Author: Lars Iyer

I’ve got you on the run, philosopher. You’re scared of something. What are you frightened of – getting too sticky?


You like this disgusting: that’s what you’re afraid of. You like me in all my disgustingness. And you like me in your disgustingness.


Philosophers are afraid of sex. I’ve worked that out. Male philosophers anyway. It’s – just – sex.


Help! I’m scared of fucking. I only like books that I can’t read and can’t understand. Help! I’m frightened of living and love and sex and romance and affairs. And I’d like to be alone for the rest of my life just writing about how much I hate things.


This is my impression of you. I hate being biological. I hate being dependent. I hate being alive. I can’t cope with any of it. So I’ve invented some stupid philosophy called Gnosticism. Which isn’t even Gnosticism. It’s just a way of being fucked up. Just psychological disturbance.

And that’s what you teach and that’s what you write about and that’s the poison you’re spreading.

It’s not poison. It’s counterpoison. Tell yourself that, philosopher.


Biology, I hate biology. I hate what it makes me want. I hate my instincts. I’m disgusted by my instincts.

You’re disgusted by me? That’s a complement from you.

I’m disgusted by what I want from you.

You hate being human.

I hate being animal.

You hate being dependent.  You hate love.

This isn’t love.

It’s erotic.


You’d rather not need any of this. You’d rather be a man of culture forever. Up here, in your own, working and wanking. Doing your last days of high culture thing. Pretending that it hasn’t all just ended. That it isn’t actually over.


You want sex, just like anyone else. You’ve got a boner, just like anyone. You’re base – in your own eyes. Like you’re ashamed of it all. You want to be a true spirit, but you’re not. You’re impure, philosopher. You’re perverted.


All this stuff you want to be and you’re not. Only you’re trying to make something out of this ‘not’. The nothing of your talent. The not there of your oeuvre. The no one’s home of your original ideas. Of your intellectual virtues. Of your critical intelligence. But you can’t make anything out of your great nothing burger.


Trying to conjure up some negative philosophy out of the fact that you’re a fuck up.


What issues do you have? You were brought up by both parents, right? Stable Indian home. You weren’t destitute. You were good immigrants. Your parents worked. They got on. So what was it? were you abused?

No.

Did someone fuck you when you were young?

No.

So your attitude is just philosophical? Don’t believe it. There must be a reason why you’re so susceptible to all this everything / nothing stuff.

We grow old during the academic year. We grow ancient. And then we need to become young again, at the end of the academic year. We need to find it again, our innocence. Our youth. The youth that you incarnate, postgraduates.


Summer is a dreaming, postgraduates. A recovery. Summer is contemplation.


We all need to lie fallow, postgraduates. We all need Time. We need to go larval. We need slow incubation.

Eternal summer! Weeks and weeks, held into the eternal. Turning there, kept

by the eternal. Weeks, lying back beneath summer skies. Watching summer pass over us.


With no one knocking on our office doors. No one phoning us on our office telephones. With but a few postgraduate meetings every now and then.


Summers becalmed, postgraduates. Summers with no breeze, nothing taking us forward. Summers without wind to fill our sails.

And weren’t we glad of it, postgraduates: to be blown like dandelion seeds through the corridors of summer? To hatch into summer, like summer midges?


Weeks and weeks in the eternal, postgraduates. Weeks settled in the eternal. Turning there. Kept by the eternal. Held by the eternal.


Trust in summer, postgraduates. That summer is eternal. That the weeks will turn in eternity. How many weeks before the start of the term? Before the start of the new academic year? Infinite weeks. Endless weeks.


Summer, working through you. Summer, thinking through you. Summer, reading through you.


And time – the gift of time, postgraduates. Time’s timing. Time’s whiling. The turning of time in summer.


Possibility: that was to be your element, postgraduates. Potentiality – when you were brought back to ourselves. Given to yourselves – all over again.


The summer inside you, postgraduates. The outside within. Our summer. The perfect coincidence of yourselves and the Origin. And the Beginning. And the Inexhaustible.


Stunned summer, like a blow to the head. Summer stunned, reeling, staggering all around you. And you were staggering, too.

Summer stupor. The summer when idiocy could breathe out. Be what it was. When you no longer tried to escape our stupidity. When you accepted it. Merged with it. Became one with it.

Your stupidity, joining the great stupidity. Your idiocy, joining the cosmic idiocy. The idiotic Creation. (And wasn’t God an idiot, too, in the high summer? Hadn’t God always been the perfect idiot, above the high summer sun?)

You wore your summer haloes, you philosophers of summer. You burned with summer Genius, which was indistinguishable from summer idiocy.

You worked, yes, but it was souffle-light, your working. You worked, but your work had air inside it, like kneaded bread. Summer air! Summer lightness!

If you fell asleep in the sun, what then, postgraduates? If you closed our eyes, of what would we dream? Dream those dreams now, in the cold of the Organisational Management campus. Remember them – your dreams. The summer’s dream, when stupidity holds hands with brilliance.

All the sunken continents of European thought.

We’re doing entropy’s work for it. We’re deliberately … dissipating ourselves. Deliberately … being undeliberate. Just fanning out. Like a river braiding. Becoming a delta. Pouring itself out into nothing.

They’re going to fix European philosophy. They’ve sent in the bots. Going to optimise it. Make it ready for use. Feed it into the large language models.

The lie is up. But what if there was nothing holding it together but the lie? What happens after the lie? When the lie’s no longer a lie?

Nothing’s working. Nothing’s productive. Nothing’s busy. No one’s keeping up appearances. Appearances aren’t keeping up appearances. They can’t be bothered anymore.

They’re taking down the scenery. Dismantling the set. They’re not even pretending to pretend.

Is this what we’ve uncovered: the truth? The non-lie of the ruins?

Postgraduates in a huddle, shuffling in circles like penguins at the pole. Changing places to keep warm.

A survival technique. Darwinism in action. They’re adapting.

Philosophy has to be what is essentially above us. Philosophy has to be about what we barely understand.

Better than us: that’s what philosophy must be. In every respect, superior. The impossibility of our ever understanding philosophy: that’s what philosophy has to be about.

Keeping us out! Keeping us away from holy ground! Reminding us of our impudence at even thinking that we might do philosophy. Our arrogance!

Do you think we’ll ever be functional human beings? Do you think we’ll ever reverse into a parking space? Ever look up things on a Smartphone? Ever get a mortgage? Clear our debts?


Eternal children – that’s what we are. Expecting everyone to indulge us. Whilst we do our supposedly important work. Which isn’t, of course, important at all.

Expecting our pocket money from the state. To teach things that don’t matter to students who aren’t listening.

How long can it go on? The game is up – that’s been realised, hasn’t it? The pretence can’t go on, can it? We’re surplus to requirements – of course we are. We’re not needed.

The humanities should go back to being a hobby, or whatever. A way you indulge the children of the rich.


From another time. Who are we to be? Where are we going? What are we going to do now?

We need a bit of organisation. And management. We need some entrepreneurial get up and go.


For the great run of humanity, what’s the point? They’ve been entertained our of the humanities. Netflixed. Lobotomized. They’ve been indulged out of the humanities. They don’t need the humanities.

It can’t go on like this, and nor will it. We got in at the last possible moment. We entered the academic as it was about to collapse. We found our way in – of course. Just as it was dismantling itself. And we were part of its dismantling.

Expecting to be allowed to continue to do whatever it is we do. To continue to fool ourselves and the world …

You have to neglect everything to find it. A vocation that doesn’t call upon you.


It’s not even important. It’s not even significant. It doesn’t even matter.

To be true to it is to forget it. To serve it is not to serve it – to pay it no heed. To ignore it as it ignores us. To forget it as it forgets us. To leave it in oblivion, even as it is oblivious to us.

It doesn’t matter – and nor do we.


The night that doesn’t matter. The night in which nothing matters. Not even us – especially us.

The night that neglects us. Forgets us. Buries us in is forgetting, so unimportant are we to it.


What’s the opposite of posterity?


Aren’t we perfectly prepared for oblivion? Haven’t we wanted nothing but oblivion – from the start?

For our names not to be known; not to be remembered.

Never wanting to leave a mark, knowing that our mark would defile everything. That it would only vandalise it all.

Never wanting any signs of our presence to remain. Never wanting to spread our contagion.

We only wanted to be kept in a kind of infinite quarantine. Hidden. Buried in it. Lost in it. Never surfacing.

We wanted only to be buried in the landslide. The great slump of the earth. Falling over us. Choking us.


Let us not disturb anything. For our breath never to fill the air.


We’re defilers. Spoilers. We’re polluters. Spreaders of disease. They should just throw us in the plague pit. In the mass grave. We don’t deserve our own gravestones.


Some sublime Punishment. Some blow from the sky. To extinguish us. As surely as the city of Sodom. Wouldn’t that be a mercy?

A sublime death blow. An awesome Destruction. In which we wouldn’t matter. A catastrophe completely indifferent to us.


Just to be rubbed out. Erased. As mistakes. But an erasure that costs no one any trouble. That’s almost incidental. Almost unnoticed. That’s done by a kind of instinct.

A gesture, like wiping the table clean. We’ve done Wrong. We were always Wrong. But we didn’t want to cause any trouble with our wrongness. We don’t want to make work for anyone.

Just gently snuffed out. Pillows placed over our heads. Smothered. But gently. Almost incidentally.


Must we live? Who made us live? Why are we being allowed to live? What part of God’s plan is this? Are we serving God in our own way? Do we have a place after all?


Our redundancy. There’s no need for us. No place for us at the table. We busy ourselves, merely. We look as though we’re working. That’s our task, our lives: pretending to be doing something. And keeping a place for others to come. Warming the seat.

For what? For who? For those better than us. For the real lecturers to come. For the real thinkers.


We’re merely warming their seats. Merely preparing things for them. Those who will take our place – without even noticing us. Without even knowing that they did so.

They won’t even notice us. And if they didn’t, they’d forget us straightaway. They’d be busy with important things. With real things. With Doing Suff.

The immediate past of the department wouldn’t concern them. What we did or didn’t do. The effort we made or the effort we didn’t make.

None of it will be their real concern, our replacements. They won’t know we were there. No one need remember us. No lecture rooms need to be named after us. No buildings. We won’t even retire. We’ll simply wink out – disappear.

We’ll simply be no more – out of taste. We won’t even kill ourselves – we won’t have to. Pfft – a rushing sound and we’ll be gone. No longer part of this universe. We’ll go out like the stars at the end of the universe. We’ll be snuffed out, as part of a general movement.

It won’t be just us, but others like us. All the placeholders. All those who stood and waited. Who stayed at their posts. Wanting only to be relieved of them. Wanting only not to have to burdened.

No longer having to be anyone at all. No longer getting in the way. No longer pretending to be what we’re not. No longer having to lie.

Are we doing what God wants for us? Are we fulfilling our dharma? Do we serve the right and the good? Let it be that we were serving the right and the good, even in our way. Even in our infinite humility.

Humility: we have that. We’re the lowest – and the lower than that. We’re base. We’re as humble as the desert fathers. And so we should be. It’s the one thing that’s true about us.


We’re suspicious of ourselves – infinitely so. We loathe ourselves- is that it? We’re lost in self hatred. We wander through it all day: our self hatred. All the rooms of our self hatred. All its dimensions. In its sprawl. It’s a whole world, our self hatred. It encompasses so much. There’s so much to see, to taste, to experience. Its infinite extent. It’s prolixity. Its climates.


We’re dead, really. We were never anything other than dead, that’s what we want to say. So don’t expect anything from us. We weren’t even alive. We weren’t even anything. We never emerged into the day. We were never born. We never lived. We were entirely imaginary.

Someone made us up. We were never real. A rumour, that’s all. All the things we don’t deserve. All the things we don’t want. No accolades. What is the opposite of accolade: that’s what we want. Condemnation. Exorcism, even. But that would be too much.

That would put people to too much trouble. We really don’t want to cause any fuss. We don’t want to make work for anyone. Just being ignored, then. Passed over. Forgotten. By those too generous to single us out. Who didn’t want to condemn us publicly. Who knew that there was no need for that. We didn’t need to be told off, reprimanded.

No one needed to know about us. About what we’d done. We’d already fucked up. They’d keep quiet. They knew that the ship would right itself. They wouldn’t have to intervene. That intervention wouldn’t be necessary.

Our kind … were an aberration, that’s all. We’d soon disappear. We wouldn’t be a problem. Better to overlook us entirely. To pretend we didn’t exist – that we never were. That Livia’s philosophy department never actually opened. Belonging to the very obscure history of UK continental philosophy. In an obscure appendix.

In a footnote to that appendix. In an endnote that no one ever reads. The history of the real departments: the sagas of Warwick, of Essex. The brave stories of Manchester Met, of Sussex. Of UWE. Of Dundee.

Who were we, by comparison? A footnote to a footnote. Leave us to our obscurity. Just some mad aberration. Just some lunacy in the deep provinces. Scarcely worth analysing. Thinking about. Or even noticing.


But perhaps there was a significance in our insignificance. An importance in our unimportance. It would take a Robert Walser to write of us. Not so Woolworths Bernhard.