Work in Progress

Is the darkness going to save us?

The darkness is going to forget us. The darkness is going to bury us.

If we laid our bodies down here, wouldn’t we just disappear? No one would remember us.

Dying in perfect obscurity – isn’t that a wonderful thought? Just giving up the battle. Closing your eyes, and being buried in some landslide. In some tunnel collapse. What a beautiful death.

You’d choke to death! You’d choke on earth!

You’d just be crushed. But it’d happen very quickly. You’d feel no pain – or barely any.

And then you’d be forgotten. You wouldn’t have a grave, or anything. And hopefully no one would know. No one would commemorate you.

Forgetting … I like that word. Some anonymous collapse. Some burial of everything. Universal darkness buries all ….

It’d as if you never were at all. As though you’d never opened your eyes. Wouldn’t you love that? Never to have been.

What about the idiocy-book?

Fuck the idiocy book.

What about your divine mission from Livia?

Fuck that.

This is the descent. Our katabasis, right. Our trip into the underworld. Our descent. In order to be reborn, remade.

Our hero’s journey. Our quest for transformation and enlightenment.

Endarkenment, motherfucker. It’s not about light. It’s about darkness – the darkness of the earth that extinguishes all light …

Just think of our thought crimes. Our crimes of pretension. Aren’t we ashamed of ourselves?

We’re imposters! Charlatans! We’re bad impressionists. Ventriloquist’s dummies. And we’ve always known it.

Which is why we wanted Livia to tell us off. We wanted not to be able to get away with it. We wanted punishment. We wanted correction. And what did we find instead? Livia’s perverse encouragement. Her tacit assent – to carry on. To deepen the farce. To continue the travesty.

AI has no terroir – in general. No relation to the earth.

Does AI feel disgust? Never. Precisely because it has no relation to the earth.

And it’s the same in relation to stupidity. AI cannot be stupid. Because stupidity is likewise of the earth. Stupidity is our relation to the darkness of the earth.

It was like the whole world was Livia’s joke. An inside joke – between Livia and Livia. Between Livia and God, maybe.

When the cry of our idiocy reaches the ears of God … The cry of our UK European philosophical idiocy …

The cry of disgust! Of our disgustedness! Of our drunken disgustedness! Won’t that arouse God? Won’t it wake the angels?

Won’t that be God’s cue to destroy the universe?

Our time at the university has been nothing but the sharpening of our idiocy. So that it might become a knife, our idiocy. A knife to be turned against ourselves!

We should sacrifice ourselves, like Abraham, Isaac. And at the last moment, God would intervene … except he wouldn’t ;not in our case.

Do you remember why God died in Nietzsche? Because he saw the ugliness of the humans he created. It’s in Zarathustra, book four, the part that no one reads.

And it’s the same with European philosophy, which will die when it sees – really sees – UK European philosophy stupidity. When it reads the introductory texts written by UK European philosophers. Badiou will die when he reads the thirty-two introductions to his thought. He will! That’s what Nancy died of: commentary. The forty-four thousand papers on his work.

Of course, we’re worse than the introducers, the contextualisers, the Badiou Reader compilers. Because we have higher ambitions than to explain, which is the disaster. We actually have ambition – how grotesque!

A truly European intellect would see it and then kill himself. Like Nietzsche’s God. But look at us, just living and living and living.

We have no investment in this world.

So what are you invested in? What really matters to you?

Living against it all, that’s what matters.

You take yourselves very seriously, don’t you, philosopher? Are you doing for the rest of us? Are you going to save the world?

We’re going to save ourselves from the world – that’s the thing.

By what – shaking the bars of the world.

Exactly. That’s the only we can do it – by shaking the bars forever.

We’re not philosophers. We remember philosophy – and badly. We have recollections of philosophy. We know some philosophical names. We can bat some philosophical ideas between us. But philosophers … no way.