Work in Progress

This wine shouldn’t be: that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s what we’re supposed to feel. This wine is wrong.

It’s more than that. This wine shows what’s wrong with everything. It shows that everything shouldn’t be.

Shouldn’t: according to who?

According to anything right and true.


What’s real is disgusting. What’s true is disgusting. The disgusting is the real. The disgusting is the true. It’s the thing in itself, and so on.


This wine is a decomposition. It’s a rotting.

A rotting of what?

Of everything. Of the entire world. The whole lot.


The great disgust, Nietzsche calls it. And that’s the greatest danger, he says: the great disgust. Nothing’s more risky. It’s nihilism, pure and simple.


Disgust is a rejection. But the point is to overcome disgust. To reject our rejection. To turn the no into a yes.


You have to feel disgust at disgust. A disgust at your disgust.

Like, second-degree disgust? Complicated.


We need disgust. As a catalyser. As a necessary condition.

We need to reach the great disgust and overcome it. We need to say no to the no to life.

We have to become convalescents. Go through the sickness. And the illness. We need to see it as a test.


Beyond disgust: that’s where we have to get to. Disgust is something that needs to be overcome, and so on.

Disgust has to become a fountain of pleasure. We have to say yes to what our senses reject. Mastery. Right?

We have to move from becoming no-sayers to become yea-sayers.


‘Are poisoned wells necessary, and stinking fires, and dirtied dreams, and maggots in the bread of life?’


A reversal. A revaluation. Of baseness. Of all disgusting things.


You have to be able to bear the thought of the eternal return of this wine. Of It’s coming back again and again. As if we were to perpetually ruminate on this wine. Endlessly regurgitate it …


We need to love the wine. To savour the wine. All its disgust notes.

To love all the disgusting things. Including ourselves! Especially ourselves!


To be able to bear it – but more than that, to love it.

The depths of disgust. The deepest depths. The abyss of disgust. To be able to bear it and affirm it and love it and all that.


The immanent conversion of the disgusting. The immanent … transformation.

The immanent transfiguration of all the foul things. Changing the meaning of the world.

But that’s impossible, isn’t it? You can’t just affirm this world. You can’t just discover this wine to be delicious. You can’t pretend.


There has to be something else – breaking in. Something from without. Something contentless. A void. The void.

Is the void disgusting? What does the void taste like? What does anything taste like?

No one’s asking you to lick the void. Or to sniff it.

An exorcism – that’s what this wine is. A way of driving the devil out of our mouths. Of throwing up the phantom. It’s a purgative – sure. A scouring out of ourselves. A driving out of the anti-angels. Of the bad seraphim. It’s a casting out.


That’s why this wine’s necessary. It’s part of a process – a dreadful process, but a necessary one. It’s an ethos. It’s a discipline. It’s what we need. It’s medicine – in the form of anti-medicine. It’s the cure – in the form of poison.

What are we tasting? The European curse. The European dregs.

The European poisoning. Different from the UK poisoning. With different notes than UK poison. A bit of variety compared to UK poisoning …


Maybe we’re tasting this wine with analytic philosophy lips. If we taste it with European philosophy lips, then …

We need to vomit up everything. We need to vomit so hard that we vomit ourselves up. That we vomit up the universe inside us.

We need to vomit ourselves inside out. Like, total expulsion. We need to thrown up our stomach linings. Turn ourselves inside out.

Can you throw up your soul, do you think?


We want to throw up ourselves. We’re disgusted with ourselves, first of all. We want to retch up ourselves. To spit ourselves out.

We want to expel ourselves. To be nothing other than this expulsion. This voiding.


We want to retch ourselves up – the old us. Who we once were. We want to throw ourselves up – everything we are. We want to expel it all – to expel ourselves. To expel the world in us. To vomit it up.


We must become an act of expulsion – nothing more. A violent exiting of ourselves. A continual exodus – through ourselves. Through our own bodies. Through our digestive tracts …


As though we could throw up everything we are. Everything we have been. As though we could just hurl out the poison. Our poisoning – all the lies. As though we could eject it all.

Some act of expulsion. Some casting out. Of ourselves! Of who we are! Of who we have been! Of what we’ve been made into! Of our wretchedness! Of our fallenness!

Have we reached peak disgusting now? Come on, this has to be it.


What is this wine doing to our internal organs?


Is this wine giving us cancer? What I it doing?


Is the poison a cure in some sense? Like in homeopathy.

In homeopathy you’re supposed to have the tiniest drop of something. Not, like, swig after swig.


You can’t actually sip it, this wine. It’s too unbearable sipping and knowing that there are more sips. It’s too disgusting, like that there’s more to drink. You have to get it down in one go.

Get it down you. Chug a fucking lug.

Don’t get all frat boy.

Take your medicine.

Medicine!? This is poison.

Gulp, motherfucker.

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!