Author: Lars Iyer

We have to hate ourselves as natural, I say. Feeling revulsion of ourselves as part of nature: that’s all that can justify us.

Why can’t we accept we’re just being fooled … by our own bodies? I ask. That we’re liars? That we’ve been lying all our lives? That our lives are lies?

Biology’s fooled us, I say. We’re … gene-perpetuation making machines, that’s all. That’s what it’s all about. God … It’s humiliating. And we invented God and Meaning so we wouldn’t feel so humiliated …

We’re apes realising that they’re apes, I say. The disgusting discovering that we’re disgusting. That we’re fucked in the head. That we never had a chance. That we were always fooled. That we fooled ourselves. Our hormonal systems … our endocrinal systems … every bone in their bodies – and our bodies themselves. Every cell, craving … what? … to make more of itself …

Nature’s humiliated us, I say. Nature’s a joke – a cosmic joke. Something that went unchecked. That was allowed to be. To sprawl. To take over a planet. And then … become self-conscious enough to know its own disgustingness. To know itself as joke in us. To see it in the mirror – in us. As sheer, laughing futility – in us. As endless laughter at itself – in us.

It’s disgusted with itself – the entire universe, I say. It feels horror at itself – the deepest horror. Which is totally at one with our self-disgust. Our instinctive horror at everything.

We’re, like, the universe soiling itself – as it wants to soil itself, I say.

And it’s going faster, our decline, I say. It’s increasing. This acceleration into nowhere. It’s becoming more complex. We’re making more of a mess.

There’s no end to this experiment, I say. No limit. The experiment experiments. Blindly. For no purpose. Without reason. Just because … there’s nothing better to do, in a universe that just lies. That just mocks itself. For, like, an audience of NO ONE. For empty skies. For the absent fucking divinity. For the great NOTHING. The great FUCK ALL. The great GO FUCK YOURSELVES.

Mockery, echoing out into NOWHERE. In which we laugh at ourselves laughing at ourselves and so on …

And all we want is an end to this, I say. An end to … being fooled. Just some great full stop. The fucking apocalypse. Just to set a limit.

It needs to be rounded off, I say. It needs to be completed. A stop to the spasming. To the screaming and the laughing and the noise.

Silence – wouldn’t that be perfect? I ask. Responding to the silence that is the universe. Echoing the great silence, the great darkness. Echoing the NOTHING. Why does there have to be MORE? I ask. More mockery. More farce. I can’t believe the world’s still bothering to exist. It’s all past its self-by date. All of it. And everything. All of this. It’s missed the perfect moment to … end. I mean the way it all continues is just so … tasteless.

Telling ghost stories in the dark. Stories of the old departments, the vanishing departments. In the days of wine and roses. Before shit got serious.

Stories of who we once were. Of where we did our PhDs. Stories of our supervisions. Of our dissertations. The conferences where we delivered our first papers. Our maiden voyages.

Our kind. Our gang. Hanging out on the conference lawns. Doing cartwheels. Dressed down. In shorts. In band teeshirts. Knowing no better. Alongside others of our kind. Other pranksters, other rogues and rascals; other bad boys and girls who’d somehow blagged their way in. Who’d somehow found themselves among the serious academics.

The academic world had opened, for a while. Academia opened its doors. All sorts were there. What a company! What a crew! People like us. Delinquents and miscreants. Chancers, pretenders. Who weren’t exactly the tallest flowers. Who weren’t the choicest cuts. Who were no one’s first pick for any philosophical team.

But we were there nonetheless, we PhD students. There at the annual conferences. On Oxford lawns. In Oxford colleges. Wandering Oxford rivers. Taking Oxford walks. Drinking in Oxford pubs – us! How was that possible?

Our kind, the doomed kind, the clueless kind, fruit of mass Higher Education. Fruit of the crappiest universities (the only ones where European philosophy could be taught.) Fruit of the working class!  

Our salad days! Halcyon days! When we were funded to attend conferences. When there were such things as conference bursaries. As subsidised accommodation. When we were out among them, the serious academics.

Did we remind them of their own youths back then, in those conference summers? Ah, but they were more diligent than us. They worked harder than we did. They were from higher social classes. With a better class of education. With conscientiousness! More ability to defer gratification!

Did they envy it our levity, our casualness, the way we lacked all need to impress? Ah, but they couldn’t understand it. And really, they never ventured amongst us, except when it was late, and they were drunk and looking for someone to fuck (and it’s true: some of us were fuckable.)

The joy of our academic lives. The sheer improbability of our academic lives. Of moving through the ranks of UK European philosophers. It was a culture – a world. Where were the anthropologists to remember its codes? Where are the memoirists? When will it appear in literature, in film? Will it really be forgotten? Buried in the memory?

Remembering the real European philosophers came amongst us. Hans-Georg Gadamer in his nineties, going from postgraduate table to table at conferences, telling Heidegger stories. With such modesty!

Paul Ricoeur, billed in the local papers as the cleverest man in the world, addressing a small group of us at Staffordshire university. Chantal Mouffe, at Bolton Institute. Frederick Worms, on his return visits to Dundee University. Dominique Janicaud, at Manchester All Saints.

We saw them! We heard them. True, we barely understood a word, but there they were: a dose of the continent …

The conferences of yore! At Greenwich, the old Naval campus, in the Italianate squares. At Dundee, which always extended the most magnificent of welcomes.

Conference days, conference nights. There were philosophy-offs. Philosophy duels! Subtle Machiavellian manoeuverings! General jockeying for power (for what little power!) Betrayals! Backstabbing. Rats-in-a-sack politicking.

But we were oblivious to all that, in our PhD days. Larking about! Late night drinking. All-the-way-to-morning drinking. In someone’s room. Chasing the party. Going to where the fun was.

We made up the numbers. We were part of the crowd. Conference extras, not understanding a word. By turns baffled, puzzled, bored. Wandering what everyone else was getting out of it. Doodling on our pads, or just staring into the air.

That was before our part-time years. before we finished our PhDs. Ran out of scholarships. Before we were cast out into the outer darkness.

It was before we knew we had to make an impression. Stick up our hands. Ask clever questions. Network. Sit next to the right people at conference dinners. Before we signally failed at all those things! Before we knew the futility of all those things for our kind, for the idiot kind …

Livia, the last scion of old Europe. The last in the line of Mitteleuropa.


We drank too quickly, like all the British, Livia said. We drank too quickly, and then passed out. Whereas she – she drank slowly. She paced herself. Savoured her drinking. Savoured the night.

She was ready to drink the whole night through. To drink all the way until daytime.

And we were already asleep – comatose – wrecked. We were already snoring where we sat.


Binge life. Her manic energy. Her glee. Only too much was enough.


She didn’t want to hold forth – she wanted us to hold forth. She didn’t want to be centre of the conversation – she wanted us to speak.

Livia wanted our conversation around her, very lively. She wanted to bathe in our banter, she said. She wanted irreverence. Taking the piss – above all taking the piss.


Did she ever write down her thoughts, Livia? Was she at work on a memoir of a communist youth? Of escaping to England in a haycart?

What’s the opposite of kairos – the opportune moment?

Never knowing the right time to strike. Never horizon scanning. Never keeping up. Never clued in. Clued up! Never with it. Never up on what’s happening. Never keeping a weather eye open. Never tracking trends. Never looking out.

Philosophy: that word, postgraduates! That terrible word! That wonderful word!

What’s wrong with us? What fever have we caught? What European fever? What alien contagion? What’s reached us from across the channel?


We’re acolytes. Fanatics. Cult members. We’re an Alexei German film. Confused! Multiple! Plotless! Muddy! Full of grotesque gurning! A fever dream! A torrent! A streaming, without beginning of end.

We’re a sixteen legged philosophy machine, postgraduates. We’re like the werewolves in Twilight: telepathically connected. We’re our sole company. Our sole friends, our sole enemies. There was Livia, for a while. There was even Herwig, but not for long.

We’re a thought gang. A philosophy collective. There’s barely a cigarette paper between us.


We’ve mind melded. Thought melded. Except for Helmut. And Fiver, probably. And Gazelle is too clever for us all.


We sound the same. We speak the same. We think the same.

Sure, Io’s Christian – but she’s punk Christian, which is virtually gnostic. Sure, Driss is wired to the conspiratorial theory moon, but he hates the world as much as the best of us. Sure, Sophia’s always a little behind – Livia probably named her ironically, but she gave us all ironic names. Sure, Shiva’s some euro-Indian nutcase. And Furio’s all attitude. And Fiver’s a genuine mystic. But none of us wants simply to be themselves.

Everything becomes mulch in the end. It’s all heading to the mulch-death of the universe. Everything heading mulchwards. These ruins are just the beginning.  

Yeah, but everything began with mulch, too. This is just a resurgence. Mulch is the stuff from which everything comes. That God ordered in the Creation.


This is deep mulch. It’s doing to take over the world. It’s spreading, like some giant yeast infection. Like a bad case of athlete’s foot. It looks like it should itch.


Is this mulch alive? is it conscious? Is it self aware? I hope not. It would just be disgusted.


We’re essentially mulch heads. Having mulch thoughts in the dark.

The humanities must study the ruin of the humanities. The humanities must study the conditions of their ruination. They should be solely focused on that.


Should be doomed humanities studies. The humanities eschaton studies. Should be research centres dedicated to the gnostic humanities.


The humanities kill box: that’s what the Organisational Management campus is.


Will there be a humanities left to think the cull of the humanities?

A UK European philosophical martyrdom. The scouring of the philosophical shires.


Perhaps they deserved their worshippers, these strange European gods. Perhaps that was the due punishment for their obscurities. Their murkiness. Their thickets of prose.


We obscurantist-apologists. We Pythia of the continental oracles. We high priests of the European Mysteries. We front-people of the Cult.


The continental philosophy pond is drying up.

We have to kill the analytic philosopher inside each of us. The analytic philosophers we cannot help but be.


Oxford and Cambridge are just analytic philosophy bot farms.


The analytic philosophy robot hordes. Technocrats of thought, doing their programmed thing. Doing their Skynet thing.


Philosophy’s a war for our souls. It always has been. An attempt to beat back the analytic philosopher inside us. Our inner logicians, our inner literalists.


Slay our inner analytic philosopher. Die to it, analytic philosophy. Give ourselves over to full Europeanness.


The banality of the analytic philosophy world. They’re cultureless, these people. They’ve watched nothing. They’ve read nothing. Seen nothing. And they don’t think they should.


They’re faux scientists, the analytic philosophers. But really boning kind of scientists. Consensus types. Scientific drones.


Analytic philosophy doesn’t know what waits for it in the darkness. It’s not afraid – but it should be. It doesn’t know that the Leviathan is waiting. All the chaos monsters. It doesn’t know what will swallow it, and swallow the world.