Unknown Lands - Lecture 3

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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: 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

  I guess we may as well get started, 6.30. Okay, so having by this point fastidiously kind of lambasted Kant and the phenomenologists as his key theoretical nemeses, the rest of Land's early writings trace another post-Kantian tradition that Land calls libidinal materialism, a tradition whose adherence sees upon death…

• 00:17:14

  So that's all just straight out of the first critique of Kant. Thank you. Yeah, so in the... In the second book, Schopenhauer argues that none of the natural sciences which depend on causal relations in space and time, none of them can therefore grasp what the world is like beyond the phenomena of possible experience…

• 00:32:02

  So we move to Nietzsche now. So yeah, in the Thirst for Annihilation, Art as Insurrection, and a 1995 essay called Shamanic Nietzsche, Land says, Land argues that Nietzsche inherits Schopenhauer's energetic unconscious to the point of what Land calls an extreme anti-humanism. In Nietzsche's first book, first published…

• 00:51:08

  So in other words, we've unwittingly ended up in the philosophical domain of libidinal materialism. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so, despite Freud's really kind of gargantuan discovery here of the death drive, Land notes that Freud did retreat at times from his own insight. And even beyond the pleasure principle, Freud wavers…

• 01:09:13

  So yeah, this is how Socrates distinguishes his wisdom from the expert's supposed wisdom. He says the expert thinks he knows something when he doesn't, whereas just as I don't know anything, so I don't think I do either. So I appear to be wiser. So yeah, it's Socrates' subversion of the great Athenian authorities…

• 01:25:38

  Land says, philosophy becomes dialectical with Socrates, which is to say, justificatory, political, logical plebeian. Truth is identified with irrefutability, evidentiality and educated belief, beginning its long subsidence into the forms of human credence as if its acceptability were in any way a criterion. Even…

• 01:41:37

  Through this rationalisation of warfare, Bataille argues that Ray was stripped of his means of expending life's solar surplus on the land. On the battlefield's altar of death. Okay. So, Ray is now looking for a substitute. In Bataille's view, it's because of this rendering of war as useful that Ray withdrew from…

• 01:58:19

  It's a classic critique of those works as, like, it's a transcendental critique. It's still a commitment to critique. But, um... Yeah, that's another story. But, like, I just basically agree with what you said, pretty much, yeah. I mean, much more could be said, but, you know, we should probably end it there. So…