Our PhD

This is their last chance, our PhD students. They know it. Their last few years. Just as these are our last years – though we have more years than our postgraduates.

We love their unworldliness. Their doomedness. The fact that they’re fucked. Which mirrors our own unworldliness. Our own doomedness. The fact that we’re fucked.

 

They’re copying us, our PhD students. They’re learning from us. It’s accelerated development. They’re moving quickly. But where it will get them? Not as far as us, which is the tragedy. They won’t end up in jobs, like us. They won’t end up working at some half-decent university, or indeed any university.

There are barely any jobs for European philosophy. For non-technocratic philosophers. Nothing for genuine questioners. We slipped through, it’s true. But we were lucky. It was a flaw, a fluke. It happened entirely by chance.

 

They’re copying our gestures, our mannerisms, our PhD students. Even our doom, which is more advanced than theirs. Which has more twists and turns than theirs. Which is more complex, no doubt more mature than theirs.

But it’s coming on, their doom. It’s developing, their doom. It's ripening …

 

They should shoot themselves, our PhD students. And shoot us, first – their teachers. For giving them vistas. For opening them to too many things. For providing them with names. With books. With the grounding for reading such books … It was cruelty: the vistas we showed them. The books we told them about. The films! The music!

 

How tender we’ve been with them, our PhD students. We’ve been generosity itself to our PhD students. As though they were our own children. Which they are in many ways: our own children.

 

The suicides of our PhD students: we expect them. They’re not going to live long out there. They’re not going to last long, not in the world. They’re sensitive. And the world is cruel.