Author: Lars Iyer

They’re busy with the great work of translation. Translating European philosophy into analyticese – analytic philosophy. Making it clear! Intelligible! Readable by a general audience!

No more obscurity. Nothing difficult. Nothing unnecessarily opaque.

They’re bringing it all into the light – the Analytic Philosophy light. That shines benignly upon us all.

The great work of translation. Necessary work, if European thought is ever to become really intelligible. And thereby accessible. And thereby useful.

If thought is ever to have impact, beyond the academe … If it is ever to connect, to tell its story … If it will ever contribute to funding bids … to impact case studies …

If it is ever to be known outside the humanities. To the broader public … If it is to be introduced properly, contextualised properly … If it is ever to have a plaque by its name, like contemporary art … If it’s ever going to be explained (and explained away) … It needs to be translated into a neutral vocabulary (which is to, an analytic vocabulary.)

And with all the advances in Analytic Philosophy to help. To assist. All the latest developments in Analytic Philosophy at hand.

The analytic philosophers have been working hard for this. Writing their papers. Gathering at conferences. With a sense of mission.

You know what they’re like. Philosophical underlabourers. Modest. Scientist-like. A group project, really. A borg thing. Writing their papers. Quoting each other. An analytic wide web …

And the light, the Analytic Philosophy light everywhere. Shining into every corner and crack. Making things clear. Intelligible. Understandable.

Bringing European philosophy into mainstream debate. European philosophy won’t be on the philosophical margins. It can be part of the general conversation. In the name of diversity. Of equality. Of the honouring of the fact that there are other traditions. Other ways of doing philosophy.


We need to admit it. Continental thought needs to be updated. Reframed. Made clear. Made relevant!

If only Immanuel Kant had had the language of Analytic Philosophy at his disposal. If only he’d written in English. Good old English, the clearest of language. The most transparent.

Because Analytic Philosophy is, if nothing else, clear. Because Analytic Philosophy pretty much has the dibs on clarity. Analytic Philosophy, alone knows what clarity is. Has been working on clarity, in clarity, thinking of nothing but clarity.

Shining its light! The beneficent Anglo light! The great gift to the world: beneficent Anglo light! Bringing clarity! The light of the Analytic Philosophy sun. That will banish all shadows.

The Analytic Philosophy light standing still in the sky. There it is: the analytic noon. Obvious. And making everything obvious. Allowing everything to be revealed. Shown. For what it was. Banishing shadows. Darknesses. Obscurities. Mysticisms …

No more dubious religiosity. No more antediluviainism. None of the old stuff. A brave new Analytic Philosophy dawn. Things won’t be the same anymore.

General positivity. No more adolescent stuff. No more talk of nothingnesses and voids. No more fretting about the death of God, or death as God. Jettisoning once and for all the eternal return of Gnosticism. The idea that nature is evil. That there should be a horror at existence. No more angst. No more throwback existentialism.

Philosophy’s not to be the hideout of weirdoes. Conspiracy theorists. We need to weed out all the strange people. Clear out the eccentrics. Isn’t that the mission?

A general organising and managing. That takes the form of a sorting. Of a separation of the wheat from the chaff.

We need saner philosophers. Calmer philosophers. Philosophers with clear heads. With a sense of mission. Who know what’s to be done. Modest philosophers. Underlabourer philosophers. Who have the requisite philosophical taste.

This is not a time for fanaticism. For the ill-tempered. For excess, in general. For unregulated emotion. What’s needed is a cadre of the sensible – of the analytic philosophy sensible. Calm under pressure. Non excitable types! Cool headed types! Not all blood and fervour! Not all full of wild imaginings!

None of the religious madness! None of those European religious types,r religious without religion. None of the continental faithful who have nowhere to place it, their faith.

None of those passionate intensity types. Fervoured types. Febrile types, heads full of fever. None of the disturbed. The addled. The conceptually confused.

None of the mooded. Those prone to melancholy. To depressions. To general messianism. Forget the pathos-led. The mood-fuelled. Unbalanced types! Wayward types! The barefoot in the head!

And no more prose poem philosophy. Philosophy’s not about literary beauty. Written in clear, calm prose. Philosophy needs to be severed once and for all from the poetic. From dubious old literature. From every kind of rhetoric.

Philosophy, in calm prose. Unfebrile prose. Philosophy, written with a clear head. Not drunk! Not even hungover!

A new sobriety! The sobriety of Analytic Philosophy! Of Organisational Management!


There’s work to be done – sober work. Calm work. Measured work. Work that needs cool heads. There are meetings to be had. A careful division of tasks. Going into each branch of philosophy. Root and branch reform. The continental tinkers will need to be subject to analysis. Taken apart. Reassembled. Made bionic.

This will take time. And patience. Only the soberest and calmest need apply! Need analytic philosophers working on every part of continental philosophy. Extracting analytic value. Converting the most rebarbative formulations into clear declarative propositions. Labouring to make the obscure clear. Taking full advantage of the many advances in analytic philosophy. New advances in clarity!. New progress in the science of distinctness!

We might even be able to automate the process. Surely there’s help to be had from large language models … Surely they’ll develop a bring-Adorno-into-clarity app. A Hegel-in-plain English app.

Heidegger’s causing them particular problems. Let alone Hölderlin! Analytic Philosophy doesn’t do madness … Or poetry …

Al these names! These great European signatures! Of course, Analytic Philosophy has long since outgrown the celebration of individual genius. And the pathos of thought, capital T. All the European infantile fixations on Genius and Great Men. Which is really only a sign of the immaturity of thought. Of a kind of drunkenness in thought.

It’s what happens when you’re given too much rope. Europe, Old Europe, must be brought into line. Its delusions of grandiosity. That philosophy can actually Decide things. That philosophy matters. Queen of the Sciences, and so on.

All that metaphysics! Irrationality! We have to work out what is to be saved and what should to be jettisoned, from European philosophy. From Old Europe in general. And if it’s going to be judged, it has to be presented in a neutral vocabulary at least.

Only then might European philosophy’s contributions to epistemology, ontology, metaphysics be weighed up by analytic experts. Gauged! Carefully assessed! Placed alongside their Analytic contemporaries. By editors of Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Mind. No more hagiographies. No more hero worship. Ancestor worship. Cultic reverence for predecessors. No more uncritical veneration. No more laudatory essays. No more placing on a pedestal. No more mystique about thought. It isn’t helpful. No more general pathos. No more general hysteria. The age of Clarity is arriving.

The analytic philosophy soul. The mediocre soul. The revenge on philosophy soul. The hating-philosophy soul. Which is the Anglo-American instinct.


What analytic philosophy has done to the British! How it has deepened the Britishness of the British – which didn’t need deepening.

And now it’s being exported, all over the world. Now it’s conquering Germany itself. And France. What a triumph! And Mitteleuropa. That’s the catastrophe.

The British didn’t need to be any more British, and yet we’re making them more British. Deepening their Britishness. Their so called commonsensicalness. Their philistinism. It’s getting worse.

They’re cut off from Europe. And now they’ll remake Europe in their own image. Now Europe is falling to them, the analytic philosophers.


None of our questions are analytic philosophy questions. None of our problems. They’re all pseudo-philosophy and folk psychology and existential throwback.


They’re rewriting the European classics. Re interpreting them. Rewriting them in analytic-ese. Re-introducing them. Re-contextualising them. In analytic philosophy™ approved clear Anglo prose.

If only Kant had written in English! Kant’s so much clearer in English. If only Heidegger had the English language at his disposal! And analytic clarity! Analytic luminousness!


They’re so naïve, over the Channel. They don’t know what they’re up against. It’s an invasion. It’s an attack. On philosophy!


They’re ruining philosophy. They’re polluting the European waters. And the European philosophers are too melancholy to fight back. They’re too full of Weltschmerz.

Who can resist analytic philosophy? Who can resist the lure of clarity – of so called clarity? Of clean prose. Of streamlined prose. Of the desire to explain it all. To expose everything to the light.

The light – the tyrant of light! The tyranny of clarity! They’ve exposed Europe to the light. And Europe cannot bear the light.


Europe has fallen. Of course it has. There’s no more Europe, essentially. The analytic virus is spreading. Converting darkness to light. Curing weltschmerz and angst and saudade and all the other things (a false cure.)

*Truly European thought survives only at the corners of Europe. Only at its edges. And only in bastardised form. Only in archaisms. In unreasonableness. In excessive moods. In madness. In degeneracy. In so called Gnosticism.

In the rejection of the world. In absurd world hatreds. In cultic madness.

It only survives in parody. In absurd exaggerations. In arrant contortions. In baroque twistedness. In the spasming of stupidity. In flinches. In obscene gestures. In the unintentional comedy of our lives.


The shadow is leaving Europe. The shadows are being banished, lost. There’s light everywhere. No corners in which to hide. No cracks.

It’s spreading, the light. The light that does not see. The light that hides what is hidden. It’s not the Heideggerian Lichtung.

Disappearing itself will disappear. Hiddenness itself will hide. Darkness will no longer be dark. Silence will no longer be silence.

No more tact. No more discretion. No more veils. No more depth. No more burial. No more earth. No more resistance. No more death – not even death. You won’t be able to die your way out of this.


The terrible reign of positivity. The horrors of the rictus grin. Yes-I-can compliance. General agreeableness.


And no more time. Time itself will be sucked away. No more study. Only Optimisation. Only organisation. And Management. And the official philosophy of organisation and management.


The banishment of negativism – of so-called negativism. Forgetting will be forgotten. Withdrawal will be withdrawn. Concealment will be concealed. There’ll be no more truth. No depth of truth. No dimensions of truth.

Only the correct. Only the positive. Only facts. No more time. Not deep time. No time for contemplation. No pausings. No whilings. No ponderings. No musings. No woolgatherings.

No attunements to the hidden and the deep. No Stimmungen. No fundamental moods – or any moods. No anxiety. No deep, deep boredom. No love – not even love! No darkness. No shadows.

That’s the atrocity. The banishment of anything but light – their so called light. Their shadowless light.


No more dubious religiosity. No more artistic pathos. No more incoherence. No more general misunderstanding.

No more awe at thought, and the possibility of thought. No more self-denigration and self-hatred.

No more energy of despair. No more formless intensity. No more extremity in general.

The sensible, instead. The calm, instead. The measured, instead. The so-called intellectual virtues, instead.

No more fanaticism. No more wildness. Calmness, instead. Temperance, instead. Sobriety, instead. No more death of God talk. Nor death as God talk. No more pessimus stuff.

No more spurious etymologising. No more aimless study. No more black teat of inspiration. No more reading in machine translations. No more magick, in general. No more dubious occultism.

No more pseudo reading. What we think of as reading. No more general spuriousness. No more parody. No more farce. No more jokes-of-all-of-our-lives.

No more laughter at laughter. No more despairing cries in the night.

No more crucifixion in general. No more unwatchable arthouse films. No more music of the depths. No more Jandek!


Analytic philosophy soul cavitation of the European philosophy soul. The hollowing out, in preparation for the analytic philosophy possession. For analytic philosophy takeover. For analytic philosophy automation.

Homo borg genesis is an analytic human. The post human. The analytic philosophy human.


Only Gnosticism can save us. And drunken Gnosticism. And incoherence. And stumbling. And mumbling. And diatribes. And paranoia. And emotions to be despised. And attitudes to be discarded.

All our childish things. Our recidivism. Our primitivism.

Pour it out. As a libation to some disgusting God. To a god of disgust.

Is there a god of disgusting things in Hinduism? There are gods of everything else.


Pour it out. As a disgusting libation to the disgusting.

The gods won’t want it, believe me.

Not even the disgusting gods?

Our disgust with the world: that’s what we need to remember. Our disgust with everything. It needs to be kept at the brink. At the highest intensity. We should never forget it.

The need to top up our disgust. To maintain it at its peak. In its extremity. Disgust should never die down.


Anti-wine, for an anti-universe. Dark matter wine.

Is dark matter disgusting?

It is if it tastes like this.


It’s like the dark period, where the laws of physics don’t apply. On those nano seconds after the big bang. When everything was just disgusting.


What’s the final disgust lesson? What’s the final chapter in the book of disgust?

We have to find disgust itself disgusting. Climb up the ladder of disgust and then throw it away. Disgust at disgust: that’s the goal. Like a negation of negation.

And then what – do we like everything, all of a sudden?

I thought we had to reach absolute disgust. Like disgust in itself, incomparable, nothing but itself. An anti-star of disgust, burning, sufficient unto itself.

There’s no such thing.


What if disgust is only a lack. Disgust is privation. Just as evil is the absence of the good.

I don’t believe that.

What does Organisational Management madness look like, you’re wondering. A frenzy of organising and managing, maybe. Or maybe the opposite: a war against organising and managing. Either way, I’m sure it doesn’t measure up to philosophical madness, which must be entirely superior.


Maybe I’m only mad relative to Organisational Management, which means not particular mad. Which means not especially mad at all. Like when very conventional people say, I’m a bit mad, me. Will you teach me to become philosophically mad? Will you? Or am I incapable of that?


I wonder if I’ll go madder? I wonder whether you’ll bring out the madness in me? Or at least license it.


Or did I only say I was mad to intrigue you? Did I say it because I thought it might draw you in? Did I want to be fascinating? Did I want to fascinate the philosopher?

Imagine that: that I would want to fascinate you. Just for a dose of philosophical cool. You see how we’re secretly in awe of philosophy in Organisational Management? Do you see what your reputation is? How insecure we are in Organisational Management? How lacking in confidence we are, really?

We’re sinking. We’re giving up. Letting ourselves be swallowed down and down. As by some mighty sea serpent. As Jonah was swallowed down by a Leviathan.

We’re being swallowed by the Newcastle earth. Gulped down. We’re sinking.


A vortex of the earth. A kind of earthquake.

Hardly an earthquake – a really well built tunnel. The Victorians built things well.

Cheap labour. Lots of poverty.

And skill. And pride.


Can’t you feel the gravity? Pulling up downward. The earth’s tractor beam. Wouldn’t you just like to be lain down in the sod?

And sodomized. Yes please.


You must feel at home here, Helmut. The Heidegger likes to be close to the soil. A bit of blood, and that would complete things, wouldn’t it?

Who’s your favourite fascist? If you had to pick one? Would you rather be ruled by Hitler or Mussolini?


Katabasis. Are we getting more stupid as we descend, do you think? Are we drooling more? Dragging our knuckles? Are our IQs dropping a point every hundred meters? Saying duh more often?


We are stupid and growing stupider.

Is that a word?

One only the stupid would use.

If it wasn’t for us, the universe wouldn’t be disgusted at itself. That’s why it made us: so that we could express its self disgust.

Why did it want to do that?

Out of perversity. The universe is perverse. Unless it was another force – God – who made us.

Did God make the universe?

Oh, the universe wasn’t God’s fault. It wasn’t God’s fuck up.


God redeemed the universe, by creating us. Once we appeared, the universe knew itself as damned. Through us. If we weren’t here, then there’d be no damnation. There’d be no horror. There’d be no disgust.


This is the only living planet in all the universe. This is the Aberration This is the Exception. We are the ones who shouldn’t be, but are. What a miracle! What a disaster!


We’re the disaster. We’re the atrocity. Why can’t someone put an end to it? Why can’t someone bring it to an end?

Because they want to hear our cries. They want to hear us cry upwards. They want our agony. Our agony is our sacrifice. Is our offering to them.


Have we reached it, the completion of disgust Have we reached it, utter disgust? Have we reached it, the bottom of the abyss? But the abyss has no bottom.


The demonism choking me. The Satanism … Livia-Leviathan ..


Drink – go on. Drink. Raise our toast.

A toast to what?

The universal fuck up. The universal atrocity. Our original sin, which is to say, the sin of existing.

This wine is distilled universe. It’s concentrated universe. It’s essence of universe. It’s what the universe is and is and is. It’s the universe concentrated into a single bottle.

Let’s drink. Let’s take deep gulps.


I’d like to rip my taste buds out. Can you actually rip your taste buds out.

Disgust gone rogue. Disgust gone wild. The dance of disgust. Like the dance of satyrs. What does the dance of disgust look like? Is there a Hindu god of disgust? Is there a saint of disgust?


It’s so very very over. It’s so late. It’ so late that it’s … Early?

The universe shows very bad timing. It knows the game is up. That the game was up long ago.

It can’t go on, can it? It can’t keep it failing and failing and failing to end. In what bad taste does it continue?

What a fuck up. You fucked up, universe! We’re supposed to be dead! In fact, we were never supposed to be born!

You would have been perfect, universe, if it wasn’t for us. You would have been pristine, universe, but you made your mistake.

You made us! You allowed us to appear! Let us open our eyes! What a mistake! How did that happen, blind universe, dead universe. How did you let it happen?


We ended up alive. We ended upraising our fist at it all. Shaking our stupid fists at everything.


We ended up alive. And here we are. The whole evolution thing. And then – us. How many billion years and then us, sitting here. Full of disgust and self-disgust.


The universe wakes up. The universe wakes up and realises what it is. The whole curse. And we sing the song of the horror of the universe. We sound the universe’s disgust and self-disgust.

The end is nigh.

How nigh? Very nigh? It seems to have been nigh for ages. And it looks like it’s going to go on forever.

The end is nigh-on nihilistic.

Are you wearing your death pants, Furio? In case you soil yourself?