Author: Lars Iyer

We’ve been carried away on a disgusting wave. A disgusting wave on a disgusting sea. That’s part of the great ocean of disgust. AKA the universe.


We’ve swallowed the poison – the poison of the world. And Livia’s wine is the counter-poison.


We have to be disgusted. To be disgusted by what actually is disgusting – the world.


This is a disgust against disgust. That shows the disgusting. Reveals the world as what it really is – disgusting.

It’s against the lies, this wine. The lies we live by. And the lies that we tell ourselves about the lies.


We have to die to the lies. We have to die into truth.


The wine lifts the spell. The whole enchantment. Under which we’ve been living for our whole lives. All the lies. All the untruths.


The truth is revolting. The truth makes us gag.

Yes – in this world. But in another world, on the right timeline, this wine is the sweetest nectar. In the world beyond this, the wine is sherbert.

We’re made of humiliations. We’re nothing but humiliations. At every stage! At every level!

So thwarted. So beaten. Like dogs! Like curs!


Shouldn’t we be more than this? Should we be able to lift ourselves out of ourselves? Out of our pasts! Out of our pits!


How are we supposed to live, anyway? Must we always be drunk in charge of our lives? Or drunk and not in charge of our lives? Or hungover?


Isn’t everything just wrong? The entire universe? Hasn’t it all gone off course? Aren’t we on the wrong timeline? Of course we are.

Who would we have been, in our proper lives? Who would we have been, on the right timeline?


Always reeling from one catastrophe to another.

I like the way you can whip up torment out of nothing, Shiva. Zero to torment. Quite impressive, really. Like, torment just bootstraps itself through you.


There’s something groundless in your torment, Shiva. Something gratuitous. There’s no reason for it. It just surges out of nothing.


You’re very good at doing torment. It’s like, cue Shiva torment. That’s why Livia likes you.


Working up your hatred for poison and lies. Poison, Shiva. Lies! They’re telling lies to us. About poison! You go, Hindu boy!

A Hindu literature. A Hindu litearo-philosophy. A Hindu philosophical literature. The idiot-buch would have an Indian twist.


If any of us knew anything about the Upanishads, we’d quickly see through you. Like, how many Upanishads can you actually name? Have you actually read?


Time to draw the Indian sword out of its scabbard. Time to wield the Upanishads or whatever.

The postgraduates have been beamed up, or something. It’s the postgraduate rapture.

What about the party? I don’t understand.

It’s the postgraduates’ way of saying goodbye. They’ve joined the paragraduates now. They’ve escaped.


I can’t believe the postgraduates left us behind.

They’re in a better place now.


Why can’t we be beamed up, too?

Because we’re not as young. As pure.

What about Fiver – he’s gone, too.

He never finished his PhD.

Of course.


Didn’t you hear that whooshing sound? That was the postgraduates being beamed up. They’ve left us – this whole dimension. This timeline, or whatever. There’ll be no more postgraduates, ever again.

They were too good for the world.

We’ll never hear them sing, not anymore.

Which is it, philosopher: is it all unreal – or is it evil and disgusting and so on? Because those two things are very different.


Is everything unreal or evil and disgusting? Dissociation versus disgust – which is the more profound Grundstimmung?


Feeling unreal isn’t the same as feeling disgusted.

Maybe it’s the feminine version of the same thing.

 It’s all too real. It’s stiflingly real.

 I just want to drift off into vagueness. Vagueness is, like, my superpower. I’m good at vagueness.

I want to vague out. Vague out the universe. Vague out myself. Vague out everything. I’ve had enough of everything.


Vague – that’s the strategy. Vague out – that’s what I do in Organisational Management meetings. That’s what I do when Alan talks to me. Where were you? Alan will ask me. And I’ll say: nowhere. Anywhere but here.


It’s like I’m just bleeding out into nothingness. It’s like I’m evaporating. Can human beings evaporate?

You sound like a stoner.

It’s the afternoon. It’s what afternoons do to me. It’s about taking about God does to me.


Can we smoke something? Do you have anything to smoke? Do you have a stash hidden behind your Angelopoulos DVDs?

Have you ever seen the nakedness of the void, postgraduates? Could you bear to see it? Only at a certain point. When you’re ready for it. And perhaps you’ll never be.

You won’t know it unless you work part-time. Until you know full precarity. Only then. Because the part-timer works beneath the void. Beneath the empty sky.

Only the part timer can see it: the void. The part-time European philosopher. The part-time idiot European philosopher. With no prospects!


Follow their example, postgraduates. Start the equivalent of an underground church. Of an apocalyptic cell.


It’s a matter of ascesis. Of some deliberate discipline. Of discovering a way of life, and philosophy as a way of life.

Don’t do what we did. Don’t compromise. Don’t think you’re condemned to a life like ours.


Refuse the world, postgraduates. Scavenge. Glean. Live in the margins. Reinvent what it means to live.


Find postgraduate Narnia! Postgraduate Neverland! Find the forest at the back of the wardrobe. Proceed second to the right, and straight on till morning.

Be like the lost boys and girls. Be lost postgraduates, living in the Home Under the Ground.


Alas postgraduate Neverland is closed to us. And we’re too old to enter postgraduate Narnia. Too old! Too corrupt! Too tainted with the world! And with all the things we’ve had to do to survive in the world!


We need some of your postgraduate fairydust. Sprinkle a little upon us. We need to believe in you, postgraduates. To light the fire of our belief from the fire of yours. To sing out Little Drummer Boy and its cousin-songs …


You safeguard study, we who have forgotten what it is to study, postgraduates. You hold onto time – to study time, time without end, without goal.


Dig out your warren, postgraduates. Surround yourself with the earth. Hibernate here, if you needed to. Vegetate in the darkness.


Build dens, postgraduates. Go down. Stay down. Be unnoticeable. Undetectable.

Keep your heads beneath the parapet. Hide when the tourists walk through the Victoria tunnel. Build a whole civilisation down here. An anti-civilization …


Become new kinds of cenobite. In a new kind of desert.


You’ll barely remember us. You’ll tell fantastic stories to each other. Forget the old life. The worldly life.


There’s to be no finishing anything, postgraduates. Only suspension. Only pause.

Becalmed: that’s what you’ll ee. Adrift. On the high seas! Spacewalking. Drifting through the heavens.

Potentiality – that’s what you’ll have. But unrealised potential. Never to be translated into action. Never to become anything.

Perpetually larval: that’s what you’ll be. Perpetual nymphs. Always changing, like wax in a lava-lamp.

If we keep you safe, we keep something of ourselves safe, too. Our hopes and dreams – isn’t that it? The dreams of a new kind of human being. Homo ludens, not homo faber. No work, but life. No praxis. Not an actor, but a player.


We are pilgrims in this world: haven’t you taught us that, postgraduates? We’re strangers in this world. Migrants. In perpetual peregrination.


You don’t have to be awake anymore, postgraduates. Sleeping philosophers: that’s what you’ll become. Dreaming philosophers. Who’ve given into sleep. Who aren’t like us, all awake, all vigilant, all ardency, n the perpetual emergency …

Sleep for us, postgraduates! Dream for us! Sink into the earth! The dreaming earth!


An underground International: that’s what we’re dreaming of. On your behalf! Exile in the desert of the earth! Finding the least evil place in the world, and hiding yourself there.

Such a moderate, Gazelle. We need moderates. There’s plenty of work for moderates. Not everyone has to be crazy, do they? Or stupid. Or imbeciles. But there’s another sense of work. Livia’s work. Livia’s plan.

Oh, stop with your Livia’s plan.


We were to have no investment in the world, that’s what Livia said. Wasn’t that the point? But you’re invested in things, Gazelle. You have a future. You want a future in this world. You want good things to happen, and even expect good things to happen. You’re a reformist, not a revolutionary.

You don’t want to abandon it all, Gazelle. You haven’t got the temperament. You haven’t reached the disgust that we have. Maybe because you were never really an hourly-paid part timer. Maybe because you had a least a couple one-year posts. Maybe because you were always going to get a job or at least a postdoc somewhere or other. You never really were sick with precarity.

But above all, because you’re several IQ points above us, Gazelle. It’s a matter of raw intelligence. Which is largely inheritable! Which, over a certain age, you can’t do much about!


Does everything have to be a disaster?

Yes it does Gazelle. Yes it does. A disaster, or heading towards disaster. balancedness. This isn’t a time for the well-balanced. For moderation!

Madness, Gazelle. There’s no such thing as a moderate madness.


I’ll bet you don’t even believe in the Bug, Gazelle. Or in the Postgraduate Child.

The postgraduate what?


These times belong to drunks, Gazelle. And the hungover. The times belong to the end times junkies. To the apocalypse-entranced! And the eschatology-fascinated! These times belong to the sent mad. To the idiots! And to geniuses too – who knows?

These times can be grasped only by philosophers, Gazelle. Twisted philosophers. Fuck -p philosophers, full of the darkest Grundstimmungen. This isn’t a time for good sense. Or common sense. This isn’t a time for moderation. For being sensible. For well balanced arguments.


You can work away on Susan Taubes, Gazelle. But you’ll never understand why she killed herself. Why she took her own life, in the end.

She was fucked up by Jacob Taubes. He was a monster. She was head fucked. Driven mad.

It was her Gnosticism, Gazelle. A direct result of her Gnosticism. Her death was a following through of everything she wrote.


Which is why this isn’t a time of sober critical exegesis. You have to be Susan Taubes, rather than just write about her. It’s not enough to paraphrase her work. To weigh up and assess her arguments.

It’s an emergency, her oeuvre. It’s a cry. Don’t you feel that you have to acknowledge that somehow? Isn’t failing to do so the worst kind of bad faith?

You have to look at your situation, Gazelle. A little suicidalism won’t do. A little modesty. It has to be greater than that. Madness, Gazelle – that’s what you have to unleash. It’s a matter of a personal apocalypse.

You have to be destroyed, Gazelle. Broken in two. Could you let that happen to you?

You have to feel the tension. The forcefield, or whatever. Between you and what you’re not – between you and Susan Taubes Between you and genius. Between you and … the thunder. From which the lightning might come.

Only those who are really fucked in the head, Gazelle. Only those … who know their failure – really know it. That it isn’t just failure. That it isn’t about throwing over thinking for life – for love, or whatever.


What do you hate, Gazelle? What do you love? Do you think Susan Taubes is your ticket out of here? Your scholarly commentary on Susan Taubes? Your exit route. Your ejector seat from Mercia philosophy?

You’re always holding what needs to be thought at a distance. With academic tongs. Wearing academic hazmat, so you won’t be infected. With your university mask, so you won’t breathe it in.

Do you think that’s what the end times need: another scholar? Fuck scholars. Fuck scholarship. This is a time of ignorance. This is a time of generalised stupidity. Fuck the intellectual virtues.

These are the times of impatience, Gazelle. Of immoderation. Of drunken study. The times of inebriation. This isn’t a time for a scholarly career. For quoting and paraphrasing.

Degeneracy, Gazelle. Persiflage. Plagiarism. A time for the plummeting of all values. Cometh the disaster, cometh the idiots. Cometh the catastrophe, cometh those of the catastrophe. The catastrophe-wallahs. That’s who we are. Join us, Gazelle.

I suppose you can see father than we can, Gazelle. You have a greater intellectual vista. And depths. You’re probably deeper than us, too.


You never did belong in our loser’s corner, Gazelle. You were always heading for somewhere better.


You weren’t like us. You never howl at the moon like we do. You never lived on the brink.


You never got as drunk as we did. You were never quite as desperate. Your part time years weren’t as bad. You weren’t hourly paid – the lowest of the low. You had a couple of one-year contracts – comparative luxury. If you hadn’t have got this job, you would have got postdocs at least. Then a permanent lectureship, somewhere else. Some crappy university, no doubt. But you’d have worked you way to somewhere better.


Face it, you’re the head girl type, Gazelle.


What’s it like having that little bit of extra IQ headroom, Gazelle? Having that slightly enhanced ability to think?

What’s it like to actually have some semi-ideas, Gazelle? That are sort of your own?

Stop bullying!


To be lost among the midwits, Gazelle. What a fate. What a fuck up!


How many IQ points are you above us? How much more intelligent are you? What can you do that we can’t? But I suppose we can have no understanding of what you might do that we can’t.

We can’t conceive of you – all the things you must think! All the ideas you must have! Inspiration, almost constant!

Stop it, you guys.

No really, Gazelle. You have it. You have the gift. You should be our great helmswoman. But you have better things to do that to lead us. We should leave you to your research. Give you as much time as possible.

Because really, you’re going to carry us, Gazelle. You’re here to lead us upwards. To put the department on the map. You can help us up the league tables. God knows, we need a reputation. You’ll be the making of us.


Did Livia know who she was hiring? Where you might take us? I’ll bet she didn’t. Livia didn’t reckon on you. Or perhaps she did. Perhaps it’s all 5D chess, and wheels within wheels.


You’re the wild card, Gazelle. Did Livia think putting you amongst us might help us reach for the philosophical stars? It raises the average IQ, undoubtedly …


You’re on your way out, Gazelle. You’re not really here. You’re not with us. You’ll move onto better things. And when you do – when you escape to some normal department, some better department, spare a thought for us, every now and again.

Oh, we never expect to hear from you again, once you achieve your international career. This will all have been an embarrassing interlude. A period of fuckedupness. You won’t want to remember. No one need remember your Newcastle years. Like Foucault’s Upsala years. An anomaly. That no one understands.

No, you won’t remember your old thought-companions. The whole Livia imbroglio. You won’t spare a thought for us, once you’re launched on your international career.


Did Livia made a mistake in appointing you, Gazelle? Because you really weren’t a waif or a stray, were you? You weren’t like the rest of us.

Why did Livia place you amongst us? It was cruel, in a way. Was she trying to lift us up? Raise our sights? Wasn’t there a purpose to everything Livia did? Ot was it to force us lower. To lower our gaze. To understand what we would never, never be able to do. To keep us humble. To keep our gaze on the earth. With the humus.


To leap over us all, with a Gazelle-like leap.