Author: Lars Iyer

This is what Livia knew was going to happen – or not happen.

Livia wanted to complete our Gnosticism, by making us pass through the failure of our apocalyptic hopes.

Because we do hope, despite everything. It’s a perverse hope – a twisted hope – but it’s still hope. The hope that’s someone’s going to stop us. Someone’s going to put an end to it – and us. That someone – God, maybe – will call time on the whole disaster.


We were never hopeless enough. Never despairing enough. We didn’t accept the endlessness.

But now – with the thirteen bottle of wine? And with what follows the thirteen bottle of wine, i.e., nothing? NOTHING – in capital letters?

Nothing is going to change. Nothing’s going to happen. The empire lasts forever. It’ll only ever be Rome AKA Babylon AKA the whole shitstem, and isn’t that the point?


We don’t want to be reconciled to this world – not this world. Still the hope that our idiocy will turn itself out and reveal itself as anything but idiocy. That disgust won’t really be disgust, but a way of savouring sweetness, and goodness. That the most disgusting wine will be the most perfect wine, from the perfect terroir. The New Jerusalem terroir, or whatever …

The great lesson is that banality wins. Is that the mundane wins. The world will last forever.

Will it?


You can cry for the end all you want. You can think that cry is the purest cry of all. But the end won’t come. Nothing will actually happen. Death isn’t going to come because you want it to. Isn’t that the great lesson?


The disgusting will always be disgusting and it won’t mean anything. Isn’t that painful?


Bathos is what you’re frightened of. The everyday – that’s the most frightening thing of all to you. Ordinary life and ordinary people. The world just going on. Imagine that: the world just going on. Look at you shudder.


Because you think it’s all in terribly bad taste, this going on. This endless survival. You think you’re in some kind of bad taste – so bad, that it should offend Someone. God maybe. Who would just strike you out.

The fact is that there is no Good Taste. That the adults aren’t in the room. That God’s not in his heaven …

Anything goes in these times. It’s just contortion in these times. It’s just twistedness, in these times. It’s grotesquerie, that’s all.

And that’s what life is, in these times – continuing beyond the point when it would have to make sense.

Day follows day. Day succeeds day, and what does it amount to? Can’t someone just put us down? Put us humanely to sleep? Wouldn’t that be the thing?


We’ve finished drinking. We can throw the empty bottle down and … what? We can drain it to the dregs and … nothing. Nothing happens. Livia doesn’t return at the moment of our deepest need. Death doesn’t come with his scythe, to cut off our heads. The candle snuffer doesn’t snuff us out. The apocalypse disappoints us.


And we’re still alive, still going. How awful! How awful for everything, how awful for us! Aren’t we all tired of our lamentations? Have we ever done anything other than lament?

The last hope is the hope for the end. Isn’t that what we’ve reached: the last hope, which is the purest hope? The hope that is only for cessation. Only for disaster.

The last hope is for the finish line. The no-more-again hope. The oh-all-to-end hope. The this-time-that’s-it hope.

But it won’t end, will it?


The world won’t die. The world is the world, even in ruins. The ruins are still part of the world. It goes on. It goes on even more.


What gets in the way of the end of the world is the world. The world is the obstacle. The world is what means there’ll be no end to the world.


You want it to End. You ache for the end.

You want it all to end. To save you from actually having to kill yourself.


God’s become just death for you – just destruction, which I suppose is apt.

Thirteenth bottle – look, Shiva’s getting excited. He thinks he’s going to achieve samsara.


The thirteen bottle. Is the end really nigh? Of course not. Are you ready for the anticlimax? For the bathos?


What’ll happen after the thirteenth bottle’s drunk – that’s the question. And what’s the answer?

Nothing. Nothing will happen. We sit here, like cunts in the ruins.

Cunts of the ruins – I like that.

Just another phase of our journey into dust. In our travels in nihilon.

Why do we bother?

We don’t bother. Do you think this is bothering?


What’s going to happen when the end doesn’t come – what then? When it just goes on and on?

You’re waiting for the transubstantiation of disgusting wine into – what? The wine of truth. The wine of the true vine. You’re hoping for the miracle of inversion.


You’re waiting for the dialectical flip. You’re waiting for the disgusting to become un-disgusting. Well, you’ll be waiting a long time. You’re waiting for transcendence to intervene. The hand of God, or the void, or whatever. For things to just … turn around, but that’s not going to happen. You’re waiting for the inversion to invert. For Deliverance. For the Miracle. But you’ll be waiting forever.


If only we have dialectical taste buds. If only we had dialectical capacities, as Livia had. Then this would be the sweetest nectar.


The thirteen bottle: our last chance to show that we have Livian taste buds. That our palates could be educated. Could be dialectised. That a ray from heaven could shine into our wine cups.

You’ve gone, postgraduates. You’ve left this wicked place. You’ve found the escape route. Climbed up the rope and disappeared. Yanked yourself up by your bootstraps. Escaped into another, better universe. You’ve left this disgusting world behind. Gone where the organisational managers cannot find you.

The O.M. Faith zone. O.M. faith …

OM can’t have faith. They can’t have religion – not that. It isn’t theirs. Do they know what they’re playing with? What they’re doing? Faith … is it a game to them?


A universal religion to bind them all. To manage them all. To organise them all.

A belief solution. A false solution.


Do they think they can organise the lightning? Manage an organisational-managerial lightning rod? Do they think they can work with antinomian energy? Gnostic energy, that rumbles and rolls under everything? Can they hear the ground rumbling? Can they feel the coming earthquake, like a coming storm? Don’t they see the first clouds from which lightning could strike? Can they feel the first drops of rain?

How could Organisational Management do this? But they don’t know what it is they’re doing. Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do …


Don’t they need intercession? Someone to die for all the Organisational Management sins?


We should pray for them. We pray for them, just as we should pray for ourselves. For what they have done. For what they continue to do. Their terrible plans.

Forgive them, father. Forgive them, because they do not know.

And so cold. And so bitter. And so ravaged. And so ravaging.


Their ice-Babylon. Their pathetic towel of Babel.

They’ll burn in Hell, the Organisational Managers. In cold Hell!


The campus, in defiance. A city, in defiance. A metal fist – clutched against the sky.


An affront! A defiance! An insult to God! To the Most High!


The punishment will be terrible. Don’t they know that? The punishment for their imposture. For their hubris. For their lies …

This Judgement to come – don’t they feel it?

But perhaps there’ll be no Judgement – which is even worse. Perhaps the campus has gone too far. Perhaps the Most High has turned his face away.


Is the Most High even listening? Has the Most High simply turned his face away? Is it only silence now from the Lord of Lords?


The Judgement of no Judgement. The finality of no finality – of no last Judgement.


God is all but dead and O.M. all but killed him.


God doesn’t want this. Can’t bear to see this. He’s turned away. Looks elsewhere. He’s had enough of trying to bring us to righteousness.

I thought he was supposed to be a God of love. I thought he was supposed to be walking with us. This campus was the final straw. We broke the covenant.

O.M. broke the covenant! It wasn’t us. It wasn’t you or me.


The world functions, that’s all. The world buzzes and beeps, that’s all. Blinks its lights. It’s self sufficient. Immanent. Indwelling. It doesn’t need God: that’s what it says. And so God turned away.


The world lies – in its entirety. And it doesn’t mind that it lies. God has covered his face. God has closed his eyes.


The world doesn’t call up to the Most High. Unless it calls by not calling. Except if non-calling was a kind of call.

The sharpness of the wind. Ice fragments, in the wind.

The scouring wind. The eroding wind – that tolerates no human flesh – eroding everything but metal. Leaving only metal. Only metal teeth. Metal claws. Scraping up at the sky.

Vicious metal! Vicious scraping! Fangs bared. Metal fangs, metal claws. A whole metal exoskeleton, showing itself at last.


The sun, so far away. A point of light. A star. And the other stars – too far away. The earth is lost. On too distant an orbit. And falling further and further out.

A cold planet. A forgotten planet. Where Organisational Management rules in the darkness. Where Organisational Management spiders crawl the desolation.


The sun just a point of light. The earth as far out as Pluto.

And management is only the management of ice. And organisation is only the organisation of darkness.


Ice age cold! Neanderthal cold! Woolly mammoth cold!

Are there mastodons on the Organisational Management campus? Sabre-toothed tigers?


A mini Antarctica. A Vladivostok grove. The coldest place in the world, eight-six degrees under.

Living history against the grain. Understanding the world as a manifestation of divine nothingness. Knowing immanence itself as an inverse of a lost transcendence.


Sure, the world is meaninglessness, for both Gnosticism and nihilism. But nihilism is secular. It’s atheistic. It says God is dead. And Gnosticism – well, it’s obviously religious.


Look, Gnosticism is what religiosity becomes after the death of God. The death of God has a religious meaning. Because God never was anything – never, despite all the religious traditions. God was always nothing – closer to death than to life: that’s what shows itself when those traditions lose their authority. It was always about the void of God. About the nothingness of revelation, which is the revelation of nothingness.  


It’s about an antinomian investment in the world … that actively opposes its immanent logic. Its law. Gnosticism rejects immanent lawfulness. But it does so by emphasising the otherness of the true God, the real God.


Transcendence is empty. Gnostic transcendence can only be described negatively. God is unrecognisable, unnameable, incomprehensible, without form, without bonds.


So what are you supposed to do if you’re Gnostic? What do you sign up to?

Gnostics are fucked. You might think that immanence is depraved, inferior, evil; you might dream of an escape to the transcendent, but you’re still here. You still have to live in this world that you want to negate.

So what do you do?

Live in the world, but live against it. Live in it, but as though you weren’t living in it. You can revolt, if you like. Engage in sabotage or subversion. But you have to know that nothing positive can be accomplished in this world. That the only action is to invert it – to overturn its laws.