Ray Brassier - Brassier Unbound

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.

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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: 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

  The very rules of eating of negativity and singularity Including the ultimate form of singularity which is How can I not care? Switch to the whole state of things In pure bias without much of care This is the typical bias of information It's violent because what happens there is a murder of the real The vanishing…

• 00:23:49

  I read some of that literature as an undergraduate, you know, I had realist sympathies, you know, inclinations even then, although, you know, I understood the sophistication. I understood the sophistication of the anti-realist argumentation. But I thought that was a fascinating, because it seemed a lot at stake. That…

• 00:37:47

  And as Brandon 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 likeness. And they left out, you know, Sellers' Kantian alternative. And that's…

• 00:51:13

  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, are liars, basically. They have a vested interest in making sure that things don't change. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right…

• 01:03:56

  Yeah, no, he is. Stirner'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, which hopefully will get more people reading. I had him on the show. Oh, great. Okay, great. I'm glad. All these figures. I mean, this is the other thing is that…

• 01:16:20

  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 the simulations where Baudrillard says, I am a nihilist. I see, except I like that. I remember like that's, you know, it's had this really bracing kind of rhetorical…

• 01:36:01

  overlooked, or at least, you know, I only noticed recently, is that there's also in Adorno and Marcuse, who were both influenced by Freud, is that the ego, what we ordinarily call the self, is a defense formation, it is an instrument of self-preservation. So like freedom, individual liberation, individual…

• 01:50:42

  . ! But with nothing less but recycled whitewashed lobotomized people as in the block work or range. Thank you.