Ray Brassier on Nick Land and Accelerationism, Goldsmiths, 15 09 10

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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: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: video original (.mp4).

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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

  kind of the theoretical. But I want to insist that this is necessary because this machinic practicism that Land insisted on leads to a kind of practical impotence. So I want to insist that it's necessary to confront fundamental kind of conceptual issues before you can begin to understand what it is you're doing. And I…

• 00:01:23

  Any kind of dialectical antagonism or opposition. And I think it's necessary to do that in order to be able to kind of to identify what its strengths and weaknesses are. The three points I want to focus on are the three kinds of dyads are critique and materialism, critique and materialism, teleology and eschatology…

• 00:02:23

  rhetorical kind of animus, etc., etc., it's simply kind of, it's not enough simply to kind of dismiss them as a kind of puerile indulgent kind of hyper-Nietzschianism. It's far more sophisticated than that, even if I do think it is ultimately kind of stymied by incoherences. And on any account, rereading those texts…

• 00:03:18

  An attempt to kind of, to find some kind of prosecution of a kind of Marxist materialism that somehow would be kind of anti-Hegelian. In the same regard, like, Lannes' work is a kind of mad black Deleuzianism. It's an attempt to kind of, to turn Deleuze's the vitalist impetus, the affirmationist élan that kind…

• 00:04:19

  fury. And that's what makes him kind of really powerful. And because I'm really interested in this issue about the power, and in fact I want to try to show that it's possible to kind of rehabilitate the powers of the negative against what Ben Noyes has called this kind of affirmationist consensus in contemporary…

• 00:05:04

  These preliminaries aside, first of all, the Lamb sets out his, he's operating under the aegis of kind of a work. He proposes to radicalize critique. To radicalize critique, to convert the ideal conditioning of representation of matter to the material conditioning of ideal representation. So that in the Lambian kind…