Unknown Lands - Lecture 3

Alright, I guess we may as well get started, 6.30. Okay, so having by this point fastidiously kind of lambasted Kant and the phenomenologists as his key theoretical nemeses, the rest of Land's early writings trace another post-Kantian tradition that Land calls libidinal materialism, a tradition whose adherence sees upon death as the ultimate transcendental horizon from whence to critique anthropomorphizations of reality. Now, according to the portrait that Land provides in his book The Thirst for Annihilation, libidinal materialism is characterized by four key traits. So, firstly, it enacts, libidinal materialism enacts what Land calls a dehumanization of nature

by alighting the transcendental ego in favour of impersonal energies and forces. Secondly, libidinal materialism implies a ruthless fatalism according to which our intentions and actions have no power to alter the world which is completely indifferent to our desires, values, wants and needs. Thirdly, it's defined by the absence of all moralising to the extent that the fatalism, the second part, renders our moral values and ethical acts superfluous and meaningless. And finally, libidinal materialists harbour a profound contempt for commonplace opinions and especially for the rather narcissistic belief that our concerns have any sway over the world.

So in short, the libidinal materialist tradition essentially consists in the critique of all anthropocentric philosophies by showing how our thinking is just a secondary and rather dissimulating representation of more primal forces and inhuman drives. Okay, now apart from this fourfold criterion that we're going to break down today, Land tends to analyse libidinal materialism in terms of its specific thinkers, right? So in the first half of this lecture, I'm going to first consider Land's readings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud as really the first three thinkers to have uncovered this kind of savage, impersonal energy transcending our rational knowledge.

And then in the second half, I'll turn to Bataille, and particularly Bataille's confrontation with Socrates. So that's, again, two parts. Okay, so part one. Now, Landbest outlines his history of libidinal materialism in the First for Annihilation, as well as a 1991 essay called Art is Insurrection, the question of aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I think from last week we can already see, specifically from Land's reading of Trackel, that art is conceived in Land's philosophy as a sort of insurrectionary site where this inhuman outside can be savoured. Land, in the epigraph to Art is Insurrection, which is actually Land quoting himself,

he says, artists are those savage beasts that can't get enough of too much. They can't get enough of too much in the pursuit of this kind of excess beyond all reason. Land's privileging of art as sort of the apotheosis of nature's sublime insurrection ultimately stems from his understanding of the libidinal materialist tradition as originating through a certain reading of Kant's concept of genius in the third critique of judgment. so I'm going to first just go through in the first week actually I only got halfway through the critique of judgment so we're just going to go back to that and just go through the second half of the third critique just to set the scene so in the appendix to the critique of aesthetic judgment Kant makes a

distinction between artistic works specifically he distinguishes artistic works from natural creations in that artistic works are produced through a rational free choice whereas natural products aren't and Kant makes another distinction, he says that art is distinct from science in that art is practical and creative rather than a simple kind of theoretical application of a clear rule and finally a third distinction is that art is different from handicraft in that it's not created for a specific purpose or determinate end such as for example, you know, monetary remuneration, which is the main exchange value of handicraft. So the bottom line of all these distinctions is that

here, as with the aesthetic judgments we looked at in the first week, art, fine art, is a product stemming from some kind of indeterminate concept or unknown end which evokes delight. Now, since fine art is not produced through the application of some determinate end in mind, it must come from another source, and this other source is what Kant calls genius he calls genius the innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art and therein lies why Kant insists that genius cannot be learnt or taught the idea is that since aesthetic ideas are not created through any determinate concepts any clear purpose in mind but just from this natural talent endowed by nature the artist does not really know themselves

the source through which they're actually composing their works of art. So Kant says, where an author owes a product to his genius, he does not himself know how the ideas for it have entered into his head, nor has he in his power to invent the like at pleasure or methodologically and communicate the same to others. So while the genius, the artistic genius, must always convey their aesthetic ideas through determinate artistic materials, through some kind of art form the artist only does so in a way as to inspire the imagination to find a kind of larger transcendent concept that is the actual aesthetic idea irreducible to the determinate materials that they're using and yet this is why Kant sees poetry as the highest art form

because the poet's use of words is already purely conceptual and hence able to more easily inspire indeterminate concepts unmixed with determinate, sensible materials. So Kant says, the last point, from among the boundless multiplicity of possible forms in accordance with a given concept, to whose bounds it is restricted, poetry offers that one which couples with the presentation of the concept a wealth of thought to which no verbal expression is completely adequate. So yeah, the bottom line is that for Kant, artistic genius is a kind of blind, unconscious force indifferent to any determinate concepts of reason. okay so yeah for an idealist like Kant

the genius's natural talent refers to their intuition of the concepts according to which they're able to synthesize sensible materials in order to elicit some kind of universal delight and so that's the idealist account of genius but on land's materialist account genius should not be seen as something which synthesizes a sensible manifold by subsuming it under the rule of an indeterminate concept. Instead, genius now denotes a kind of passive, impersonal expression of an inhuman nature's own creative, libidinal energy. Land says, Kant's word genius is the thought of an utterly impersonal creativity that is theoretically registered as the radical discontinuity of the example of irresponsible legislation

as order without anyone giving the orders. so yeah again if the genius cannot teach uh their talent as Kant claims it's precisely because they did not consciously create their works of art rather uh that they the artist is just merely the instrument through which nature legislates for itself irrespective of the artist's conscious reasoning about their work so so contrary to Kant's reading uh if we take the case of poetry again poetry is not the synthesis of nature according to kind of discursive rules of reason in determinate reason, rather poetry is the sublime rupture with concepts of reason according to nature's transgression so Land says poetry is an invasion and not expression, a trajectory of incineration

so great poetry is not beautiful in the Kantian sense that it mediates a sensible manifold through some kind of common sense or sensus communis as we saw in the first week on the contrary poetry is actually hideous because it marks a cut in communication that cannot be assimilated into the sameness of of the self the transcendental subject so land goes on true poetry is hideous because it is base communication in contrast to pseudo communicative discourse words are passages leading into and through lost mazes and not edifications in land's view then it's precisely because great poets trace nature's sublime transgression of the unity of reason that can't tries ultimately tries to reduce the beauty of art

to either a symbol of moral reasons idea of the highest good or a sublime testament to the ideas of reason superiority to any particular sensible objects so contrary to can't's again transcendental idealist reading of genius as speaking to this senseless communists, these grand ideas of reason. Land's transcendental materialist reading envisions genius as a kind of unconscious disruption of reason which emanates from a sublime nature's incongruous laws. Yeah, so in the last point, Land says it is no doubt comforting to speak of the genius as if impersonal creative energy were commensurable with the order of autonomous individuality governed by reason, but it does not belong to a psychological lexicon. Far more appropriate is the language of

seismic upheaval, inundation, disease, the onslaught of raw energy from without. One is a genius only in the sense that one is a syphilitic, in the sense that one is violently problematised by a ferocious exteriority. So on Land's reading what Kant discovered in the third critique by its end was that reason had failed to fully tame the chaos of nature as nature comes to unleash itself through artistic genius. In the third critique, second part, called the Critique of Theological Judgment, Kant then sets out to sort of outlaw nature once more through an account of what he calls theological judgment, which are judgments by means of which we consider natural objects as if they have some kind of purpose or end in themselves,

which is derived from thought. Again, it's an end that's indeterminate. so more precisely Kant distinguishes between two kinds of purposiveness here firstly there's an extrinsic purposiveness whereby an object is a means to an end so for example we use certain things to end, like this water bottle is a means for me to quench my thirst or something like that and then on the other hand there's intrinsic purposes where a thing is an end unto itself for Kant are means for animal survival because they eat them to survive and animals are also means for our ends because we eat them as well and use them to grow crops and farm and so on

while all these other kind of organisms are means to at least our end, only humans harbour this intrinsic purposiveness in so far as we are an end unto ourselves and if humans are what can't cause nature's ultimate end, it's because we harbour the freedom to rationally determine ourselves. So we're able to determine what our end is. And in particular Kant notes that our freedom permits us to strive after the moral law, the highest good, which is again the highest end imaginable. So Land says oh this is Kant actually man is the only natural creature whose peculiar objective characterisation is nevertheless such as to enable us to recognise in him a super sensible faculty, his freedom

and to perceive both the law of the causality and the object of freedom which that faculty is able to set before itself as the highest end. Without humanity then, Kant says that the whole of creation would be a, this is a quote, the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain and have no final end. So in the second division of the critique of theological judgment called the dialectic, Kant returns to the book's key question about how free moral agents can emerge from a mechanical nature. And so to reconcile our moral agency with the necessary laws of nature, Kant ultimately locates a kind of unifying principle in the idea of a God. A God who creates all of nature, including ourselves,

with the purpose of pursuing the moral law. Now, at least for Kant, this postulate of God is not a kind of dogmatic retreat from his critical philosophy. because recall that he sort of refuted all these other proofs of God but this postulate of God is not a dogmatic metaphysical proof of God because it's a postulate of an indeterminate God like this indeterminate super intelligence that we cannot know as opposed to a God that we can understand and subsume under our concepts of reason as per kind of medieval philosophy's rather anthropomorphic conception of God yeah so Kant says yeah the last point the only way I can judge of the possibility of those things of their production is by conceiving for the purpose

a cause working designedly so it's only such a super sensible God that permits Kant to unite our theoretical reason operating according to mechanical laws with our practical or moral reason operating according to our freedom our free rational deliberation okay now in light of Kant's concepts of both this kind of telos of nature and artistic genius as well as the beautiful in the sublime that we looked at in the first week what the Kantian corpus ultimately leaves us with as far as land is concerned are two equally kind of logical routes after what we might call the death of god so on the one hand we have the possibility of an unconditional humanism according to which nature is reduced to a mere correlate of the transcendental

eye or subject and we looked at this in last week this is the phenomenological tradition out of Kant from Hegel to Derrida and then on the other hand there's the possibility of a virulent nihilism according to which humanity is merely the plaything of more primordial unconscious forces and that's what we're going to look at this week and next week and that's what Lang causes libidinal materialist tradition from Schopenhauer to Deleuze and Guattari. Okay, so Land's materialist reading of genius as nature's shattering of the mirror of reason harks back to Schopenhauer's reading of Kant, a reading which is really the founding gesture of libidinal materialism. Okay, so Schopenhauer begins his two-volume magnum opus

The World as Will and Representation by taking off from Kant's transcendental distinction between appearances for us and things in themselves, phenomena and noumena. Schopenhauer says, Kant's greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect. So clearly Schopenhauer has no time for Hegel and other German idealists or what Schopenhauer calls, these are his words, the notorious sophists of the post-Kantian period. He has no time to them to the extent that he sees all of these German idealists as conflating the real with the ideal in a way which recapitulates dogmatic metaphysics under the mistaken belief that we can have direct access to the thing in itself through the concepts of reason.

So in the first of four books that make up the world as will and representation, Schopenhauer instead explains, as per Kant, that the entire world as we know it is merely a representation of it such as it appears to us through the categories of understanding and the concepts of reason. In particular Schopenhauer explains that the seemingly external world is determined by the pure forms of space and time which differentiate things into individual things and multiplicities and differences as well as causality as the key category of how we organise the multiplicity of things in space and time. So that's all just straight out of the first critique of Kant. So in the second book, Schopenhauer argues that

none of the natural sciences which depend on causal relations in space and time, none of them can therefore grasp what the world is like beyond the phenomena of possible experience. Even the seemingly immediate knowledge of our own body is actually, we actually only have knowledge of our own body as an external object in space and time and so we're not accessing even our own bodies in themselves. But nonetheless, Schopenhauer persists that along with our representations of outward things, we also have this kind of inner sense or feeling of will, will as the driving motor of our body's actions. Now given Schopenhauer argues that the will is not empirically observable, like we don't see it anywhere, and it's therefore not mediated through the forms of space and time,

the will must be what our body is like in itself so Schopenhauer says willing is the one thing known to us immediately and not given to us merely in the representation or else is here therefore lies the datum alone capable of becoming the key to everything else or as I have said the only narrow gateway to truth and Schopenhauer even goes so far as to argue that the will is nothing other than not just the numeral ground of our own individual bodies, but it's actually the numeral ground of all representations, everything. And this is because if the will is separate from phenomena, it's not subject to space and time, it's also not subject to individuation and plurality, which is only generated through the forms of space and time. So Schopenhauer says,

we have called time and space the individuating principle because only through them and in them is plurality of the homogenous possible. This plurality, however, does not concern the will as thing in itself, but only its phenomena. The will is present, whole and undivided. So whereas Kant's notion of will aligns it to a kind of duty to reason's unconditional law, Schopenhauer here is affirming what Land calls a non-agentic will, which is anterior to the concepts of reason that it actually generates or grounds. So Land says, rather than thinking willing as the movement by which conceptually articulate decision is realised in nature, Schopenhauer understands the appearance of rational decisions as a derivative consequence of pre-intellectual and ultimately pre-personal

even pre-organic willing. So it's precisely this notion of an impersonal unconscious will irreducible to phenomena that land is going to seize upon as an imperfect but nonetheless inaugurating gesture in this libidinal materialist strand of post-Kantian philosophy. Okay. actually yeah so given Schopenhauer goes on that our will is whole and undivided, it's undifferentiated or individual representations can only be what he calls different grades objectifications or ideas of this one and the same primal will expressing itself through us as well as animals, plants and even inorganic matter animals for instance

express the will in the form of their instincts to pursue certain activities Schopenhauer gives the example of a spider which seems to wheel a cobweb without realising, actually consciously knowing what it's doing. Plants also seem to react to environmental stimuli as if they were feeling pleasure or pain. Obviously they're not conscious. The way that a plant seems to strive for sunlight. And even the force of gravity for Schopenhauer seems to wheel things to it, and magnetic forces seem to repel and attract things to it, again as if willing or repulsing them. And in particular Schopenhauer argues that even humanity's own kind of higher faculties of reason and morality and so on are just secondary byproducts of this pre-individual will. Whereas Kant reifies reason as the arbiter of all phenomena

Schopenhauer demotes reason to just one arbitrary instrument among many others of a more primordial and impersonal will's endless striving. Okay, so a crucial kind of corollary of the fact that the intellect is only one determinate expression of the will is that our intellect has no greater purchase on the ultimate reality of the world than any other phenomena. Schopenhauer says, All these facts are evidence of the complete difference between the will and the intellect and demonstrate the will's primacy and the intellect's subordinate position. So yeah, whereas Kant tends to see nature as emerging out of the intellect, Schopenhauer sees reason emerging out of a non-conceptual nature by shifting the notion of will, what Land says, not in an idealist or phenomenological direction, but towards unconscious willing.

So Land goes on. Yeah, where Kant distorts, marginalises and obscures the thought of the unconscious, Schopenhauer emphasises and develops it. He defines the pretensions of imperialistic idealism by describing reason as a derivative abstraction from the understanding. Again, the idea is that rather than bracket nature by reducing the objects to the transcendental subject's own self-positing in a kind of further landlocking upon the Kantian island of reason, as the phenomenological tradition did last week, what Schopenhauer is doing is he's regionalising or parochialising the subject as just a mere plaything of a blind, more primal puppet master, the will. So in this way Schopenhauer, for Land, becomes the first true metaphysician

in the sense that he neither renounces the search for the absolute, for the thing in itself, but he doesn't also misrecognise the absolute for something made in our own image. Okay, now the only flaw that Land finds in Schopenhauer or the key flaw is Schopenhauer's still or too human predilection to view this numeral will as ethically abhorrent such that Schopenhauer ultimately seeks to renounce and repress the will. Land says Schopenhauer considers the anarchic character of the pre-ontological cosmic bedrock to be morally objectionable and merely replaces its traditional theistic determination with an extrinsic moral principle of absolute negation or denial of the will.

So why does Schopenhauer find the will morally abhorrent? It's because his reasoning is that given that our desires are manifestations of this endless willing, this will to will, none of our desires can actually be fully satisfied. And consequently, the reality of the will condemns us to a life of unquenchable want and infernal suffering. So this is, Schopenhauer says, no satisfaction, however, is lasting. On the contrary, it is always merely the starting point of a fresh striving, thus that there is no ultimate aim of striving means that there is no measure or end of suffering now as we'll see in a moment whereas Nietzsche will find a way to affirm our suffering Schopenhauer seeks to find a more kind of serene and peaceful state which is akin to the securities that Kantian reason and the god of dogmatic metaphysics were able to provide but no longer

can so in the third book so yeah that's the last two books of the world as will in representation are essentially an attempt to repress the discovery of the first two books of The Welder's Will. Okay, so yeah, in the third book, Schopenhauer looks to art as a force for abstracting things from their everyday use value for our individual will. So his key example is that in still-life paintings of fruits and other vegetables and so on, typically if we're in a sort of aesthetic contemplative state, we do not desire to eat, say, an apple in a still life painting. Rather, we look at these foods in a disinterested way, such as for their symbolic moral meaning or their formal shape and colour,

whatever is the case. So, artistic works for Schopenhauer... Oh, sorry. So, yeah, a life kind of modelled on aesthetics then, or aesthetic contemplation for Schopenhauer, would renounce the striving after our individual desires as being in vain. when we're in an aesthetic state of contemplation we're no longer seeking to fulfill our individual interests like can I eat this apple or whatever it puts us in a state where the ego kind of dissolves away so yeah Schopenhauer says genius is the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception to lose oneself in perception to remove from the service of the will the knowledge which originally existed only for this service even more so than can't

Schopenhauer emphasises that artistic genius is, and this is his word, a madness, a madness which is distinct from rational abstract knowledge, insofar as artistic genius stems from this primal will, this numeral will, beyond the categories of understanding and the forms of intuition which merely serve our individuated self-interest. so it's in this way that Schopenhauer thinks aesthetic beauty amounts to a kind of transcendent escape from our individual willing into a kind of platonic realm of serene disinterested oneness beyond the horror show of our phenomenal existence so in the final book Schopenhauer qualifies that while artistic genius can resign

their self-interested willing for a short period of time when we're in a state of ascetic contemplation. It's only the kind of saintly figure that's able to, the kind of religious figure that's capable of permanently renouncing their will in favour of a kind of severe extreme asceticism. More precisely, Schopenhauer encourages an ethics of what he calls compassion, where compassion means to treat others as ourselves. The idea is that since compassion consists in emphasising with another's well-being as if it were our own, it is through compassion that we relinquish our own individual phenomenal self by assisting others. So if we're identifying with someone else, then again, the individual ego, the phenomenal ego,

seems to melt away. So yeah, for Schopenhauer, it's compassion that permits us to renounce the futile pursuit of our own desires in favour of, again, a serene peacefulness in the aid of others. Schopenhauer says, the aesthetic has a presentiment that however much time and space separate him from other individuals in themselves and apart from the representation and its form it is the one will to live appearing in them all. So we can think of examples for this right so you know someone who gives away all of their wealth to charity is not serving their own interest their own will it's rather they're treating others wills as if it was one and the same with their own you know in a way that seems to renounce the kind of multiplicity of individuals generated by the forms of space and time.

Okay, so despite Schopenhauer's rejection of dogmatic metaphysics, at least initially, this ethics ultimately seems to turn against his own discovery of this non-agentic will in favour of a return to an essentially kind of Christian, or at least more generally religious, moralism. I think there's a sense in which this renunciation of the individual will is actually still profoundly nihilistic to the extent that it literally involves dissolving ourselves into a greater inhuman will. Schopenhauer directly advocates that the highest ethical ideal is voluntary starvation. He says this. So it's still, in some sense, profoundly nihilistic, but Schopenhauer only kind of enters into this nihilistic pact with the will so as to precisely deny the will and the infernal pain and misery that it reaps.

Okay, now, although Schopenhauer ultimately advocates disinstituted aesthetic beauty as a kind of loophole out of the world of endless suffering, Land notes that Schopenhauer also identifies another kind of beauty, a second kind of beauty, which, you know, as a notorious misogynist, is exemplified by the female body for Schopenhauer. So, yeah, particularly in a chapter in the last book called The Metaphysics of Sexual Love, Schopenhauer identifies another kind of beauty that does not lead us to disavow the will, as per aesthetic beauty, but actually gets us to affirm the will ever further. And Schopenhauer is here speaking of romantic love, passion. A romantic love that for him is rooted in the sexual impulse

to affirm the will to live through breeding new generations of life. Given the history of misery and conflict that the search for romantic beauty has reaped upon humankind, in Schopenhauer's view, this kind of beauty can only be seen as obliging us to descend ever further into an endless striving rather than renounce it as per aesthetic beauty so this is Schopenhauer's description of this romantic beauty, he says every day it bruises and hatches the worst and most perplexing quarrels and disputes, destroys the most valuable relationships and breaks the strongest bonds, it demands the sacrifice sometimes of life or health, sometimes of wealth, position and happiness, it appears on the whole as a malevolent demon, striving to pervert, to confuse, and to overthrow everything.

So yeah, while Schopenhauer's aesthetic beauty would have us spurn the brute fact of the will, in favour of some kind of peaceful serenity, Land suggests that we pursue this feminine, what Schopenhauer characterises as feminine beauty, as it leads ever deeper into the inferno of willing. Land says, there is also another troubling, enticing, arousing and captivating type of beauty. Nietzsche will come to say that it is the only one, the beauty that is exemplified in post-Hellenic Western history at least in the female body. The anagoic disinterestedness of resignation is echoed and parodied by an indifference to ego interest that leads in a quite opposite direction, deeper into the inferno of willing. So yeah, it's precisely the deeper willing of this second kind of beauty that Land sees

Nietzsche as radicalising in a way which maintains Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will, but without Schopenhauer's renunciation of the truth of our suffering. So we move to Nietzsche now. So, yeah, in the first For Annihilation, Arda's Insurrection, and a 1995 essay called Shamanic Nietzsche, Land argues that Nietzsche inherits Schopenhauer's energetic unconscious to the point of what Land calls an extreme anti-humanism. In Nietzsche's first book, first published book, The Birth of Tragedy, which is absolutely drenched with Schopenhauerian pathos, Nietzsche argues that the history of tragic art and culture more generally is grounded upon a kind of conflictual choreography between a

dark Dionysian drive to intoxicate, transgress, destroy and create, which expresses nature's true chaos. And also another Apolline drive to fixate, conserve, fetishise, stabilise and secure in a way which buries our heads in the sands for fear of the world's true horror. So I think clearly the Dionysian drive is one and the same with Schopenhauer's primordial will to endless striving, for which Apolline reason is just one contingent by-product. So Nietzsche says, Excess revealed itself as the truth, contradiction, bliss born of pain, spoke of itself from out of the heart of nature. Thus, wherever the Dionysiac broke through, the Apolline was suspended and annulled. According to Nietzsche, it was the ancient Greeks who best understood and embraced this Dionysian necessity of life's infernal suffering.

and this is why the Greeks' predominant art form was oral folk songs in which words were subordinated to music which Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, sees as the wheel's highest artistic form beyond a more conceptual poetry based on Kant's understanding of poetry so the Greeks' Dionysian art particularly reached its apotheosis through tragedy's musical chorus with the musical chorus in Greek tragedy always disclosing the finitude of human reason before the fate that nature has destined us without our say or permission. And as Land 2 sees it, tragedy depicts a kind of radical alterity's rupture with the law of the

polis, be it through, for example, Oedipus' downfall at the hands of the Stynx, or Prometheus' eternal punishment by the gods for disobeying them. Land says, desire is delivered upon the order of representation in a delirious collective affirmation of insurgent alterity, nature, impulses, oracular insight, woman, barbarism, Asia. Greek tragedy is the last instance of the Occident being radically permeable to its outside. Ultimately, however, Nietzsche goes on to argue in The Birth of Tragedy that the late Greek tragedy reconceived the horrors that befell the tragic hero as a consequence of disobeying the Apolline law of order and reason. Yeah, so Nietzsche says, as an ethical divinity, Apollo demands measure from all who

belong to him. So the idea is that whereas tragedy initially emerged as an affirmation and even perverse delight in our suffering, it ended as the moral imperative to avoid straying outside the walls of the city of God into the wilderness. okay now late tragedies re-subordination of Dionysian music to kind of Apolline reason is for Nietzsche exemplified by the ascendancy of Plato's philosophical dialogues in ancient Greece in fact for both land and as for Nietzsche Socrates marked essentially a new solipsism that projected Apolline values about what is good true and beautiful onto the cosmos in a way which repressed nature's tragic Dionysian ground.

Yes, so Land says, the Socratic death of tragedy is the beginning of the ethnic solipsism and imperialistic dogmatism that has characterized Western politics ever since. The brutal domestication process with which the repressive instance in man reason has afflicted the impersonal insurrectionary energies of creativity. Yeah, and I'm sure as anyone who's at all familiar with Nietzsche will know in so far as Nietzsche sees Christianity as what he calls a Platonism of the masses Nietzsche of course equally condemns the subsequent Christian medieval philosophy after Plato for also retreating from this world of strife and suffering by concocting dreamscapes where human values purportedly still hold sway over the world yeah so for Nietzsche Christianity

is nothing other than a kind of base anthropomorphisation of the cosmos such that it comes to conform to our moral values. Nietzsche says in his last work, it is the height of psychological mendaciousness in man to frame according to his own petty standard of what seems good, wise, powerful, valuable, a being that is an origin and an in itself. And yeah, just to get back to Nietzsche's problem with Schopenhauer, it obviously follows from this kind of platonic and Christian philosophies denigration of the real world in favour of some kind of transcendent ethereal realm that the Christian and Platonic ethics essentially consist in living ascetically by kind of spurning the world in the here and now in favour of contemplating the next world

to come. And yeah, Land could not agree further that Christianity is, as he calls it, a device for trapping the sick. The sick being those who are too impotent to confront the brute fact of the world's suffering and chaos. Now Nietzsche initially looks to Schopenhauer's philosophy as well as Wagner's romantic operas to initiate a rebirth of tragedy in the Germany of his own day. It's not long however before Nietzsche dismisses Schopenhauer as just another variation of platonic Christian moralism or nihilism. And certainly Schopenhauer recognises that there's no, as we've seen, there's no objective universal meaning in either this world or some other world as there is for the Christians and Platonists.

But the problem is that Schopenhauer draws the conclusion from this that since our values can never be satisfied or realised, we should turn against the way of the world, the will, by renouncing all action in life as superfluous in what amounts to recapitulating the same ethics of self-flagellation as the Christians and the Platonists. Yeah, and I think this is what Nietzsche is hinting at when he condemns self-proclaimed atheists like Schopenhauer as actually still secretly God-fearing. So Nietzsche says, Yeah, unconditional honest atheism is therefore not the antithesis of that ideal, as it appears to be. It is rather only one of the latest phases of its evolution, one of its terminal forms and inner consequences. Yeah, so this is ultimately why Nietzsche just takes Schopenhauer

as a stepping stone to a still higher philosophy, namely because Schopenhauer fails to see that the death of God does not so much annihilate all meaning as it shows how all meaning is contingently generated by way of this primordial unconscious will, this endless striving, or what Nietzsche will come to term after modifying it slightly, the will to power. Nietzsche's active nihilism, as he calls it, is distinguished from Schopenhauer's passive nihilism because it is not a refusal of all values. Rather, it is the more radical refusal to kind of constrain and delimit the constant creation and recreation and recreation of values atop the void of being. So, yeah, I mean, Land explains this quite well.

He says, yeah, unlike the will to life, the will to power is not driven by the tendency to realise and sustain a potential. Its sole impetus is that of overcoming itself. it is in this sense that the will to power is creative desire without a prefigured destination or anticipatory perfection seen from the kind of perspective of the will to power all meaning and values in life and even life itself are just sort of fragmentary moments in the becoming of this will's endless creative destruction again Nietzsche is such a great writer that I'll just defer to him He says, life that is continually shedding something that wants to die. Life that is being cruel and inexorable against anything that is growing weak and old in us, and not just in us.

Life, therefore, means being devoid of respect for the dying, the wretched, the ages, always being a murderer. Yes, certainly while humans are an expression of this will to power, as everything is, The will is also utterly indifferent to our concerns insofar as it only creates us as what Nietzsche calls a bridge to go beyond us and not a purpose, an end in itself. For Nietzsche, someone who would be able to rejoice in their own suffering and even death would no longer be a human, but rather an overman, the uberman. He says, I teach you the overman, human being is something that must be overcome. by affirming the will's endless striving to the extreme point of accepting

and even embracing gleefully our own destruction Land argues that Nietzsche surpasses Schopenhauer's residual humanist morality to achieve the highest articulation of these kind of libidinal death scapes that this libidinal materialist tradition traces. Land says in the last point, Nietzsche no longer considered the sufferings of the self to be a serious objection to the basic cosmic processes that underpinned it. Life is thought of as a means in the service of an unconscious trans-individual creative energy. Mankind as a whole is nothing but a resource for creation, a dissolving slag to be expended in the generation of something more beautiful than itself. If Land spends much more time on Nietzsche than either Schopenhauer or

Freud, it's precisely because he sees Nietzsche as really the first thinker to not just have drank but to have gleefully drunk from this kind of poison chalice of an annihilating ecstasy beyond all reason, order, and understanding, and even basic human decency, to the point where he was literally driven insane, right? To the point where he had more sympathy for the dark beasts, for horses, than for his fellow humans. In his kind of middle, and particularly the later works, Nietzsche encapsulates his virulent act of nihilism through the notorious doctrine of the eternal return. Fittingly expressed at first through the mouthpiece of a demon, the eternal return contends that our life shall forever recur exactly as it is over and over again.

Nietzsche, or rather the demon, says, the eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it speck of dust. Speck of dust, I think, is the most important clause in this quote, as we'll see in a moment. So yeah, on Land's reading, the eternal return reveals that all our hopes for a redemption and progress are in vain when seen from what he calls this nihilism of recurrence. The idea is that since all of life's suffering and contingency recur again and again without any salvation, or achieved purpose at the end of the process that would make sense of all of our suffering, life and all our values are rendered meaningless. or Nietzsche also says it like this, he says, the total character of the world, by contrast, is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity,

but a lack of order, organisation, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms accord. In no way do our aesthetics and moral judgements apply to it. Yeah, so it's Nietzsche's reduction of humanity to a speck of dust, as this kind of eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over again. It's this which prompts Land to champion Nietzsche as what he calls the greatest of all anti-humanist writers whose writings attest to the most powerful eruption of impersonality in the Occidental world since it was rotted by the blight of the Nazarene. Okay. Okay. In Nietzsche's wake, Land looks to Freud

as bringing the libidinal materialist tradition into the 20th century, albeit in a much more mitigated and essentially Schopenhauerian manner. Just as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer honed in on this non-agentic wheel, so did Freud trace in his patients, or they call it, Anna Lozanne's neurotic symptoms and hysterical behaviour. He traced this back to an unconscious realm of drives, instincts and forces, which simultaneously constituted their waking life, but also disrupted it. Freud says in Beyond the Pleasure Principle psychoanalytic speculation takes as its point of departure the impression derived from naming unconscious processes that consciousness may be maybe not the most universal attribute of mental processes but only a particular function of them

so Freud's 1920 book which is the key book for land, Beyond the Pleasure Principle it begins by explaining that psychoanalysis initially accounted for all psychic processes in terms of a drive to alleviate tension and instability or what Freud called the pleasure principle. Over time however Freud discovered that there were various phenomena which seemed to contradict the idea that all psychic processes could be explained with recourse to the pleasure principle. Freud gives several examples of how the pleasure principle is undermined particularly case studies of soldiers who seem to harbour a compulsion to repeatedly dream about their traumatic wartime experiences even though you would expect them to precisely repress them

and as per Nietzsche, Freud also gives the example of the way we seem to enjoy watching tragedies even though they're full of misery and death while previous ascetic theories tended to see us as still making a gain in pleasure through our watching of tragedies Freud proposes a new explanation of tragedy in some ways a new aesthetic theory that tragedy satisfies a different contrary drive to self-destruction and self-mortification Freud says the form of play and imitation practiced by adults does not spare its spectators the most painful of experiences for instance in the performance of tragedies and yet may nonetheless be regarded by them as something supremely enjoyable some economically oriented aesthetic theory may wish to concern itself with these cases in situations where unpleasure leads ultimately to a gain in pleasure.

Okay, so what Freud ultimately seeks to do in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is account for these phenomena which seem to contradict our own conscious ego's pleasure principle and the concepts of reason which serve that pleasure principle. Okay, yeah. To this end, Freud gives an account of how, it's a bit complex, but it's an account of how living organisms are formed in the first place when these living organisms' surfaces are bombarded by external stimuli which threaten to overwhelm and destroy their sense of self, their unit of matter. Consequently, the living organism develops a protective outer shell that only lets in lower levels of external stimuli into the inner part of the organism

in strategically acceptable ways permitted by the sense organs. while the barrier of the senses protects the inside from external overstimulation Freud notes that there's also an internal stimulation from within the organism itself although this stimulation largely supports the system stabilization it can also tend towards excessive energy so again an example here is that in traumatic situations where the protective shell is breached by an overwhelming external stimulus again wartime experiences in these kind of traumatic situations one response of the organism Freud notes can be to invest energy into the breach as a source of masochistic pleasure in order to cope with it, turning something that was seemingly

going to overwhelm us and destroy us into a source of pleasure in order to cope with it a kind of biological Stockholm Syndrome I guess according to Freud it's in this way that we not only harbour a pleasure principle tending towards homeostasis and stability and self preservation, but also a death drive, what he calls a death drive, which seeks to return to a more primary process of inert matter before the secondary process by which living organisms emerge through the repression of this external excessive energy in order to stabilize its ego. For land, it is this unconscious death drive that marks the point where primal matter eviscerates our conscious ego in the form of traumatic encounters with the outside. Land says, there is

the quantitatively stable energy reservoir deployed by the psyche in the various investments constituting its objects of love, including the ego, and there is the general economy of traumatic fusion with alterity that floods the nervous system with potentially catastrophic quantities of alien excitation. It was Freud's recognition of this second economy and its role in the genesis of 1914 to 18 war neuroses, stemming largely from the effects of continuous and overwhelming artillery barrages that was fundamental to the discovery of the death drive. As we can see, in Land's view, what Freud found in his analyzants like the Wolfman and the Ratman that we looked at last week was what he found was precisely the unconscious animality that civilization had for so long exiled

outside the wars of the polis in the name of God and then in the secular name of reason. Yeah, Land goes on. What exploded in the hysterics of Freud's patience was an irresistible volcanism of becoming inferior whose petrified lava flows mapped out the aggressive character of the drive. Freud himself concludes beyond the pleasure principle by noting the similarity with Schopenhauer's idea of the wheel as an endless driving underlying all things, which persists even after the individual ego's death. Freud says, We have unwittingly ended up in the philosophical domain of Schopenhauer, for whom, of course, death is the proper result of life, and hence its purpose. So in other words, we've unwittingly ended up

in the philosophical domain of libidinal materialism. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so... despite Freud's really kind of gargantuan discovery here of the death drive, Land notes that Freud did retreat at times from his own insight. And even in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud wavers at times as to whether the pleasure principle is the secondary sublimation of the primary death drive or a distinct drive that would split the unconscious by way of a kind of dualism between pleasure and pain or eros and thanatos. as Land sees it Freud's oscillations and hesitations stem from an essentially

Schopenhauerian moral hang up that wishes to maintain the ego's sovereignty even as this sovereignty is completely invalidated by the more fundamental process of this thanathropic unconscious Land says despite recognizing that the conscious self is a modulation of the drives so that all psychical energy stems from the unconscious from which ego energy is borrowed Freud seems to remain committed to the right of the reality principle and its representative the ego and thus to accept a survival or adaptation imperative as the principle of therapeutic practice. In the terms both of the reality principle and the conservative movement of psychoanalysis desire is a negative pressure working against the conservation of life a dangerous internal onslaught against the self-tending

with inexorable force towards the immolation of the individual and his civilization. and Land reserves his greatest rebuke for what he calls the disastrous way that Freud reduces works of art like Hamlet, Oedipus Rex and the brothers Karamazov to their authors' psychobiographical histories such as for example the Oedipal complex whereby apparently the authors sought to play out the fantasy of killing their fathers in these various texts and this is despite the fact that the sons do not actually murder their father in either Hamlet or the brothers Karamazov. So it's a real kind of reductive reading. It's a real, yeah, it's pretty loose. But so yeah, Lance says, when he writes on art degenerating despite his wealth of acuity

into banal psychobiography, a terribly damaging loss of direction afflicts the psychoanalytic enterprise. It becomes Kantian, bourgeois, a delicate police activity dedicated to the social management and containment of genius. yeah so the idea is that through these kind of pathologizing literary hermeneutics Freud's readings of various novels and authors end up recapitulating the Kantian limitation on the artistic genius's will by subsuming it under the rule of the psyche okay nonetheless it is because of Freud's honesty or perhaps you know unwitting naivety to elide his own moral sensibility and articulate this kind of morbid primary process.

It's for this reason that Land championed psychoanalysis as an insurrection against capitalism's large-stitched National Socialist effort to cohere society around the Fuhrer's absolute Oedipal ego by suppressing libidinal figures of alterity such as women, people of colour, communists and nomadic Jews. Land says that part of 20th century philosophy resonant with the aesthetically oriented tendency outlined here has as its two great tasks the diagnosis of Nazism and the protraction of the psychoanalytic impulse in other words, the arming of desire with intellectual weapons that will allow it to evade the dead-end racist Gata Damarung politics which capital deploys as a last-ditch defence against the flood. When viewed in these terms

what emerges is this idea that libidinal materialism is nothing other than an attempt to arm philosophy with the weapons that it needs in order to wield this kind of insurrection against the neurotic brown shirts and perverts with perfect comb-overs and toothbrush moustaches. OK, well, that's the end of part one, so maybe open it up to questions, if anyone has any questions at this stage. Yeah. I was just going to ask that line where you're sort of talking about the forbidden ideas and you sort of talk about communists. In a way, sort of communism is seen as, I guess, just as repressive as

tactics perhaps in some sense. Yeah, I don't know, just a few thoughts about that. Yeah, well, so this is still the young, the period of what I'm calling like the young land. Next week we're moving on to the mature land. And one of the key, there's sort of two key breaks in between the young and the mature land, and one of them is precisely this reconceptualisation of communism, or not necessarily communism, but kind of, yeah, like a clearly kind of left-wing socialist insurrection as it's actually, land will come to reconceive it not as an instantiation of the outside, but precisely a fascistic repression of the outside. and added to that is also the

transvaluation of capital not as national socialist but precisely as the true unleashing of the outside yeah so yeah so I mean that's Lan's views over time in terms of communism I guess yeah any other questions or comments yes You said something about contrasting Kant and Schopenhauer, and it was about the relationship between the phenomenal world or nature and the intellect. I think that the contrast was something like that Kant's nature emerges out of the intellect, but Schopenhauer emerges out of the unconscious.

And I was wondering what the difference, what do you think the difference is, the essential difference is in this? Because the colour would be like the transcendental subject. Which kind of is the same for Schopenhauer. Is there something through July or something? Is it the essential difference? So when, did you say nature, from Schopenhauer, nature emerges out of the unconscious? Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, for Schopenhauer, or I mean, for land even, the unconscious here is not the transcendental subject's unconscious it's nature even with Freud where Freud's seemingly talking about this unconscious psyche Land has a kind of cosmic reading of the unconscious

these Freudian dynamics are actually playing out in terms of our relation between the subject whether it's unconscious or not and nature or the world sometimes Schopenhauer used the term nature to refer it in the Kantian sense to refer to the phenomena of possible experience and so on which are ordered and mediated by the categorism the understanding and so on um but i mean in terms of that sentence that i said i i was meaning the unconscious there meant the will the in itself so this this will is not it is unconscious in the sense that we're not aware of it but like it's it's not in our psyche in the way that nature is for Kant it's actually the in itself that grounds our psyche and phenomena

but also ruptures with it. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. So Land reading Schopenhauer's will will and representation is cosmic if not as subjective. Yeah, I mean, Schopenhauer does that as well. That is Schopenhauer's conception, I think, of the will. It is in itself. So Land is just, I think Land just has a faithful reading of Schopenhauer. But yeah, in terms of the unconscious in Freud, that's more cosmic I reckon there's more of a creative reading it's still also there though because you know Freud's talking about these living organisms encounter with like an external world and so on but yeah any other questions? so

we're on a course towards a figure who moves quite dramatically from one point to another, or much opposite point. And I'm just trying to decipher the language in that last quote. which capital how does it work out which capital the war is as the last pitch against the flag is that telling us that I'm just not sure which one around

the attitude towards capitalism at this stage and in this quote capital is conceived as a repression of the outside and fascism is, this is like a classic Trotsky's reading at least orthodox Marxist reading of fascism as the most extreme form of capital, like in times when capital can no longer depend on social democracy to survive it resorts to fascism. So all these things capital is a repression of the inhuman outside here and fascism is its most extreme form of defence and re-fortification. I'm still a bit confused about how it's expressed.

I mean, we'll... Yeah. The intellectual opens which will allow it to evade the racism. That's anti-bargant. Yeah. That's dead racism. or in politics which the flood is the flood of the outside, of alterity of insurrection of artistic genius of death yeah I mean next week I'm going to go through in detail Land's initial view of

capital, like his critique of capital and then the transition to his re-evaloration of capital so I mean I think next week we'll hopefully answer your question in much more detail because it's really, the whole lecture will be dedicated to that there's a minute to be at a stage where his anti-capitalism is here but I'll go through his anti-capitalism next week as well in more detail cool let's take a quick break yeah? Like five minutes. Okay, so in the, I'm just going to start because I've got a lot to get through. So in the last section of Arda's Insurrection, Land identifies the four key post-Croydian libidinal materialists as Bataille,

Deleuze and Guattari that we'll look at next week, and also Wilhelm Reich. While Land never gets around to examining Reich in any detail. His writings during the early 90s focus on Bataille before moving on to Deleuze and Guattari. So yeah, again, reserving discussion for Deleuze and Guattari for next week. The rest of today's session is going to examine Land's reading of Bataille. But instead of trying to encapsulate all of Land's book on Bataille, which would be impossible, I just want to focus on a 1993 essay called After the Law, the second half of which also actually appears in a chapter in the First for Annihilation. And yeah, I'm going to focus on this essay and this chapter

because it's really here that Land proffers his most definitive critical assessment of the history of philosophy since Socrates by drawing upon what he calls, again, this libidinal materialist counter-tradition that is now best exemplified by Georges Bataille. so to do that Land proposes in the essay to juxtapose two infamous trials Socrates trial as recounted by Plato in the Apology and the 1440 trial of the serial killer Gilles de Rae as recounted by Bataille what permits Land to compare these two trials such as Plato and Bataille recount them is that both are grounded upon three ideas of philosophy, truth, and death,

but, of course, with very different understandings of these terms and how they relate to each other. But just to sort of anticipate, as we're going to see, whereas Socrates judges death as if it were commensurable with what human reason thinks of it, even though death should mark the complete annihilation of thought, Bataille's Gilderay is going to savour death as this impersonal, libidinal force at the limits of rational judgment and human decency. So yeah, the claim that I'm making here really is that I think Land's essay here can be seen as pitting Socrates against Bataille in what the Middle Ages Germanic law called a trial by combat, in which the defendant emerges victorious by appealing to death as a higher tribunal

than either the law of the polis or rational argumentation. So the claim is that Land is modeling philosophy on a trial by combat, a notion probably best more recently popularised by Game of Thrones. In that universe, this concept of the trial by combat still exists as a rather barbaric form of judicial judgement. Okay. Oh, wait, actually... Oh, yeah. So Land opens the essay by arguing that since, at least Socrates, philosophy has sought to find the ultimate criterion from which absolute justice could be derived and dealt out. He says, philosophy has affirmed its vocation only in so far as it has fantasised a supreme tribunal, an ultimate court of appeal or ideal form of justice.

Traditionally, philosophy had done this by judging all things as more or less good or bad with reference to a higher spiritual reality, be it being, God or reason or mind. according to Land what unites all of these seemingly disparate courts of appeal to a high reality is that each is modeled on an image of human reason and representation he says appearances or cases are to be judged from the perspective of generic reason at a superior level of reality identified in the pre-modern period with an ideality whose final term is the intellect of God now at first glance Plato's apology might seem to contradict Land's characterization of philosophy here because the apology actually depicts Socrates contesting the legitimacy of

the law to act as the arbiter of all truth and value. However, Land's central argument is that Socrates does not really contest the court's appeal to human knowledge as the principle of authoritative judgment. Rather, Socrates merely questions whether this principle of authority should be identified with the Athenian law, such as it is, or rather with philosophy's Socratic reason. So Land will argue, rebellion is not Socratic, and the principle of authority or right to judge is never radically interrogated, only its source is in question. So in the first part of this essay, Land is going to provide a close reading of the apology to show how Socrates remains complicit with the very ignorance of justice that he condemns the Athenian judges for

lacking and subjugating to anthropic values and ideas. Okay. Now, the Apology sees Socrates brought before the court of Athens on three charges. Firstly, he is accused of corrupting the youth. Secondly, he is charged with the sophism of, as the judges say, busying himself with research into what's beneath the earth and in the heavens and making the weaker argument the stronger and teaching the same thing to others. In other words, sophism. and finally he's accused of not believing in the gods the city believes in but in other new divinities to these charges socrates objects that he can hardly be called a sophist since the delphic oracle representative of the gods herself told socrates friend that there was no one wiser than

socrates socrates says uh he's yeah he actually his friend actually went to delphi and had the face to ask the oracle whether anyone was wiser than I was and the Pythia duly replied that there was no one wiser. Yeah okay so certainly Socrates claims to be surprised by the oracle's pronouncement that he is the wiser since he himself is unsure of what true wisdom actually is. Nonetheless it is the oracle's decree as to Socrates' sagacity that gives Socrates the gore to commence what he calls the divinely instigated interrogation of Athens' great experts, their great poets, craftsmen and statesmen, questioning them as to the nature of wisdom, only to end up chastising each of them for failing to recognise their own ignorance

as the truly wise Socrates does. So yeah, this is how Socrates distinguishes his wisdom from the expert's supposed wisdom. He says, The expert thinks he knows something when he doesn't, whereas just as I don't know anything, so I don't think I do either, so I appear to be wiser. So, yeah, it's Socrates' subversion of the great Athenian authorities in this way that encourages the rebellious youth of Athens to crowd around him and imitate his style of questioning. And it's this which incites the elders to bring Socrates before the court for corrupting the youth into undermining their sovereign right to rule. Okay. if Land thinks that Socrates is still complicit with the Athenian elders even as he seemingly undermines them

it's because Socrates shares their belief that all actions and things are to be judged according to a certain human authority while Socrates judges things according to his own reason instead of in conformity with the law of the polis both principles of authority share the same status of being anthropic arbiters of all value and sense Socrates initially betrays his enduring adherence to the principle of spirit of Geist except the spirit of reason rather than that of the law he betrays this when he dismisses the judge's charge that he does not believe in the gods on the grounds that actually Socrates does still believe in the gods or in spiritual beings just not the same ones that the the judges believe in he says I teach the young to believe that there are gods of some sort in which case I believe there are

guards myself so that I'm not a total atheist. I'm innocent on that score. Just different ones, not the ones the city believes in. Yeah, and even though Socrates starts out by professing his ignorance, he goes on to claim that he's possessed of a kind of divine voice which sagaciously sets him on the righteous path against the law. He says, some god or divinity intervenes with me, a sort of voice that comes to me and when it comes always discourages me from what I'm about to do, never encourages me, it's this that opposes my playing the statesman. So much for the humility of Socratic wisdom. For Socrates, judgments of what is just and true by appeal to the principle of human authority is not what is problematic about the charges brought against him.

Rather, his accuser's mistake was to have identified this authority with the common law rather than the philosopher's reason, and even more particularly Socrates' reason. Now, despite Land's criticisms of Socrates for remaining too anthropocentric in this principle of authority, Land does note that the apology contains what he calls certain sceptical openings where Socrates appears to grasp the truth that reality exceeds the rational if only grasping it inadvertently. For example, Socrates' subversion of the expert poet's wisdom is achieved precisely by exposing how the poet does not consciously know how they created their works of art. This is again the very Kantian conception of genius. Instead the genius of

their poetry unconsciously struck them as if by divine inspiration. Socrates himself says it wasn't wisdom that they did what they did but rather through some sort of natural talent or because they were inspired like the seers and soothsayers who make many fine utterances but have no knowledge about the things they're saying. So again, for the expert poet, wisdom does not emanate from any conscious and rational deliberation, but from an unconscious and ineffable force beyond their control. Far from possessing wisdom, the truth strikes us from outside ourselves in a way that actually undermines rather than reinforces our prejudices and preconceptions about what the world is like. even if Socrates will ultimately suggest that the poet's pretensions to wisdom are false because

it's not grounded in a still too or too human philosophical reason at this point Land suggests that Socrates briefly grasped that the truth is to be found in recognizing reality exceeds what we know of it or what we can know of it in principle and Land also finds particular merit in the way that Socrates cognises death as the ultimate testament to the fact that human knowing cannot exhaust reality's greater unknown vastness. It's not by chance that Socrates is awaiting his death in a different dialogue, the phaedo, after his conviction and the apology, that it's precisely there Socrates claims that we can only attain true knowledge of the real through death. Socrates says, the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess

to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime. On Land's reading here, Socrates' famous proclamation that philosophy is a preparation for death consists in the idea that the sincere love of wisdom, philosophia, recognises all humans are mortal and along with us our delusions of grandeur. Consequently, philosophy should not appeal to the law of the city or even that of reason, but simply to the brute reality of death that is indifferent to both law and reason as it promises to annihilate both of them over the course of time. Land says, according to the judgment of death by which all human judgments are judged, only the philosopher is just because only he recognizes the specificity

of all sensible judgments and their subsumption within a higher genus of wisdom. The fact that death here is a testament to the truth of reality beyond our anthropic dissimulations, explains why Socrates refuses to plead for his life when the Athenian judges convict him, which actually provoked the judges to vote in favour of the harshest punishment of death at the end of the apology. Now, even once Socrates is sentenced to death, he still does not actually find any reason to be afraid. And this is because Socrates argues that we do not know what death is. So to fear death would be to harbour the pretension

that we know what death will be like. Since life cannot know death and reason cannot think the cessation of its own thought except as a mysterious X, we have no reason to fear death. Yeah, and it's no wonder that Socrates' famous dictum as to his ignorance is articulated in the same instance when he expresses his ignorance as to what death will reap. Socrates says the fear of death is simply this thinking yourself wise when you are not it's thinking you know what you don't know death may even be the greatest of all good things for a human being no one knows yet people fear it as if they knew for sure that it's the greatest of bad things if there's any way in which I'd claim to be wiser than the next man it would be because not possessing enough knowledge about the things in Hades

I actually think I don't know and therein lies Socrates' key counter charge to the Athenian judges they purport to legislate even unto the realm of death about which they can know nothing the idea is that the judge's primary mistake is not to have sentenced Socrates to death but rather to have imagined that doing so would be a punishment as if they knew that death would be something horrifying and odious again in other words the accuser's use of the death penalty as a punishment betrays their pretension to fully know what death will be like and Land reformulates this he says, the court is no more capable of judging death than judging Socrates, since it is in both cases ignorant as to its own ignorance. As Socrates interprets things, the Athenian court, having judged the punishment as incompetently as the defendant, accidentally rewards an innocent

man rather than persecuting a guilty one. It's this kind of Socrates who questions whether death is a punishment, because we don't know what it will bring, that land latches onto as opening up the possibility of a true pursuit of wisdom by appropriating death as the transcendental horizon from whence to critique or anthropic projections of human values onto an unknowable, inhuman reality. In the final analysis, however, Land argues that Socrates retreated from this very sceptical aperture that he himself opened into this morbid beyond. As far as land is concerned, Socrates only really questions the Athenian

lord's ability to know the unknown and exhaust death in life so as to assert that the philosopher is alone really capable of doing this. Rather than allied thought's capacity to totalise and exhaust death in human terms or together by conceiving death as the absolute cessation of thought, Socrates contends that we can come to know death by appeal to philosophical reason if not by appeal to the judiciary's tribunal of justice. Socrates thereby continues to anthropomorphise death with anthropic allusions, for example, about our soul's immortality no less than the law did when it judged death as a punishment, as if either had any right to the certitude that they know what death will bring. Land writes, Socrates' own sense of preparation

for death is the path of wisdom rather than intoxication, aligning himself with a knowing that is compared to its inadequate instances rather than succumbing to the unknowing beyond comparison beside which all knowing is inadequate this is the edge of the unknown but always there is the gesture of recuperation of knowing to judgement, to the tribunal justice and authority more precisely Socrates argues that death is one of two things. Death is either an eternal sleep or a continuation of the soul's life when separated from the physical finite body. Socrates says, either the dead are nothing, as it were, and have no perception of anything, or else, as some people say, death is really a kind of change, a relocation of the soul from its residence

here to another place. Okay, if death is like a sleep, Socrates goes on to argue it will be what he calls a striking gain since we will not be awake to feel any pain or bemoan the loss of our life in the first place. If death instead marks our soul's resurrection, we still do not need to fear death. In fact, on the contrary, we can even look forward to it as an opportunity to meet all the great deceased individuals of history that Socrates will get to debate with for a time. So yeah, we know from other dialogues that Socrates more often than not favours this latter notion of death as the soul's resurrection, or transmigration. According to Land, Socrates' doctrine of the soul's immortality in other dialogues is the particularly egregious repression

of the reality of death by redefining death as its exact opposite, namely the eternal recurrence of the living and the already known. Land says in the last point, the soul is the fantasy of a separation from death that persists in death, a kind of corporal telepresence by which the body projects its servile categories into the unknown. even in the first scenario in which death is conceived as an eternal slumber Socrates is still reducing death to a correlate of what we imagine it to be in both cases then Socrates represses death's unknowability by conflating it with the sameness of this life in the here and now again Land says the Socratic sophism runs either one already knows death since it is only the cessation of life or death is a higher knowing

Death is either the extinction that makes it nothing except what life knows of it, or the immortality of the soul that preserves knowing in death as entry into knowledge of the ideas. The idea is that at the same time that Socrates questions the judge's ability to know death as a punishment, Socrates himself postulates the existence of either an eternal sleep or a heavenly afterlife that is not so different from the philosopher's present life such as it already is. again Land says if human wisdom has little or no value where do the dogmatic assertions about God and his wisdom stem from why should they be trusted is not the figure of God indistinguishable from the claim that we know it is knowledge that matters that the unknown is something we know something we can populate with our feverish anthropomorphisms so yeah the idea is that Socrates ultimate kind of rationalization of death

at the end of the apology contradicts his initial critique of the judge's sentencing since he proceeds to enact the very anthropomorphisation that wielding death as a punishment also entailed. Seen in this way, Socrates' objection to his accused's sentencing is not motivated by the desire to undermine their appeal to human knowledge. Rather, his critique is enacted in the name of replacing the Athenian law with philosophical reason as the arbiter of absolute knowing, including even the knowing of death. While the two principles are certainly different in degree, for Land they are of the same kind inasmuch they both depend on the premise that human thought can grasp reality and even the irreality

of nothingness within its either juridical or logical clutches. yeah Land says Socrates disrupts one trial in order to replace it with another mocks human judgment in order to replace it with divine judgment subverts sophistry in order to replace it with a higher sophistry and disengages himself from this world only to bind himself more tightly to another Socrates is the mobilization of unknowing on behalf of knowing again instead of calling into question the legitimacy of of the law's understanding of death as a punishment to open the way for a critique of anthropocentrism in general Socrates merely sought a higher fortification of reasons sovereignty over all things literally

unto death and consequently Socrates rationalization of death is no less anthropomorphic than the Athenian laws politicization of this morbid unknown. Okay. Now, in light of Socrates' complicity with the law, Land argues that Socrates should not be seen as inaugurating the philosophical pursuit of truth, but rather as repressing philosophy's true beginnings with the pre-Socratics. So Socrates and Plato are not at the origin of philosophy for Land. In fact, they're an anti-philosophical counter-revolution. against the pre-Socratics. So yeah, with Thales and Aximander and Aximenes and other pre-Socratics, philosophy first emerged by contesting

ancient myths and religions' anthropomorphizations of the heavens, of the cosmos, in terms of human values of justice, harmony, reason, order, and beauty, and so on. Where primitive humans saw natural processes as governed by the same cosmic justice as social and psychological processes, the pre-Socratics broke with these parochial judgments in favor of a radical dehumanization of nature that upheld brute matter, be it fire, air, water, as the foundational principle of all things. For land, even the very apologetical form of Plato's dialogues marks a betrayal of the pre-Socratic philosophy. Other pre-Socratics like Heraclitus and Palmenides explicitly opposed their philosophies to the commonplace opinion of the masses,

and so they would never have tried to justify themselves or feel the need to defend their views before the people. Land says, It was precisely as an escape from the opinion of the people that philosophy emerged. To philosophise and to ignore popular opinion are scarcely differentiable. Yeah, so while Heraclitus and other pre-Socratics belittled the masses' primitive anthropocentric myths as absurd, Socrates engages in a dialogue that identifies truth with what is common to everyone's opinions. Socratic truth is to be dialectically discerned as that which everyone can rationally assent to in the space of reasons, rather than that which ruptures with reason altogether. Land says, philosophy becomes dialectical with Socrates,

which is to say, justificatory, political, logical, plebeian. Truth is identified with irrefutability, evidentiality, and educated belief, beginning its long subsidence into the forms of human credence, as if its acceptability were in any way a criterion. Even if certain pre-Socratics like Anaximander sometimes spoke of a cosmic justice, Land suggests that this was only a metaphor for a sacred kind of justice that was beyond human control, and hence radically indifferent to human conceptions of what is fair and right. Land says, if the pre-Socratics speak in terms of cosmic justification, as the next humander already does, it is as a concession in order that the people will at least understand

the surpassing of human judgment, if not that which it has surpassed. The harsh justice of fate is the ironisation of human litigation and not its inflation to the absolute, or monotheism. So just to kind of explain that image there, on Land's reading the idea is that Socrates is the sophist Trojan horse in that he purports to be a philosopher only to wage a kind of counter-revolution against philosophy's true origins in going beyond anthropomorphic absurdities. Okay, in After the Law's second section, Land goes on to juxtapose Plato's apology with Bataille's account of Gilles de Rae's trial.

Like Socrates, Bataille interprets the law as Rayifying itself as the sole legitimate arbiter of the values and significations of all our actions and intentions. Just as Socrates criticised the law for using death as a punishment as if we know that death will only bring pain and suffering so did the secular and ecclesiastical courts sentence Ray to death in retribution for his crimes. What's more both courts also sought to provide an explanation for Ray's horrific murders in juridical and psychological terms of the pursuit of a perverse yet still utilitarian erotic pleasure. So in this way, the court subsumed Ray's morbid interest in death into the logical categories of the subject. Against this psychologising tendency,

Bataille insists that he says, we badly understand the monster whose violence would be absolute at the unchained hour if we did not first perceive in this apparent insensibility in this nonchalant indifference, which, to begin with, situates him outside and well beneath the sentiments of average humanity. Yeah, so much as Socrates critiques the law for synthesising death through the categories of human understanding, even though Socrates goes on to do much the same, so does Bataille see the authorities as overlooking the irrational excess of Ray's actions to any human logic by judging them in terms of juridical categories and moral codes for social condemnation. To fully grasp what Bataille is getting at in his reading of Ray's crimes and trial,

I think it's worthwhile taking a brief look at Bataille's general, what we might call solar ontology, beginning with Bataille's juxtaposition with Socrates' idea of the sun in the Republic. so as land notes in Thirst for Annihilation ever since Socrates' allegory of the cave the sun had been used to symbolise the truth of being to be able to directly gaze at the sun without protective screens or through reflections would be able to attain a knowledge that would instil some chosen few with the legitimate right to rule and judge as philosopher kings Socrates himself says in the Republic the sun not only provides visible things with the power to be seen but also with coming to be growth and nourishment.

In The Pineal Eye, among other essays and works Bataille also models his concept of being or the absolute on the figure of the sun. Only whereas Socrates sees the sun as the truth of being that is difficult to discern but nonetheless can be looked upon at least by an elite few Batai reevaluates the difficulty of sun gazing as the already grasped encounter with reality's annihilation of or representation. Batai says the sun situated at the bottom of the sky like a cadaver at the bottom of a pit answers this inhuman cry with the spectral attraction of decomposition immense nature breaks its chains and collapses into the limitless void. This sun now burrowing its brilliance from death has

buried existence in the stench of the night. The idea is that it's not that representation is failing to grasp being when it gazes at the sun only to be stricken blind with pain. Rather, we are truly grasping what being is like when through representations, solar annihilation. In Land's view, Bataille's story of the eye, another essay, solar anus and other narratives where the sun, eyes and solar images feature prominently. All of these speak to this idea that the sun's solar energy escapes our representational capacities. Land says, the common theme of these writings is the submission of vision to a solar trajectory that escapes it, dashing representational discourse upon a darkness.

So again, whereas Socrates sees the sun as a source of life and understanding, Bataille reassesses the sun as the ruination of reason and even life itself. Okay now, more precisely, Batai sees the sun's solar energy as always being in excess and hence needing to be differentiated in other forms of investment. He says, an accident must be dissipated by means of deficit operations. And that's really Batai's idea of creation. namely all things are created as expenditures of the sun's solar energy or what he also calls accursed shares this is what Land is also getting at when he says life appears as a pause on the energy path

as a precarious stabilisation and complication of solar decay now since life gets its energy from the larger reservoir of the sun life in turn harbours more energy than is needed to preserve itself Bataille says the solar ray has for effect the over abundance of energy on the surface of the globe, of the earth according to Bataille, life thus spends its excessive solar flows through a ceaseless drive towards decay and destruction as far as Bataille and Land are concerned life is nothing but the means for the becoming of death's solar flow through its own suicidal expenditures Land says, death, wastage, or expenditure is the only end, the only definitive terminus

It's precisely because there is an overabundance of life that the solar economy expresses itself through the mortality and finitude of all living things Land goes on, but Thai interprets all natural and cultural development upon the earth to be side effects of the evolution of death because it is only in death that life becomes an echo of the sun realising its inevitable destiny which is pure loss okay that was probably a pretty abstract and brief encapsulation of Bataille Solar Ontology so I'm going to do something slightly deranged here and give a more popular contemporary example so at the risk of looking like I'm perversely obsessed with Pixar and Disney films and let's face it that that risk has already been run and confirmed

I've got a picture of Olaf the Snowman from Disney's Frozen here and that's because I think Olaf is a really great contemporary example of this solar drive to self-destruction that I've just described in rather abstract terms now apart from Gilles DeRay that we'll get to in a moment Bataille often uses a photograph of a Chinese torture victim who seems to be orgiastically enjoying his own mutilation for example his eyes rolled back in a kind of orgasmic fashion rather than in pain. In the same way, if anyone's seen the film, Olof is a snowman whose most cherished desire is to experience summer even though obviously summer will lead to his complete meltdown

because he is, after all, a snowman. So all I'm suggesting is that with this kind of obscene sadomasochistic love of summer Olof is, you know, really again the best cinematic depiction of Bataille's Chinese talk to victim or Jill DeRay's thirst for an annihilating ecstasy, right? In other words, you know, again, I don't know how helpful that was to kind of popularise the solar ontology, but it's just another deranged digression, but I couldn't help but put it in there because Ulof is my favourite contemporary libidinal materialist. But anyway. So yeah, what Bataille's history of life demonstrates is that we're not made by the sun for any other purpose than to discard and be discarded.

To ignore this is to anthropomorphize the cosmos by reifying ourselves as more than just an accidental by-product of death's solar flows. As Lamb puts it, there is only the primary process, Bataille Sun, except from the optic of the secondary process, representation, which at the level of the primary process is still the primary process. So what therefore masks the truth of this kind of solar decay is what Land refers to as the hypostatisation of a mere moment in solar becoming as if it were the whole, as if it could exhaust all of becoming. Far from being the rational animal that knows it will die, Land argues that humans are too often the animal that falsely immortalises itself, be it through a literal belief in the soul's immortality

or through a more secular and cunning anthropomorphisation of nature. Land says man is the animal that knows it will die, determined in its essence by a knowledge whose specific mode is an immortalising sublimation. And Land particularly chastises both secular and religious law for its arrogant belief that humans can control and order society and even nature, when in fact both natural and social processes operate according to cosmic laws beyond our management and engineering. He says, For land, the law is absurd since it relies on the anthropocentric illusion

that we are free to legislate over cosmic processes to our advantage. Again, Few things approximate so closely to infinity as the humorous incommensurability between man and the sum of the universe. To span such a gulf within oneself is to live an idiocy. You know, really harsh caustic terms here, right? If both Bataille and land find the law problematic, it's because it exemplifies this deluded reification by, you know, kind of, again, reifying a merely anthropic phenomenal moment for the whole of cosmic time. Yeah, I mean, Land says again, when compared with the play of combination occurring at an inferior stratum of composition,

every being is an improbability so violent that Bataille labels it chance. To therefore rid thought or philosophy of its narcissism, Land argues that any genuine philosophy must come to terms with the brute fact that humanity will one day become extinct over the course of time. He says that humanity is fated to terminate is amongst the most basic thoughts and no more than the most elementary qualification for philosophy since to think on behalf of one species is a miserable parochialism. According to Bataille, again, the history of life is comprised of so many variations on death's expenditure beyond the utile purposes of bear survival.

Or as Lan puts it, when the silting up of energy upon the surface of the planet is interpreted by its complex consequences as rigid utility, a productive civilization is initiated whose culture involves a history of ontology and a moral order. Predominant amongst the incendiary and epidemic gashes which contravene the interests of mankind are eroticism, base religion, inutile criminality and war. We can see from this quote that war and crime are two chief sublimations of death's solar flows. So I think we can guess then that Batai's interest in Gilles de Rey stems precisely from the way that Rey's crimes, you know, really barbaric crimes, attested to death's general economy

in transgression of the law's moral and utilitarian pronouncements. In the particular case of Ray, Bataille notes that the early 15th century French society in which Ray was born typically expended its overabundance of life through the practice of constant war. Bataille says, even the poetry that the nobles of the 14th and 15th centuries affected to love was in every sense a deception. Before everything, the great lords loved war. Their attitude differed little from that of the German berserkers, whose dreams were dominated by horrors and slaughter. so yeah but i see his war as less a utilitarian fight over the necessary resources for survival and more a mechanism for disposing of an excess of life for the sake of this general economy's

drive to solar destruction and yeah ray ray was no exception having served as a commander in the royal army uh from 1427 to 35 during the hundred years war in a war in which he distinguished himself for his reckless bravery. Of course what the military honors bestowed on him overlooked was that Ray was not actually putting himself in harm's way to save the lives of his countrymen but rather to flirt with death. Yeah okay so yeah Land concludes this analysis of war he says Bataille locates war and industry within a general economy as the respective tendencies to useless and a productive expenditure, far from being the Frankenstein monster of production,

war has a solar genealogy. At the same time, Bataille notes that the Protestant Reformation rose to dominance during Ray's lifetime, only to prohibit transgressive instances in art, scientific experimentation, and of course the boudoir. This new puritanical ethic even extended to warfare as the scientific development of archery and pikes replaced heavy cavalry, leading to a new ethic of military discipline, according to which war should only serve utilitarian means of shoring up the defences of the city, of the polis, of the law. Bataille says the discipline, the rigorous directives and the scientific commandment imprinted war with this essentially rational character.

Through this rationalisation of warfare, Bataille argues that Ray was stripped of his means of expending life's solar surplus on the battlefield's altar of death. Okay, so Ray is now looking for a substitute. In Batai's view, it's because of this rendering of war as useful that Ray withdrew from public view and began murdering adolescents, eventually reaching a frightening death toll of anywhere from 35 to 200 victims from 1432 to 1440. It's crucial to grasp here that although Bataille provides an explanation for Ray's crimes in terms of the sublimation of death's solar flows, it's qualitatively

different from the law's moral judgments of Ray. Whereas the law rationalises Ray's crimes by tracing them back to a psychosexual drive that is perfectly human and comprehensible, if obviously perverse, Bataille views his crimes as expressive of this solar economy's drive to dissolution beyond any concerns for order, stability, homeostasis or even a perverse pleasure. In other words, Ray's crimes for Bataille should not be reduced to his psychological makeup or any self-interest but to the way that a general economy beyond the particular human economy discards its overabundance of solar energy through life's death drive. Yeah, Bataille's point is that no tribunal of justice

or rational philosophy is able to make sense of Ray's acts by appeal to some utilitarian or psychological explanation because Ray's crimes were utterly indefensible in the precise sense that they stemmed from an inhuman desire to save a morbid beyond. Yeah. Okay, I'm sort of skipping through things here now because I'm fastly approaching the ending. Okay, so whereas Land repudiates Socrates for rationalizing death, he looks to Bataille to index death as an irrational excess to all reason, insofar as death marks reason's breakdown into inarticulacy, violent trauma, and ultimately nothingness. Land says,

The words, no philosophy has been able to incarnate the essence of nobility, are a concise anti-Socratism. It cannot be a matter of a retrial, therefore, as if a higher judgment were to redeem a victim of injustice DeRay is almost perfectly indefensible so as far as land is concerned no one could ever write an apology for Ray as Plato could for Socrates because Ray's actions were unjustifiable in as much as they stemmed from this realm of non-being and nothingness where human representation and moral judgments cannot trespass even in principle yeah and that's also why Bataille characterizes the trial of Ray as a tragedy. A tragedy in the precise sense, Greek sense, that Ray's conviction is not a testament to human reason's ability to see that

justice is done. It's rather a tombstone to both reason and the law as they attempt to blunder out an inane sentence that would try to make sense of these excessive, irrational actions. So if Land ultimately thinks that Bataille emerges victorious from this trial by combat he has staged with Socrates, is because Bataille understands that it is death which marks the ultimate principle of authority, of judgment, as death incinerates all of our moral judgments and rationalizations into specks of dust. Conversely, Socrates subjugates death as a misdemeanor before our rational judgment, as if death were anything but indifferent to our moral values and ideas. Land concludes, transgression is, in the last quote,

transgression is not a misdemeanor, even if this is the necessary form of the social interpretation. It is rather a solar barbarism resonant with that of the berserkers and of all those who fathom an abysmal inhumanity on the battlefield becoming derelicted conduits of the impossible. After the law, across the line of unknowing, where tribunals count for nothing, Socrates is silent and accusation is dissolved into the sun. okay unfortunately I'm going to have to skip an attempt to critique Batai and Land's understanding of Jules de Rey via Mindhunter so I'll just summarise the key point so yeah what land ultimately derives from the trial

by combat between Socrates and Batai is this notion of death as the organon for the critique of philosophy's essentially Socratic tendency to idealise the real in a way which displaces the fact of our mortality and insignificance before nature's great abyss. While Land's critiques of Socrates and philosophy more generally can come across as rather dismissive because of the rhetoric, it's crucial to note that Land nonetheless actually does remain a philosopher, at least on his reading of philosophy's constitutive sense. after all land's project of subtracting anthropomorphic dissimulations from reality remains faithful to the initial pre-socratic mission of philosophy as a rupture with myth

religion and anthropomorphizations of the heavens by coming to terms with an inhuman indifferent world of course at the same time that land seeks to continue voyaging with philosophy beyond these primitive pre-philosophical parochialisms of the past, he also understands this to necessitate the modelling of critique on the berserker's trial by combat, whereby the philosopher must wield death itself, more than reason or rhetoric, as the ultimate weapon for breaking down the walls of the polis to let loose the barbarians, impatiently waiting outside and thirsting for blood. Okay. now in another objection to this kind of Socratic and juridical attempt to hold Ray responsible

for his actions Bataille argues that Ray was merely a puppet of the greater feudal social order such as it was organized around the expenditure of its luxuries be it through displays of affluence or warfare you know and Ray's own execution is a perfect example of this insofar as Ray's execution was turned into a public spectacle in which the crowds gathered to delight in Ray's mutilation and death in much the same way that Ray had done to his victims. Bataille's notion here of social processes as not of our own making permits Land to argue at the essay's end that Ray's penchant Judah Ray's penchant for the unknown beyond human judgement is today not only sublimated through the modern phenomena of serial killers but even

more so through what he calls cybernetic capitalism or what he calls in this essay commodity phase population cybernetics. Now given as we've seen over the past few weeks that land started out by critiquing capitalism for arresting humanity's heat death it's rather jarring here I think if we read him in order to see him now championing capitalism as an explosion of solar energy. So just what could have motivated you know such a sharp about-face is precisely what we're going to look at next week as we turn to land's mature writings. It's like almost 8.30 but if you don't mind I'll come up to questions for a couple of minutes. Yeah, so any last questions on the young land? Okay. For a second I thought, you know,

questions were dissolved into the song. Something I've never quite got to Gush with, which seems to be quite relevant, is the way Freud does the death drive and the emphasis that we now see on death with land. Could you explain Freud? What about Freud exactly? His death thrive. His idea of the death thrive. Which is also a little bit in the death of Socrates. Socrates says that dying is not, as you put it out, dying is not a great tragedy.

it's something that we have to gear our minds towards the fact that we're dying I'm just trying to get it all together because it does seem to me that that land doesn't quite get to grips with what we all know is that even though as individuals we die society continues on and we still have the capacity to know what has happened in history with dead people through our study of history. So the idea that somehow

death is so important seems to be undermined by the more general idea that humans do go on, survive, reproduce, and death is a phase for each individual but not for humanity as a whole. I'm sorry, I'm wandering around a bit. No, that's fine. I mean, all that I think Land would, or a Libiden or Materialist, be it Land or Ulof, would say is that but humanity will go extinct, so it doesn't matter about individual death that, you know, even if society lasts through certain individual deaths,

extinction is coming. So, after that, there's no memory, there's no impersonal immortality through civilisation and history. So, Land is thinking of death as extinction, ultimately. Oh, that's right, yeah. Yeah. Much like, you know, Brazier and... Yeah. Yeah. Any other? I have a question for you. like constructing this kind of genealogy of life in these spaces,

do you think if you positively embrace in his attitude towards his position of capitalism, apart from that changing, this cross between the young and the young, do you think his other preoccupations are continuous? Is there anything else that changes in that perspective? I think there's two key definitive markers at the break which are intimately connected. And they are, yeah, this re-evaluation of capital, but also across the emphasis. Why, I mean, the second thing that breaks is a consequence of why he's interested in capital law,

and it's because he thinks its technological advancement will lead to a technological singularity singularity that is the real extinction event. So yeah, it's this, the mature land I think is marked by the emphasis on capital and or techno-capital as the subject of critique but in terms of the continuity over these different periods, even today I think he's always got the same project, absolutely it's always this project of radicalising Kantian critique through the critique of anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism and metaphysics by this appeal to death and extinction and what changes is I think just what changes even within this early period

whether he's focusing on feminist insurrection or artistic genius or death itself what changes is that just what he thinks is the best subject or the most accelerated subject that can enact this extinction, this critique as extinction and yeah so that changes over time and the key change I think the big change is it becomes not an anti-capitalist insurrection but it becomes techno-capitalism itself yeah yeah yeah because sometimes he's read as really as like he kind of encourages this sometimes in interviews and stuff as like really unsystematic and there's no

kind of coherency and this is just like if you just read it it's like if you contextualise these texts there's an absolute kind of assiduous persevering principle of critique throughout all of these works even the more recent stuff yeah maybe this is pushing too far but do you think that this is the case even now with his current position like I can see like that in like the belt down you've got like a over like the 20 acceleration extinction but in the current stuff now there seems to be like you have to ward off like disgenic collapse which will also be an extinction kind of invention, it's like on the one hand

you're warding off this disgenic extinction but accelerating towards this post-capital singularity extinction, is there do you think that that is another shift from from this period? What do you mean by dysgenic? So, like, in the neo-action stuff, for instance, it's democracy that is problematised as both the extension of the human security system, which is maybe the meltdown stuff, but it's also that democracy is something that brings out some kind of mineral and intellectual collapse of human society. And that forestalls the acceleration into

techno-capital singularity. And so it would seem that if land was concerned with exploring the extinction event, then he wouldn't care if it was a dysgenic collapse or if it was a techno-capital singularity event. But he seems to prefer the techno-capital singularity completely to the Yeah. I mean, I think it's just because of his conception of AI, as we'll look at in the final week, as this kind of... as just the ultimate form of critique. It literally just keeps critiquing itself, self-critiquing, self-improving. It is the... Maybe not the ultimate, but actually it's like the only real transcendental philosopher.

And so that extinction event is obviously far superior to one that... you know, one that leads to a kind of drawn-out unleashing of intense kind of human security mechanisms. So maybe the extinction event has always been a tool of critique and is holding on to critique at the expense of extinction event. Yeah, yeah, I think so, yeah. I mean, there's another story to be said, like, like, sometimes I'm tempted to add, like, a third period that I call the senile land, where I think he makes certain misjudgments about what he thinks is actually accelerating this kind of AI singularity in some of the near reactionary stuff. I'm not saying it's not a classic critique of those works

as morally abhorrent or something. It's a transcendental critique. It's still a commitment to critique. Yeah, that's another story. But I just basically agree with what you said, pretty much. I mean much more could be said but we should probably end it there so yeah thanks for coming if anyone wants to go out and get drinks keep discussing or anything feel free to join some of us but yep we'll leave it there