Author: Lars Iyer

Think of the summer, postgraduates! Warm yourselves with thoughts of the summer!

Think of the end of teaching and the opening out of summer, postgraduates. Think of the final Board of Studies, the final Board of Examiners, and the expansiveness of summer.

Think of summer flight, borne by summer winds, postgraduates. Think of setting sail into the summer, of catching the summer breeze.

Think of the near-empty summer campus, excerpt for a few foreign students, postgraduates. Except for a few academics gathered for summer conferences.

Think of our philosophy accommodation, office doors open, postgraduates. Of wide-open windows. Of the wind-stirred blinds. Of desk fans moving drowsily from side to side.

Think of your summer studies, postgraduates. Of your summer reading. Were you going to tackle The Science of Logic this year? The entirety of Kierkegaard, including the sermons? Were you going to eat your Aristotle greens and finally tackle the Metaphysics? And what were you going to write, this summer? What was going to be your writing project, this summer.

Think of looking back through your notebooks, postgraduates. Of letting your thoughts assemble. Letting them come calmly together, as light poured through them. As warmth buoyed them, lifted them.

Think of summer thoughts, postgraduates. Summer ideas! That seem to float upwards. That seem to rise into the sky, like fire balloons. Summer thoughts, rising. Summer ideas, rising. But casually. Neglectfully. Without paying any attention to themselves. Without trying. Without sweat.

Summer, postgraduates! The opposite of our Organisational Management winter! The opposite of our White-Witch winter. Our Moominland-in-November winter.

Let it burn in your hearts, postgraduates! Let it warm your hearts! The coming summer. The summer that still hasn’t arrived. The summer condition –without beginning and without end.

Draw strength from it: the inexhaustible summer, postgraduates! The summer that you’ll never be able to use up! The summer that never ends! That is always but a dream of summer – the summer of inexhaustible potential. In which great things could be done. No: could be undone. Think of the undoing of things – of all things. Of the idling of summer.

The idling summer, postgraduates: think of that. Weeks without mooring. Those weeks of summer voyage. Summer languor. Summer luxuriance. The great summer stretching of limbs. Under the summer vault!

Think of your eternal youth, postgraduates. Your perennial faith. Your perpetual beginning, that’s never begun, that’s forever ahead. Of your secret childhood, that hasn’t happened yet. That hasn’t been crushed in you.

 Think of the summer of hope – of idled hope, postgraduates. Of idled work. Of idled reading – and writing. Of work without work, which was more about unworking. About unpicking the stitches.  

Not work, but the contemplation of work, postgraduates. Not work, but study detached from work, fallen out of step with work. That remains out of phase with anything productive …

When time seems to lose all direction, postgraduates. When time seemed to sink into itself – lie down. Think of time pools. Of time hazes, like heat over summer roads. Think of the air turned thick. O, postgraduates. Of the air turned runny.

Summon it up inside you, postgraduates: the memory of summer, that is also the expectation of summer. Of the summer to come.

Organisational Management is the form the end will take. The endless end. Bureaucratised. Administered from here to eternity.


There’s not even a magnificence to the collapse. It’s not even some sublime spectacle.

Is there a reason why we’re here?

Everything happens for a reason.

(Pointing at Helmut.) What’s the reason for him? What’s the reason for Heideggerians?

Didn’t Heidegger write a book about the essence of reasons?

And the principle of reason. That was the title: The Prinicple of Reason. All I can remember is he kept quoting that line from Angelius Sileius: A rose is without why.

A Helmut is without why: I like that.

The world is disgusting.

We know that.

More than usually disgusting.


Disgustosophy. That’s what we do now.


There’s a new quality in our disgust.

Do you think?

I think our disgust’s giving us gravitas. I think it’s giving us substance.

The soft suicide of our lives. Which will one day become hard suicide.

Amazing we’re still alive.

You don’t have to do much to be still alive, do you?

Every day is the day of wrath. Every day is the last day.

Ah, the life of the desire to die.

The dynamics of self-hatred. The life of self-hatred. Of our thrashings. Of our convulsions …


Nothing hates itself like a human being. We’re the uniquely fucked up species, right?

What’s wrong with us? How did self-loathing become a form of enjoyment? Like scorpions stinging themselves.


Shutdown, that’s what we want. The final final. Credits rolling, or whatever. The end, in big capitals. Fin, like the end of a Godard film.

Our kind … So ill-fitting. So maladjusted.

Why did we appear? What are we for? What were we brought to Newcastle to do?


We’re a type that only appears at the end, as a sign of the end. Of the sickness of the end.


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.

The party’s over. The end’s come and gone. We were too late to be late.


Our torments of posthumousnesss. Our throwback existentialism. Our very-late-for-the-party philosophical Angst.

Of course, our madness is really a counter-madness. Our madness is really a madness against their madness. Against their delirium. It’s a protective madness, of a sort. It’s a sheltering madness.

This is God’s suicide watch. God’s looking down at us.


Emergency extraction, that’s what we need. To be beamed the fuck up.


At least we can share the despair.