Livia’s Gnostic ruse. Her Gnostic stratagem. The reason we’re here. Why Livia employed us.
We were prodigies of a sort, Livia said. Natural Gnostics. It came easily to us: world-rejection. World hatred!
She’d had to learn Gnosticism the hard way – the slow way, Livia said. She came to Gnosticism gradually. Through her mathematical research. Her philosophical research.
But with us – it was as though we were born to it, Gnosticism. As though we’d woken into it. As though we first opened our eyes in Gnosticism.
There was an attitude she saw in us, in our loser’s corner, Livia said. A stance. Towards everything. Towards Life. Towards ourselves. Towards what we were and are.
We lived in tension with it, the world. We lived against it. We lived in opposition.
We weren’t part of the world, that was the thing. We recoiled against the world – we couldn’t help it. We shuddered at the world – and it was a shuddering of everything we were.
That was our Gnosticism. Oh, it had nothing to do with our so-called philosophical research, Livia said. With our ostensible academic interests. It wasn’t about our writing projects; our papers, that we sent out to academic journals.
The spontaneous philosophy of our lives: that’s what mattered. Which is to say, the non-philosophy of our lives. Which meant, really, the idiocy of our lives. Which meant stupidity as a spiritual practice.
2
Yes, we were natural Gnostics, Livia said. But we had yet to allow ourselves to become Gnostics – not really. We had yet to really come into our Gnosticism, which is to say, our stupidity. At present, we were simply denying our Gnosticism. We were trying not to be idiots – too hard!
For too long, we’d wanted to prove our academic worth – to be taken seriously as academics. We’d wanted to be alone with books – to read, to jot down notes. Intellectual projects: we’d even had those. With which we were busy – so-called busy. Primitively, no doubt. Stupidly – without knowing what we were doing! But there we were, nonetheless, absorbed in our academic labours.
We had PhDs in philosophy, of course – how was that possible? Who’d awarded us PhDs? What lapse had there been in the logic of the universe? No doubt there had been some drastic fall in the standard of UK doctoral research, Livia said. No doubt the quantum leap in grade inflation in UK education had reached PhD study, especially at the dubious universities from which we’d come.
But it wasn’t because of our PhDs that Livia employed us. It wasn’t the crappy papers we wrote that we’d placed in the worst of academic journals. It wasn’t the crappy books some of us had virtually vanity-published.
It was the quality of our idiocy.
3
Only Livia could savour it, the quality of our idiocy. Only Livia knew it, our idiocy, in its true dimensions.
The potential of our idiocy: that’s what she saw. The way it might be used.
In her philosophy department! As her philosophy department! Even in, and perhaps especially as, the inevitable failure of her philosophy department!
Anarchy in the academy! That’s what we were to be. Idiocy in the academy! Tomfoolery in the academy! Jokes and jesters in the academy. Unleashed! At play! Abroad! That’s what Livia wanted.
We were Livia’s plague. Livia’s contagion. Livia’s rats, to be set loose in the academy, as you’d set loose vermin into a building you wanted to be condemned.
She was a vandal, Livia. She was a demolition expert. We were her barbarian horde. We were her football hooligans. We were her rioters. Her looters! Her smash and grabbers!
We were her Viking raiders, Livia! We were her hyperbolists! Her degenerates! Her mutant army! Her flying monkeys! Dysgenics in person!
4
Livia created us, in a sense. She uttered the words, Let there be idiots. And idiot-Gnostics! She found us, in our loser’s corner. She knew us for what we were, and could be.
This was the hour of our stupidity: that’s what Livia discerned. The moment when our idiocy steps forward. Becomes – important. Becomes Gnostic.
In the face of the world – of what the world had become. In the teeth of the university – of what the university had become. In defiance of analytic philosophy – of what philosophy had become.
Wasn’t it only now – now – that she could have discerned us, Livia? Wasn’t it because of the present crisis, which Livia had also discerned? Wasn’t that how we could help her blast her way out of the academic continuum?
Which was why it was a question of reaching it, our stupidity – which is to say, our Gnosticism, Livia said. Of owning it, our idiocy – of becoming worthy of it. Of dwelling in it, our idiocy.
5
Livia’s idiot’s assemble. Livia’s Z-team.
She needed a general apocalypticist: Furio.
She needed an expert on advanced conspiracy theories: Driss.
She needed an all-purpose dunce, who was nothing but impostor’s syndrome: Sophia.
She needed a Christian on the scene: Io. We’re in a spiritual war, she said, so we need a spiritual badass. A punk Christian badass!
She needed a visionary, savant, touched by the heavenly fire: Fiver.
She needed someone to write her Idiotbuch. With an Indian twist: me.
And doesn’t every philosophical gang needs a crap Heideggerian? Like the fat kid in old Hollywood movies. There has to be one …
And there we were, her toy European philosophy department – a miniature breed of Continental philosophy, she said, we remember. Like toy poodles! Like Yorkshire terriers! It wasn’t about us as individuals. It was about our collective idiocy. The constellation of our idiocy.
6
The danger: that we would be absorbed by the university. That we would become part of the university. Comfortable in our jobs! In our university offices! With our office pot plants! With our office posters!
The danger: that we’d give ourselves over the to the rhythms of the university. To working through the academic terms, the academic semesters. Through year after academic year.
Through all the academic meetings! The Boards of Studies and the Boards of Examiners. The Staff-Student Committees and the Education Committees.
The danger: that we’d come to feel at home in the university. That we’d feel that we deserved to be there, in the university. That we’d greet colleagues in the corridors, in the university.
The danger: that Philosophy, Livia’s department, would become naturalised at Mercia. That the university would get used to us, and we’d get used to it.
The danger: that we’d confuse ourselves for players in UK continental philosophy. That we’d rise up in the world, as part of the UK European philosophy scene. That we weren’t just ignorable anymore. That we weren’t sumply contemptable. That we weren’t fly-by-nights, soon to disappear.
The danger: that we’d be taken to be fixtures, of a sort, in UK continental philosophy. That we were in it for the long haul, and worth getting to know. That we might lend a hand as external examiners, or something. A PhD examiners. As external degree validators. As co-investigators on a research bid, who knows?
The danger: that we’d become institutionalised, in UK European philosophy. That we were part of mutual advantage networks. Of department on department boosterism. Whatever next: would one of us be asked to become Treasurer of the British Society of Continental Philosophy? Join the Executive of Hermeneutica Scotia? Become the Secretary of the European Philosophy Circle?
The danger: that Livia’s department would become a UK Continental Philosophy powerbase. That we’d become people to meet. People of influence! Eventually, professors. Eventually, heads of learned societies and editors of academic journals. Eventually, commissioners of books for book series. Eventually, keynoters. Worth buttering-up after our papers (‘Very rich. Very interesting.’) Worth Flattering. Worth Cultivating. Worth Attending to in general. Worth sitting next to at conference meals.
The danger: that we’d be on the inside. Recognised at conferences. Greeted. Nodded to. Waved at. That we’d be thought of as Going Somewhere. That we’d think of ourselves as no longer on our hiding to nothing. That we’d become an integral part of it, the Anglophone Continental Philosophy machine. The European philosophy in the UK operation.
The danger: that there’d even develop a kind of mystique about us, the Mercia people. The European philosophers of Merica.
The danger: that we’d lose our sense of absolute precarity. Of original part-timers’ sin. That we’d forget the part-time horror! Our part-time trembling! Our part timer’s fear!
The danger: that we’d forget what it did to our heads, part-timism! What it did to our hearts, being casual academic labour! What it did to our souls: the part-time perpetual emergency. The part-time panic!
The danger: that we’d lose our instinctual world-hatred. Our spontaneous horror. Our disgust for everything!
The danger: that we’d lose our world horror! Our world dread! Such as we knew it at the height of our drunkenness! That we’d lose our drive deathwards. Our apocalyptic thirst. For the end blow to come! For the guillotine blade to flash down!
The danger: that we’d fall from the Great Hatred. The promise of Correction – of the coming Deletion. Of the act of Erasure. Of the divine Wipe-Out. The wave of Destruction, great than we are. The Catastrophe even greater than our catastrophe.
The danger: that we’d forget that we were the Abomination. That we’d lose the dynamics of self-hatred. The life of our self-hatred. That we’d fall from the pinnacle of disgust and self-disgust. From our auto-allergic reaction to ourselves as UK European thinkers.
There was the question of maintaining the Gnostic tension. Of charging up the Gnostic forcefield, the Gnostic Kraftheld, as Livia put it. Of holding onto our apocalyptic disappointment. Of our experience of the endless death of God – of the failure of all eschatologies.
And if that was to happen, there could be no complacency – no mercy. Mercilessness: that’s what Livia would have to be, if things were to be kept at a Gnostic peak, in tip-top Gnostic conditions.
She would have to disappear, Livia, from our lives. She would have to drop her position as Head of Philosophy. She’d have to withdraw her protection from us, her Z-team. No longer stand between us and the university! No longer hold it at bay: the academic horror.
Livia herself would have to disappear, if she was to save us – which means to save our Gnosticism. Livia had to give us a Gnostic push – by exiting stage right. That was the only way she could let us become what we were. What we could be.
But there was more than that. Livia had to prepare the downgoing of her philosophy department – she had to ready its sacrifice, her philosophy department. She had to offer it to be swallowed up whole by Organisational Management.
7
And so Livia placed me in charge, the most unlikely leader. Her anti-protégé. Her idiot-in-chief.
And so Livia sealed the deal with Alan: the future of philosophy at Mercia.
And so on Livia left her job, left her city. Left her flat in the James Knott Memorial Flats. Leaving behind only what remained of her wine cellar – thirteen bottles. Disgusting bottles! So that we’d never become complacent in our drinking.
Livia’s departure would bring us most truly into our Gnosticism. Livia’s tsimsum would let us become what we are – would complete her act of creation.
Philosophy at Mercia, abandoned. Philosophy, left to itself – but only thereby coming into itself. As the world’s first idiotic department. As the only Gnostic philosophy department in the world.
Work in Progress 