The Opposite of Posterity

You have to neglect everything to find it. A vocation that doesn’t call upon you.


It’s not even important. It’s not even significant. It doesn’t even matter.

To be true to it is to forget it. To serve it is not to serve it – to pay it no heed. To ignore it as it ignores us. To forget it as it forgets us. To leave it in oblivion, even as it is oblivious to us.

It doesn’t matter – and nor do we.


The night that doesn’t matter. The night in which nothing matters. Not even us – especially us.

The night that neglects us. Forgets us. Buries us in is forgetting, so unimportant are we to it.


What’s the opposite of posterity?


Aren’t we perfectly prepared for oblivion? Haven’t we wanted nothing but oblivion – from the start?

For our names not to be known; not to be remembered.

Never wanting to leave a mark, knowing that our mark would defile everything. That it would only vandalise it all.

Never wanting any signs of our presence to remain. Never wanting to spread our contagion.

We only wanted to be kept in a kind of infinite quarantine. Hidden. Buried in it. Lost in it. Never surfacing.

We wanted only to be buried in the landslide. The great slump of the earth. Falling over us. Choking us.


Let us not disturb anything. For our breath never to fill the air.


We’re defilers. Spoilers. We’re polluters. Spreaders of disease. They should just throw us in the plague pit. In the mass grave. We don’t deserve our own gravestones.


Some sublime Punishment. Some blow from the sky. To extinguish us. As surely as the city of Sodom. Wouldn’t that be a mercy?

A sublime death blow. An awesome Destruction. In which we wouldn’t matter. A catastrophe completely indifferent to us.


Just to be rubbed out. Erased. As mistakes. But an erasure that costs no one any trouble. That’s almost incidental. Almost unnoticed. That’s done by a kind of instinct.

A gesture, like wiping the table clean. We’ve done Wrong. We were always Wrong. But we didn’t want to cause any trouble with our wrongness. We don’t want to make work for anyone.

Just gently snuffed out. Pillows placed over our heads. Smothered. But gently. Almost incidentally.


Must we live? Who made us live? Why are we being allowed to live? What part of God’s plan is this? Are we serving God in our own way? Do we have a place after all?


Our redundancy. There’s no need for us. No place for us at the table. We busy ourselves, merely. We look as though we’re working. That’s our task, our lives: pretending to be doing something. And keeping a place for others to come. Warming the seat.

For what? For who? For those better than us. For the real lecturers to come. For the real thinkers.


We’re merely warming their seats. Merely preparing things for them. Those who will take our place – without even noticing us. Without even knowing that they did so.

They won’t even notice us. And if they didn’t, they’d forget us straightaway. They’d be busy with important things. With real things. With Doing Suff.

The immediate past of the department wouldn’t concern them. What we did or didn’t do. The effort we made or the effort we didn’t make.

None of it will be their real concern, our replacements. They won’t know we were there. No one need remember us. No lecture rooms need to be named after us. No buildings. We won’t even retire. We’ll simply wink out – disappear.

We’ll simply be no more – out of taste. We won’t even kill ourselves – we won’t have to. Pfft – a rushing sound and we’ll be gone. No longer part of this universe. We’ll go out like the stars at the end of the universe. We’ll be snuffed out, as part of a general movement.

It won’t be just us, but others like us. All the placeholders. All those who stood and waited. Who stayed at their posts. Wanting only to be relieved of them. Wanting only not to have to burdened.

No longer having to be anyone at all. No longer getting in the way. No longer pretending to be what we’re not. No longer having to lie.

Are we doing what God wants for us? Are we fulfilling our dharma? Do we serve the right and the good? Let it be that we were serving the right and the good, even in our way. Even in our infinite humility.

Humility: we have that. We’re the lowest – and the lower than that. We’re base. We’re as humble as the desert fathers. And so we should be. It’s the one thing that’s true about us.


We’re suspicious of ourselves – infinitely so. We loathe ourselves- is that it? We’re lost in self hatred. We wander through it all day: our self hatred. All the rooms of our self hatred. All its dimensions. In its sprawl. It’s a whole world, our self hatred. It encompasses so much. There’s so much to see, to taste, to experience. Its infinite extent. It’s prolixity. Its climates.


We’re dead, really. We were never anything other than dead, that’s what we want to say. So don’t expect anything from us. We weren’t even alive. We weren’t even anything. We never emerged into the day. We were never born. We never lived. We were entirely imaginary.

Someone made us up. We were never real. A rumour, that’s all. All the things we don’t deserve. All the things we don’t want. No accolades. What is the opposite of accolade: that’s what we want. Condemnation. Exorcism, even. But that would be too much.

That would put people to too much trouble. We really don’t want to cause any fuss. We don’t want to make work for anyone. Just being ignored, then. Passed over. Forgotten. By those too generous to single us out. Who didn’t want to condemn us publicly. Who knew that there was no need for that. We didn’t need to be told off, reprimanded.

No one needed to know about us. About what we’d done. We’d already fucked up. They’d keep quiet. They knew that the ship would right itself. They wouldn’t have to intervene. That intervention wouldn’t be necessary.

Our kind … were an aberration, that’s all. We’d soon disappear. We wouldn’t be a problem. Better to overlook us entirely. To pretend we didn’t exist – that we never were. That Livia’s philosophy department never actually opened. Belonging to the very obscure history of UK continental philosophy. In an obscure appendix.

In a footnote to that appendix. In an endnote that no one ever reads. The history of the real departments: the sagas of Warwick, of Essex. The brave stories of Manchester Met, of Sussex. Of UWE. Of Dundee.

Who were we, by comparison? A footnote to a footnote. Leave us to our obscurity. Just some mad aberration. Just some lunacy in the deep provinces. Scarcely worth analysing. Thinking about. Or even noticing.


But perhaps there was a significance in our insignificance. An importance in our unimportance. It would take a Robert Walser to write of us. Not so Woolworths Bernhard.