We, at the bottom of the academic ladder of stupidity, are in fact spiritually higher than those many rungs up. That’s our paradoxical elevation … That’s the strange contradiction in which we live.
And it’s why we see further than the rest of them. The gifted. The bright. The high achievers. All of Cicero’s professors!
It’s why we know the light of the Most High as it shines through us: the Most Low. As it shines in our stupid faces – in our idiot’s faces.
When we talk of our stupidity – from it. When we say the most idiotic things. When we drink!
And how we drink! It’s a mainline to idiocy, and therefore counter-idiocy. It’s the royal road to stupidity, and therefore the opposite of stupidity. That lets brilliance pass through us. That turns our faces upwards. And lets us see the sky – and see through the sky.
The fools, the jokers, at the bottom of the ladder at least know there’s a ladder. Can at least dream of ascending, even though they can’t possibly ascend.
In perfect tension with the world, the universe, the university. In the agon.
To suffer it – and laugh about it. To laugh from it. Just as we laughed, on our drunken evenings.
Cicero saw it in us. Marvelled at it. What lightness! What a gift of lightness! A laughing crucifixion – was it possible? It was.
Suffering laughed. Despair laughed. And this was not a contradiction of suffering, or despair. It was their completion. Their bloom. Their highest flower.
The laughter of despair: that’s what Cicero needed to learn. But couldn’t. A working class thing? A British thing? She wasn’t sure. But it lay outside her. It wasn’t within her powers.
Us at our best, because we were at our worst. Us at our most serious, because we so laughable. Us at our most philosophical, because we could barely string a philosophical sentence together.
To feel at home in our exile. To feel close to brilliance in our distance from brilliance.
The place that shows our stupidity is exactly where we belong. Is our true intellectual home.
We cannot escape the Cross. We’re on the Cross. We’re Holy idiots, right there on the Cross, because of our holiness. Because of our idiocy.
The Lamb is being slain. The Lamb was always slain – from the beginning. There’s no respite for the Lamb.
Genius lies tortured. And is nothing other than this torture.
We have to consent to our idiocy. To affirm it. Even as we want it to be something else.
We affirm our idiocy by disavowing it. By turning from it. By seeing it in each other and by taking the piss.
That’s what redeems us: taking the piss. That’s how we know the other as geniuses and anti-geniuses. How we know each other as the greatest thinkers who’ve ever lived, and the worst.
The way we pull each other down. The way we laugh at each other. The truest friendship! That’s how we know friendship – as the opposite of friendship. As the torment of friendship.
We’re fools for Genius … For Philosophy, God knows …
How far Philosophy’s fallen. To find itself among us! Among our kind!
Does that mean we can save it?
Are we going to put philosophy back together again?
We’re going to smash it still farther. Until not even the memory of it survives. And that’s how we’ll save it. And ourselves.
The death of God, the death of the university: the same. The death of the university is only the outworking of the death of God.
Cicero killed the university. She broke the university.
The university lives on through us. Through this philosophy dept. We’re the university, and this, all around us, is a lie.
We’re the true uni. The true uni lives. In us. In our Board of Studies. In parody.
We’re the true lecturers. And we’re the true philosophy department. This is the truest philosophy department.
The dicers at the foot of the cross are actually on the cross, being crucified.
The great crucifixion is that there are dicers at the foot of the Cross, ignoring the Cross.
That’s why it’s fallen to us. That’s what happens at the end, the very end. We’re the ones who take it over. We’re the truest testimony to what it once was.
Our readings of Heidegger are the most faithful for our time. Our interpretations of Deleuze are the most profound for our time. Our engagement with Levinas is the most timely, the most relevant, the most important for our time.
Because it’s not timely! Because it’s not relevant! Because it’s of no importance whatsoever!
Work in Progress 