Author: Lars Iyer

This is serious drinking, postgraduates. Nothing frivolous here. Another bottle of wine that we have to finish. It’s our duty to see where it leads. To see where it takes us.

Because there’s somewhere we have to be taken. We have to get out of ourselves. Out of our heads. Our heads are confining us. They’re turning us inwards. Whereas drink turns us outward …

 

Are we drinking too much, postgraduates? But there’s only drinking too much. That’s the only acceptable way of drinking.

 

Those Organisational Management fuckers. Do you think they know how to drink? They can do everything but drink. Because drinking’s not about what you can do. It doesn’t concern what you can do.

Drinking’s a giving up. A throwing in of the towel. An admission of defeat. You have to have been terribly defeated, if you’re going to drink.

 

Really our drunkenness is an attunement. To how things are. Really, it’s a receptivity. Really, our drunkenness is a satellite dish, turned to receive signals from the sky.

 

Drinking deeper, postgraduates. Drinking all the way down. Drinking into the Urgrund and the Abgrund. Drinking into the abyss, and deeper than the abyss. Drinking-falling, down into our groundlessness. Plunging into our groundlessness.

 

To drink until we pass out, that’s the aim, postgraduates. That’s always the aim. Until we lie, unconscious. Because we don’t need to be conscious. We should relinquish our consciousness. There’s no reason to stay awake in this world.

 

There’s no saving us, postgraduates. We can’t save ourselves. We’re lost. Ruined. And only deepening our dereliction. We’re only furthering our loss of all true things.

 

This is a wake for our hopes, postgraduates. This is a wake for the ruination of our hopes. We’re staying up all night to mourn their ruination. To celebrate it, too. We’re more lucid than before. We see things better than before.

 

We disappoint ourselves, without alcohol. We bore ourselves. We’re not the people we should be, sober. We don’t rise. We don’t look upwards. We don’t aspire.

That’s what’s this tower is called: Aspire.

 

We’re drinking ourselves to death – no doubt. But what other choice is there other than drink ourselves to death? It’s a creative suicide. It’s our own way of dying, which is to say, living.

 

We depend too much on alcohol, of course we do! It isn’t good for us, all this alcohol! But we need a route out of ourselves. We need a way out. We can’t get there all by ourselves. We can’t get there sober.

 

A reprieve: that’s why we drink. We want a temporary cessation. A laying down of arms. Simply, time … Time out. A minute’s peace. A gap in the world’s being the world.

 

Sometimes you have to step through the drunken looking glass. Through the drunken mirror. Into the drunken inverted world.

We’re drunkenly bewildered. But bewilderment is understanding, on another plane. Drunkenly lost. But loss is also finding, on another plane. Drunkenly rambling. But rambling is always precision, on another plane.

Spouting drunken obscenities. But obscenities are the sweetest poetry on another plane. Drunken lamentation. But our laments are celebrations, on another plane.

What looks like our self-destruction is really self-preservation. What looks like sinking is really elevation. What looks like collapse is really rising.

In another dimension, we’re sober. We’re upstanding. We ‘re the most lucid people you’ve ever met. In another dimension, it all makes sense, just as nothing makes sense here.

 

We’re serious drinkers. Our seriousness lies in our drinking. In the way we drink. In the seriousness of our drinking. In the concentratedness of our drinking. In its focus.

Sure, we’d try to brown-nose the great and the good at conferences. Would vie to sit next to them at conference meals. When we could barely afford the conferences! When we couldn’t feed ourselves at conferences!

Paying for a ticket to the conference meal just so we could place ourselves next to some influential person or another. Someone in charge of some Philosophy department or another. So that we’d be a face to them, at least. So they’d know our names at least.

Ready to ingratiate ourselves. To impress.

But we’d never really know how to make conversation. To show polite interest. To ask things of others. To respond to questions in turn.

We had no general conversation. We could never think of anything to say. We stumbled over words. When addressed with friendly curiosity, when asked about ourselves, we could never find any words. We could never sum up what we’ve been doing, or what our interests were.

Giving nothing back to polite inquiry. Even from the great and the good! Even those who might give us jobs! The nihilism would overwhelm us. Hopelessness would crush us.

Sure, drunk, we could perhaps manage a few words. We could offer the beginnings of a drunken monologue; could extemporise on hopelessness or failure or despair. Or on our apocalyptic desires. Our world-revolution desires. A few feverish words! But that wasn’t what was wanted, was it? And we weren’t drunk – or never drunk enough. Not sitting at a conference meal.

 

Tongue-tied. Stumblers.

All those years of learning, and for what? All that expensive education, and what for? With what result?

All our desperation for a full time job, and where was it leading us?

A conference was a networking opportunity – and what were we doing?

 

What creatures we were! What specimens! From the outer outer darkness. From outside the university. Wanting nothing other than to enter the university. Wanting only to find their way inside the university. Believing that they had no tolerable life outside the university.

And yet, when given the chance, unable to take sell ourselves. Unable to network. Unable to press the flesh and impress …

 

Our supposed desperation. Our supposed cravenness. The supposed fact that we’d do anything – anything for a job. That we’d be fucked by anyone, would fuck anyone. Sign away our souls.

And yet, when it came to it … We couldn’t do it. Couldn’t ingratiate ourselves. Couldn’t make polite conversation. Could network with the great and the good. Couldn’t sell ourselves, American style. Couldn’t get our faces known.

What was it – some sort of pride? Some last inner stand against humiliation? Against compromise? Something uncorrupt inside us? Something not completely abased?/

Some kind of retrospective resentment that we’d all but prostituted ourselves? That we’d all but lay ourselves out to be fucked? That we’d all but worn a sign around our necks saying, Will fuck for teaching hours?

Some late-in-the-day rebellion against the fact that we’d essentially volunteered for everything? The fact that we’d always our hands straight up in the air? That we’d done all kind of exploitative stuff just to show we were available for anything? That we’d do whatever it was just for the experience – just to put it on our CVs.

Some self-sabotaging attempt not to drown in the bottomless swamp of our indignity?

Why was it any good to make our stand now, sitting among the great and the good at a conference meal? Why did it stick in our throats only now, as we’d wormed our way next to some big name or another at the dinner table? Hadn’t cravenness already brought us to the conference, to the meal, to our strategic seating? What was wrong with a little more ingratiation, when it had already got us this far?

It was like a moment in a Nuri Bilge Ceylan film. Like something a Dostoevsky character would do – a particularly pathetic one … half-alcoholic … with shaking hands. After all, I’m not an insect?: is that what we said to ourselves, like the underground man?

So weak! So compromised! So ludicrous! So capering! And yet, in the final hour, there was some wild pride after all. Some disgust at ourselves, after all. At who’d we’d become, as part-timers, as hourly paid lecturers.

No more convulsions! No more thrashings! No more stinging ourselves, like scorpions! Something in us wanted to get up onto its feet. Something wanted to no longer be disgusting! Or pathetic! Something said it would not be part of the whole part-time academic dance of death!

The humanities, forced to justify themselves on the enemy’s terms. In the enemy’s vocabulary. The humanities, forced to talk about transferrable skills. About the uses of the humanities in business. Abut their fostering of business-relevant communication skills.

The humanities can’t survive. Or if they do so, it’s only as a shell of themselves. As husk-history. As hollowed-out literature. As phantom history of art.

 

The conditions for the humanities have disappeared. We can see that. There’s no place for the humanities anymore.

Which means that it’s only now that the humanities can appear as such. In their perfectly uselessness. In their perfect superfluity.

Our kind … So ill-fitting. So maladjusted.

Why did we appear? What’s are we for? Attitudes like ours … The thoughts that we have …

Our pathologies. Our maladies. Our disturbances. Our fantasies …

 

We’re a type that only appears at the end, as a sign of the end. Of the sickness of the end.

 

We indulge it in each other. We multiply it in each other. It’s accelerated. Given wings. Made to echo.

 

Our living fever … Which we have in common. Which we share.

 

What were we brought to Newcastle to do? What would Cicero have us do?

 

This excess energy … This extra darkness … this force of negativity … but what’s it for? What are we for?

What’s wrong with a time that produces people like us?

 

And philosophy’s only made it worse. Philosophy’s only given us a vocabulary.

Yet what we express isn’t philosophy. We express it through philosophy, it’s true, but it’s not philosophy. We’re using philosophy to do something else.

What for? Religious purposes? Apocalyptic purposes? To express our peculiar … personalities? Our living fever …

 

There are whole philosophies that we’re ransacking. That we’re selling for parts.

 

Our kind … our type … Harbingers. Preparers.

 

There’s a reason for this. There’s a reason for us.

 

Will we find out what we’re for? Will there be a special role for us that we’ll discover at the end?

 

Dreamers of disaster: why are they needed? Living death drives.

A screaming inside us. A horror unleashed. Flaming.

Fire, licking upwards. Through us. To what? To reach what?

Fire, answering fire. Fire, calling out for fire in the sky …

 

Our hyena-laughing. Our Satanic laughter. Our rictus grins.

We have to descend. Stay low. That’s the only way we’ll get anywhere. We have to speak from these depths. Sing out from this abjection.

 

There’s further to go. Further down the spiral. We haven’t reached bottom yet.

This endless doom spiralling. This game of one-down-one’s-ship.

 

We’ll destroy ourselves. In our own way. In our own time. With our own style. We do it with panache. And humour. This is actually amusing for us …

And she trained us, didn’t she? She took it upon herself.

Trained us! Insulted us, more like.

it was a kind insulting. It was meant to spur us on.

It was meant to crush us –

Do you remember how she used to criticise your shoes. She said they weren’t smart enough.

She thought you wouldn’t take yourself seriously without proper shoes. Look, you’re wearing them now. Brogues in the snow.

And how she’d make us read Hölderin out loud! In German! Just to mock us!

She’d ask us what we thought it meant. How we might translate this word, or that word …

And she’d make us read the great commentaries on Hölderin. Cicero on Heidegger’s reading of Der Ister, as we read Der Ister. Agamben on Hölderin’s late fragments, as we read the late fragments.

As if we’d understand!

And there was our Sophocles reading group …

Of course! How could we forget?

Sophocles! In ancient Greek! Which she’d quiz us about.

Mouthing over our words as we read them. Following lines of text with our fingers.

Near illiteracy, she marvelled! What did they teach us in our British schools? In our British universities? What happened to the long tradition of working class education? How did it pas us by?

And yet we seemed to need to read. And books that were too hard for us – obviously.

We were drawn to high seriousness, despite our irreverence. Despite our flippancy. High seriousness! Why did we need it? Why did we look for it? How could we even recognise it? And yet recognise it we did.

We were maulers, distorters, primitives, but still … There was something there. Crude, primitive insights. Feelings – intensities. Identifications – entirely illegitimate, no doubt.

She sometimes dreamt of a whole new school of barbarous interpretation, Cicero said. A whole college of idiot’s hermeneutic? Wasn’t that something we could contribute to the intellectual life of the world? Had Cicero stumbled upon a unique philosophical method – a stupid method? Outsider philosophy, in some sense? Probably not, Cicero said.

But there was reverence about us, despite everything. When we’d fall silent, and listen, in wonder. When we’d marvel … Despite our stupidity! Notwithstanding our stupidity! As if it awakened something in our soul. From a previous life! A previous incarnation!

How else could she account for it? How could Hölderin reach us? And Sophocles? But they did. It did, old European culture. All the books no one reads anymore … All the forgotten names …

Was there hope yet? Was the memory of Europe still alive after all? Were there those who could still be moved by its ruins?

Our uneducated enthusiasm. Our autodictat’s instinct. We’d led ourselves through so many European pages? All by ourselves. Alongside our formal studies. Alongside our BAs, Our MAs, Our PhDs …

She loved our seriousness. She was amused by our being moved. She used to ask to see our notebooks. She’d ask us to read our favourite quotations. She loved it when we stumbled over our words. When we looked to her for correction. There we were, in our thirties, still reading like children! And stupid children, not gifted children! No one hand corrected us before! No one had taught us to pronounce this, or that! Until now!

And even better when we were drunk and reading out loud. Best of all, when we were slurring, too. When we were full of drunken pathos. Soaring on our own drunken oratory, such as it was.

Better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion, she said, quoting Kierkegaard. The passion of thought is to discover something that thought itself cannot think, she said, quoting Kierkegaard again.

What battle? There isn’t going to be a battle. They’ve already won. Look at this place. They’re breaking in the new system. Everything’s lined up – every major logistical element. Every working part … It’s out in the open. They’re not trying to sneak up on the herd anymore.

And they’re actually accelerating their agendas. Bringing things forward. It’s all happening at once. It’s, like, a thousand apocalypses now …

But why … what do they want to do?

The mystical marriage of philosophy and organisational management. The marriage of heaven and hell, right?

Opposites attract, maybe.

Opposites repel.

It might destroy the universe, you know. Like matter and anti-matter. Because philosophy is anti- organisational management, just as organisational management is anti-philosophy. At opposite poles. Bring them together and you risk tearing the universe apart.