Work in Progress

This is their last chance, our PhD students. They know it. Their last few years. Just as these are our last years – though we have more years than our postgraduates.

We love their unworldliness. Their doomedness. The fact that they’re fucked. Which mirrors our own unworldliness. Our own doomedness. The fact that we’re fucked.

 

They’re copying us, our PhD students. They’re learning from us. It’s accelerated development. They’re moving quickly. But where it will get them? Not as far as us, which is the tragedy. They won’t end up in jobs, like us. They won’t end up working at some half-decent university, or indeed any university.

There are barely any jobs for European philosophy. For non-technocratic philosophers. Nothing for genuine questioners. We slipped through, it’s true. But we were lucky. It was a flaw, a fluke. It happened entirely by chance.

 

They’re copying our gestures, our mannerisms, our PhD students. Even our doom, which is more advanced than theirs. Which has more twists and turns than theirs. Which is more complex, no doubt more mature than theirs.

But it’s coming on, their doom. It’s developing, their doom. It's ripening …

 

They should shoot themselves, our PhD students. And shoot us, first – their teachers. For giving them vistas. For opening them to too many things. For providing them with names. With books. With the grounding for reading such books … It was cruelty: the vistas we showed them. The books we told them about. The films! The music!

 

How tender we’ve been with them, our PhD students. We’ve been generosity itself to our PhD students. As though they were our own children. Which they are in many ways: our own children.

 

The suicides of our PhD students: we expect them. They’re not going to live long out there. They’re not going to last long, not in the world. They’re sensitive. And the world is cruel.

What’s the point of lecturing on anything but the terrible world?

So let’s lecture on that. The pointlessness of lecturing. The pointless of everything.

It’s not the world that’s the problem, it’s Organisational Management. Get rid of Organisational Management and you liberate the world. Is it that easy?

What’s the most anti Organisational Management we can teach? What does it mean to do Organisational Management in the opposite direction?

Like, disorganised unmanagement. Chaos. All that stuff.

Let’s change all our modules. Let’s destroy Organisational Management with our teaching. Let’s become a war machine against those fuckers. Let’s blow them up.

Should we rename our modules? Call them, like, I hate Organisational Management. Organisational Management sucks.

It’s about changing the content. Changing the direction. Teaching undercover. We’re behind enemy lines, basically. We’re secret partisans. We have to equip our students to see all the agendas. What this is all About. We have to help them diagnose the horror. And not to give in to suicidal despair. For now, anyway.

 

Let’s get ourselves sacked – honorably. Let’s destroy our careers. I’m tired of having a career.

 

Study has to become the opposite of Organisational Management. It has to be something Organisational Management could never appropriate.

It can’t be about philosophy, with some determinate content. With a syllabus … It’s about non-learning. About no-syllabus. About wandering infinitely in the darkness.

We should help our students on strike – some profound strike. Striking should be our lives – our whole lives. They shouldn’t be tested. Shouldn’t be under any kind of pressure. They shouldn’t have to complete a thing.

 

It’s a question of sharpening philosophy against the whetstone of Organisational Management. Of rediscovering philosophy, in a sense. Letting it come into its own. Become what it is – what it has to become. Now.

 

Philosophy has to be allowed to drift away from anything useful. From anything to do with results. It has to float away. And take studying with it. And all our students.

We have to rediscover the beauty of philosophy. In its perfect uselessness. The lotus flower blooming from the humanities. In the navel of the humanities. The most beautifully useless subject of them all.

Philosophy has to be made uselessly stupid. And our students, too. We’ll have to lead out students into stupidity – the great stupidity, greater than the biblical desert. We’ll all have to become stupid, together. Perfectly stupidity. And that’s where we’ll meet one another: in perfect stupidity.

 

Our teaching.

We have to be anti-processors. Spanners in the works. We have to stop the flow. Pull the emergency brake. There must no more processing.

The students need a rest. A holy pause. It’s their only chance. Their change to see the divine Nothing. At the heart of all things. At the heart of the uni. At the heart of us. At the heart of philosophy.

They have to learn to live against. In the opposite direction. They have to live in the world but be not of it. Trust – must be eroded. The sense of reality … that this is real. That their world is real …

 

*We have to encourage our students to dwell with their potentiality. To step back. To rediscover what they might be … or might not be.

It’s about opening them to a vocation, a calling. For nothing in particular. For anything. And to remain in that indeterminacy. To stay eternal students. Eternally stupid. Stupid, but with a sweet stupidity. A gentleness. Poised on the brink of … what?

 

What is our freedom? Perversity. The capacity to be perverse. To be strange. Negation. Negativity. That’s how we show it. Our philosophy. Our questioning. That we’re not just victims.

What are we then?

Negators. Nihilists, if you like.

 

Hatred – that’s what out freedom has contracted into. That’s what it’s become. Some point of negativity. Some seed of negativism. That’s what it’s made us into, the system.

Only hatred is left to us.

That’s what love’s become: hatred. Our capacity for friendship: hatred.

And what we hate is what we have in common. An instinct of hatred toward the same things. An instinct for horror at the same things. A basic flinching – a recoil at the same things. It's what saves us. It’s what keeps us together, in dark times.

The same sense of machinery working in the dark. That there are vast and shady … manipulations. Power-grabs and counter power-grabs. Great armies clashing in the dark.

The same sense that there are shifting planes of darkness, that’s all. Powers. Principalities. That we can’t even catch a glimpse of our true rulers.

The universe should get drunk, too. Join with our drunkenness.

The universe should give up! The universe should set aside its plans! They don’t matter. They’re not leading anywhere.

Every living thing must drink! Must be drunk! Every non-living thing! There must be drunken rocks and drunken stones. Drunken skies! Drunken stars!

Everything should be drunk with us. There should be a great drunken celebration. Of all things! Of everything!

 

The pub. This is our Church. This is our Temple. This is our Shelter.

This is the centre of all things, and immune from all things. The world turns around us here. All things turn around us. We contemplate all things as at a distance.

 

Our drinking. It’s how we reach what we are not. How we deviate from the Plan – even our own Plan.

Suspension. Means, losing their ends. Means, uncoupled from their ends.

We’re holding fate back. The inevitable. We’re not letting the world be the world, at least for a while.

 

Keep drinking! Stay drinking! There are drunken conversations that we simply must have. A drunken intensity which we must maintain. A drunken paranoia. A drunken conspiracy-theorising. A drunken drunkenness.

We’re drunk on each other. We’ve turned each other drunk. We’ve turned each other wild. Are we good for each other? Is this good for us?

We’re made each other high. We’ve made each other mad. That’s the effect we have on each other. We’re accelerants. Catalysts. General intensifiers.

We spread our disease. And even increase our disease. Our madness! Because we should call it by its name: madness!

In a kind of contagion. An illness. We’re running a fever. We’re running wild. We’re febrile. We’re dreaming crazy dreams.

The blooming of our drunkenness, it’s bearing fruit. Its yield. Bountiful. Plentiful.

Our ideas, carried in a mad flow. Our enthusiasm. Our love of film! Of music! Of books!

The signs and wonders that keep us alive. That make life worth living! These life buoys … These oxygen masks …. As our ship sinks. As our plane crashes.

 

Drunken recommendations of books! Of films! Of music! That we’ll forget. Unless we write them down … But we’ll never be able to read our own drunken handwriting …

Drunken explications of film plots. Of novels. Drunken renditions of favourite songs.

 

A mad drunken seeing of connections. A drunken discernment of patterns …

 

We’re drunken enthusiasts. Drunken culture-devourers. We need succour. We need something for our souls. To keep our souls alive.

 

Getting drunk and watching epic Eastern European gloomfests …

We drink for stupor. We drink to be stupid. To clear out all good sense from our head. All common sense.

We drink for encounters. We drink to meet the Outside. We drink to Reach … We drink to … Discover …  

 

We drink to be ready. To raise our heads. To look up at the sky and to look through the sky … The system’s sky.

As if something from the sky could save us. Some catastrophe, reaching us from the sky. Some incursion. Some roaring from the heavens.

 

The sky. Something sees us up there. Something’s watching. On the other side of the night. Of endless space.

Someone’s eye is upon us. We do not live in vain. We do not drink in vain.

And that’s why we drink. To remember. To get up off our knees … And then to fall down again. For a moment’s respite …

 

Our method; our drunken method. To follow the drunken path, a little. Even as it meanders. Even as it appears to go nowhere. Even as it leads nowhere.

 

We want to see the absence of God. We want to see the empty sky.

Transcendence. We’re thirsty for transcendence. We drink for transcendence. To be reminded. That the world system isn’t complete. That this isn’t all there is. That the irruption can come from without, and only from without. That the revolution happens in the sky, the empty sky, the starless sky.

The divine Nothing. The Nothing as the divine. The divine absence. That’s what we’re waiting for. Absence as the divine. That leaves nothing standing. That spares no one.

 

Drunken prayer is more effective than sober prayer.

We want a miracle! A drunken miracle!

Through the drunken looking glass. Through the drunken mirror. Into the drunken inverted world.

 

Drunkenly bewildered. But bewilderment is understanding, on another plane. Drunkenly lost. But loss is also finding, on another plane. Drunken rambling. But rambling is always precision, on another plane. Drunken obscenities. But obscenities are the sweetest poetry on another plane. Drunken lamentation. But our laments are celebrations, on another plane. Drunken despair. But despair is joy, on another plane. Drunken hopelessness. But hopelessness is hope itself, on another plane. Drunken hatred. But hatred is also love on a higher plane.

 

What looks like our self-destruction is really self-preservation. What looks like sinking is really elevation. What looks like collapse is really rising. What looks like self-mutilation is a way of putting ourselves back together. What looks like degeneracy is a regeneration …

 

In another dimension, we’re sober. We’re upstanding. We ‘re the most lucid people you’ve ever met. In another dimension, it all makes sense, just as nothing makes sense here.

 

Stop seeing alcoholism as a disease. It’s a blessing. It’s an exit route. It’s the only way out. It’s an escape route. It’s a higher Sobriety – much higher.

 

Hamlet is my drunken name.

Macbeth is mine.

Diogenes is mine, Just call me the Dog.

My name is Bacchae.

That’s a plural.

 

We’re the sons and daughters of alcoholics. Generations of them. Of died-young drunkards. Of drinking-themselves-to-death drunkards.

Somehow they reproduced. Somehow they gave birth to children. Who could of course, only become alcoholics in turn.

 

Foetal alcohol syndrome: we can blame everything on that. We were ruined by drink. Born ruined! And now we’ll complete the ruination. We’ll see it through to the end. To the end of the night!

 

Drunkard … a lovely word. What’s the etymology of drunkard?

 

Really our drunkenness is an attunement. To how things are. Really, it’s a receptivity. Really, our drunkenness is a satellite dish, turned to receive signals from the sky.

 

We’re serious drinkers. Our seriousness lies in our drinking. In the way we drink. In the seriousness of our drinking. In the concentratedness of our drinking. In its focus.

There is only drinking. There’s nothing but drinking. People – all people – are only more or less drunk. Too drunk, or not drunk enough.

 

Our drunken lives. Our more or less drunken lives.

Our defeat – is cosmic. Our rout …

 

Our enemy: the cosmos.

The perpetual victor: the cosmos.

 

The self-consciousness of drunkenness. Drunkenness learns to speak. Drunkenness sings. And of itself.

Drunken hymns to drunkenness. Drunkenness, singing of drunkenness. There’s nothing better.

Great drunken hymns to be sung. Drunken threnodies. Drunken paens.

 

Drunken celebrations. That there can still be drunkenness. That drunkenness is allowed. That drunkenness Is permissible – even now.

 

What has drunkenness taught us? What are its lessons? Surely there’s something we’ve learned from all these years of drunkenness?

But it’s not about results. Drunkenness is study. Study without result …

 

We’ve been drinking for days now.

This is our drunken residency. This is our drunken art practice. We’ll be drunk permanently! From now on! From here to eternity!

 

Drunken hope is more ardent than sober hope. Drunken laughter is deeper than sober laughter. Drunken hatred is more intense than sober hatred.

 

We’re recovering. From a long period of sobriety. From a too-long period of not-drinking. They’re always too long: periods of not drinking.

 

There are things we understand when we’re drunk. Things that come to us when we’re drunk. We’re inspired when we’re drunk.  

What if we’re supposed to think this is the apocalypse? What if that’s the true apocalypse: that we’re supposed to think it’s the apocalypse? What if we’re actually going to be okay?

 

We thought the apocalypse frees us from the world, this world. We thought the apocalypse would shatter open the world. Destroy the world. But really, the apocalypse is a technique of this world, a ruse of this world. It’s how they keep their world going.

 

I’ve spent my whole life waiting for the world to collapse. And it doesn’t collapse.

Yes, but it’s going to collapse.

I don’t make any long term plans, nothing. I don’t think about the future, because I don’t believe there’s going to be a future.

So there’s no future?

There’s a future of no future. Just loads of crises. Just World War Three and so on.

The collapse, in other words.

*We have to free ourselves from addiction to the end. From apocalyptic fantasies.

That’s going to be difficult. I’m largely apocalyptic fantasies.

It’s a swizz – don’t you see? We’re supposed to think like this, believe like this. It’s what replaces religion. It just becomes faith in some contentless end. Faith in some explosion.

 

We have apocalyptic temperaments. Or at least I do. It’s what we’ve been trained for. From birth. We’ve been brought up to basically panic – permanently To live in a perpetual state of emergency.

 

They want us panicked. They want us trembling in fear.

Who’s they?

The powers that shouldn’t be, right? We have to find a way to live. It’s not just about thought. It’s about – just trying to survive. About trying to find our way out of depression.

I don’t think I’m depressed.

Sure you’re depressed. You’re depressed and I’m depressed. It’s a lively depression, but it’s a depression. We talk about apocalypse all the time.

That’s a sign of life!

That’s a sign of death!