Ray Brassier - Mad Black Deleuzianism; On Nick Land (2)

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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: audio original (.mp3).

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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

  Thanks, thanks. What Mark has said really kind of sets up or introduces the, I'm going to talk about Nick Lamb's work. I'm going to talk about it in a way, I'm going to talk about it philosophically because I think that's, and explain why I want to talk about it philosophically because I think that's…

• 00:04:31

  Okay. And they certainly, um, there are kind of, uh, you provide a sobering contrast with the kind of the, the flaccid inanity of contemporary kind of Bergsonian vitalism. And the French philosopher, um, this one, they call him once described as what sorry, um, the, those are his antedipus and leave towards the middle…

• 00:07:36

  The critique of the Kantian critique of metaphysics, um, of which there are kind of, uh, several versions, several, which is kind of, um, you know, kind of supplemented in, in various kind of configurations in 20th century continental philosophy. This, this Kantian critique of metaphysics is converted into…

• 00:15:51

  is based upon the you know the process of primary you know the real as intensive difference primary production um matter in itself whatever you have to call it okay um now this is so this is an initial kind of you know philosophical difficulty and it's a difficulty okay which interestingly like um which land himself…

• 00:23:44

  it becomes unclear okay I'll just in other words this you get this is where there's a the kind of um the replacement of the substitution okay of a kind of um uh you know sublimated materialist eschatology for all forms of um rationalist teleology okay in other words the question is that the imperative to um intensify…

• 00:30:11

  It's a very specific concept. There's nothing, there's a quote, I won't find it. There's a quote which says, it's happening anyway and there's nothing you can do about it. Okay? The key claim is that you are being, something is working through you, okay? There's nothing you can do about it so you might as well kind…

• 00:33:30

  Okay? And he says, and interestingly in this paper, it's radical, militant, guerrilla, lesbian feminists, who will kind of, who are the only kind of revolutionary subjects. So he moves from this moment where he's perfectly willing to kind of endorse or affirm, you know, kind of radical, he thinks kind of, his critique…

• 00:36:57

  In other words, you become a pawn of another kind of impersonal force, but it's no longer the glamorous and seductive impersonal force that you hoped to make a compact with. It's a much more kind of cynical, it's cynical kind of libertarian capitalism. I should stop. Okay.