They foresaw how we’d transformed it, their thought. Simplify it. In our desire for clarity! In the introductions we wrote. A book is nothing but an explanatory plaque. And such thought didn’t want to be explained! Didn’t want to be translated!
They foresaw who their interpreters would be. The ones who would exhume the European corpse. Who would be busy practising their Anglo forensics on the continental cadavers. Who would wheel the exhumed bodies under the Anglo lights. For dissection. For transplant.
We woke it up early, European thought. We brought it blinking into the Anglo morning light. We led it by the hand into the Anglo clearing. Where all dreams were banished. Where all its yearnings vanished. All its literary shadows. Its rhetoric.
European thought, with its literariness. With its allusions. With its styles. Flattened out. Laid bare. Endnoted. Explained. Explicated …
Everything turned to the merciless Anglo light. Everything made wincingly understandable.
When Adorno write about damaged life. When Heidegger wrote about die Technik. When Ellul wrote about technique. They were thinking of us. Of our kind. Of what was going to happen to their thought, at the hands of Anglo types. Types who hated them and types who loved them: it amounted to the same. Europeanphobes and Europephiles: no different. We were part of the pincer movement. Lovers or haters, it didn’t matter.
The Anglo world would bring its light – its terrible light. The Anglo world would bring its demand for clarity. Its desire for exposure. Daylight is the best disinfectant, and so on … But daylight is inimical to thought.
The Anglo world with its idiot’s guides, its introductory guides, its attempt to work out what was useable in the philosophers of old Europe.
We simply did our Anglo damage. We simply swung our Anglo sword.
And European thought retreated. Continental thought became more hermetic. European philosophy buried itself – because it had to. Because thought across the Channel wanted to survive. European thought burrowed away from us, into the darkness.
Which made us love it more! Which made us seek it more! Because it had what we lacked: darkness. Because we wanted to flee after it – out of the Anglo world. Away from the Anglo light.
Why did we want to bring European thought to the light? Why, to hunt it down – to invade its burrow? To demand that it hide us from the light. To ask that it protect us, from the Anglo light, and even our Anglo light?
~
What did we seek from it, continental thought? That it close our eyes. Lay us down. Let us rest in the darkness – in its darkness.
Why demand that it do all those things for us? That it fulfil all our secret desires? Because we wanted to die to the Anglo light. Because we wanted to plunge into the European abyss.
Didn’t we want the cool earth surrounding us? Didn’t we want to lay down our heads underground? Didn’t we want to lie in the tomb, and to be dead with it, European philosophy? To lie in its coffin?
We’re infecting European philosophy – we, ourselves. We’re poisoning it. We’re contagious – don’t we understand that? We’re damaging a delicate environment. A sensitive ecosystem. We’re destroying it. We’re stomping all over it.
What we’ve done to continental thought! It’s like uncontacted tribes being wiped out by common illnesses.
We bear the Anglo disease. Of which old Europe is dying. We’re killing it. Even though we mean well. Even though we only want to do good by it, European thought. Even though we want to honour it, European thought. We can only destroy it. We can only devastate its environment, continental thinking. Tear away delicate filaments of thought. Its ecosystem.
What we’ve done to Difference and Repetition. To the Visible and the Invisible. Tearing butterfly’s wings. Just by reading them. Just by reading them in translation. With the terrible anglophone demand for clarity.
Less light! Less light! That’s what Goethe should have said on his deathbed.
Supposedly fussless writing. Supposedly clear writing. Unadorned.
Getting-to-the-point writing. Saying-it-all-without-persiflage writing. Prose without detail. Without ornament. Without personality. Without flair. Robot prose. Analytic philosophy prose.
Work in Progress 