Ray Brassier on Herbert Marcuse's '5 Lectures' with Acid Horizon

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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

  Hello and welcome back to Zero Books. This is Acid Horizon on Zero Books, and today we are excited to have a discussion with Ray Brassier, author of Nihil Unbound, Enlightenment and Extinction from 2007. Ray has also made notable contributions to the canon of speculative realist writings. Today, he joins us to discuss…

• 00:12:23

  And the Grundrisse is one of, you know, the texts that Deleuze and Guattari kind of draw on in Anteidopus, where Marcuse, or where Marx rather, talks about the transformation where the capital industrial machine, the industrial machine, the industrial machine, the industrial machine, the machinery, in a way, releases…

• 00:22:09

  But in a way, his argument is that that is not possible. Okay. that kind of the complete, the automation of desire, or in a way, or the mechanization of libido is impossible. Okay. Okay. on philosophical grounds. And that's why it's possible that capitalism reshapes desire, but reshapes it in a way that undercuts…

• 00:35:04

  highly industrialized capitalist societies society reproduces itself is through a kind of manufacturing of desire and a kind of drip feed of smaller pleasures but also through dimensions like dimensions like dimensions like dimensions like dimensions dimensions like dimensions like dimensions dimensions dimensions…

• 00:45:16

  But how this will unfold is difficult to kind of, you know, to predict or to foresee. But at least it's clear that what needs to be done is, you know, I think the negation of capitalism must be determined. That means that, you know, there's a very simple kind of injunction for anyone who wants to call themselves…

• 00:54:11

  So, but production then becomes in a way that the, the liberation of production as Mertuzza sees it, I think is, so it's neither simply kind of, you know, producing according to these pre-established needs, apart from simply kind of, you know, feeding, clothing and sheltering everyone. But, you know…

• 01:02:55

  And I think that really, I mean, this kind of might sound like a compound, but I think philosophy is a combination of both in that it's neither something that you can approach purely objectively as a technical, domain of specific and compartmentalizable problems, but which you can solve through kind of, you know…

• 01:12:33

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