Author: Lars Iyer

Nihilism says that there’s no transcendent beyond – nothing to guarantee the meaning and order of the world. No objective justification of morality, and all that. The highest values degrade themselves, right?

And Gnostics think that there is a beyond?

Sure, but it’s one we can’t access. There is meaning and goodness and so on, but not for us. Transcendence is just nothingness – a hole in the world. God is just the nothing of the world. Nothing remains of God but the void.

So Gnostics believe in God?

God is absence, that’s all.

Yeah, but the absence of God is not nothing. There’s still a relation to God – but as absent. As absent meaning, truth and goodness.

So what?

It’s a relation that inverts the values of the world, and calls for us to invert them. Living against the world – that’s what it’s about. Live in the world, but as though you didn’t belong to it. Do what you do, live as you live, but in full awareness of the nullity of every worldly relation, every action.

Wait – here’s an article. You know you’re a Gnostic when … 1) You approach religious, political and cultural institutions with scepticism. Obviously.

2) You read everything symbolically – in terms of myths, scriptures, dreams. Do we do that? Come on, listening to us talking about Organisational Management.

3) Everything, for you, about the soul’s journey towards awakening. We’re awaken – we have to say that. We’re well awake.

4) You keep a spiritual journal. Shiva’s writing his idiot book, that’s true. Does that count as a spiritual journal?

I thought Gnostics were into asceticism and fasting and celibacy and that sort of thing.

Gnostics don’t do that anymore. 


Here’s another one. Is your friend Gnostic? Alarming cult spreading through philosophy and theology … blah blah … There are warning signs, apparently. 1) Claiming to be strangers in the world. fuck yeah – deffo. 2) Espousing homesickness for an unknown reality. Sure, a bit of that. 3) Stating that no institution has the monopoly on truth. Well, that’s true, isn’t it …

4) Saying the creator of this world isn’t the highest reality. Do we believe in any kind of creator?

Io does.

But the rest of us?

5) Speaking of awakening rather than conversion. Dunno, really. You’re a convert, aren’t you, Io?

I am a convert.

6) Saying that they’re inwardly connected to something beyond ordinary life. Probably … Ordinary life really does suck, you have to admit that.


Gnosticism is about inner transformation. The deepest human task is to awaken to a higher spiritual reality through direct experience.

That’s old Gnosticism. Now it’s about living against stuff. And thinking the world really sucks.


Okay – things Gnostics Like. Films: Bladerunner, and the sequel. Obvs. The Matrix – yeah, yeah. Books: Philip K. Dick in general. Sure – the Black Iron prison and all that. Dead can Dance. Current 93. Okay.


Stuff Gnostics do. 1) Study Gnostic texts: the gospel of Thomas and the Nag Hammadi Library. Yeah, sure. 2) Study myths and archetypes and sacred geometry. 3) Study comparative mysticism – mapping out Gnosticism in its relation to Hermeticism, the Kabbalah. Nah. Can’t be bothered. 3) Learn ancient Coptic or koiné Greek. Fuck that – too hard. 4) Meditate and cultivate spiritual insight. This is old school Gnosticism. We can’t be bothered with that stuff.


So what are we – neo-Gnostics? Gnostiks with a k? We’re not into all the true God stuff, are we? And that stuff about the Demiurge? And what about the archons – do we believe in those?

No – fuck off. We just think the world’s evil.

We don’t want to bring light to obscurity. It’s not about bringing anything to the surface. We want the other night – the hight that does not come after the day.

We want the concealed in its concealment.

We want the entire weight of the world. No – of the pre world. Of the absence of the world. Of the earth before and after everything .

Continental philosophy belongs to the earth. It’s about hiding itself. Fleeing the pitiless analytic sky.

European thought flees. It goes downwards. It digs. It rests in the earth. Stays there until one day it might rise again.

Dark thought – chthonic thought: that’s how European thought appears now. Though that must be cloaked. Veiled. That has to speak through a mask. Through idiocy, even. But an idiocy nourished by the earth.


In an age of compulsory positivity. Of ever spreading light. It can only appear as doom-laden, European thought. As dreadfully depressing. UK continental thinkers can come across only as churls. As ingrates. As hyperbolically negative.

They’re releasing the counter-campus. The anti-campus. The non-campus within the campus. That will turn the campus to the outside.

They’re destitute the campus.

What, make it poor?

They’re de-instituionalising it.


Does destitution mean we have to make a mess of everything? Does destitution mean pilling the wires out of the wall? Does it mean flooding the place, like, deliberately?


The organisational managers want the destitution. Like Alan’s whatever space. It’s some new organisational managerial strategy. To let things destitute. To let things unravel and break down. And then … I don’t know. Let things go for a bit, and then just yank them back in.


A secret grove. The secret garden. Is it a garden?

This is the heart of the ruins. This is what the ruins are centred around. This is what they turn around. This is what they’re About.


It’s like the inside of our heads. It’s inner space.


It’s something you could smear on toast. It’s all so soft. It’s something you’d scrape out of a crustacean. What’s there beneath the shell. The soft stuff.


This is where we belong: with the old things. The defunct things. The archive of everything.


Don’t think the ruins are here by chance. Or that we’ve been admitted by chance.


It’s not even the ruins of the humanities. It’s not even significant. It’s just stuff. Random stuff.


 Bringing our own ruination to the ruins.


They passed through here, the paragraduates. It was caught up in their whirlwind, all of this. And then …


Drink – in the ruins. Drink to the ruins. Lift your glasses. Toast the angels of death.


The future ruins need a Sebald. You could write your great work of mourning about the academic humanities.

 Write about your part in its downfall.


This is about the paragrad Nothing.

The paragrads who never actually appear.


There’s nothing left to people on earth. This is the only place to come when all hope is gone.


Listen, the postgraduates are singing … very far off, in the distance. What is it?

Idumea.


The paras ruin everything.

No – they’re attracted by ruins. If you ruin it, they will come.


Does the disaster know that it’s a disaster? Do we know ourselves in our disastrousness?


Ruin parties are all the thing.

Parting in the ruins.


In the ruins. And the ruin’s ruins.


The ruins are, like, ruinating. This is entropy in action.

Can you feel the agency of the earth? The vibrancy of matter or whatever?

The festering of matter, more like.


Stuff’s rotting down here. Stuff’s compositing. Compacting. Releasing its gases.


It’s like it’s sentient or something. Like it’s developed its own kind of AI. Tellurian intelligence. Thoughts of the earth. What is it thinking?


Katabasis is a journey inward, not a journey downward. A journey into death! Into the unconscious! Into suffering, or whatever!

Katabasis is supposed to be a prelude to insight or rebirth or transformation. A downgoing.


Disgust is the true descent. The true katabasis. And we have to fall ever deeper. Drink ourselves into the fundament.


Gaia thoughts. Slow, dark thoughts. Dreaming thoughts. Because the earth’s asleep – deeply so. The earth’s in a trance.


Are those stalactites? Made of mud?


Who made these tunnels?

Maybe the Bug …

I think it’s mudworms.

Mudworms!?

Like in Dune. Harness them somehow. Ride them. Through the tunnels. There’s, like, no trace of any worm. Launch the assault on Organisational Management towers.

I think we should harness the Bug. Calling: Bug! Buggers!


It’s darkening. I swear it’s getting darker.


In the gnostic darkness.

Is that what this is?


Only here in the darkness could we formulate these thoughts. Only down here could they come to formulation.


Drinking at the centre of the earth. Drinking at the earth’s core. Drinking in the depths.


Everything in the earth hates the campus, I know it. It’s, like, anti Organisational Management campus.


Depth without substance. Depth, but nothing else.


It’s like something’s rotting under here. Something fetid.


I thought we’d be used to the disgusting. But this really is disgusting. Something’s shat here. Something vast. Some beast that has eaten all the wrong things has actually shat.


Drink it down to the dregs. Drink it and know –

Know what?

The depths of the earth.


So is it getting more disgusting the more we go down?


The song of the void.

No, it’s drilling.


That’s a gnostic rumbling. Those are gnostic energies.


It’s the buzzing of the Bug’s wings we can hear. The Bug’s buzzing just beneath this reality as in an adjacent dimension.

We woke up the Bug. And the Bug doesn’t like to be woken up.

The Bug was dreaming.


The underearth: this is where all revolution comes from. The bowels of the earth, where all the ferment brews.


The earth is only quicksand, and it’s sucking us down.


Is there still darkness on the face of the Deep? Is the earth still without form and void?


A world without philosophy – what’s that? A world without earth. A world without truth. And light everywhere. And nothing but light. A world without shadows. A word full of Organisational Management antilife. False light, from the false heaven.


What can we hear down here? Only essential things. Only the great turning of things. Only the Same, being the same, turning around the Same. Just the empty perpetuation of the Way Things are.


They’re building down. Burrowing. This is a philosophy warren.

There are places like this all over the country – that’s the rumour. An underground resistance network. Whenever the humanities are threatened, this is what happens. A kind of withdrawal. It was like those ancient people in Derinkuyu, with their underground city. It’s like monasteries during the Dark Ages. Keeping the flame of civilization alive.

It’s like a doomsday cult.


Admiring the brickwork. The arch.

It was built really well.

Victorians, right?


It’s kind of glowy. There are glowing things on the wall.

It’s a glowing mould. Mould’s what the paras cultivate. They actually live on mould – on different kinds of mould. There are moulds for all purposes under fucking heaven for the paragrads.


What are we hoping to find? What’s going to show itself in an underground revelation? What are  the secrets of Newcastle boulder clay?


We should start some underground ritual. Like a sweatlodge, or something … Maybe we should have some underground therapy. Does therapy work when it’s closer to the centre of the earth?


Shiva’s going to enter some Hindu ecstasy. Of the soil! Of the earth!


The unilluminable. The always-buried.

We unproductives. We rebarbatives. We ineducables. We stuck-in-the muds.

We retards. We laggards. We behind-the-times types.

They foresaw how we’d transformed it, their thought. Simplify it. In our desire for clarity! In the introductions we wrote. A book is nothing but an explanatory plaque. And such thought didn’t want to be explained! Didn’t want to be translated!


They foresaw who their interpreters would be. The ones who would exhume the European corpse. Who would be busy practising their Anglo forensics on the continental cadavers. Who would wheel the exhumed bodies under the Anglo lights. For dissection. For transplant.


We woke it up early, European thought. We brought it blinking into the Anglo morning light. We led it by the hand into the Anglo clearing. Where all dreams were banished. Where all its yearnings vanished. All its literary shadows. Its rhetoric.


European thought, with its literariness. With its allusions. With its styles. Flattened out. Laid bare. Endnoted. Explained. Explicated …

Everything turned to the merciless Anglo light. Everything made wincingly understandable.


When Adorno write about damaged life. When Heidegger wrote about die Technik. When Ellul wrote about technique. They were thinking of us. Of our kind. Of what was going to happen to their thought, at the hands of Anglo types. Types who hated them and types who loved them: it amounted to the same. Europeanphobes and Europephiles: no different. We were part of the pincer movement. Lovers or haters, it didn’t matter.


The Anglo world would bring its light – its terrible light. The Anglo world would bring its demand for clarity. Its desire for exposure. Daylight is the best disinfectant, and so on … But daylight is inimical to thought.


The Anglo world with its idiot’s guides, its introductory guides, its attempt to work out what was useable in the philosophers of old Europe.


We simply did our Anglo damage. We simply swung our Anglo sword.

And European thought retreated. Continental thought became more hermetic. European philosophy buried itself – because it had to. Because thought across the Channel wanted to survive. European thought burrowed away from us, into the darkness.

Which made us love it more! Which made us seek it more! Because it had what we lacked: darkness. Because we wanted to flee after it – out of the Anglo world. Away from the Anglo light.


Why did we want to bring European thought to the light? Why, to hunt it down – to invade its burrow? To demand that it hide us from the light. To ask that it protect us, from the Anglo light, and even our Anglo light?
~

What did we seek from it, continental thought? That it close our eyes. Lay us down. Let us rest in the darkness – in its darkness.


Why demand that it do all those things for us? That it fulfil all our secret desires? Because we wanted to die to the Anglo light. Because we wanted to plunge into the European abyss.


Didn’t we want the cool earth surrounding us? Didn’t we want to lay down our heads underground? Didn’t we want to lie in the tomb, and to be dead with it, European philosophy? To lie in its coffin?


We’re infecting European philosophy – we, ourselves. We’re poisoning it. We’re contagious – don’t we understand that? We’re damaging a delicate environment. A sensitive ecosystem. We’re destroying it. We’re stomping all over it.

What we’ve done to continental thought! It’s like uncontacted tribes being wiped out by common illnesses.  

We bear the Anglo disease. Of which old Europe is dying. We’re killing it. Even though we mean well. Even though we only want to do good by it, European thought. Even though we want to honour it, European thought. We can only destroy it. We can only devastate its environment, continental thinking. Tear away delicate filaments of thought. Its ecosystem.


What we’ve done to Difference and Repetition. To the Visible and the Invisible. Tearing butterfly’s wings. Just by reading them. Just by reading them in translation. With the terrible anglophone demand for clarity.

Less light! Less light! That’s what Goethe should have said on his deathbed.


Supposedly fussless writing. Supposedly clear writing. Unadorned.

Getting-to-the-point writing. Saying-it-all-without-persiflage writing. Prose without detail. Without ornament. Without personality. Without flair. Robot prose. Analytic philosophy prose.

Continental thought wasn’t surprised by us, by the likes of us. European thought foresaw our kind, its busy interpreters. Its maniac introducers. Its fun-mirror contextualisers.

The great Europeans knew their fate. They foresaw the Anglo threat, the Anglo disaster. They didn’t want their Anglo resurrection. They didn’t want to reborn in introductory books. In idiot’s guides to this or that. In reader’s guide to everything under the sun. In handbooks to whatever. In encyclopaedia entries. None of them want our secondary commentary.

Just bury us deeper, they said. Hide our remains. Our leftovers. Our corpses! Out of the reach of the Anglophone scavengers. Of the Anglo burrowers. They didn’t want to be feasted upon by Anglophone jackals.

Anything but Anglo enthusiasts! they said. Anything but Anglophone Schwärmerei! Anything but Anglophone fanboys and girls!


Couldn’t they just be left alone, the European thinkers? Couldn’t they be left to rot in peace? Why this undignified scrabbling?

They didn’t want to be reanimated onto Anglophone bookshelves. Crappily cloned. Smudgily Xeroxed.

They didn’t want to be applied to this or that. Transplanted hither and yon. They didn’t seek to serve Anglophone so-called problems.


The European thinkers are only fleeing from the light. Only burrowing more deeply into the darkness. Only vanishing.

Which is probably why they wrote so obscurely: it was to protect their thought. It was the hide from the likes of us, whose coming they foresaw. Who they knew would come.

They wrote to preserve an esoteric core. A hidden truth. Their sentences guarded a secret. Something our commentaries could never reach. Something inviolable. Something sacrosanct. It was deliberately hermetic.


They were burying their thought in their work, the great continental thinkers. Making it idiot proof. They knew that their was no underestimating Anglophone stupidity. Anglophone depthlessness. Anglophone missing-the-point.

We philosophical underlabourers. Modest, so modest. Content to simply wok in our corners. To busy ourselves in near darkness. Crouched over our laptops.


We’re the humiliators of European thought, even if we think we serve it. We’re the betrayers of European thought even if we think we’re working to preserve it. We’re the desecrators of continental thought, even if we believe we’re it’s most enthusiastic celebrants. We’re the murderers of European thought, even if we think we’re saving it. Even if we think we’re passing it on. Keeping it alive.


We’re the punishers of European thought, even if we think otherwise.


We simply confirm the worst cliches about continental philosophy. The most grievous charges against European thought.


European thought cannot survive the anglopshere. The anglopshere, in its entirety, is the domain of false light.


European thought is essentially vampiric. Essentially elitist. It can’t bear the light. It flees from the light.


European thought, buried in European coffins. Interred deep underground, in the European sod.


It’s nocturnal, continental thought. No one should try to bring it to the light. No one should venture to make it clear. It’s never asked for that – not in the Anglophone world. It wanted only to sink into forgetting, European thought. To achieve Oblivion. It didn’t want to speak its name in this world, continental thought – in the world of light. It didn’t want to be.