(My story. My primal scene.
Livia knew about my literaro-philosophical escape capsule. She knew what I was hoping for. She knew my bust-out plan. My tunnel out of philosophy. She knew all about my philosophico-literary opus.
I had failed philosophically – of course I had. Anyone could see that I had failed – and would never do anything other than fail. But I was going to convert my failure. Change its meaning, my failure.
Because I was going to write it up, my philosophical failure. I was going to make literature out of all my philosophical failures!
Which meant I had never really been committed to philosophy – not really. Hadn’t I always been merely watching myself so-called philosophise? Wasn’t it always a matter of observing my failure to philosophise from a distance. And from a literary distance!
Because I’d taken out literary insurance against philosophical failure. Because I had my literary side-hustle, which was also a literary sidestep. I thought I’d found a literary loophole. A literary get-out clause. Something to escape my failed UK European philosopher destiny.
I was going to write the last will and testament of UK European philosophy, Livia says. UK European philosophy’s last gasp. UK European philosopher’s last fumblings in the dark. Its last attempts to pin the tail on the philosophical donkey …
Literature: that’s where my dreams of genius went. Literary writing: that’s where I stowed it, unlike my peers who only ever had philosophical dreams.
A genius of non-philosophical-genius: that’s what I wanted to be. A literary writer who could make good on his non philosophical genius. Very cunning. A genius-move all by itself.
Of course, the potential flaw in the plan was obvious: for wasn’t writing literature just as hard as writing philosophy, if not harder? Wasn’t it the case that the European literature-meisters I admired, that they were as much geniuses as the European philosophy-meisters I revered- if not more so?
Did I really think I was going to be a Blanchot 2.0? Livia asked. That I was going to be a new Hélène Cixous? Was I going to rise to the rank of a Marina Tsvetayeva? Of a Marguerite Duras? Did I really think I had the literary chops? The delicacy of literary register? The profound relationship to the language of literature? To the European greats? Who was I to try to make his literary mark after the massif of world modernist literature?
But I had an answer to that, too, Livia knew. I thought of myself as writing in a post-literary time. I conceived myself as writing at a time after literature – when all the prestige of literature had evaporated; when you couldn’t do that high-falutin’ stuff anymore. You couldn’t write in a high literary register, not anymore – not if you didn’t want to live in bad faith.
The time of literature had passed! The time of the possibility of writing literary fiction had receded. The ultimate excuse: these aren’t literary times, so I can’t be a literary genius.
The only way to carry great European literature forward was by eschewing everything that was European in literature. By writing Britishly. By keeping a British distance from the European fire from heaven. Which is to say, a farcical distance! A bumbling distance! The distance of an idiot, and a British idiot.
The literature (non-literature) true to our times was a farcical literature. A literature after the literary fall, the cultural collapse.
And didn’t I even dream of combining my non-literature with my non-philosophy? Didn’t I dream of writing my failed literature about my failed philosophy? My attempt to become a UK European philosophy was just as farcical as my attempt to become a UK European literary writer. And what’s more, it redoubled the farce. It multiplied the farce. It drove the farce to infinity.
No one ever accepts that they’re an idiot, Livia said. No one ever calls themselves an idiot and means it. They think they’re smart enough to know their so-called idiocy. As though they could outwit it – as though they might master it, by calling it idiocy; and by that they are thereby most assuredly not idiots. And that’s what my literaro-philosophy was for me, she said: my method of mastery. Which was a method of denial!
I called it idiocy. I called it a farce. As though you could intentionally create a work of idiocy! As though creating a farce was something you aimed at, rather than happened through failure.
The hubris! Did I really think I could outwit stupidity itself? That I’d made a move that changed the literary game – and the philosophical game?
My role was only to complete it, my idiocy. To fulfil it. To set the seal upon my idiocy by writing the book that could only be the book of my idiocy – and of idiocy in general. By writing the book of the Mercia Philosophy Department and its idiocy.
And wasn’t that Livia’s project: to write a book of idiocy? Wasn’t what she saw in me at that British Society for Continental Thought, all those years ago: my potential to find a form for Livia’s Idiotbuch?
My idiot’s cry. My dunce’s howl. My one-man protest against my British philistinism. My British provincialness, despite my second-generation Indianness. And my utterly inability to escape that philistinism – that provincialness!
Only once the idiotbuch is complete will the lightning strike, Livia said. Only when it’s finally done, will the world be shown as what it is. By the lightning’s light! By the lightning flash!
Livia used to quiz me about it: the origins of my literaro-philosophical writing. My philosophico-literary writing.
She used to make me tell it to her again: how I began my philosophico-literary writing in my Hertfordshire University years. As I commuted between campuses of Hertfordshire years. Between the Aldenham campus, the St Albans campus, the Hatfield campus. As I commuted to and from Watford, where I had my bedsit. Where I scraped by on my part-time wage, an itinerant hourly-paid philosophy lecturer on the Hertfordshire plain.
Listening to Penderecki on the extra-slow bus between the campuses of Hertfordshire University. Reading Mandelstam on the stopping-everywhere bus. Listening to Ligotti, on the requiring-infinite-patience bus. Reading Hélène Cixous on the stuck-in-various-traffic-jams bus.
And working in a department actually hostile to European philosophy, at Hertfordshire University. That papered its walls with articles warning about the perils of European philosophy. Of the charlatanry of European philosophy! Claiming that Deleuze was a fraud! That Derrida was an impostor! There were pinned up photocopies of accounts of Heidegger’s Nazism! Of Paul de Man’s fascist journalism! Of reviews of Intellectual Impostures! Of Fashionable Nonsense!
And there I was, reading Edmund Jabes behind enemy lines. There I was, in my Watford bunker, reading Friedrich Hölderlin in the cold and the damp. There I was, reading Hélène Cixous and Maurice Blanchot – reading books that veritably flaunted their philosophico-literariness, their literaro-philosophicalness, in my Watford bedsit.
There I was, dreaming that writing my literaro-philosophico project might just be possible, might just squeeze through as the last literary gasp, the last philosophical gasp before UK European philosophy shuts down entirely.
But I’d made a mistake. I was still trying to imitate their high seriousness, the European literary authors, the European philosophical authors I admired. I still thought I could write a UK version of high European philosophico-literary prose.
I still hadn’t failed, fundamentally. I still wasn’t howling from the depths of disaster. I hadn’t understood by Britishness – even my British-Indianness – stood in the way of my essentially European ambitions.
Humour: that’s what I had yet discovered. Laughter in prose, not just in life – at myself. And at my laughter. Abyssal laughter, that falls into itself. That laughs at itself laughing.
And I didn’t know the horror yet. The poison – the lie: I hadn’t experienced them. They hadn’t driven down deeply enough inside me.
It hadn’t happened yet, the disaster. It hadn’t burst into my world. It hadn’t reached my bloodstream. Crossed my blood-brain barrier.
The state of exception. The tyranny. The great Violation. The Atrocity The great Obliteration. That would break my life in two. That would reveal the Real Forces. Show the Whole. Reveal what was coming. What they had planned for us. That was to come. That’s what would show itself in my paper at the Society for Continental Philosophy annual conference. That’s what would roar out of them then, with only Livia knowing what it meant.)
Work in Progress 