Macbeth and Inhuman Forces

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[quote][i]“Organisation is suppression... we do not yet know what death can do.” — Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, p. 31[/i][/quote]

[b]Introduction[/b]



To interpret Shakespeare’s [i]Macbeth[/i] through Nick Land’s [i]Fanged Noumena[/i] 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.



[b]1. Deterritorialization and the Becoming-King[/b]



Land’s notion of [i]deterritorialization[/i] 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 [i]signal from the Outside[/i], a viral code that infects his subjectivity. His ambition ceases to be a personal choice; it becomes a [i]machinic compulsion[/i].



[i]“Fair is foul, and foul is fair”[/i] — 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 [i]destratification[/i] — a tearing apart of the moral and political strata that compose the kingdom (p. 319).



[b]2. The Death-Drive and the Thanatropic State[/b]



For Land, death is not the end but the productive matrix of reality: [i]“The reality of identity is death.”[/i] (Fanged Noumena, p. 229). Once Macbeth kills Duncan, he becomes an agent of the [i]thanatropic current[/i] — life’s own drive toward entropy. Power and death merge into one flow. His reign becomes the pure expression of what Land calls the [i]Ur-State[/i]: a social machine feeding on its own collapse (p. 175).



[i]“Security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.”[/i] — 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.



[b]3. Fate, Time, and the Inhuman[/b]



Land redefines fate as [i]“Infinite Difference Monopolar Universality fully expressed as Fate”[/i] (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 [i]Chronos[/i] (linear time) and [i]Aeon[/i] (Land’s infinite, looping time).



[i]“Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.”[/i] — 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.



[b]4. After the Law: The Collapse of Order[/b]



In Land’s essay [i]After the Law[/i] (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 [i]“the violence of the insidious”[/i] (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.



[b]5. Lady Macbeth and Libidinal Materialism[/b]



Lady Macbeth channels Land’s [i]libidinal materialism[/i] (p. 229): desire as raw energetic contagion rather than motive. Her famous cry — [i]“Unsex me here”[/i] — 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 [i]machinic death[/i] that underlies all civilization (p. 345).



[b]6. The Schizo-Tragic Collapse[/b]



[i]“There is no tragedy without an Agamemnon, or some other mad beast of war.”[/i] — Fanged Noumena, p. 145. Macbeth is that beast. His tragedy is not that of moral failure but of [i]ontological infection[/i]: 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 — [i]“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”[/i] (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.



[b]Conclusion[/b]



In Land’s framework, [i]Macbeth[/i] 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 [i]chosen by the Outside[/i]. Through him, time, power, and death converge into one process: the self-destruction of the human form in the face of its own desire.


[quote]“Can what is playing you make it to Level 2?” — Fanged Noumena, p. vii[/quote]

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I went to see Macbeth in Stratford Upon Avon the other day. It was set in 1980\'s Glasgow in some dive bar. Made slot of sense in a kind of gangster theme.

The Macbeth text i was referring to.

[url=https://indieagora.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/macbeth_no_fear_script.pdf]macbeth_no_fear_script.pdf[/url]

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Strange how it renders like that - seems to render fine in Atrium:

https://indieagora.com/?tab=discuss&iad ... _topic=512

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Moved.

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Bumping due to relevance to other topics about The Outside.