Zero-Degree Writing: The Impossibility of Commentary
“There is not a single sentence which is other than a gratuitousness and a confusion; a cry at least half lamed and smothered in irony.”
Land’s preface launches an assault against the very possibility of academic commentary, positioning itself as simultaneously a failure and the only honest engagement with Bataille. The problem is established immediately: to write a book about Bataille is to betray him, to recuperate his transgressive energy into the “cultural machine” of capital. Land describes what he might have written—”a sound book” that would have “discussed the contribution he has made to the philosophical and literary culture of twentieth-century France”—only to reject it as a “schlecht book,” a betrayal through respectability.
The preface thus enacts what it describes: the impossibility of writing about Bataille without neutralizing him. Land performs this impossibility, making his text a series of false starts, fragments, and self-negations. The text’s form mimics its content—a disjointed series of sections separated by asterisks, shifting between theoretical exposition, personal confession, and poetic fragments. This fragmentation is not stylistic affectation but philosophical necessity: “It is only in the twisted interstitial spaces of failure that contact, infection, and—at the limit—the anegoic intimacy that he calls ‘communication’ can take place.”
Land’s preface thus establishes itself as not merely an introduction to a book about Bataille, but an attempt to channel the “contagion” of Bataille’s thought—to become a site where “communication” in Bataille’s sense might occur. This positions the text as deliberately anti-academic, a transgression against the sanitizing tendencies of scholarly discourse.
The Insistent ‘I’: Confessional Writing and the Beggar’s Plea
“Do not think I am unsympathetic. These thickets of abstract identity are no doubt unpleasant to stumble through. The scrawny little sign of promiscuous individuality is a perpetual aggravation; reminding you in each case of your own incarceration by self.”
One of the most striking features of Land’s preface is its insistent use of the first-person, a stylistic choice that he explicitly thematizes. The “I” that pervades the text is characterized as a “loathesomeness,” a reminder of the “incarceration by self” that afflicts both writer and reader. Yet Land adamantly refuses the possibility of impersonal writing, declaring every attempt to “write oneself out of a book” as necessarily “hypocritical.”
Land associates this persistent “I” with the figure of the beggar, who “sinks beneath the burden of individuality” rather than transcending it. The beggar becomes a central metaphor for Land’s writing: a desperate plea from a position of abjection, “scrabbling at the coat-tails of a reluctant and embarrassed attentiveness.” This confessional mode is explicitly aligned with Bataille’s own literary practice, particularly his recurrent use of first-person narration and his multiplication of narrative voices.
The insistence on the “I” thus performs a double function: it acknowledges the inevitable entrapment within subjectivity while simultaneously straining against its limits. As Land writes: “the ‘I’ is not to be expelled, but submitted to sacrifice.” This distinction between expulsion and sacrifice is crucial—not a transcendence of subjectivity but its ecstatic dissolution, its burning-through rather than its overcoming.
The Night Writing: Philosophy in Extremis
“It is 03.30 in the morning. Let us say one is ‘drunk’—an impoverished cipher for all those terrible things one does to one’s nervous-system in the depths of the night—and philosophy is ‘impossible’ (although one still thinks, even to the point of terror and disgust).”
Land’s preface repeatedly returns to the experience of thought under extreme conditions—intoxication, exhaustion, despair. These states are not presented as impediments to philosophy but as its proper domain, revealing dimensions of thought concealed by “successfully adapted, tranquil, moderate, and productive reason.” Against philosophy’s traditional aspiration to clarity and sobriety, Land invokes a “night writing” that unfolds at the edge of coherence, when “thought itself were copulating unreservedly with suffering.”
This celebration of extremity aligns with Land’s critique of philosophy’s sanitization of thought. By restricting itself to “undisturbed reasoning,” philosophy artificially excludes the “violent blanks” that constitute thought’s suppressed underside. Land credits Bataille with doing more than anyone to “obstruct the passage of violent blanks into a pacified oblivion, and thus to awaken the monster in the basement of reason.” This “monster” is not separate from reason but connected to it “by a secret continuity”—a “labyrinth” rather than a “dungeon.” Land’s preface thus positions itself as an exploration of this labyrinthine underside of reason, where “the moans of the minotaur reverberate through its arteries, hinting at an indefinable proximity.” The nocturnal writing that results from this exploration deliberately courts incoherence and exhaustion, pushed to the point where thought becomes indistinguishable from its own dissolution.
Libidinal Materialism: The Anti-Philosophy
“There is one simple criterion of taste in philosophy: that one avoid the vulgarity of anthropomorphism. It is by failing here that one comes to side with cages.”
Land’s preface culminates in the articulation of what he calls “libidinal materialism”—a philosophical orientation that radically rejects anthropocentrism and positions itself against the humanizing tendencies of traditional metaphysics. This anti-anthropomorphic stance is formulated through four key principles:
- “Thorough going dehumanization of nature” – The elimination of all traces of human personality from cosmological explanation
- “Ruthless fatalism” – The rejection of notions like decision, responsibility, and freedom
- “Absence of all moralizing” – The refusal of corrective or vengeful impulses
- “Contempt for common evaluations” – The cultivation of alienation from prevailing values
Land characterizes libidinal materialism not as a coherent doctrine but as “perhaps less a philosophy than an offence”—a corrosive force within philosophical discourse rather than an alternative system. It is described as “historically pessimistic,” “thermodynamic-energeticist,” and “genealogical” in method, yet irreducible to any of these characterizations.
Most significantly, Land insists that no one could ever “‘be’ a libidinal materialist.” It is a position that can only be “suffered as an abomination, a jangling of the nerves, a combustion of articulate reason, and a nauseating rage of thought.” This impossibility of identification reflects libidinal materialism’s status as a limit-experience rather than a theoretical position—a point where thought encounters its own dissolution.
The Thirst: Negativity as Excitation
“The thirst for annihilation. This name has grown on me as an ulceration in the gut. Is it desire or its negation that is marked here?”
The preface’s concluding sections circle around the central concept of the “thirst for annihilation” that gives the book its title. Land characterizes this thirst as “first of all the compulsion to abstract”—negativity torn from its logical function and transformed into “an excitation.” This formulation captures the paradoxical nature of Land’s project: the fusion of desire with its negation, of affirmation with dissolution.
Land frames this thirst as “an aberration inextricable from truth,” acknowledging the apparent perversity of being “excruciated upon my thirst for [death]” while insisting that “to be parsimonious in one’s love for death is not to understand.” The preface thus concludes with an intensification of its confessional mode, as Land positions himself as having “floated in death” and claiming a “community of the kiln” with Bataille’s “inexistence.”
The final lines shift into overtly poetic register with fragmentary verses about “ragged wings” that “have never been licked by the sun” and “only open for the night.” This poetic turn reinforces the preface’s resistance to closure or systematic articulation, ending not with a summation but with an image of nocturnal flight and a mumbled utterance from one who claims to have “returned from the dead.”
The Infernal Paradise: Literature, Evil, and the Death of God
“Literature is a transgression against transcendence, the dark and unholy rending of a sacrificial wound, allowing a communication more basic than the pseudo-communication of instrumental discourse.”
Land’s preface includes a significant passage on Bataille’s “Literature and Evil,” which he describes as “the greatest work of atheological poetics.” This section establishes literature not as cultural production but as transgressive force—a “violation of individuality, autonomy, and isolation” that opens beings to “the community of senseless waste.”
For Land, following Bataille, literature’s transgressive power is inseparable from the death of God, which he characterizes as “the violent absence of the good, and thus of everything that protects, consolidates, or guarantees the interests of the individual personality.” This alignment of literature with atheology positions aesthetic transgression as a privileged site for the expenditure that utility-oriented civilization suppresses.
Land’s account of literature thus dovetails with his broader vision of libidinal materialism—both involve the dissolution of boundaries, the embrace of waste, and the rejection of utility. Literary transgression becomes one manifestation of the universal tendency toward expenditure, a point where language opens onto the silence that both precedes and exceeds it.
Beyond Philosophy: The Impossibility of Conclusion
“Philosophy will be the last of human things; perhaps the efficient impulse of the end.”
Land’s preface repeatedly returns to the relationship between his writing and philosophy, positioning libidinal materialism simultaneously within and against philosophical tradition. Against proclamations of philosophy’s death, Land insists that “Philosophy will be the last of human things,” yet his vision of philosophy diverges radically from its conventional understanding.
The philosophy Land envisions is ruthlessly anti-anthropocentric, treating humanity as “a little thing that has learnt to stammer the word ‘infinity’” while making “everything small, diminishing even itself.” This anti-humanist orientation positions Land’s thought against the “vulgarity of anthropomorphism” that he identifies as philosophy’s cardinal sin.
Land’s preface thus enacts a paradoxical relationship to philosophy—writing within its tradition while simultaneously corroding its foundations. This paradox is never resolved but rather intensified, as Land embraces the tension between philosophical articulation and its dissolution. The text concludes not with a summation but with a series of increasingly fragmentary gestures, resisting closure and instead opening onto the silence that both precedes and exceeds philosophical discourse.
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