Professional Mourners

We’re the last despairers, postgraduates. This is the last and lowest form of despair. Despair has fallen to us, which is why despair itself must despair.

 

We’re, like, professional mourners, postgraduates. The kind they hire to wail and tear at their clothes. To fall upon the coffin.

Except we’re mourning the end of a civilization. We’re mourning because no one else will. Because no one else sees it.

Sometimes it feels as though it’s only us. That we’re the only ones. There are tears only in our eyes. For what has passed. For what is sinking into history. An entire civilization! And philosophy is sinking with it. And of course, the humanities. We’re anachronisms, postgraduates. We’re irrelevant.

We’re like coelacanths, caught in the ocean depths. Our time has passed – in fact we’ve never even know it, our time. Essentially belated: that’s what we are. It’s nachträglichkeit. It’s return of the repressed.

And what about you? You’re even more out of time than we are.

 

You can’t go home again, postgraduates. Because we were never home. There never was a home for the humanities, let alone philosophy. There was only ever temporary accommodation. Only tents pitched in the desert. Only a rest break.

True exile: that’s our true vocation. Exodus. The humanities are only ever on the way out. And we’ve been turfed out again. We’ve been cast out again. The deepest exile of all. Into Organisational Management. Into the anti-philosophical. Not merely indifferent to philosophy, but antithetical to it. Actually hostile to it. In essence. What shelter will philosophy find in glorified Business Studies?

How hard we’ll have to fall, postgraduates! How far we’ll fall! Truly, we’ve never know falling like it.

 

The logic of the world is leading here. The logic of the new world. The Organisational Management campus is only what the world’s becoming. What the world already is, in essence.

The O.M. campus is only showing us where we already were – for some time. It’s being revealed to us. The essence of the new world. What it is, what it looks like.

 

Our fate is not in our hands. The dice have been rolled. Where are we being taken? Where are we being led? Will we acquit ourselves well? Will we honour our philosophical ancestors? Will we be brave? True? Will we bear with us the honour of philosophy?

 

The new regime. The new reality. A world order as organisation and as management.

We’re exposed. Our hearts are beating in the open air. We’re taking risks – terrible risks. We’re all but offering up our sanity.