Postgraduate Party

On the way to a postgraduate party.

I don’t get why they’re inviting us. Would we have invited staff to a postgraduate party? Would the staff who taught us actually have gone to a postgraduate party?

I mean, we’ve made it, right? We’ve done what they’re dreaming of doing, and probably never do. We’ve got the job. We’ve got the fucking career. God knows how, but we have. Whilst they’re … fucked, right?

We won’t be able but to appear as smug. As complacent.

As old, for fuck’s sake. What’s the average age here?  

These guys aren’t anything like as fucked as we were. They’re Russell group, for one thing. That’s an advantage.

Yeah, but they don’t have our desperation. Our desire to make it despite all odds.

They don’t have a Cicero to rescue them from total oblivion.

They’ve got more book learning than we did. Some of them even have languages.

Which means they don’t have the despair that we did. They aren’t as mad.

I wish I was still a postgraduate. They’re not yet at the age when they have to deliver, right? They live in possibility. In pure potential ..

We still have some potential, though. We’ve got a few years. Heidegger wrote Being and Time at thirty-seven.

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

Thirty-three.

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 at twenty-nine …

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

We could always be late bloomers.

You’re going to bring up Kant, aren’t you? Someone has to bring up Kant.

He was fifty-seven when he published The Critique of Pure Reason. Fifty fucking seven …

We could still bloom at fifty-seven …

Delusion.

But it’s an enabling delusion. It makes us feel like we could have something to say. Philosophy’s generous like that. You don’t have to give up your philosophical hopes until you’re positively ancient …

Which means you spend your whole life living in a dream.

What about the great works of commentary – like, secondary stuff. How old was Hyppolite when he finished his book on Hegel?

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 …