Remembering our first lectures.
At long last! After so many years of service teaching! Of seminar teaching for full-time lecturers. Of the paid-by-the-hour slog.
After so many years of holding ourselves back. Our years of never being allowed to speak, and now being allowed to speak. Our sense of never having had the floor, and now having the floor.
Let off the leash. Unmanacled. Muzzles taken off – now what? What were we going to say?
What would happen when the subaltern spoke? When our kind found ourselves at the lectern? When the differend was suspended? When we had people to listen? An audience! For the first time!
What would happen when we were let loose in a Russell group university? With Russell Group students! Who actually showed basic literacy. Who could sit at a desk.
We were being trusted with the students of the wealthy. We were being let loose …
What could we do? What would we do with our freedom?
*
Surfacing. Coming up from our years of obscurity. Stepping into daylight after years in the darkness. Stepping up to the podium.
To be listened to. To be heard. Isn’t this always what we wanted? To put our view of things across. To do it better than the lecturers we’d seen over the years. Than all the full-timers we’d provided seminars for!
Our chance at last: to be in charge of a room of students. To guide them, a room of students. To left them up and lead them forward, a room of students.
*
We were raw at first. Sometimes, words strained. Sometimes, voices trembling. Sometimes, drops in volume … Whispers … The students had to lean in … Students were all but confidants …
But build, at other times. Break out. Crescendos. Great peaks …
Sudden … accelerations. Decelerations.
Were the students moved? Were the students stirred?
*
Following our own notes at first. Following our own slides. And then? Putting aside our notes. Turning off our slides. Extemporising. Letting words come.
Openings out. Widenings. Our words, reaching the Open. Our words, sun-touched. Sun-dazzled. Light breaking across them.
A shimmering across the surface of our words. Like light on water.
We said the words and the light came. The light dazzled. The light sparkled …
That we’d reached an open grove of speech. That what we were saying was an opening. A widening. That we’d reached the sky. That we stood before the sky.
A moment of grace … A reprieve in speech … That’s where our lecturing led. To … blessed moments. To happiness in speech. To small utopias, where speech wandered into truth. Into illumination. Where we let speech receive light from above.
Calm, in our teaching. In spoken simplicity. Without technical terms. Without terms of the art. Without jargon. A calmness – of which we were incapable in any other sphere of life. A limpidity. Where we simply laid everything out …
*
And we had the common touch.
We didn’t close our eyes and pretend we were at Oxford, like the full-timers we’d seen. We didn’t speak to our students as though they were scholar-princes-and-princesses of yore.
We took questions. We listened. We read the room. Took the temperature – the spiritual temperature.
None of this was to be over their heads. None of this was to be as if to no one, to the open air, to ghosts of the academic past. We were addressing them and only them. They were the audience we wanted to reach.
Looking out at them. At their faces. Reading their eyes. Did they follow? Were they involved? Would they rather be somewhere else? Were they daydreaming? Woolgathering? Thinking about other things?
The effort to win their attention. To say something unexpected. Moving. Hilarious. Something – anything so as not to lose them. So as to warrant their focus.
Relating to them – them. Speaking to them. Making all of it real – about something real. Something vital. Something important. Making them feel it: the Seriousness. Of the topic. Of our discussion.
Making them remember this lecture. This encounter. Now. Right here …
And an urgency to our teaching. A matter of life of death. Of utmost importance. That something would have been missed if you hadn’t attended. If you haven’t been present here. Today …
To reach them. To think with them. Together. To draw them into thinking – your thinking, the class’s thinking. To think collectively. To think now, here …
*
How did we find our way to what we said? That was the question.
We didn’t know. As though we were undergoing hypnosis – or some counter-hypnosis. Like we were waking up – or falling asleep: which? Like we were lucid dreaming. Or awakening into lucidity – a greater lucidity.
We spoke … We were spoken. A kind of ventriloquy. A kind of thrown voice. But from where was it thrown? Whose voice was it? European philosophy’s? European philosophy, speaking through us?
Why did it fall to us, European philosophy? Why were we the ones to receive it? To let it speak through us?
Because we were truly of our times. Because we were most truly of our times. Because we knew the world’s dereliction, and philosophy’s dereliction in the world.
Because we knew its marooning, European philosophy. The way it wandered without itself, in our country. Without its memories.
European philosophy, amnesiac. European philosophy, stranded. Lost in a strange land.
And it fell to us to teach it, European philosophy. To us! Because we were likewise marooned. Because we likewise wandered without ourselves – what we could have been, who we would have been, had we received a proper education.
Our words, the last words of European thought. Its last testimony. Our lecturing: the last message of Continental thought. In its final hour, philosophy could signal its predicament. Send its SOS through us. Because of us. Because we were the ones to whom it had fallen to speak.
Wasn’t that what Cicero was waiting for? To receive a message from European philosophy – a last message? To hear European philosophy’s last words. It’s last will and testament in the lectures of delinquents in a provincial philosophy department? Didn’t she want to hear philosophy’s cry as experienced its obsolescence. Its banishment? As it knew the European dream was over.
Because what had happened here – in the UK – was happening on the continent, too. Because Anglophone nihilism was spreading like cancer on the European soil. Anglophone philosophy, which meant analytic philosophy, which Cicero held in absolute contempt.
Work in Progress 