Author: Lars Iyer

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.

We want the original philosophy department in its death, its disappearance. We want it closed – failed – defeated.


Do we really want to learn the lesson from the old department – bring it into the light of the day? Give it substance, shape and reality once again? Do we really want to find what we lacked, and lead it upward?


We have to reach the measureless deep. Pass through it, in a kind of trial. We have to endure the old department in its death. In its impossibility. In the fact that it could not possibly exist anymore.


It was closed in the 80s. It belonged to the 80s, to the 70s, to the 60s – a forgotten time.

We couldn’t confront it directly. We couldn’t bear the thought of it. It’d be too much – what it was. What was possible, back then.  

Forgotten academia. The old elite academia. Before the mass expansion. Before mass higher education.

And if we looked at it directly, what would see: only its impossibility. Only its total implausibility. Only a vanished world, that could not possibly be brought back to life.


The old department, the paragraduates, are already dead, and can only be dead.

We only want them in their death, as angels of death.

We don’t want a department of that old daytime, of what was possible back then. We want to see what has disappeared in its disappearance. What is now concealed in its concealment. Want to experience the impossibility of what was once so eminently possible.

The used-to-be academia. The once-was academia. Want to maintain the tension between the present and the past, between what is possible now, and what was possible then. The vanished world! The forgotten world! That we want in its vanishing, in its having-been-forgotten. In its inconceivability.


We want its dying without end, old academia. The ordeal of its absence. We want the experience of impossibility of the old university to be drawn out for as long as possible. We want to know the present as what hides, what conceals, this phantom. And even hides this hiding and conceals this concealment.


We want to touch the old department in its shadowy absence. In its veiled presence. As Eurydice, in other words.

And we know, like Orpheus, that we can’t turn back. That we can’t look backwards. We have no conception of what it was like back then.

And we couldn’t have entered that world, anyway. We were too stupid, always too stupid. We’re the products of mass higher education, not elite higher education. We wouldn’t have got the grades! We would never have been admitted!


The old department Eurydice. We’re dead too – we’re no less dead, if we seek to have a relation to what is dead, to what can only be dead.

But this is a death without end, for us. It’s the ordeal of the end’s absence. An infinite dying that is an infinite mourning for what was, for what cannot be any longer.


We can’t bear the thought of it as it was. We only want it as what we are not, as what is impossible in the here and now.

We can’t bear to think about it. The old department is the heavenly fire. It’s the measureless. And we can’t have any relationship to it other than in mourning. We are only shades by comparison – philosophical shades. Academic shades.


We’re dead – infinitely so.

Our mourning song. Our keening. We were always impatient. We always wanted too much. We wanted to tear our gaze away.

We wanted to realise something in the here and now. To make something.


Which is to say that we failed to sustain the movement of our mourning. We’ve lost the old department all over again.

But perhaps that’s how we want it; as lost. As infinitely lost. And we want ourselves lost too. We want ourselves sacrificed. Buried.


We want to know the old department as we can never know it, as it lies beyond us. We want it as it escapes us, and as this escape. We want it as what is lost, and what can never be found. As it is inconceivable, impossible. As what the university once was and cannot be again. As our impossible desire that it return.


The old department’s default helps us. Its disappearance comes to our aid. Wouldn’t it simply burn up our present, if such a department existed?


We want it to be dead; UK European philosophy. We want ourselves to be dead. We want that excuse. We want to be ghosts – to have always been ghosts. We want to be undead. We don’t want this to have been the world. We don’t want this to have happened to philosophy.


We want ruins – at least honest ruins. We want to see the ruins. We want to see it lost, as past. We want to see the ruin of what the university was. We want to see our own ruin. Our own deadness.

We want it confirmed: that we’re dead, and long dead. That we’re ruined. That we have no place in the new world. In the new normal. We’re mourning for ourselves too. Mourning that we were never born, never lived, never emerged into the world. We want it shown to us: that nothing is real except ruination. That the new campus was built upon the ashes of the old, and is made of ashes.


And no choice but to be appalled. No choice but to be horrified. And we want to feel the horror. We want to mourn what we could never have been. Who we never were. We want to lament the utter corruption of this timeline.


We want to mourn UK European philosophy in its entirety. Because it never should have been. It never should have been allowed. just as we should never have been allowed.

And we were the worst! We were the Outcome. We were the poisoned fruit of its vine. We were the last, and the lowest, and the vilest.

But at least we knew out vileness. At least we disgusted ourselves. At least we knew the horror, which was also horror at ourselves.


The ur-fact: that we were given jobs. That we were allowed to study this stuff. The ur-offence. The first disaster. The ur-collapse. The ur-horror. That we were welcomed through the gates of academe. That we ever won a scholarship. That we ever opened a book: A European philosophy book. That we ever turned a European page.


How to expiate our guilt? What can we do to make up for it? What damages can we pay? What amends can we perform? What community service? What punishment should we receive? What sentence could we serve? Our original sin. The initial collapse. The first disaster, to be followed by so many others.


We ruined it, UK European philosophy. Or we deepened its ruin. It was our fault, in a way – the whole fiasco. The blood of European thought is on our hands.

How can we sleep at night? But we don’t sleep. We never sleep a full night. It’s always disaster. It’s always nightmare time. And our nightmare: ourselves. Being ourselves. Thinking as ourselves. Turning pages as ourselves.


We’re trapped with ourselves. We’re rivetted to ourselves. We’re tied to the concrete block of ourselves. Thrown into the river, as ourselves, weighed down by ourselves.

We’re cursed with ourselves, and bear the burden of ourselves. By who we had to be. By who we couldn’t help but be. By who we were actually allowed to be.

What slackness! What indulgence! What misplaced kindness! What equality-and-diversity madness! That we were tolerated at all. That we could get by at all. A mad permissiveness. We didn’t want to be this way! It wasn’t our fault! We were encouraged! It was allowed!

The world went mad. Some lowering of standards. The madness of grade inflation. That made us think we were better than we were. But did we ever really think it: that we were better than what we were? Did we ever believe it?

We Knew. Deeper than ourselves, we Knew. We were Aware. We were Certain, in our own way. And that’s what made us complicit with the disaster, that Knowledge. That made us willing accomplices.

We were compromised – of course we were. And we still are compromised. Which is why we were complicit. Why we are complicit. And therefore culpable. It’s why we should be put on trial – along with the world. Why it’s our fault, too. Why we can’t simply throw up our hands and blame others.

No – we Knew, and were complicit. We might have been encouraged. We might have been brought on. The whole system might have gone equality and diversity mad. But it was still out fault, in part – even in large part. We fuck ups. We, too, need to Go Down. We need to be put up against the wall and shot. We, too, need to be cleared away if there’s to be a rebirth.

A full accounting – that’s what’s needed. A full reckoning. An Explanation of it all. With a clear paper trail. Who planned it. Who executed it. How we could be allowed to desecrate the sanctum. How the thieves were allowed to overrun the temple. They should bring in investigators. Auditors. A Report is needed. A Public Inquiry. Explaining how it all happened. How were allowed to become lecturers.


An offense – that’s what it was. An offense to reason. To propriety. To everything Good and Worthwhile. To Standards. To the old world. To the Way Things Were Done.

The incentive structure was wrong. The gatekeepers were wrong. The checks and balances weren’t working. They eft the gates open. They let us through.

We need it explained to us. How we were misled.


We’re only a sign that it Doesn’t Matter. That they’ve Given Up. Washed Their hands of it. That it’s Not worth Bothering With. That it’s Going Nowhere. And the only thing to do is to abandon it. To press eject. To expect nothing. To look away. To focus on other things, better things.

That we’re beneath their attention. That there are more worthwhile things to think about. Of course there are. It’s all happening elsewhere, all the important stuff. This is no one’s base of operations. It’s been abandoned. Left to people like us. And who are we?

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 some Woolworths Bernhard.