Stuck again. W. looks into the air. He grinds his teeth. He clenches his fists, then unclenches them. Then he sees me looking at him. – ‘You enjoy this, don’t you?’, W. says. I enjoy watching him groping for thought.

W. thinks of his other collaborators, over the years. Of others in whom he had placed his hopes. One by one, they were picked off by careerism, by laziness, by the temptations of applied ethics and the writing of introductory books. Of course, it was really the futility of thinking that destroyed his collaborators. The lack of recognition. They expected their thought to be rewarded! They expected that the world would be interested in their Denkwegs, in their paths of thought. When that didn't come, they sought recognition through other means.

With me, there's the opposite problem, W. says. My disregard for the world. My indifference to the opinions of others. My aim is to make thinking yet more futile. It is to make philosophy part of my vagrancy, part of my escape from the suburbs. I take delight in the oblivion of thought. In wearing it out. What have I ever sought but to undo philosophy; to unwork it, just as Penelope unpicked by night the tapestry she wove each day?

Somehow, he senses that my unworking is greater than all his philosophical labours, W. says. That my non-philosophy encompasses his thought and dissolves it. Will his legacy lie in his books and articles: in his studies of messianism (his mathematical messianism) or in my destruction of his legacy? He thinks of the painting of de Kooning that Rauschenberg erased. He thinks of the paintings Francis Bacon would buy just to kick them to pieces on the street.