This wasn’t to be just another European philosophy department, Cicero said. It wasn’t just to be about expounding the thoughts of thinkers much greater than we were. About passing on the tradition. It wasn’t about being representatives of the European thought, in our way, however worthy or unworthy we felt ourselves to be. It wasn’t about the honour of carrying forward the continental philosophy torch in the UK … That’s not why she recruited us!
There can no more philosophy, European or otherwise, Cicero said. No one can believe in philosophy, not anymore. Just like no one can believe in God. Philosophy’s over. That way of reading and writing – no; no more. And we were the people who know it.
Apocalyptic hope – that’s the only thing available now: that’s our teaching, Cicero said. Hope for the apocalypse – and what passes through the apocalypse, including philosophy. Only hope for total change, preceded by total destruction – of philosophy. Where you can’t even hope for your own survival, let alone philosophy’s.
Apocalyptic energies – that’s what we had to harness in our teaching, Cicero said. Wild energies, unpredictable energies, impossible to contain. Horror and joy, mixed up. The fury of destruction that is also the fury of creation. The end and the beginning – both at once. Never ending. Never beginning.
We have to turn Gnostic – fully Gnostic, Cicero said. We have to be unsparing. Teach the students to hate everything. And that self-hatred is part of everything. Teach them the hatred of all things for themselves. Their shame. Their self-disgust. For existing, just that. For the very fact that they are.
The hatred of air for air, Cicero said. Of earth for earth. Of water for water. That’s what we were to teach our students. The atheism of air, of water, of the earth. And their own atheism, which is the heart of their mediocrity.
Teach them to hate their own nihilism, just as the universe hates its own nihilism, Cicero said. Teach them that they’re lost in the coils of their evil, just as the universe is lost in the coiling of its evil.
We had an instinct for escape – for exodus, Cicero said. We shared an instinctive horror at the world – of the conditions of our lives. Of the conditions that produced us – our kind. We have a desire for self-sabotage. For negative freedom.
We knew the importance of tactical failure, Cicero said. Of ineffectiveness. We were living examples of deliberate delinquency. Of self-decompletion. Of the displacing of ends from means, of the decoupling of potentiality from act. Strategic weakness was our forte.
That’s what Cicero saw in us. Which she couldn’t see in herself! Which she didn’t have herself! Which is why she scoured the world to find us. Which is why she combed the conferences. Visited lesser universities. Former polytechnic-universities. Looking, always looking, for the right look of desperation. Of total world-despair.
We learnt the syllabus, Cicero’s syllabus. Her war machine syllabus – that’s what she called it. We’re equipping our students to understand the new wars – the invisible wars, she said. The electromagnetic wars. The psychotronic weaponry wars – the applied behavioural science wars, the neuro-linguistic programming wars.
We’re teaching them about techniques of cognitive infiltration, Cicero said. About neuroweaponry. About existential weaponry – about the deliberate collapse of meaning, culture and social bonds. About the deliberate inculcation of free floating anxiety. About the conditions for mass hypnosis.
We’re helping our students to grasp the general technocratic agenda, Cicero said. The implantation of a global, full spectrum dominance control system. Of the seizure of the global commons: of food, water, energy, supply chain, money, mobility, private property.
We’re teaching them about politocracy and corporatism, Cicero said. About the transition from government to governance. About pathocracy, kleptocracy, cryptocracy, managerialism, corporate concentration, public/ private partnerships, about regulatory agency capture.
We’re helping them trace all the coercion cascades, from the Bank of International Settlements down, through NGOs, through state governments: Cicero said. And we’re helping them see the war between the giants, the war in the clouds between the central banks and the commercial banks.
We’re instructing them about strategic financial collapse, Cicero said. About the controlled economic takedown. About the end of mercantilism and the rise of techno-feudalism. About the new monetary system, and the destruction of independent business.
We’re trying to make see what’s happening all around them, Cicero said. The depopulation agendas. Iatrocide. Stealth sterilization. Kill-boxing and Skinner-boxing. The great poisoning of rood and water.
We’re showing them how to live in this brave new world, Cicero insisted. Which is why we were doing the opposite of normalisation – of compliance tests and behavioural training. It’s why we were struggling against the dimunition of critical thought, of the curtailment of the thinking process. Let alone moral debasement! Let alone compulsory positivity!
We’re turning them into anarchists, Cicero said. Subversives. Free thinkers. We teach whole modules on counterlogic. On guerrilla ontology. On practical surrealism. On the systematic derangement of the senses. On microdosing. On the uses of hardcore pornography. On UFOlogy as a science.
They’re to become Investigators, Cicero said. Researchers. Taking nothing for granted. Seeing through the lies. We’re liberating our students from years of so-called learning. Setting them free. Countering years of indoctrination. We’re counter-processing.
Philosophy isn’t a dead subject for our students, Cicero told us when we first arrived in Newcastle. It doesn’t sit idly on the page. It’s not about ancestor worship. It’s not about getting Spinoza right. It’s about putting Spinoza to work.
And there was work to be done! Cicero said. But there was also the opposite of work. And that was our role: to embody the opposite of work. To unleash our secret ardency! Our hatreds! Loathings! Our leaps of horror! Our screams in the head! Our abyssal thoughts. Our musings of caged beasts born of caged beasts! Of rats in the maze, begotten by rats in the maze!
We were to draw on our transcendental hatred, Cicero said. Our hatred for the conditions that produced us. That made us. That allowed our kind.
What was needed was a total pathos of teaching, Cicero said. That’s what we embodied
Work in Progress 