Ph.D thesisIn recent years the philosophical texts of Nick Land have begun to attract increasing attention,
yet no systematic treatment of his work exists. This thesis considers one significant and
distinctive aspect of Land's work: his use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary, which is deployed
to try and avoid several problems associated with metaphysical discourse. Land's larger
project of responding to the Kantian settlement in philosophy is sketched in the introduction,
as is his avowed distaste for thought which is conditioned by anthropocentricism. This thesis
then goes on to provide a genealogical reading of the concepts which Land will borrow from
psychoanalytic discourse, tracing the history of drive and desire in the major psychoanalytic
thinkers of the twentieth century. Chapter one considers Freud, his model of the unconscious,
and the extent to which it is anthropocentric. Chapter two contrasts Freud's materialism to
Lacan's idealism. Chapter three returns to materialism, as depicted by Deleuze and Guattari in
Anti-Oedipus. This chapter also goes on to consider the implications of their 'schizoanalysis',
and contrasts 'left' and 'right' interpretations of Deleuze, showing how they have appropriated
his work. Chapter four considers Lyotard's works from his 'libidinal period' of the late sixties
to early seventies. These four readings, and the various theories of drive and desire they
contain, are then contextualised in relation to Land's work in chapter five. This final chapter
considers Land's theory of 'machinic-desire', and evaluates if his construction of the concept,
via psychoanalysis, offers a superior approach to anti-anthropocentric positions constructed in
metaphysics. The role of psychoanalytic thought in constructing Land's cosmological theory
of thermodynamic entropy and extropy is also considered
