The university’s laughing at itself by employing us. The humanities. It’s a deliberate parody. Deliberate self-sabotage.
We’re a joke the university is playing on itself. In its dying days. At the end of everything.
It’s a last gasp. A last laughing gasp. Of the entire university. A last laugh of the humanities at the humanities, in scorn for the humanities, which is to say, for itself, for themselves.
At the end! At the very end! In parody of a proper end!
We’re not even philosophers. We’re not even anything. We don’t have an idea in our heads. Except other people’s ideas. Except the thoughts of others, which we only parrot and mimic.
Our thought: borrowed. Our so-called intellectual lives: borrowed. And not even borrowed well.
We don’t deserve this. But then we don’t deserve anything. And yet here we are, teaching! Yet here we are …
Why us? It’s a torment. It’s a torture … Of the university! Of the humanities! Of philosophy! And a self-torture of the university. A masochism of the humanities. Philosophy has come to hate itself.
Surely someone must enjoying it. The demiurge, maybe. The Antichrist, perhaps.
A deliberate parody. Not just nihilism, but nihilism doubled up. Nihilism laughing at itself. Laughing at itself for being nihilism.
Work in Progress 