All her professors, Cicero. All her Europeans. She thought they were complicit. That they just went along with things. That the world had been too good to them, or something. Thery weren’t instinctively appalled, as we were, as she was.
They didn’t see the farce. The killing joke. They were too trusting. They trusted the present course of things. The world as it was. They thought they could just carry on the old world, the old culture, translating Thomas Mann, or whatever. As if the old world hadn’t gone! As if it hadn’t disappeared!
Sure, old Europe can go on Old Europeanizing, Cicero said. It can do its thing, on the other side of the channel. But it’s in the UK that you see the truth. In this philistine country …
All the ways they believed in the old culture, Cicero’s professors. All the ways they believe they could teach it, transmit it, the old world, old Europe. All the ways they were able to pretend to themselves, to others, that that world wasn’t a museum world. A superseded world. A denialism of the world as it was. In its poison! In its lies!
The didn’t see the End all around them, Cicero’s professors. They don’t see the new Forces. They don’t feel it: that everything has changed. That the old laws no longer apply. That all that culture was a blip. In the void. In the voiding of the void, or whatever.
There was nothing appalled about them, Cicero’s professors. Nothing burningly intense. There was no laughter at EVERYTHING. Just as we were filled, at our best, with a laughter at EVERYTHING.
It’s not just that no one’s interested in philosophy anymore, that no one reads books anymore. That no one has the attention span anymore. All those laments miss their mark.
It’s that the fundaments of civilization are fundamentally shifting. And something is revealing itself in that shift, in that move towards technocracy, towards total management and total organisation. Because the very condition of that move is the void. Is the experience of the nothingness at the heart of things. The fact that the whole order is grounded upon nothing – upon no ground. Upon no sense of what is good and right and just. Upon no faith in the order of things.
And the technocrats know it too, in their heart of hearts. They know the world as void. They’re acting upon the world as void. Directly. Because the world is showing itself as void, directly.
The nothing as the world. The world as void. But the technocrats don’t know the divinity of the void, that’s the thing. They see the nothing as mere absence, mere lack. They think the time has come to manipulate it as such. To work on the void as such. But they don’t understand the depths of the void. They don’t know what it is – and isn’t.
That’s why she listened outside the lecture rooms, as we taught. That’s why she liked to listen to you talk, Shiva. At your sense of poison and lies. The way you spoke of poison and lies, quite explicitly.
Poison and lies: wasn’t that what you were lecturing, about at that conference, when she first heard you speak?
We were like punk philosophers to her, or something. Punks know how to draw their energy from the end, that’s what she said. A future from the fact that there is no future.
Which is why Cicero enjoyed our gaucheries. It wasn't just philistinism, to her. It wasn’t just bad manners. It wasn’t just not knowing how to do small talk.
Work in Progress 