Busy with our projects – with what we might realise, might do.
Leave us alone. Let us see what we can do. What we might write. What we can think. How clever we can be. Give us a chance …
We’re in the chrysalis – the scholarly chrysalis. We’re busy transforming. Seeing who we can be, if given the chance. Testing our potential – to see whether we really have potential.
Leave us to do our thing, to do our work, to get on with stuff. Leave us to find out who we are as thinkers. Who we could be as philosophers. As philosophical anthropologists (Sophia.) As theologians (Io.) As writers! As literaro-philosophers (me.)
We’re all tribute acts, and not just you, Helmut.
Let us imitate the European greats, and learn through imitation. Let us busy ourselves with our tribute acts to Levinas and Blanchot and the rest. Let us try to write with flair.
We can still indulge all our fantasies of being thinkers of promise. Young academics to watch.
We haven’t run up against our limits yet – not really. We don’t know who we can’t be – not yet. Not really.
We talk a lot about our idiocy, but do we really know our idiocy? Have we really experienced our idiocy?
Would we able to make the transition, post PhD? Who might we become? Would we reveal a secret genius, furled until now?
If we work hard enough. If we keep our heads down for the summer. If we keep going, day after day.
Couldn’t we will ourselves to greatness? Just us and our books. At our laptops, tip-tapping our way to greatness.
Were we late developers, after all? Would we come into ourselves? Do the foundational work for our future careers.
Intensity. Focus. We were not to be idiot professors, focusing on this and then that. On this thinker, or that one.
We were to drive ourselves through the days and nights. Find ideas to live or die for – was that it? To develop … intuitions. Thoughts. In a British context! Here – in our benighted country. Thoughts, native to our country. That arse from the benightedness …
Weren’t we looking for a politics? And what political philosophy did we want to develop?
Was it Marxism, or something? Were we left wing, after all, after all the tyranny? Should we read the rightists?
Was there anything left in Marxism? Something no one had noticed? Something no one had noticed before? What about the Frankfurt School? Is there some corner of Frankfurt School thought that no one’s done anything with? What about the Italian automonists? The operarismo types? What about the Invisible Committee? Or the Anonymous Committee, or whatever they want to call themselves? Or some other group of radicals?
Maybe we should be the radicals. Maybe we’ll be the new political thinkers.
Do we have any political-philosophical ideas? Feelings? What do we have to work with?
We’re waiting for idea. We’re looking to discover our Idea. That would be all our own. That would give our thought an individual physiognomy. That would be all about us.
The sense that we were thinking something worthwhile. That only we could think! That only someone with our particular … histories. Backgrounds. Idiocies …
That only we could think, we idiots. We stupidismos …
Work in Progress 