Continental thought wasn’t surprised by us, by the likes of us. European thought foresaw our kind, its busy interpreters. Its maniac introducers. Its fun-mirror contextualisers.
The great Europeans knew their fate. They foresaw the Anglo threat, the Anglo disaster. They didn’t want their Anglo resurrection. They didn’t want to reborn in introductory books. In idiot’s guides to this or that. In reader’s guide to everything under the sun. In handbooks to whatever. In encyclopaedia entries. None of them want our secondary commentary.
Just bury us deeper, they said. Hide our remains. Our leftovers. Our corpses! Out of the reach of the Anglophone scavengers. Of the Anglo burrowers. They didn’t want to be feasted upon by Anglophone jackals.
Anything but Anglo enthusiasts! they said. Anything but Anglophone Schwärmerei! Anything but Anglophone fanboys and girls!
Couldn’t they just be left alone, the European thinkers? Couldn’t they be left to rot in peace? Why this undignified scrabbling?
They didn’t want to be reanimated onto Anglophone bookshelves. Crappily cloned. Smudgily Xeroxed.
They didn’t want to be applied to this or that. Transplanted hither and yon. They didn’t seek to serve Anglophone so-called problems.
The European thinkers are only fleeing from the light. Only burrowing more deeply into the darkness. Only vanishing.
Which is probably why they wrote so obscurely: it was to protect their thought. It was the hide from the likes of us, whose coming they foresaw. Who they knew would come.
They wrote to preserve an esoteric core. A hidden truth. Their sentences guarded a secret. Something our commentaries could never reach. Something inviolable. Something sacrosanct. It was deliberately hermetic.
They were burying their thought in their work, the great continental thinkers. Making it idiot proof. They knew that their was no underestimating Anglophone stupidity. Anglophone depthlessness. Anglophone missing-the-point.
Work in Progress 