Hubris

Didn’t Cicero educate us in all things, pretty much? Poetry. Didn’t she teach us to love the work of Paul Celan and Friedrich Hölderin? The work of Rene Char? Making us read Hölderin out loud! In German! In turn! Passing Hölderin around a reading circle.

She’d make us read aloud, in German. She’d ask us what we thought it meant. How we might translate this word, or that word.

And extemporising commentaries as we read. And commentary on commentaries – the great commentaries on Hölderin. Cicero on Heidegger’s reading of Der Ister, as we read Der Ister. Agamben on Hölderin’s late fragments, as we read the late fragments. As if we’d understand! And we shouldn’t understand!

 

Our atrocious German. Our even-worse French. Our laughable ancient Greek. Our execrable Latin.

Reading Dante – in Italian. Reading Sophocles – in Greek! What else! And then Hölderin’s translation of Sophocles – in German! 

 

We had to be encultured, but not too much so, Cicero insisted. We mustn’t lose our barbarism. Our rough edges. Our mispronunciation.

We mustn’t lose our hatreds. Our horrors. Our sense of not belonging to the world. She loved us as vandals! As ruiners! With bared teeth!

Yet strangely capable of being moved. Something, somehow, there was an openness to deep European culture in us. Where had it come from? How did it survive?

Some sense of reverence … When we’d fall silent, and listening, in wonder. Marvelling … Despite our stupidity! Notwithstanding our stupidity! As if it awakened something in our soul. From a previous life! A previous incarnation!

How else could she account for it? How could Hölderin reach us? And Sophocles? But they did. It did, old European culture.

All the books no one reads anymore. All the forgotten names.

So the memory of Europe wasn’t dead after all. And if it was dead – even if it was dead – there were still those left who could be moved by its ruins.

And wasn’t that was highest in us: that capacity for reverence? Our uneducated enthusiasm? Our autodictat’s instinct? Hadn’t we led ourselves through so many European pages? All by ourselves? Hadn’t we read parallel editions. Mouthing the foreign words? Hadn’t we practically taught ourselves philosophy?

Somehow! Despite everything! Despite ourselves! Despite the atrocities of our education. Despite the reach of Analytic philosophy! Despite the corruption of the Anglophone soul! Despite the thought-poisons than ran through us! (Unless we read from the poisons. Unless it was the poisons that rad hoping for an antidote.)

 

Truffling through the ruins. Snuffling. Scavenging, like pigs. Led ourselves by our own noses.

 

As though we were playing in the ruins. Picking up things that moved us, without us knowing why. It was moving, desperately so.

 

And our writing! How Cicero liked the thought of us writing. The questions she asked us, about our writing habits. About our methods of production. How we sat as we wrote. Our posture. The expressions on our faces.

How seriously we took ourselves, despite everything! Of course it was a mock seriousness. A sham seriousness. An imitation of seriousness’s seriousness. But that itself was moving.

She loved our seriousness. She was amused by our seriousness. But even better, those moments in which we caught ourselves being serious. When we laughed at our own seriousness. Saw ourselves in a mirror, as it were. And couldn’t take our own seriousness seriously. Didn’t think we’d earnt it.

 

Our note-taking. Our annotation of books. Of articles. Our underlings. Our putting things in bold. Our comments. Our collections of excerpts.

She’d ask us to read our favourite quotations. She loved it when we stumbled over our words. When we looked to her for correction. There we were, in our thirties, still reading like children! And stupid children, not gifted children! No one hand corrected us before! No one had taught us to pronounce this, or that! Until now!

And even better when we were drunk and reading out loud. Best of all, when we were slurring, too. When we were full of drunken pathos. Soaring on our own drunken oratory, such as it was.

 

Cicero, laughing and clapping her hands, delighted. My philosophers!, she’d cry. My very own philosophical idiots! My dunces!

 

We didn’t know our own stupidity, not really. Which was probably a relief, Cicero said. Which is probably what kept us going.

 

As our postgraduates were to us, so were we to Cicero.

 

And yet we were capable of such moods. Such depths. Such hatreds. And such loves – why not – since hatred is always a kind of love.

Passions of the barbarians! Of the apes in the academy! Constantly revealing our non-scholarliness … Our clumsy-footedness … Our ill-education … Our linguistic incompetence …

It was a marvel that we’d learnt anything at all. And yet we had learned. A few things, at least. We had instincts – powerful ones. That dove us. That whipped us on through the most rebarbative texts! Whipped us through things we barely understood! Like savages. Reader-barbarians!

Greedily wrenching meaning from our texts – even spurious readings. From our readings – barbaric readings.

They’d make Cicero’s head spin, our readings. Our interpretations. They’d all but make her head turn round and round. She’d start, surprised. She’d flinch. And she’d second-guess herself.

Had we broken open some new scholarly path?, after all. Had we seen what no one else had seen? By force of passion? By sheer barbarism-power! By the power of stupidity!

We were maulers, distorters, primitives, but still … Didn’t we have some crude insights of our own? Couldn’t Cicero dream of a whole new school of barbarous interpretations? A primitive’s hermeneutics?

Was it really so mad to dream of a school of barbarised European philosophy? Something the British would contribute to the intellectual life of the world? Couldn’t we have stumbled upon a unique philosophical method – a stupid method? Outsider philosophy, in some sense?

 

Mouthing over our words as we read them. Following lines of text with our fingers.

Near illiteracy! And yet we seemed to need to read. And books that were too  hard for us – obviously.

We were drawn to high seriousness, despite our irreverence. Despite our flippancy. High seriousness! Why did we need it? Why did we look for it? How could we even recognise it? And yet recognise it we did.

Only the most lofty of books. And the deepest ones. The surprise of what we had read! The surprise of our acquaintance with Pindar, with Goethe, with Proclus. Cicero was amazed. What was it that had led us into those corners of the library?

The ancient books! In Green Loebs! In red Loebs! In facing translations. As if we needed them! As if we really were going to cross check the English against the Greek! As if we could actually even remember the Greek alphabet!

And didn’t we have Heidegger in German! Various items from the Gestamsausgabe. Auf Deutsch! The presumption! The ambition! The unlikehood! In what fit of optimism did we buy Unterwegs zur Sprache. And Was Heisst Denken?

And our French books! What a marvel! Those creamy Gallimards! La by Helene Cixous. Le Differend, by Lyotard. As if we going to read those in the original!

And even some Italian books – Virno. Agamben! God knows. Tiny books, with sixty or so pages. Exquisite. As if we were going to magically be able to read those books, just by being close to them!

 

But what an insight into us, our personal libraries. Once upon a time we really took ourselves to be capable of such things. We really thought we were going to be pan-European readers.

Our immodesty! Our hubris! Our secret aspirations! Our dreams! One day, we’d be able to read these books. We were too good for translations! We needed more! Who knows, perhaps we were going to translate them ourselves.

A glimpse into how we once saw ourselves. And maybe we saw ourselves that way still! Perhaps we thought that now we had open-ended contracts, the nearest thing to permanent jobs … Now we were actually gainfully employed, and full time … that we might bloom into our true scholarly capacities. That we might soar into our real vocation. Read in all the major European languages. Become proper scholars of the Latin, of the Greek.

Turn ourselves into new Hans Blumenbergs. Into European style scholar-philosophers. Writing eight hundred page magnum opuses, one after another. On complicated periods of European thought. On medieval philosophy, and that sort of thing. On ancient philosophy.

Magisterial! Epoch-spanning! Commanding whole eras of intellectual philosophy! Testament to years of patient scholarship! Yes, wasn’t that what we were going to write, now we had full time jobs?