Newcastle Philosophy: this is where European philosophy has beached itself. Had flopped ashore. There it was: the great whale, lying there. Regarding us, with its great European eye. Flapping its useless European fins.
We need to weaponize our euro-angst. Beam it up to Mother. Upload it, like they uploaded that computer virus in Independence Day. Destroy the whole thing.
We need to fight back.
We need to summon all the European pathos. The ur-moods. The euro-gloom. The stuff you find in ponderous arthouse films.
Let Mother contemplate it. Let her take it in.
We need to summon up our misery. And the terroir of our misery. The old Europe of our dreams.
The European water’s poisoned, Cicero always said. There’s nothing to draw up from the European well.
There’s only rotting now. Only putrefaction. Only the mulch of the long dead. Only the great European compost heap, with its useless books, that no one reads anymore.
Eastern Europe is no longer the treasury of doom, Cicero said. They’re no longer net doom exporters.
The UK will have to produce its own doom.
No one makes ponderous arthouse films anymore, Cicero said. Nothing interesting is growing from the Eastern European soil. Let alone the western European soil.
Our imitation European drunkenness. Our ersatz European angst.
Europe’s last gasp. Europe’s last message.
Not an S.O.S. – what? Europe’s last … what? Plea? Prayer?
Were we French in a previous life? Were we German? What attracted us to European things?
Our European idiocy. The European flavour to our idiocy. We speak from our idiocy in a European way.
Our angst is European angst. Our twistedness is a European twistedness. It’s as though we’d been given European hearts. As though we’d had a European faecal transplant.
What has Europe become in us? What has European philosophy become? What unexpected flowering had happened at its very end? In its final hour?
The last light from Europe. A last European refulgence.
Europe has been poisoned, too. And the only philosophy must be a philosophy of poison. A philosophy that has grown from poison, and lets poison philosophise.
A diminished philosophy. A stunted philosophy. But an honest philosophy because it dwelt on its condition. Or issued from its conditions.
The lights of Europe are going out.
There’s thunder in the European mountains.
We weep European tears, in our European idiocy.
Our European souls are crying.
Work in Progress 