Author: Lars Iyer

You’ve been dormant until now, Helmut. You’ve been hibernating until now. Errupt, Helmut! Become the Heideggerian volcano! Drown us in Heideggerian lava!


What’s the Heideggerian life cycle, Helmut? Is it like in Alien – do you lay weird eggs? Do they hatch into the equivalent of, like, Heideggerian facehuggers? Do they disappear down your throat? Do they grow inside you, and burst out of your stomach? Is this all part of some devious plan to take over the world.


Is there a great mating cry of the Heideggerian, Helmut? Is it like Spock – only once every seven years? Will you unleash a great cry, hoping there might be another Heideggerian in the vicinity? Which is unlikely, since we’re in Newcastle! In the UK!

Ah, the lonely Heideggerian. There should be a song about that.


Jotting down your Heideggerian thoughts in your own Black Notebooks. What’s in your notebooks, Helmut – racist thoughts? Fascist thoughts? Are you writing the Little Book of Persecuting Jews?


You seem a lot happier, Helmut. You’re positively blooming in your Heideggerian skin. I guess you’re just busy being the best Heideggerian you can be.

In the other word, we are not dead. In the other world, we’ve never told a lie. In the other world, what we call death is what we call life.

In the other world, all the inversions are inverted. In the other world, the lies are untold.

In the other world, God is all in all. There’s no need for the word, God. There’s no need for the word, love. There’s no need for the word, peace.

But we’re in this world.

And what’s Organisational Management, in the other world?

Organisational Management doesn’t exist, in the other world.

And who are in the other world?

We’re alive, but not as we know it. In a different way. In an unimaginable way. Like angels, maybe.

Are we angels, on the other timeline? Beautiful.

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.