Author: Lars Iyer

It’s weirdly tropical in here. Coldly tropical. It’s not right. The seasons are topsy turvy.


Is it cold or warm? I can’t quite tell.


A microclimate. A ruins climate. A posthumous climate.


Sound doesn’t travel properly here. Retarded. Delayed.

A kind of bruising of sound. Sound smeared.

Slowness. Sound sinks here. Sound waves can’t be bothered to reach anything.


A glowing of the walls. A throbbing of the walls. A fever of the walls. They’re hot.


God what are we stepping in? Some kind of humanities mulch.

Shiva, you’re soiling your brogues.


Some kind of sweat – is that what it is?


Where did those boulders come from?


There must be some mud worms somewhere.


Like there should be dinosaurs, or something.


Fronds. Ferns. Mole rats, all curled up.

It’s fetid. Sticky.

And it’s drizzling … something.


Something wrong. This isn’t how things are supposed to be.


A bunker. An incubator.  Like where the Moher alien lays all her weird eggs in Aliens.


It’s, like, aggressively damp.


A very wet void. A sopping void. A humid Nothing.


Something’s running down the walls.

Something sticky. Spermy. Ejaculatory.

Something drooly. Something that should be wiped away. As should we.


It’s realer than we are.

Were we only ever a dream of this room. A fever dream?


What is this stuff? What’s it doing?

Fermenting, I think. Like some kind of kimchi. A sauerkraut of the void.


Is this some kind of saliva? Is it digesting something?


Stuff’s, like de-evolving.


There seems to be a river. Someone left the taps on.

It seems to be meandering. Through all the … debris.


The walls are, like, bruised.


Things have hatched here. They’ve left behind their old kin.


There are mosquitos – winter mosquitos.

There are winter wasps, I think.


I’ll bet there’s some really unique terroir. I’ll bet the soil’s been watered by postgraduate tears. By the sweat of postgraduate study. By unknown postgraduate suicides, buried in the sod.

Dead postgraduate wine.

Some kind of shrine. Half submerged.

A shrine to what?

Like that sunken church in Nostalghia. Where Gorchakov gets drunk and recites poems.

So let’s recite some poems. From memory! A bit of Hölderlin. The late fragments. Auf Deutsch. Can you remember them in German? Hölderlin, Helmut? We demand Hölderlin! We must have Hölderlin!

Okay, if not Hölderlin, how about Heidegger. Some hot stuff from the Black Notebooks. About how he hates British philosophy. Where he says Analytic philosophy is Sputnik and so on …

What’s the most continental of continental philosophers to read out? Obscure as fuck. Really headwrecking.

The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline.

Oh yeah. That hits the spot. The sort of thing that could never, never be published in the UK. Except in translation by some university press, after the person was dead famous and everyone in modern languages was raving about them.

Imagine what the analytic philosopher would do if they heard that. They’d pop. They’d spontaneously combust. Spit out their pipes. Gasp. Die of heart attacks.

Start a petition, more like. Write a stiff letter to the Times.


We need to be darker. We need more despair. We need to cry out. Then something might happen.

Whose words can we use? Who wrote the most despairing words? Who wrote the most wretched things ever written.

Jandek, of course.

Leopardi.

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.