts, clinically insane? So, yeah, and then after falling off the institutional grid of sanity and academic respectability, the sceptic would go on, didn't land only reappear in Shanghai at the turn of the century, only to produce rather obsequious propaganda for Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Communist Party. And particularly now,

isn't he just simply another alt-right internet troll who's blogging about his hatred for democracy and odes to capital's most authoritarian tendencies, seemingly fit to garner the respect and interest of, you know, the most concrarian and reactionary spheres of 4chan and Reddit, right? So in other words, what this sceptic is arguing is that what could be more absurd than for us to be here now and devote an entire course to study someone who seemed to so readily abandon real academic erudition in order to side with the occult and with capital, someone who for all we know might be actually clinically insane. So this is the case against him. Now, despite living on the margins of academic acceptability,

really just on obscure hyperlinks on the web, I want to insist, and this is going to be a theme throughout the course, I want to insist that Land is of interest to us because he is far more influential on contemporary philosophy, political theory and culture than this sceptic might imagine. Land's charisma, he's, as we'll see, extremely heterodoxical thought, and he's a very singular compositional prose style. We're all able to influence and infect many figures who would go on to become prominent figures in their own right. So just to give a couple examples of that. yeah so in philosophy for instance Land taught former Warwick University students

Ian Hamilton Grant and Ray Brazier two of the four founding figures of speculative realism perhaps one of the most audacious contemporary continental philosophical movements in its quest to rid philosophy of anthropocentric biases Land's kind of rather meteoric impact can also be seen in the art world and particularly the British art scene, particularly through figures like Orphan Drift, Jake and Dino Chapman and Steve Goodman, who's better known as Code 9, and Resina Garastoni as well, all of whom use different artistic forms and different methods in an effort to liberate art from its humanist prison

by trying to find escape routes, ascetic escape routes, which lead to what land will call the inhuman outside. And yeah, land is also really the key influence on accelerationism, perhaps one of the most ambitious contemporary political theories in its attempts to appropriate and repurpose techno-capitalist processes as a prelude to radical social change. So these are figures like Mark Fisher, Nick Cernak and Alex Williams. and yeah several cyber feminists have also drawn on land's concepts probably most directly Luciana Parisi has used land in directly in her theory of future technology's ability to

abstract sex from reproduction as a form of feminist liberation and you know these there are many other examples but these are just a couple of key examples of land's influence so I think these are enough examples to glimpse that land's shadow as it were stretches far and wide over the contemporary philosophical, political and cultural conjuncture in which we reside. And yeah, so I don't think it's any hyperbole for the British Ghanaian filmmaker and writer, Kodre Eshan, to have claimed that land is quote, the most important British philosopher of the last 20 years. Now, of course, whether land's influence is desirable or not is another question that we'll come to in time. Nonetheless,

and as I said in the course description, what I want to insist is that just as a canonical figure like Heidegger needed to be understood despite his flirtations with National Socialism, because of his at the very least, because of his gargantuan influence on Derrida, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and other prominent French phenomenologists and philosophers, so too do we need to study land as a symptom of the situation we're in, whether we like it or not, really. So, given that, what I want to do in this course is essentially trace the development of land's thought from his very earliest writings in the late 1980s to his, what is now called

his fully formed accelerationist philosophy throughout the 1990s. And we're going to trace the development of land's thought by, in each case, first looking at the major philosophical figures land engages with before turning to see how land sort of repurposes them, reappropriates them in rather creative and heterodoxical ways. OK, so, yeah, in the first class today, we're going to look at how land's philosophy first emerges by critiquing both capitalism and what he sees as capital's Kantian ideologues for masking the reality of our mortality by projecting anthropocentric values such as stability, homeostasis and order onto what is actually an indifferent

and perhaps even hostile cosmos. Yeah, I won't go through... Well, we'll just... Yeah, if you want an anticipation of the other weeks, just have a look at the course description. But yeah, I won't go through each week now. Okay, now, yeah, just another sort of preliminary point. So since we're going to be interested in land as a kind of political or cultural symptom rather than as a person, I'm only going to provide the barest of biographical facts throughout. And in fact, to do more than that, to focus on Land's biography would actually betray the subject matter of Land himself, because Land quite consistently dismisses the notion that a thinker's thought can be reduced to their psychobiography.

He says in an interview, I have always absolutely detested the human cognitive effort devoted to trying to turn a final form of anything into a psychobiography. so in Land's view what actually what motivates Land's own thought more so than the memories of his own life, his own subject history is what lies outside of life altogether, which is to say death, non-being, nothingness so Land goes on death is no longer a speculative problem to me but a memory belonging to something else a vestige upon zero crouching deeply broken in this life which has become the vestibule of an unbearable but delicious horror, I supplicate myself to nothing

and offer up the sacrifice of these words to death. In his only book, well actually he's just started releasing another book, but in his only completely published book to this day, The Thirst for Annihilation, published in 1992, there Land also claims that his true ancestors, his true influences, are not so much, you know, people in his life or even his intellectual influences like Deleuze or Bataille. Instead, his true ancestors are, as he puts it, vagrants, whores and killer minds, basically anyone whose mind has been melted by the rational, the perverse, the base, the animal and the inhuman. And in the book's bibliography, Land also notes on the slide, more important by far

than most of these names, names like Bataille and Deleuze, have been the saints, shamans, werewolves, vampires and lunatics with whom I have communed and whose names are absent from this text even though their words have infested my own beyond extrication. Now in particular in that book Land argues that his true Ur-mother, as he calls it was bitten by a vampire in the wilderness such that he inherited this vampiric mother's cancerous desire which surs after what Land caused an unholy intimacy with death. Now obviously the Ur-Mother about whom Land speaks isn't his own mother or any actual mother, it's simply the mother nature or origin of Ur, which is to say, as we'll see, the famed Numenon.

Death itself, nothingness, right? And this is also what Land is getting at when he unabashedly compares himself to the Nazarene, to Christ, insofar as he claims both of them have returned from the dead. So I'm hoping we're beginning to at least see that some of the skeptics kind of legendary mythical representations of land actually have intellectual meat behind them. Okay, now yeah, just one more preliminary thing I think. Yeah, so I think it's worth noting that although land consistently employs the first person, at least in the early works, the I, he qualifies that

the ideas and arguments he's presenting are not so much his own as they are supposed to be impersonal expressions, bites, wounds, and aromas and tastes of death itself. So he says, I indulge myself intolerably, although I is also baptised, the French I, because it is not his or anyone's. To the objection that the third person might be a better form, a less egocentric and hence more appropriate form to articulate Land's critique of human narcissism, Land sort of bites back and says that while neither the third person or the first person are perfect for his purposes, the third person is more problematic than the first person

because it gives a false sense of clinical neutrality, a false sense of a bird's objective bird's eye view, which Land associates with what we'll see are the dogmatic metaphysicians who mask their own prejudices and predilections behind an aura of objective rationality. So in other words, the third person betrays these dogmatic thinkers' arrogance that humans are able to assume an objective bird's eye perspective on things without our ego, ourselves, dragging us down to a limited, swampy perspective. So this is what Land means when he says, it is remarkable how degraded a discourse can become when it is marked by the obsessive reiteration of the abstract ego,

mixing arrogance with pallid humility. So, yeah, this is why Land proposes to stick to the first person and present the eye in his writings, if only to be able to constantly confront the eye with its own decimation. Yeah, so he goes on. The eye is not to be expelled, but submitted to sacrifice. So as we read Land and study him, we should therefore remember that for Land, if not necessarily for us, for Land at least, his prose only expresses what he himself thinks to the extent that he's able to align his thought and commune with this thoughtless realm of non-being, of death and nothingness itself. OK, so yeah, as I said, in light of Land's critique

of psychobiography's kind of pathologising tendencies, I'm only going to present a very bare minimum of facts needed to trace the trajectory of Land's accelerationist thought. So, but yeah, I think it's just worth noting real briefly that he was born in 1962 in Britain, and in fact all that Lant himself ever says of his adolescence in his writings is that he was always a proud atheist and this is because he claims that even at a very young age he grasped that humanity was nothing for him but a sickness a glitch a mere speck of dust in the desert of reality he says in first for annihilation he says I have not been a thias for a single second of my life nothing could be more alien to me because nothing is more obvious than the fact that

humanity far from being a creation is a disease okay so uh growing up land went on to study continental philosophy at the university of sussex and then essex uh where he was by all accounts rather precocious and brilliant student after completing his doctorate with a dissertation on heidiger's reading of the austrian poet george trackle that we'll look at next week uh land accepted a lectureship at Warwick University in the late 80s and you know it's really at Warwick University where he would garner a rather renowned reputation for you know a charismatic and penetrating if extremely unorthodox interpretation of philosophy as well as pedagogical methods

over the next 10 years before resigning in 1998. But yeah to go back so in 1988 Land published his first article entitled Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest a polemical introduction to the configuration of philosophy and modernity now as we'll see the references that Land cites throughout the essay attest to the fact that he was already quite well versed in thinkers as diverse as Kant the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss Marx and Engels, Nietzsche, French feminists like Irigoy and Monique Wittig and many others so yeah basically what can capitalism can't incest structural anthropology french feminism nature and marxism all have in common so that's what we're going to spend the next hour uh unpacking

oh yeah it's worth noting that uh so each of uh each week is sort of broken up into two parts so the first part corresponding to the two readings the key readings so the first part's called insurrections of the other. Yeah, and there's also just a note on the course readings, actually. So I should probably point out that some versions of the readings that I've uploaded are from different editions than the ones listed in the course description, so they therefore have different page numbers. So if in doubt, if you're trying to figure out what to read, go by the chapter and section titles rather than the page numbers in the course description. Yeah, and whether you read, you know, one key reading or both key readings before or after or no key readings, that's entirely up to what you consider, you know, most helpful.

Yeah, these lectures are going to aim to be kind of as tabula rasa as possible. Yeah, so that's entirely up to you. And the recommended readings are just there to indicate the best place to go to start off with if you want to explore further what we talk about in the corresponding lecture, right? so yeah okay so alright let's get into the first part okay so Land begins the essay, Can't Capital and the Prohibition of Incest he begins it by arguing that we can only really come to understand the dynamics of class, race and gender oppression in modernity

by taking South Africa's apartheid regime as a kind of microcosm, a metonym, or what Land calls a recapitulation of the world in miniature. So apartheid consists in what Land calls an economic proximity of Africans to the white metropolis so that they can produce all of the wealth of that society, but also a political distance from the white metropolis by literally geographically excluding the Africans to segregated zones called Bantustans, where they therefore won't be able to contest and menace or partake in the wealth of the white metropolis. So, yeah, apartheid is based on both an economic proximity of Africans to the metropolis as well as a political distanciation.

Now, although the advanced industrial Western countries more or less eventually condemned apartheid, emphasis on eventually, Land argues that the West's exploitation of a third world labour force essentially is based on the same model of appropriating the labour power of other peoples while excluding those people from partaking in the wealth produced so he says the third world as a whole is the product of a successful although piecemeal and largely unconscious Bantustin policy on the part of the global capital metropolis. Now, here, Land draws on what is essentially a Marxist account for why the nation-state is a logical and natural consequence

of modern capitalist dynamics. So what Land essentially argues is that, and this is very Marxist, essentially, he argues that capitalism's ideal that there would be no resistance to market relations is what Land calls an impossible fantasy and this is because the very means for capitalists to generate surplus requires the exploitation of a proletariat of a working class which thereby incentivises the working class to resist and overcome capital so yeah it's because capitalism can only accrue value based on exploitation that it can never be done with resistance to market relations. So, yeah, Lance says in the second point,

Marx's contention that labour trading at its natural price in an undistorted market equal to the cost of its reproduction will tend strongly to express an equally natural political refusal of the market continues to haunt the global bourgeoisie. So, yeah, contrary to the view that capitalism melts traditional national borders into air, Land argues that capitalism reinforces the nation state as a way to deal with this inevitable proletarian resistance. So the idea is that capitalism uses the nation state to fortify essentially Western centres of economic wealth and political stability by geographically displacing the exploited working class offshore where they cannot contest the Western centres, offshore to what was then called the third world.

So he says, yeah, the displacement of the political consequences of wage-labor relations away from the metropolis is the fundamental condition of capital as nothing other than an explicit aggression against the masses. So, yeah, the idea is that given that the division between capital and labor comes to be expressed through national borders and national lines, specifically the division between... So the division between capital and labor comes to be expressed between the division between the West and the Third World. for land then exploitation, capitalist exploitation winds up having an essentially racial nationalistic character. So yeah, okay. So along with the nation state and the kind of nationalism and racism it ferments, land also sees women's oppression

as the other central pillar for modern capital's smooth functioning. And again land draws on an essentially Marxist view of women's oppression which is I think best articulated in Friedrich Engels' book, The Origins of the Family, the State and Private Property. So in this book, Engels essentially explains how in primitive communist societies, pre-historical societies, or what Engels called primitive communism, everyone essentially more or less collectively produced, appropriated and consumed the products of their labour each day, but importantly without being able to produce a surplus beyond what the tribe needed to eat, consume and so on to reproduce their labour each day.

And so the key thing is that it was a relatively egalitarian mode of production. And so consequently, because the mode of production was generally egalitarian, this was reflected in the family kind of social relations under primitive communism, whereby all parents essentially treated all children as their own because of widespread sexual promiscuity and therefore the inability to determine what children biologically belonged to which parents. So with the Neolithic revolution in agriculture, metallurgy and the domestication of animals however, a surplus beyond what was needed to reproduce the tribe's labour each day was at last generated. And so it was

not long before what Engels calls a warrior or priestly class was able to emerge by appropriating the surplus without producing any of it themselves in what Engels refers to as the origin of the first class societies. Now here's where women's oppression comes into the picture. So to ensure that the new ruling class's property was passed down to their own family line, monogamy, Engels argues came to be enforced such that women could only have sex with one man and hence the patriarch's blood heirs could be definitively determined um yeah and so angles caused this moment the the institutional monogamy the world historic defeat of the female sex so yeah it's it's from there on

on this account that you know women were kept in seclusion only really permitted to communicate with each other and used as commodities to be married off to other ruling families. And this is what Land is getting at when he refers to women's oppression as a mechanism to achieve what Land calls the stability or identity of the male line. Yeah, okay. So what Land's Marxist readings of both women's oppression and nationalism reveal is that capital is not the transgression of traditional patriarchal and xenophobic relations in favour of what Land calls exogamic relations, which means relations with other groups, outsiders, others. Instead, capitalism, on Land's early reading,

intensifies and augments prohibitions on exogamy, and Land symbolises this through the incest taboo in this quote. He says, When we discuss capital in its historical concreteness, we are simultaneously discussing a frustration of the cultural tendency of human societies towards expansive exoticism. Capitalist is the point at which a culture refuses the possibility which it has itself engendered of pushing the prohibition of incest towards its limit. Okay, so yeah, the idea is that while capital, obviously, as we've seen in Angle's account, capital didn't create racism and sexism, they only continued to exist and be prominent because of their use value for the fortification of capitalist property rights, essentially. so for this young land

it's only if we come to grasp how capitalism depends on women's oppression and the nation state that we can actually understand that fascism's essential nature to hate the ethnic other and to hate the emancipated woman is not a kind of perversion of capital but it's actually capital's direct logical extension okay so yeah so after in the essay after having kind of outlined the the driving motor of capital as this kind of this uh enforcement of sameness against uh exogamy against uh alterity uh through you know xenophobia ethnic xenophobia and uh sexual repression land then turns to critiquing

what he sees as the key philosophical or even ideological expression of these capitalist dynamics which he thinks is most clearly articulated by Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism. Now this next kind of part we're basically going to go through Kant now for like 15 minutes or so and yeah this part's going to be the densest and most technical so we're going to start technical and then in coming weeks break it down. So yeah, bear with me if you don't follow it or if you're not that familiar with Kant that's fine I'll encapsulate the key points after and yeah if you're really finding it confusing just try to think of it as that what Kant is doing is essentially writing the greatest horror

story ever written that led you know figures like Kleist to kill himself and Schopenhauer to advocate self-destruction and suicide as the highest ethical ideal so yeah it might seem boring but like it's going to be traumatic okay so uh yeah let's see how it goes okay so uh Kant opens his first critique of pure reason published in 1781 by lamenting the fact that whereas the natural sciences seem to be constantly progressing in terms of their knowledge of the world uh meanwhile metaphysics and philosophy seem to be marred in an endless battlefield of contradictory views and inconsistent systems. So what Kant proposes to do is try to

revalidate metaphysics upon a new and more solid ground, and he's going to do this through a critique of the older, what he will come to call dogmatic metaphysics. Okay, so Kant begins his inquiry into the very possibility of metaphysical knowledge by observing that essentially all knowledge is comprised of two kinds of judgments, where judgments are propositions linking predicates to subjects. So on the one hand, a priori analytic judgments, as can't cause them, have their predicates contained in the concept of the subject. So for example, all bodies are extended is an a priori analytic judgment because the very interesting nature of bodies implies extension, where extension means extended in space.

now what Kant's going to focus on is the other kind of judgment, synthetic a priori judgments and these are judgments which have to infer the predicate because it's not directly contained in the concept of the subject so for example, this is Kant's example all bodies are heavy is a synthetic a priori judgment because there's nothing about the essential nature of the definition of a body that would suggest that it's heavy we can imagine bodies are light so this universal claim that all bodies are heavies has to be inferred so the idea is that synthetic a priori judgments cannot be we cannot derive them from the contingent objects of our experience importantly because they involve universal statements

so I can't use my experience to generalise universally because it's based on a particular finite experience it has to be a universal statement so these statements cannot come from our experience that's the first key point now yeah so if all our knowledge purely conforms to objects of experience empirical objects of experience then synthetic a priori judgments are impossible we cannot make these universal statements with validity so for objective universal knowledge to be possible objects of experience for Kant must instead conform to our cognition our a priori cognition as he calls it so this is Kant's what Kant will call his you know notorious Copernican turn of re-envisioning

objects as revolving around our cognition rather than our cognition as revolving or conforming to objects so Kant the way Kant puts this he says if intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori but if the object as an object of the senses conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition then I can very well represent this possibility to myself. So the idea is that for Kant, it's only if he can show that metaphysical knowledge derives from a priori, or what he also calls transcendental grounds, through which objects are given to us, that he's going to be able to revalidate metaphysics. So in the next section of the critique,

called the transcendental aesthetic, Kant begins by considering the transcendental conditions for the possibility of metaphysical knowledge by beginning with the way that we are first affected by objects through sensibility. Now, far from sensibility referring to the sensible world in itself or the external physical world or something like that, for Kant, sensibility denotes what he calls the pure forms of intuition before any concrete sensations emerge because it's precisely through these forms of intuition that sensations can emerge in the first place. So for Kant, there are two forms of sensibility, space and time. And the fact that all of our sense is given in terms of space and time

is demonstrated, at least to Kant's satisfaction, by the fact that space and time are not empirical objects that are drawn from experience. Rather, they're the ground through which all objects of experience emerge and presuppose. So in other words, whereas we can think of objects in space and time as not existing, particular sensible objects, we cannot imagine space and time as not existing. We cannot imagine a sensible space without precisely space and time. So the way that Kant puts this in not-so-helpful jargon is that although time and space are empirically real, they are also transcendentally ideal because they're space and time of the conditions for all objects of experience but conditions which arise from the mind rather than from

the world itself. Okay, yeah, so in the transcendental logic Kant goes on to argue that while intuition, sensible intuition gives us particular objects of experience we can only think them and therefore develop propositions and theoretical knowledge about objects through what he calls the categories of the understanding so in other words just as there are no concepts without sensible objects to think so is there no knowledge of those objects without concepts yeah so the necessary categories of the rules of the understanding for Kant are formalized by the logic of his day in terms of our faculty of judgment again where judgment is that which

links predicates to subjects. Kant identifies four general types of judgments each of which has three parts as you can see on the table on the slide but for our purposes it's not crucial to go through those in detail. The key point is that the concepts essentially synthesise particular objects of experience under rational rules and norms. The concepts their key function is synthesis And so Kant says in the quote, By synthesis in the most general sense, I understand the action of putting different representations together with each other and comprehending their manifoldness in one cognition. Yeah, so it's through this synthesis of judgment that we develop as many categories of the understanding as there are judgments,

as we can see on the right-hand side of the table. But again, it's not crucial to go through these in detail. yeah okay so Kant then goes on to provide what he calls a transcendental deduction of this synthesis, this process of synthesis in order to guarantee those concepts of objective validity and he's going to do this by showing that these concepts arise a priori before all contingent objects of experience because again they're that through which objects of experience can appear at all so to this end Kant has to note that there are three key faculties of the mind at play here and there's sense imagination and a perception so firstly sense it creates uh is that which

creates what Kant calls the synopsis which is basically it creates a sensible manifold out of the objects of experience uh you know like so for example a chair or something that's made up of different sensible impressions it makes it it turns into a manifold that's the role of sensibility so then imagination is in yeah so imagination is what then marks the synthesis of that sensible manifold under one of the a priori rules of reason and finally a perception is simply the the transcendental unity that unites both the manifold and the concepts of reason under um it's the grasp of the imagination so I mean the way yeah so like Kant particularly focuses on this last point of a perception

so the way he describes it is it is this a perception that must be added to the pure imagination in order to make its function intellectual for in itself the synthesis of the imagination although exercised a priori is nevertheless always sensible for it combines the manifold only as it appears in intuition yeah that's probably that's like pretty brief and dense but the uh the key point is that it's through this transcendental ductions kind of threefold synthesis that we arrive at the objective validity of the categories of the understanding uh because they're shown to be not empirically inferred from objects of experience but given to us a priori um as the conditions for the possibility of all experience okay so uh yeah in the analytical principles uh the next section can't then details uh the way

that judgments subsume things under given rules in terms of or categories of the understanding in terms of what he calls transcendental schema so transcendental schema are the parts of of judgment which apply pure concepts to particular sensible intuitions um yeah in other words they're the part the scheme is that part of the imagination as or judgment that turn a sensible image into uh into a concept by relating that image to some kind of category of the understanding so the schemas are that which mediate between purely sensible images and APOA concepts so the way Kant puts this, he says the schema of a pure concept of the understanding is something that can never be brought to an image at all, but is rather only

the pure synthesis in accord with the rule of unity, according to concepts in general which the category expresses and is a transcendental product of the imagination okay yeah again just to note the the table of judgments brings about four possible schema for synthesizing a sensible manifold under a concept but again they're on the slide that you can refer to at another time if you want but uh again they're not essential for our purposes here okay now we're getting to the key point at least for land uh so at this stage Kant argues uh that a crucial, perhaps the crucial consequence of the fact that metaphysical knowledge is derived from our a priori concepts of the understanding is that we cannot think of objects

as what Kant calls things in themselves or noumena beyond the bounds of what he distinguishes as possible experience or phenomena. So in other words, we can only think of things such as they appear to us through the mediation of our mind, not as things are independently of our mind. so in Kant's own terms he says from this deduction of our faculty of cognizing apoi in the first part of metaphysics there emerges a very strange result namely that with this faculty we can never get beyond the boundaries of possible experience so in other words although we can think of this concept of things in themselves as that which lies outside of all experience we cannot positively know what those things in themselves are because our knowledge is limited to possible objects of experience. So he says, Kant goes on, from this arises the concept of a noumenon, which however

is not at all positive and does not signify a determinate cognition of any sort of thing, but rather only the thinking of something in general in which I abstract from all form of sensible intuition. Yeah, so the noumenon is purely a negative concept, a limit concept. But at the same time, Kant does note that the noumenon serves a positive function of acting precisely as a limit concept beyond which we cannot stretch our knowledge without falling into an illegitimate misuse of it. So he says, yeah, the concept of a noumenon is therefore merely a boundary concept in order to limit the pretension of sensibility. Okay, last section of the first critique. So, okay, so yeah, in the transcendental dialectic,

Kant gives a couple of examples of how we can essentially avoid falling into the illusion of thinking beyond the bounds of possible experience of illegitimately thinking the newman the newman so and more precisely Kant identifies three types of ideas beyond the bounds of possible experience and they're firstly in three different fields of psychology cosmology and theology so firstly psychology makes the mistake of thinking beyond the bounds of possible experience if it thinks of all of our experiences in terms of some kind of numinal soul or eye or substance. Cosmology does this when it thinks of all of the objects of appearances as cohering around an external world in itself. And theology also makes

the same mistake when it thinks of everything as the result of some kind of God. So, focusing first on yeah so when psychology thinks beyond the bounds of possible experience Kant says that this misuse generates four parologisms as he calls it so basically all of the four parologisms of psychology make the same mistake of misrecognising conditions of experience conceptual conditions of experience as things in themselves yeah so I mean the four parologisms lead us basically the four false influences that psychology makes for Kant are that it thinks that the soul is an actual substance, that its quality is simple, it has a unity over time, and it can relate to

objects in space. Now, I won't go through all of them, but just to give one example of how psychology falls afoul here. The first pyrologism essentially makes a mistake of attributing a real existence to the soul as a substance when in fact this substance is not inferred from experience or an external world but it's just the substance is just derived from the very concept of substance so in other words it's mistaken it's using a just what is just a concept of substance in order to actually talk about what is supposedly a substance in itself an actual real existing substance so i mean in kant's own terms he says we have not grounded the present proposition on any experience but have merely inferred from the concept of the relation that all thought has to the eye as the common subject in which it inheres. All of the

other parologisms essentially make the same mistake. So I'm not going to go through all of them but we'll just move on to the mistakes of cosmology. Kant then considers what he calls four antinomies which are generated by applying pure reason to try and explain a world in itself. So what Kant essentially does to show the error of pure reason here is he shows that pure reason can generate four theses about the world but pure reason can also generate four antitheses which contradict those theses and so given that reason is capable of presenting four propositions

as well as four other propositions that contradict the first four then we cannot use pure reason to definitively affirm anything about the world um so again just to give uh one example if you just look at the second thesis uh it's probably the simplest it states that uh so the initial thesis is that every composite substance in the world consists of simple parts so for example you know i mean i'm a composite substance i have different limbs and so on so maybe i i'm composed and eventually atoms as well so maybe I'm composed of simple parts um yeah and the proof the proof for this is that we cannot imagine a composite thing without simple parts right by the very definition of a composite thing it's made up of parts um but we can imagine simple things without composites um but so

yeah so that's the thesis but then Kant shows that reason can also establish the antithesis which is that no composite thing in the world consists of simple parts and so the proof of that is that even if we picture a simple thing a simple thing has to exist in space and therefore it is a composite with space it's a part of space so again, I mean like this precise reasoning is not important the key point is that pure reason is able to generate this contradiction or this antinomy yeah okay now finally finally uh yeah Kant addresses what he calls the ideas of reason which of theology now the central idea of reason here is that there is some kind of maximum

absolute reality cohering all things uh and as this kind of overarching being that encompasses or it would have to be eternal, self-sufficient, simple, and therefore it's essentially one and the same with the classical notion of God as one, all-encompassing, the origin of war, simple, and so on. So what we're dealing with with the ideas of reason is God, this idea of God. Now, Kant identifies three inadequate proofs for the existence of God that pure reason can generate. So again, just to give one example, if we just look at the second cosmological example uh yeah it essentially argues that if something something exists something finite like myself or anything uh then

a god must exist in as a necessary being in order to guarantee that finite thing's existence so for you know like the way this is normally done in uh many medieval philosophy like aquinas or someone like that is that you know there's a finite thing cannot get its existence from itself because it's finite so that requires a cause but if its cause is also finite say a parent like a father or mother or something that's also finite so that might be able to cause one finite thing but that that requires another cause because that that is also finite so in order to avoid this infinite regress of finite causes generating finite things we have to posit an infinite cause something that is eternal because it gets its existence from its own essence and it uses it

and it grants existence to all finite things um yeah that's the kind of classical form basically to mass aquinas's form of the cosmological argument now the key point anyway is that Kant dismisses this argument because it relies on causality to move from particular empirical things finite things to some kind of super sensible god but the problem with this is that causality is merely a category of the mind it's a concept of the understanding so we cannot use it to invalidly infer from appearances to a thing in itself a super sensible being um yeah this is what Kant says the way he puts this is the principle of causality has no significance at all and no mark of its use except in the world of sense here however it is supposed

to serve precisely to get beyond the world of sense. Okay. Yeah, that was a bit of a whirlwind, kind of a dense whirlwind. So the final point is that Kant concludes the first critique by suggesting that we have to have the discipline, that's his term, the discipline to restrain our knowledge to judging only things as they appear to us, not voyaging out beyond the limits of possible experience. Okay. All right, so... Now, certainly Land has no qualms at all with Kant's critique of dogmatic metaphysics, just as he has no issue with the way that capitalist modernity

melts and annihilates the old feudal regime into air, right? The trouble for Land with Kant is that essentially he basically threw out the metaphysical baby with the dogmatic bathwater. In other words, what Land takes issue with is a crucial consequence of the fact that all our metaphysical knowledge is derived from the understandings APOA concepts. That is, we can no longer grapple with objects as things in themselves beyond the phenomena of possible experience. So, if Land can't jump from just decimating dogmatic metaphysics to prohibiting tarrying with noumena at all, whether it be in dogmatic terms or not. So, yeah, again, for Land, after Kant,

it's basically only through the transcendental subject's preconceived concepts of the understanding that what Land would call alterity or noumena can appear to us, but it only appears to us as conceptual, so it's no longer really alterity or noumena. Yeah, so Land's basic point is that all that Kant is going to be able to say about things in themselves is that we cannot say anything about them. That's the problem. So the way Land puts this in the first quote on the slide, he says, The paradox of enlightenment, then, is an attempt to fix a stable relation with what is radically other, since insofar as the other is rigidly positioned within a relation, it is no longer fully other. This aggressive logical absurdity reaches its zenith in the philosophy of Kant. Okay, and worse still,

land even suspects at times that can't actually imagine that the noumena was not even really out there in some kind of realm in itself rather land suspects that can't think the noumena is merely posited as this limit concept that's posited by reason so it's not even actually a thing in itself it's actually just a concept of a thing in itself generated by reason so if that's the case then you know inside and outside, subject and nature phenomena and numina there are not really two distinct realms, rather the outside the numina, nature is just merely generated through the subject's own antinomies and contradictions

yeah so Land goes on Kant still wants to say something about radical alterity, even if it is only that it has no relevance to us, yet he has deprived himself of the right to all speculation about the nature of what is beyond appearance. The vocabulary that would describe the other of metaphysics is itself inscribed within metaphysics, since the inside and the outside are both conceptually determined from the inside. Yeah, so on Land's initial account here, Kant is essentially the humanist philosopher, par excellence, because he prohibits cognising a numeral reality outside of any phenomenal relation to us, and he's able to prohibit the thinking of this numeral numeral reality on the grounds that any thought about things in themselves independent of thought

is a performative contradiction because we're thinking it so you know we can try and think a thing in itself but by nature of thinking it then it's no longer a thing in itself it's a thing for us so i mean at least at this stage we haven't finished looking at the the first essay uh kant and capital but at this stage we can see that the key point is that what land's critique of kant i think shows us is that land's key concern throughout all of his works will be to liberate a kind of radical numeral alterity from the conceptual prison in which the concepts of our experience have ensnared it. Yeah, okay, so maybe I'll open up for questions then, if anyone has questions before finishing off looking at this essay.

Does anyone have any questions at this point? no not at this point that's good then I guess alright well I mean obviously if there's something you need to directly ask in order to keep following feel free to ask that at any time but in terms of more general questions I have a question why did land leave academia Oh, okay. I mean, this is kind of a trite question, but most people are dying to hold on to academic positions

or even lock into one. And here you have somebody who actually currently won in his career decides to bag the whole thing. I mean, okay, there are a number of reasons for that. So, I mean, he has some actual kind of... I mean, I think it is an act that is actually ground and a consequence of his philosophy. Like, I definitely would maintain that. And so even in Thirst for Annihilation, his book in 92... So he leaves academia in 98, but even in Thirst for Annihilation in 92, he's drawing upon Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's critiques of academia, and he already has a clear critique of academia there, and he's pretty consistently critical of it. And even the whole project of setting up

the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, that was also a way and an attempt to have a para-academic, at least a para-academic organisation that was not, you know, did not succumb to the various bureaucratic trappings of traditional academia, right? But, I mean, just like, basically, like, I mean, historically, essentially, from most reports, it just seems to be because land was essentially riding more and more cybernetic stuff, more para-academic stuff with the CCRU, stuff that was looking like theory fiction and cyberpunk and sci-fi, and basically it started to look like it was, at least to a very conservative philosopher, it doesn't look like standard academic scholarly philosophy anymore.

It's something different. So the department thought he was no longer really doing philosophy, and so he was sort of forced to resign, failing to contribute. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't... Like, from reports, it seems like he wasn't liked among the rest of the staff. But at the same time, like, I guess he was pushed, but, like, maybe, like, in a way, maybe he was begging to be pushed, right? Like, he is a masochist, though, in some sense. So, yeah, like, I don't think he saw it as a great, like, trauma or, you know, tragedy in his life that he was kicked out of academia. Yep. I think, I mean, I'm not quite serious, but he's kind of manifesting, in a way, through that action, an aspect of his philosophy, which is to move to that.

Absolutely, yeah. I think that's, like, really... I mean, that's the way he formulates it. And, like... Yeah, so, for example, after he's not in academia anymore, most of his work came out on the internet, on his various blogs and things like that. and he writes about how that like some people say okay why take him seriously anymore he's just like blogging like why take those works seriously you know it's not proper kind of scholarly academic publications but he's all point like even that was philosophically motivated or motivated by his philosophical commitments in the sense that so for example for him one reason he likes to blog is that he's able then to keep up with the accelerating the times as they accelerate as things happen so he's able to publish something

people able to respond a lot quicker online and have a much more collective engagement with his work and revision in that way, whereas if anyone's published in academia just to get an article out, it takes a year, a year and a half or whatever and by that time, given the future shock of maternity by that time, that article is probably completely obsolescent and irrelevant, so imagine trying to write about Trump's presidential election campaign or something and then it's coming out now or something like there's so much that has happened since then and that's made it would have made it irrelevant so like that's so yeah i mean that's just an example of the move to blogging is not just some random contingent act it's actually it's intellectually motivated by what he's trying to do i think yeah and same thing with the move from academia um yeah any yeah

I have a question. Just to take a split, I don't expect that you're going to be able to see the flow. Why do you think, since this whole idea in terms of the treatment of the wisdom is to de-sexualism, and think of it as a kind of positive nothingness that is separate about needing to clarify it, why did he choose the demeanor rather than the thing in itself, in that income system. Because the thing in itself is the thing that contains the intensity of the income, which I guess comes to have quite a little weight of the ability to reduce their entire time. And so I'm not really sure of an answer to it, but I just kind of wondered if you had a little why stop

in the people, which is the concept of that object, rather than the thing itself as the first figure the answer. Yeah. Sorry, I forgot to repeat questions for this recording, but yeah. So the question was basically like, why does land focus on the noumena, which is a concept of the thing in itself rather than the thing in itself? Yeah, we are the task of the noumena, so you can't Yeah. Because like Schopenhauer is really hard to think of the concept. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean I mean yeah it is speculation but like the I mean like one reason could be that he like he's

critiquing Kant so he needs to start from this point of view of like the way that Kant can only grapple with the thing in itself as as conceptual yeah there's also the sense yeah I mean there's a sense in which Kant, Land will say that Kant is right that we actually can only we can only deal with the thing itself as a conceptual noumena but then the next step would be to pursue a thirst for annihilation maybe it's kind of like just to do that maybe it's kind of a quick thing about the first thing that you have to start from the Islamist system and not just sit yourself with it

Yeah, yeah, exactly, because that, I mean, that would be suspicious already, like, like, without, without starting with our possible objects of experience, our experience, our concepts, and so on, if you just try to jump maybe straight to thinking about the thing in itself, or like, kind of not thinking, but, you know, grappling with the thing in itself, then you won't even know what, whether you're still conceptualizing, I guess, like, you need to start by stripping away everything to make sure that there's nothing conceptual left. But yeah, I mean, I think we'll see more. Yeah, I mean, I should probably point out that when I was talking about the noumena and the thing in itself, I was using them vaguely interchangeably. But like, and distinguish, yeah,

but there is a distinction between is the noumena actually something in itself or is it just a limit concept generated internally by reason? And that's an ambiguity that we're going to see again and again. Yeah, throughout. Have you got a try for one more? Yeah, sure. Yeah. I guess it is in response to what you were saying. There's a sentence on that screen that's really resonating with something that I maybe recall and I push out, I can't remember exactly where it's from. Yeah. There's something that David Hume said in his, I don't know, against the soul. And he said, if the soul exists and therefore is eternal, then it existed before we were born.

And in the same way, because it is post-mortem, we have no concern at all about the soul before we were born. Therefore, we ought to have no concern about it after we die. Now, in that case, not so much the soul, but death itself, right? Death would have the characteristics of this radical activity that he seems to be referring to here. He says it has no relevance to us. That's a very Humean argument about the soul, that it has no relevance to us, the way we live our life. yeah is death

would death possibly be an example of this numenum that it is not a concept so much but calling death a concept is the very thing that makes it appear to have substance well yeah I mean as we'll see particularly when we look at the next essay death is the numenum for land essentially death marks the cessation of thought and therefore of a conceptualising being. And so it is the way, the access to the numina, even though it's not really an access because it's the destruction of a conceiving being. But for them, death is precisely this numinal alterity.

But if you look to speculate on it, isn't that where we get the kind of sci-fi, the kind of real-world vampire relevance, that homomorphism's work? I guess it depends what you mean and speculate on it, though. He doesn't want to conceptualise it, which is what he'll take issue with figures like Heidegger's being towards death and so on for doing, for only thinking death from the point of view of the living. He'll want to talk about death much more apothetically, in the vein of negative theology, but without the anthropomorphic God at the end of the tale. But, I mean, it's a question whether he succeeds in doing that. Yeah, I mean, see what you think after this next session,

because we're going to look directly at death now. Yeah, so I'd better keep going. Okay. Yeah. Okay, actually, we'll just finish off the Kant and Capital essay. so yeah in another work called the groundwork for the metaphysics of morals Kant details his notion so we've looked at pure reason and that and Kant also develops a notion of practical or moral reason and he first in the groundwork he first develops this idea of practical reason by asking simply what does it mean for us to be good or to be moral and he He formulates it both negatively and positively. So negatively, he says that to be good cannot mean that we adhere to,

we are good simply by chance or natural instinct or by self-interest because we think we're going to get some benefit from being good. All of these things aren't really being good for Kant, right? Instead, so that's what being good is not, just out of self-interest or by spontaneous inclination. Instead, and this is the positive definition, for Kant, good means having what he calls a goodwill, which essentially means that we both intend to act for the sake of the good and actually do act for the sake of the good. So for the sake of the good is an end in itself. So for example, I'm not... So just distinguish between those negative and positive definitions. if someone drops their wallet

or whatever, if I do any kind of good deed but I do that good deed because I think I'm going to get praised for it that's not really been good I'm only doing that good act as a means to my own benefit so it has to be a truly good will has to do the good as an end in itself and so he says if the goodwill cannot act out of just by chance or inclination or out of self-interest, then it's a duty to a law. Duty is not done necessarily out of self-interest, it's obliged. And it's a law, yeah, so the goodwill acts out of duty to the moral law as Kant calls it.

Yeah, so that's, okay, that's the initial definition in the groundwork of what it means to be good. to have a good will that intends to and does act in order to fulfil our duty to a moral law. Now, in the second critique of practical reason, Kant goes on to argue that, and this is a bit of a rehearsal of what I just said in the groundwork, for the good to be beyond any particular self-interest, it has to be this highest and universal good of all. right? And this is yeah, the highest good of all cannot be what Kant calls hypothetical esoteric, which again means a good which is good as a means to achieve some other good, because that's not the highest good as an end in itself, that's a good in order to achieve something else

which is higher than it. So the highest good obviously cannot be as a means to another end, esoteric or hypothetical as he puts it. Instead, the highest good has to be categorical and this is Kant's famous categorical imperative so according to Kant's categorical imperative essentially what the imperative suggests we do is that we ought to act not only in certain situations but in all situations categorically meaning that we should act in such a way that we could will our action in any case to be universally enacted by all so the way Kant puts this, he says act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law

so the reason so why Kant thinks this achieves the universal good of all is that a good someone affirming or acting according to the catacoccal imperative could not pursue their own self-interest alone to the detriment of others because then they would be willing that that act can be enacted by everyone and that means everyone could pursue their self-interest to the detriment of others including the person currently making this wager right so you know for example Kant's own example which I think he gives lots of examples that are really helpful but I think the one that's probably the simplest is that he has this idea he says that we should not refrain from putting our talents whatever our talents be to good

use even if we're in a privileged and comfortable position because if we're operating according to the categorical imperative then that would be, and we refrain from putting our talents to good use that would mean we would be willing for everyone to refrain from putting their talents to good use and that means we wouldn't be in the privileged, comfortable position we're in. So it's a way, yeah. So I mean it's just a way to ensure that we treat everyone as an end in itself rather than as a means to our own end essentially. yeah so that that's yeah okay so as far as and back to the land essay now as far as land is concerned in terms of the second critique um this land thinks the second critique is further

evidence essentially that Kant's critical project only does away with you know dogmatic theology and morality in in order to make uh reasons categorical imperative the unconditional and essentially even dictatorial arbiter of all value and ethical action. So for Land, the second critique just merely strengthens the first critique's exclusion of a non-conceptual numeral reality by prescribing that the law of reason must be affirmed and adhered to categorically, unconditionally. So Land says, The law of this empire is called the categorical imperative, which means a law stemming solely from the purity of the concept and thus dictated by the absolute monologue of colonial reason. Kant's practical subject already prefigures a deaf Fuhrer barking impossible orders that seem to come from another world.

Now, although Land acknowledges that it might seem ridiculous to label Kant a kind of fascist or Fuhrer, notwithstanding that respected thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer and the Khan have also compared Kant's ethics to that of the Marquis de Sade, it's actually worth noting that Kant himself first defined his critical project at the beginning of the first critique in you know political even violent terms as a battle in the war of metaphysical ideas right so Kant says in the second point in metaphysics we have to retrace our path countless times because we find that it does not lead where we want it to go and it is so far from reaching unanimity in the assertions of its adherence that it is rather a battlefield and actually a little

later, Kant even at one point compares the way that his project limits thought to the boundaries of possible experience beyond which we should not venture. He compares that critical limitation to the work and function of the police. So he says to deny that this service of criticism is of any positive utility would be as much as to say that the police are of no positive utility because their chief business is to put a stop to the violence that citizens have to fear from other citizens so that each can carry on his own affairs. in peace and safety. Now, obviously, whereas for Kant, these are simply metaphors, Land suggests that they betray the materiality of the proletariat or the third world's submission to capitalist dynamics,

and therefore Kant's transcendental idealism is the ideological expression of these dynamics. So Land says, I think it's on the next slide, oh yeah so yeah in other words uh yeah so can't the way that can secludes a truly kind of uh uh a truly differentiated humanum is for land uh symptomatic of the way that modern capitalist imperialism registers the other only in so far as they facilitate the circulation of capital through the trade of third world labor. So Land says, Kant's object is thus the universal form of the relation to alterity, that which must of necessity be the same in the other

in order for it to appear to us. This universal form is that which is necessary for anything to be on offer for experience. It is the exchange value that first allows a thing to be marketed to the Enlightenment mind. So in other words, much as capital needs the other, or the dominated other as a condition for the possibility of its surplus extraction, so does Kant maintain the transcendental subject by way of a limited and controlled object which is only ever engaged with through the subject's own a priori concepts of reason. So as Land will put it in The First for Annihilation a couple of years later, it seems as if Kant only sought to do away with dogmatic metaphysics, anthropomorphisation anthropomorphisation or conceptualisation of the numeral heavens, only so as to ultimately

maintain that very anthropomorphic order when sceptical secular reasons seem to threaten it, precisely by co-opting sceptical secular reason in the name of the dogmatic. So he says, it's a long quote but it's pretty important, so he says, like Luther, Kant was forced into conflict with an institution steeped in tradition with which he would have been happier to conform if only it was strong enough to keep the barbarians at bay. But whilst atheists such as Hume threatened to wash everything away, the Pope spawned bastards and Christian wolf pontificated absurdities. There was only one answer, revolt in the service of the establishment. And the revolt once began was carried through with a steel dedication. What was also common

to both of these reluctant reels was the renewed vitality that they breathed into the antique institutions they engaged. Within a few years of Luther, the Jesuits, after Kant, Hegel. Catholicism and metaphysics both were born. After all, fear is the passionate enthusiasm for the same. So, yeah, just again, simply put, far from assassinating God, it would seem that all Kant really wanted to do was resurrect him under the secular name of reason. Okay, now according to Land, the only subject capable of resisting these capitalist dynamics

would have to be, again, what he calls exogamic, in the sense that this subject would have to both constitute capital while also being repressed by capital and therefore having an incentive to break with it. So he says the forces most unambiguously antagonistic to this grotesque process are exogamic or less humanistically exotropic, the synthetic energies that condition or surplus value and yet coexist with capital only under repression. Now, as we saw earlier, given that class relations are geographically and sexually mapped along racial and gender lines, it is obviously then going to be oppressed women and the third world that have the power to disrupt the patriarchal, nationalistic dynamics upon which capital depends.

Now here, Land actually favours the women's liberation movement over national self-determination struggles. And this is because Land views the oppressed ex-colonies' national liberation struggles as having a tendency to resist the West's global apartheid by asserting their own nation-states in a way which reproduces the very nationalistic, even fascist logic which generated the oppression in the first place. So this is what he means when he says, as soon as a metropolitan society disengages its organisation of kinship and citizenship from its international economic symphases, it already reveals proto-fascist traits. So instead Land's going to look to the women's movement as

really alone harbouring the revolutionary potential to disrupt the patriarchal relations upon which capital depends. He says, it is this revolutionary requirement for a spontaneously homeless subversion that gives an urgency to certain possibilities of feminist politics since the erasure of matrilineal genealogy within the patriarchal machine means that fascising valorisations of ancestry have no final purchase on the feminine subject. Now as with the fascist tendencies of certain national liberation struggles, Land does warn that patriarchy has attempted to defuse such threats by liberalising itself and parceling out a limited ration of prestige and social status and emancipation to

women. So to effectively smash the capitalist patriarchy then rather than merely compromise with it, Land argues that we need a virulently revolutionary feminism which cannot be assimilated in any way into fellow-centric capital. Yeah, he says yet the state apparatus of an advanced industrial society can certainly not be defeated without a willingness to escalate the cycle of violence without limit it is this harsh truth that has deflected western politics into an increasingly servile reformism okay now more precisely uh land looks to the militant radical feminism pioneered by uh monique wittig so you know just to really

kind of summarise her key point. So Wittig's basic insight is that liberal feminism is compromised in that its heterosexuality means that it still maintains relations with men in such a way that it can be recuperated by husbands, brothers and fathers. So to truly dismantle the rule of men, Wittig argues or advocates for a lesbian society that is irrecuperable to patriarchal society in that it is devoid of compromised heterosexual relations with men. So, this is Wittig's own words. She says, That which makes a woman is a particular social relation to man, a relation that we have at other times called servitude, a relation that implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligations,

a relation to which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to remain heterosexual. So, yeah, for the young land, in his first essay, the conclusion is that it is only lesbian warrior women that have the interest and capacity to bring down the police state of colonial reason, right? This is the conclusion. Okay. All right, we're going to move on to the Delighted to Death essay now. So, yeah, in... So, Delighted to Death, it's the 1991 essay. So here, Land in many ways completes his diagnosis of Kant by looking at the third critique, the critique of judgment.

And it's in his third critique where Kant proposes to address how three moral agents, the three moral agents that he studies in his second critique, are able to emerge out of a world operating according to mechanical laws as studied in the first critique. So yeah, to bridge this gap between three moral agents and the mechanical laws of nature, Kant draws upon what he identifies as a third power of judgment and so he's interested in the faculty of judgments a priori principles because he thinks they're going to be a middle term a bridging term between freedom and the mechanics of the concepts or theoretical and practical reason so according to Kant

the a priori principle of our judgments cannot be derived from the categories of the understanding that we've looked at or the practical moral ideas of reason because judgment doesn't actually have a concept of its own. Judgment is merely a faculty for subsuming things under concepts. But at the same time, without an a priori principle governing the power of judgment, judgments couldn't be universally valid. They would have to arbitrarily depend on the contingent objects of experience. Yeah, so what Kant's conclusion is that we need an a-por-a concept governing the power of judgment, but it has to be a concept for which there is no determinate content.

So, I mean, the way he puts this, he says, These rules without which we would have no means of advance from the universal analogy of possible experience in general to a particular must be regarded by understanding as laws, i.e. as necessary, for otherwise they would not form one order of nature, though it be unable to cognise or ever get an insight into their necessity. So just to kind of rephrase that, basically Kant is distinguishing between two kinds of judgment. So firstly, determining judgments, they're the kind of judgments that subsume things under determinate concepts. So an example is, in the first critique, Kant was looking at how concepts of the understanding are determinate concepts subsuming sensible manifolds or appearances. but what he's interested here in terms of the principle of

the judgements that he's interested in the third critique are what he calls reflective judgements and they're reflective judgements are judgements where only the particular is given without a clear universal principle to ground it. There is some principle to ground it but we don't know what it is Okay, so let's break that down a bit more so in the first part of the third critique called the critique of aesthetic judgment, Kant explains that we can find such an indeterminate principle for reflective judgment, specifically in aesthetic judgments of the beautiful and the sublime. So this is why he's turned to aesthetics. This is what motivates it. Now, judgments of aesthetic taste for Kant are not grounded upon the synthesis of some

object under a determinate category of the understanding. instead, which would make it determinate but we're talking about indeterminate concepts here instead for Kant judgments of taste transpire when the imagination assents to the fact that an object seems to confer us some kind of feeling of pleasure by fulfilling some kind of end some kind of concept, some kind of purpose but for which we cannot describe so I mean, Kant breaks this down into four moments of the aesthetic judgment. Yeah, so firstly, again, disinstitute essentially means that it's not, the aesthetic judgment is not serving some end such as a determinate concept of reason

or some kind of moral idea. It's supposed to be an indeterminate or reflexive judgment, therefore it has to be disinstitute. It can't serve some kind of interest. And yeah, so that's what, so aesthetic judgment is disinstitute in that sense. The second moment stipulates that the judged object, the object judged as beautiful or whatever, or aesthetically pleasing, must be capable of being experienced as beautiful, as aesthetically pleasing by everyone universally in order for it to be objectively valid. The third moment states, again, this is kind of repetition, but that the concept that we imagine is grounding our aesthetic judgments, determining our aesthetic judgments is

serving some kind of purposiveness but it's a purposiveness or an end for which we don't have a determinate concept again so this is Kant's famous purposiveness without purpose and the final moment holds that the delight or pleasure in the beautiful is considered necessary and universal because it's referring to a concept it's referring to a universal rule without a concept, like without a determinate content. So yeah, there's a section in the third critique called the deduction of pure aesthetic judgments, and it's here that Kant further explains that since universal judgments of taste

are supposed to be precisely universal for everyone, if they're not to be contingent and subject to scepticism and so on, each of our individual cognitions must be organised in the same way but must be grounded in the same principle and can't cause that principle that we all universally share a common sense or sensus communis so yeah, it's ultimately this sensus communis by which means of which we make judgements of taste but again, it's not determinate, we can't actually spell it out so yeah, just to summarise again aesthetic judgments have four qualities. They're disinterested and universally communicable because they're grounded in a proposiveness without purpose

or common sense. Okay. Now in the dialectic of aesthetic judgment, the next section Kant, again this is in many ways a restatement of what I just said. So Kant addresses what he calls the antinomy of aesthetic judgment. So again, antinomy, remember, has a thesis and antithesis, and Kant's going to try and find some resolution. So the thesis is that judgments of taste cannot be based on concepts, because they would therefore, meaning determinate concepts, because they would not be open, they then would be open to dispute or proofs, when in Kant's view, they're just clearly not. Judgments of taste are universal, we can't dispute them. But the antithesis is that judgments of taste

are based on concepts because without concepts they wouldn't have universal validity. They would just arise from the contingent objects of experience. So Kant's solution, as we've kind of already seen in the four moments of aesthetic judgment, is that judgments of taste do refer to universally valid concepts. They're not contingent and arbitrary. They're universal. And they're grounded in a universal concept. But it's an indeterminate concept that we therefore cannot prove. he says all contradiction disappears however if I say the judgement of taste does depend upon a concept but one from which nothing can be cognised in respect of the object and nothing proved because it is in itself indeterminable and useless for knowledge ok yeah and

yeah it's worth pointing out that the way that Kant solves the antinomy is important for him because it basically means that Kant points out towards the end of this section that our knowledge of God is also an indeterminate concept. Like, we cannot grasp indeterminate concepts God. Therefore, for Kant, beauty is a symbol of the divine. So, for him then, it's this aesthetic judgment, this indeterminate concept that's able to unite practical moral reason, theology and so on, with theoretical reason, with concepts. Yeah, this is what he means. The beautiful is the symbol of the morally good. Okay.

Now, in the second book called The Analytic of the Sublime, and here I think it's going to get a bit more intuitive leading into next week as well. So, yeah, I think this is going to be a lot more intuitive than what the kind of formal technical stuff we've been going through so far. So, yeah, hopefully this helps. okay yeah so in the second book of the third critique called the analytic of the sublime Kant notes that um well he begins by noting similarities and differences between the beautiful and the sublime now the key similarity between the beautiful and sublime is that they are both disinterested and reflective judgments which please universally but Kant's actually more interested in the in the differences and he identifies three key

differences between the beautiful and the sublime. So firstly, while beauty delights in the form of an object, the way that an object seems to conform to some kind of indeterminate principle, the sublime is rather some kind of formlessness of the object for which we cannot account. We cannot, there doesn't seem to be a principle organising the sublime. Secondly, whereas beauty is comparable to what can't cause ornamental charm in the sense that it's pleasing, it's pleasurable. The sublime involves negative feelings which seem to be closer to pain. And above all, this is really the key distinction, is that where the beautiful speaks to a certain purposiveness in nature, it seems to serve some end, even if we can't say determinately what that purpose or end is,

the sublime seems to mark a disharmony, a disjunction between nature and our concepts. When the sublime object contravenes or ruptures with our power of judgment's capacity to subsume or synthesize it under a principle or concept. So Kant says, and Land quotes, Land uses this same quote in Deladded to Death, whereas natural beauty conveys a probosiveness in its form, making the object appear, as it were, already adapted to our power of judgment, that which excites the feeling of the sublime may appear indeed in point of form to contravene the ends of our power of judgment, to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation and to do violence, as it were, to the imagination. Keep in mind that Kant uses the term violence for the sublime because that's going to become important for land

and the use of that word is not his own. It comes from Kant. Now, in the analytics of the sublime, Kant gets more specific and he distinguishes between two types of the sublime. so yeah the mathematical and dynamical sublime so firstly the mathematical sublime is invoked at the kind of quantitative magnitude of an object that is beyond any conceptualization quantitative conceptualization or measure that we can achieve without reason so uh i don't know maybe an example i mean this is can't doesn't know about this but like maybe an example would be something like you know kantor's infinite sets or something like that or girdle's incompleteness theorem right

maybe and then on the other hand the dynamical sublime is the qualitative feeling that we cannot resist some kind of overwhelming fearsome power which appears to be greater than ourselves but in any case in both cases the sublime seems to speak to the failure of the imagination to schematise some kind of overwhelming magnitude or awesome force in nature Kant says there is such an absence of anything leading to particular objective principles and corresponding forms of nature, that it is rather in its chaos or in its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation that nature chiefly excites the ideas of the sublime. There's a

cliche painting of the sublime that I'm sure we've all seen. Yeah. Okay, now yeah so now keep in mind that Kant sees nature as not as a thing in itself right not as an external world but as the sensible manifold generated by our own pure forms of intuition so given that nature is not out there it's our it's our own internally generated sensible experience he qualifies that no object in nature is actually sublime it's not actually rupturing with our cognition, right? Because the sublime is actually generated within reason. Sensibility is within reason. So for Kant then, his

explanation for the sublime is that the sublime is generated by what cannot, that part of our cognition which cannot be presented in determinate sensible experience. Which is to say the ideas of reason. yeah he says here the sublime cannot be contained in any sensuous form but rather concerns ideas of reason which although no adequate presentation of them is possible may be aroused and caused caught to mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation thus the broad ocean agitated by storms cannot be called sublime so yeah far from the sublime confronting us with our helplessness or the impotency of reason before nature it actually affirms our reasons preeminence above nature

which for Kant saves humanity and our person from humiliation and at the same so yeah remember that Kant said that the sublime can cause negative feelings such as pain and not just pleasure and you know if it if it affirms our preeminence one might wonder why is it painful and Kant just points out that if the sublime causes us displeasure as well as pleasure it's because it does require a sacrifice but it's only a sacrifice of one part of ourselves the sensible part of ourselves in the name of another part of ourselves the ideas of reason and yet so Kant concludes that the analytic of the sublime noting that since both aesthetic judgments of beauty and the sublime seem to speak to these ideas of reason

and of God and of moral freedom these kind of ideas it's therefore the faculty which collapses the distinction between freedom and necessity and practical and theoretical reason, or practical and pure reason, which was his motivation for the third critique in the first place. Yeah, okay. Now, Land opens the Delighted to Death essay with the claim, a slightly strange claim, that Kant's basic gesture with his critical philosophy is to limit dogmatic metaphysics excesses by masochistically constraining the grasp of reason to a limited and more certain horizon of possible objects.

So he basically thinks Kant and critical philosophy is a masochism, as it were. And here, Land contrasts Kant's critical project with Descartes. so there's something that might seem very similar between Descartes and Kant because both involve a scepticism towards the ability of us to have knowledge of ourselves, of the external world, of God and so on, but there's a key difference obviously between Descartes and Kant, so Descartes only uses hyperbolic doubt and doubting all things, the existence of himself and so on, he only uses sceptical doubt as a stepping stone on the way to achieve certain knowledge and absolute knowledge and indubitable knowledge about himself, the cogito, about the world, and about God.

So scepticism in Descartes is subordinated to some kind of absolute knowing, as it were. But on the other hand, Kant's critical method really does, the scepticism in the critical method is really used to truly renounce our pretensions to go beyond ourselves and think the absolute. So Land says, Kant steeled himself against the seductions of the whore of reason pursuing an ascetic doctrine that he baptised critical philosophy. And Land gives another example of what he sees as Kant's kind of hunger for truth and the hunger for truth as involving some kind of joyful self-destruction or masochism or asceticism. And the other example he gives initially is that Kant was profoundly fascinated by the French Revolution.

certainly Land knows that Kant was critical of the revolution's violent excesses during the reign of terror but in a strange kind of counter reading of Kant's criticisms of the reign of terror Land argues that since the Jacobins the French revolutionaries imprisoned free thinkers like Desaad because of what Land calls the mystical delirium of Desaard's atheism. So since the Jacobins are prohibiting these kinds of, actually imprisoning Desaard and these kinds of free thinkers, Land suggests that maybe Kant turned away from the French Revolution not because it was too violent, but because its bloodletting was not violent enough, right? It wasn't excessive enough.

So he says, in the second point, it is equally possible to suggest that in so far as Kant turned away from the French Revolution, it was because it basically restrained, it's basically restrained and utilitarian secularism failed to quench his thirst for extinction. So Land uses just these initial examples of both Kant's kind of ascetic critical gesture and Kant's response to the French Revolution to suggest that, quote, Kant is the first philosopher of intolerable pleasure. meaning that Kant is the first to really rigorously grasp the way that we can be truly delighted in death for some reason so yeah, Land says uninhibited pleasure does not tend to the benefit of the organism

but rather to its immolation life is not consumed by death at its point of greatest depression but at its peak so Kant suggests that pleasure is the combustion of life and we survive by smouldering now here Land hasn't forgotten his earlier reading of Kant as capitalism's greatest greatest ideologue either so yeah even in this essay Land argues that Kant's asceticism this kind of masochism captures the and you know other people have claimed this as well like Weber Max Weber but yeah Land argues that Kant's asceticism captures the very ethic of capital accumulation whereby the capitalists must invest and sacrifice billions and billions of capital to invest in the productive forces in order to generate more capital, which is still not enough

for the capitalists, but they must reinvest it again and again and again, constantly sacrificing billions without ever attaining enough in sort of aesthetic worship of, you know, not God but the invisible hand of the market. so yeah this lamb says it was Kant's genius to combine the saint with the bourgeoisie he was not immune to the prevalent aesthetic practice of our age accumulation only religion speaks the sort of language that could possibly affirm the conclusive loss of terrestrial pleasure such as that which is represented by the subordination of consumption to the massing of productive resources so i mean the idea here is just to say that you know just as much like the Christian martyrs

endured absolute horror and tortures and so on and death out of the hope of achieving some kind of ecstatic exquisite truissance in the afterlife, in heaven so does the capitalist invest in a very aesthetic way all of their money into productive forces out of the hope of monopolising the market yeah so for land and and you know maybe for kant as well it's not utilitarian neoclassical political economists like smith and ricardo it's it's not them that best express the logic of capital accumulation it's rather the martyr and the aesthetic right okay so

yeah so according to land the place where can't best so we're getting some examples here right like the logic the masochistic logic of a critical gesture can't's fascination with the french revolution but land's going to focus on the sublime because he thinks that it's in the analytic of the sublime that Kant best articulates this at once religious and yet also modern idea that death can lead to a higher, truer life. And why the sublime? It's because in the analytic of sublime, that's precisely where Kant seems to acknowledge that some objects of experience do seem to break with our imagination's capacity to schematise them

according to concepts of reason. as land notes both the mathematical and dynamical senses of the sublime in Kant emerge from essentially from the feeling of our own finitude vulnerability and inferiority before nature's awesome forces beyond our imagining he says the mathematical sublime is associated with the insignificance of the human animal and the dynamic sublime with its vulnerability so on land's reading the sublime speaks to the part of the sensible world over which human reason cannot impose its concepts. So for Land, the sublime is really the one moment in the Kantian system where we can sort of delight in unguarded access to a higher truth, but only by way of the violent scission

with our own ego, our own reason. So Land says, Kant's theory of the sublime is concerned with the supernatural delight experienced by the self when it intuits the splitting of itself. You know, it's no wonder that throughout the analytic of the sublime, Kant constantly describes the sublime as generating both horror and sacred awe, as those are Kant's terms. But yeah, so the idea is that given that Kant seems to suggest that we can partake in the pleasures associated with this horror and sacred awe only at the point where our ego disintegrates, Land ultimately situates Kant's theory of the sublime as what he calls an extreme point in the history of

occidental mysticism ok now it's crucial to note that Land has not misread Kant's idea of the sensible objects of experience that the imagination cannot synthesise as the things in themselves so in other words land is fully aware as we sort of saw when I went through the analytic of the sublime land is fully aware that Kant remains fully within the bounds of reason such that he sees the sublime as resulting from the way that the ideas of reason rupture or are in disjunction with the sensible objects of experience which are also generated by our cognition

so in other words the Kantian sublime is exclusively generated in thought through this disjunction, this disharmony between the grandeur of reasons, ideas and the measly phenomena of experience. So this is what Land's getting at when he says Kant would have us believe that this sacrificial consumption of animality merely exposes the transcendentally established truth of reason in respect of the body. It would be the confirmation rather than the generation of the absolute supremacy enjoyed by the part of us that we share with the angels over the part that we share with the beasts. So, yeah, clearly my point is that land recognises that Kant is not saying that sensible objects, you know, such as mountains or oceans or whatever, are sublime in themselves,

completely rupturing with our cognition. Rather, those sensible things, very inadequacy to capture the all-encompassing ideas of reason is what gives rise to the sense of the sublime. okay so yeah now despite Kant's intention of which Land fully acknowledges to submit kind of our sensible animal part to transcendental ideality Land persists that Kant cannot help but repeatedly trace a numeral animalities bite marks on the surface of our transcendental experience he says it would be difficult to delineate the violent desire to consummate the purity of reason

in the annihilation of animality more starkly. But this does not prevent Kant from elaborating upon these horrors for page after page. Okay, so what Lann's admittedly creative reading of the Analytic of the Sublime ultimately proposes to do is re-evaluate the sensible animality that the imagination cannot synthesise, as nothing other than nature, matter, understood as the thing in itself, the fanged numenon. So, you know, here opposing Kant's conclusion that the sublime is merely a secondary result of the conflict of our faculties, Land argues that would he cause a materialist reading of Kant towards the issue of his mysticism would reinterpret the sublime as, you know,

the real first principle, as the primal ground of things. Land says it is important to begin with the sublime rather than aesthetic contemplation in general and to read the sublime as generative rather than revelatory in its relation to reason. So in other words the civil war of the faculties is for Kant the sublime is a civil war of the faculties whereas for Land he wants to see the civil war of the faculties give way to a kind of all-out absolutely alien invasion that neither sense or the concept can come to terms with. Yeah, so if the sublime comes first, then reason for land has to be seen as a secondary process that divides and distorts the sublime noumenon to constitute itself as the limited experience

of merely possible objects. and according to land Kant himself unwittingly asserted the primacy of the sublime when he had to note how the imagination has to constantly do violence to sensibility to reshape it into a in accord with reason with the ideas of reason so land says reason is something that must be built and the site of its construction first requires a demolition the object of this demolition is the synthetic capability that Kant refers to as the imagination. Now, you know, here Land just makes a strange analogy with oppressive political regimes. It's just based on like a kind of understanding of oppressive regimes

where if a regime is being actively violent and oppressive, that's not a sign of strength, that's a sign of impotency, that it's not able to control its populace. So as with these kind of secretly impotent and openly oppressed of political regimes, Land suggests that the imagination's open violence and hostility towards sensibility in Kant betrays its fear, the imagination's fear that it's going to be too weak and impotent to be able to contain the feral alterity outside it. So this is what Land means when he says, if reason is so secure, legitimate, super sensibly guaranteed, why all the guns? Why all these deductions, demonstrations and proofs of reason, preeminence over nature. So, yeah, the bottom line is that the imagination,

despite all these deductions and demonstrations, continues to be haunted by some kind of sublime animality whenever the sensible part of ourselves seems to split and exceed our own reason. Yeah, so Land concludes, the pain resulting from the defeat of the imagination or the animal part of the mind is the tension that propels the mind as a whole into the rapture of sublime experience. Sublime pleasure is an experience of the impossibility of experience, an intuition of that part of the self that exceeds intuition by means of an immolating failure of intuition. Yeah, okay, so... Yeah, just to conclude, so on Land's reading, the sublime marks this eruption of sensible animality

that the imagination cannot subsume under the concepts of reason. And it's an eruption which nonetheless kind of evokes a certain perverse delight, a perverse pleasure at the splintering of our own selves in a way that kind of records the mystics, you know, aesthetic communion with the beyond as their ego peels away. Okay, so, yeah. So now, seeing through this kind of land's mystical and materialist kind of re-reading of Kant. The key point is that reason can only encounter... It sort of can encounter a radical alterity, but it can only do so through a violent rupture with itself in which it essentially feasts upon its own blood. So I think we've come to land's closest

to positive approximation yet of what numeral reality is like in itself. Insofar, as he envisions a co-identity between matter and death, nature and destruction, self-destruction, and being and non-being. He says, and this is in Thirst for Annihilation, one must first unleash the noumenon from its determination as problematic object in order to glimpse that between matter and death there is both a certain identity and an intricate relation. Okay, now, even here, there's a really important, crucial sense in which Land wants to maintain Kant's transcendental method of critique. He doesn't think that he's doing anything other than transcendental critique, Land.

But that's provided we understand transcendental critique to mean something like the diagnosis of false projections of concepts of reason onto numeral reality. So for Land, insofar as Kant enacts his critique of dogmatic metaphysics anthropomorphizations by prohibiting thought from going beyond itself, Kant still remains too dogmatic in a way, too egocentric. And we've already seen how this kind of idealist form of Kantian critique can even be seen as a last line of defence against... a last line of defence of the very anthropomorphism that it purportedly critiques by cutting off any legitimate inquiry into the outside. limiting philosophy and thought to its own narcissistic countenance, its own mirror image.

So what Land proposes to do is uphold Kant's transcendental method, but materialise it. Materialise it by critiquing anthropocentrism from the point of view of some kind of absolute exteriority to thought, which thought could not therefore ever synthesise. So we've got two kinds of transcendental philosophy. on the bottom there. So Kant's transcendental idealism critiques anthropomorphism by exposing how dogmatic metaphysics conflates phenomena for things in themselves. On the other hand, what Land wants to do, and what he's proposing, is a transcendental materialism which would critique Kant's own anthropocentric vestiges by appeal to a kind of external materiality which thought cannot schematise, it cannot subsume, because that reality would mark nothing

less than the complete decimation of thought itself. Okay, yeah, and this is already, you know, land's transcendental materialism is already exemplified in the way in which land modifies Kant's analytic of the sublime, right? So instead of envisioning the sublime as a testament to the supremacy of reason, land re-evaluates it as an external reality which ruptures and decimates reason. So yeah, as we're going to see in the coming weeks, the key idea is that by materialising the transcendental method, Land thinks he's able to continue Kant's critique of anthropomorphism, of dogmatic metaphysics but include within this critique Kant's own anthropocentric residuals by appealing to, yeah, again

an external reality Yeah, okay, so I think we can already, at this stage at least begin to glimpse the germ of Land's own constructive project which essentially means overturning Kant's idealism towards objects of experience or the sublime or the sensible by reconceiving nature's sublimity as a kind of primal numina and hence human reason as a secondary dissimulation and mutilation of that primal matter in order to constitute itself and its possible objects of experience. okay uh yeah okay so just to finish um yeah so next week yeah a lot of the kantian stuff was real technical and formal i get that so next

week uh when we look at heidegger's land's critique of heidegger's reading of treckle's poetry it's going to be much more kind of intuitive i think more commonsensical um yeah so i think next week we're going to get a better grasp of what's going on here but uh just just So just to sort of seg into that, I think there's two images that are worth contrasting because I think it helps us, again, gives us an intuitive sense of what's going on here. So in the first critique of pure reason, at one point Kant describes his transcendental idealism as having at least discovered what he calls an island of truth, an island of certainty, so long as we remain shored up on this island and don't seek to sort of voyage out into the stormy oceans that Kant associates with the noumena, with beyond the bounds of possible experience.

So Kant says, This land is an island, and enclosed in unalterable boundaries by nature itself, it is the land of truth, surrounded by a broad and stormy ocean, the true seat of illusion, where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands, and ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes the voyager looking around for new discoveries, entwined in adventures from which he can never escape. Now, in a chapter in the Thirst for Annihilation called Fang, Pneumon, Passion of the Cyclone, I think Land nicely encapsulates his critique of Kant by juxtaposing this metaphor of the island of reason with his own metaphor of the cyclone. So as Land notes, since records began in the 18th century, cyclones have killed millions of people

as they accumulate energy built up over feedback loops and smash them against coastal towns and cities. Land's point is that given that the Numenon, like the cyclone, comes from the sea, I think Kant's metaphor, it comes from the sea only to reap death and destruction upon reasons, islands of truth, it's unsurprising that Kant would have what Land calls a fear of the sea and seek to prohibit all expeditions by conceiving of the oceans, as Land puts it, having no sense except as a failure of the land. Yeah, but despite the psychotic catastrophe that these oceans comprising notably most of the Earth's surface, despite this psychotic catastrophe that they cause and can reap upon us,

Land insists that what he calls Kant's terrestrialism is completely asinine, in that it amounts to, again, what Land calls a deliberate blindness towards death. although death is obviously terrifying Land argues that any true philosopher who sincerely loves wisdom philosophy will find some kind of sublime pleasure and sacred perverse awe by voyaging out to these numinal seas even as they threaten to sink us. So Land says a dark fluidity at the roots of our nature rebels against the security of terra firma provoking a wave of anxiety in which we have submerged until we feel ourselves drowning with representation draining away. So in other words, whereas Kant shores himself up out of a fear of

mystery that he euphemises under the terms like disinstitiveness and discipline, what Land is going to propose to do is that we ride this cyclone to wisdom, even as it completely wrecks the Kantian coast because riding the cyclone will be the fastest way to what this course is all about, which is unknown lands, right? So I'm going to leave it there, but yeah. the rest of this course is going to be nothing but riding the cyclone, okay? So, thanks. If there's any questions, I mean, like, if people need to go, it's 8.30, but if anyone has any questions, I'm happy to ask that as well. Yeah. So, just sort of like, I don't understand, I mean, it's really important to sort of

get the movement sort of in itself in a way. Can you ask to sort of say the fact that you're not really going for anything new you're just sort of extending the bad news of the phenomenon? I mean this would be we'll look at this next week a bit because that would be Hegel's kind of move out of Kant but for land it's not we're not, we can't positively experience this new moon earth he agrees with Kant in that sense we're only going to experience it as non-experience as the complete decimation of experience which is why it's aligned with death so it's not really expanding I mean it only

its exploration only expands our possible knowledge, our possible objects and so on in so far as we get a better grasp an identification of the Numenite as a limit concept maybe but we're not grasping it further into the in itself yeah did you have a question sorry if this sounds a little naive but is there any significant difference between the account of the Numen on transcendental materialism and the Lacanian realm it sounds so similar sorry the account of whose Numen at the Ants or Cots you know the Lacanian realm

it's a complete destruction of knowledge and how conceptualises it's the extent you always kind of ignore it yeah I mean the problem I mean you know I don't know enough about the Khan to really like you know go off my way through this but I mean from what I have read of the Khan isn't the real generated by the symbolic though and by language so it's not that the real is anterior to the symbolic. It's like it's an excess in the symbolic in language. So it presupposes language. I mean, that's what I would think. Yeah, so I'm not... It kind of sounds more like the cartoon sublime in a way, maybe.

I should say it was a naive question, sorry. Oh, no, certainly not. Yeah, so I'm not sure. Well, we'll see in week four that Lan does take issue with Lacan. He does think Lacan is like this kind of Kantian idealist. So yeah, we'll look at that briefly in week four. So maybe we can get some, shed some light then. But yeah. Yeah. Any other questions? Okay. All right. All right. Well, thanks. Thanks for coming.