Author: Lars Iyer

You think your idiocy is going to save you – you do. You attribute to it some weak messianic force, or whatever.

 

When all faith’s failed, you’re placing it in idiocy.

You think idiocy is what makes you special. That you have a very special idiocy.

 

The idiocy get-out. The idiocy clause. You think it makes you some kind of saint.

A very special abasement. An elevating self-disgust.

 

You’re self-aware about your idiocy, sure. But do you think it saves you? Do you think it makes you cleverer than your idiocy? Do you think you’ve outsmarted it? Outfoxed it? Run ahead of it?

 

You’ll still be the idiot you always were. Just because you can name your idiocy doesn’t make you any less of an idiot.

 

Doing your idiocy writhe-around. Your Beyonce dance around your idiot Jay-Z. Your little idiotic crucifixion.

Doing your idiot’s dance. That’s pretty much all you can do. Pretty pathetic. Is that what you’ll do with your life? Is that what you’ll amount to? Is that what life’s for nowadays?

 

Cry up your idiotic cry.

 

Idiocy is a ruse, a con. It’s always a pretence. You’re play-pretending at idiocy. That you’re stupider than you are.

The curse is that you realise your stupidity. Which means your idiocy isn’t entire. It doesn’t wholly enclose you.

 

Your idiotic faith. You have a faith in your idiocy after all – that your idiocy’s going to save you.

 

You’re too clever to be an idiot.

Maybe I’m a very clever idiot.

The worst kind. A real bore.

 

Our super-idiocy. Our sur-idiocy, like the surrealists.

 

That’s our idolatry: worshipping our own idiocy.

 

This is where holy idiocy has led you.

 

Praying like an idiot – to your own idiocy. Worshipping your own idiocy, essentially. As a condition for your faith.

You’re make my head spin.

Sure, your idiotic head.

 

Philosophical idiocy is special.

Only in philosophy can you make a career of idiocy. Will idiocy take you somewhere.

 

Idiocy's just like sin – of course it is. You know you’re a sinner. Which means you’re not entirely a sinner.

Does that mean you can save yourself?

No! But it means you know you can’t save yourself. That you’re damned, in other words. But that knowledge means you’re not entirely damned.

So I’m clever than my idiocy …

Complicated, isn't it?

You can’t kill literature. It killed itself, long ago. You’re too late for the death of literature.

But philosophy, on the other hand …

 

Philosophy is the only subject that can say its death. That can say, I am dead and still be meaningful.

 

You can’t kill philosophy. Philosophy’s living off its death.

So does literature, maybe.

But no one reads literature.

No one reads philosophy.

No one ever did. It’s an elite thing. An anti-elite thing.

I’m going to write the worst book ever written. A fucked up book about being fucked up. An idiotic book about idiocy. It’s going to be so bad that it’s going to spoil literature – all of literature.

That bad.

What are you going to call it?

Why I Write Such Bad Books.

Why should anyone read it?

They won’t. No one will read it. No one will care. No one will notice. Because no one’s looking to literature for anything.

 

Literature’s a stupid word, anyway.

 

So because you’re no good at literature, you have to spoil all of literature.

Exactly.

But no one will actually notice?

No.

And who’s going to publish your anti-literary book.

No one.

You’re an idiot.

 

An iconoclast with no icons. You’re too late to smash anything up.

 

You haven’t reconciled yourself to not being a genius, so you have to be an anti-genius.

Wait – is that Cicero’s handwriting? What’s Cicero written on it?

 

The wine’s numbered. There is an order. Cicero’s spidery scrawl.

 

Written in gold pen – very deliberate. She went out and bought a gold pen to write this.

 

Cicero’s messages from the grave – or wherever she is.

 

She’s drawn something on this label.

 

13 – that’s what she’s written.

It must be a countdown. Counting down to what?

The ultimate bottle. The last bottle.

 

She’s written ultra before wine.

Ultra wine.

 

She’s got a little arrow pointing up after the ‘e’. And inserted an h.

Whine. Is she telling us to whine?

We’re good at that.

 

Drink me, she’s written. She’s trying to poison us. That’s her game.

Remember happened to Alice in Wonderland. Didn’t she shrink and stuff? She fell down a rabbit hole, just like us. Several rabbit holes.

 

She’s written wine. Wine wine. Like wine squared? What does that mean?

 

This is, like, the ultimate wine. The last of all the wines. The wine to which all the other wine was leading?

The bottle’s dusty. It is. That its immense age. Its vintage. It’s May 1968 wine. Wine from May 1968 …

 

The seventh bottle. You remember what Cicero said about the seventh bottle? You remember the legend of the seventh bottle.

No I don’t.

Nor do I, actually.

The virtuosity of our self-hatred: Cicero liked that.

Everything began with that with us: self-hatred. Hatred of our own idiocy.

She thought it was magnificent. Not only idiocy, but hatred of our own idiocy! Not just stupidity, but being appalled at our stupidity!

 

The way we attacked ourselves. The way we were appalled by ourselves. And, extension, everything. We were appalled by everything because we were appalled at ourselves.

 

Torment: that’s what we knew. A torment that we could express because of European philosophy. That European philosophy allowed us to express.

What irony! Because the main cause of that torment was trying to do European philosophy. Was trying to read European philosophy!

What a quandary. But that’s what made our attempt at European philosophy interesting, Cicero thought. That’s what gave it life.

 

We were appalled that we’d been even allowed to do European philosophy. That we’d been given jobs teaching European philosophy.

Cicero had raised us too high – and she knew it. Cicero had asked us to do the impossible – of course, of course.

But that, for Cicero, was the condition of our finding something interesting to say. We must express our idiocy, she said. Live it. Philosophise with it. Philosophise as idiots! As European philosophy idiots!

That was our truest vocation, according to Cicero. That was the great gift she’d given us.

 

That we had to look in the mirror as European philosophers. That we had to stand at the lecture podium as European philosophers. As would-be European philosophers! Anglophone European philosophers!

That was the step we had to take.

 

To embrace our idiocy. To write from our idiocy. To write out of the infinite tension of our idiocy. Through the infinite passion of our idiocy: isn’t that what Cicero intended?

 

We were natural Gnostics, Cicero said. But we had to allow ourselves to become Gnostics. At present, we were simply denying our Gnosticism. We were trying not to be idiots – too hard!

In our off-duty lives, in our drinking lives, we weren’t pretending – that’s the thing. We were giving our idiocy its head.

 

This was how the ruin of Europe was coming to know itself: in us. This is how the destruction of European philosophy was becoming self-aware: in us – in our idiocy.

And on the island that wasn’t part of the mainland. In the kingdom off the shore of Europe proper. There. And wasn’t that where Eastern European doom might be reborn, too?

 

We were each what she could not be – an idiot. We weren’t prodigies, like her. We weren’t savants. We would never finish our PhDs at twenty-one, as she did.

Nothing was expected of us. No one had ever called us geniuses. And yet we had a reverence for Genius. And yet we looked up to genius. Al our culture heroes had genius.

And we even wanted to become geniuses – we shouldn’t deny it. We even wanted to be brilliant. We even thought we could become brilliant. With a certain amount of time. With some job security. With open summers for work before us, mightn’t it be possible?

We even thought we might be late developers. Late-life geniuses …

Snow with ice in it. It’s vicious. It actually hurts.

The wind, as though full of tiny knives. Fresh on our faces. Our faces too naked, too exposed.

We should have worn balaclavas.

 

The ice-wind, scouring. Scouring. Imagining how it would carve the metal after thousand of years. This will be a metal Monument Valley.

 

The wind of ice giants and Norse mythology. The wind of Fenrir and giant wolves. The wind of Ragnarok, who knows?

The world of sombre northern fate. Of Armageddon. Of terrible Nordic melancholy. Not dispelled by all their talk of hygge. That lingers yet in Scando-alcoholism.

 

The Viking wind. The pillaging wind.

The wind of doomed, melancholic northern folk, losing themselves in drink.

 

Is it a Gnostic wind? Would Cicero approve? Is there a special gnostic element in its mournful whistling?

 

The wind of wolf howls.

The cold breath of Satan.

The northsong. Of general northern grimness.

 

Blown from Denmark. Blown from Norway.

That’s come across the frozen seas.

That’s full of Nordic world-despair. The despair that drove the northmen to conquer half of Europe …

 

The evil’s growing. The evil’s increasing.

Evil is cold. There demons of cold.

 

The scouring wind. The whistling wind.

That’s come across the Finnish lakes. Across the tundra!

 

Snow usually softens things. Muffles things. But this snow…

 

And it’s grey snow. When did the snow turn grey? Was the snow always grey? Was it always this way? Was it always greasy? Why did they have to fuck up the snow?

 

This snow’s made of ice. It’s hard.

 

Is it snow or hail? It’s, like hard snow. Pelletted snow. The snowflakes are bounding off my head.

 

I’m actually turning blue.

 

Googling symptoms of hypothermia.

 

They’ll have to amputate our fingers. What will we type with?

Our noses.

They’ll amputate them, too.

 

Can your brain actually freeze? Can you like, get winter dementia?

The brain’s the last thing to shut down in the body. So we can feel the torture.

 

Not so much brain fog as a brain freeze.

 

Can your bones freeze? Can they?

 

We need huskies. A sled!

 

The Grand Solar Minimum is approaching! The return of the full-on Ice Age! Sheets of ice are coming. Miles high ice sheets.

And the northmen. In raiding parties! Fearsome! Terrifying! Like those guys from Game of Thrones.

Newcastle will fall. And then Newcastle will be scoured, and this campus with it. Isn’t that reassuring: that the campus will be scoured? All traces of it gone.

 

The last winter. A vision of eternity. The earth, turned into an ice planet. Silent. Lifeless. And just the frost-filled wind blowing across.

 

Do you remember the sun?

I don’t remember the sun. I don’t even remember the moon. It’s always cloudy.

Those clouds aren’t real. They’ve been pumped from somewhere.

 

We’re not allowed the sky anymore. The stars. They’re Verboten.

 

There’s a fog rising from the earth. Seeping out of the earth. A freezing fog.

 

How deep they are, the depths of winter. How lost we are in the depths of winter. How buried we are, in the depths of winter.

 

The world’s just an ice ball with some metal clad buildings sticking out …

What’s worst is that it doesn’t die – that it goes on, European philosophy. That there’s more of it European philosophy. Always some new book series. With new introductions to the usual suspects.

The thirty-first introduction to Being and Time. The two hundred and sixth idiot’s guide to the Phenomenology of Spirit. A handbook of … A companion to … The Cambridge introduction to … The Oxford introduction … The Edinburgh introduction to … Philosophers in sixty minutes … Guides for the Perplexed …  A Bloomsbury Critical Introduction to …

How many, how many! Do people really write these things. Textbooks, textbooks. It goes on.

There are still conferences. Still publishers’ stands at conferences. Still symposia. The whole thing continues. It rolls on, through the years. Institutionalized. Still things to be said about Hegel and Husserl and Heidegger. Still readings of readings of readings. Still new waves of interpretation.

 

What’s worse than being an introducer? A Contextualiser? An explainer of European philosophy in a way the Anglophone world might understand. In plain, serviceable prose. No flourishes!

Don’t, whatever you do, try to imitate the great stylists! Nothing worse than an Anglophone imitator of high French style. Grotesque! Forced!

Reconcile yourself to explanation. To bullet points. To numbered lists. To taking the quick and rendering it slow.

 

There should be a rewilding of continental philosophy. Where people like us aren’t allowed to write introductory books about this European thinker or that one.

Where thinkers can think in peace. Without opportunist secondary commentary writers looking for the Next Big Thing. Thought-prospectors. Thought-opportunists. The introductory philosophical book industry.

 

Americans, on a Parisian safari. Helping to see the big beasts of philosophy in the Parisian wild. In their natural habitat. In their environmental niches.

Americans, hanging around the Sorbonne, or whatever.  All but asking for signatures. Getting all fan-boy and girl. Getting all groupie. Ask Badiou for a selfie. Jacques Rancière …

The intricacies of our idiocy. Its filigree. It’s delicacy, even. Idiocy could be quite a refined thing. Like some complex confectionary.

The taste of such delicate idiocy. The savouring of such idiocy. Only a connoisseur of idiocy, like Cicero, could really appreciate it. It’s too bad we never learnt to appreciate it ourselves. Too bad that we were incapable  of enjoying our idiocy. But that would require a non-idiocy that none of us possessed.

 

To dream of greatness! Despite everything: to want greatness! To think that we were capable of it, greatness. That because we could recognise greatness, and even appreciate greatness, that we thought we could become great.

Us!? Great!? Hope against hope. Hope, despite being near certain of its impossibility, that we might become great. Hope, even as knew, pretty much, that we would never achieve it: greatness. But hope nonetheless.

Hope that it might happen still. That it could surprise us in the final hours. In our later years. That we might awake, like Kant, from our dogmatic slumbers. But we were sleeping very deeply, that’s the thing. We were nothing but slumber …

 

Which meant that we were condemned to idiocy. That we could only ever be idiots, when our idiocy measured against greatness. Because we could only ever be less than great, and therefore – by our own measure – idiots.

Non-idiocy was not in us. Non-stupidity.

Shouldn’t we have been content to stay with our idiocy – within its confines? To keep to our stupidity – to be reconciled to it. To accept it. To start a plan a life of non-greatness.

But there we were, working under the delusion that we might become great. Didn’t we spend hours in our offices in search of greatness? In the hope that … With the dream that …

What could we feel but thwarted? But deprived? What could we conceive but that greatness had been stolen from us? Our birthright!

How could we not be resentful at our idiocy?

 

Couldn’t we learn to be happy with our idiocy? Happy within its limitations. Wouldn’t then our sense of our idiocy begin to fade?

After all, we were not especially unintelligent. We weren’t low in IQ. In problem-solving. We didn’t have special needs in real life. We could function, after all. Hold down jobs. Go about our daily business.

Didn’t we have jobs? Flats? Didn’t we live in a real city? Couldn’t we afford our mortgages. Our bills? Our weekly shop? Did we live with our parents? We weren’t scrabbling anymore. We weren’t living hand to mouth? We stood on our own two feet.

We’d launched! We’d made something of ourselves! We had jobs. Open ended contracts. We weren’t failures in that sense. Wasn’t that consolation enough? Shouldn’t we be happy enough? We had summers – open summers!

But the worm of failure ate at our breast. Devoured inside us. And isn’t that what Cicero loved?

 

The genius shatters the world. The genius breaks the world – this world. The genius is the wrecker of all the mundane pieties. The genius is the re-maker, the reconfigurer. The paradigm-shifter.

The genius is the re-forger. The one who transforms. Who awakens. The genius is the overcomer – and the self-overcomer. The halo of the genius! The aura of the genius!

 

And wouldn’t we leave ourselves behind as geniuses? Wouldn’t our lives be burned up in genius? Wouldn’t everything that happened to us be justified? Everything to led us to the genius-thought, the genius-idea?

Nothing else would matter. All this, the years of struggle, would be a distant memory. What would matter was the work – the labours of genius. The great making of genius.

 

And the feeling that we owed everything to genius – to the genius that had possessed us. That life was simply a clearing away of all the obstacles of realising genius. That wasn’t even our genius. That had touched us from on high. That was heavenly fire. That traversed us. Burnt through us. So that we were capacitators of genius, merely. Conductors of genius. Genius is always apocalyptic, or nothing at all.

We had to embrace our failure. We had to become our failure. Be nothing other than our failure – that’s what Cicero thought.

We had to move from lamentation to affirmation. Defiant affirmation! Like stupidity pride.

 

That’s what I had to write about she said: my philosophical failure. That’s how my philosophical failure would become a literary success. A miracle!

But really, it would only become yet another kind of failure: a literary failure. For how could it be anything other than a failure? How could I suddenly exhibit literary talent, I who had shown no talent for anything whatsoever?

And that aside, the age of literature had passed. Just as the age of philosophy had passed!

 

So really, the move to literature would mean only redoubled failure! Failure once again! Which was impressive in its own way.

To fail – and so enormously – not once but twice! To run aground once – and then again. To come up against my limitations for a first time and then a second time.

It could only be a disaster. It could only end poorly. It could only ever be on a hiding to nothing, my literary project. My literaro-philosophical project!

 

There’s a quality of failure that she treasured, Cicero said. There’s a complexity of failure. That can really only come from failing once, in one area, and then failing again, in another – precisely at the moment when you thought you’d found success. Precisely at the moment when you thought you’d eluded failure. Tricked your way out of it.

In the end, failure was waiting for you. Failure was a step ahead of you. You’d be permitted no escape from failure, only a greater failure. Only a deeper failure.

It’s not as if Cicero was trying to correct some injustice by giving us jobs. She wasn’t trying to give us a chance. It wasn’t about letting us show of what we’d be capable if we had full time positions – if we had time to think.

Because she knew what would happen if we were allowed time to think: nothing. Because she knew that time would only reveal to us the extent of our stupidity, and let us lament our stupidity.

 

Cicero knew she’d raised us too high, had given us too much time. She knew that our kind wouldn’t benefit from this kind of freedom. She knew that we’d only experience our limitations. That our sense of our limitations would only grow more intense. That we’d only experience them over and again.

She knew that we’d only have our confinement confirmed – in our own stupidity. Would look up at her, with infinite sad eyes. As if to say, stop it. Kill us now.

 

Cicero wanted to torture us. To give us just enough freedom, enough space, enough time, to really discover how stupid we were. For us to fail at philosophy. At what we most loved. To fail to become philosophers. To fail, at what we most admired.

 

She knew how badly we’d fail. She knew what we wanted to be, and couldn’t be. She knew how we wanted to think, and that we could not think.

She knew what we admired, and how we could never achieve what we admired. She loved our sadness. She liked nothing better than to hear our lamentations, on nights at Trillians. Our drunken cries.

 

There was a particular quality to our sense of failure. A taste – for the palate of her mind. That mixture of sadness and lamentation and so on.

 

Our absence of learning. Our cultural illiteracy. Our general inarticulacy. Our tendency to excitement. To use exclamation marks. Or to wistfulness. Letting our sentences fade off into ellipses. The emphases we placed on certain words. As though they were italicised. As though they’d been underscored a dozen times. Our repetitions. At the beginning of sentenes. At the end of them. Anaphoras! Epistrophes!

The way we seemed to think as one. To mind meld. To speak in the first person plural. As though we were undivided. As though we experienced exactly the same thing, which we probably did.

 

Cicero was the appreciator of our sadness. The connoisseur of our laments. Which is why she encouraged our drinking. Our incipient alcoholism. She wanted us drunk. She wanted us ruined, or nearly ruined. For us to break through into pure lamentation. It’s a great art, lamentation, she said.

 

The cry of our stupidity, of knowing our stupidity: that’s what Cicero enjoyed. That came from knowing our idiocy. The immensity of our failure. And of suffering it, that immensity!

The thwartedness of our aspirations! The defeat of our hopes! Our terrible knowledge of what we were not. Of what we could not be.

Our dread and horror at ourselves, which is to say, of our own stupidity. The way we obstructed ourselves, stood in front of ourselves. The way we couldn’t escape our own shadows. We couldn’t leave them behind, our shadows.

Because we were in the wrong element: a philosophy department. We were out of our natural habitats. We were we shouldn’t be. Fish, thrashing on dry land.

 

Were we thinking we’d get away with it? That we were getting away with it? That we were going places? That we wouldn’t be noticed?

But of course we’d be noticed. We’d notice ourselves. It was inevitable! It had to happen!

We were intelligent enough for that, weren’t we? Smart enough to know our lack of smartness. Successful enough to know how we’d failed! Wasn’t that our curse?

But it’s what Cicero loved.

 

Cicero’s sadism – was that it? Or was it our masochism?

It’s what we made each other: a sadist, a bunch of masochists. That’s what we became, when we were together. A perfect fit.

 

How we fail ourselves! And how we fail to do anything other than fail ourselves! And disappoint ourselves!