See, we’re the last of a kind. There won’t be many of our kind left. It’s amazing we lasted this long.
We’re past our time. Relics. Coelecanths. No one can make sense of us. We people out of time. Dregs.
But at least we know it. And we do! We know it!
We’re ghosts. We’re survivors. The last Heideggerian. The last Communist. The last Tinkerbell Anthropologist. The last Furio Jesian. Preserved. In parody. Who’ve outlived their time. Of no use to anyone.
Meaningless. Purposeless. Spare parts. Who no one wanted. Who no one ordered. The last Critical Theorist. The last descendants of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Broch. The last Mitteleuropeans-in-spirit.
The last European philosophers, long after the European Philosophy horse has bolted. After its stable was burnt down …
With irrelevant skills. Useless knowledge. Who’ve read the old books – or think they should have read them Or who’ve at least read some introductory books about the old books.
Who say their prayers to our vanished European gods. What did Hölderlin write about the departing gods? The great Theorists of the yore. The Master Thinkers.
Some survive – but how old are they now? In their 90s … In their 100s. Still doing the European rounds. Still conferencing.
But here in the UK? We’re the last of the kind. the last aardwolfs. The last dodos. We’re Oric-1s. We’re jigsaws with missing pieces.
Don’t they know how precious we are? The last specimens of European-philosophers-in-the-UK. Should be a Preservation Order slapped upon us.
We live on.
We haven’t been sacked. We haven’t been shot. We haven’t been poisoned to death (not yet.) No one sent assassins after us – though they probably should have. We were allowed to live on, disgracing ourselves. And the tradition!
Despoiling European philosophy and the memory of European philosophy. If anyone remembered it. And there’s no need to remember it. It never added up to anything. It didn’t amount to anything. Futile, it was all futile. What could it have been but futile?
Haven’t we been in full European mourning for European philosophy? And European philosophy does mourning very, very well. European philosophy mourned itself very decorously.
No legacy to it, European Philosophy. It won’t outlive its death. No one will remember, not over here – not in the UKs. It just sinks in the memory. Disappears into the memory-hole.
It shouldn’t have been. And it never was, not really. It never took. It never arrived. It was always useless. It never led anywhere. Too alien. Too remote. Too not-of-this-country.
It stuck in the English craw, European Philosophy. It was spat out. Ejected. It couldn’t survive here. A foreign plantation. Its roots found no sustaining earth. No nutrients in the English soul. So in the end … it blew away. Dispersed on the wind. Carried off into nowhere.
Alien. Too foreign. Too European. It couldn’t be rendered in calm English prose.
But for a while … A time …
Utopianism, in the ‘80s. Fever dreams, still in the ‘90s. And in hand with theory. Dreaming of the transformation of the English thought-scape. That something would sprout from European neologisms. From showboating European prose.
That they could only paraphrase weakly. That we could only imitate. They weren’t equipped to do it. Just as we aren’t … and we’re much less equipped.
The last communists, the last psychoanalysts, the last Freudians, the last people who think psychoanalysis has anything to say. The last hermeneuts. The last … deconstructionists. The last Deleuzians. The last readers of Lyotard and Guattari and Negri.
The last revolutionaries. The last critical theorists. The last Habermasians, God knows. The last Levinasian ethicists. The last readers of the Jewish modernists.
Work in Progress 