Work in Progress

After the end of philosophy – what then?

The philosophy of the end of philosophy.

And after that?

 

After the end, what then? Philosophy. Philosophy alone can speak of the end. Philosophy is essentially posthumous.

 

Do not be afraid of death, postgraduates. For death means only the beginning of philosophy. The philosopher must be dead. The philosopher must have died.

 

We had all died, Cicero said. She could see that.

 

Philosophy’s a resurrection. But a resurrection in death.

 

You have to have died in you are to think, that’s what Cicero said.

And what about Cicero – had she died?

She kept quiet about that.

 

There must be a burial – and a resurrection.

 

And maybe the world has to have been destroyed, for there to be a thought.

Apocalypse … or a coming apocalypse.

 

For the Gnostic, the world is dead. And we’re dead, too, in a sense. Or at least we’re dead to the world – to this world.

 

To have died means you are not part of the world. That you aren’t invested in this world. That it isn’t yours. It has nothing to do with you – in a sense.

 

You are the bastard child of this world. You are not of it, this world. You’re an interloper in this world. You don’t belong here, like the others. You cannot be at home here. You see through it.

 

You know the terrible evil. You know the Wickedness. You know the terrible things they’re doing to us. What they’ve done to our DNA. The way they’re replacing our species. The way they’ve engineered us.

 

You know their plans – you sense them. You know what’s Wrong. Their propaganda. Their psy-ops.

Is this your bedroom, really? Is this your flat?

 

We’re at the end of the world. Or after it. Or something.

 

The world is sinking. No, it’s completely fallen.

 

Do we have to live anymore? Are we still alive? Have we always been dead?

 

There is no campus. There never was. Where are we, then? Where’s this supposed to be?

 

We’re AI, entertaining itself. Mother, entertaining herself. We’re in some simulation, after the real world ended. This is a fake world. This is a fake timeline.

How do we find a way back to what was real? How do we get back?

 

Do we have to die in this world, too? How many worlds do we have to die in?

 

I feel I’ve lived this before. I think I’ve been here before. Déjà vu, right? No: I think I will be here again. What’s the opposite of déjà vu?

 

Mother made us. Or made me. And didn’t fill in all the details properly. Parts of my memory are kind of blank.

 

I don’t feel real. Do other people feel that? Is that part of the human condition, not to feel real?

 

Who am I supposed to be. And who are you, anyway? What’s supposed to happen here? Are we pretending? Or is pretending pretending?

I don’t think I like this world. I think there’s something wrong with this world.

Something’s wrong: that’s the phrase. Everything’s wrong. And I don’t think it’s going to get any better.

 

I don’t want to speak anymore. I don’t have any words. These words aren’t mine.

 

And it was all a dream. We were told we couldn’t end our stories that way when I was in school.

 

Is that what we’re saying: that it was all a dream? Very Hindu. Very Upanishadic. Our forefathers and foremothers would approve, wouldn’t they?

 

It was all a dream: is that our conclusion? Some conclusion. More of a cop-out than a conclusion.

 

Are you realer than me, or am I realer than you?: that’s the question.

 

Who can help you when you don’t feel real? Can philosophy help? I’ll bet philosophy makes it worse …

Was Mother kind of sketchy filling all the details? Or is it just … vagueness? Tiredness? Needing to sleep?

 

Couldn’t you fall asleep right here? Right now? In each other’s arms?

 

We’re sick with ourselves. Sick of being ourselves, maybe. Poisoned, maybe. Do you believe in poison – like, universal poison?

 

Something evil’s here. Something Bad, capital B. Something’s … infested the world …

 

The greatest dreams are dreams of annihilation. Of wipeout – a wipeout so entire that … Every trace of me. Of us. Of every … thing …

The original sin of our existence. That we were at all.

 

Terrible things … terrible things, philosopher. I feel them. I know them.

 

Mother … what is Mother anyway? Is it all Mother? Is everything Mother?

 

We live inside the dream.

Organisational Management’s dream? Who’s the dreamer?

Is this all just some giant app? Is any of this real?

You and I both could be synths. Just AI, amusing itself.

 

Maybe you’re the most advanced synth ever made. The synth that doesn’t know it’s a synth. That thinks it’s real.

Maybe you’re a synth.

 

Maybe the world’s too evil to exist, philosopher.

 

There’s too much evil. The world can’t be left to itself. It must be destroyed. To burn away the poison.

 

And we have to destroy the world in us, too. How? How do we do that?

 

All we can want is apocalypse. It should all be destroyed. And me along with it. Especially me.

The destroyer should be destroyed. The negator negated. There must be no more of this.

 

Am I real? Does Alan really have a wife?

Is Alan real?

Oh, Alan’s real. Too real.

 

I’m what Mother made and sent to you.

 

I’m Mother’s message to you. I’ve been sent from the Organisational Management unconscious. I’m an Organisational Management damsel in philosophical distress. What a philosophy would want from an organisational manager.

You think your idiocy is going to save you – you do. You attribute to it some weak messianic force, or whatever.

 

When all faith’s failed, you’re placing it in idiocy.

You think idiocy is what makes you special. That you have a very special idiocy.

 

The idiocy get-out. The idiocy clause. You think it makes you some kind of saint.

A very special abasement. An elevating self-disgust.

 

You’re self-aware about your idiocy, sure. But do you think it saves you? Do you think it makes you cleverer than your idiocy? Do you think you’ve outsmarted it? Outfoxed it? Run ahead of it?

 

You’ll still be the idiot you always were. Just because you can name your idiocy doesn’t make you any less of an idiot.

 

Doing your idiocy writhe-around. Your Beyonce dance around your idiot Jay-Z. Your little idiotic crucifixion.

Doing your idiot’s dance. That’s pretty much all you can do. Pretty pathetic. Is that what you’ll do with your life? Is that what you’ll amount to? Is that what life’s for nowadays?

 

Cry up your idiotic cry.

 

Idiocy is a ruse, a con. It’s always a pretence. You’re play-pretending at idiocy. That you’re stupider than you are.

The curse is that you realise your stupidity. Which means your idiocy isn’t entire. It doesn’t wholly enclose you.

 

Your idiotic faith. You have a faith in your idiocy after all – that your idiocy’s going to save you.

 

You’re too clever to be an idiot.

Maybe I’m a very clever idiot.

The worst kind. A real bore.

 

Our super-idiocy. Our sur-idiocy, like the surrealists.

 

That’s our idolatry: worshipping our own idiocy.

 

This is where holy idiocy has led you.

 

Praying like an idiot – to your own idiocy. Worshipping your own idiocy, essentially. As a condition for your faith.

You’re make my head spin.

Sure, your idiotic head.

 

Philosophical idiocy is special.

Only in philosophy can you make a career of idiocy. Will idiocy take you somewhere.

 

Idiocy's just like sin – of course it is. You know you’re a sinner. Which means you’re not entirely a sinner.

Does that mean you can save yourself?

No! But it means you know you can’t save yourself. That you’re damned, in other words. But that knowledge means you’re not entirely damned.

So I’m clever than my idiocy …

Complicated, isn't it?

You can’t kill literature. It killed itself, long ago. You’re too late for the death of literature.

But philosophy, on the other hand …

 

Philosophy is the only subject that can say its death. That can say, I am dead and still be meaningful.

 

You can’t kill philosophy. Philosophy’s living off its death.

So does literature, maybe.

But no one reads literature.

No one reads philosophy.

No one ever did. It’s an elite thing. An anti-elite thing.

I’m going to write the worst book ever written. A fucked up book about being fucked up. An idiotic book about idiocy. It’s going to be so bad that it’s going to spoil literature – all of literature.

That bad.

What are you going to call it?

Why I Write Such Bad Books.

Why should anyone read it?

They won’t. No one will read it. No one will care. No one will notice. Because no one’s looking to literature for anything.

 

Literature’s a stupid word, anyway.

 

So because you’re no good at literature, you have to spoil all of literature.

Exactly.

But no one will actually notice?

No.

And who’s going to publish your anti-literary book.

No one.

You’re an idiot.

 

An iconoclast with no icons. You’re too late to smash anything up.

 

You haven’t reconciled yourself to not being a genius, so you have to be an anti-genius.

Wait – is that Cicero’s handwriting? What’s Cicero written on it?

 

The wine’s numbered. There is an order. Cicero’s spidery scrawl.

 

Written in gold pen – very deliberate. She went out and bought a gold pen to write this.

 

Cicero’s messages from the grave – or wherever she is.

 

She’s drawn something on this label.

 

13 – that’s what she’s written.

It must be a countdown. Counting down to what?

The ultimate bottle. The last bottle.

 

She’s written ultra before wine.

Ultra wine.

 

She’s got a little arrow pointing up after the ‘e’. And inserted an h.

Whine. Is she telling us to whine?

We’re good at that.

 

Drink me, she’s written. She’s trying to poison us. That’s her game.

Remember happened to Alice in Wonderland. Didn’t she shrink and stuff? She fell down a rabbit hole, just like us. Several rabbit holes.

 

She’s written wine. Wine wine. Like wine squared? What does that mean?

 

This is, like, the ultimate wine. The last of all the wines. The wine to which all the other wine was leading?

The bottle’s dusty. It is. That its immense age. Its vintage. It’s May 1968 wine. Wine from May 1968 …

 

The seventh bottle. You remember what Cicero said about the seventh bottle? You remember the legend of the seventh bottle.

No I don’t.

Nor do I, actually.

The virtuosity of our self-hatred: Cicero liked that.

Everything began with that with us: self-hatred. Hatred of our own idiocy.

She thought it was magnificent. Not only idiocy, but hatred of our own idiocy! Not just stupidity, but being appalled at our stupidity!

 

The way we attacked ourselves. The way we were appalled by ourselves. And, extension, everything. We were appalled by everything because we were appalled at ourselves.

 

Torment: that’s what we knew. A torment that we could express because of European philosophy. That European philosophy allowed us to express.

What irony! Because the main cause of that torment was trying to do European philosophy. Was trying to read European philosophy!

What a quandary. But that’s what made our attempt at European philosophy interesting, Cicero thought. That’s what gave it life.

 

We were appalled that we’d been even allowed to do European philosophy. That we’d been given jobs teaching European philosophy.

Cicero had raised us too high – and she knew it. Cicero had asked us to do the impossible – of course, of course.

But that, for Cicero, was the condition of our finding something interesting to say. We must express our idiocy, she said. Live it. Philosophise with it. Philosophise as idiots! As European philosophy idiots!

That was our truest vocation, according to Cicero. That was the great gift she’d given us.

 

That we had to look in the mirror as European philosophers. That we had to stand at the lecture podium as European philosophers. As would-be European philosophers! Anglophone European philosophers!

That was the step we had to take.

 

To embrace our idiocy. To write from our idiocy. To write out of the infinite tension of our idiocy. Through the infinite passion of our idiocy: isn’t that what Cicero intended?

 

We were natural Gnostics, Cicero said. But we had to allow ourselves to become Gnostics. At present, we were simply denying our Gnosticism. We were trying not to be idiots – too hard!

In our off-duty lives, in our drinking lives, we weren’t pretending – that’s the thing. We were giving our idiocy its head.

 

This was how the ruin of Europe was coming to know itself: in us. This is how the destruction of European philosophy was becoming self-aware: in us – in our idiocy.

And on the island that wasn’t part of the mainland. In the kingdom off the shore of Europe proper. There. And wasn’t that where Eastern European doom might be reborn, too?

 

We were each what she could not be – an idiot. We weren’t prodigies, like her. We weren’t savants. We would never finish our PhDs at twenty-one, as she did.

Nothing was expected of us. No one had ever called us geniuses. And yet we had a reverence for Genius. And yet we looked up to genius. Al our culture heroes had genius.

And we even wanted to become geniuses – we shouldn’t deny it. We even wanted to be brilliant. We even thought we could become brilliant. With a certain amount of time. With some job security. With open summers for work before us, mightn’t it be possible?

We even thought we might be late developers. Late-life geniuses …

Snow with ice in it. It’s vicious. It actually hurts.

The wind, as though full of tiny knives. Fresh on our faces. Our faces too naked, too exposed.

We should have worn balaclavas.

 

The ice-wind, scouring. Scouring. Imagining how it would carve the metal after thousand of years. This will be a metal Monument Valley.

 

The wind of ice giants and Norse mythology. The wind of Fenrir and giant wolves. The wind of Ragnarok, who knows?

The world of sombre northern fate. Of Armageddon. Of terrible Nordic melancholy. Not dispelled by all their talk of hygge. That lingers yet in Scando-alcoholism.

 

The Viking wind. The pillaging wind.

The wind of doomed, melancholic northern folk, losing themselves in drink.

 

Is it a Gnostic wind? Would Cicero approve? Is there a special gnostic element in its mournful whistling?

 

The wind of wolf howls.

The cold breath of Satan.

The northsong. Of general northern grimness.

 

Blown from Denmark. Blown from Norway.

That’s come across the frozen seas.

That’s full of Nordic world-despair. The despair that drove the northmen to conquer half of Europe …

 

The evil’s growing. The evil’s increasing.

Evil is cold. There demons of cold.

 

The scouring wind. The whistling wind.

That’s come across the Finnish lakes. Across the tundra!

 

Snow usually softens things. Muffles things. But this snow…

 

And it’s grey snow. When did the snow turn grey? Was the snow always grey? Was it always this way? Was it always greasy? Why did they have to fuck up the snow?

 

This snow’s made of ice. It’s hard.

 

Is it snow or hail? It’s, like hard snow. Pelletted snow. The snowflakes are bounding off my head.

 

I’m actually turning blue.

 

Googling symptoms of hypothermia.

 

They’ll have to amputate our fingers. What will we type with?

Our noses.

They’ll amputate them, too.

 

Can your brain actually freeze? Can you like, get winter dementia?

The brain’s the last thing to shut down in the body. So we can feel the torture.

 

Not so much brain fog as a brain freeze.

 

Can your bones freeze? Can they?

 

We need huskies. A sled!

 

The Grand Solar Minimum is approaching! The return of the full-on Ice Age! Sheets of ice are coming. Miles high ice sheets.

And the northmen. In raiding parties! Fearsome! Terrifying! Like those guys from Game of Thrones.

Newcastle will fall. And then Newcastle will be scoured, and this campus with it. Isn’t that reassuring: that the campus will be scoured? All traces of it gone.

 

The last winter. A vision of eternity. The earth, turned into an ice planet. Silent. Lifeless. And just the frost-filled wind blowing across.

 

Do you remember the sun?

I don’t remember the sun. I don’t even remember the moon. It’s always cloudy.

Those clouds aren’t real. They’ve been pumped from somewhere.

 

We’re not allowed the sky anymore. The stars. They’re Verboten.

 

There’s a fog rising from the earth. Seeping out of the earth. A freezing fog.

 

How deep they are, the depths of winter. How lost we are in the depths of winter. How buried we are, in the depths of winter.

 

The world’s just an ice ball with some metal clad buildings sticking out …

What’s worst is that it doesn’t die – that it goes on, European philosophy. That there’s more of it European philosophy. Always some new book series. With new introductions to the usual suspects.

The thirty-first introduction to Being and Time. The two hundred and sixth idiot’s guide to the Phenomenology of Spirit. A handbook of … A companion to … The Cambridge introduction to … The Oxford introduction … The Edinburgh introduction to … Philosophers in sixty minutes … Guides for the Perplexed …  A Bloomsbury Critical Introduction to …

How many, how many! Do people really write these things. Textbooks, textbooks. It goes on.

There are still conferences. Still publishers’ stands at conferences. Still symposia. The whole thing continues. It rolls on, through the years. Institutionalized. Still things to be said about Hegel and Husserl and Heidegger. Still readings of readings of readings. Still new waves of interpretation.

 

What’s worse than being an introducer? A Contextualiser? An explainer of European philosophy in a way the Anglophone world might understand. In plain, serviceable prose. No flourishes!

Don’t, whatever you do, try to imitate the great stylists! Nothing worse than an Anglophone imitator of high French style. Grotesque! Forced!

Reconcile yourself to explanation. To bullet points. To numbered lists. To taking the quick and rendering it slow.

 

There should be a rewilding of continental philosophy. Where people like us aren’t allowed to write introductory books about this European thinker or that one.

Where thinkers can think in peace. Without opportunist secondary commentary writers looking for the Next Big Thing. Thought-prospectors. Thought-opportunists. The introductory philosophical book industry.

 

Americans, on a Parisian safari. Helping to see the big beasts of philosophy in the Parisian wild. In their natural habitat. In their environmental niches.

Americans, hanging around the Sorbonne, or whatever.  All but asking for signatures. Getting all fan-boy and girl. Getting all groupie. Ask Badiou for a selfie. Jacques Rancière …