Work in Progress

Organisational Management is the form the end will take. The endless end. Bureaucratised. Administered from here to eternity.


There’s not even a magnificence to the collapse. It’s not even some sublime spectacle.

Is there a reason why we’re here?

Everything happens for a reason.

(Pointing at Helmut.) What’s the reason for him? What’s the reason for Heideggerians?

Didn’t Heidegger write a book about the essence of reasons?

And the principle of reason. That was the title: The Prinicple of Reason. All I can remember is he kept quoting that line from Angelius Sileius: A rose is without why.

A Helmut is without why: I like that.

The world is disgusting.

We know that.

More than usually disgusting.


Disgustosophy. That’s what we do now.


There’s a new quality in our disgust.

Do you think?

I think our disgust’s giving us gravitas. I think it’s giving us substance.

The soft suicide of our lives. Which will one day become hard suicide.

Amazing we’re still alive.

You don’t have to do much to be still alive, do you?

Every day is the day of wrath. Every day is the last day.

Ah, the life of the desire to die.

The dynamics of self-hatred. The life of self-hatred. Of our thrashings. Of our convulsions …


Nothing hates itself like a human being. We’re the uniquely fucked up species, right?

What’s wrong with us? How did self-loathing become a form of enjoyment? Like scorpions stinging themselves.


Shutdown, that’s what we want. The final final. Credits rolling, or whatever. The end, in big capitals. Fin, like the end of a Godard film.

Our kind … So ill-fitting. So maladjusted.

Why did we appear? What are we for? What were we brought to Newcastle to do?


We’re a type that only appears at the end, as a sign of the end. Of the sickness of the end.


We’ve been disastered. We’ve been nihilised. We’ve been fucked in the head. We’ve been destroyed.

It was done to us. And now it has to be undone. With wine.

The party’s over. The end’s come and gone. We were too late to be late.


Our torments of posthumousnesss. Our throwback existentialism. Our very-late-for-the-party philosophical Angst.

Of course, our madness is really a counter-madness. Our madness is really a madness against their madness. Against their delirium. It’s a protective madness, of a sort. It’s a sheltering madness.

This is God’s suicide watch. God’s looking down at us.


Emergency extraction, that’s what we need. To be beamed the fuck up.


At least we can share the despair.

Have you got any Heideggerian poems memorised? I always liked those.

Helmut, silent.

How about you – any Bataillean poems that you know by heart?

Shaking my head.

I’d settle for a psalm. Recite a good psalm, Io.


I’ve always thought of you as an emotional support Heideggerian.


Heidegger was the equivalent of a Geordie, Livia told us. He had a strong regional accent. Wore regional clothes. Lederhosen, in his case. Used to yodel on the weekend with Gadamer. Solidly lower middle class. One of the reasons he became a nazi.