The very rules of eating, of negativity and singularity, including the ultimate form of singularity, which is... I can't. I can't. I can't. We won't stay in the same. It's true of bias without a person. This is a typical bias of information. is violent because what happens there is the murder of the queen, the vanishing point of reality. Let's not cover this at the beginning here.
Welcome to this week's edition of the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour with Cooper Cherry and Taylor Atkins. As always, we are sponsored by the People's Institute for Revolutionary Semiotics. Before we get started with today's guest, just want to mention we've got a Patreon page at patreon.com forward slash MUHH. Consider dropping us a dollar a month there or potentially throwing us a nice review on iTunes. If you leave us a review that says banger episode, I will give you a shout out on next week's episode. But in order to properly introduce this week's guest, I'll throw it to my very capable colleague, Taylor Adkins, to do those honors.
Well, today, Cooper and I are very excited to announce that we have with us Ray Brazier. And Ray has translated the works of Quentin Mayesu, Alain Badu, Francois Laruel. In fact, many of our listeners may already know this. I myself and a great many people became familiar with these thinkers through his translations. He's also written Nile Unbound, but he's also written more recently on Wilford Sellers and many other topics. And Ray, we're just extremely delighted to have you here today. And I'm so glad that you decided to come talk to us. Thanks for inviting me. So the big question that I always like to ask, and you can tackle this in any way you want.
We all kind of have our stories about encountering philosophy in these, obviously, these big questions about what it means to think. And do you have a story to share with us or some memories about when you first started becoming interested in philosophy and some of the encounters with thoughts, ideas, thinkers? I first became aware of philosophy or I discovered what philosophy was. When I was 13, I was in a secondary modern school in Scotland where I grew up. And we had a history class. And one week, the topic was ancient Greece, the contribution, the ancient Greek contribution to civilization.
And there was an assignment, as I recall. We were all invited to go and look up one aspect of the Greek contribution to the Western civilization. And for reasons that I am unsure of, I decided to look up philosophy. And I did so via a small encyclopedia. We had no works of philosophy. you know I lived with my mother and sister and my grandparents we had um you know no there wasn't there weren't many books in the house but there was a an encyclopedia I think from the 1940s or 1950s that my grandparents had bought I assume and there was an entry on philosophy when I read
that entry and it was um and what I was particularly fascinated by Zeno's paradoxes that's the thing that really got me hooked. So I read, you know, there was a kind of a summary of Zeno's arguments and I found this incredibly fascinating that you could prove, you know, that things don't move, that nothing really moves. I thought this was so cool. And I think I can't remember, to be honest, I'm not sure if I wrote something about it for class, but once that happened, that really got me hooked. and then I continued pursuing this interest on my own in the public library. Scotland in the 1970s, you know, had a public library system
and I would go, you know, before and after, or like during and after school when I had some free time, I would go to the public library and, you know, loiter in the philosophy section and just randomly kind of, you know, start kind of trying to read stuff, you know. And also, I knew who Sartre was because there was a kind of, you know, because my father was French, you know, so I could read French. So I read Sartre's Nausea. Yeah. And, you know, I can't say, you know, I really understand. But then I became, so I kind of got very interested in kind of, you know, Sartre and then obviously, you know, Heidegger. and so I would just kind of try to kind of read this stuff
in the kind of the public library. And what I read in what order was completely, it depended like on how much of that you understand really. So it was very kind of haphazard. You know, the fascination developed and I kept doing this and I left school when I was like 15 because I really disliked school intensely. I had no desire to pursue tertiary education. So I kind of left school, but carried on this interest and kept reading. I always liked reading in general, but I kept reading philosophy and I kept doing this. After I left school, I did various jobs,
various types of manual labor for about between the ages of 17 and 27. You know, when I hit my late 20s, I was still kind of, you know, reading philosophy in my spare time. And I thought, you know, I really, I was kind of fed up with doing the kind of jobs I was doing. And I thought, I'm really interested in philosophy. I care more about this and I'm more interested in it than I am in anything else. So I thought I tried to pursue it academically. And it was then possible to kind of just to be a mature student. You know, I was 27 when I embarked on my first degree. But I was lucky enough then that I was able to get funding to be a full time kind of undergraduate in my late 20s.
That meant, effectively, it was materially possible for me to stop working and to get a philosophy degree, which that's no longer possible. This was in the very early 1990s in London. I did this. And then I just kept going, I guess. And I just became more compulsive and more addictive. Yeah. Is there someone or a movement or perhaps an individual that you sort of latched on to in particular? Someone perhaps, maybe someone that excites you the most and perhaps even influenced you the most over the course of your intellectual journey? You mean a philosopher? Yes. had more influence on me. Or a teacher. And or a teacher. When I went to university, so I went to what was called a new university in 1992.
Polytechnics, as they were then called in the UK, became universities. Polytechnics were obviously kind of, you know, then considered kind of, you know, they were not kind of prestigious in any way, shape or form, but they were places where lots of working class people and mature students kind of would go and try to get an education so I ended up doing my degree at the University of North London which no longer exists you know and it was had been called North London Polytechnic was then the University of North London and the lecturers there they all impressed me they all impressed me because they were, by their patience, you know, their depth of understanding, their modesty, their dedication, none of them were careerists.
None of them, I think, you know, they were philosophers. They were people who loved philosophy and thought teaching philosophy for very little money was the most valuable thing we could do. And they did it. And that was inspiring. They were all inspiring. and in a way their selflessness, their lack of egotism, their dedication to teaching and to teaching seriously, you know, for very little in the way of either kind of monetary or academic reward, you know, was inspiring. And that inspired me and I still think of those, they're exemplary for me, you know, they're still exemplary for me. And by the time I made the decision to study philosophy, I was aware of the analytics.
And one thing I didn't want to do is I didn't want simply to kind of to pursue. I wanted to become a philosopher and not just read up on the one or two philosophers or the type of philosophy that I find personally appealing. This is very important to me. For instance, in my, you know, I read a lot of Nietzsche. I'm like every, someone should make a film. I was a teenage Nietzschean. Yes, common refrain, yes. So like everyone, you know, is, and it dawned on me that, well, I could spend the rest of my life just kind of reading Nietzsche and filtering reality in my experiences through this Nietzschean kind of lens. But I thought it was kind of too easy and lazy.
And I thought it's not credible, however kind of pleasurable or satisfying I may find Nietzsche. That's not, you know, that's not. Philosophy is surely not just about kind of constantly kind of having your prejudices and predispositions confirmed. They should be interrogated. So I wanted to become, I wanted to know the history of philosophy and to understand the history of these philosophical problems and the different positions on these problems. And not simply be a kind of disciple. So someone who parrots another kind of tutelary figure. And that's why I also wanted to learn about analytic philosophy. Although continental philosophy was more spontaneously appealing to me,
but I thought it was not possible to dismiss analytic philosophy as mere kind of scholastic kind of nitpicking, as many continental philosophers do. So I thought, and I learned about analytic philosophy and forced myself to read it. It was hard, you know. In a way, the point of getting an education in philosophy was like to learn stuff, to be forced to learn stuff you don't particularly enjoy. And it's important, as I now realize, because that's the only way in which you actually learn. It's by reading stuff that you may find really boring and uninteresting and annoying. and then you've years later you realize actually this guy who I read as an undergraduate and who
really annoyed me he's right actually what he said about x you know I thought you know I preferred x or y you know but now I realize having kind of thought about this for a few years now that so and so is right you know so I think that that's really valuable I wanted to get a philosophical education and, you know, so that I could become a philosopher, which means being able to kind of, you know, think through philosophical, identify philosophical problems independently and think through them independently, as opposed to merely kind of, you know, becoming an expert on what one or two philosophers have said about a problem. I really like this explanation. And it's fascinating for me, this notion of reading those with whom you don't necessarily agree or
who don't spontaneously just give us pleasure, even though there is the sense in which we are drawn to certain thinkers and that certain thinkers do hit those buttons for us. Nietzsche himself says, I mean, everything you said very much could have been said, or Nietzsche says in a certain way, right? Like, if you want to follow me, you have to lose me. These other things about not just parroting, as you put it. And I think that that's one of those things that kind of brings me to the next question. I mean, I mentioned in the intro, but you are, in my mind, responsible for introducing a lot of these thinkers that in greater or lesser degree have enjoyed a certain popularity now in English. I mean, Badu is probably the most extraordinary example of that.
But I am adepted to being introduced to Laura Well by your translations and your writing on him. And you translated, after Finitude, Mayasu's book pretty much almost right after it came out. So did you already have, well, first of all, I guess that would be a question of if you already had a relationship with Mayasu. I assume you may have. But talk a little bit about the translations of these works that now are more and more, they're building up steam and snowballing and having this huge impact, at least on the continental side, hopefully on the analytics side, because each one of these thinkers that I just mentioned, Badu, Larwell, Mayasu, they have something to speak to both sides of the quote-unquote divide. I read After Finitude in French, not long after it was published. I was very impressed. I thought
it was like brilliant. And I wrote to him. I just contacted him. I didn't know him. I hadn't met him. I knew he had been a student of Bad News. Daniel had already kind of translated some of, you know, I've used work, you know, Alberto Soscano and I had edited and translated the Theoretical Writings collection, which had been published a couple of years before. After Finitude was interesting, not just for what it said, but for how it said it. And in a way, because it was so, you know, its style is so, you know, it has this kind of limpid clarity and simplicity. And it's not at all like what continental philosophy is supposed to be. like this really kind of impenetrable, you know, jargon-laden kind of word salad.
So I thought that was also kind of important. And it offered arguments. It dared to be clear, and it dared you, invited you to kind of, you know, to disagree with it and to say, to try to figure out what's wrong with it. And I liked that. I was very sympathetic to its general claims. So that's why I translated it. And I was able to do it fairly quickly. and yeah, I was very happy to do it. And I think that the thread, you know, the French thinkers who, the first French thinker I translated was La Ruelle. I started translating some of his pieces when I was still a graduate student because I was writing my thesis on his work. And he interested me because I came across, again, his work
just when I embarked on my MA in philosophy and, again, by chance. And it was very intriguing because, well, as I'm sure you know, he mentioned his key influences were like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derda and Deleuze, these four thinkers, you know, who I was also interested in and who I wanted to study. He seemed to have been able to kind of absorb their work, and he seemed to have a kind of a critical perspective. He seemed to have distilled, you know, the fundamental consequences and implications of their respective projects and be able to kind of construct something original on the basis of that absorption. And I found this very interesting also because I was very aware that one of the problems with common philosophy
is that you're almost encouraged to become a disciple. You set up camp within continental philosophers, and then you interpret and produce commentary. And whether it's Heidegger or Derrida or Deleuze, that's the way kind of anglophone continental philosophy works. So I didn't want to do that. So Larell was a way of talking about these figures without simply having to become a Deleuzean or a Derrida or a Heidegger. And it took me a while to understand. I mean, it was also intriguing on its own because it was really fascinating. I was fascinated by his claim that non-phosphory was a science. I thought that was very interesting because even then I was getting a little bit kind of,
I found the kind of the automatic, you know, the claim that science is, you know, this kind of defective kind of thinking compared to kind of philosophy. I didn't know much about, I didn't know very much about science, but I was suspicious of this kind of rhetoric. So I liked the fact that he was reclaiming the term science for what he was doing. I thought that was a really interesting move, actually. So that also attracted me to his work. And yeah, so it seemed very unlike. And Badu, I read a little bit during my PhD. I read Being in Events. I thought it was amazing. I read Being in Events in the, you know, I think late towards, you know, as I was completing my PhD, I thought it was an amazing book, kind of really extraordinary.
Its depth and its precision and the fact that it consists of these interlinked arguments, which are developed over hundreds of pages, its rigor, I find these like really extraordinary and really compelling. So these three thinkers, you know, La Roelle, Badiou, Neassou, they seem to be kind of breaking with a kind of orthodoxy, a continental orthodoxy. You know, that continental philosophy is about liking art and poetry more than science and mathematics. they also seemed not Heideggerian which although I have I studied being in time carefully it's a book that I I read as an undergraduate and that you know made a big impression on me
I thought it was like it's an amazing book but I think Heidegger's influence is kind of you know very bad and I think Heideggerianism is not a good thing even if being in time is a great work But, you know, I think that the stuff that comes after that, I'm not a fan of. So, yeah, I was also very interested in Levinas. I was interested in Levinas's piece of Heidegger. So he was also someone who I was reading towards the tail end of my undergraduate degree and the beginning of my master's degree. So, Maruel, Badiou, Mayassou seem to have, they're very different and they're critical, you know, their projects are kind of, you know, fundamentally incompatible, but there's a sensibility,
you could say a kind of a rationalist sensibility. There's a rationalist strain running through all three thinkers, which I think now is what actually drew me to them, what I find attractive. And in a certain way, they each share a resistance to the dominance of phenomenology. Yes. At the time, I tried reading Husserl as an undergraduate, and I've read Logical Investigations, and I think it's a great book. At the time, I tried reading Husserl, and I just found it incredibly annoying. Yes, yes. Annoying for the same reason that Gilbert Ryle said it was phonology. It was annoying. It was like too many pots and pans with labels and not enough kind of ingredients
or materials. I love that. I feel so much better about my Husserl opinions now. Thank you. But I think, you know, I think logical investigations is great. And I now think that there's much more in Husserl than I was able to kind of detect at the time. So like I've relaxed my views on that. People who just seem to find their consciousness and their subjectivity endlessly fascinating. I also thought that was a little bit kind of dubious. Yes. I found it hard to believe that the starting point for philosophy was like your subjectivity. I was like, no, there's more to it than that. And I've since kind of, you know, rediscovered the kind of, you know, the weight of the insights of German idealism. But at the time, it just sounded like, why are you obsessed with your subjectivity?
in Europe. And so I was attracted to kind of philosophical positions that were, you know, to a philosophy of the concept, as opposed to a philosophy of, you know, of experience and selfhood, which did not seem very appealing. Those were the common strands running through the thinkers that interested me. And on top of the resistance or pushback against phenomenology, Each of them in their own way shares an aversion to correlationism or obviously what Harmon calls philosophy of access. And Maesu makes that front and center, but you've also teased out how each of them specifically constitutes an attack on this kind of predominant strain of thinking that you can see kind of running throughout the history of philosophy, at least as far back as Parmenides, right, with thinking of being are the same.
And do you want to say a little bit about that? Because that aspect comes out very clearly in Nile and Bound is tackling with how the correlational strain is this kind of resilient. It keeps cropping back up almost like a hydra, right? If you cut off one of its heads, it kind of regrows even more resiliently. Do you want to say a little bit about this? Does that also kind of orient your interest in these thinkers and your own research? It did at the time. And that's like, so like, you know, Laravel's defense of realism, transcendental realism, you know, I thought that was a really fascinating provocation in the climate of, you know, he's writing this in the 80s and early 1990s. And this seemed, again, it seemed like a will for anyone who's familiar with content philosophy, this would be kind of, you know, nonsensical or like something that is impossible to defend for a sophisticated philosopher.
And yet this is exactly what Laravel was proposing to rehabilitate. That's also kind of, interestingly enough, when I was an undergraduate, the one area or the one kind of strand of contemporary analytic philosophy that I found immediately compelling in a way in which lots of other analytic philosophy was not at all compelling to me was the debates about realism and anti-realism, which I studied a little bit. I read some of that literature as an undergraduate. You know, I had realist sympathies, you know, or inclinations even then. Although, you know, I understood the sophistication of the anti-realist argumentation. But I thought that was a fascinating, because it seemed a lot at stake. That seemed to be a really, it wasn't trivial.
The kind of, the consequences of this kind of debate were far from trivial. So that was something that I found very interesting. Quine, actually, was the analytic philosopher who most impressed me when I was young. So I guess that predisposed me towards kind of finding someone like Laravel interesting, and obviously Mia Su's kind of defense. Well, actually, not of realism, but of speculative materialism. I think the significance of this is often overlooked in that Mia Su is not a realist or does not see himself as a realist, but as a materialist, which is very different. He explains why. And I now think that it's really important to kind of emphasize. And what's about you, it was the audacity of claiming that mathematics is... Ontology. It's ontology.
Or rather, ontology is mathematics. Because he's giving ontology to mathematics. That's very important. It's the other way around. He's handing over ontology to mathematics and saying, this is what tells you about being 12 being. I thought that was a really fascinating claim because there's no mystery of the ineffable kind of meaning of being or what it means to me. It is conceptually tractable and there's a science of being which tells you what is sayable of being what being. I thought that was absolutely, I thought that was fantastic, actually. Fantastic thing to say. So at the time, this is like 20 or so years ago, I guess, yes, Mea-Su's critique of correlationism seemed to be spelling out or saying or declaring, you know, in the most emphatic possible way, what is problematic.
Or he seemed to be kind of challenging a doxa of post-Kantian continental philosophy in a really kind of blunt way. And I thought that that was really an important thing to do. it was in the wake of that that I started reading in a way it was like reading Mea Su's challenge to the Kantian legacy that made me try to really understand that legacy, to understand Kant properly which I did via the work of Wilfred Sellers who, it's only after reading Sellers that I really I think I properly understood Kant and why Kant in a way can respond to some of the charges you know made against him by Mea Su and Badiou in their different ways I think this happens a lot in philosophy is that even the most profound thinkers gets trivialized.
The most profound philosophical insights get reduced to kind of, to doxa, to catchphrases, which are repeated and which become cheapened and debased. And if you grow up, you know, so and if you hear these things kind of repeated all the time, to the point where they're simply kind of taken for granted and no one can be bothered kind of reconstructing the ins and outs of the philosophical justification for them, you end up having a negative response. They sound, you know, they become annoying. So no, I don't think Kant is kind of the root of everything that's gone. On the contrary, I think Kant is a decisive turning point. I think Kant is the philosopher of modernity
in the same way in which Aristotle is a philosopher of the ancient world. But I think you need to understand them. It takes a long time to understand. I studied Kant's. I read the Critique of Pure Reason as a kind of first-year graduate student. I could parrot the phrases. I knew what Kant said, and I could kind of reiterate Kant's claims. So if you set me an exam on Kant, I would probably get it right. I said, this is what you know. But I didn't understand it. It took me years to understand it. And I think that philosophy is like that because I think philosophical understanding is intensive, not extensive. It takes a long time to actually fathom the depths and the ultimate implications and consequences of a philosophical proposition, which is why I think there is progress in philosophy, but it's very slow.
It involves always kind of going back in order to go forward, trying to understand there's usually a reaction against something going on. And then you see that the reaction is caused precisely by the kind of calcification of a doctrine and the philosophical effort. You need to understand why that reaction is taking place and what really underlies it and why the figure of the philosophy that is being kind of rejected may have, needs to be reinterpreted. It needs to be properly sounded out in order to be able to make progress. Yeah, sounding out the idols, right? Like the twilight of the idols. And you mentioned Sellers, and I only became familiar with his work initially from your interest in your writing on him, particularly in the Concepts and Objects essay, which you published in the Speculative Realism or the Speculative Turn volume.
and you've kind of written about the properly Kantian aspects of Sellers' work, partly in defense against Rorty's, I believe Rorty, as you mentioned, was a student of his, partly in Rorty's kind of, let's just say, calcification of Sellers or canonization of him. Do you want to say a little bit more about Sellers for the listeners and for myself, why there is something appealing to him, or even about what you refer to as his naturalism. I'm just kind of curious about what you find now in this stage of your thinking about Sellers. The first thing I should say is that the person who got me to read Sellers was my friend Damien Beale, who's a philosopher, who my friend and fellow graduate students at Warwick, who
you know we would often talk and he you know he started off as someone working on I owe him a lot I owe him a philosophical debt which I wish I could repay him I think he died a few years ago but he started off as someone working on Heidegger and Husserl and then immersed himself in neocantianism and then started reading kind of the variegations of neocantian thought in 20th century philosophy anyway it's got a long story short he was a a voracious reader. He read everything. And he read Sellers. And he said, well, you're always banging on about science and naturalism. And I'm not saying, we need to read this guy. We need to read Wilfred Sellers, which I did. So it was because of Damien that I did. And I read Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind.
And I thought it was remarkable. But it's very difficult. And I think I now realize that the first couple of times I read it, I probably understood less than half of it. Although I thought I understood it, but I really didn't. And what amazed me was that he was someone who was, in a way, defending kind of an uncompromising philosophical naturalism, which took natural science very seriously. And it didn't resort to an easy gesture of compartmentalization, whereby you say, natural science just deals with like this, you know, facts or this kind of trivial stuff,
whereas, you know, transcendental philosophy or philosophy deals with kind of something that is, you know, with being, right, or the ontological or whatever you want to call it, the stuff that is really important. And Sellers didn't seem to kind of engage in these kinds of facile maneuvers. And he also seemed to be kind of saying something fundamental about the nature of meaning and how the experience of meaning is never immediate, but is actually the result of a complex process of historical and cognitive mediation. And once I started to understand that, backtracking, I'd read, he was Paul Churchland's thesis advisor.
Interesting, interesting. I was reading a lot of philosophical naturalism, principally the work of Daniel Dennett and Paul and Patricia Churchland. And I knew that Sellers had influenced both Dennett and the Churchlands. He advised both Paul and Patricia Churchland in Pittsburgh in the 60s. So I knew he was in the background of a limited materialist. And then I read him. So then I was able to work out, you know, Initially, my angle of approach was trying to understand Sellers as this kind of tutelary figure for illuminative materialism. But then I started to realize he was much more and that his position was actually more sophisticated and kind of deeper. And once I understood it, he was basically saying that, you know, thoughts and sensations are not kind of given.
Thoughts and sensations are not ontological givens, but conceptual constructions and our ability to kind of understand our own experiences in terms of the categories of thoughts, of thinking and sensing was the result of cognitive evolution. And the myth of Jones and Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, I tend to explain how we came to invent or discover, that's the kind of controversy, the categories of thinking and sensing and come to be able to conceive of ourselves and our experience of the world in those terms. And this is interesting because Sellers is also a cantine. So what he's saying, he's naturalizing the faculties
of the understanding and sensibility. and showing how these transcendental faculties, the way in which they are a priori, need not be, can be dereified. In other words, they can be, they are conditions of experience, but that's not to say that they are ahistorical. It's Sellers who made me understand where the transcendental a priori is not metaphysical. It's not metaphysical a priori. It's not like the innate. And that you can reconcile a commitment to transcendentalism with a commitment to, with a broadly naturalistic commitment to the claim that everything we know and think about ourselves is a historical achievement. It was acquired and not in it. So it was Sellers who kind of, you know, made me understand this.
And yeah, it took me a long time. So I spent about 10 years reading Sellers and I'm still reading it. And it's been, so he's the one in a way who made me understand that what appealed to me in these French thinkers, you know, La Relle, La Vieux-Messu, their rationalism, their kind of hostility to kind of subjectivism in the broad sense, i.e. the claim that, you know, that subjectivity is kind of somehow prior to and, you know, irreducible to the world or, you know, the ontic domain. He was able to kind of explain how, you know, to criticise those kind of stances, i.e. criticized the transcendental pretensions of phenomenology and, in a way, the absolutizing
of experiential immediacy, which I was always kind of suspicious of, without dismissing subjectivity altogether. In other words, he naturalized subjectivity and he naturalized conceptual form in this incredibly sophisticated way. And this is important because in a way, with Sellers, you get Sellers articulates the rational and the natural. And instead of like simply kind of saying, you know, even in a philosopher like Badiou, you've got conceptual rationality is a cut in being and it's irreducible to the natural order. But it's irreducibility is abstract. And in a sense, this is simplification, but you could say undialectical.
Whereas Sellers articulates the normative and the natural without simply trying to absorb one into the other. That's what makes his philosophy so difficult, but also so rewarding, because it's an incredibly powerful position. Once I started to understand this, I found it incredibly powerful and compelling. He began this question by asking me about Richard Rory. So Rorty was never a student of Sellers, but he read Sellers, and he was a champion of Sellers at a time when Sellers' reputation was in steep decline amongst his analytic peers, which is to say in the late 60s, early 70s. Because as Robert Brandom points out in the introduction to his volume, from Sellers from Repritism to Expressivism, so Sellers in the 40s and 50s was at the forefront of the then Mason analytic tradition.
And he was producing these really important papers that everyone read. And in the 1960s, when his debt to Kant became more and more explicit, and when he basically started to expose his own Kantianism, science and metaphysics is called variation on Kantian themes, he fell out of favor with his peers, and no one could really understand what he was going on about. and he garnered this reputation for obscurity. And as Brandom also suggests, the pivotal shift in 1960s analytic philosophy is from empiricism to rationalism, from empiricism to rationalist metaphysics. And Sellers was a Kantian. So it was obvious that he,
they went from human to liveness and they left out the Sellers' Kantian alternative. and that's why he was unread, increasingly kind of unread. And Rorty wrote a review of Cellars' Science and Metaphysics where he called Cellars, you know, possibly the most, you know, the most original and inventive systematic philosophy of writing in English and drew heavily on Cellars. Rorty draws heavily on Cellars in Phosphate and the Mirror of Nature, Lovish in 79. And in a way, Rorty is perhaps responsible for keeping Cellars' reputation, keeping Sellers' name alive after his death, in a way, when Sellers was like a completely marginal figure who had once been important but was considered irrelevant.
So Rorty kept Sellers' name alive. But the problem is that Rorty's spin on Sellers' achievement, which is that Sellers is a pragmatist, everyone should be just a pragmatist, in a way kind of completely disregarded those aspects of Szilard's work, which are challenged, the version of pragmatism that kind of royalty champions, can't be kind of absorbed into it. So that's why I think that it's important to challenge, you know, so for instance, The distinction between left and right Szilagianism, which still kind of predominates in the reception of Sellers' work, you're either, you know, the left Szilagian emphasizes the irreducibility of the normative, and the right Szilagian embraces Sellers' scientism, his naturalistic scientism.
But of course, Sellers wanted to reconcile both. Sellers said, you know, the whole point of Sellers' project is not to be either one or the other. Just as Kant is neither a rationalist nor an empiricist. And Rorty, in a way, distorted Salazar's achievement by, in a way, kind of constructing this prism through which everyone subsequently interpreted Salazar's work and chose, opted for either one or the other. And I think that that is a really, that prevented people from seeing what was unique and profound about Salazar's work. Yeah, it sounds like a double-edged sword that he keeps his name alive, but then splits him, right?
Yes, exactly. And it seems like by making a pragmatist, he makes him a proto-Rordian, right? It's like giving birth to your influencer and sort of claiming your father figure that you've kind of birthed yourself. Yes. You know, as I've tried to kind of say in a couple of things I've written, I think this is a problem and I think it's no longer satisfactory. to kind of, I mean, there's a political dimension to this because, you know, obviously Rorty borrows the left-right when he says they're the left Szilagy, which he needs himself and Robert Brand. The good Szilagy. The good Szilagy and the right Szilagy are the metaphysical backsliders, the reactionaries. And obviously this is an echo of left and right Hegelianism.
No one wants to be a right Hegelian defender. But the irony is that Rorty's brand of left-so-marginism is just this, I think, very reactionary liberalism. And the liberalism that Rorty defends is, I think, anything but radical and anything but emancipatory. And I actually think that Sellers' philosophy is much more radical than the version of it proposed by Rorty. He skews it. Actually, Sellers is a really radical thinker. And I think it's Sellers who kind of got me onto Marx. Sellers who really helped me understand what Marx was actually doing in the wake of Hegel. and why once you see that rationality is socially instituted,
Brandom's catchphrase is that transcendental constitution is social institution. This is kind of Brandom's version of this kind of the pragmatist kind of appropriation of Kantianism. Then you realize that discursive practices, the game of giving and asking for reasons, is at least supervenes on these social forms, okay? And it's socially enveloped. And I think this is what Marx saw. This is why Marx comes out of Hegel. This allowed me to kind of, to realize that the most radical consequences, the critical consequences of rationalism, which I was interested in,
because I was interested in philosophical, in this peculiar French rationalism, I mentioned before that in a way the Marxian critique of political economy is in a way the most radical manifestation of this critical rationalism. The understanding that reason is of the world, but of the world not simply because it is a function of bias and prejudice and perceptual habits, but of the world because we are social beings and that the resources of justification and explanation depend on our social relations to one another, not how we give and ask for reasons.
But this also depends, but these social relations can't be abstracted from economic relations, from material economic relations. That's Marx's basic kind of insight. So that's how I got from Sellers to Marx. That's a fascinating pipeline that might be, that's new. I mean, we all eventually, I think, come to Marx and try, at least in philosophy, at least for me, it was anti-Oedipus, which like your reading of Sellers or some of the other thinkers you mentioned. The first time I read it, I probably understood 10% of it, but it got me exposed to Marx and Freud through the back door. And I had just a very quick question to follow up. And then I think I'll let Coop ask something.
I was thinking about what you were saying with Sellers and your dissatisfaction with either Husserl or the phenomenologists that start with subjectivity. And you write in your essay on Prometheism and its critics, this notion about a subjectivism without selfhood. And I know you in the essay, too, bringing up Marx. So is Sellers sort of in the background with this notion of Prometheanism? And if you can quickly, because I know we could talk just a whole episode on it, just to fill in the listeners, what Prometheanism kind of means for you and perhaps in distinction from the more mainstream versions of post-humanism. I know that's a lot. So just feel like tackling any of that.
Sellers is in the background because, so Sellers doesn't have a theory of the subject. So Sellers is canton in that he says that our subjectivity, which is to say our capacity for thinking and feeling, the fact that we experience the world as creatures that think and feel, is itself a cognitive achievement. In other words, the fundamental character and nature of our subjectivity is man-made, not God-given. It has a history, okay? Because thinking and feeling, we had to learn to think and feel. We didn't just, we weren't just kind of created with this kind of spontaneous capacity to think and feel. For sellers, though, this means that this capacity is collectively distributed,
not socially instantiated and collectively distributed. and that means that intersubjectivity is the key category, as it is, I think, for these figures like Rorty and Brandon. Now, in that kind of Prometheanism kind of essay you mentioned, it's actually, there's another concept of subjectivity, which is operative, which is Badiou's concept of subjectivity as a process, a subject that is without an object, a subject that is not, in a way, co-relative to an object or that doesn't emerge as the, you know, in relation to an object, is, you know, the subject of truth in Verdue, which is a process, you know, which it's a process which is impersonal, collective, and anonymous,
and individuals are the support of this subjective process, which constructs a truth. And that was the, you know, the concept of subjectivity that I continued to be, I was and continue to be kind of fascinated by, but I couldn't see how to connect it to the kind of, how to connect this kind of bad you and the kind of subjectivity with the, you know, the Salar's account, because I didn't know how to connect truth and knowledge. Okay. So Salar's explains to you how we know things about ourselves and the world, and we know things about ourselves and the world through our conceptual capacities, which gradually develop over time. And Badiou says that truth is a break with the reigning conceptual order.
It's a subtraction from knowledge, and subjectivity only arises as this break from knowledge, from the order of knowledge. and in a way what I've been trying to do is kind of put those two halves of subjectivity together to articulate the cognitive and the alethic dimensions of subjectivity and again Marx I think is a thinker who provides the resources to do this because I think that in a way Marx's account of, Marx's account of the primacy of social relations of production and his analysis of
social forms underwrites this Kantian naturalism, this account of, you know, in other words, any account of intersubjectivity must factor in the way in which the intersubjective dimension is constrained and shaped in some way by social relations which are not transparent to consciousness, which can't simply be, can't be intuited or can't be uncovered through transcendental reflection. And this is also why I think in the bad union account, the break between truth and knowledge or the way in which, you know, subjectivation occurs as a break with ordinary ways of thinking and feeling,
hinges on this theory of the event, which I actually find, you know, I always had problems with. I always feel kind of unconvincing or, you know, I mean, fascinating, but kind of really unconvincing. And I started to see how Marx as a thinker, I mean, what is the point of Prometheanism? Is that if there is no way that the world is supposed to be, And if all the evidence is that the world is at best indifferent, at worst positively hostile to our desires and interests, then the response is the world must be changed. The world must be remade. and Prometheanism is simply to say that there is no reason to accept,
once you realize that there is no reason to accept that the world has to be the way it is, that nothing, you know, that everything we know and experience in the world is to a greater or lesser extent made and not given, then, you know, the onus is on us to, if we are dissatisfied or unhappy with the world, then we should remake it from the ground up. And Marx is a great Promethean thinker, a great Kantian, post-Kantian Promethean thinker. You know, in the introduction to his doctoral dissertation, he calls, you know, Prometheus the only patron saint and martyr of the philosophical canon or philosophy.
So Marx explains how the world in which we find ourselves, the world that we inhabit and which punishes us and frustrates us at every turn is the world that we have made collectively over generations. Right. And if we made it, we can unmake it. And those who tell you that we can't or that it has to be this way or there's nothing we can do with it, you know about it, are liars, basically. They have a vested interest in making sure that things don't change and things carry on the way they have been. So Marx says, here is how the world is made. Here is how we construct the world unknowingly, without knowing, realizing what we're doing through our everyday social practices.
And once we understand this, we realize that in our everyday practices of buying and selling for monies, we weave this web of relations, which end up dominating and disempowering us and preventing us from doing what we want to do or should want to do. and that web is called capital and Marx gives you, he lays out the kind of structure of the web and makes its dissolution and transformation both at least cognitively feasible and the problem then is the practical implementation. It's like exactly how we know what has to be abolished but we don't know exactly how to do it
And the way in which Marx brings together the kind of, as I said, the Szilardian epistemic and kind of bad you and the lethic dimensions of subjectivity is because in some sense, everything we know about ourselves in the world depends upon the social relations and the social structures that we practically generated. and the way in which to break with the order of knowledge is not by awaiting an event, but by dismantling the social forms which constrain the horizon of cognitive and practical possibility. And that's what revolution is. That's what communism is the name for this,
for the abolition of the harnesses and blinkers which prevent us from seeing and doing what we would otherwise be capable of seeing and doing. And in a way, that's why Marx is the answer to Nietzsche. When Nietzsche says that nihilism is about, you know, the sponge wipes away the horizon, Well, Marx explains how the horizon was constructed. And he says that once we realize we constructed it, we can not only wipe it away, but instead of replacing it with another kind of prefabricated horizon, we can really start investigating. We can open up a horizonless prospect of possibility. And the name of that, I think, is communism.
And communism is the real movement to abolish the present state of things, right? Yes. Yes. Shifting gears a little bit, Ray, I was curious, it seems to be, and this could be also just a result of, I guess, siloed internet subgroups or what have you, but it seems like there's a kind of resurgence of Hegel in particular, but German idealism broadly. and I think there is some evidence for this in the way that Reza Negrestani's work has moved but I think for me even more incongruous it's kind of hard to see someone like Ian Hamilton Grant going from translating Leotard's Libinal Economy Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death and then going back to shelling I don't know if you have any opinions on this trend
or anything to comment related to that at all but if you do, I'd love to hear it Yes. I mean, look, Reza and Ian, I probably kind of, I was shaped by the Nietzscheanism. What is French, French post-structurism? It's basically kind of variation on Nietzschean themes. It's reductive, but it's not that reductive. No, it's not. Yeah. So, and of course, Nietzsche, as read by the French, is the great anti-Hegelian. He's the great alternative to Hegel. So like everyone else, when I entered, I thought, although ironically, when I first read philosophy, I mean, I was fascinating. I read a book about Hegel, which I loved.
I read William Stace's The Philosophy of Hegel when I was like 14 or 15. and it's like a 1920s work on expounding Hegel's system and I thought it was great. I loved it. But by the time I entered into my radio studies, I thought Hegel was bad. Everyone thought Hegel was bad. And in a way, that prevented me. Although I was interested in Marx, in a way, the problem was I was prevented from reading a lot of Marx literature because there was a problem in Marx and that was his death to Hegel. This was kind of an obstacle to kind of engaging with Marx. So actually Badiou was the first thinker I read who made me rethink this kind of ingrained anti-Hegelianism,
which I and many others of my generation had simply kind of absorbed, you know, because all these French guys told you what was wrong with Hegel, why he's this bad totalitarian thinker. It took me a long time to kind of... So Badu was the first thinker who made me rethink that because he's incredibly, you know, Hegel is a great kind of tutelary figure for him. Also, taking courses with Stephen Hoolgate. Stephen Hoolgate was my teacher, and I studied Hegel's science of logic with him. And that already kind of, it was very difficult to kind of just simply repeat the platitudes about Bad Hegel. So again, who tells you, no, this is actually how it works. this is what's going on.
It's not so easy to say, like, Hegel's a thinker of unity, identity. And then when you're given evidence, that's actually much more complicated and interesting than this. So the seeds were planted in my kind of, I guess, my graduate years. And then gradually, Sellers really made me rethink my attitude to Kant and then really pushed me back towards Hegel. I suddenly thought that, you know, what Sellers was saying, because Sellers is a kind of post-Kantian. You know, he's trying to kind of overcome some of these. He's trying to kind of naturalize and historicize these Kantian transcendental structures or make them move, get them moving
and make them kind of dialectically kind of interdependent. And that's already pushing you towards Hegel. So I've also become much more interested in Hegel. and, yes, I just to rethink, you know, I like Hegel as a thinker of contradiction, as a thinker of conflict, not as a thinker of, like, resolution and harmony, but as a thinker of confrontation and contradiction in a really charged sense. And if you read Hegel, if you read the text that Hegel composed, i.e. the Phenology and the Science of Logic, what's remarkable is how crazy and unpredictable they are it's not like this they're not seamlessly right unfolding people
had to kind of smooth it out and to make it seem like this kind of conveyor belt this dialectic right to make it to make it digestible digestible because otherwise it's it's just fucking crazy yeah and it just there are bits in the uh phenomenology where like it's just the text is exploding in every direction. And there's these amazing reversal. And the claim that Hegel always knows where he's going and has planned it all out in advance is like, no, he clearly, when he was writing this, he didn't know where he's just, this stuff is kind of unfolding. The concepts are unfolding and exploding and ramifying in these ways that he's only partly in control of and being led along by. That's, I think, fascinating. And I think that people have rediscovered that,
where I hope that people are beginning to rediscover this aspect of Hale. So Reza, yes, so Reza's work is putting together kind of, you know, the project of artificial general intelligence with these insights from kind of German idealism. And Ian, well, Ian started reading Schelling way back. And he tells me he was just bored of the philosophy he'd been kind of, you know, reading, the kind of the French stuff he'd read. And he walked into a bookshop and kind of spontaneously kind of bought Schelling's Freedom Essay. Amazing. And that was it, you know, kind of inflamed his philosophical imagination, I think. Yeah. I have heard great things about Schelling's work, at least as far as it being kind of similar to Hegel in terms of it's kind of exploding in these different directions.
Yes. Yes. These are not tidy thinkers. right Shelley even less than you know kind of a joke and how many you know how many systems can you find in Shelley you know several dozen within every within a six month period you can kind of you know kind of dozens of them but yes he's he's a very kind of an incredibly rich and you know profound thinker and um and i think that people i guess very simply is that um you know to go back to the kind of the beginning of the conversation is that you know everyone should read nature everyone should read nature but then you need to kind of get out of it you know yeah i think that he does constrain your your philosophical horizons actually for you know although he's an amazing
he's an amazing writer and he kind of you know he liberates well the problem with Nietzsche is that you don't know what he's fighting against so he'll tell you like what's wrong with Plato and what's wrong with Kant and his predecessors but that's dangerous if it prevents you from reading with you know these thinkers and seeing actually no this is not you know he has an agenda which is culturally and historically specific. I mean, I don't want to get into the ins and outs of Nietzsche's politics, but the conditions under which Nietzsche emerges as this kind of master thinker for a generation are historically specific. And there's a reason why he captures our imagination.
And I think you need to be aware of that. But I think it's very dangerous when Nietzsche becomes a worldview. and actually philosophy is not a worldview when you start filtering it as I said when you start filtering everything through this your favorite philosopher then that's just you're not doing philosophy anymore you're just interpreting using a kind of preformed grid yeah so I think that that's maybe that's why I think people Reza and me and our friends I think their interest in these figures is I think we had a similar kind of trajectory. You discover that you become dissatisfied with the solutions or the responses that you had to think.
You discover that there's something about a line you're taking on an issue that just doesn't work, that's not kind of, you know, really doesn't hold up to prolonged scrutiny. It may hold up if you don't poke it too strongly, But like, if you really test it, you see it just doesn't stand up. Yeah. I would like to flag a thinker. You don't have to respond to this, but just really briefly, I wanted to insert this. So personally, one of my figures within German idealism that I like to read would be Max Stirner, who I think is an interesting figure in the way that sort of bridges this gap between a Nietzscheanism and a Hegelian in the way that he is very – his logic is very Hegelian in his critique of the phenomenology and unique in its property.
but he's a very interesting figure you know i think the stuff with shelling and the eye and so forth has some relationship to sterner's the creative nothing but that's neither here nor there yeah no he is um sterner's a figure like i don't know what it's all but i read jacob blumenfeld's recent book on him which is a great little book and which hopefully will get you know more people reading i had him on the show figures oh great okay great i'm glad all these figures i I mean, this is the other thing is that, you know, you think that these French, you know, these 60s French thinkers are the most radical and brilliant and inventive thinkers. And they were, they were brilliant. They were all brilliant. You know, I'm not minimizing their brilliance.
But then, you know, you read this stuff, this post-Hegelian stuff, and you see it's incredible. like these guys were equally brilliant you know and they were just as kind of imaginative and they were trying to they were also trying to kind of think beyond the kind of you know the horizon of established philosophical possibility and the stakes were immense. Farback is a thinker like I discovered and you know he's really extraordinary so all these thinkers were like really remarkable. And they have, you know, they're responding to Kant and Hegel, who are like these titans. And they're doing so in these incredibly inventive ways. And you start
to realize that in philosophy, 200 years in philosophy is like, you know, a day. It's really nothing. Philosophical temporality is not like, and we're still dealing with the problems that these thinkers were dealing with. And that, you know, you can draw a line, you realize that these French thinkers are still kind of working out the consequences and the ramifications of problems that were formulated in the immediate aftermath of German idealism. And it's a mistake to think that philosophical temporality is not synchronized with, you know, empirical, historical chronology. So 200 years in philosophy is nothing, you know, and this is why
these German thinkers are still our contemporaries. They're not old hats. We haven't simply advanced beyond them in this straightforward chronological sense. I do like that. I mean, you can see that in, obviously, Deleuze is someone that I think of when we think about anti-Hegelianism, because he does take up Nietzsche, at least. And as you kind of point out controversially, perhaps, his book, Nietzsche and Philosophy, is controversial, So at least to one extent in, if not as reading The Will to Power and Eternal Return, then in making him the key figure in the anti-Hegelian front. If we take that out of context of the time in which he's writing, at least to Liz, if we take him biographically seriously, he's kind of saying how his generation was, what you had on the menu was Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel.
And so there is a kind of, you have to think about the situation that Nietzsche was an antidote to their time, or at least to his upbringing. And I assume you can include Foucault and Leotard and Baudrillard and these other thinkers. Maybe not Baudrillard, he was off doing a little bit something different. But and that's why your point about temporality and not being synchronized. And it's also highly contextualized that it makes sense why it is it is important to see. And it does perk people's ears up when someone like Grant is writing on Schelling as a contemporary thinker in his own right or Reza going back to Hegel. You know, that's I think that's that's very poignant what you just said. I realise it can sound, I mean, it can sound like I contradicted myself because earlier I was insisting that, you know, philosophy is historically kind of embedded.
And now I'm saying that philosophical temporality is kind of, is not simply kind of synchronic with kind of history events. But I think both things are true. The way that philosophy is always of its time, is kind of, you know, generated by, it arises, what a philosopher says and thinks is kind of determined in a complicated way by the social historical circumstances. But at the same time, those circumstances may be transformed at a rate and at a pace which isn't kind of synchronic with the transformation of the problem. So in a way, the world in which there's a, in one sense, there's a profound difference between our reality, our social historical reality in the early 21st century and Germany in the 1840s and 50s.
Right. And that's true, but there's also a sense in which there's some things that haven't changed. And I think that the way in which, you know, the historical change is multidimensional, it's not kind of unilinear. In a way, the way in which historical time unfolds, it unfolds in these different strata, not always at the same kind of pace. And that's why, you know, a philosopher writing 200 years ago, who thought is responding to the circumstances of 200 years ago, can still have something, even if the historical circumstances in which he was writing have resolved themselves, his thinking may not, is not necessarily resolved into something kind of successive.
so that's the sense in which philosophy is both is always of its time but the time it's of is multi-layered the depth to it and the implications of what unfolds from a historical moment is unfolds in this kind of different rates at different speeds I really like that and I was going to be Nietzschean for a second and say you could invoke the untimely, but we've already warned our listeners to let's keep the Nietzsche down. You know, a little Nietzsche is enough for now. Everything you said puts all of this in light. And the follow-up we had, or the follow-up I was thinking of, because Baudrillard does, in the first chapter of symbolic exchange of death, he mobilizes, you know, the master and
slave dialectic to say that what sort of happens in that relationship is the master. It's not necessary. He kind of inverts it, right? It's not that the master holds the power of death over the slave, but he has the power to like allow living and therefore that's how the subjugation occurs. And we were thinking about this in terms of your essay on the human and your own reflections on Hegel. That made me also think about, in the back of my mind, in reading Baudrillard, I always have the sense in which, perhaps differently than Nietzsche's own confrontation with nihilism, Baudrillard cultivates a kind of nihilism that perhaps takes it to the consequences that he's
trying to draw out in its extremes. And I just wanted to perhaps get you to speak a moment about your taking seriously of nihilism in, I mean, you phrased it so well in the beginning of Nihil Unbound, this notion, philosophy can be too quick to reconcile thinking and life, right? You mentioned this question of the hostility of life. And perhaps this was also part of what you were thinking of when you were speaking of Hegel and this kind of notion of tearing with the negative and this explosive notion. Do you want to say anything about your understanding of nihilism or what it means meant for you? And if it's perhaps still does have something left for you to sort of extrapolate and if it has any bearing on your current or future work?
I'll try to answer by, in a way, responding to the final part of your question first. And I would yes I mean I got to where I am now which is to say working on Marx you know Marx being I think this the most radical kind of successor to Kant and Hegel by through my earlier kind of work on nihilism and it's simply because what spurred that work was that nihilism is both banal something that easily becomes banal and kind of that everyone thinks is can be kind of, you know, overcome. But there's something about it that refuses, or at least there was something about it for me
that kind of couldn't be, that represented a kind of a point of indigestibility or something that couldn't be kind of simply circumvented or kind of traversed. And this is that, you know, the accommodations, the philosophical accommodations that we try to make with the world can sound really like self-deceptions. Like, you know, pretending that the world, you know, the world is not okay, you know, that there's something profoundly wrong with being alive and with life as we know it. And that these, you know,
these philosophical mitigations or consolations are just kind of sophistry and delusion. And that's, and I think that that is a, so part of this, it's in a way it's my, my kind of mistrust of, I guess, of reconciliation, of easy reconciliation, or of accommodation that made me interested in nihilism. But then, of course, I also realized that nihilism can also turn into comfort blankets. There's a brand of nihilism which becomes also a nice, a nice comfy hospital bed where you don't have to kind of, you know,
it's a kind of facile resignation. Right. But in a way where you kind of protect yourself, You protect yourself from the world's power to hurt and humiliate. So everything I've done, Neil on Bound is a book about despair. And despair is an emotion. It's a very simple emotion, which I think most people experience. And I think that despair is not something to be summarily dismissed. I think that there are objective grounds for despair. and in a way lots of the kind of these philosophical antidotes to despair can sound really farcical and hollow. An attempt to kind of take it seriously but then also to kind of
work through it without doing something without, you know, to find a non-nichin alternative, to find an alternative to the realistic despair that wouldn't simply be the love of fate. Yes. The love of fate and in a way that's why fatalism, the book I'm writing no is about the word entitled is faithlessness, it's about thinking the absence of fatality the absence of fate without affirming without simply affirming freedom as a positive condition I think this is what Marx is trying to Marx is a thinker of emancipation because he's trying to think freedom as something that we have not
yet achieved freedom is something that can only be negatively envisaged as what is not, freedom is not it has to be made to be and that's the kind of the challenge and that's what I think the overcoming of nihilism kind of entails so I think there is a kind of a trajectory from this stuff I wrote a long time ago now the stuff I'm trying to do now and the relationship to Baudrillard that's a long time actually I read Baudrillard in my 20s. I read a lot of his stuff. And I found it very kind of seductive. And the prose was kind of fascinating. And actually, I like that. I like that in simulations where Baudrillard says, I am a nihilist.
I see, except I like that. I remember that it had this really bracing kind of rhetorical effect. I liked his really disenchanted, there's no stuff about desire, no stuff about affirmation. It's just like this really kind of glacial kind of outlook on this monstrous commodity world. But I'd have to say I can't really remember. I mean, if I revisited it, I'm not sure I would kind of agree with the diagnosis. No, and actually, you mentioned you're pairing with Leotard.
Boudreaux and Leotard are ex-Marxists. They were Marxists who kind of turned to, well, Leotard switched to Nietzsche. And they see kind of the Marching Revolutionary Project has failed, and that option is no longer available. So we have to kind of, you know, reconcile ourselves to the terminal absence of the prospect of liberation. I think they're wrong. I think, again, that's kind of myopia, historical myopia. They took a peculiar historical predicament to be this kind of eternal, uncircumcensable kind of condition. and actually they're an example of the way in which there's a kind of, dialectically, radicalism so quickly flips over into kind of complacency.
So like Lyotard, and again, like I read those books, Living on Economy and Dispositive Fusione, and loved them at the time. But you have to remember, if you see where Lyotard ends up, it's not in a radical place where he ends up. He ends up with Kant and liberal democracy. And St. Augustine at the end. And St. Augustine, you know, and he's a beautiful writer, but like, yes, voting for Giscard this thing in 1974 as an anti-communist. So these thinkers really painted themselves into corners where there, you know, there's a kind of gestural radicalism which flips over into something very
conservative. You can see and I think it's apparent in the positions that these thinkers got themselves into. It's a salutary lesson. That's why I think it's a reason to study their work. They were trying to think through these political and philosophical deadlocks and they were trying to do so kind of bravely and audaciously. But what they took to be a kind of a radical alternative ends up being something that is, again, becomes something that's part of the status quo, something, a default, you know, a kind of a default option that becomes all too palatable
and kind of that loses its kind of, you know, the veneer of provocation and radicalism. And anyway, that's the problem with like any radical gesture is immediately neutralized because it's so tied to a specific time and place. Right. What seems super radical in 1974, years later, like you see, like it's, you know, it's not at all radical. Quickly. And I know that Koop, I want you to ask your next question and we can circle back, but And we can start to wrap up too. We've had you for two hours. And anyway, with Leotard in Libidal Economy, you see throughout the work, and he's even actually very critical of Augustine, which is ironic because he ends up with them, but he repeats throughout the work is like,
we can't do, like, that has to be cordoned off as nihilistic. Whereas even in 76, in Symbolic Exchange of Death, Baudrillard hasn't yet said, I'm a nihilist. He kind of is still considering nihilism not to be what he's after, which is why sometimes I think in that work, he has the feeling of nostalgia, even when he's saying, you know, we can't go back. It's still kind of feel like he's not in the simple positive Rousseauian, we need to go back to symbolic exchange in primitive societies or whatever, but it still feels like there's this yearning. And that's also not the kind of answer that Prometheanism or taking nihilism seriously
can offer as a solution, this sort of yearning for the past, because that again is, as you were saying, that's a palliative. That's just another consolation to merely kind of fantasize rather than sort of plug that desire, not to use a word that you may not want to use, but you know what to plug that into something that could still be viable. Yes, yes. I think that's right. And I know that Cooper wants to ask you about Dune because he felt something in your discussion of Prometheanism in the work of Frank Herbert. Have you ever engaged with the series by chance? I think it's a very interesting kind of, at least narratively examines a lot of these kind of bigger movements
And maybe the Marcuse Ordon piece, I think, more directly deals with this kind of question about, because in Dune, you have this sort of messianic figure, right? That is sort of this being that has access to all ancestral memories, you know, from the beginning of humanity. And so they have this basically access to all of human history so they can sort of, and they're also prescient, so they have the ability to see what the potential future outcomes are of humanity and so forth. So I thought it was relatively interesting there. And then as the books, as the series progressed, you have this sort of merging of the human with the animal world and sort of trying to collapse down this distinction between culture and nature into this kind of, I almost say, it's almost Hegelian in its approach via the God Emperor. And I don't know if any of this even is registering at all, so please stop me if you have no familiarity at all.
I've never read the books and I haven't seen the series. I'm not sure. Is this, I've seen David Lynch's film from the 1984, I think. Yeah. I really liked, I think it's brilliant. I haven't seen the new one. All those things are kind of philosophically kind of, you know, resonance, you know, and I think they're, yeah, they're clearly, I mean, in terms of the kind of, you know, the culture and nature thing, I think in Marx, The point is not to recover this kind of pre-lapsarian harmony, this, you know, this, this Edenic state where culture, you know, where the state of nature, but in a way to kind of, to dissolve, you know, the artificial, you know, the human made boundaries between
what we call culture and what we call nature and thereby transform both in the process, which means that it's a process because neither is fixed. Neither culture nor nature is like fixed as a kind of a, as a determinate result. So the remaking or in a way Prometheism would be kind of, you know, humanity actively contributing to the creation of the universe, like not actively making the world and making it not just in, not on an imaginary level, but in a kind of a real practical and cognitive way. And science, I think that's a science fiction is often treats of that topic.
And yeah, if I knew Frank Herbert's books, I'd be able to see more. I've just never, yeah, I'm afraid I've never gotten around to kind of reading them. Can you tell me more about the series? Where was it shown? I was speaking specifically to the books because the books, the only, only really the first one or two books have ever been adapted to the screen. But where Herbert really gets interesting in terms of his philosophy angle is in the third and fourth books, which would be Children of Dune and then God Emperor of Dune. And this is him and his most philosophically resonant. And I want to say, you know, Herbert was, he was an American. He was raised Catholic, became a Buddhist later in his life. But his time and place was effectively at the sort of in the 60s, like, you know, the sexual revolution was occurring, you know, the conflicts in the Middle East over oil and so forth.
So this is like the landscape in which his writing developed, which I think is heavily influenced by writers like Freud and Marx and kind of this very historical materialist approach to how human culture develops that I think really sets it in distinct opposition to most of the kind of more liberal-oriented ontological way that most science fiction, at least in the US, is addressed. Sure, except the category of God Emperor I mean, yeah, it's like I wouldn't want a society Where there was a God Emperor That would make me uncomfortable A despotic regime Here's the interesting angle on the God Emperor Okay, so the whole facility Of the God Emperor is basically To prepare humanity The idea is this extreme
Amount of repression so that Humanity can kind of burst forth And scatter and populate the universe instead of becoming this sort of steady state dying culture without its, you know, like if humanity is sort of concentrated within certain angles of the universe, they're more susceptible to the end, right? To the end of time, as you talk about a little bit. So that's kind of his approach is this extreme repression. It's almost, and it's, it even auto is almost like this vitalist revolution. I would call it in a sense, in the way that it's kind of like this Nietzschean, very Darwinian, you know, sort of only the strong survive, sort of very hard, stark vision of Darwinism or evolution as a process as applied to humanity. Well, what I liked about what you just said the way before throwing it to you, Ray, was
what comes out now in your description, because I haven't read the books either. And Koop's, he's trying to get me to read them and I'm going to have to consent at some point. But this tension between progress and the antinomy of progress, right? As you write about with Marcuse and Adorno. Is this going to be featured in your book on fatelessness? And do you see some of the ideas of this god emperor preparing the human for scattering throughout the universe? Do you see how that kind of relates a little bit to the crux of your isolating? I don't know if I thought of them as paradoxes, but obviously antinomies and paradoxes aren't the same. Do you want to just say a little bit about that piece on Marcuse and Adorno? Yeah, that piece focuses on an antimony of progress that each thinker identifies,
both Adorno and Marcuse kind of identify, but from which they draw different consequences. And the antimony is that on the one hand, well, it's actually, Marcuse maybe kind of makes it easier to explain because he distinguishes between two kind of dimensions of progress, qualitative, quantitative technical progress, progress in kind of the domination of nature, you know, technology, etc., and progress in a kind of a normative, political, emancipatory progress, you know, kind of the overcoming of oppression and domination. So the antimony is stated by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment is that we
free ourselves from nature you know we we overcome you know nature's domination of us as a weak frail animal species by dominating it but the point i don't know how to make is that in dominating nature and freeing ourselves from nature's kind of deadly grip upon us we simply you know we reiterate nature. We still channel nature because this domination is itself a natural kind of compulsion so that we remain, we enslave ourselves to nature even as we try to free ourselves from it. So the paradox is that on the one hand, we've achieved a kind of, you know, we've progressed
far beyond our original kind of dependence and vulnerability to nature. You know, our hominid ancestors were vulnerable to the caprices of nature in ways in which we are not. And yet, ironically, like, you know, all of this vast technological armature that we've developed to protect ourselves from nature ends up kind of enslaving us and dominating us and preventing us from. And it creates a second nature. This is also what Marx is talking about. The capital is the second nature that forces us to serve it instead of it being subservient to our ends.
So all this to say that you can't have one without the other. So you can't have, you know, human beings have to free themselves from nature. They have to free themselves from the complete kind of subservience to nature in order to kind of to live a human life. So that, you know, we have to be able to kind of cure diseases and, you know, minimize infant mortality, etc., etc. But the more we're able to do this, you know, the resources through which we do this end up enslaving us in a different way and end up making us dependent once again. Right. So that's the antimony. and both Adorno and Horkheimer have different kind of proposals to resolve it. With Adorno, it's by, I mean, it's complicated.
I mean, I'm not sure I can do it justice off the top of my head like this, but it's if you, I guess you can't, you can't dominate domination. Right. So you have to, as he puts it, there's a, you know, remember. There's a self-negation that progress involves, and you kind of problematize his answer or that his solution isn't quite satisfactory, even if he's inching toward it, right? This proposal of resistance that you're not quite sure how we get there, but you can see the glimpses of it. Yes, it's like in a way what Adorno says that in a way progress would be the resistance to compulsive progress.
Right. progress would be achieved when we're not compelled to keep dominating both inner and outer nature to stay alive. Because really, the fact that we are compelled to dominate in order to survive, the fact that we're still compelled to preserve ourselves shows that we are not free. And capitalist society compels self-domination and the domination of others as a condition of self-preservation. You can't exist as a human in a capitalist society without either, you know, dominating or being dominated, okay? So that's the, in a way, so the resistance to the compulsion to dominate or to be dominated would be a progress, but obviously this could only be kind of
socially, collectively, socially achieved. And Marcuse's argument is also dialectical. He says that there comes a point at which the progress in the technological kind of means of repression renders, you know, diminishes the amount of socially necessary repression. Right. So there comes a point where kind of the gap between what he calls the ratio of a surplus to necessary repression is canceled or dissolved and where we can live without being compelled to repress.
So in a way it's like repression itself is sublimated, determinately negated. And interestingly enough, through technological advances and through automation, so Marcuse, so this argument is kind of first sketched in Eris on civilization but then repeated in the 1960s but he's the first kind of what is now known as accelerationism the claim that capitalism somehow generates the conditions for its own overcoming is first broached by Marcuse which is not surprising because it's a Hegelian and Marcuse is a Hegelian of course it's not, it's very different well, Delos and Gossary site, Marcuse, and I think there is a kind of influence
in Southern Antioedipus. Yeah. So, yes, so that's the antimony of progress. And I think the crucial claim, and Adorno makes his claim, is that progress, it's in a way the assumption that progress has been achieved or the confidence that we now have, that humanity, as we now know it, is definitely provides some kind of, you know, yardstick of accomplishments and that we are a template for, you know, future human development is precisely the kind of the regressive kind of delusion. So it's very interesting because I think it's a dialectical engagement
with the problem of, instead of saying progress is all good, if you're kind of a liberal progressivist who thinks that things have just been getting better and better. No, things are pinker. Things have just been getting better and better. And they're just these kind of resistances, these remaining resistances, which are kind of regressive tendencies that must be kind of... The gesture of confidently demarcating progression from regression is itself regressive. But the wager that there's something in, you know, we're recognizing the regressiveness of what we have called progress up until now would be the first step, the first progressive step, the first step towards liberation, towards kind of achieving liberation, which is the liberation from compulsive self-preservation.
And the interesting corollary to this, which is, I think, sometimes overruled, or at least, you know, I only noticed recently, is that there's also in Adorno and Marcuse, you were both influenced by Freud, is that the ego, what we call the self, is a defense formation. It is an instrument of self-preservation. So like freedom, individual liberation, individual and collective liberation would involve the solution of the ego as this kind of defense mechanism. In a way, the ego is both a weapon of aggression and a defense mechanism, which is perpetuated by social antagonism and by conditions of the compulsion to self-preservation, because we're constantly besieged and threatened.
and it would become unnecessary under communism. If you dissolve the conditions that make compulsive self-preservation necessary, then the ego, as we know it, that psychic formation would be redundant. Yes. Which doesn't mean, and it's interesting because it doesn't mean like you merge with the cosmos. Right, right. It means that the way it would mean a fundamental kind of reconfiguration of experience and of the relationship between self and other. Both Marcuse has very interesting things to say about this Adorno too, although he's less confident. He's a little pessimistic. Yes. Which is good, which is good.
Yes. But that's an interesting kind of implication of this view. When I was reading your paper on Marcuse and Adorno and the Centinomy of Progress, it made me think of one of my favorite novels, which is Brave New World, and how Huxley kind of imagines this fantastical future society that wherein some of the conditions, particularly of the ego that you're talking about, are also redundant. And instead of kind of merging with the cosmos through the means of the magic drug Soma, there are these, you know, ritual communions with other bodies. You know, it's everyone belongs to everyone else. And of course, at the end of the novel, the horror of engineering the society is revealed by one of the world, by Mustafa Amand.
He kind of runs New London and he's explaining not only to John the Savage, but really to the readers that in earlier iterations of this perfect society, of this utopia, this brave new world, the engineers tried to make it so that there was nothing but free time. And there was no there was no sort of labor requirements whatsoever. And, you know, Huxley cynically or humorously, satirically kind of says that this didn't work. People weren't happy. And I was reflecting on this because it's not even essential to the novel for Huxley to have this little aside. It's like a paragraph or two. But just to have this little notion, it made me think about Marcuse and Odordo.
but Marcuse specifically thinking about how you could almost say there's this fall in the tendency of the rate of repression or something. And now Huxley is kind of saying, well, humans wouldn't like this. Although he's, I mean, Huxley, he's putting this in the mouth of someone whom we shouldn't trust, who likes the society the way it is in this perfect stability, identity, whatever the mottos are. But I was just kind of thinking how working through the dialectic that Marcuse going through. The way you put it, which I thought was brilliant, was although repression as process is coextensive with history, it cannot be synchronized with it, right? And you say some other kind of brilliant things too about this, the synchronicity of repression in history,
but it kind of made me think too that Huxley may have been sort of vibing with some of what you end up with at the end of the essay and some of what Marcuse is trying to think through dialectically. I've never read Brave New World unfortunately but I will do I'm very curious about these resonances that's very very interesting and I don't know much about Huxley, I don't know much about his politics and Adorno has a very interesting essay on Huxley and Prisms which I read not so long ago which is very interesting again talking about in a way the kind of saying that the book is more interesting is not just partly defending the philosophical interest
of the book against critics who just say it's a reactionary fable about the dangers of social engineering. Right. But also, like, seeing how it's limited, you know, I think Huxley has a really interesting premise, but it doesn't follow through on some of the interesting manifestations. Yeah. It's particularly that, I think, the reason why the book stuck with me is how it thinks through some of Freud's categories, you know, it thinks through the notions of drive and even kind of thinks through death drive in a certain way, which is collectively distributed. Everyone's kind of got a Logan's run timer on their heads, you know, and the bodies themselves are not necessarily cremated or buried, but
turned back into the substance to regenerate more embryos and all this. But I know we're sort of at a good stopping point. There was one question that I had that kind of loose and fun, and we can kind of end on that note. I was just thinking about how I was reading your Wikipedia page, just for interest in making sure that I kept up on your bibliography. But I saw at the bottom that Nick Pizzolatto, the creator of True Detective, references you in an interview saying that your work, I assume he means Nile Unbound, but he could mean some of your essays too, helped inspire the creation of True Detective. Have you heard this or have you seen this said? Someone mentioned this a few years ago and I saw the first season.
I mean, I thought it started off very promisingly. wasn't quite kind of convinced by um yeah it kind of intimated that kind of metaphysical dimensions that it didn't really kind of deliver on but thomas legate is clearly the kind of the fundamental influence on that on that season and um if anyone i'm kind of surprised it's a It's an unexpected surprise that the writer referenced my stuff. It's not every day a philosopher gets to have an impact on popular culture like that, right? Yeah. Well, I don't think it's nice, but I don't, I mean, I think Ligotti, the ideas in the Ligotti deserves, he's the inspiration.
He's the kind of the key inspiration and everything else would be kind of secondary or tributary to that primary information. I'll let you be modest. I think I can have to go back and rewatch now thinking of our conversation and your work. The time is a flat circle. I can almost see kind of in this notion of time introducing kind of a disjuncture in thinking, or how is it you, I'm sorry, you put it, the disequilibrium, sorry, the disequilibrium, which time introduces into knowing, right? As you kind of phrase it, this is what the Enlightenment contributes.
And also this notion of Prometheanism in general and of Adorno and Marcuse and what you're working through with progress and the question about disequilibrium and whether or not humans should have the right and the freedom to enter their own disequilibriums into the world as though this were somehow prohibited, right? this very question I found to be at least resonant on a certain level. But anyway, I found that entertaining. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, the key thing is, in a way, the disequilibrium that human beings should be allowed to inject into the world and to release into the world should be creative and not the kind of the banal and destructive disequilibriums of the free market,
for instance. So in other words, it's not like saying, if you say the world is a chaos of forces, and therefore, you know, capitalist competition and the free markets are merely kind of, it's a second reiteration of this primordial chaos. That's a very, very conservative. That's a way in which like affirming the chaos of the world ends up being making sure that nothing will change. Yes. And it's the ultimate kind of, you know, conservative position. There's a way of embracing chaos that is completely conservative, because it naturalizes chaos. And the point is not to naturalize chaos, but to say that actually, the world as it is, and even what we take to be
these natural dynamisms, which we are so impressed by are nothing compared to the dynamisms that we could collectively generate, but for genuinely kind of creative, not for kind of destructive, but for kind of beneficent ends. Because maybe, you know, the good is more creative and more interestingly generative than the bad. Take it as a platonic hypothesis. So the point is to kind of not to naturalize chaos, but in a way to denaturalize it. And by saying that we can, the ways in which we can unmake and remake ourselves and our world could be produced without this kind of, without the cheap pathos of creative destruction.
Yeah. Which is really, I think everyone, we now see how pathetic and banal the pathos of creative destruction is. And it's really, there's something a little bit kind of, worshipping it or elevating it into this kind of cosmic power is a capitulation. It's a gesture of submission and not a very courageous posture at all. Coop, I'll let you have the last word if you'd wish. I don't have anything to add other than to say I'm a tremendous fan of your project, Ray. And I'm just very honored that you decided to spend these few hours chatting with us. This was the first podcast I've been nervous for in quite some time.
And I've done over 200 plus. So if that says anything, I'm very grateful. Well, thanks very much for inviting me. Thanks for a really, really interesting conversation. I echo Cooper. I appreciate your time and you coming. And I've already kind of said my debt is to you, since you began this conversation kind of talking about some of your influences, even if not by name, then at least collectively, you're one of the first to grab my attention and to kind of open my horizon outside of my Nietzschean teens and these other things. And including to the fact that there were these thinkers out there who were in need of translation and that perhaps that could
be something that I could share in and share with others. So that was something that kind of made it so that I realized like, hey, there are so many books out there and so many languages. And the one I was at least interested in, I didn't necessarily have to sit back and wait, and I could actually participate and hopefully help to open up the discussion more. So you kind of were always that inspiration. So I just have to thank you for that. I owe a huge debt to you for that. Thank you. That's very kind. You know, it's really incredibly kind. Thanks. I'm very glad if something I did was fruitful in that way. So that's thanks. I'm very happy. I'm very happy to hear that.
And I know I'm not the only one. And he was also on the reply to Liz's essay, Sid Littlefield. He was my teacher. And he helped to show me he's always been interested in your work. And he helped to kind of broaden my horizons. I don't think I would be either the person or the thinker I am today without having come in contact with your work. So I can't thank you enough just for that. But I also really thank you for your generosity and your time today. Not at all. I'm very glad to do it. And thanks. Thank you for engaging, you know, for engaging with my work, for asking me questions about stuff I've done. Yeah. Because, yes, it's very heartening to be able to kind of discuss these things.
So thanks again. Thank you, Ray. We'll let you go and enjoy the rest of your evening. And I look forward to your work on Fatelessness. I'm already anticipating it. and we just thank you again. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. You two have a good day. You two. Have a good day. Cheers, Ray. Thanks again, Ray. Bye. Bye. Once again, thanks to Ray Brossier and that will wrap up this week's edition of the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour with Cooper Cherry and Taylor Atkins. The very rules of eating, of negativity and singularity, including the ultimate form of singularity, which is in the world state of things
a pure bias without much of the airport this is a typical bias of information it's violent because what happens then is the murder of the queen the vanishing point of reality Let's not have a misunderstanding here. What I did is the following. With nothing left but to cycle, whitewashed, lobotomized people, as in the blockwork orange.