Work in Progress

We disgusted her, that’s the thing. We horrified her. How could we not?

We were swarming things to her.


Teeming life. Profusion. What you’d find under a rock.

Busy with life, in some sense. Busy with our life-death. Busy in our living death. Crawling over each other. Horrific. Abased and abasing.

All the way to Hell! Academic Hell!


Some foulness. Something you’d scrape from your academic shoe!

Something macabre. The outcome of some lengthy process of decomposition. No: the decomposition itself. The fall-apart.  Entropy, in action.


How could she not feel nauseous recoil, Livia? How could she not flinch, ontologically? Down to the depths of what she was?

She was all flinch. All trembling, in our presence. Her terror, her horror: she couldn’t hide it. Abjection, in person. How could she not gag to see us?


It was more than just squeamishness.

The wrinkled nose! The pursed mouth! Pulled down at the corners!

Disgust is a limbic system thing. A primitive thing. A simple emotion. Like fear. Like anger, like fear, like sadness. It’s pancultural. Anyone would feel it.


But she was fascinated by us, too.

There was an erotics to her disgust. She felt called by what repelled her. She called us towards us. She even smiled.


Some sick desire. Some pollution drive. Some contamination drive.

This wine’s alive in some disgusting sense. It’s crawling and swarming. It’s like swarming insects. It’s like some repulsive excess.


Rampant life. Some horrible vitality. Some effervescence of the corpse.


Crude things. Unrefined things. Sweating and fuming and thronging.

Some danse macabre. Some vermin. Some swampy flourishing. Some formlessness. Some … mass.

Yeah, a black mass. 


Some foul abundance. The everything of everything. A … multiplication. The horror sprawl.


All the execrated things. All the vile things. The vile parts of existence.

Livia’s views were ours. She was a little way further on than we were, that’s all. She’d advanced farther. She’d drawn conclusions … that we would have drawn, in time. That’s why she was our leader. That’s why she could lead us on.

Why did we want to be lead?

We wanted to be saved. Pulled up from the waters. Rescued from our disgust.

Only to be delivered unto further disgust.

The real question: what was so wrong, so very wrong with Livia? With our own Leviathan? What had gone wrong in her head?

That she wanted proteges. That she wanted to be a leader. That it wasn’t enough for her to simply retire early.

She wanted to do something. She had a mission. And she needed followers.

What was it: revenge on the university? For her humiliations?

But what humiliations had she suffered? Sure, some of the managers were annoying. They showed small-souledness, that’s what Livia said. The opposite of great-souledness, that Aristotelian virtue. Of magnanimity.

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! We were her thought-plague! We were her flying monkeys! We were her lizard people. Her degenerates! Her mutant army! Dysgenics in person!

We were her betrayal of everything good and true, Livia. We were her war on western civilization.

Livia combed the European philosophy conferences for us! For our kind! Deliberately! Purposefully! No one else would do!

She came to the European philosophy conferences with a Mission! With a Purpose! She knew what she wanted. What to avoid. He wanted nothing to do with the careerists. Nothing to do with the out-for-their-own-glory types. Nothing to do with the academic mountaineers.

Us! Only us! Ony we would do! Only us, in our combination. Only us, her future Z-team. It was UK European philosophy idiots assemble, or nothing. Only us! Only we would do!


Livia’s instincts. Livia’s hatred! Livia’s love! led her right to us.

She Knew. She Realised. She Guessed. She had Faith! And Love! And Hope!

And who were we to be? What were we to become, in Livia’s plan? How were we to be moved, on Livia’s chessboard? What role would we have, in Livia’s passion play?


Livia’s heart! Livia’s greatsouledness. Livia’s magnanimity! Livia’s expansiveness. Livia’s character. Livia’s breadth. Livia’s soul – so wide, so great. Livia’s lifeforce!

Philosophy – a way of seeking to be crushed.


Philosophy – that the dark planet toward which we wanted to be drawn. To be crushed by its gravity! To be pulverised against it!

Philosophy, like that supersun, ten thousand times times greater than the size of the earth.

Sublimely great. Inescapably great. Vast – unimaginably so.


To be drawn into the dark orbit of Phenomenology of Spirit. Of the Science of Logic. Of the complete works of Edmund Husserl.


To be drawn in. Ushered in. To the philosophical Presence. To the philosophical Leviathan. To monster-books. To whale books. To deep plunging books, that would take us down with them.

We don’t want to come up for breaths. We don’t want to breathe, not anymore. We don’t want to live.

To be stifled. For philosophy to place its pillow over our face. To smother us. We don’t want to take another breath. Of course not!

Let philosophy breathe in our stead. Let philosophy breathe where we cannot. We offer up our UK breaths, our working-class breathing. We offer up our British lives, our working class lives!


Didn’t we Sense something in this philosophy. The chance of our destruction? Wasn’t that what we wanted: the chance of our destruction?

Weren’t we lured in by it? Like those weird creatures of the sea-depths. With their dangling lights. We were drawn in to be swallowed by Kant fish and Feuerbach fish and Husserl fish. But we wanted to be swallowed. We were sick and weary of being ourselves.


Almost incidental Destruction. Not-even-noticing-us Destruction. Too vast to care.

We were to be eaten up like plankton. Like krill. Unnoticed. Unimportant.

And nothing even special about our Destruction. And that’s how we wanted it: not for there to be anything special about our Destruction.


To be undone, in a single gesture. To be killed by one blow. Mercifully. Kindly, even.

And barely noticed. Because unimportant – as we were unimportant. Unnoticed – as we, in our insignificance – were unnoticed.


Anonymous death. The death of flies in empty rooms. Curled up on the windowsill.

Irrelevances. Unimportants. Incidentals. We were No Ones. Nothings. Flies or fleas. Infusoria in the water, to be poured away.


And we wouldn’t bother them in our dying. Wouldn’t cry out. Wouldn’t raise our voices. We’d be Good. We’d died quietly. Unnoticed. Because we weren’t worthy of their attention, the Great Books. Because they should be disturbed, the Great Tomes. Because we weren’t to wake them from their slumbers, the books like tombs!


We went to them only to be crushed. Only to be devoured.

We offered ourselves up. We were willing sacrifices.

The books were busy with Mourning. With Praying. With thinking. With Diagnosing. With Marxi-ising. With moralising.

And we, who were we?

Words like great boulders. Words like leftover ruins. Stranded words.

Hard books. Harder than we are. Harder than we could ever be. We’re soft. We’re made of softness.

Aren’t we tired of being alive? Aren’t we tired of the confusions of life? Haven’t we had enough of continuing to live? Isn’t continued life just more twisting to us? More confusion to us?

And we don’t want to be confused, not anymore. We don’t want to be twisted.

Untwist us. Undo us. Return us to nothing. Unlive us. Rewind us. All the way back to … what? Inception?

The great subtraction: that’s what we want. The great deletion. The great Correction.


Can a book correct us? Might a book undo us? And a philosophy in the book?

A dark philosophy. No: a dark non-philosophy. An unphilosophy that wants to swallow us up into darkness. Take us into its great dark stomach.

We didn’t want clarity – the bright light of analytic clarity. We didn’t want to understand what we read.

To plunge into continental obscurity: that’s what we wanted.

Senselessness! We loved senselessness! We loved sentences that we could not understand. That needed decryption. That needed code breakers.

We wanted to bathe in prose – in obscure philosophical prose. We wanted to dwell in philosophy. Wanted the waters of European philosophy to close over our heads. To wash over our heads. To wash our poor heads away.


To think with the thoughts of others. No – with their unthoughts. With their sort-of-like-thoughts. With their obscurities. With the things we do not understand.

We want the unground. We want the groundless. Forget clarity! Forget logical rigour! Forget precision!

We want the obscure. We want the unreadable. We want to read pages where we lose the thread. And our thread. And ourselves. Our very sense of ourselves!


Reading isn’t about lucidity! It’s an escape from lucidity.

We don’t want to understand a line – not a line. We’re tired of understanding. Tired of clarity! We want the darkness to close over us. Want to be broken up. Broken away. How tired we are of being ourselves!

We want to sink. We want to go down. We want to plunge. We want to drown. In obscurity. In darkness.


The great churn of … incomprehensibility. Not a single intelligible sentence. Not a single phrase we could parse. Might as well have been written in a foreign language. And a very foreign language. A language that had nothing to do with us.


We want books that keep the secret – that keep their secret. That turn away from us.

Unsociable books. Forbidding books. Books like landscapes, like skies. Like the breast of the earth.


Books of the earth. Books of black earth. Of the darkest terroirs!

Books turned away from us. Unreadable books. Books that flee reading. That belong to the dark, and press into the dark.


Let’s never read again. Let’s forget what reading was.

Intelligibility? Fuck that. Arguments? What are those? Clarity. Forget clarity! Forget the clear. Forget the light. Forget reason. Forget the rational. Forget it all.


Books that are all question, that are nothing but question.

We want enigmas. We want paths that trail off into the darkness. Paths that lead nowhere. Paths that don’t even begin. Non paths!


Let the darkness thicken. Let the darkness choke us. Let it thicken in our heads.

The darkness, slurring. Darkness’s words. That do not signify. That do not mean. That are heavy, that’s all. That sink, in their heaviness. And pull us down with them.

Earth-words. Words of matter. Sludge-words, thick and heavy.

We’re wading through sludge. Wading through mire.

We understand less than we ever did. We know less than we’ve ever known. We aren’t ourselves and we aren’t anyone. And it’s a relief. It’s pressure – off.


Sinking, with the words. Sinking, into non meaning. Into the abyss of non meaning. Words that carry us down with them. Ballast words. Rubble words. Anchor words. That sink us down into nothing.


Are we drowning? How can you drown in words? How can you be choked by words?

We’re pulled down. We’re dragged down. We’re sinking – and it’s a relief to sink.

Dying – are we dying? A sort of dying.

We want to be released. We want to be let go. We’ve had enough. Enough of everything! Enough of the world! Enough of living in the world! Enough of living! Enough of enough!

Let’s lie down. Lie down, and be done to. Lie down and be crushed. Lie down and be overwhelmed.

Linguistic hell. Idiot books, but deep idiocy. Enfolding idiocy.

European proxies. Our European laughter. And what do we know of Europe! We’ve never even been to Europe! Never participated in the French exchange. Never holidayed in the Mediterranean. Never sailed down the Danube. Never hiked in the Alps. In the snowfields of Switzerland. Never caught a cable car up to the peaks in Saas Fe.


We have to retrieve a new Europe. Our own Europe. We have to repeat Europe, in the Kierkegaardian sense. Re-take it. Farcically. Let it live again, in our own way.


A way of reappropriating the European past. A way of reliving the past in the present. A past that we never lived! That wasn’t ours to reappropriate!


A farcical repetition. Not the return of old Europe as old Europe. Not a retrieval of the possibilities of old Europe. Not a restoration of the possibilities of old Europe, not making it possible again. Not the rearticulation of a past we could never attain. Not re-experiencing the European past in a different way, in a way that responded to what is needed in our time, in our present.

A farcical repeating, that meant only the impossibility of retrieval. That showed only the irrelevance of the old times. Of the European past.

We’re ahead of you, postgraduates. In our despair. In our horror. We’ve gone further than you. We’re ahead. Will you ever catch up with us?

Not until you’ve passed through the part time trial by fire. The part time ditch! We’ve been out there, postgraduates. We’ve been out there, as you have not.

Sure, you came from there, postgraduates. You got your scholarships and escaped, from the world. But imagine you were thrown out there again. Imagine you were expelled from here and had to make your way out there again.

Out there again, postgraduates, looking for work! Scraping by! On hourly paid work! Freelancing! Precarious! Ah, what misery.


 Haunted, in our dreams. Nightmares, of being part-time again. Of knowing it again, our part-timism. Of being cast out again into the pit of part-timism. In which we barely existed! In which we were never able to come to ourselves!

Part time indetermination. When nothing was yet. Chaos. When there were fragments, that’s all.

A whirling. A whirlwind. Vortices. Where we were spinning out of control, that’s all.

We haven’t recovered yet. We’ll never feel ourselves to be secure, safe. We’ll never have believed ourselves to have Arrived. To be employed full time.

We will never believe ourselves to be secure. To be safe. It could all be taken away from us. We could be left high and dry. We could be stranded. Beached. We could be left without shelter.

We’re regular people now: can we believe that? We’re like the others. We aren’t charity cases anymore. We don’t need handouts.

We aren’t Devastated. Ruined. One day we might even clear our debts. Imagine that: clearing our debts.