Author: Lars Iyer

The organisational management move. Were we recruited as part of some dastardly plant to discredit European philosophy? To make it look ridiculous? To destroy its reputation? To drag it down even further? is it part of some country-wide plot? Were we just one of the many chess pieces that had to be moved into place?

 

The organisational management move. A movement in the void, of the void. It was the void hiring us, the void bringing us in. The void that was the centre of all plans. The void desiring. Laughing. The void moving all the pieces. 

Nihilism at work. The void at work, as it’s always at work.

Driss, in a hatred-of-Organisational-Management trance. In a horror-of-Organisational Management trance.

Clicking fingers in front of his face. Wake up! Snap out of it!

Don’t be weak! Don’t give in! Don’t yield!

I can feel my brain going. Like, I want to obey. I want to go over to their side. Wouldn’t it be easy?

The void, showing itself now. The void, no longer keeping its own secret.

The void, coming to itself now. The void, wakening  to itself. The void, aware of itself, as it wasn’t before. Opening its eyes. The void, becoming conscious, in its own way.

 

The void. What does it want? To come to itself. To return to itself. Through everything in the world. Through all that exists. Through the death-drive in everything. The void-drive. The movement of void to the void. 

 

The void, speaking. The void’s words. The void’s hollowing out of words. The void resounding through words. The void, voiding. That’s all it does. Hollowing out what it can.

 

The void, flowing through the void. That’s all we see. The void, flowing to itself, returning to itself. Coming back to itself. That’s all we see.

 

The void, becoming absolute. Becoming all. Until there’s nothing but void.

The slow invasion of nothingness. The slow voiding. Is that it? Is that how it’s going to happen? A slow numbing. The poison gradually reaching all the extremities …

 

The voiding of our lives. The emptying of our lives.

That’s been going on too long. That’s been going on all our lives … That is our lives. Nothing but our lives.

 

A gradual … distancing. Like our atoms are dispersing. Into the air. Like we’re just vanishing into the air. Slowly, very slowly …

 

An unhappening. A dehappening. A hollowing out of events. A de-eventing. Until everything’s indifferent. Until nothing’s happening at all.

 

A super-nihilism. So vast. That we’re moving through like a region of space. Like an anti-nebula. Like a space where stars unform. Where everything disperses into nothing.

 

But our lives have been voided. Our lives have been emptied out.

A process of … nihilisation. A slow dissolution. Until there’s nothing left but nihilism.

 

And nothing adds up. Nothing makes anything else. Significance is … failing.

 

It’s like we’re being hypnotised by something. By some great blind eye. That watches us, without seeing us … Like we’re in some great trance.

 

A very slow vortex. Slowly turning. At the heart of everything.

Turning in our hearts. It’s turning in the world – at the heart of the world. Turning in all things.

 

Negative philosophy, like negative theology.

Voided philosophy.

 

A kind of blindness. Black, blind depths that see. That see us. And through us, like an X-ray. That see our nothingness.

 

The void, swallowing us all. The void, that’s everywhere. In all of us. Looking out of our eyes. Looking at us in the eyes of others. Looking at us from the sky – the whole blind sky. Looking down, blindly, in the sky’s blindness.

All our lives, gathered up, waiting to be offered.

Offered to what?

I don’t know – just offered up. To the cause.

To what cause?

Of embracing Futility, capital F. Our Fate, or whatever … Our Fatelessness … Our pointlessness.

 

All we can do is gather up all the futility – all these failed days – and offer it up.

Everything botched. All the blind alleys. All the mediocre stuff. We just need to offer it up. To abandon it. Not to try and make anything of it.

They needed a rest, we told our students. A holy pause. To step back from what they were, or what they might be.

Discover what you might be … or might not be, we told our students. Stay with what is undecided. Remain in that not yet. And be, thereby, eternal students. Eternally studying. Eternally stupid, just as we are eternally stupid …

 

Stupidity: wasn’t that what we tried to pass on to them, our students? What was not yet, what had not become anything – not even philosophy.

An opening. A widening. An open grove of speech: that what we sought to find in teaching. Where we stood before the sky.

Blessed moments. Happiness in speech. Small utopias, where speech wandered into truth. Where our lectures received light from above.

Moments of calm in our teaching. Of stillness spreading around us. When we achieved a kind of simplicity. A limpidity. When we laid everything out, in a series of declarative sentences. Anaphorically. In a wisdom of despair – achieved despair.

The way speech stood up. Stretched itself upwards. In its plainless. In spoken simplicity. Without technical terms. Without terms of the art. Without jargon.

And we had the common touch.

We didn’t close our eyes and pretend we were at Oxford. We didn’t speak to our students as though they were scholar-princes-and-princesses of yore.

None of this was to be over their heads. None of this was to be as if to no one, to the open air, to ghosts of the academic past. We were addressing them and only them. They were the audience we wanted to reach.  

We listened. We read the room. Took the temperature – the spiritual temperature.

Looking out at them. At their faces. Reading their eyes. Did they follow? Were they involved?

Thinking with them, and only them. Making it real, for them. Something vital. Something important. Making them feel it: the Seriousness. Of the topic. Of our discussion. Making them remember this lecture. This encounter. Now. Right here …

An urgency. A matter of life of death. Of utmost importance. That something would be missed if they hadn’t attended. If they hadn’t been present here. Today …  

And moments of calm in our teaching. Openings out. Widenings. Our words, reaching the Open. Our words, sun-touched. Sun-dazzled. Light breaking across them.

We said the words and the light came. The light dazzled. The light sparkled. The breath of God came over the waters – and our words were the waters.

Words of truth, singing through us. Echoing through us. Like Sprachgesang to invisible music.

We spoke We were spoken. A kind of ventriloquy. A thrown voice, not our own. But whose voice was it?

And Cicero listening. And Cicero marvelling. As the stillness spread around us. As we reached an open grove of speech. As we reached the blessed moment. A utopia in speech.

Not-yet philosophy, speaking through us.

From what hovered before philosophy. That philosophy always betrayed. Philosophy, amnesiac, speaking through us. Philosophy stranded. Left behind. That wasn’t yet philosophy.

Philosophy, marooned before itself. Wandering without itself, without its memories. Because we ourselves had been marooned in life! Because we ourselves had wandered in life! Because that was the truth of our hourly paid condition! Because that’s what we’d known in our years of service teaching!

We spoke the truest word, which means the most abandoned word. The found word, which is also the lost word. We spoke what was forgotten before the beginning of the world. And of what would pulse there after the end.

Not yet philosophy! Not even philosophy! The breath before. The stillness before. As we laid everything out in a series of declarative sentences. Anaphorically. In a wisdom of despair – achieved despair. In the beauty of despair.