We want to turn study into something. We can’t just let study be study. We want study to be transformed …
It’s like the ancient Greeks. All those ancient schools of philosophy. Where it wasn’t about university, or a degree, but a way of living. That’s what Hadot called philosophy as a way of life. The ultimate test of philosophical study was how it changed you. How it became a way of living.
A way of living against.
Sure, that was the Gnostic thing. Actually, Gnosticism comes later. It wasn’t a Greek thing. It was a Jewish thing. It arose out of apocalyptic disappointment. When the messiah didn’t come to wrap up the whole wicked world. When the End didn’t arrive, they wanted to know why. When the messiah didn’t show up, there had to be a reason. So people started to live against the world. It’s in Paul.
What do you know about Paul? Or Judaism? Or anything?
Livia told me. Livia instructed me. Gnosticism is the matrix of all revolutions. All ways of overturning the world.
It’s in Scholem. And Taubes.
Those guys.
Yeah, those guys.
And when our apocalypse doesn’t come …
Then what?
We live against it all. We live against. We live contra. We live opposite. We invert the inverted world. We flip the fucking flipped.
But don’t Gnostics believe in an alien God?
I don’t think you have to believe in that. That’s optional. It’s the against the world stuff that matters.
Yeah, but the real Gnostics believed in the demi-urge, didn’t they? They believed that his world was ruled by the demi-urge, and there was some other god …
The true God and the fake God. God and the devil, basically. God and Satan. God and Lucifer … So Satan’s in charge of this world and the real God’s, like, faraway. Sounds just like Christianity.
This is too insane. God, I feel like I’m in some cult. There’s too much madness here. We’ve sent each other mad, eight? We’re a fucking cult.
You’re leaving? Where are you going to go?
Work in Progress 