We’re idea-stealers, that’s all! Panners for philosophical gold in European waters. Gathers of European pollen from the finest European flowers. Fishers of ideas in the European pond.
Ideas we barely understand! That we barely even grasp! Ideas that we have to dumb down. Simplify. Rip out of their context. Reframe. Make stupid …
Ideas that we have to domesticate – to transplant to Anglophone soil. That we have to make grow here. Simplified! Contextualised! Reframed! Remade! To be presented in our journal articles and conference presentations.
Explainers: that’s what we are. Makers-clear. Renderers-up of difficult things. Cutters-and-dryers. Servers-up of difficult things!
We know the division of labour: the Europeans think, and we introduce their ideas. Europe is the element of ideas, and the Anglophone world the element of introductions to ideas. Europe is where ideas swim in the wild, and the Anglosphere is the place where ideas are caught – snared. Domesticated.
We’re supposed to be idea-seizers. Idea opportunists. Dutiful worker ants. Drones. Making ideas usable in the Anglophone humanities. Ready to be put to work, by other humanities disciplines. Read for the discerning educationalist or art historian or music theorist …
We’re supposed to be in the deciphering department. In the explanations game. Rendering explicit: that’s supposed to be our job. Translating obscure European ideas into clear English prose. Transforming the fire from heaven into packageable ideas – into gaudy paperbacks in collect-‘em-all series.
Whole careers can be made from a few crumbs from the European table –but not our careers. Great books to be written – for prestigious presses; where you can make your name as an [insert European name here]-ian; as a specialist in the thought of [insert up coming name here] – but not our books.
Plan well, and you could be ahead of the curve – but we’re behind it, and behind every curve. You could be the go-to person about this thinker-on-the-rise or that – but no one would ever come to us. Think strategically, and you could be ready with a raft of articles on this up-and-coming thinker or that one – but we’re hopeless at tactics. We can’t do strategy.
You could be hunters-down of other crumbs from the French philosophical table. Stuff that’s been missed from the ‘50s or ‘60s. Thinkers Deleuze mentioned in passed. Ready to be translated! Introduced! But we were incapable of that.
We were never epigone of this thinker or that. Never ready to the Deleuzian thing or the Badiouan thing. And doing something else when that gets tiresome.
We had no hotline to the Parisian experimentium. To the Parisian ideas incubator. Paris: we’ve never even been there. We can’t even conceive of Paris. We don’t speak French, let alone Parisian. We can read a but of French, sure. A bit of German. We know the letters of ancient Greece. But Paris would be quite impossible for us. We’d explode if we ever went near Paris – My God!
Could we say that we resisted it all – that we wanted to be more than covers bands, doing our own crap version of European ideas? That we aspired to more than being the backers of the right European horses? Could we say we had too much integrity to play pass the European philosophy parcel?
It was as though we were not yet philosophers – that’s what Cicero said. As though we were not even philosophers. Philosophy, in us, was the ache, the desire for philosophy. Philosophy, in our cases, was the full knowledge that philosophy of any kind was impossible.
Philosophy, for us, was the perpetual as-not … You never philosophise as a philosopher: that’s what we knew …
Our idiocy. Our experience of idiocy. As it belonged to philosophy. As it was the most intimate part of philosophy. As the core of philosophy. Wasn’t that what was most important?
Knowing ourselves as having no ideas of our own, of having nothing to say, and no means by which to say anything. As being never able to philosophise. We could never pass ourselves off as philosophers. Let alone as philosophier-introducers to European ideas. We could never play the part of philosophical master – as in command of the oeuvres of others. As explainers. As contextualisers.
The completeness of our stupidity: that’s what we expressed in our best moments. In our drunken laments. In our ceaseless complaints about our inability. Stupidity without apology: that’s what we became. The happiness of idiocy: even though we were also as miserable as sin.
Perfect idiots. Beautiful idiots. Beautiful in our idiocy and because of it. Dwelling in idiocy. In a whole ethos of idiocy – a way of perceiving and engaging with the world, with ourselves, with others …
Perhaps it takes a non-idiot to understand it, Cicero said. A non idiot standing outside it. Who’s not part of it. Who doesn’t dwell within it. The point is to affirm idiocy. Not to see it as a deficiency. Not to see ourselves as lacking anything. But we were incapable of that.
You have to know how to read idiocy, Cicero said. There’s a whole idiocy’s hermeneutics. And that was her role: to show the meaning of our idiocy.
Which is why she’d given us jobs. Why she’d raised us to these heights …
Work in Progress 