Work in Progress

Philosophy, to us, was an atmosphere. Wa a climate. Was a temperament. Was a temperature.

It was a perfume. A haze. A rumour. It was a pattern of drift. A current. A warm front. A movement of air in air. Of water in water.


We weren’t hard edged. We weren’t tough-minded. We didn’t have sharpened teeth, spiritually. We weren’t philosophical predators. Philosophical big-beasts. We weren’t philosophical Jack the rippers. Cut throats. We weren’t pirates, on the high seas of philosophy.

Skulkers, instead. All huggers. Avoiders. Recluses. The type who wanted only to hide out with their books. To live in disguise. In retreat. To inhabit philosophical dens. To descend into their philosophical burrows.


We weren’t self-promoters. Freebooters. We avoided philosophical discussions. We were no good at it, philosophical to and fro. We were inept in debate.

Philosophical talk would only leave us flustered. Panicked. Saying any old nonsense. Coming up with any old thing. Standing there bewildered. Scratching our heads. Dumbfounded.

No, no, we didn’t want debate. We didn’t want our ideas, our so-called ideas, tested. We didn’t want to venture out on philosophical public. Even giving papers was anathema to us. We didn’t have the skills. We feared the exposure.

We didn’t like to justify ourselves. To argue. To reason, even – not in public. We didn’t want to be seen to think. To extrapolate. To improvise. Even to read our own words.

Unbearable – our own words! Everything we’d ever written. And said! Everything we’d said! Ever! To say more was only to deepen the sin. Let alone writing more. Let alone publishing.

It would just make things more entangled. To compromise ourselves more deeply.


That we had to exist! That we were supposed to write more! That there was more time! That we were going to live longer! That we weren’t just going to pop out of existence! Just be destroyed!

And why was that – why wouldn’t God destroy us? Why wouldn’t he just take us out, all at once?

Proof, if it was needed, that God didn’t exist. Proof, if it were needed, that the archons were in charge. That the demi-urge was the level-boss of this world.


That we existed! That we were made to live on! Teaching philosophy and even writing philosophy! What agony! What tragedy! Only it didn’t rise to tragedy, not really. It was too pathetic for that.


On our minds: only the end, only non-existence. Resting our heads in death. Falling asleep in nothingness. The lure of the void.

No, we were not to be alive. It wasn’t for us, this being alive.


Time: we didn’t want it! No more time! No more minutes! No more seconds! No more agony – the agony of hours. That it wasn’t the End! That the apocalypse hadn’t come! That the roll wasn’t being called up yonder was agony to us. That the Man had yet to come around. That the last judgment was delayed – infinitely so!

Livia’s achievements. What she’d done. Where she’d been. Who she’d known. A doctorate at twenty-three. Completed early (in eighteen months!) A raft of publications – hundreds of papers. The research teams she’d led. The money she’d brought into the university. The conferences where she’d keynoted. Her work in pure mathematics. In applied mathematics.


She was always pragmatic, Livia. It was always Realpolitik, for her.

She was an emigrant. An exile. A refugee. Who’d escaped communism!

She had no fallback. No plan B.

But she’d play the West at their own game – and win. The amount of money she brought into the university … The research funds that she had at her disposal.

Her trips over the Atlantic and back. To the greatest ivy league universities. Her keynoting – at the best universities. A couple of decades at the top of her game. One of the most renowned mathematicians in the world. And a philosophical mathematician, to boot. A mathematical philosopher, pretty much.

And what did she do, in the end, with her research money? What did she spend it on, her mathematical income stream, at the height of her career? Setting up her own philosophy department.


Livia’s forward planning. Her schemes.  

The cultivation of a humanities professors at Mercia. Carefully winning them over. Earning their respect. Impressing them with her seriousness. A mathematical colleague. With an intense interest in the arts. In culture.

Livia did the emotional work. Entertained them, these jewels of the humanities. These conduits of Old Europe. Impressed them with her talk of interdisciplinarity. Of cross faculty collaboration.

So she brought them over. They would support the initiative.  They offered expertise – as if it were needed. Make sure it was approved. Helped it through the appropriate committees. Added their names to the paperwork. Which is why Livia ended up reviving philosophy, restarting it, at a university that had closed its original department back in the ‘80s.


They were classy, her Europeans. They knew what was what. They came from prosperous European homes. Cultured homes. They were sons and daughters of professors. Bloodlines of European academics. Not like Livia.

Prosperous, cultured, confident. So what were they doing at Mercia? Passing through, probably. A UK sojourn, for a few years at least. Anglophiles, for some reason. Sort of like W.G. Sebalds. Intellectuals on tour. Doing the melancholy European thing. All kind of Welt-schmerzy.

Insulated from the UK. Not dragged down by the UK. Not half destroyed by the UK. Not inwardly collapsed because of the UK. Not rendered witless by the UK. Not become provincial, by living in the UK. Immune from it, the UK.

Breathing their own European air …


Livia liked to drink it in, our stupidity. Like to sip from our idiocy. It made her giddy. Made her high.

She liked gaucherie. And provincialness. And unwittingness – a c certain innocence. The innocence of knowing no better.

She liked it when we half-forgot our idiocy. When we weren’t burdened by it. Wasn’t crushed by it. She liked it when at our most childlike. At our least self-consciousness. Livia liked us not knowing what we were doing.

All but humming to ourselves, as we turned our philosophical pages. Singing to ourselves, as we wrote in our offices. As we busied ourselves teaching, lecture-writing.

Fools, but unwitting fools. The best kind of fools – the ones who didn’t know they were fools. Who’d never been cursed with intelligence.

Maybe it’s halahala.

Hala what?

Halahala. The most lethal poison there is. It threatened to destroy the universe. So Shiva drank it all up. He was going to sacrifice himself to maintain the cosmic equilibrium.

Then what happened?

His wife gripped his neck with both hands to stop it reaching his stomach. Shiva held the poison in his neck. It turned his throat blue. Which is why he’s also called Nilakantha – the blue-throated one.

And he didn’t die?

The poison is negativity, anger, pain – all the stuff that could destroy you. Or the world. Unless it can be contained properly. So it’s a story about attaining inner control. About managing negativity. Maintaining the cosmic balance and all that.

Are we on the edge of unlimited abundance, philosopher? Some tech utopia that will meet all our desires? We won’t have to work anymore, that’s what they say. The government will pay us not to work. Universal basic income …

So long as we keep in line. So long as we don’t say anything or write anything or think anything against the regime.

Look, the new totalitarianism will be ever so benign. We’ll barely even notice it. And we’ll get used to it. We’ll learn what we’re to say or not to say. It’ll become instinctive. We’ll self-censor and all that. And after a bit, we’ll barely notice it. We’ll adjust.

But it’ll be worth it. We’ll be entirely fulfilled for the first time in human history. Even you, philosopher. With all your discontent. Don’t scoff, philosopher. Don’t scoff at happiness. I supposed happiness isn’t good enough for philosophers.

Only European thought measures up to this. Only Europeans can think – really think – the coming technocracy. Down to its depths. To its roots. Grasping – really grasping – the essence of technocracy: only your Heidegger, your Benjamin, is capable of that. Only your Rosenzweig. Only your Gershom Scholem. Your Adorno. Your Arendt. Your Illich, maybe. Agamben – don’t forget him. Agamben’s the daddy.

The real thinkers. We’re not thinking of court jesters, like Zizek. Players to the crowd. Hot takers. Poseurs. Controversialists.

We’re not thinking of the old bores, like Habermas. Of all those fucking psychoanalysts.

You know this is the thirteenth bottle, don’t you?

So what?

The thirteenth bottle is the last wine. It’s the culmination of a whole eschatology of wine. It’s the wine all the others have been leading up to. That will make all of them make sense. We’ve been ascending a wine ladder, don’t you see? Or descending it. It feels like we’ve been going down, down, down a spiral staircase.

There’s been a method – of sorts.

A method in our drinking?

Thirteen bottles is the end of the course of anti-poison. It’s a cure. A cure in doses.

The thirteenth bottle turns lies into truth.

Is that right?

It’s the messianic wine.


 Drink the bottle, the last bottle, the thirteen bottle, and you’ll step across the threshold. You’ll actually be alive. For the first time .Your life won’t have been entirely worthless.

Don’t attribute these motives to her. She was a trickster. She was a provocateur. There wasn’t anything serious about Livia.

But that lack of seriousness was seriousness.

She was playing games. 5D chess, or whatever …


The trickster isn’t serious. Just wants to laugh at everything. Leaves nothing in its place – just empty laughter.


Pagan laughter. The laughter of paganism.

Laughter that laughs at itself laughing. At its own imposture, and all imposture. That is nothing but the void laughing, and the void in all laughter. The creation laughing at itself. The creation despising itself.


This isn’t Jupiter’s laughter, where laughter is part of some greater joy. It’s wicked laughter. It’s laughter that says, you won’t get anywhere. Everything’s pointless. It’s nihilistic laughter. It’s a big no to everything. It says: everything was fucked up from the start.


What if – what if Livia was a demon who fed on failure. All along. What I she lived on our misery. Harvested it. For her dark master. What if she just wanted to fuck things up. And to enjoy her fuckery.


We should do away with ourselves. We should go down with the ship. We’d throw ourselves on Livia’s funeral pyre. Burn up with her. Why should we outlive her? Outlast her? What would they do with us after Livia?

We’re a thrashing of the earth. We’re a spasmism of the world. We’re a flinching of existence – the whole of existence.

Some twitch. Some fit.

We’re an accident. We weren’t supposed to happen.

We’re the world’s bastards. Nature’s illegitimate offspring. Never mind that we had actual parents, or anything. We shouldn’t have been …

But here we are. We shouldn’t have been born – but we were born. We sprang into life.

Amazing, that we’re allowed to wander about, just living. Astonishing, that we’re allowed to desecrate life. That we still exist.

Here we are. Quite brazenly existing. Taking up space. Breathing the air. Surely we’re not entitled to breathe the air. But here we are, breathing the air. Poisoning all things by our being here. Spreading our disease. Our contagion.

We wanted to be defeated by higher things. We wanted to run up against a taller wall. We wanted to be smashed up by something noble. Obviously greater than us. Something worthwhile.

We wanted to shrink ourselves up looking upwards – terribly high. We wanted to diminish ourselves. We wanted life in diminuendo. We wanted to be crushed by something so vast that it wouldn’t even notice.


To be crushed by vast things. To be destroyed by great, good forces. For our deaths to be necessary. Incidental. Unimportant. To be extinguished – because it had to happen. For the greater good.

That’s what we wanted – to die for the greater good. But to die unobtrusively. Almost unnoticed. Not a martyr’s death, or anything like that. We want to be destroyed by something True. And Clever.

Death – that’s what we want. A death blow. A sublime blow, as from the sky. As from the stars. A glorious extinction. Glorious because it’s complete – it’s absolute. A nothing-left-over smashdown. Like at Sodom. And Gomorrah! Biblical style.

You think Livia was some kind of Zen fucking master. That her life was a koan to understand. That everything was riddle.

Everything she did was endlessly enigmatic.

She probably knew that. Did it on purpose. Just to keep us busy, and her amused.

Who would surround themselves with idiots? With people who were her inferior.

She was always praising our drunkenness. Our idiocy. She loved watching us make mistakes.

It was sadism – she was a sadist. And we were masochists. There – no mystery. And masochists love to interpret their sadist. Thinks their sadist is part of some higher purpose. Which, in the end, is just part of their masochism.


It’s not even an interesting masochism. Not even S&M. And it’s all mental, which is even more pathetic.


She never meant anything she said. She was always laughing. Laughing at us. Laughing at herself. Laughing at philosophy.

Heaven forefend!

She thought it was a joke – thought everything was a joke. That laughter was the highest thing. That’s how I picture her: sitting, laughing on her own, clapping he hands as she laughs – that’s probably what she’s doing now. In glee!

It was laughter all the way down, right? And it wasn’t even her laughter – not ultimately. It’s Satanic laughter. Because Satan is an imitator.