Text page
Land - Making It with Death (1993)
An early Land essay that routes desire, production, and death together, giving capitalist modernity one of its bleakest libidinal formulations.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The essay insists that death is not outside desire but one of its engines. Thanatos and desiring-production are forced together so that modernity appears as a process of libidinal expenditure rather than social progress.
Psychoanalysis, Bataillean expenditure, and Deleuzo-Guattarian production are compressed into a single anti-human account of drive. The page turns mortality into a circuit rather than an endpoint.
That matters because the capital section repeatedly depends on libidinal intensification, not just economics. This essay shows how death itself can be folded into the machinery of abstraction.
How to read this text
Read for the relation between thanatos and production before trying to summarize the page as a stance on mortality alone.
Keep an eye on how death is made productive, circulatory, and systemic. That inversion is the key move.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Nick Land Making it with Death If Deleuze is to be salvaged from the inane liberal neo-Kantianism that counts as Philosophy in France today it is necessary to re- assemble and deepen his genealogy.
Definition · paragraph 1
Nick Land Making it with Death If Deleuze is to be salvaged from the inane liberal neo-Kantianism that counts as Philosophy in France today it is necessary to re- assemble and deepen his genealogy. The Pseudo- Nietzscheanism of the late 1960's reaction against Hegel is scarcely a context commensurate with a thinker of major importance. and the same could be said of his jousting with structuralized psychoanalysis.
Definition · paragraph 10
Perhaps, then, the desire of the Nazis goes beyond the reinvestable thanatos that emerges in psychoanalysis' pact with capital, to the point that it insidiously simulates the transcendental recession of the body without organs? It is tempting to think that the contortions such a thought demand expose an overhastiness in the 1972 reading of thanatos, which even in 1980 is still being dismissed as ''the ridiculous death instinct'' (TP 155).
Definition · paragraph 4
The bloodless zombie proletarian is to be resuscitated by the political therapist, ideologically cured of the unholy love for the undead, and bonded to a new eternal life of social reproduction. The death core of capital is thought as the object of critique.
Definition · paragraph 8
What separates the reinvested antiproduction of capitalist war from the absolute repulsion of the body without organs is the final liquidation of death into its function. This is still no more than the issue of consummate critique, since capital is the historically concrete illegitimate usage of the conjunctive synthesis.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.