Have you ever seen the nakedness of the void, postgraduates? Could you bear to see it? Only at a certain point. When you’re ready for it. And perhaps you’ll never be.
You won’t know it unless you work part-time. Until you know full precarity. Only then. Because the part-timer works beneath the void. Beneath the empty sky.
Only the part timer can see it: the void. The part-time European philosopher. The part-time idiot European philosopher. With no prospects!
Follow their example, postgraduates. Start the equivalent of an underground church. Of an apocalyptic cell.
It’s a matter of ascesis. Of some deliberate discipline. Of discovering a way of life, and philosophy as a way of life.
Don’t do what we did. Don’t compromise. Don’t think you’re condemned to a life like ours.
Refuse the world, postgraduates. Scavenge. Glean. Live in the margins. Reinvent what it means to live.
Find postgraduate Narnia! Postgraduate Neverland! Find the forest at the back of the wardrobe. Proceed second to the right, and straight on till morning.
Be like the lost boys and girls. Be lost postgraduates, living in the Home Under the Ground.
Alas postgraduate Neverland is closed to us. And we’re too old to enter postgraduate Narnia. Too old! Too corrupt! Too tainted with the world! And with all the things we’ve had to do to survive in the world!
We need some of your postgraduate fairydust. Sprinkle a little upon us. We need to believe in you, postgraduates. To light the fire of our belief from the fire of yours. To sing out Little Drummer Boy and its cousin-songs …
You safeguard study, we who have forgotten what it is to study, postgraduates. You hold onto time – to study time, time without end, without goal.
Dig out your warren, postgraduates. Surround yourself with the earth. Hibernate here, if you needed to. Vegetate in the darkness.
Build dens, postgraduates. Go down. Stay down. Be unnoticeable. Undetectable.
Keep your heads beneath the parapet. Hide when the tourists walk through the Victoria tunnel. Build a whole civilisation down here. An anti-civilization …
Become new kinds of cenobite. In a new kind of desert.
You’ll barely remember us. You’ll tell fantastic stories to each other. Forget the old life. The worldly life.
There’s to be no finishing anything, postgraduates. Only suspension. Only pause.
Becalmed: that’s what you’ll ee. Adrift. On the high seas! Spacewalking. Drifting through the heavens.
Potentiality – that’s what you’ll have. But unrealised potential. Never to be translated into action. Never to become anything.
Perpetually larval: that’s what you’ll be. Perpetual nymphs. Always changing, like wax in a lava-lamp.
If we keep you safe, we keep something of ourselves safe, too. Our hopes and dreams – isn’t that it? The dreams of a new kind of human being. Homo ludens, not homo faber. No work, but life. No praxis. Not an actor, but a player.
We are pilgrims in this world: haven’t you taught us that, postgraduates? We’re strangers in this world. Migrants. In perpetual peregrination.
You don’t have to be awake anymore, postgraduates. Sleeping philosophers: that’s what you’ll become. Dreaming philosophers. Who’ve given into sleep. Who aren’t like us, all awake, all vigilant, all ardency, n the perpetual emergency …
Sleep for us, postgraduates! Dream for us! Sink into the earth! The dreaming earth!
An underground International: that’s what we’re dreaming of. On your behalf! Exile in the desert of the earth! Finding the least evil place in the world, and hiding yourself there.
Work in Progress 