Kant’s Unacknowledged Discovery: Reason’s Incompatibility with Reality

Land’s opening assertion establishes the central paradox driving the chapter: “Kant’s great discovery—but one that he never admitted to—was that apodictic reason is incompatible with knowledge.” This formulation positions the Kantian project as a philosophical catastrophe whose implications continue to reverberate through contemporary thought. For Land, the term “transcendental” functions as “the most elegant euphemism in the history of Western philosophy,” masking what is essentially reason’s fundamental separation from reality.

Land argues that Kant’s critical philosophy exposes “truths of reason” as “fictions, but cunning ones,” since they can never be empirically refuted. These “big lies to the scale of infinity” constitute a spectral metaphysical landscape populated by “divinities, souls, agents, perdurant subjectivities, entities with a zero potentiality for triggering excitations.” This ghostly apparatus maintains philosophical tradition’s entanglement with theological structures of control—”the sprawling priestly apparatus of psychological manipulation and subterranean power.”

What emerges is a reading of Kant as initiating philosophy’s most elaborate defensive maneuver: a “fit of panic” comparable to “Luther’s hysterical reaction to the disintegration of Christendom.” Both represent “revolt in the service of the establishment,” breathing “renewed vitality” into decaying institutions through an “intellectual paralysis” characterized by “rigorous and consistent austerity.” This paradoxical structure—rebellion that reinforces what it ostensibly challenges—becomes a recurring motif in Land’s analysis of philosophical modernity.

Modernity and the Dissolution of Perpetuities

“In speaking of modernity we acknowledge that an insatiable historicization has befallen the Earth; a shock-wave of obsolescence has swept away all perpetuities.”

Land conceptualizes modernity through the lens of accelerating impermanence, where thought functions as “the very catalyst of history” rather than standing outside temporal flux. The defining feature of modernity becomes “a rate of the obsolescence of truth,” where critique operates as “an instrument of dissolution” that unleashes “lavish metamorphic forces.” This dissolution dissolves the boundaries between reality and imagination, creating a condition where “reality becomes soluble in the madness of invention.”

The relationship between Kant and capital emerges as “two sides of a coin” in this account—”a strange coin indeed that can synthesize a humble citizen of Königsberg with the run-away reconstruction of a planet.” Yet Land insists this apparent absurdity cannot be adjudicated by appealing to a more universal standard (which would be “a transcendental move”) or a more profound ontological foundation (which would be “a theological idiocy”). This suggests that critique itself operates within parameters established by what it purports to critique, creating a self-reinforcing system.

Land identifies a tripartite structure of modern thought as necessarily exhibiting “a complexion of retardation, critique, and aberration,” where philosophical positions either resist modernity’s critical resources, attempt to harmonize with them, or venture into “expansive obscurities beyond.” This framework establishes the parameters within which Land positions his examination of post-Kantian philosophical traditions.

Post-Kantian Trajectories: The Fate of Transcendental Philosophy

Land traces the divergent responses to Kant’s critical intervention through a genealogy that positions contemporary philosophical currents in relation to their Kantian inheritance. Although Bataille’s work might appear primarily engaged with Hegel, Land argues that “the Hegelian text is nothing other than a response to the predicament of transcendental philosophy,” making all its terminology “operative from the start within a Kantian register.”

The genealogy branches into several distinct trajectories:

1. Hegel’s “life-support machine”: Land characterizes Hegelian philosophy as an attempt to “save transcendental philosophy from the lethal spasms welling up from within.” Hegel sought to overcome the “bad infinity” of Kantian thought—”the endless task of perpetual growth (capital)”—by developing a system of “actual infinity” that could subsume finitude rather than standing opposed to it. Yet Land perceives this redemption as fundamentally compromised: “The filthiness and ignobility of Bataille’s writing follows immediately from its being steeped in Hegel.”
2. Schelling’s “Indifferenz”: Where Hegel’s Aufhebung “passes through the other, appropriating it as a mediating pause of absolute reason,” Schelling’s approach “undercuts the articulated terms” in a move that “exacerbates the critical gesture.” This difference manifests in contemporary philosophy as the contrast between “an ever more nostalgic discourse on the failure of totality” (critical theory) and “an ever more complacently impotent discourse on the impossibility of radical subversion” (deconstruction).
3. Schopenhauer’s “energetic unconscious”: Land identifies Schopenhauer as initiating an approach to the Kantian noumenon as “an energetic unconscious,” generating a discourse that is “not speculative, phenomenological, or meditative, but diagnostic.” This strand leads through Nietzsche to Bataille’s “base materialism,” for which “noumenon” is addressed as “impersonal death and as unconscious drive.”

This genealogical mapping positions Land’s own project within a lineage that proceeds from Kant through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Bataille, emphasizing “the meditation upon the will” as the crucial development. This tradition transforms will from Kant’s “transcendental agency” (the “more or less lucid pursuit of ends”) to Schopenhauer’s “pre-representational (‘blind’) impulse” that reverses “the traditional relation between intellect and will.”

The Academic Enclosure and Its Outside

“Pessimism, or the philosophy of desire, has a marked allergy to academic encompassment.”

Land identifies a fundamental tension between institutional philosophy and what he calls “pessimism” or “the philosophy of desire.” This tension is not merely theoretical but institutional, manifesting in the “mutual revulsion between the academy and a small defiant fragment of its outside.” Schopenhauer’s “On University Philosophy” serves as the paradigmatic critique of institutional philosophy’s compromise with state power, arguing that “the university is inextricably compromised by the interests of the state” and necessarily “involved in the perpetuation of the monotheistic dogmas that serve such interests.”

This critique extends to contemporary academic discourse, particularly the practice of debate as “the dominant mode of pacification employed by the university: the validation of certain manageable conflicts within the context of institutionalization, moderation, and the indefinite deferral of consequences.” Land rejects the notion of the university as a neutral space for the encounter of divergent thought, insisting that “what is transcendental to academic debate is submission to socio-economic power.”

The conflict between academic philosophy and its “pessimistic” counterpart manifests as a distinction between “speculative thought” (the “logic of social progress”) and “pessimism” (the “affect process of unconditional revolt”). Where speculative thought remains committed to “the reality of progressive development,” pessimism rejects the notion that “our history has been in any way beneficial.” This produces divergent models of revolutionary transformation: the speculative model of “taking over” versus the pessimistic model of “escape.”

The Question of Atheism: Beyond Deconstruction

Land’s examination of atheism constitutes one of the chapter’s most incisive interventions, positioning Nietzschean atheism against both traditional theism and deconstructionist approaches that would neutralize its force.

The genealogy begins with Schopenhauer, whose atheism was “not merely erroneous, but grotesque.” Schopenhauer’s critique centered on monotheism’s “massively anthropocentric tendency,” rejecting the notion that “intellect, personality, and consciousness” could characterize the cosmos, which is instead “driven by impersonal and unconscious forces.” This positioned theism as “the apotheosis of immorality; a wretched attachment to the principle of personal identity.”

Nietzsche extends this atheistic orientation while reconceptualizing Schopenhauer’s “will-to-live” as the “will-to-power,” for which survival is “a mere tool” in service of “an unconscious trans-individual creative energy.” This shifts the focus from redemption to creation: “Mankind as a whole is nothing but a resource for creation, a dissolving slag to be expended in the generation of something more beautiful than itself.”

Land distinguishes this Nietzschean atheism from deconstructionist approaches that would treat it as merely another form of negation. Both Derrida and Lyotard, in Land’s account, mistakenly assume “that atheism is an instance of negation, rather than a transmutation or transvaluation of its sense.” For Land, Nietzschean atheism is not trapped in a binary opposition to theism but initiates a radical rupture:

“To say ‘there is no God’ is not to express a proposition in a preestablished logical syntax, but to begin thinking again, in a way that is radically new, and therefore utterly experimental. Zero is fatally discovered beneath the scabrous crust of logical negativity.”

This critique of deconstruction centers on its “systematic closure of the negative within its logico-structural sense,” which domesticates radical negation by always referring it back to “a bilateral opposition as if to an inescapable destination.” Where deconstruction “thinks loss as irreducible suspension, delay, or differance,” Land insists on a more radical dissolution that cannot be contained within the conceptual structure it negates.

Nietzsche’s Dionysian Economy: Beyond Reciprocity

The chapter culminates in an exposition of what Land terms “Nietzsche’s economy of the artistic process, or Dionysian economy,” which operates “beneath the Vesuvian antilogic of eternal recurrence.” This economy represents “a perpetual re-emergence of inhuman squandering” that transforms negation into “profligate zero.”

Land draws on Nietzsche’s description of the artistic condition as “an explosive condition” characterized by “an extreme urge to communicate,” “a need to get rid of oneself,” and “inability to prevent reaction.” This condition manifests as “a disequilibrium between expenditure and income” pushed to its extreme—”the ultimate form of dangerous madness; a process of antiaccumulation that is totally out of control.”

What distinguishes this Dionysian economy from conventional economic models is its rejection of reciprocity, the principle “that determination equals negation, according to which every loss is correlated with an associated gain.” Where “bourgeois and Marxist economists” operate within the logic of “double entry book-keeping,” Nietzsche’s remarks “tend to depart from intelligible human economy from the first.”

The Dionysian economy operates through the “transfiguration of negation into profligate zero,” where “logical negation never arrives, even though zero impacts.” This produces a form of difference characterized not by logical opposition but by “an increasing virulence” or “intensification”—”epidemic difference is only enhanced by the spasmodic aberration from itself.”

Land concludes with a provocative formulation of desire as “nothing but becoming a woman at different levels of intensity,” though he immediately qualifies this by noting “it is always possible to become a pious woman, to begin a history, love masculinity, and accumulate.” The final lines push this formulation to its limit: “Everything populating the desolate wastes of the unconscious is lesbian; difference sprawled upon zero, multiplicity strewn across positive vulvic space. Masculinity is nothing but a shoddy bunkhole from death.”

Tracing the Noumenon: From Kant to Bataille

A critical thread running through Land’s analysis is the transformation of the Kantian noumenon—the thing-in-itself that lies beyond possible experience—across different philosophical traditions. This transformation reveals how the “unthinkable” has been variously interpreted and approached:

1. Kant’s original formulation: Land characterizes the Kantian noumenon as what “escapes the competence of theory,” marking the boundary beyond which thought cannot venture. “Noumena are what escape the competence of theory, being those ‘things’ which are unknowable in principle.”
2. Hegel’s speculative resolution: Hegel attempted to overcome this boundary by arguing that “the boundary of experience is produced by the inherently self-transcending character of reason.” The noumenal outside becomes merely spirit’s “own unreclaimed (alienated) work,” which can be reappropriated through historical development.
3. Phenomenological bracketing: Husserl sought to neutralize the noumenon by “bracketing” it as a “transcendent or naturalistic postulate,” reconstituting the transcendence of the object “on the side of the subject as the intentionality or inherently outward-oriented character of experience.”
4. Schopenhauer’s energetic unconscious: Schopenhauer recast the noumenon as will—a “pre-representational (‘blind’) impulse” that underlies all representation but cannot itself be represented. This transformed the noumenon from an epistemological limit into an energetic substrate.
5. Nietzsche’s diagnostic approach: Following Schopenhauer’s lead, Nietzsche developed a “genealogy of inhuman desire” that approached the noumenon as will-to-power, an impersonal creative force underlying all manifestations of life.
6. Bataille’s base materialism: In Bataille, the noumenon is addressed as “impersonal death and as unconscious drive,” marking a further intensification of the energetic-diagnostic approach initiated by Schopenhauer.

This trajectory reveals how what began as an epistemological boundary in Kant gradually transformed into a substrate of impersonal forces, drives, and energies that escape representation but nevertheless constitute the real that representation can never fully capture.

Increate Matter: Beyond Metaphysical Materialism

Land’s examination of Schopenhauer’s transformation of the will introduces a crucial distinction between conventional scientific materialism and what he terms “increate matter.” This distinction hinges on the relationship between matter and creation:

“Increate matter is a translation of will or noumenon; a designation for the anti-ontology basic to any positively atheistic materialism (‘[t]o say the World was not Created …is to deny there is a God’ writes Hobbes in his Leviathan).”

What distinguishes this notion from scientific materialism is the latter’s tendency to be “implicitly agnostic, or even theist, rather than virulently atheistic.” Scientific materialism continues to conceive matter as “ens creatum, distinguished from a creative being which is determined as an extrinsic spontaneity,” making matter “essentially lawful.”

In contrast, increate matter is “anarchic, even to the extent of evading the adoption of an essence.” This conception underlies Schopenhauer’s position that “the principle of sufficient reason or logicality of being” has “merely superficial validity.” The implication is radical: the fundamental substrate of reality is not governed by reason or law but constitutes an anarchic flux that resists both logical determination and theological recuperation.

This notion of increate matter links Land’s project to a materialist tradition that radically breaks with both theological frameworks and scientific reductionism. It points toward a materialism that is not merely non-theistic but actively anti-theistic, recognizing in the concept of creation itself a theological residue that must be purged from philosophical thought.