IndieAgora

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

Introduction

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

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but a node through which inhuman forces pass — the will of the Outside, using him as a conduit for its own mutation.
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Wow, this is so much like what I was going to write about these days, starting a few days or weeks ago, right around when my phone got messed up. I'm so glad that the themes still seem to make their way through here even when I'm not as available, which is also like this theme itself, since it is fnnding its way through here whether it is through me or you for now, which is pretty amazing. This also has to do with the idea of the game I mentioned, as well as how I believe things may really work, albeit less exaggerated, but not all that much less in some cases.

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I also played Macbeth in a play where I gave a stunning performance and I relate to the character, particularly the imges of the character from a recent film starring Michael Fassbender where he has paint pr blackstreaks on his face, possibly also similar to Conan The Batbarian in Conan The Destroyer.

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.