Work in Progress

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.

Our Board of Studies.

You’re in charge, Shiva. Come on then – lead us. Show us the way! Lead by example. You have to be decisive, Shiva. That’s what you’re for. So decide! Cut through the red tape! Though the Gordian knot! There are decisions to be made! Things to be done. We have an agenda to work through. Points to address. Action points to tick off.

We’re in Organisational Management now, remember that. They’ll be scrutinising our minutes. Make sure our minutes are immaculate, Fiver. Don’t record anything we say about suicide. Or our drunkenness. Or about throwing ourselves out of the window. None of that! We need clean minutes. Don’t record the swearing. Or the panic. Or the threats of mutiny.

We have to pass muster. Under the radar. We shouldn’t stand out. We don’t want to draw attention. We want to appear as though we’re an efficient cog in the overall machine. That we can keep the academic wheels turning. We need to appear as a functioning department. And that’s half the battle, isn’t it?

But we’re not a functioning department. We’re not a functioning anything. Of course not! Everything’s wrong with us. My God, look our leader!

We have to reign in our masochism. Keep it under wraps. We can’t show ourselves as what we are.

 

Our meeting. Our Board of Studies.

It’s just us. The lunatics really have taken over the asylum. The chimps have taken over.

Let’s have a chimp meeting. What would be on the chimp agenda. Bananas. Inter chimp rivalry. Mating. Eating their own shit.

They only do that in zoos.

Colourful assholes.

That’s mandrills.

 

Press the panic button!

Is there a panic button? Why not?

Phone the police. There’s a crime in progress. An ontological crime. It’s all a crime. The university’s a crime. The university itself!

Calm down! Don’t get hysterical! Driss, slap him!

There’s a planetary crisis. There’s emergency. Of being!

 

Why are you lying down, Shiva?

I’m assuming  my position on  the floor of dread.

Get up off the fucking floor of dread!

Driss, lying on the floor of dread. Barbarossa, lying on the floor of dread. Fiver, lying on the floor of dread.

What is this, some kind of yoga?

Yeah, doom yoga.

Get up! You’re supposed to be chairing this meeting, Shiva. You’re supposed to be in charge. This is the Board of Studies, for fuck’s sake. What have you got to report to us from the Executive Committee? What’s coming down from on high.

I don’t know. I didn’t go to it. I said I was ill.

Ill?!

Mentally ill Too full of dread.

You can’t keep giving excuses like that! Not to the Organisational Management Executive! Those guys are serious. They’re world conquerors. These guys are taking over the world. What do you think they’ll do to us if they think we can’t run our department? We have to keep up appearances.

For fuck’s sake! This is not a time for dread, but for manly resolve. No lying down! And are you actually meditating, Driss?

I’m just closing my eyes.

Well, open them again! My God. And Fiver, leave off the visions for a few minutes. We need our departmental administrator alert! Focused! Writing minutes! Taking down our words of wisdom. The relevant action points.

 

We need an emergency meeting.

We’re already in a meeting.

We need a meeting inside the meeting.

Wow, a meta-meeting.

 

Let’s put this to the vote: should we kill ourselves immediately? Just fall on our swords?

We don’t have swords.

We need to be issued with swords. That’s an action point. So we can fall on them. Contact the department of metallurgy. Ask them to make some swords. Our philosophical honour is at stake. The honour of philosophy falls to us.

Isn’t it a bit late for that? If it was so honourable, why did it give us jobs at a Russell Group university? PhDs? Why did it give us first degrees. Face it, philosophy’s in a slump. Philosophy’s been being dishonoured since … God knows when. We’re just the latest twist in its deep dishonour.

Which doesn’t mean we should dishonour philosophy any further!

Uh … do we have to kill ourselves or not?

We’ll wait for the swords to be delivered. Why do we need to wait for swords? We could just throw ourselves out of the window.

But the window doesn’t open wide enough. Have you noticed that?

It’s a deliberate anti suicide measure. Those bastards. It’s prejudice. Against the suicidal! It’s against the Equalities Act! We have rights!

They actually want us to kill ourselves, that’s the thing. It’s why they’re building euthanasia pods.

So we should live! In defiance! That would serve the true honour of philosophy.

We need our hangovers – don’t you see? After the up, the ecstasy, the falling down. We need both – both sides. The opening to transcendence. And the fall to Earth. And into the Earth. Into amorphy. Into existence without existents.

Hungovers: this is where we truly experience our conditions. This is where we know the irremissibility of it all. Where we know ourselves to be animals, caught in a trap. Where we know that we’re stuck with who we are. Stuck to ourselves. Stuck to this world. To what just repeats itself – returns on its fucking self.

When we know ourselves to be stuck in this horrible tautology. When we experience our very existence as fate. As inevitability. With no escape. No evasion. The unbearable heaviness of being, right? The unbearable crushedness of being …

When we know ourselves as buried. Buried in life.

The hungover lowers the coffin. The hungover seals the tomb.

The highest and the lowest, right? The day after the night before. The trick is to remember what we saw when drunk in the midst of the hangover. It’s the tension, you see. That’s what we need to maintain.

You can walk in the kingdom of God even though you’re still in this fallen world. You can bring the kingdom here. Even though this is a realm of delusion and suffering.

 

It’s God’s grace that the world’s become as evil as it has. We’re now being shown good from evil. It’s no more evil than it was. We now see evil for what it is. Evil is not hidden.

 

The Organisational Management campus is the last gasp. It’s the last effort of the old order. It will fail. This is already the old world. We’re walking through the last of the old world.

 

We’re not part of this. We’re aliens. We’re strangers in a strange world, right. And it’s very fucking strange.

 

They’re panicked, and they want us panicked.

Are they panicked?

They’re losing.

Are they losing?

They’re struggling to control the narrative.

It doesn’t seem like that.

Look, it’s like Hitler in the bunker. He kept going with all his and delusions, didn’t he? They’re already dead. They’re charging towards us with the last of its energies, but they’re dead – the beast is dead. We’ve won – we’ve already won.

I don’t believe that.

We’re already saved.

 

The Destruction is real – fucking real. What they’re trying to do to us. And we collaborate in our own destruction. We want our own destruction.  Because w don't believe in ourselves.

 

We’re each of us wounded. Each of us fucked. And traumatised. And it’s not some clinical thing. It’s an ontological thing. It’s about the nature of the universe.

It’s about some age old struggle between good and evil. Really ancient stuff. That’s the drama – a spiritual drama. In which we’re all caught up. In which we’re all involved. That takes place in our hearts. And soul.

They want us to personalise it. To make us think it’s about our individual psychologies and life problems. To make us think it’s our individual despair-spiral. When it isn’t. When it’s their world that's doing things.