05/18/2021
In his essay “Art as Insurrection: the Question of Aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche’ (found in Fanged Noumena and in Nietzsche and Modern German Thought), Nick Land says that the body without organs “is produced transcendence”.[1] What is more servile than the body without organs then? It is a result of production and within the labyrinth is transcendent. Better to chase after the objet petit a like a dog chases a tennis ball (that is like a dog in continuity) than be a body of a transcendent relation which actually falls into the negativity which Deleuze and Guattari believe Lacan and Freud are stuck in with their concepts of desire-as-lack. Desire as lack is rather the affirmationist theory of desire in that it affirms death (i.e. it rejects the fear of death). I derive this latter conclusion from my Bataillean interpretation of desire, which sees desire as lack from following the principle of insufficiency but it is because desire is lack that we can enter into continuity, that transgression is possible, etc. The body without organs and the accompanying Deleuzian/Guattarian theory of desire as produced is nothing more than the negativity of the slave and master, ironic considering Deleuze’s desperate want to escape Hegel in Nietzsche and Philosophy. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is produced until it is destratified “into” the body without organs. This is just like how the slave labors (which is productive negation), per Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, until it reaches the Absolute. But alas, one must take Hegel seriously like Bataille and Lacan do (with Kojève).
Bibliography
Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007. Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2011.
Reference
[1]: Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2011), 173.
