Author: Lars Iyer

Is there a way of dying where you get to be reborn? Is there a dying that isn’t really dying? Where you can be resurrected? Where you can come alive again?

The light is demanding something of us. The light is asking a question. No, it’s showing something.

 

And I know the answer. And yet, I won’t let myself know. I don’t know what I know.

 

Why should it be me? Why me? Why now? Why today? Why here, with you?

 

It’s about me. About who I am. And will be. It’s about today. A choice. And what am I to choose? Who am I to be?

 

Can I live my life without mocking what I’m supposed to be?

 

I’m some tiny step from … whatever. Some … turn of the head. I have to make some … adjustment.

Are you close to it, too? Do you feel it? Maybe that shouldn’t matter.

Cicero’s hopes for us were kinda moving. I mean, we’re not the types to save the world. We can’t even save ourselves. We needed Cicero to save us.

 

We were savants to her. Channels. Through who the truth would speak. Wasn’t that why she listened outside our lectures. In case we said it – what she was waiting for. Said it without even knowing what we said. Somehow putting the right words together. In perfect inadvertence.

Do you think they turned on the Northern Lights just for us? Do they turn on different skies for different people? Is there different weather?

 

The lights – who are they illuminating it all for, and for what?

 

Cicero would really hate the Northern Lights. She would have a special ire for all this flashing. Some dumb offering of nature. To make us feel small. Stupid.

I always feel stupid.

Well, more stupid then.

 

The Northern Lights are a clue. Of what we’re supposed to begin. It’s a sign of the lightning to come. The lightning we’re supposed to channel. To bring into the world.

We know the disaster. We got too close to it, we know that. It’s like being radioactive. We’re saturated. It’s entered our pores. It’s like we glow with it. Like we’re fluorescent with it.

The disaster bomb has dropped – went off. In our heads! In our souls! We’re fizzing with disaster …

It all falls to us. It rests on our shoulders. We’re carrying the whole of European philosophy. Not just for Newcastle or the northeast. But for the country!

 

It’s pass the European philosophy parcel, where we have no idea what’s inside. It’s the European philosophy relay, where we’re simply passing the baton that we can’t understand.

 

We’re like those medieval monks who kept civilization going. Copying manuscripts, which we don’t understand. Doodling in the margins. Our whole lives: a doodling in the margins.

 

We’re defending something we don’t understand. Keeping memory of what is beyond us. We’re preserving it, without knowing what we’re preserving.

Who are you when you’re with them, your philosophers? Where do you fit in, in the pack? Are you the alpha male? The beta one? Are you in the inner in group? Or are you all the way down the hierarchy? Are you the lowest of all? The butt of all jokes. I can’t tell, philosopher. I’ve no idea of what your role is in the fourteen-legged philosophy machine …

Put down the Blanchot. Step away from the Blanchot. You’ll never get out of it, if you start on the Blanchot. You’ll be lost forever in the Blanchot vortex. By the Blanchotian Sirens’ song.

There have been so many scholars lost to Blanchot studies. I’ve seen them before – all bright eyed – keen. Full of promise. And then they … enter the oeuvre. Start reading. My God. They become shells of yourselves. Husks.

Blanchot’s work – so beautiful. So enticing. Written by some total fucking genius. Written in classical French, the essays, anyway. With perfect clarity. But that concerns the most obscure, unimaginable things.

Blanchot’s logic. It looks like logic. It reads logically – clearly. But you can never actually work out the argument. You think you can, but just when you think you’ve seized on it, it moves further out of reach. Leading you deeper into the thicket of texts.

Until you’re drowning in Blanchot! At the bottom of the Blanchot ocean! Lost in the darkness of the Blanchotian night! In the Blanchotian underworld! Carrying your flaming torch down, down, down, into those desolate pages. Like Orpheus, or whatever.

Fiver’s, like, the anti-administrator. What’s the opposite of an administrator? That’s you, Fiver. Which is why Cicero hired you.

You’ve heard of redemption through sin, right? All that Sabbati Zevi stuff? Well, you’re here to redeem admin through bad admin. Through the opposite of admin.

We’re not on edge. We’re not all urgency. We’re not all half mad. We’re not extremists anymore. We’re not far left or far right or whatever. We’re not domestic terrorists now.

Were we becoming complacent? Stupid? Hadn’t politics become just noises off? Wasn’t it all over there? Wasn’t general world suffering a matter of the usual usual?

 

Our idols are dead and our enemies are in power: that’s what we knew. But we had jobs. We were okay.

 

Marks and Spencers wanderings. Was that what we were good for? Pret a Manger avacado wraps. Was that who we were now?

 

We were distracted. Dupeable. Were we Guardian readers now? Were we liberals?