Work in Progress

Cicero, praising our piss taking. Calling it magnificent. Our constant laughing at each other. A constant reminder that everything was fake. That it was all imposture. Who we took ourselves to be. What the university took itself to be. That none of it was to be taken seriously. That we were already sky high above it. And below it. Both at once.

 

Cicero praising the miracle of working classness. The middle class always approve of each other’s middle classness. But the working class … The banter. … It wasn’t just about bringing each other down. It was reminding each other that we’re more than this. What they take us to be.

That we’re uncapturable That every role we take is a play-role. Is fakery. That none of this is to be taken seriously. That it’s to be despised, really. Laughed at. With a great laughter. With a great and liberating laughter. That sweeps us away – whatever we take ourselves to be. Whoever we suppose ourselves to be.

What can withstand that? It’s not a middle class humour. It’s more abyssal than that. The middle class cannot let go of the world, whereas the working class despise the world. Because it’s not their world, the working class. It’s a world always imposed upon them, the working class. That is supposed to be good for them, the working class. Which is why they resist and cannot help but resist.

 

The people of Newcastle: will they resist?

They’re too good natured. There has to be hatred. And suspicion. Drinking cannot be about camaradie, as it often is among Geordies. This is not pubism. There has to be a programme. Hatred must be part of the mix. The people of Newcastle are too genial.

 

Of course we could not help but deepen the farce, Cicero said. We were, by nature, deepeners of the farce. Farce-plungers. There was about us a joy of loathing. A magnificent energy.

 

Coils of loathing. Paroxysms. Our self loathing – became a loathing of all things. We loathed of everything about ourselves – except what let us loathe. Except the very power of loathing. Except the power of the void, beaming out like the eye of Sauron.

There’s a void inside the sun. A black sun. And a void in the earth, at the heart of the earth. And a void on the campus …That’s why we laugh.

I can’t see it. I can’t find it. The campus is too … vast. When you’ve lost contact with the void … when you can’t laugh at everything – that’s when you know you’re in trouble.

 

We need to discover the void – that’s why we drink. The reassurance of the void.

Because it can reveal itself in joy – drunken joy. Impersonal joy. Laughing joy. The happiness of the void: there is such a thing.

 

The philosophy bomb will unleash the void.

Will it?

The philosophy bomb that changes absolutely nothing. That no one even noticed went off.

 

Our philosophy, wholly given over to the void. Due to our superior moods. Our elective attunements.

 

Void-drinking. Void chasing. Until we’re able to see it. Until it knows itself in us. In wine is truth, right? In wine: the void …

 

We needed to educate her in the void, Cicero said. In void studies. We need to press on with our void training.

She couldn’t reach it, not like we could. She couldn’t inhabit it. Which is why she liked to watch us drink. Which is why she liked to see us approach it, the void. In our laughing! In our shouting!

There was something exquisite, she said, in our mixture of despair and exhilaration. She hadn’t know that there could be a joy to despair. A lift. That despair could bear us heavenward, which it clear did. That there was a life to despair. That despair could bellow, as we did when we drank.

Why did our laughter turn bad? Why is our laughter abyssal? We laugh at ourselves. At our imposture. At who we dared to present ourselves as being. As crappy monograph writers. As conference discussants. We laugh at all that …

We look at ourselves from the point of view of the void – that’s the thing. We see ourselves with the void’s eyes. As the void sees us. And that’s what laughs in us. At us. At everything.

It’s not that we see through it all. It’s that the void sees through it all. It sees in us, through us. It knows itself in us. That’s what Cicero saw.

 

The void at the heart of every institution. At the heart of the university. That stares out from every institution.

A kind of blindness. Black, blind depths that see. That see us. And through us. And beyond us, like an X-ray.

And that’s how we see ourselves, too. Through ourselves. Beyond ourselves. Because anything that isn’t the void is a lie. And a stupid lie. And a joke.

And that’s our lives: stupid lies. Jokes. Except for the void. Except for what sees through us and beyond us, blindly.

 

The void is potential. Or impotential. It’s the not yet and the not even. It’s what’s never begun. And cannot end. That just turns in itself. From nothingness to being and back again, endlessly.

 

The void, hovering between existence and non existence. Just rustling and rumbling and sometimes sending out flashes of lighting.

 

And we laugh because we know. We laugh at everything because we know what returns at the heart of it all. And in our own hearts.

And the void laughs in us. That’s what it becomes in us: laughter.

 

We never believed in it – what they pass off as reality. Consensual reality. What is it about us?

Immigrant parents. General working class-ness. Driss was a refugee, for fuck’s sake. That’ s what we have in common. What turns us from every certainty in the world. Ever investment in the world.

 

We need to discover the void – that’s why we drink. To remind ourselves of it. to bring it close.

Drink opens the void. if you drink enough. In the right way.

Drink is the means of access to the void. And the void itself.

We’re, like, drunken Buddhists. Drunken Zen Buddhists. Looking for Enlightenment. Wherever we can find it.

 

Cicero was a philosopher of the void, is that it? She wanted to prepare the way for the coming philosophers of the void. That was our business, or yours, Shiva.

She knew that that was the counter philosophy of the age. That that was what was needed.

We’ve seen the void, come on. We know it.

But what does that mean?

That we saw through things, right? We couldn’t participate in the social games. In the academic games. We couldn’t do the small talk. We couldn’t say the right things. We wouldn’t perpetuate the lie. We weren’t taken in. We couldn’t believe in anything, not with our whole hearts. We’ve had to be authentically ourselves. Swearing and shouting and drinking or whatever. And generally disgracing ourselves.

Because our minds were on other things?

Because it’s the only way we could be.

We saw through the lie of the world, Cicero said. We knew that this wasn’t for us. We were like a different species.

 

All the European professors around Cicero lied to themselves. It’s all a lie: that’s what Cicero told us, when we went to her, forlorn. You see what they do not, she said. You live what they do not.

They raise no objections to anything, Cicero said, of her European professors. But you – your lives are living objections.

They lie, and you do not, Cicero said, of her European professors. You’re drunk because you will not lie.

 

We were drunk because we would not lie: that’s what we told ourselves. The void would not let up.

The void got us drunk, right? It was the void’s fault …

The void blazed through our drunkenness. Like a black sun.

You make us sound so cool.

 

The professors around Cicero lied to themselves, that’s what she said. It was all a lie. And our drunkenness was not.

We were drunk because we would not lie – because we cannot bear lies, Cicero said. The void wouldn’t let us. And we were on the side of the void, anyone could see that. The void got us drunk, right?

We’re going to become the true resistance.

Yeah? How? By being drunker than anyone else? By swearing more loudly?

 

Are we the future of European philosophy?

Sure. Because it’s entered its farcical phase. Its self-parody phase. Its grotesquerie phase.

 

So how do we live the endless end times? In perpetual drunkenness? How do we live against it all?

Cicero would say that we already do. That we can’t help it.

 

She wanted to protect us. For as long as we needed it. Then set us free.

Yeah, into Organisational Management.

She knew we needed an enemy, to come into your own. A worthy adversary. And we have that now.

 

So we’re going to bring down the Organisational Management empire? Personally I thought it’d be the Humanities Liberation Front.

The Humanities Liberation Front is a myth. You know that.

We have to be the Humanities Liberation Front – that’s the point. Wherever there’s any resistance to the Organisational Management, there’s the Humanities Liberation Front.

 

The best thing is for us to be a sleeper cell. To wake ourselves up whenever we’re needed.

We’re not actually asleep.

We’ll be pretend asleep until the time comes. Then we’ll set off our philosophy bomb …

All her professors, Cicero. All her Europeans. She thought they were complicit. That they just went along with things. That the world had been too good to them, or something. Thery weren’t instinctively appalled, as we were, as she was.

They didn’t see the farce. The killing joke. They were too trusting. They trusted the present course of things. The world as it was. They thought they could just carry on the old world, the old culture, translating Thomas Mann, or whatever. As if the old world hadn’t gone! As if it hadn’t disappeared!

Sure, old Europe can go on Old Europeanizing, Cicero said. It can do its thing, on the other side of the channel. But it’s in the UK that you see the truth. In this philistine country …

 

All the ways they believed in the old culture, Cicero’s professors. All the ways they believe they could teach it, transmit it, the old world, old Europe. All the ways they were able to pretend to themselves, to others, that that world wasn’t a museum world. A superseded world. A denialism of the world as it was. In its poison! In its lies!

The didn’t see the End all around them, Cicero’s professors. They don’t see the new Forces. They don’t feel it: that everything has changed. That the old laws no longer apply. That all that culture was a blip. In the void. In the voiding of the void, or whatever.

 

There was nothing appalled about them, Cicero’s professors. Nothing burningly intense. There was no laughter at EVERYTHING. Just as we were filled, at our best, with a laughter at EVERYTHING.

 

It’s not just that no one’s interested in philosophy anymore, that no one reads books anymore. That no one has the attention span anymore. All those laments miss their mark.

It’s that the fundaments of civilization are fundamentally shifting. And something is revealing itself in that shift, in that move towards technocracy, towards total management and total organisation. Because the very condition of that move is the void. Is the experience of the nothingness at the heart of things. The fact that the whole order is grounded upon nothing – upon no ground. Upon no sense of what is good and right and just. Upon no faith in the order of things.  

And the technocrats know it too, in their heart of hearts. They know the world as void. They’re acting upon the world as void. Directly. Because the world is showing itself as void, directly.

The nothing as the world. The world as void. But the technocrats don’t know the divinity of the void, that’s the thing. They see the nothing as mere absence, mere lack. They think the time has come to manipulate it as such. To work on the void as such. But they don’t understand the depths of the void. They don’t know what it is – and isn’t.

 

That’s why she listened outside the lecture rooms, as we taught. That’s why she liked to listen to you talk, Shiva. At your sense of poison and lies. The way you spoke of poison and lies, quite explicitly.

Poison and lies: wasn’t that what you were lecturing, about at that conference, when she first heard you speak?

 

We were like punk philosophers to her, or something. Punks know how to draw their energy from the end, that’s what she said. A future from the fact that there is no future.

Which is why Cicero enjoyed our gaucheries. It wasn't just philistinism, to her. It wasn’t just bad manners. It wasn’t just not knowing how to do small talk.

She was training us, in her own way. It was like in Karate Kid. We didn’t know we were being trained, but we were.

Trained for what?

To further Cicero’s plans.

And what were her plans? The furtherance of European philosophy?

Or the parody of European philosophy. Cicero liked to laugh at what she loved, you know that. Some kind of farcical repetition was the only way anything could survive in this degenerate world. Everything in parody. Everything laughable. All of it at a distance from what it was. Nothing just allowed to be itself.

 

Complications. Cicero liked complications.

 

She wanted to see the dance of death. Things that were dead, playing at life. Grotesquerie. Capering. She liked chimps. And baboons. And whatever it is that we are. She liked running her zoo.

 

Theories of decline: Cicero liked those. Toynbee and Evola and all that. Accounts of the winter season. Of the latter days. Kali yuga. New kinds of primitivism and vulgarity. History falling to savages and barbarians.

And she wanted to further barbarism, right? To make things worse?

She wanted to make things more frenetic. Life at the end is feverish life: that’s what she said.

 

It was never about escaping from the tyranny of this world, for Cicero. She didn’t want to escape, but to go deeper. To fall more. To push things as far as she could.

Forcing the messiah: that’s what she wanted, in the end. To make things so bad, that only a messiah could save us.

And she thought a messiah would appear?

If a messiah was going to appear, it would be then: when the world had allen to its lowest stage of amorphy.

 

We were Cicero’s pets. Her sea monkeys. Her ant farm.

 

She was an accelerationist of madness. Wanting only madness, more madness.

 

She was ahead of everything. Like, riding the disaster.

 

Was Cicero just a fancy kind of nihilist? What did she actually believe in?

In living against the world.

You can’t be against everything.

She wanted to laugh at it all. To laugh and laugh until … you died of laugher. Dying with indignity: that’s what she used to talk about.

It was nihilism on top of nihilism. Like she wanted to double it up. She wanted to increase the tension. Make living in the world utterly unbearable. Until … God intervenes to just explode it. Until the messiah returned just to destroy everything. God was death, that’s what Cicero said.

 

Are we alive and playing at being dead, or the other way around?

 

Remember her watchwords: deepen the farce. That’s what she used to whisper.

 

Cicero was just one big evil grin.

 

Cicero, pleasing herself. Cicero, entertaining herself. Cicero, amused at what she had done. At getting one over on the world. At accelerating its fall. At deepening the farce.

 

She wanted one over on everything. To have gone more farcical than the farce of the world. To have, like, accelerated beyond it, and just stand there, looking back, grinning her evil grin.

 

Is there such a thing as a salvific farce? As a farce so farcical that … it exposes the whole game? That just … shows the farcicalness of everything? Or maybe … destroys the farce.

 

Cicero’s glee – her smile. She showed her teeth. Like she was daring the world on. Get worse: that’s what her grin said. Go on, get worse. It was some edgelord thing. Just sheer, arrant, magisterial hopelessness. She wanted to intensify the nihilism. To go madly mad with it. To out madden the madness …

But she wasn’t a nihilist, right?

She was a Gnostic.

So she had faith in something.

Yeah – in the divine nothing, not the nothing of the nihilist. The void that shows the in-vain of everything.

That’s nihilism!

It was a divine void, that’s the point. An interruption. A break, in the logic of the world. A breath. That blew from on high. From some absolute fucking transcendence.

 

All her stuff about the divine void was her version of hope, right? That things do not have to be as they are. That you can be free of things. That there’s a distance between you and the world.

That divine gnosis was what saved you from the world. And maybe it saves the world, too. It saves the world from being just the world. It means there’s something from somewhere else. That you can receive from elsewhere.

 

It’s all about how we live it: the divine nothing. It’s about living against. Living the distance from the world. Because it’s what shows the world as a farce. As a tautology. As the same, returning on itself, endlessly.  It shows the farcicalness of all things.

The divine void is … freedom, in a way. The freedom not to have to go along with it. To laugh in the face of it. Because it can make you laugh. Because it can make you just … cry out into the sky. FUCK IT ALL!  

 

So it’s a religion. It’s a … negative theology?

Maybe it is. A religion of the opposite direction. The source of all religions.

You must have loved Cicero.

I didn’t love her. She was always too far away. I didn’t feel close to her. You could never get close to Cicero. She … kept everything at a distance. It was hard to know what her investment in anything was.

But you were her girl.

Sure – she liked that. She liked having a girl. But I don’t know if she was capable of loving anyone. You had to be a player behind the iron curtain. An operator. The world was full of apparatchiks, for Cicero. You had to play or be played. And she could outplay everyone. She thought moves and moves ahead.

So where is she now?

She removed herself from the board.

Cicero liked me because I was so deeply fucked up. She thought all these Jewish gnostic things, she said, but I actually I felt them. I had the … revulsion. She thought it marked me out: the quality of my disgust.

Disgust with what?

With everything. With the world. She used to talk of my pit of negativism. The beams of loathing I was, like, sending out. the way I saw through all things. Nothing could fool me, she said. Nothing can hide from you. It’s like I had X-ray eyes …

That’s why she called me Shiva. That was my apocalyptic name. Because Shiva’s, the destroyer, right?

A hangover is an attunement. Our hangover is about the essential hungoverness of all things. Everything is hungover, don’t you see? It’s all hungover.

 

The pain of sobriety. Of the day after.

Last night, everything seemed to hold together. To hang together. We were inches away from the Truth. We feel the streaming of the Truth right above us, so close. But now …

 

Cicero liked us hungover. Liked us all thoroughly depressed. It amused her. She used to torment us, remember? She used to call 9AM meetings, just to summon us on. Breakfast meetings! Just to see us at our worst.

She used to sit there and take the piss. List our shortcomings. Bellow at us to make our heads ring. And then she’d sit back, grinning.

 

Hungovers are a necessary disenchantment, that’s what Cicero said. They show the world as it is. In its fallenness. In its state of abandonment.

 

Drunkenness, hangovers. Caught between the two. Oscillating form the one to the other. Our lives, perpetually in sway from the heavens to the abyss.

Better than living life without extremes. Better than living on the fucking flatlands. Where we do not know the height of height depths of depth. Where we do not understand what transcendence means. Or immanence.

Heaven and hell, right?

 

You can see the angels when you drink. And God, and the Most fucking high. And you see the absence of God when you’re sober. And the Most fucking Low.