Author: Lars Iyer

We’re not entitled to our angst. We don’t deserve our existentialism. How dare we presume to have fundamental moods. I mean, are we European all of a sudden? Have we become philosophers?

They’re beyond us, fundamental moods. We’re not worthy of them, angst and the rest. We haven’t earnt it, European angst, European moods.

Our anxiety can only ever be a sham anxiety. A fake anxiety. An all-too-British ersatz anxiety, which is really only an anxiety about not having anxiety – proper European anxiety.

It’s not who we are, individually. It’s what we add up to.

What do we add up to?

It’s scenius, not genius.

So this is scenius?


I think our leader’s passed out.

I think our leader’s clinically depressed. I think our leader’s died. Wake up, Shiva.

What’s the opposite of a reprieve? We’ve been spared. But for nothing good. We’ve been set aside – saved, but not for any purpose.


What if we’re just part of the life-cycle of something greater than we are? What if something’s living through us? I don’t know what that means. What any of this is about. I just have a sense of something greater.


What’s the antidote – the antidote to the world?


Who rules the world? Who are they? Who are the poisoners in chief?


Everything that’s made us what we are! All the books we didn’t understand! All our café sitting. And afternoon wandering. All our drunkenness – particularly that. Our permanent hangovers. All the languages we haven’t learnt! The books we haven’t read!

The only direction this is heading in is death. The only way things are heading. The only momentum I can see – is towards death.

And yet it’s never ending. And yet it never seems to ease. It goes on forever.

It’s the eternal. It’s the on and on.


All of Creation wants to die. All Creation wants to come to an end. Wants to breathe its last breath. Wants to sink down on its knees. Even the mountains, sinking down on their knees. Even the rivers, sinking on their knees.

Rivers don’t have knees. Nor do mountains, last time I looked.


The whole spangled sky is God’s corpse. The corpse of God is the stars. The galaxies. All the blackness. It’s all just fragmentation of the divine unity.


The will to die, philosopher. What about the will to live?

The will to live is the will to die.

So death wins?

Death always wins. And death should win.

Because you want death to win, right?

Death’s already won.

But in the meantime, we’re alive.


‘God is dead, and his death was the beginning of the world’.

Our light will shine. Not the light of clarity. Not the fake light, but the true light, that shows what is hidden. That shows forgetting. That shows darkness. Shows obscurity. The hiddenness. The must-not-appear …


The humanities have to take the dark path – the world negating path. The humanities must become Gnostic or not at all. The humanities have to drink deep …


Disgust is the path. We have to go where things are worst. Where thoughts are at their darkest. We have to think disgusting things. With disgust. Holding onto our disgust. All the horrors of existence. And the horror of existence itself.

They can’t alter the Board of Studies without our consent. The Board of Studies is inviolable. A sanctum. An ark. The holy of holies.

They can’t touch it! They can’t change it from above! They don’t have the authority. Even the university president himself …

We would have to make changes – if there were any to be made. We would have to alter it.

And that’s what they understand. Which is why their tactic is demoralisation. General waring down. They’re trying to fuck us psychologically. That’s how they’re going to breach the sanctum. Invade the inner citadel. The Board of Studies holy of holies. They’ve been working on us all along.

The idea is that our curriculum would no longer be our curriculum. That if they fuck with our heads enough, we’d spontaneously alter what we teach. Introduce business elements. Make it business relevant. We’d turn it into some best practice philosophy of business department.


We’ll think that there’s nothing else we can do. That we come crawling to the Bos, utterly resigned. Accepting Organisational Management victory as a given. Thinking that we have to make the changes. That it’s fate. The way of things. That it’s predestination.

They’ll have to make us believe in our own impotence. That we’re good for nothing. That we can’t do anything. This is how they work on us. Their whole shock and awe op. Their behavioural psychological warfare. Their general nudging. The whole demoralisation programme. The whole disgraceful roll out. It’s a psychological implantation, first of all. It happens in the head.


One of the rare occasions where Livia seemed to address us with absolute urgency.

We must protect the Board of Studies, she said. At all costs! It’s the soul of philosophy at Mercia. They can’t touch us, if they don’t make us change the Board of Studies. We had the power of the Board of Studies on our side – always.

Livia, serious for once. Speaking with absolute urgency. With no ironic distance. No smiling distance.

The Board of Studies is the central meeting. The core meeting. Where the programme regulations are decided. Where the essential operations of Philosophy at Mercia are confirmed.

The Board of Studies wasn’t part of the comedy. It’s what she worked to protect. The Board of Studies shield.

Philosophy, to us, was an atmosphere. Wa a climate. Was a temperament. Was a temperature.

It was a perfume. A haze. A rumour. It was a pattern of drift. A current. A warm front. A movement of air in air. Of water in water.


We weren’t hard edged. We weren’t tough-minded. We didn’t have sharpened teeth, spiritually. We weren’t philosophical predators. Philosophical big-beasts. We weren’t philosophical Jack the rippers. Cut throats. We weren’t pirates, on the high seas of philosophy.

Skulkers, instead. All huggers. Avoiders. Recluses. The type who wanted only to hide out with their books. To live in disguise. In retreat. To inhabit philosophical dens. To descend into their philosophical burrows.


We weren’t self-promoters. Freebooters. We avoided philosophical discussions. We were no good at it, philosophical to and fro. We were inept in debate.

Philosophical talk would only leave us flustered. Panicked. Saying any old nonsense. Coming up with any old thing. Standing there bewildered. Scratching our heads. Dumbfounded.

No, no, we didn’t want debate. We didn’t want our ideas, our so-called ideas, tested. We didn’t want to venture out on philosophical public. Even giving papers was anathema to us. We didn’t have the skills. We feared the exposure.

We didn’t like to justify ourselves. To argue. To reason, even – not in public. We didn’t want to be seen to think. To extrapolate. To improvise. Even to read our own words.

Unbearable – our own words! Everything we’d ever written. And said! Everything we’d said! Ever! To say more was only to deepen the sin. Let alone writing more. Let alone publishing.

It would just make things more entangled. To compromise ourselves more deeply.


That we had to exist! That we were supposed to write more! That there was more time! That we were going to live longer! That we weren’t just going to pop out of existence! Just be destroyed!

And why was that – why wouldn’t God destroy us? Why wouldn’t he just take us out, all at once?

Proof, if it was needed, that God didn’t exist. Proof, if it were needed, that the archons were in charge. That the demi-urge was the level-boss of this world.


That we existed! That we were made to live on! Teaching philosophy and even writing philosophy! What agony! What tragedy! Only it didn’t rise to tragedy, not really. It was too pathetic for that.


On our minds: only the end, only non-existence. Resting our heads in death. Falling asleep in nothingness. The lure of the void.

No, we were not to be alive. It wasn’t for us, this being alive.


Time: we didn’t want it! No more time! No more minutes! No more seconds! No more agony – the agony of hours. That it wasn’t the End! That the apocalypse hadn’t come! That the roll wasn’t being called up yonder was agony to us. That the Man had yet to come around. That the last judgment was delayed – infinitely so!

Livia’s achievements. What she’d done. Where she’d been. Who she’d known. A doctorate at twenty-three. Completed early (in eighteen months!) A raft of publications – hundreds of papers. The research teams she’d led. The money she’d brought into the university. The conferences where she’d keynoted. Her work in pure mathematics. In applied mathematics.


She was always pragmatic, Livia. It was always Realpolitik, for her.

She was an emigrant. An exile. A refugee. Who’d escaped communism!

She had no fallback. No plan B.

But she’d play the West at their own game – and win. The amount of money she brought into the university … The research funds that she had at her disposal.

Her trips over the Atlantic and back. To the greatest ivy league universities. Her keynoting – at the best universities. A couple of decades at the top of her game. One of the most renowned mathematicians in the world. And a philosophical mathematician, to boot. A mathematical philosopher, pretty much.

And what did she do, in the end, with her research money? What did she spend it on, her mathematical income stream, at the height of her career? Setting up her own philosophy department.


Livia’s forward planning. Her schemes.  

The cultivation of a humanities professors at Mercia. Carefully winning them over. Earning their respect. Impressing them with her seriousness. A mathematical colleague. With an intense interest in the arts. In culture.

Livia did the emotional work. Entertained them, these jewels of the humanities. These conduits of Old Europe. Impressed them with her talk of interdisciplinarity. Of cross faculty collaboration.

So she brought them over. They would support the initiative.  They offered expertise – as if it were needed. Make sure it was approved. Helped it through the appropriate committees. Added their names to the paperwork. Which is why Livia ended up reviving philosophy, restarting it, at a university that had closed its original department back in the ‘80s.


They were classy, her Europeans. They knew what was what. They came from prosperous European homes. Cultured homes. They were sons and daughters of professors. Bloodlines of European academics. Not like Livia.

Prosperous, cultured, confident. So what were they doing at Mercia? Passing through, probably. A UK sojourn, for a few years at least. Anglophiles, for some reason. Sort of like W.G. Sebalds. Intellectuals on tour. Doing the melancholy European thing. All kind of Welt-schmerzy.

Insulated from the UK. Not dragged down by the UK. Not half destroyed by the UK. Not inwardly collapsed because of the UK. Not rendered witless by the UK. Not become provincial, by living in the UK. Immune from it, the UK.

Breathing their own European air …


Livia liked to drink it in, our stupidity. Like to sip from our idiocy. It made her giddy. Made her high.

She liked gaucherie. And provincialness. And unwittingness – a c certain innocence. The innocence of knowing no better.

She liked it when we half-forgot our idiocy. When we weren’t burdened by it. Wasn’t crushed by it. She liked it when at our most childlike. At our least self-consciousness. Livia liked us not knowing what we were doing.

All but humming to ourselves, as we turned our philosophical pages. Singing to ourselves, as we wrote in our offices. As we busied ourselves teaching, lecture-writing.

Fools, but unwitting fools. The best kind of fools – the ones who didn’t know they were fools. Who’d never been cursed with intelligence.

Maybe it’s halahala.

Hala what?

Halahala. The most lethal poison there is. It threatened to destroy the universe. So Shiva drank it all up. He was going to sacrifice himself to maintain the cosmic equilibrium.

Then what happened?

His wife gripped his neck with both hands to stop it reaching his stomach. Shiva held the poison in his neck. It turned his throat blue. Which is why he’s also called Nilakantha – the blue-throated one.

And he didn’t die?

The poison is negativity, anger, pain – all the stuff that could destroy you. Or the world. Unless it can be contained properly. So it’s a story about attaining inner control. About managing negativity. Maintaining the cosmic balance and all that.

Are we on the edge of unlimited abundance, philosopher? Some tech utopia that will meet all our desires? We won’t have to work anymore, that’s what they say. The government will pay us not to work. Universal basic income …

So long as we keep in line. So long as we don’t say anything or write anything or think anything against the regime.

Look, the new totalitarianism will be ever so benign. We’ll barely even notice it. And we’ll get used to it. We’ll learn what we’re to say or not to say. It’ll become instinctive. We’ll self-censor and all that. And after a bit, we’ll barely notice it. We’ll adjust.

But it’ll be worth it. We’ll be entirely fulfilled for the first time in human history. Even you, philosopher. With all your discontent. Don’t scoff, philosopher. Don’t scoff at happiness. I supposed happiness isn’t good enough for philosophers.