Work in Progress

It’s not enough to make thing meaningless, they have to make a mockery of meaning. They have to laugh at meaning. It’s deliberate. It’s an existential attack.

That’s how they demoralise us. They know how to wield nihilism as a weapon.

Cicero’s doom-ideation brigade. Her philosophical self-harm troupe. Her philosophy Z team. Her parasuicide squad.

 

Our pidgin Europeanism. Our European philosophy gobbledygook. Our speaking in European tongues.

Our free British improvisation on European themes. Our daft extemporisation on Continental thought.

 

It wasn’t European philosophy’s fault. Continental philosophy shouldn’t be held responsible.

The problem is, it was mediated through the stupid English head. What the English head does to continental ideas! How it banalizes European ideas!

 

This was really a toy European philosophy, like toy poodles. This was really pretend European philosophy. But wasn’t that enough?

 

Rockpool European philosophy. Diminished European philosophy. Shrunken European philosophy. The shrunken heads of Europeans. Shrunken by the Anglophone world! Shrunken Derrida! Shrunken Deleuze! Shrunken Foucault!  

 

Perhaps one day they’ll de-extinct European philosophy. Like Jurassic Park. The old philosophers will walk again.

 

The last European philosophy department! Like the last Neanderthals.

In your younger and less Heideggerian days.

 

I was a teenage Heideggerian.

 

Were you actually a teenage Heideggerian? Were you always like this?

 

How many Heideggerians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

 

Beat your Heideggerian chest. Strike your Heideggerian pose. Make your Heideggerian move – we’re waiting for it. Do you Heideggerian thing.

 

You need to find a Mrs Heidegger. Someone who’d understand you.

 

You always wanted to be the boy wonder of Heidegger studies.

 

Do you ever ask yourself, What would Heidegger do?

 

Sing your Heideggerian song. Be the best Heideggerian you can be.

 

Channel your inner Heidegger! Your great-great grandfather! You’re last in line!

Every philosophical gang needs a Heideggerian. Like a fat kid in gangs in Hollywood movies. There has to be one.

 

Do your Heidegger face. Is that it, your Heidegger face?

 

The guy who wrote that book, When Heidegger wept. No, it was When Nietzsche Wept, idiot.

 

Maybe they’re sending out a being-signal, like a bat signal. Only a Heideggerian can save us now.

 

All we have to offer the world is high quality anguish. 100 proof. Like the sweat of Heidegger.

 

Don’t fucking hulk out, Helmut. Don’t Heidegger out.

You have to cultivate disgust, she said. Just like you have to cultivate taste. You need a disgust palate. To distinguish between different kinds of disgust. To know all the varieties of disgust, which is to say different varieties of poison.

 

Let’s take a moment to savour our disgust. To enjoy its flavours. Let’s meditate upon what it shows us, our disgust. Let’s extend some gratitude to it, our disgust.

 

Philosophy is nothing but an apprenticeship in disgust, Cicero said. You must start with being disgusted by things closest to you, and then work outwards.

 

We’re supposed to feel disgust, she said. We need disgust. Because it makes recoil from the world. Which is to say, frees us. Disgust is the beginning of wisdom.

 

Do you feel it, disgust? she used to ask. Do you know it, disgust? Do you feel disgust at it all, with everything?

 

Cicero’s joy in disgust. In others, who were disgusted. Who were as disgusted as she was!

Her joy of fellowship in disgust.

In the terroir is the earth, postgraduates. And you know what Cicero thought of the earth! A fundamental Heideggerian term – always underestimated. There is earth and there is world, so Heidegger, Cicero said. And earth struggles with world. Earth tries to keep hidden, to stay dark. To turn away from the world’s light.

And the world, in turn, tries to expose the earth, to reveal its secret. Never understanding that earth will struggle against this revelation. Will fight to conceal itself and to keep itself in concealment. In forgetting. The earth doesn’t want to shown.

And this struggle between world and earth is the essence of Heidegger’s later philosophy. And it must be our philosophy, too – our wine philosophy.

The terroir is the earth, that’s what Cicero said. We need to drink what hides itself. In its hiddenness. What flees from the light. In its darkness. That’s there, in the wine. That’s what rises up through it. That’s what meets our lips.

Terroir, postgraduate: that’s a word you’ll have to learn. A wine expresses the unique place where it was created. All true wine has a terroir – a soul, because that’s what it’s all about postgraduates: wine is ensouled.

This isn’t about all that mass-produced, eager-to-please dreck that you find in the supermarket. Terroir is about the soil. The earth! The land!

Grapes are not carrots, postgraduates. They’re sensitive to where they are grown. To the particular character of the soil. To the microclimate. To the specifics of precipitation. Air. Water drainage. Elevation. Sunlight. Temperature! To all the circumstances of their cultivation.

Terroir is immutable, postgraduates. The terroir is what grants the uniqueness of the wine. What can’t be replicated. That can’t be anatomised. Analysed. That can’t be measured, only savoured. As an indivisible whole.

The goût de terroir, postgraduates. The taste of the soil! Winemaking is only about revealing the terroir, postgraduates. The skill of the winemaker is one of self-effacement – of knowing how to amplify the terroir by allowing the right kind of barrelling and fermenting. Without the winemaker’s own embellishment! Without stylistic flourish! There is no place for the winemaker’s signature. The terroir must bloom in and as the wine, that’s all. That’s the winemaker’s humble task.

Cicero used to recommend that we meditate on the terroir. Which is why we must drink this so carefully.

Didn’t Cicero hint sometimes about her Tractatus? It was in numbered points, very precise, she said sometimes. It’s written in the form of a poem, a bit like Lucretius, she said at other times. It’s written by a whole universe of heteronyms, in many volumes: didn’t she say that, too?

 

She considered it a very Jewish work, her magnum opus – that’s what she said. It was a product of her secret Judaism, which none of us could understand.

It was a passengenwerk, she said. A collection of fragments. Which she’d selected itself!

But when she disappeared, the work must have gone with her.

 

Her magnum opus was her life: I heard her say that. Her magnum opus was us – that’s what I heard her say. Was our department. And she left when it was essentially complete.

 

We were her work. This department.

 

Cicero’s life was her magnum opus. The philosophy embodied in her life. The philosophy that was her life, understood in the right way. And even in her disappearance, interpreted in the right way.

And in her wine, interpreted in the right way – that’s what I think.

 

The Ciceronian life. The dimensions of that life. The perversions of that life. The magnificence of that life. The foolishness of that life. There should be biographies of Cicero – plural! Rival biographies. At odds biographies.

 

Chapter twenty-six: tight perms. Chapter twenty-seven: whippets.

 

Cicero philosophised in life, rather than treatises. She philosophised in gestures. Like the Organisational Management move itself. Like her disappearance.

Yes, that was her philosophy. Everything was there for those who could understand it.

 

You were her magnum opus, Shiva. Don’t you see that?

 

And now her wine is all we have left of her. Drink this in memory of her, and so on.

Cicero hoped all these ides would volatilise inside us. Would gain their own strange life. Would open their eyes inside us.

And spawn some UK variety of European thought! Some native variety of continentalism!

Some amalgam of council estate and Heidegger. Of Sunderland in general and Jewish philosophical modernism!

And what happened?

 

Couldn’t Cicero see we were helpless? That we had no savant’s gifts. No high IQs. That no intellectual miracle could be expected of us.

Who were only ever good at turning upon themselves! Upon each other! At piss taking and self-derision!

 

Only when we drank, only then could we lose our impostor’s syndrome. Our acquired underconfidence. Only then did we come into glorious intellectual life. Did the philosophical heavenly fire reach us. Burn inside us.

Drunk: that’s when our philosophy would come alive. Our philosophical method. Which obtained only as banter philosophy. As piss taking philosophy. It was dialogical, in its own way, Cicero said. Socratic, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Merriment philosophy. As much pathos as philosophy, As much nonsense as sense. Turning all of philosophy into a gigantic joke.

Not philosophy as it had ever been known. Pataphysics, instead. Palavering. Persiflage.

Raised above our stations, in some ghastly experiment. Through some attempt at social engineering. In some mad quality and diversity initiative!

Scraped from our council estates from our shuttered up towns, from our regions in decline.

Lifted into a world of which we could make no sense. That only bewildered us. That set standards impossible for us to reach.

Well-meaning left-liberals wanted to get out type in. To effect social change! To bring about social justice! When really we should have been left in our place.

All because we’d read some books! Because we became excited at ideas! There’s a natural hierarchy. Why things are as they are. As they have been. It’s not by chance. Now we have to live our lives in perpetual intimidation.

You want to free me from Organisational Management. But what you don’t realise is that I’m nothing other than Organisational Management. I’m O.M.s dream. O.M. can still dream up someone like me.