Work in Progress

We don’t even want to kill ourselves. We don’t even … have that get out. We don’t have the sincerity to kill ourselves. We never quite mean anything.


We appal ourselves. Of course we do. We perturb ourselves.

How can we be? Something we constantly ponder. What allowed us? Our kind? What were the conditions? What went wrong with everything? Was it part of the plan? Was there really a sabotage plan, all along?


We are the things that should not be. Haven’t we always known that?

Some eruption. Some crack in being. Some aberration. Some spasm. Some shudder of the world. Some vast flinching. Of disgust. In disgust. At the very fact that we are. At the fact that the world gave birth to us.


This isn’t our … planet. This isn’t our scene. This isn’t our world. None of this means anything to us. It’s water off our ducks’ backs.

It has nothing to do with us, this reality. It’s not our fault.


We arrived late – very late. We arrived posthumously. Born with the dead. Born as the dead. Waking up, opening our eyes, into death.

The humiliation: that our minds have to be on this. That we have to think about this. That we should even be thinking of this. That we should even be talking about this. That it should even be our concern.

The humiliation: that we should be thinking about them, Organisational Management, as Organisational Management doesn’t think about us. That it should even be a concern – an issue.

The humiliation: that our minds are drawn to it, Organisational Management. Drawn back to it. As if we didn’t have anything better to think about! As if our minds shouldn’t be open to something else!

The humiliation: we’re supposed to be thinking about what matters most. Is Organisational Management what matters most?

The humiliation: it shows us what we are, our Organisational Management obsession. It reveals to us how worldly we are. How fixated upon worldly concerns we are. How we’re unable to rise above them, worldly concerns. How we’re unable to compartmentalise them, our worldly concerns. As any thinker worth their salt could do! As any real philosopher could do!

But what would we be thinking about, if not for this? What would be on our mind, if not this? What great philosophical thoughts would we be thinking?

At least it gives us an alibi, thinking about Organisational Management to the exclusion of all else. At least it hides the fact that we never really were thinking about anything profound, O.M.

We’re lucky, in a way, that we don’t have to consider our lack of ability to think anything worthwhile. To contemplate the fact that we’re not capable of pondering anything worthwhile.

But did you ever consider we might think philosophically about our predicament – about the Organisational Management move? That the move itself is actually worth thinking about – philosophically, I mean. Like, what’s the essence of Organisational Management? Is the essence of Organisational Management anything organisational? Or managerial?

Sounds like a Heideggerian question, Helmut. Have you got your Heideggerian head on?

Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing philosophy should be about: issues in the real world? About real things? About fucked up things, but real ones?

Fuck you – philosophy isn’t about the world – it’s better than the world.

It can be about the end of the world, maybe. Or about disgust with the world. But philosophy isn’t about things in the world. It’s about the world as a whole, maybe. About the world in toto.

Philosophy is not about the world. It’s about hatred of the world. You’re confusing philosophy with Gnosticism. Idiocy – philosophy is Gnosticism,. In this world. What else can it be? When everything is so disgusting. It’s all gone so bad. So rancid. It’s all so rotten.

Is it actually compulsory to hate the world?

Stop, Sophia – stop. Why are you doing this to us. It’s a given that things absolutely suck. It’ a priori that nothing should be allowed to go on as it is. That the world as run out of world. Disgust is the Grundstimmung, remember that.


It’s mutiny, Shiva. That’s probably what Livia wanted: mutiny. We have a traitor on board. A Judas. A one woman Organisational Management sleeper cell, planted in philosophy years ago. They’ve been infiltrating us for years! Years!

You’re a disgrace, Sophia. To our little pirate ship. We should make you walk the plank..


That we’re emotionally engulfed by horror. Philosophy is for suicides – for would-be suicides. If you’re not either about to kill yourself or on the brink of conversion, you’re not doing philosophy.


A sense of absolute urgency – that’s what philosophy’s about. A sense of permanent emergency. Of the total unbearableness of it all – the whole thing. The world – that’s what I’m referring to. The unbearableness of the world. The fact that it exists only as an affront. Only as a kind of insult. To us! Personally!

The world as horror – as nothing other than horror. The world as assault – and an assault on us. To be a philosophy is to be assaulted. By the world. And precisely as a philosophy. As one appalled by the world. Insulted by it! Injured but it! Humiliated by it! In permanent humiliation!

And what if the Organisational Management move helps cultivate it, this hatred. What if Organisational Management is the best possible place for philosophy. Keeping us on permanent tenterhooks. Making sure that we’re always on our toes.

It’s about stoking the fire of philosophical angst, that’s the thing. We need to feel the fragility of our thought-place. That our right to think could be revoked at any moment! That we’re undergrounders. Misunderstood. Unanswerable to foreign powers.

Maybe this is about what all our philosophy has been for: this moment. The O.M. moment. Philosophy is about to come into its own. We’re about to come into our own. We’ll reveal ourselves as the superheroes of philosophy. With special powers.

With special needs. Face it: we’re fuck ups. We’re deficient. There are things wrong with us – major things. We need, like, immediate therapy.

We were being prepared for his. Livia brought us here for this. This was her purpose. her higher purpose.


Maybe Organisational Management is only a training. This is a kind of obstacle course for philosophers, for would-be philosophers (and all philosophers are would be philosophers. No one I ever simply a philosopher. Philosophy is only ever about yearning – and the yearning to be a philosopher.) Maybe we have a higher purpose.

What higher purpose?

Livia wanted to train us up, prepare us, for some war. A war against reality itself. A war against the world – this world – what it’s become. This is part of her Gnostic ruse.

Cunning.

Sure, it’s cunning. Livia was cunning.

Don’t speak about her in the past tense.


Maybe it’s like Karate Kid, or something. We’re being trained.

What for?

Aliens. It’s got to be aliens.

Organisational Management aliens?

Or fallen angels – don’t forget fallen angels.

Don’t start with your Book of Enoch shit. Don’t start with your fallen angels.


Is there any Hindu hope, Shiva? What do they many Hindu gods have to say about it all? Is there a god of humiliation? Of compromise? How many heads do they have? How many arms?


The thing to remember is that we’re dead. That the philosophy is already dead, in our world. That we’ve already been destroyed.

Even the crap philosopher?

Even the crap philosopher.


We’re not part of this. Except possibly Sophia. It’s not our battle.

Oh it is.

They’ve already won. We’ve already lost. We’ve already conceded victory. Theirs are the spoils – because we don’t want the soils. Theirs is the victory over the world. What do we care.

 Oh, we care. Oh we do!

The importance of drinking. Of drunken self-confidence. Of drunken be-who-you-are.

Let us become these drunkards, these unashameds. Let us become these cosmic drinkers, unafraid. Unabashed!

Let us become the barbarians we are. An affirm it: our barbarianhood. Let us come into our barabarianism. Our inner intellectual Visigoths. Our philosophical Ostrogoths!


No why to our drinking. The explosion of whys. And wherefores.

We drink because … there is no why. Drinking has no why. It’s not about the why.

The drunken question – that’s what we want to hear. The question we can only ask when drunk. That can only sing through our drunkenness. Exalting our drunkenness. Lifting it higher.

The drunk before the sky. The drunk, under heaven. A kind of holy drinking – and a holy drinker. A toast to the night. To the lightning. To the fire of the stars.

Let’s never be sober again.


A great alcoholic influx. Into our veins! Into our bloodstream! The swelling of a mighty alcoholic river. That carries us away!

And don’t we want to be carried away! Don’t we want it to be carried away: our mediocrity! Our Britishness! Our inner organisers! And managers! Our inner analytic philosophers!


Idiocy’s song is a drunken song. The drunkard sings of idiocy and sings idiocy. Our idiot cries! Our drunken cries!


Is there a drunken god to which we cry? Is There a Dionysus in our sky? A wine god? A Bacchus for our revels? To whom we direct our drunken prayers? To whom we pour our drunken libations?


Our drunken sacrifice – of philosophy. Of all philosophical sense. Of all reasonableness. Of all measuredness. Drinking is the sacrifice of analytic philosophy. Of the analytic philosophers inside us. Of calm, measured sober philosophy. Of philosophical tranquillity. Of philosophical peace.


We’re waking up our philosophical neighbours. We being raucous – philosophically raucous. Unreason, unleashed. Passions, unleashed. The drunken attunement: unto what does it open us? What does it let us declare? What are we attuned to?


The drunken earth and drunken sky. The drunken stars in the drunken night. The whole world as drunk, and the earth as drunk. We see it all: the world’s inner drunkenness. The world’s drunken song. Its bacchanial revels.


Is there a drunken wisdom? Are there drunken profounds? Drunken fundaments? Are there drunken philosophies – philosophies that you understand when you’re drunk?

 Or is drinking only ever the ruin of philosophy? The sacrifice of philosophy? Of philosophical reason? Of the philosophical logos?


To liquefy philosophy. To render it fluid. Fluent – in another tongue. Tbe carried away by drink.

The philosopher torn apart in the drunken flood. The philosopher-Orpheus, singing in his pieces.

Let us be these drunkards. Let us drink ourselves to death – to the death of the philosopher inside us. And let us philosophise from this drunken death, this drunken dying.


Our bloodshot eyes! Our wine stained teeth! Catching alcoholic cancers of the mouth and throat!

We’re drinking ourselves to death and beyond death. We’re drinking-dying, which is better than sober-dying. We’re drinking endlessly during the endless end.

We’re dosing – not even micro dosing. We’re macro dosing. Overdosing. As the world becomes more unbearable …


Our drunken fantasia. Our inebriation … Our incapacity … the impossibility of thinking. Of living. Of being alive.

No more living in this world. No more accepting it – this world. No more, it’s terms and conditions – this world. We’re tearing up the contract – the social contract.


We’re antinomian in drink.

We’re the drunken Alcibiades, not sober old Socrates. We’re drunken Cynics.


Were there ever drunken schools of philosophy? But drunks are always philosophers. Drunkards always have a theory of it All. Something momentous to impart.

Drunkards think of themselves as being on the brink. As bringing the drunken good news. The drunken gospel.

There is such a thing as a drunken messianism. As the feeling of an imminent world shift. Of drunken prophecy. The drunk is a prophet. But of what world. Of what world cataclysm.

The drunk KNOWS. A spurious knowledge. A dubious knowledge. A distorted knowledge. A know nothing knowledge. An idiot’s knowledge, which is to say a non-knowledge. But a knowledge nonetheless.


Drunk in the world’s night … Drunk in the age of the world picture … Drunk in the technate …

*Drunken assurance. Drunken confidence. A drunken mission.

We drink to forget stupidity. We drink to consummate our idiocy. To think that idiocy is enough. That it will take us to where we need to go.

To sail away on our drunkenness. On our drunken boat. Over the drunken waves. Under the drunken stars. Full of our drunks’ song. Full of our drunken lament. Our drunken cry.

And our drunken souls will sing upwards. Our drunken cries. We’ll drink all the way to second innocence. We’ll forget all the enchantments. All the songs of experience.

A second childhood, in drunkenness. We’ll be children again, but drunken children, in the world’s morning.

Our good fortune: the barrier of idiocy is always raised against the idiot. We never really know how stupid we are.


There’s a song of idiocy. A forlorn song. That is of half knowing one’s idiocy – the curse of one’s idiocy. The tragedy of it. And the tragedy of knowing that one doe not know and cannot know one’s idiocy. That idiocy can never think beyond idiocy, encompassing it. That the idiot can never think from the other side of idiocy.


The finitude of idiocy. Idiocy’s limitations. The poor dull eyes of the idiot, locked into their idiocy. The poor idiot’s brain, which can only think so much.

Unless idiocy is also a kind of insulation. Unless idiocy actually protects you from knowing the truth – the terrible truth. Unless idiocy is a version of a protective coma, into which the body sends you when reality becomes too much. Unless idiocy is a shield, a carapace, which prevents the total collapse that the real philosopher would feel.


We’re protected. Idiocy protects us. Holds it to its bosom. Keeps us out of total danger. Total exposure. Which is why we’ve kept our sanity, such as it is. Which is why we it hasn’t led us into the fate of Hölderlin, of Nietzsche.

We’re lucky, in a way. Idiocy keeps us as at distance from it, the truth. Idiot says its protective spell over us. Idiocy keeps us alive. Idiocy is a thought-helmet. A thought cage, like a shark cage. Idiocy is the bathysphere that protects us in the deepest depths.


The idiot always stands in their own way. Idiocy blocks the idiot. It’s their original sin. It’s what idiocy can’t get past.

*A banal idiocy: that’s what has to be avoided. A complacent idiocy. Idiocy should always struggle against idiocy, Livia said. Idiocy should be in mortal combat with idiocy.

*A workaday idiocy. An idiocy content to go about in idiocy. Never that!

Idiocy must suffer itself, that’s the thing. It must suffer its idiocy. Must find itself unbearable, its idiocy. Idiocy must despise idiocy, the very stuff from which it’s made. Which means that it wants only to become something other than idiocy. Even as it’s condemned to idiocy, and to nothing other than idiocy.


The idiocy plunge. Like an ice-bath for her, for Livia. Refreshing, in its way. Enlivening. The splash of water on the face. There she was, figuratively diving with idiocy, just as you might dive with dolphins. Enjoyable, in its way. Enlivening, for an old non idiot like her.


The innocence of idiocy is too be enjoyed. Idiocy, disporting: a fine sight. Idiocy at play, like dolphins at play. Idiocy, leaping up to the height of idiocy. Trying to break the surface of idiocy, with its idiot leaps. And failing to do so – failing to break the surface. But failing charmingly. Laughingly. Which provokes laughter in turn. Joyful laughter. Idiots do the funniest things, right?


The idiocy-spring. The idiocy-origin. Fresh from it. Sparking with it.

The innocence of idiocy. Idiocy, fresh from the idiotsprung, as Livia called it. From the origin of idiocy.


You can savour it, idiocy. Sip at it.

Idiocy nectar. The honey of idiocy, slipping down the throat.


The idiocy sparkle. The nothing-but-idiocy.

Idiocy’s dance. Idiocy’s joy. As it comes into itself. As it returns to itself. As it takes it leaps – its idiocy leaps. As it cries out in idiot-exaltation. In idiot joy. In its idiot simplicity. Its idiot-innocence …


There are times when idiocy need not suffer itself. When idiocy is relieved from despising itself. When idiocy plays. Disports. When idiocy larks about.

Idiocy’s skylarking. Idiocy’s frigging in the rigging of life. Idiocy’s cavorting. Idiocy’s clambering over itself …


Idiocy, among the idiots. Idiocy, between the idiots.

Idiots’ banter. Idiocy’s to-and-fro.

The idiocy pell mell. The idiocy chaos.

Idiocy, swarming. Overspilling. Idiocy frothing. And frothing over! Idiocy, foaming. idiocy’s bubbles, popping under the idiocy’s sun.

Idiocy’s champagne …


Idiot’s outside, always outside. Under the idiot sky, the idiot stars, the idiot sun, the idiot moon. Idiocy, on the idiot earth.


The idiot-leap. Out of idiocy? No: into idiocy.

Idiocy can never beak out of idiocy. Transcend idiocy.

Idiocy’s only ever a deepening of idiocy.


Idiocy’s increase. Idiocy’s pressure.

The density of idiocy. Idiocy gathering and loosening. Idiocy hardening, clotting. And idiocy loosening again. Finding its flow. Becoming liquid. Deliquescing.

They’re busy with the great work of translation. Translating European philosophy into analyticese – analytic philosophy. Making it clear! Intelligible! Readable by a general audience!

No more obscurity. Nothing difficult. Nothing unnecessarily opaque.

They’re bringing it all into the light – the Analytic Philosophy light. That shines benignly upon us all.

The great work of translation. Necessary work, if European thought is ever to become really intelligible. And thereby accessible. And thereby useful.

If thought is ever to have impact, beyond the academe … If it is ever to connect, to tell its story … If it will ever contribute to funding bids … to impact case studies …

If it is ever to be known outside the humanities. To the broader public … If it is to be introduced properly, contextualised properly … If it is ever to have a plaque by its name, like contemporary art … If it’s ever going to be explained (and explained away) … It needs to be translated into a neutral vocabulary (which is to, an analytic vocabulary.)

And with all the advances in Analytic Philosophy to help. To assist. All the latest developments in Analytic Philosophy at hand.

The analytic philosophers have been working hard for this. Writing their papers. Gathering at conferences. With a sense of mission.

You know what they’re like. Philosophical underlabourers. Modest. Scientist-like. A group project, really. A borg thing. Writing their papers. Quoting each other. An analytic wide web …

And the light, the Analytic Philosophy light everywhere. Shining into every corner and crack. Making things clear. Intelligible. Understandable.

Bringing European philosophy into mainstream debate. European philosophy won’t be on the philosophical margins. It can be part of the general conversation. In the name of diversity. Of equality. Of the honouring of the fact that there are other traditions. Other ways of doing philosophy.


We need to admit it. Continental thought needs to be updated. Reframed. Made clear. Made relevant!

If only Immanuel Kant had had the language of Analytic Philosophy at his disposal. If only he’d written in English. Good old English, the clearest of language. The most transparent.

Because Analytic Philosophy is, if nothing else, clear. Because Analytic Philosophy pretty much has the dibs on clarity. Analytic Philosophy, alone knows what clarity is. Has been working on clarity, in clarity, thinking of nothing but clarity.

Shining its light! The beneficent Anglo light! The great gift to the world: beneficent Anglo light! Bringing clarity! The light of the Analytic Philosophy sun. That will banish all shadows.

The Analytic Philosophy light standing still in the sky. There it is: the analytic noon. Obvious. And making everything obvious. Allowing everything to be revealed. Shown. For what it was. Banishing shadows. Darknesses. Obscurities. Mysticisms …

No more dubious religiosity. No more antediluviainism. None of the old stuff. A brave new Analytic Philosophy dawn. Things won’t be the same anymore.

General positivity. No more adolescent stuff. No more talk of nothingnesses and voids. No more fretting about the death of God, or death as God. Jettisoning once and for all the eternal return of Gnosticism. The idea that nature is evil. That there should be a horror at existence. No more angst. No more throwback existentialism.

Philosophy’s not to be the hideout of weirdoes. Conspiracy theorists. We need to weed out all the strange people. Clear out the eccentrics. Isn’t that the mission?

A general organising and managing. That takes the form of a sorting. Of a separation of the wheat from the chaff.

We need saner philosophers. Calmer philosophers. Philosophers with clear heads. With a sense of mission. Who know what’s to be done. Modest philosophers. Underlabourer philosophers. Who have the requisite philosophical taste.

This is not a time for fanaticism. For the ill-tempered. For excess, in general. For unregulated emotion. What’s needed is a cadre of the sensible – of the analytic philosophy sensible. Calm under pressure. Non excitable types! Cool headed types! Not all blood and fervour! Not all full of wild imaginings!

None of the religious madness! None of those European religious types,r religious without religion. None of the continental faithful who have nowhere to place it, their faith.

None of those passionate intensity types. Fervoured types. Febrile types, heads full of fever. None of the disturbed. The addled. The conceptually confused.

None of the mooded. Those prone to melancholy. To depressions. To general messianism. Forget the pathos-led. The mood-fuelled. Unbalanced types! Wayward types! The barefoot in the head!

And no more prose poem philosophy. Philosophy’s not about literary beauty. Written in clear, calm prose. Philosophy needs to be severed once and for all from the poetic. From dubious old literature. From every kind of rhetoric.

Philosophy, in calm prose. Unfebrile prose. Philosophy, written with a clear head. Not drunk! Not even hungover!

A new sobriety! The sobriety of Analytic Philosophy! Of Organisational Management!


There’s work to be done – sober work. Calm work. Measured work. Work that needs cool heads. There are meetings to be had. A careful division of tasks. Going into each branch of philosophy. Root and branch reform. The continental tinkers will need to be subject to analysis. Taken apart. Reassembled. Made bionic.

This will take time. And patience. Only the soberest and calmest need apply! Need analytic philosophers working on every part of continental philosophy. Extracting analytic value. Converting the most rebarbative formulations into clear declarative propositions. Labouring to make the obscure clear. Taking full advantage of the many advances in analytic philosophy. New advances in clarity!. New progress in the science of distinctness!

We might even be able to automate the process. Surely there’s help to be had from large language models … Surely they’ll develop a bring-Adorno-into-clarity app. A Hegel-in-plain English app.

Heidegger’s causing them particular problems. Let alone Hölderlin! Analytic Philosophy doesn’t do madness … Or poetry …

Al these names! These great European signatures! Of course, Analytic Philosophy has long since outgrown the celebration of individual genius. And the pathos of thought, capital T. All the European infantile fixations on Genius and Great Men. Which is really only a sign of the immaturity of thought. Of a kind of drunkenness in thought.

It’s what happens when you’re given too much rope. Europe, Old Europe, must be brought into line. Its delusions of grandiosity. That philosophy can actually Decide things. That philosophy matters. Queen of the Sciences, and so on.

All that metaphysics! Irrationality! We have to work out what is to be saved and what should to be jettisoned, from European philosophy. From Old Europe in general. And if it’s going to be judged, it has to be presented in a neutral vocabulary at least.

Only then might European philosophy’s contributions to epistemology, ontology, metaphysics be weighed up by analytic experts. Gauged! Carefully assessed! Placed alongside their Analytic contemporaries. By editors of Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Mind. No more hagiographies. No more hero worship. Ancestor worship. Cultic reverence for predecessors. No more uncritical veneration. No more laudatory essays. No more placing on a pedestal. No more mystique about thought. It isn’t helpful. No more general pathos. No more general hysteria. The age of Clarity is arriving.

The analytic philosophy soul. The mediocre soul. The revenge on philosophy soul. The hating-philosophy soul. Which is the Anglo-American instinct.


What analytic philosophy has done to the British! How it has deepened the Britishness of the British – which didn’t need deepening.

And now it’s being exported, all over the world. Now it’s conquering Germany itself. And France. What a triumph! And Mitteleuropa. That’s the catastrophe.

The British didn’t need to be any more British, and yet we’re making them more British. Deepening their Britishness. Their so called commonsensicalness. Their philistinism. It’s getting worse.

They’re cut off from Europe. And now they’ll remake Europe in their own image. Now Europe is falling to them, the analytic philosophers.


None of our questions are analytic philosophy questions. None of our problems. They’re all pseudo-philosophy and folk psychology and existential throwback.


They’re rewriting the European classics. Re interpreting them. Rewriting them in analytic-ese. Re-introducing them. Re-contextualising them. In analytic philosophy™ approved clear Anglo prose.

If only Kant had written in English! Kant’s so much clearer in English. If only Heidegger had the English language at his disposal! And analytic clarity! Analytic luminousness!


They’re so naïve, over the Channel. They don’t know what they’re up against. It’s an invasion. It’s an attack. On philosophy!


They’re ruining philosophy. They’re polluting the European waters. And the European philosophers are too melancholy to fight back. They’re too full of Weltschmerz.

Who can resist analytic philosophy? Who can resist the lure of clarity – of so called clarity? Of clean prose. Of streamlined prose. Of the desire to explain it all. To expose everything to the light.

The light – the tyrant of light! The tyranny of clarity! They’ve exposed Europe to the light. And Europe cannot bear the light.


Europe has fallen. Of course it has. There’s no more Europe, essentially. The analytic virus is spreading. Converting darkness to light. Curing weltschmerz and angst and saudade and all the other things (a false cure.)

*Truly European thought survives only at the corners of Europe. Only at its edges. And only in bastardised form. Only in archaisms. In unreasonableness. In excessive moods. In madness. In degeneracy. In so called Gnosticism.

In the rejection of the world. In absurd world hatreds. In cultic madness.

It only survives in parody. In absurd exaggerations. In arrant contortions. In baroque twistedness. In the spasming of stupidity. In flinches. In obscene gestures. In the unintentional comedy of our lives.


The shadow is leaving Europe. The shadows are being banished, lost. There’s light everywhere. No corners in which to hide. No cracks.

It’s spreading, the light. The light that does not see. The light that hides what is hidden. It’s not the Heideggerian Lichtung.

Disappearing itself will disappear. Hiddenness itself will hide. Darkness will no longer be dark. Silence will no longer be silence.

No more tact. No more discretion. No more veils. No more depth. No more burial. No more earth. No more resistance. No more death – not even death. You won’t be able to die your way out of this.


The terrible reign of positivity. The horrors of the rictus grin. Yes-I-can compliance. General agreeableness.


And no more time. Time itself will be sucked away. No more study. Only Optimisation. Only organisation. And Management. And the official philosophy of organisation and management.


The banishment of negativism – of so-called negativism. Forgetting will be forgotten. Withdrawal will be withdrawn. Concealment will be concealed. There’ll be no more truth. No depth of truth. No dimensions of truth.

Only the correct. Only the positive. Only facts. No more time. Not deep time. No time for contemplation. No pausings. No whilings. No ponderings. No musings. No woolgatherings.

No attunements to the hidden and the deep. No Stimmungen. No fundamental moods – or any moods. No anxiety. No deep, deep boredom. No love – not even love! No darkness. No shadows.

That’s the atrocity. The banishment of anything but light – their so called light. Their shadowless light.


No more dubious religiosity. No more artistic pathos. No more incoherence. No more general misunderstanding.

No more awe at thought, and the possibility of thought. No more self-denigration and self-hatred.

No more energy of despair. No more formless intensity. No more extremity in general.

The sensible, instead. The calm, instead. The measured, instead. The so-called intellectual virtues, instead.

No more fanaticism. No more wildness. Calmness, instead. Temperance, instead. Sobriety, instead. No more death of God talk. Nor death as God talk. No more pessimus stuff.

No more spurious etymologising. No more aimless study. No more black teat of inspiration. No more reading in machine translations. No more magick, in general. No more dubious occultism.

No more pseudo reading. What we think of as reading. No more general spuriousness. No more parody. No more farce. No more jokes-of-all-of-our-lives.

No more laughter at laughter. No more despairing cries in the night.

No more crucifixion in general. No more unwatchable arthouse films. No more music of the depths. No more Jandek!


Analytic philosophy soul cavitation of the European philosophy soul. The hollowing out, in preparation for the analytic philosophy possession. For analytic philosophy takeover. For analytic philosophy automation.

Homo borg genesis is an analytic human. The post human. The analytic philosophy human.


Only Gnosticism can save us. And drunken Gnosticism. And incoherence. And stumbling. And mumbling. And diatribes. And paranoia. And emotions to be despised. And attitudes to be discarded.

All our childish things. Our recidivism. Our primitivism.

Pour it out. As a libation to some disgusting God. To a god of disgust.

Is there a god of disgusting things in Hinduism? There are gods of everything else.


Pour it out. As a disgusting libation to the disgusting.

The gods won’t want it, believe me.

Not even the disgusting gods?

Our disgust with the world: that’s what we need to remember. Our disgust with everything. It needs to be kept at the brink. At the highest intensity. We should never forget it.

The need to top up our disgust. To maintain it at its peak. In its extremity. Disgust should never die down.


Anti-wine, for an anti-universe. Dark matter wine.

Is dark matter disgusting?

It is if it tastes like this.


It’s like the dark period, where the laws of physics don’t apply. On those nano seconds after the big bang. When everything was just disgusting.


What’s the final disgust lesson? What’s the final chapter in the book of disgust?

We have to find disgust itself disgusting. Climb up the ladder of disgust and then throw it away. Disgust at disgust: that’s the goal. Like a negation of negation.

And then what – do we like everything, all of a sudden?

I thought we had to reach absolute disgust. Like disgust in itself, incomparable, nothing but itself. An anti-star of disgust, burning, sufficient unto itself.

There’s no such thing.


What if disgust is only a lack. Disgust is privation. Just as evil is the absence of the good.

I don’t believe that.

What does Organisational Management madness look like, you’re wondering. A frenzy of organising and managing, maybe. Or maybe the opposite: a war against organising and managing. Either way, I’m sure it doesn’t measure up to philosophical madness, which must be entirely superior.


Maybe I’m only mad relative to Organisational Management, which means not particular mad. Which means not especially mad at all. Like when very conventional people say, I’m a bit mad, me. Will you teach me to become philosophically mad? Will you? Or am I incapable of that?


I wonder if I’ll go madder? I wonder whether you’ll bring out the madness in me? Or at least license it.


Or did I only say I was mad to intrigue you? Did I say it because I thought it might draw you in? Did I want to be fascinating? Did I want to fascinate the philosopher?

Imagine that: that I would want to fascinate you. Just for a dose of philosophical cool. You see how we’re secretly in awe of philosophy in Organisational Management? Do you see what your reputation is? How insecure we are in Organisational Management? How lacking in confidence we are, really?

We’re sinking. We’re giving up. Letting ourselves be swallowed down and down. As by some mighty sea serpent. As Jonah was swallowed down by a Leviathan.

We’re being swallowed by the Newcastle earth. Gulped down. We’re sinking.


A vortex of the earth. A kind of earthquake.

Hardly an earthquake – a really well built tunnel. The Victorians built things well.

Cheap labour. Lots of poverty.

And skill. And pride.


Can’t you feel the gravity? Pulling up downward. The earth’s tractor beam. Wouldn’t you just like to be lain down in the sod?

And sodomized. Yes please.


You must feel at home here, Helmut. The Heidegger likes to be close to the soil. A bit of blood, and that would complete things, wouldn’t it?

Who’s your favourite fascist? If you had to pick one? Would you rather be ruled by Hitler or Mussolini?


Katabasis. Are we getting more stupid as we descend, do you think? Are we drooling more? Dragging our knuckles? Are our IQs dropping a point every hundred meters? Saying duh more often?


We are stupid and growing stupider.

Is that a word?

One only the stupid would use.