Author: Lars Iyer

They think, the Europeans, and we interpret. They feel, the Europeans, and we relate what they feel in clear English prose. They wrote in the midst of absolute crisis, and we, in our calmness, explain the crisis. Show how their work implicitly or explicitly responds to the crisis. Account for the work in terms of the crisis! From our safe historical distance! From our safe geographical distance! From our safe cultural distance! Safely across the English Channel! 

We defuse the text. We’re like those robots they send in on caterpillar tracks to inspect the device. We're like the besuited specialists who snip the cables. And if it blows – we smother the thought-bomb. To protect the English reader. To keep them outside the blast radius. To stop their heads exploding.

To be calm and phlegmatic: that’s what was important.

None of that European excitability! None of that continental passion!

Clear, methodical prose! No wooliness! No wordiness! None of that European high falutin’ talk. None of that German ponderousness! And French baloney!

Soundness! Rigour! None of that continental mystery-mongering! None of that European obscurity! That across-the-Channel rhetoric! That intellectual trickery!

It was about bursting philosophical balloons rather than inflating them. About resisting the lure of abstraction. About distrusting theories.

Forget good ol’ liberal humanism. The good ol’ liberal consensus.

Forget the good ol’ British virtues. Forget straightforwardness! Directness! Simplicity! Moderation! Freedom from regrettable excitability. From continental passion! From European fanaticism!

Mental hygiene!: forget that. Mental clarity! Forget a low temperature of argument. Forget deflation, rather than inflation. Forget scepticism, rather than enthusiasm. Forget small scale exploration rather than metaphysical speculation.

Forget the old conservatism! Slow wisdom! Deep peace!

 

And forget the grey scientism! The lab-coatery! Forget the test-tubery! The imitation rigour! 

Forget the analytic boredom. The analytic dullness. The analytic flattening and levelling. Forget the making philosophy about nothing schtick.

Forget all the armchair stuff. The ahistorical stuff. Forget all the technical stuff. The too clever by half stuff.

Forget all the cut and dried stuff. The bought and sold stuff. Forget the sense that it’s all been Decided. And Concluded! That all the thought-adventures have been had.

Forget the dull ol’ God-is-dead world wrapped up in an analytic philosophy bow.

 

Actual existential questioning: that’s what we’re about. Stuff that isn’t dry as dust. That isn’t all piecemeal. That isn’t all modest.

We like our thoughts hard – too hard for us. And high – above our heads. And rich – full of complex things. And dense! And thick!

We like our thoughts to come from beyond us. Beyond our British world. Beyond our cut and dried world. Beyond our-God-is-deader-than-dead world. Beyond our ordinary world. Beyond our medium sized dried goods world.

We like our thoughts racy and transgressive and not really allowed. We like our ideas wild. Grandiose. About Everything. About Nothing. In big capitals!

We like our European philosophers to be thinking things of which our own philosophers would disapprove. That is the very opposite of underlabourer philosophy. Of philosophy as plumbing, or whatever. Of philosophy as the handmaiden of the sciences …

Soaring philosophy: that’s what we love. Philosophy allowed to be philosophy. To dream for us. To speculate. To climb into the sky. To take the great view.

To forget the technical stuff. The finickity stuff. The lost in the details stuff, that everyone writes about over here.

We like our continental philosophy dense. And in poetic prose. And full of allusions we can’t quite get.

We like our European philosophy impossible for us to follow. Written in the high style. And literary – thoroughly literary. Having emerged from a genuinely literary culture. Unlike us, who come from a post-literary culture. Who have never really read anything. But who like the idea of Literature, capital L.

We like our continental philosophy full of religious pathos. Positively messianic. Forbidden stuff, for those of us brought up as new atheists. Thrilling stuff, for those from tediously secular societies. We want it to be religious for us, who have no idea how to be religious, but who are full of vast, vague and undefined religious feeling.

We like our European philosophy to have emerged from periods of absolute crisis. Of civilizational shifts. To have been written in the midst of wars … invasions … massacres. By  beleaguered types. In obscure corners. By those just about surviving. Burning whole manuscripts to keep warm. Who are just more authentic than we are! Who are just more real! Who are so much more entitled to their doomy pronouncements than we’ll ever be. Who’ve actually Suffered, capital S. Who really do have legitimate reasons for contemplating suicide.

We like our European philosophy to be too much for our Anglophone heads.

In the end, there can no more philosophy, Livia said, we remember. No one can believe in philosophy. Just like no one can believe in God.

A negative philosophy – like negative theology: that’s what we had to think. Where philosophy became apophatic. Where it’s all about what it’s not.

Or even better: a not-yet philosophy – or not even philosophy, Livia said. Philosophy that has forgotten that it’s doing philosophy. Or perhaps philosophy that doesn’t know it’s philosophy.

Amnesiac philosophy. Philosophy that doesn’t know itself as philosophy. That hasn’t woken up to itself, not yet. That hadn’t gotten onto the serious business of doing philosophy.

Philosophy, daydreaming. Woolgathering. Philosophy too distracted to be philosophy. Philosophy that had forgotten what it was supposed to be doing.

Lazy philosophy, humming to itself. Philosophy, writing a poem. The idiot cousin of philosophy, that had been bashed on the head. Which had cartoon tweety birds turning all around it.

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

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

We have a vocation, only we’ve forgotten what it is. We’re actually for something … though I’m not sure what.  

It's life is keeping us on stand-by.

For what?

We’re like some sleeper cell that hasn’t been woken up. That’s forgotten what it has to do. We just need the right call. The right emergency. And we’ll … burst forth.

Trillians was our city of refuge, like you get in the Bible. Trillians was a pub of refuge. Trillians was the place of our feast of fools. Trillians, where we no longer have to spend time in our heads. Trillians, where we could always talk of the Gnostic fuckedness of it all. Trillians, where we could prove that we weren’t mirthless after all. That this wasn’t a world without joy, after all.