(Session 1) Ray Brassier - Mad Black Deleuzianism; On Nick Land

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 unknown approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: #Accelerate panels. 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

  Thanks so much. What Mark has said really sets up or introduces, I'm going to talk about Nick Lamb's work. I'm going to talk about it philosophically, and explain why I want to talk about it philosophically, because I think that's a key to understanding, to maybe kind of understanding what its political ramifications…

• 00:05:36

  What's really interesting, as Mark said, is that what's really interesting in these texts is the way in which there's a kind of extraordinary re-elaboration of negativity, a kind of non-conceptual negativity, and these texts bristle with this kind of sublimated fury. That's what makes them kind of really powerful. And…

• 00:10:06

  This becomes the key term, in other words, it's a brilliant explicitation of the logic of the operation that De Laus and Guattari carry out vis-a-vis Kantianism in Antedipus. The name of matter is nothing but kind of, you know, machinic production, self-differentiation, and then the fundamental binary that organizes…

• 00:15:02

  Okay, so the problem is that Land's kind of, you know, kind of materialist kind of liquidation of representation also wants to kind of, because it doesn't want to kind of reaffirm the primacy of allegedly the sub-representational experience, okay, which Bergson and Phenomenology do in various ways. He has to explain…

• 00:19:39

  Okay, now, I think there's a, okay, I think there's a problem here, and the problem with this is that the concept of intensity, okay, becomes fatally, you know, equivocal here in this, in this register. There's an equivocation between, the Kantian talk about intensities at the level of appearances, and the Bergsonian…

• 00:25:49

  It's cosmic schizophrenia. So that's the ultimate horizon. And here again, he's simply unabashedly endorsing this kind of remarkable thesis in Anti-Oedipus, but kind of really kind of stripping it from all its kind of vaguely, these kind of palliatives about how this might generate new forms of creative existence…

• 00:30:40

  The philosophical problem is that there's the retention of this kind of romantic kind of Schopenhauerian kind of moments of, you know, kind of a fusion between the personal and the impersonal, okay, between the individuated subject and the cosmic schizophrenia, the impersonal kind of primary process. But it's still…

• 00:36:56

  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 hope to make a compact with. It's a much more kind of cynical, it's cynical kind of libertarian capitalism.