will carry it through insurrection into anegoic delirium” (1992, xx). Like Deleuze and Lyotard, he speaks to a compulsion to abstract civilization and subjectivity into tides of impersonal energy, a model that operates largely according to thermodynamic principles however, as Land explains, it has no predicates: “in contrast to the energy of physical thermodynamics, libidinal energy is chaotic, or pre-ontological” (ibid, 43). In this view, chaos is the irrepressible flux of compositions and being (or rather becoming) is its effect. This, Land argues, is against Lacan’s foregrounding of lack, as well as the Platonic or Christian positing of an end to desire. Actually, he describes this view as closest to Freud’s “dissipative energetic flows,” a return to Freud that is especially relevant here given that it is discussed in the context of Bataille’s peculiar nihilism.
Libidinal materialism, it would appear, accounts for the associative link between Freud and Bataille. But Land is wary in this regard. In a way that both echoes Bataille’s view of his own work as “failure” and encapsulates the implicit or inhibited complexity beyond the level of signifiers in the Freudian texts, he writes:
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 adaptive regimes, and consuming its reserves in rhythmic convulsions that are not only futile, but devastating
(ibid, xiii).
Waves Upon Waves
The totality then might be expressed as that which “is truly alien to ordinary reflection in that it includes at the same time objective reality and the subject who perceives objective reality” (Bataille, 1991, 115). Just as the emphasis on Force-as-Universal Medium supplants the individual trajectories of the lord and bondsman, here too we see a foregrounding of the