Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (2005)

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Mari Ruti, The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (2012)

In this context, it is helpful to recall that the reality principle is not “natural,” that it is not the way things, in some organic sense, “are.” Rather, it is a particularly convincing version of social ideology. In Nietzschean terms, the reality principle is a fiction that has been so successful at covering its tracks that we no longer recognize it as such but, instead, take it to be reality “in itself.” This, notoriously, is how victorious social ideologies function: They are not perceived as ideologies, as specific ways of looking at the world, but rather come to correspond with the world. Sublimation is a genuine ethical stance because it causes us to question our gullibility in the face of this apparent correspondence. Like Badiou’s event, sublimation invites us to see the world from a different point of view—one that admits the sublime echo of the Thing. This is why Zupančič insists that Lacanian ethics “is not an ethics of the finite, of finitude”, and why Badiou calls for a philosophical “securization of infinity”. What both thinkers are getting at is that ethics should be a matter of making sure that we do not shun all forms of infinitude, all transcendent aspirations, merely because the reality principle considers them unrealistic. If they insist on the continued relevance of the infinite (the “immortal”), it is because they want to counter our ethical indolence, particularly the notion that nothing can be done to change things for the better.

Mari Ruti, The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (2012)

Žižek, Varoufakis and Assange:

https://invidious.rocks/watch?v=yjxAArOkoA0

Lacan posits that our sense of inadequacy is primordial—and thus impossible to banish—because it is the price we pay for socialization. Prior to socialization, we do not yet understand ourselves as separate entities, which in practice means that we are the world and the world is us. Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of.

Mari Ruti, The Call of Character (2014)

Mari Ruti, The Call of Character (2014)

Desire desires to keep desiring.

Only if Land bothered to read Lacan's Kant avec Sade (1963), what is usually understood as a 'conscious will' is much more problematic. Land here fails to read Kant, Freud and entirely misses the radical reading of both by Lacan. Kantian ethics can go much beyond this simplification and so it does if one carefully reads The Critique of Practical Reason without already assuming prejudices on Kant. I wish Kantian metaphysics of the self and ethics were that straightforward, they aren't.

For Kant, this “contradictory” notion of self is just something we have to accept as a consequence of his system. He even claims that psychology, presumably of the empirical kind, is doomed to equate the two anyway, (mis)attributing both “I”s to one and the same autonomous and undivided self. And he is right: Every psychology does conceptualise the self in this way. All except one, however. I mean the most recalcitrant one—psychoanalysis. And of all the schools of psychoanalysis, it is Lacanian psychoanalysis especially (the most recalcitrant of recalcitrants) that I argue has the capacity to make sense of this contradiction. For, as we shall see, Lacan arrived at a strikingly homologous contradiction at the core of his theory of subjectivity—the ego and the subject.

Zifeng, Dialectic of the Public and Private Use of Reason: Kant and Lacan

It is so interesting how Land specifically picks Kant's 'conscious will' whatever it means for him, he could have just as well picked Nietzsche's passion for 'aristocracy', a manifestation of the historical examples that Nietzsche attributed to übermensch (Napoleon being one of them). Or, misinterpret his Will to Power as a justification for executing minorities.

I find such a reading not only being bad faith, but extremely off-putting. Land makes here, hermeneutically, the same classic mistake as made by  Hitler's interpretation of Nietzsche. But since Hitler is the person Land is supposed to target, and since Nietzsche is one of the foundations for his own thought, he'd just use Kant.

I have very much tried to read Land in good faith, starting from his Machinic Desire, but I couldn't help but realize that not only his writing is terrible (so is Kant's and Hegel's) but he has a poor understanding of the very subject he writes on. At places, Land completely misunderstands Freud, and I am all for complicated words as a Lacanian, but Lacan explains time and time again what they mean both theoretically, clinically, and more.

And in doing so, he isn't just magically making up concepts, he does so by sticking to the Letter of Freud. On the other hand, you try to salvage the very meaning of 'analysis', schizo or otherwise, from Land and you would fail. And then read Lacan, or even others like Winnicott or Klein. Anything other than superficial readings that end up associating Kantian ethics with 'Nazi' self-control. And I wish he had the humility of Freud or Lacan in knowing where he does a bad job, at least that would help me get over those parts of his writings.

Drives are the functions of nomadic cybernetic systems, not instincts, but simulated instincts, artificial instincts. They are plastic replacements for hard-wired instinctual responses, routing a sensory-motor pathway through the virtual machine of the unconscious. There are two basic diagrams for such processes: that of regulation by negative feedback which suppresses difference and seeks equilibrium, or that of guidance by positive feedback which reinforces difference and escapes equilibrium. Machinic processes are either cyberpositive-nomadic, with a deterritorializing outcome, or cybernegative-sedentary, with a reterritorializing outcome.

From Machinic Desire (2008)

Anyone who has seriously dealt with Freud knows that drives (Trieb) are neither artificial nor completely organic. Several schools misinterpreted from Strachey's terrible translation of Trieb into 'instincts' which made people think the simplistic idea that Freud is simply referring to biological instincts. Freud himself deliberately distinguished this in his metapsychology (Cf. Drives and their Fates) and also where Lacan continued.

The picture of unconscious and the drive is never this 'artificial unconscious' with equilibrium between something positive and negative, that's again the same classic mistake that several schools made and Land, even though coming a century after them, continues to repeat it.

Lacan reminds his readers that Freud defined the drive as a montage composed of four discontinuous elements: the pressure, the end, the object and the source.

The point is not that drive gets an object and then voila! subject feels good, no that's reductionist behaviorism. The drive always aims at something, and it never reaches an equilibrium because it doesn't have a structure of balancing things. It has a structure of excess and negation. All drives are excessive, repetitive and destructive. That is why the death drive isn't a separate drive altogether.

One finds nothing on elaborating the above, instead:

Machinic processes are either cyberpositive-nomadic, with a deterritorializing outcome, or cybernegative-sedentary, with a reterritorializing outcome.

Sure, I'd like to first see a metapsychology of 'cyber' anything in the unconscious before using that word again. I hate American Ego psychology with all my heart, but this is worse than that in terms of exposition and rigour. I might agree partially with the conclusions, psychoanalytic or political, of Nick Land but the way he gets there is not at all something that provides any novel insight to me. I wish to be proven wrong eventually.

Christian Fierens, The Jouissance Principle: Kant, Sade and Lacan on the Ethical Functioning of the Unconscious (2022)

Lacan contra Aristotelian happiness.

Christian Fierens, The Jouissance Principle: Kant, Sade and Lacan on the Ethical Functioning of the Unconscious (2022)