Thirty-Seven

Where are we on the time-line? What life phase are we in? What are we supposed to be doing?

Heidegger wrote Being and Time at thirty-seven.

That gives us a few years. Wait – how old are you?

Thirty-three.

Better get going.

Heidegger had already give the History of the Concept of Time lectures by the time he was thirty-three.

Merleau-Ponty had already written The Phenomenology of Perception at thirty-three.

Simone Weil was writing her best notebook stuff. She was dead a year later. Kristeva published Revolution of Poetic Language …

Fucking Schelling was published at seventeen. Hume wrote his Treatise at twenty three.

Maybe we’re late bloomers.

Don’t bring up Kant – you’re going to bring up Kant, aren’t you?

I’m going to bring up Kant. He was fifty-seven when he published The Critique of Pure Reason. He began it age forty-six. When he woke from his dogmatic slumbers, or whatever.

We’re second rung, right?

Second rung? You wish. What about the great works of commentary – like, secondary stuff. How old was Hyppolite when he finished his Phenomenology of Spirit book?

Thirty-seven, I reckon.

And Derrida published those three books at thirty-seven.

They were hardly commentary …

Cixous published that enormous book on Joyce when she was thirty-one. That was her doctorat d’État. Much higher than a British doctorate.

And they do habilitations on the continent, don’t they?

Sure. Doctorates are for pussies: that’s what they think over there. Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study was supposed to get him his habilitation.

How old was he?

I don’t know. Twenty-nine, maybe.

We’ve to buckle down. Get something written …