It’s growing dark. The philosophers of the end, of the very end, are starting to appear.
Who are they? Where are they hiding? What do they look like?
Like us, maybe.
Philosophy’s complicit. Academic philosophy, anyway. We can’t look to academic philosophy for anything.
So who can we turn to?
What will they philosophise about in the dark times?
They will philosophise about the dark times.
I think we’re here to attend to something. To be alert. On the watch.
What for, a miracle?
An anti-miracle, maybe. An anti-miracle … of the Antichrist. That only an … anti-philosophy could detect.
We need a new kind of thought, that’s all our own … A thought as vast and stupid as things are vast and stupid. Pathos driven thinking. Deep moods. Which we will access through drinking
Drinking! What else!
Drinking and hangovers. Even hangovers have lessons.
Only at the edges of Europe can European thought re-emerge. Only at its lunatic fringes. Only through our stupidity. By our stupidity. Wielding our stupidity.
We’ve only ever needed the courage of our stupidity. We’ve only even needed to be unleashed into our stupidity. To soar into it.
Anti-philosophers: that’s who we have to be now. The time of philosophy is over.
Anti-philosophy … isn’t that just more philosophy? We don’t want any more philosophy …
There can no more philosophy. No one can believe in philosophy. Just like no one can believe in God.
Maybe there’s room for a negative philosophy – like negative theology. Where it’s apophatic. Where it’s all about what it’s not.
Anti-philosophy … that could be the name of our movement.
Someone French is bound to have thought of anti-philosophy in, like, 1912. They’re so far ahead.
Look it up.
Fuck, there’s loads of stuff on anti-philosophy. It was all the rage in France in the ‘70s …
Typical.
There’s some guy who gave up philosophy for … sailing. He’s written a whole treatise on it. Sailing and antiphilosophy.
What about non-philosophy?
That’s taken – everyone knows that. There’s a whole school of non-philosophy: Laruelle and co.
What about hyperphilosophy?
You’re just pulling things out of your arse.
How about ultraphilosophy? Surphilosophy … like surrealism. Where the prefix Sur means beyond. …
People would be expecting things from us. Like, great things. We need to lower their expectations. They need to understand that this is philosophy in parody. Philosophy as a joke. Like a failure philosophy. A fuck up philosophy. A philosophy for the fucked up. Philosophy that isn’t philosophy. That’s not quite philosophy. Not even anything.
Not even philosophy: that’s a name.
Do you think?
Not even philosophy … look that up.
Nothing. It’s all ours.
Imagining it: a whole not-even-philosophy movement.
Would it mean we have do things? Like, work at anything? Run a not-even philosophy journal? A society? Hold conferences. Run some not even philosophy series for a publisher?
Fuck that. You shouldn’t have to do stuff if you’re not-even-philosophers. It should be like, slacker philosophy. Where it’s not about arguments, or theses, or positions, or being for or against anything.
What do not even philosophers think about? Is there, like, a not even ontology?
Not even that.
A not even metaphysics?
Definitely not.
Could you do a not even ethics?
Not even that. Not even anything. Not even philosophy.
Just being lazy useless bastards, then. Nothing’s changed.
It’s more like a suspension of philosophy: that’s how I think of it. Where we lay down the usual philosophical tools.
Where we get drunk together, in other words.
Maybe that’s part of it.
Where we hang out.
That’s part of it, too.
Where we don’t organise anything. Just sit on the fucking beach, hungover.
Not even philosophy has many mansions.
Not even philosophy. Would we become the latest thing? Would word spread through the more alert postgraduates? Through the more vibrant postdocs? Through the more advanced MA students looking for something really transgressive?
Would blurred photos of us circulate on the net?
We should write a manifesto.
The Centre for Not Even Philosophy – do you think the uni would allow that?
You can be our president, Furio. You can be in charge of spreading our doctrine. Like syphilis.
Work in Progress 