Mark Fisher - Anti - Vital (on Nick Land, Lyotard, Freud, Vitalism)

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

Listen

Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Okay, so, um, this is not super organized, it might get a little difficult. But, I mean, what I want to talk about really is, to talk about Nick Land, partly in relation to what had preceded him, and the kind of canon of thought that was kind of excavated, repotentiated in the 90s, and then the relation of that…

• 00:07:16

  in the text, which is a quote from Freud from Beyond the Pleasure principle. So, er... the death drive is not the desire for death, but rather hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensities. In its primary dynamics, it is utterly alien to everything human, not least the three great pettinesses of representation…

• 00:14:22

  And he doesn't mean in a Derridian way particularly, but he does mean it in terms of something, well, somewhat Derridian, in the sense that it's about the impossibility, the impossibility to stage binary oppositions. So what we see with beyond the pleasure principle is Freud trying to, in lots of ways, trying to give…

• 00:21:54

  It doesn't really matter that much. I think whether you call it life or death if you're positive you're not really positing this kind of this force antithetical to to structuration as such. You're just trying to burst out of any kind of any kind of boundaries that are placed around it. But just read a bit of this…

• 00:37:30

  ! as I said then the question of there seems to be a question about whether we're talking about vitalist impulse or anti-vitalist impulse doesn't really make any difference whether we're talking whether we call it life or whether we call it a death drive doesn't seem to matter at this point Deleuze and Guattari have…

• 00:46:27

  You know, at least, I mean, I think at least as a starting point, you know, we have to say, people desire capitalism, desire something that capitalism produces. Why do they desire that? Why? We can't simply pretend that, and this is the point of that polemical and, as Leotard himself came to say, scandalous kind…

• 00:53:32

  you know, who is... you know, who is to say the logic of hysteria... which has... you know, which... seizes hold of certain organisms, certain... you know, tissues... certain... muscles in... in the body... you know, who is to say that that logic... is inferior to the so-called normal running of things? So... I think…

• 01:02:08

  And that's, and that's why it's so difficult. And that's one of the reasons it's so difficult to struggle against capitalism. Because we don't have the same resources of the people engineering at, at our, at our disposal, at least on the face of it. All right, well I'll just leave it there.