Introduction“Organisation is suppression... we do not yet know what death can do.” — Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, p. 31
To interpret Shakespeare’s Macbeth through Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena is to abandon moral psychology and enter a zone of acceleration, deterritorialization, and catastrophe. Land’s philosophy dissolves the human subject into a process driven by death, desire, and time. In this frame, Macbeth is not a man tempted by ambition, but a node through which inhuman forces pass — the will of the Outside, using him as a conduit for its own mutation.
1. Deterritorialization and the Becoming-King
Land’s notion of deterritorialization describes the collapse of stable identities and structures under the pressure of desire (p. 289). Macbeth’s rise begins when the witches’ prophecy acts as a signal from the Outside, a viral code that infects his subjectivity. His ambition ceases to be a personal choice; it becomes a machinic compulsion.
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair” — Act 1, Scene 1 (p. 6) — encapsulates the same collapse of value and distinction that Land finds in capitalism and nihilism: a flattening of all meaning under pure intensification. Macbeth’s act of regicide is not an ethical failure but a phase-change in the energetic field of power. It is, in Land’s words, a destratification — a tearing apart of the moral and political strata that compose the kingdom (p. 319).
2. The Death-Drive and the Thanatropic State
For Land, death is not the end but the productive matrix of reality: “The reality of identity is death.” (Fanged Noumena, p. 229). Once Macbeth kills Duncan, he becomes an agent of the thanatropic current — life’s own drive toward entropy. Power and death merge into one flow. His reign becomes the pure expression of what Land calls the Ur-State: a social machine feeding on its own collapse (p. 175).
“Security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.” — Act 3, Scene 5 (p. 138) — becomes the axiom of Macbeth’s downfall. In Landian terms, the illusion of mastery is what triggers implosion. Macbeth’s “security” is simply the death-instinct of sovereignty: the moment when control collapses into cosmic entropy.
3. Fate, Time, and the Inhuman
Land redefines fate as “Infinite Difference Monopolar Universality fully expressed as Fate” (Fanged Noumena, p. 263) — an impersonal current of becoming that has no moral logic. Macbeth’s obsession with prophecy is a symptom of this inhuman temporality. He becomes caught between Chronos (linear time) and Aeon (Land’s infinite, looping time).
“Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.” — Act 1, Scene 3 (p. 26) — articulates Macbeth’s position inside the temporal trap Land describes: acceleration toward collapse, the compression of destiny into a single catastrophic instant. Macbeth is not steering history; he is being dragged by it.
4. After the Law: The Collapse of Order
In Land’s essay After the Law (Fanged Noumena, p. 203), the world after reason is a terrain of pure violence — a “post-juridical” space where meaning disintegrates. Macbeth’s Scotland is precisely this landscape. The moral order is gone, replaced by paranoia, murder, and prophecy. Justice becomes indistinguishable from vengeance; sovereignty collapses into chaos.
Here, Macbeth embodies what Land calls “the violence of the insidious” (p. 207) — power without purpose, law without transcendence. He is no longer a man within a tragedy but a process within an algorithm of death.
5. Lady Macbeth and Libidinal Materialism
Lady Macbeth channels Land’s libidinal materialism (p. 229): desire as raw energetic contagion rather than motive. Her famous cry — “Unsex me here” — Act 1, Scene 5 (p. 36) — is not metaphorical. It is a demand to dissolve the human form, to erase gender, morality, and even subjectivity itself. She becomes a vector for the inhuman will of becoming.
Together, Macbeth and his wife form a feedback loop: libido mutating into violence, will into catastrophe. They are a couple possessed by the Outside, agents of the machinic death that underlies all civilization (p. 345).
6. The Schizo-Tragic Collapse
“There is no tragedy without an Agamemnon, or some other mad beast of war.” — Fanged Noumena, p. 145. Macbeth is that beast. His tragedy is not that of moral failure but of ontological infection: the human organism collapsing under the weight of inhuman intensities. He becomes, by the end, a hollow vector of acceleration — a spirit already consumed by the impersonal logic of the machine.
The witches’ chant — “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” (Act 1, Scene 1, p. 6) — returns as the final echo of the Landian world: the inversion of all value, the erasure of all human measure.
Conclusion
In Land’s framework, Macbeth is not a cautionary tale about ambition but an accelerationist parable about the annihilation of the human. The witches are the emissaries of the Outside; Macbeth is their vessel. His downfall is not divine punishment but the inevitable result of contact with the inhuman current that drives history.
He does not “choose evil” — he is chosen by the Outside. Through him, time, power, and death converge into one process: the self-destruction of the human form in the face of its own desire.
“Can what is playing you make it to Level 2?” — Fanged Noumena, p. vii
