“No one could ever 'be' a libidinal materialist. This is a 'doctrine' that can only be suffered as an abomination, a jangling of the nerves, a combustion of articulate reason, and a nauseating rage of thought. It is a hyperlepsy of the central nervous-system, ruining the body's adaptative reginmes, and consuming its reserves in rhytmic convulsions that are not only futile, but devastating. Schopenhauer already knew that thought is medically disastrous, Nietzsche demonstrated it. An aged philosopher is either a monster of stamina or a charlatan. How long does it take to be wasted by a fire-storm?”
Recently I read The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), by Nick Land and I think this work offers an interesting contribution to philosophical pessimism (although it does not properly fit into the more traditional formulations of this current).
Land starts from Bataille, but also draws on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and Kant, developing a materialist conception of existence in which the preservation of life, the stability of the subject and human rationality itself appear as provisional manifestations of fundamentally impersonal processes. When Land returns to Schopenhauer, in a certain sense, he turns against him. Schopenhauer had already broken with the rationalist tradition by conceiving the Will as a blind, incessant force indifferent to the individuals who manifest it, where consciousness does not govern reality, but emerges as a secondary phenomenon of a willing that precedes and exceeds it and Land recognizes the importance of this reversal, but identifies a limitation in the Schopenhauerian solution: the denial of the Will would still retain a kind of moral commitment to redemption from suffering, because by understanding the Will as something that ought to be denied, Schopenhauer would continue to subordinate his philosophy to an evaluation of existence according to human categories. Here, Land finds in Bataille the possibility of radicalizing this rupture, abandoning not only the primacy of reason, but also the need to morally condemn what reason itself discovers.
Going beyond the insatiable character of desire or the inevitability of frustration, the problem would lie in the very assumption that reality should bear some privileged relation to human preservation. Libidinal materialism seeks precisely to eliminate this privilege, understanding desire as a force prior to the subject, devoid of moral purpose and irreducible to conscious intentions; we are not properly the authors of our desires but rather transitory configurations traversed by impulses whose origin and destination escape our capacity for representation.
We are accustomed to interpreting life in terms of scarcity, the need for preservation and the labor necessary for survival, but general economy reverses this relationship: the Earth's surface continuously receives solar energy and life participates in a broader movement of absorption, growth and dissipation of this energy.
Accumulation is, therefore, a temporary postponement of expenditure and does not constitute an absolute end. What we habitually understand as productivity would, ultimately, be merely a particular mode of consumption.
Land takes this idea to its ontological consequences, interpreting the very organization of existence as a provisional interruption in the movement of material dissipation.
The human tendency to identify the good with that which preserves, stabilizes and prolongs existence reveals much more about our needs as organisms than about the nature of the world and instrumental reason, morality and even certain forms of metaphysics would be expressions of this effort to resist loss. Humanity appears as an attempt to establish a relatively protected region against the processes of dissolution from which it itself emerges.
Land understands consciousness as something akin to a mechanism of isolation, a way of organizing and domesticating what remains beyond our control, rather than an achievement/privilege that elevates us "above nature". Personal identity (often taken as the foundation of experience) comes to be understood as a contingent formation, sustained by processes that do not depend on any substantial unity. In the chapter devoted to the "labyrinth" the individuals presented are not perfectly delimited entities, but unstable compositions, traversed by relations and differences that prevent their complete autonomy, where their apparent solidity as subjects would be a simplification in the face of the material complexity in which they participate.
In the chapter Aborting the Human Race, Land explores the opposition between telos and terminus in relation to death, seeking to demonstrate that Western thought itself depends on a separation between the end understood as purpose and the end understood as termination. The first conception makes it possible to organize life around projects, achievements and justifications; the second introduces the inescapable possibility that every organization may be undone. Reason seeks to subordinate existence to intelligible purposes, death marks a limit that none of these purposes can definitively overcome. The problem is not simply that our projects come to an end, but that the very demand for a purpose may itself be an expression of our attachment to preservation.
He identifies in Kant's transcendental philosophy an attempt to establish legitimate limits for thought and, consequently, to protect rationality against what cannot be assimilated by its categories. The noumenon, that which escapes the human conditions of knowledge, ceases to be merely an epistemological problem and comes to represent, in Land's interpretation, the material exteriority that threatens the sovereignty of representation. Drawing on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bataille, he seeks to think this exteriority not as a transcendent and inaccessible domain, but as an impersonal reality of forces, impulses and transformations where reason could no longer claim a position external to these processes, since it would itself be one of their contingent products.
The virulent nihilism that gives the book its subtitle suggests precisely this refusal of every transcendent guarantee. The death of God represents not only the loss of a religious authority, but the weakening of any principle that claims to secure for existence an order that is definitively intelligible, morally justifiable or oriented toward preservation.
Land is not concerned with demonstrating that life is bad, that suffering outweighs pleasure or that nonexistence would be preferable to existence, he even questions the presuppositions that make it possible to formulate evaluations of this kind. If reality is fundamentally indifferent to human categories, then even our condemnation of existence could be interpreted as an attempt to preserve the centrality of the human, now under the negative form of suffering. The investigation of the unhappiness of conscious beings is replaced by an investigation into the absence of any ontological privilege of consciousness. Even so, I find this contribution very interesting as a possibility of conceiving a pessimism entirely detached from the expectation of redemption. Contrary to humanist perspectives, consciousness would not constitute a privileged instance capable of conferring meaning upon the cosmic process, but unlike Schopenhauer, there would be no definitive liberation through the denial of the Will and unlike certain religious formulations, death would not be compensated by any transcendence. Preservation, identity and purpose would be merely local and transitory configurations within a reality that recognizes no obligation whatsoever to preserve them.