Author: Lars Iyer

The rotting wine, in its rotting skin. The putrescent wine, in putrescent skin. Senescent wine … as old as anything in the world. As rotten as anything in the world.

This wine has been rotting all the length of time. It’s been corrupting all the length of time. It’s reached the deepest rancidity.


Look, we’ve been disastered. We’ve been nihilised. We’ve been fucked in the head. We’ve been destroyed. It was done to us. And now it has to be undone. With wine.


We have to become creatures who live wholly in disgust, just as salamanders live in fire. We need to live immanently in disgust. Be nothing more than our disgust. And then? The katabasis will be complete. We’ll live wholly Against. In pure yearning.

We’ll achieve gnosis in our bones. In our guts. Which is what Livia wanted for us.


Disgust as a spiritual practice. As the deepest spiritual practice. As the entire descent of the soul into the world.


Will Gnostics save the world? Gnostics know the world as unsavable. That decay and destruction are themselves messianic.


We’ve already been brought low. We’ve already been crushed, disastered. And now we have to be disgusted.

Aren’t we already disgusted?

Not disgusted enough.


Can you be disgusted by disgust?

Don’t get clever.


Have our tongues turned black? Have our eyes turned black in black?


This wine is the katabasis. It’s taking us down, down down. It’s a disgusting attunement to the disgusting earth.

Thought’s on a katabasis, too – of course it is. Thought has been driven into the earth. Thought wants to go down, only down. And it’s forced to go down. Because there’s no place for thought in this world.

Just as there’s no place for us.

It’s inevitable that we descend. That we go down. In search of a place we can be. A place we can bear.

Whereas really what we want is to find the other of all places, postgraduates. The final shadow. The final darkness. The final secret, where we can lay down our heads.


What is study ever but a descent, postgraduates? But a journey downwards, in the darkness? What has study ever been but a voyage into oblivion?

A tomb: isn’t that what we’re looking for? Somewhere to be buried?


A descent into death. But we’re familiar with death. We know death inside out.

Death, doing its death thing: we’re used to that. We even revel in that.

We feel comfortable among the shades. What have the great European philosophers been to us but shades. What was reading their work for us but a descent to be among the shades?

We’re buried. We’re crushed. We’re being destroyed and destroyed. The weight of it … pressing down on us.

It’s our sky, the Organisational Management campus above. It’s our night.

And the roots of the campus, stabbing down. Its deep foundations, driving down. Its pylons, thrusting into the earth.

The O.M. campus, buckling the earth. Pummelling down the earth. As the glaciers did.

And the earth, appearing to comply. The earth, seeming to sink down, obediently. To get on its knees. The earth, apparently happy to obey.

But the earth is playing the long game and the very long game. The earth is thinking in terms of geological epochs. Knowing that, one day, the O.M. campus would fall, and it would be its turn to rise again. To swell upwards, released. To climb back up into the light …

The underground. The underearth. The underworld. We’re descending into ourselves. Which means into our stupidity.

Does our stupidity have any surprises left? Is there anything unknown in our stupidity? Are there any other dimensions of it, our idiocy? Anything left to surprise us? To catch us unawares?


The underground lesson. What is it? What are we supposed to learn? What’s it all supposed to be About?

Organisational Management wants our Gnosticism. She wants to understand why would reject all her worlds. She wants to know why we’re turned to the other of all worlds. To the earth, the restful earth!

Organisational Management wants the secret of our katabasis. She wants to know why we seek to descend into the earth, to find the earth. Organisational Management wants to know why we want to be disgusted. Organisational Management wants to know!


Our katabasis – our fall. Has Organisational Management ever fallen? Does she know what it is to fall? To descend?


Organisational Management wants the low. We’re the ones from whom it can learn.


Organisational Management wants to seize upon the unmanageable as the unmanageable. The unorganizable as the unorganizable. She wants the darkness – in its darkness.

Why? To do what?

To increase its dominion.

No – to rest from being Organisational Management. Organisational Management, too, wants to lay down its arms.


Organisational Management wants our Gnosticism and Gnosticism in general. It wants our despair. It wants to learn everything – even the unlearnable.


Organisational Management wants to learn disgust. And the philosophy of disgust. And philosophy that is grounded in disgust.


Organisational Management wants to read the Book of Idiocy. She wants to restage it. To replay it – to replay us. The whole Philosophy-in-Organisational-Management fiasco.

Organisational Management’s idiocy-mining. O.M.’s looking to discover the secret of our idiocy. O.M. wants to drill down into our idiocy. OM wants its own katabasis. It wants to descend into its own profounds.

Realisation: we don’t want to complete our mission. We don’t want to the remnant of the old department or whatever.

We couldn’t bear to find it! Even the thought of it! It’d be too much – what it was; what it could be; what was possible, back then.

The used-to-be academia. The once-was academia. It has nothing to do with us. It has nothing to do with this. We these ruins …

We could bear to meet what has disappeared only in its disappearance. The concealed only in its concealment. We could bear to experience the impossibility of what was once so eminently possible in its impossibility. In the enormity of the tension between present and past.

The vanished world! The forgotten world! That we want in its vanishedness, in its having-been-forgotten. That we can know only as we can never know it, as it lies beyond us.

We want its dying without end, old academia. We want the disappeared Eurydice. The forgotten Eurydice. The Eurydice forever dead, and who can’t be saved, who can’t be brought back to life. We want the buried as the buried. The forgotten as the forgotten. We want the dark as the dark. The hidden as the hidden.

Which is to say, we want the earth, this earth, in which everything has always and already disappeared.  We want this flood of earth. This compost of all dead things. This counter-terroir, from which nothing can grow, and into which everything disappears.

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

We want to touch the old department in its shadowy absence. In its veiled presence. As Eurydice, in other words. We want its dying without end, old academia. The ordeal of its absence.

It’s spreading, the light – their light. The light that does not see. The light that hides what should be seen.

It’s spreading. The shadows are being lost. The corners. The cracks …

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


It’s not about illuminating the darkness, but about opening the darkness in the darkness. Opening another dark dimension. It’s about the hidden earth. The deeper earth.

It’s about what’s hidden. About what shows itself only as it retreats, like the hindquarters of God.

Didn’t Blanchot write of the ‘other’ night? Of the elemental deep? Didn’t he write of the night never dark enough? Never dead enough? Of the nocturnal space, in which nothing can abide? Of the night that will not admit us. That will not open to us. To which we belong only as it excludes us.

Descent. We’ve reached as far as we can. We’ve gone as far down as is possible. For us, at least.

There’s farther to go. But we won’t go farther. We can’t, yet. There are depths of spiritual attainment that are not for us. There are profounds to reach that we cannot reach. This is as far down as we can go. These are the limits of our descent.


When will our self-hatred be complete? When will it reach completion?

Why have we been made to live this travesty of life? What are we living for? Why are we living at all? For whose amusement? For whose entertainment? Are we just being run in some simulation? What is the Purpose of this? And if there’s no Purpose? If there’s no one to be entertained? If it’s only us – only our drama? If we’re all alone under the skies? Our self-torture? Our self-hatred?


Who made us live? Who did this to us? What curse was this? What parody is this? Whose laughter do we hear?


But we know the lies as lies, don’t we? We know the poison is poison. We know the filth is filth. We know the desecration a desecration. We know the Abomination for what it is. We know the Abyss. We’re on first name terms with the void. We see things – certain things. We’re not non-player characters – not entirely.

We’ve been buried with continental philosophy. We’ve been locked in the coffin with European philosophy. We’re stuck with the corpse of European thought.


We’ve chosen to go down with its ship, European philosophy: is that noble? Is that good?


Are we ennobled? Are we martyrs? Are we dying for a great cause, even if it’s a cause we barely understand?

All I know is that we’re suffocating. And there’s not much air.


And down went European thought. Down it plunged, into the earth.

Do we even know what it is? What are we to do?


Only those who have passed through certain initiatory rites … only those who have been through rituals of purification … Only those who have likewise been driven into the earth … Only those who have been made to sink, who’ve had no other choice but to sink … Only those who’ve even been made to seek their burial. To have the soil fallen over their heads … Only those who’ve found themselves in coffins of their own … Only those who’ve sought to lay their heads on the black sod … Who’ve had no choice but to bury themselves.


Our descent. We haven’t gone down deeply enough. We haven’t plumbed out own abyss – not entirely. We haven’t reached our own depths – the depths of our stupidity.


There are depths – greater depths. There are profounds that we cannot guess at, that we cannot access. We haven’t sunk far enough. We haven’t seen ourselves in the underground mirror – which we must. Which we have to.


We’re not slain. We do not lie with the dead – the European dead. We’re still plying our stupid philosophical trade.

We’re still UK European philosophers. We still have our university positions. We haven’t been destroyed.

The horror hasn’t reached us yet, not really, Our own horror – the horror that we are. That we embody. The desecration that we live.

We don’t hate ourselves enough – not nearly enough. We’re still content to breathe. To walk. To stay above the earth. We’re still alive, and we shouldn’t be alive.

Why have we been allowed to live? Who’s letting us walk the earth? Whose fault are we? Who made us like this? Restless … Discontent … Alive only in hatred …

Why were we lifted above our station? Out of our place? Why did Livia do this to us? What have we been brought here to do?