Lars Iyer's Blog, page 84

Philosophy: will we have known what it was?, W. wonders. Will we have understood what it might have become? No, they will never destroy philosophy, not entirely. Philosophy will survive so long as people suffer, W. says. But philosophy without an institution, philosophy without the university: what will it ever be but a cry of suffering, pure pathos? What will philosophy ever be but the roaring of the end?

There must be departments of thought, just as there must be departments of history, and departments of mathematics, W. says. The university must be a place kept apart from capitalism, and from the ravaging of the world by capitalism. The university must remain a utopian space, if thought is to survive; if hope is to survive.

Because without philosophy there is no hope, W. says. Without thought, you can only return to the pell-mell of suffering from which thought begins.

‘When do you work?’, W. says. ‘When do you have ideas?’ But he knows the answer. I am too busy to work, I tell him. I am too occupied to have ideas.

He knows what I do all day. He knows I’m busy with bureaucracy and administration. But what about my evenings?

He sees me, in his mind’s eye, W. says, opening a bottle of wine in the squalor of my flat after a day at work. He sees me, booting up my laptop, getting ready to write.

But that’s my problem!, W. says. I think that writing about ideas is the same as having ideas, when in reality they are entirely different. You have to stop writing to have an idea, W. says. You have to pause and wait.

Of course, it’s worse for me when I do stop writing, W. says. It’s worse when I collapse into my bed and try to sleep. He pictures me, staggering around my flat in the early hours, preparing for bed. He sees me, ranging around my flat like the abominable snowman, my dressing gown flapping around me ...

‘You can never sleep, can you? You’ve never been able to sleep’, W says. He sees me, lying sleepless in bed, full of great paranoid imaginings about the way I think they’ll sack me. He sees me, lying there, quite panicked, fearing that I’ll be sent back to the dole queue. And he sees me, falling asleep at last, collapsing into unconsciousness at last, just as dawn breaks, and the birds start singing, just as, at the opposite end of the country, W. is waking up, ready to begin his studies. He sees me, dreaming fitfully about working out my notice and exit interviews. He sees me, mouthing the words, No!, No!, in my half sleep ... And he sees my eyes open again, the Leviathan awake, rolling out of my bed like a Spital Tongues Gargantua ...

Neat Plymouth gins on ice by the canal, musing on our failure.

There are some thoughts that will be forever beyond us, W. says. The thought of our own stupidity, for example; the thought of what we might have been had we not been stupid. The thought of what he might have been, W., had he not been dragged down by the concrete block of my stupidity ... The thought of what I might have been, had my stupidity simply been allowed to run its course ... W. shudders.

Oh, he has some sense of what we lack, W. says. More than I have, but then he's more intelligent than I am. He has some sense that there's another kind of thinking, another order of idea, into which one might break as a flying fish breaks the surface of the water. He knows it's there, the sun-touched surface, far above him. He knows there are thinkers whose wings flash with light in the open air, who leap from wave-crest to wave-crest, and that he will never fly with them.

He lacks brilliance, that's his tragedy, W. says. There is a dimension of thought, another dimension of life, which he will never attain. The murk of his stupidity has a gleaming surface ... He half-understands, half-knows; but he doesn't understand, he doesn't know.

But isn't that what saves him?, W. says. For if he had understood, really understood, how immeasurably he had failed, wouldn't he have had to kill himself in shame? If he had known, really known, the extent of his shortcomings, wouldn't his blood have had to mingle with the water?

Then again, if he really understood, he wouldn't be stupid, W. says. To know, really to know, would mean he had already broken the surface.

In his dream, W. says, I am having one of my terrible nosebleeds. Blood running from my nose. Blood pooling in my philtrum, and along the top of my lips, my great fat lips ...

In his dream, I am laughing, and blood runs back into my throat as I laugh. And then he hears them, my last words, spoken as blood runs from the corners of my mouth: I am become capitalism, destroyer of worlds.

Really, philosophy is only a training in despair, W. says. A training in the horror of the world!

The only way to think is with a man-trap shut around your ankle, W. says. With an ice-pick buried in your head!

He can't get through to his athletes, W. says. He can't make them understand the gravity of philosophy.

His sports science students lack a sense of the eschaton, of the end times, W. says. They lack any sense of millenarian eschatology. How can he make them understand that there is no hope?

His students are too full of health to despair, W. says. They exercise too much, jogging into the seminar room in their sports kits, with towels round their necks.

He misses the old days, W. says, before his college closed the humanities, when his philosophy students had to be forcibly restrained from throwing themselves from lecture hall windows. He misses the lamentations he used to hear in his tutorials, and the student keening that used to resound down the corridors of his department.

He's lost in marking, W. says. Piles and piles of it! He blocks out the horror of marking every year, he says. And this year it's worse than ever. It's like being in a bath filled with shit.

Maybe there's something wrong with his essay titles, W. says. Bela Tarr is the most important philosopher of our times. Discuss: the sports science students seem to struggle with that. And they object about being examined on Krasznahorkai's novels on a badminton ethics module. But Krasznahorkai is obsessed with ethics, W. tells them. Krasznahorkai writes about nothing but ethics!

He's been officially reprimanded for his teaching, W. says. Making his students watched Endgame over and over again has no relevance to badminton ethics, he's been told.

And they don't want to hear any more Jandek. Actually, he doesn't want to hear anymore Jandek, W. says. He can't bear it. But he thinks Jandek's good for his students, W. says.

The Essex postgraduates never succumbed to left-wing melancholy, W. says. They never thought that history was at an end, or that there could be no alternative to capitalism. Some of them, it is true, advocated a kind of hyper-capitalism, a turbo-capitalism, which would accelerate capitalism to its end. Some of them held out for a capitalism-gone-beserk, a deranged capitalism, that would destroy half the world as it destroyed itself. But the Essex postgraduates never lost faith in the utter transformation of the world, W. says. They never supposed that politics could be anything other than all-enveloping. They never thought politics could mean anything but a total revolutionary project ...

Politics was the horizon of all philosophical thought: the Essex postgraduates were sure of that, W. says. All philosophical roads were also political roads: of that, they were certain. Their most intense thoughts were political thoughts, W. says. Their most intense friendships were political friendships. Everything is political: the Essex postgraduates knew that, W. says. Life is politics: that's what the Essex postgraduates understood.

Political despair: that's what we should guard against, W. says. Political defeatism.

The danger is that we are love the loss of politics, W. says. That we are happy with it; that we depend on it. That we love Britain, even as we pretend to hate it. That we love our own inertia, our attachment to failure.

Didn't Benjamin warn us of left-wing melancholy?, W. says. Didn't he fear that what interests us least is the possibility of politics?, he says. The danger is that we no longer believe in politics. That we do not hate capitalism strongly enough! That we do not hate Britain with sufficient strength!

How can we transform despair into hope?, W. wonders. How, a sense of the end of politics into the dawn of politics?