Anti-Libation

Splashing wine onto concrete.

What are you doing?

It’s an anti-libation. The opposite of a blessing. I’m cursing the campus with Cicero’s disgusting wine …

I thought we were supposed to drink the wine in memory of Cicero, or whatever. Of what she promised us.

What did she promise us?

Some kind of meaning. Some … transcendence. Something messianic. That we were supposed to bring about. Which had to be reached through nihilism. Though some deep experience of meaninglessness. Or disgustingness, in the case of this wine.

European disgustingness – that’s what she wanted us to taste. From the European earth. The European terroir, soaked with blood.  Probably radioactive. Sprouting terrible fascisms and communisms … All that craziness. All those ideologies.

We had sober philosophers over here. Sensible ones. Who were never caried away by European unreason. By insane European ideologies. Our island kept us distant – which means, kept us safe. We were good liberals – never prey to all their -isms.

They had Bataille, but we had Ayer. They had Heidegger, but we had Russell. They had Adorno, but we had Strawson. And when a continentalist did make it over here – Wittgenstein, Berlin – they sobered up, too. They became sensible in turn.

 Cicero wanted us to imbibe the real conditions of thought – of European thought, I say. All the mad stuff. The crazy stuff. Wine drunk by Hegel. By the young Marx. By the existentialists, in Parisian cafes. Wine drunk by Adorno and Horkheimer. Wine in the blood of Georges Bataille, dancing nose to nose with Jean-Paul Sartre. The opposite of everything we grew up with …

But Cicero’s wine’s disgusting.

Cicero wanted us to disgust us with the real conditions of thought. Wine that we wanted to spit out! To retch up! Wine from over there – on the philosophical mainland. That could only be undrinkable in our island smugness. That could only make us want to vomit it up with our self-satisfaction.

Yeah, but we actually like European philosophy. We teach that philosophy.

But we don’t understand its conditions – not yet. We have to go deeper. There’s an anguish we have to know. And that anguish is in this wine. Until it tastes like the sweetest nectar, we have to drink more.