Author: Lars Iyer

The air’s so thick – so humid. You could drink it.


Damp on the walls. Spores in the air.

Like it’s all been underwater. Forever. Like it was all underwater for the longest time.


Are those butterflies? Winter butterflies?

Are those birds? Bats?


Are those clouds, inside. Are those clouds? Is it fog? Like, inside fog?


What are those things? Like weird, primitive lifeforms. Throwbacks to what there were before there were leaves … trees …


What’s that smell?

Eau de decomposition.


I think there are stalactites … something’s dripping.

On the wall, written: TIME ZONE. On the wall written: ATRIUM OF TIME.


We’re in the realm of death, postgraduates. We’re in the realm of dying. Suspended death. Death, interrupted.

The great division of labour: it’s long been known: the French think, and we introduce. The Germans think, to a lesser extent – we’re all a bit bored of the Germans – and we contextualize their thought. Spell it all out in clear, pedestrian English.

We know our job. We’re underlabourers, with not an idea of our own. Framers. Footnoters.

We know what we’re for. We’re to write introductions to continental philosophy that no one on the continent even reads. We’re to spread the European gospel to all the other disciplines. So that UK idiots in architecture and law and business studies, God knows, can apply continental thought crappily.


UK drones, busy at their keyboards. And never carrying over thought to their lives. Never living from thought. Never taking UK European philosophy as a spiritual practice.

We’re in the post-university now. The posthumous university. Anything might happen. The simulacrum university. It looks like the university, smells like the university, but it’s not the university.

There’s no TIME here. There’s no SPACE.


We’re the kind the posthumous university creates.


Of course we come too late. Our kind always come too late. We’re posthumous, essentially. We’re ruin-haunters. And here we are, in the ruins of the postgraduate halls.

The ruins appear as the opposite of ruins. The ruins appear as optimisation.

Who can understand the ruins as ruins? Who gets the ruins? Only those who loathe ourselves. Only those who know their failure. Who refuse to be flattered.


Refractory, the idiots. Backwards. Retarded. Behind the curve, and behind all curves. Lagging. Yet to catch up, and never catching up.

Missing the cues, the idiots. Possessed of poor timing. Bad timing. Missing all the opportunities.

Not even acting in their own interests, the idiots. Not even advancing their own cause. Not even helping ourselves. Not even coming to our own assistance.


They lack the modesty, the run-of-the-mill academics. They lack the idiocy – and the courage of idiocy.

They cannot see themselves as they are: as technicians of thought. As intelligences, opportunist. As Conventionals. As Typicals. As Generics. As Averages.

As limited intelligences. Operative intelligences. Functional intelligences. Who are good at things, in this world. Good at this world, and the game of this world. who are rising up the levels.

Europe has broken from itself. There’s been an internal fracture. Europe is adrift from itself. Europe’s forgetting old Europe. Europe lives in lieu of old Europe. Old Europe’s receding into the shadows.


European thought can only seem obscure now. Only rebarbative. Only perversely resistant to expressing itself clearly.


The death of Europe – Europe has to go underground. Has to take its energies downward. Bury itself. Old Europe will only exist in the catacombs. In the tunnels. Staying in the shadows, banished there.


The new Dark Ages. The desired dark Ages. The time of obscurity. Of burial. Of thought in the darkness. And the new communing with thought in the darkness.


False light. Lucifer’s light. Surveillance light. The light that seeks to expose all the secrets.


Europe in the darkness. The underearth as the truest place to know Europe. To be European. The restoring darkness.


We have to flee underground – as far as we can go. Away from the catastrophe. Which is a catastrophe of light … Of too much light … Of too much brilliance …

This is one of the crap worlds, right ?This is one of the fuck up worlds. They couldn’t be bothered to make it properly – to put it together convincingly. It’s like a pastiche of this world. They’re not even trying to make us believe in it.


This world’s falling.

Falling through what?

Just falling.


This world is flipped. The lowest is the highest. The most stupid is the most intelligent. All that stuff. Nothing is right. It’s all inverted.

Which is why Livia sought us out.


It’s like we’ve got night vision, or something. Like we see the night in the  day.

Herwig used to admire you, Helmut. A Heideggerian man mountain! A Giant Haystacks of philosophy! She used to take photos of you … talked about an exhibition, a book … just like Leni Riefenstahl admired the Nuba.

Can’t we just go limp?

Go what?

Like, in the jaws of Organisational Management. It’s what some animals do to put off predators – play dead.

We don’t need to play dead. We are dead.

Were we going to be inspiring teachers? We were going to have students rip pages out of their analytic philosophy textbooks? Did we intend to make the students stand on top of their chairs so they could see things differently? Did we mean to make them address us as captain, o my European philosophy captain? Were we planning on telling them that they’d be food for worms one day. That it was a matter of carpe deim – of seizing the philosophical day?

We’re not adventurous. We haven’t got travel tales. We’ve never travelled anywhere. We haven’t seen the world. We’re the opposite of Werner Herzog.

We never had a year in France. We were never in one of Jean-Luc Nancy’s seminars. We’ve never seen Strasbourg. Or Heidelberg. Or even fucking Amsterdam.