Our old negativity. Old world-hatred. Our living in the shadows. Our lives lived below minimum wage. Working, unthanked. Barely rewarded. And for non-entities. For no-nothings. For the comfortable. For the academic middle-class …

Resentment. Desire to turn the world upside down. World-horror. Gnosticism.

Endless being-ignored. Endless being no ones. Lost in loss. Humiliated …  

How to remember all that? How to attest to it? How to let it live on inside us?

Our patience. Our perdurance. Through the long, lean years. Playing the long game. Playing it because we didn’t know how to play anything else.

And gone secretly mad. Gone extreme. Become odd, in our inner lives.

Gambling everything, on what? Risking it all, for what? What did we think we were doing? But we couldn’t do otherwise.

 

Our tastes. Our personalities. Formed around absence. Formed around impossibility.

We were out on a limb too long. We took it all too seriously too long. We watched too many arthouse films. We read too many lofty books. We read too many revolutionary books.

We’d gone mad in the shadows.

 

Are we to be tour guides to the great books? Is that enough? Paid guides? Museum keepers? Should we be content to keep the European lights burning? To pass the old knowledge down the generations?

 

Thirty something. Isn’t it time to develop your own thought? To leap into greatness?

Heidegger published Being and Time at 37. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, at the same age. Merleau-Ponty published Phenomenology of Perception at 34. And these were the writers who took their time.

 

Is it enough, above a certain age, to be a secondary commentator? To be an introducer of books, of oeuvres?

The dream of an aggressive reading. Of a wild reading.

Think of Deleuze, and his commentaries. His overturn-the world-Nietzsche. His renewed Spinoza. His Bergson for the new millennium.

 

Or – impossible – to move from the secondary to the primary. To writing books about to writing books of your own. To have your own thoughts – just that. To move from commentary to work commented upon: shouldn’t that be the task?

Won't it all have been worthwhile then? Won't it all have made retrospective sense, then?

 

That you could be a Name. A Player. A person to court for upcoming jobs. To be someone sought after to add to a department. Approached at conferences. Would you consider … We have a job opening up and we’d like you to apply …

 

Things to keep us busy: refereeing for journals. Writing recommendations. Reviews. The ordinary business. Examining PhDs – internally and externally. Inspecting book proposals. All that stuff.

Guest speaking, here and there. Being a panellist at this or that academic conference. Hosting symposia, sometimes. Entertaining guest speakers. All that ordinary stuff. All that academic-life-as-usual.

But does it hide the void? Does it cover over the void?

 

Our notes from underground.

No one reads us. No one expects anything of us. We work in obscurity. Under floorboards.

What will all of it have been for? Will we have lived a life in vain? But what could it ever have been but in vain? Was it worthwhile, making the attempt? Is it noble to have tried, or just stupid? Laughter.

 

We’ve read the books, seen the films. The names – the great names – are familiar to us. We know our way about among the great oeuvres.

Relaxing with a volume of Paul Celan. With his correspondence. Musil and Broch count as light relief. Ingeborg Bachmann … Marguerite Duras … We know this stuff. It’s ours, in our own way. We’ve appropriated it now. It’s part of our lives now. We’ve earnt it. It’s part of our magpie’s nests.

 

Do they see it in us, our students? How effortless it is? How thoroughly we’ve infused it? The European atmosphere. The European ambience …

It must mean more to us than it can to others: haven’t we always said that to ourselves? It speaks to our kind – it was written for us – not for them.

And our radical politics … Our overturn-the-world politics … Our destroy-the-world anti-politics. Our total revolution or nothing non-politics. Our refusal of politics, of reform … Our dream of a world-end that was also a world-beginning …

The ease of our apocalypticism. The way we speak fluent apocalyptic …

 

We were sinking. Beneath our stars. Our constellations. That we steered by. That we wrecked ourselves by.

But suddenly, miraculously, we were lifted up. Suddenly, impossibly, we had jobs …