Nicholas Dames, editor in chief of Public Books, chooses My Weil as one of his books of the year.

Think Minima Moralia as a stand-up routine. You���ll want to quote whole pages. And then there���s the perfect, groan-inducing title. I���ll admit it: I���m a paid-up member of the underground sodality of Lars Iyer fans. Such groupuscules are, as it happens, the subject of Iyer���s work, particularly the one we call the humanities, fast becoming a semi-covert retreat within the neoliberal academy. In My Weil, the scene is the PhD program in Disaster Studies at the fictional All Saints University, set in a Manchester that has become a fiction to itself���the vintage Happy Mondays shirts selling for fifty quid, the conferences held at the renovated warehouse now called the Tony Wilson Centre. A loose collective of graduate students, including one who���s taken the name Simone Weil (���I wanted to live deliberately,��� she explains), spend their days in a fugue of theory banter, loathing for the Business Studies students who are the targets of their inner monologues, self-loathing, booze and hallucinogens. They���re waiting for the world to end, because what���s the humanities now but a kind of eschatology? More than anything, Iyer asks us to relish it: the abjection, the dead-endedness, and the comic sublimity of philosophizing from within damaged life. Because maybe, just maybe, when there���s finally no hope for the humanities (or humanity), that abjection may show you a way out.