NICK LAND ON NIETZSCHE WILL TO POWER EROS Feat Nick Land

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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.

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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: video original (.mp4).

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• 00:00:00

  Most dramatically, when you have Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and the erotics of that, it's completely wrapped up with death. It's completely morbid in that sense. And it's morbid for strictly Schopenhauerian reasons. That both eros and death are about a line escaping constriction and separation of beings to this kind…

• 00:20:56

  Just, yeah, but just to say that, I'm sorry, I'm not really talking about the teleology of capitalism in any way, helpful way now, but we, we, we will get back to it for sure. Yeah. No, I'm absolutely following. And I think, you know, perhaps what's more pressing and the reason I bring up teleology isn't so much about…

• 00:38:18

  Rome, all these different things. But it seems like there's this deeper impulse shaping the will, which is not necessarily just power, maybe power, and, and the erotic sort of go hand in hand, but even something like death, or the death drive, to me, they all seem to be serving the sort of erotic purpose of creating…

• 00:55:46

  We've got a kind of subjective and objective entity and fundamental division of those kinds in reality. So we know the will to power can't be just like a will that wants power. And I think the real clue to it, again, comes from Kant in the Metaphysical Morals, where he says, he says, it's impossible to will…

• 01:07:38

  Variety of senses. Then we get into this idea of, you know, how do they gather those senses? Maybe you do need an avatar. You do need a vessel for, you know, for artificial intelligence to really develop those instrumental subgoals, which requires something beyond these current LLMs. And, you know, I've been tying…

• 01:21:46

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, well, what do you value with AI, you know, either mechanistically or teleologically, for example, you know, in your Dugan conversation, you sort of seem to frame it as actually actualizing God's plan in a sense. And how occult forces, like for example, one of the things you said that I…

• 01:38:03

  Steelmans and then in relation to trying to, I guess, diagnose will to power in these things. So it's been a lot of fun. So I guess I'll just be an artist about it for a bit and see where it goes. But just going off of that, prefacing, and I realize it's biased and still, still early, but, you know, I guess where I've…

• 01:53:26

  But it's impossible that under those circumstances to sort of treat it as a, as a supreme value, which obviously, it appears much more like that in his earlier writings. So supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed prepared for this question because i because you warned…