Europe! So far away! France! Germany! So inconceivable! So unreal!
We’ve never even been. We’ve never even dared to go. We can’t imagine what it would like to visit Paris. Imagine it: Paris. Let alone Berlin!
Hasn’t Paris got gates to keep our kind out? Hasn’t it got detectors to alert them to our type? Wouldn’t the Parisian air itself report us if we tried to breathe it in? Wouldn’t the Parisian cobbles heave upwards in protest, if we tried to walk on them?
Better to deny it altogether: there’s no such thing as Paris. There is no Paris, there cannot be. Paris is a step too far. They made Paris up.
No Paris, and no University of Paris 7 and no École normale supérieure. No Sorbonne. And none of the famous seminars. Derrida never existed. Lacan. No, no. Let alone Deleuze. Especially Deleuze. There never was a Paris. Paris is impossible. Paris cannot be. There’s only the Organisational Management campus.
They don’t deserve the Anglophone enthusiast kind. The don’t-really-speak-the-language kind. The desperate provincials. Who’ve turned, for some reason, to what they do not understand and cannot understand. To what they’re not equipped to understand. To what must lie forever beyond them …
Work in Progress 