We’re like a fucked-up family.
Like the Mansons.
Like the Heideggers. You’re dad Heidegger, Helmut. You can be mum Heidegger, Gazelle: Elfride. Who was the real antisemite, apparently. Hers to him are prevented from being published until 2153, apparently.
How many children did they have?
Two. She had affairs, he had affairs …
So you’re the bastard children. You’re literally Helmut’s great great grandmother.
This is our lowest hour, which means it’s our highest hour. Here, in the depths, we’ll reach the heights. We’ll Think, capital, T. We’ll have a thought.
Genius will strike us. Genius, like a bolt of lightning. And that’s how the campus will be destroyed. That’s how the campus will crack.
Livia’s lightning: when’s it going to strike? How’s it going to save us?
I’m not sure it’s meant to save us. It’s supposed to be spectacular. Just light up the world’s night for a moment.
The lightning’s about illuminating things – showing the world as what it is. It won’t be about destroying anything. It’ll be about revealing the divine void – nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond and all that. You know the score.
It’s not lightning – a lightening. A revealing. Of what’s there, and what’s hidden.
The earth isn’t a refuge. Not for us. We don’t belong to the earth. To the whole blood and soil thing. Except maybe you, Helmut.
The thick earth. As thick as our heads. As obtuse as we are. As stupid as we are.
It’s not just dead and indifferent. It’s actually malevolent. It’s a torture mechanism.
It isn’t vibrant matter – it’s festering matter.
Philosophical honour demands we kill ourselves. At once!
Philosophy’s disowned us, dillweed. Philosophy’s laughing at us. We’re here for its entertainment.
So let’s … be … entertaining.
Is philosophy actually good for you? I mean, were you a fuck up before philosophy or did philosophy fuck you up? Were you despairing before you read philosophy, or did philosophy make you despair?
Philosophy devours its host from within. That’s what I think.
What went wrong in your childhood? It’s always about the mother. What process produces a Shiva Iyengar? Where does someone like you come from?
We’re running out of time. We’re running in empty. Someone should put us out of our misery. Someone should have strangled us at birth. Tied us up in a sack and thrown us in the river to die. We should never have been allowed to live. Who allowed it? Who gave permission?
Look at Furio – he positively wants to be a martyr. He’d love to be a martyr. He’s dying to be nailed up to something. You come into his own as a martyr, Furio. Too bad it isn’t AD47.
Don’t you want to just pour out your blood, Furio? As a libation. As an offering. Don’t you want to die as a witness to something?
So, leader. Lead us. Where are you going to take us?
I’m feeling more than usually appalled.
Did you hear that? Our leader’s appalled.
Are you going to go messianic? Someone’s got to go messianic. Like the incredible Hulk. The incredible messiah. Is the incredible messiah green?
Will you have special powers? It’ll impress the postgraduates.
She always encouraged your Inian philosophy delusion. You’re I’m-going-to-learn-Sanskrit fantasies. A setting out your Indian philosophy stall thing.
The Hindu cherry on Livia’s cake: that’s you, Shiva. The Hindu icing. A Hindu flavour to my Gnosticism.
You’re the One, Shiva – clearly. You’re the keizat haderach. You’re Flash Gordon. You’ve come to save the universe. Every body, every man every woman every child.
You’re Muad’Dib. You’re Neo. You’re all the SF messiahs in one.
Died from complications of being Shiva.
Your pathos, Shiva. Your horror at poison. And lies. She was harvesting your disgust like adrenochrome.
We’d be understood in Europe.
We’d be reviled in Europe. They’d see through us in Europe.
Our Europe is entirely imaginary. It’s just an anti UK Europe. The opposite-of-the-UK Europe.
Like, literary Europe. Arthouse Europe. The reversal of everything here. The old culture. Vanished profundities. That isn’t all ironical.
Philosophical Europe. It’s the Europe of deep and very deep questions, unlike the UK of thought-solutions.
All we needed was to be left in peace for a few years. Whilst we could play catch up. Whilst we could worked on our languages, ancient and modern. Read the great works. Trace lines of thought through the centuries.
All we needed was our time in the academic sun. What might we become! Our innate brilliance might be revealed at last!
Mightn’t we have things to say? Mightn’t we have hypotheses to explore? Arguments to advance? Mightn’t we make decisive discoveries in texts ancient and modern? Mightn’t we make our name with an original interpretation of this canonical text or that? Might we wow the world with our hot philosophical takes on this or that.
Amazing our peers at conferences. As up and comers. As thinkers of promise. Mountaineers! Ascenders! Young brilliants, with their heads on fire. Lectures with whom all the best postgraduates would want to study.
And Mercia would become the place. The capital of the north for all things European philosophical. They’d talk of the Mercia school, in years to come. Like the Pittsburgh Hegelians. Our ideas cross fertilizing … Cross germinating … We’d become a thought-school. A thought-outpost.
An annual conference in the city. Attracting international attendees. Young lectures wanting to make their name. Post paper conversations giving way to whole evenings of discussion in the pub.
A sense of life and death about thinking. That philosophy was really important. And continental philosophy! Which wasn’t just some outlier madness. Some aberrant growth. Some off the track mutation. That wasn’t just stupidity in the wild.
Even the analytics might see something in us. Might awaken. Might open their analytic eyes. Might mooch around our conference margins knowing that something was up. That things were happening. That a paradigm shift was occurring. That the day of analytic hegemony was done.
We might link up with other sympathetic departments. With genuine European thinkers! Some handy French intellectual might attach himself to our world. Could fly her in. Some stray Italian might find our Mercia conducive to thought. Some departmentally homeless German might lodge themselves in the city. Might move to our provinces.
Surely they’d give us a few years. Surely they’d let us splash around in the academic paddling pool for a while!
Surely we’d have time to bear philosophical fruit. To emerge from our chrysales! To effloresce! To sing our thought songs!
We still think that we might become thinkers.
We hadn’t reached the final cynicism. The endgame of our idealism – of our dreams of genius. We can still sustain our great alibi.
If only they would make way for us. If only they would step aside for a moment. If they’d only let us come forward. Into the light!
If only it could become our turn! Our chance! Our turn in the academic sun!
Work in Progress 