Work in Progress

Hadn’t we been anticipating lecturing almost all of lives? Wasn’t that what we’d been doing in our part-time years, as we watched the full-time lecturers? Hadn’t we always been taking mental notes of what we should not do while sitting alongside the students, preparing for our seminars?

Clear in our teaching, that’s what we dreamt of being. Speaking simply, without technical terms. Hiding behind no terms of the art. Presuming no deep culture on the part of our audience. No profounds of understanding. Laying it out so even the comprehensive-schooled could follow …

Methodical: that’s what we wanted to be. No trendy bollocks! No theory gobbledygook! No mishmash of names! Of ideas! No bricolage of this and then that and then this. No ill-disciplined leaping about, from oeuvre to oeuvre! From period to period! No scrambling! No scrabbling!

Involving: that’s what we wanted to be. The art of keeping attention: that’s what we’d practice. No reading from notes. From the lectern. It was a matter of performance. Of liveliness. Of pacing the podium, in full philosophical character.

The seriousness of philosophy: that’s what we were there to embody. The seriousness of European philosophy – of the thought of the Continent, so reviled in UK philosophical circles. Its lucidity. Its importance. The way it could contribute to the most ancient disputes. Weren’t we ambassadors of a kind for the thoughts of old Europe? Weren’t we bound to show its seriousness and its scrupulousness, European thought? The way it could stand up to any analytic scrutiny? The way it was concerned, like all philosophy, with what mattered most?

Remembering our first lectures.

At long last! After so many years of service teaching! Of seminar teaching for full-time lecturers. Of the paid-by-the-hour slog.

After so many years of holding ourselves back. Our years of never being allowed to speak – and now being allowed to speak. Our years of never having had the floor – and now having the floor.

Let off the leash. Let loose in an elite university! With elite students! Not the grade-inflated dunces of mass education, as we were. Not the products of the pile ‘em high, cram ‘em in former polys (our background.)

To be listened to! Heard! Wasn’t that what we always wanted? To surface, after years of obscurity. To step up to the podium after years in the darkness.

Unmanacled. Unmuzzled! And with so much say. With all the lessons of darkness. All that we’d brought from obscurity. This was our hour. This was our resurrection. We’d been unburied. Unforgotten. Somehow, we were to come forward to speak. And years of waiting. Years of mental preparation. Just in case. Because it might one day become possible …

Livia loved the poshness of Mercia students. And she loved putting us before them, the post southern students who came to study with us.

Mercia humanities is virtually a finishing school, Livia noted. There were veritable aristocrats amongst them. To the manor born types, and all that. Old money and very old money! With Kensington Park addresses!

Didn’t she enjoy it, hobnobbing with the youth of the aristocracy? At Open Days. At visit Days? And at graduation, too?

Livia and the upper-class parents. Livia, and the aristocratic parents. Giving her speech at our graduation celebration. How she escaped from the days of communism. How she fell out of favour with the apparatchiks back home. How she escaped with a Chopin record, a book of Nietzsche and not much else.

Addressing them all! Winning their sympathy!

Of course, Livia knew what we felt about the posh. She knew how we loved and hated them, the posh. She knew what a posh southern accent did to us. To the lower class English in general!

The whole thing amused her. The class thing. Our peasant thing.

Our natural deference struggling with our natural defiance. Our automatic reverence at odds with our spontaneous revulsion.

Our issues! Our conflicts! Our ferment! Our sizzling!

Always vexed. Always conflicted. Always reeling. Always troubled.

There was an energy to our working classness. There was a drive to our mixture of class hatred and impostor’s syndrome.

Think of the summer, postgraduates.

All of us should think of summer, postgraduates. We grow old during the academic year. We grow ancient. And then we need to be become young again, at the end of the academic year. We need to find it again, our innocence. Our youth. The youth that you incarnate, postgraduates.

Summer is a dreaming, postgraduates. A recovery. Summer is contemplation.

We all need to lie fallow, postgraduates. We all need Time. We need to go larval. We need slow incubation.

Eternal summer! Weeks and weeks, held into the eternal. Turning there, kept by the eternal. Weeks, lying back beneath summer skies. Watching summer pass over us.

With no one knocking on our office doors. No one phoning us on our office telephones. With but a few postgraduate meetings every now and then.

Summers becalmed, postgraduates. Summers with no breeze, nothing taking us forward. Summers without wind to fill our sails.

And weren’t we glad of it, postgraduates: to be blown like dandelion seeds through the corridors of summer? To hatch into summer, like summer midges?

Weeks and weeks in the eternal, postgraduates. Weeks squared in the eternal. Turning there. Kept by the eternal. Held by the eternal. In eternity’s rhythm.

Trust in summer, postgraduates. That summer was eternal. That the weeks would turn in eternity. How many weeks before the start of the term? Before the start of the new academic year? Infinite weeks. Endless weeks.

Summer, working through us. Summer, thinking. Summer, reading. In us and through us.

And time – the gift of time, postgraduates. Time’s timing. Time’s whiling. The turning of time.

Possibility: that was to be our element. Potentiality – when we were brought back to ourselves. Given to ourselves – all over again.

The summer inside us, postgraduates. The outside within. Our summer. The perfect coincidence of ourselves and the Origin. And the Beginning. And the Inexhaustible.

Stunned summer, like a blow to the head. Summer stunned, reeling, staggering all around us. And we were staggering, too.

Summer stupor. The summer when idiocy could breathe out. Be what it was. When we no longer tried to escape our stupidity. When we accepted it. Merged with it. Became one with it.

Our stupidity, joining the great stupidity. Our idiocy, joining the cosmic idiocy. The idiotic Creation. (And wasn’t God an idiot, too, in the high summer? Hadn’t God always been the perfect idiot, above the high summer sun?)

We wore our summer haloes, we philosophers of summer. We burned with summer Genius, which was indistinguishable from summer idiocy.

We worked, yes, but it was souffle-light, our working. We worked, but our work had air inside it, like kneaded bread. Summer air! Summer lightness!

If we fell asleep in the sun, what then, postgraduates? If we closed our eyes, of what would we dream? Let’s dream those dreams now, in the cold of the Organisational Management campus. Let’s remember them – our dreams. The summer’s dream, when stupidity holds hands with brilliance.

Think of the summer, postgraduates! Warm yourselves with thoughts of the summer!

Think of the end of teaching and the opening out of summer, postgraduates. Think of the final Board of Studies, the final Board of Examiners, and the expansiveness of summer.

Think of summer flight, borne by summer winds, postgraduates. Think of setting sail into the summer, of catching the summer breeze.

Think of the near-empty summer campus, excerpt for a few foreign students, postgraduates. Except for a few academics gathered for summer conferences.

Think of our philosophy accommodation, office doors open, postgraduates. Of wide-open windows. Of the wind-stirred blinds. Of desk fans moving drowsily from side to side.

Think of your summer studies, postgraduates. Of your summer reading. Were you going to tackle The Science of Logic this year? The entirety of Kierkegaard, including the sermons? Were you going to eat your Aristotle greens and finally tackle the Metaphysics? And what were you going to write, this summer? What was going to be your writing project, this summer.

Think of looking back through your notebooks, postgraduates. Of letting your thoughts assemble. Letting them come calmly together, as light poured through them. As warmth buoyed them, lifted them.

Think of summer thoughts, postgraduates. Summer ideas! That seem to float upwards. That seem to rise into the sky, like fire balloons. Summer thoughts, rising. Summer ideas, rising. But casually. Neglectfully. Without paying any attention to themselves. Without trying. Without sweat.

Summer, postgraduates! The opposite of our Organisational Management winter! The opposite of our White-Witch winter. Our Moominland-in-November winter.

Let it burn in your hearts, postgraduates! Let it warm your hearts! The coming summer. The summer that still hasn’t arrived. The summer condition –without beginning and without end.

Draw strength from it: the inexhaustible summer, postgraduates! The summer that you’ll never be able to use up! The summer that never ends! That is always but a dream of summer – the summer of inexhaustible potential. In which great things could be done. No: could be undone. Think of the undoing of things – of all things. Of the idling of summer.

The idling summer, postgraduates: think of that. Weeks without mooring. Those weeks of summer voyage. Summer languor. Summer luxuriance. The great summer stretching of limbs. Under the summer vault!

Think of your eternal youth, postgraduates. Your perennial faith. Your perpetual beginning, that’s never begun, that’s forever ahead. Of your secret childhood, that hasn’t happened yet. That hasn’t been crushed in you.

 Think of the summer of hope – of idled hope, postgraduates. Of idled work. Of idled reading – and writing. Of work without work, which was more about unworking. About unpicking the stitches.  

Not work, but the contemplation of work, postgraduates. Not work, but study detached from work, fallen out of step with work. That remains out of phase with anything productive …

When time seems to lose all direction, postgraduates. When time seemed to sink into itself – lie down. Think of time pools. Of time hazes, like heat over summer roads. Think of the air turned thick. O, postgraduates. Of the air turned runny.

Summon it up inside you, postgraduates: the memory of summer, that is also the expectation of summer. Of the summer to come.

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.