Why I am not a Destiny

I often remember an animated, half-drunken conversation on friendship, back at a lock-in in a pub in Oxford. W. said, as he often says (and writes): philosophy is born from friendship, it must be; it is always a question of a community. What did I say? Only if one can admit a kind of friendship – an amity – names the relationship between a reader and an author. I was thinking of Bataille’s claim that the books he wrote in the early 1940s were written in community with Nietzsche, and his suggestion that these books opened themselves in turn towards a community of unknown readers. Remember your philosophical apprenticeship: how did it begin? Was it a matter of a good teacher, of interesting peers, or was it the claim of a book, of a particular oeuvre?

I bought Inner Experience in Compendium bookshop in Camden in 1993. It must have been newly translated; published by SUNY press it had something like a black sun on its front cover, a motif repeated on the cover of Blanchot’s The Step Not Beyond, which I must have bought at the same time. Why reminisce? It is a matter of a kind of amity which laid claim to me. But isn’t it crude to suppose that it exist between me and a book like Inner Experience, which I could hardly understand? I will say I was trained in the Analytic tradition, and remember arguing against the notion that Foucault and Derrida were doing philosophy. But in 1993, there was Bataille, whom I first encountered, I think, in Nick Land’s book, just as I first came across a quotation from Blanchot in that terrible biography of Foucault (but why had I begun reading Foucault then, a year after the end of my degree?) What context could I have for reading Blanchot? The Space of Literature was a mystery to me (an enticing mystery). Yet I read and reread it; later, I abandoned my plan to study Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript for a Ph.D. in order to work on the concept of writing in Blanchot. Still later, knowing this task was far beyond me, I settled on writing in a general sense on the emergence of phenomenology – on the three ‘H’s: Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. Reading these authors and others, like Deleuze, who were appearing in translation at that time, I was conscious of the distance of these writers from anything I’d met in Analytic philosophy just as I knew how close they were to something European – to an ‘old’ Europe, I suppose, the one which is now disappearing.

‘Old’ Europe: what will happen, say, to Prague? I am not thinking so much of the stag party weekends but of the transformation of Czech culture, of the Czech university now that grants from Brussels will become available to transform not only the infrastructure of higher education, but also the direction of research. Heidegger said it in the late 1930s: the scholar will disappear, to be replaced by the man of research. It came true in the 1980s, with the horror of the RAE. The humanities have been reduced to a debased state. Now comes the ‘new’ Europe, which looks to America. The average humanities department, if it is to survive, will have to bid for research money. No, I will not write here about the disastrous consequences of research culture for teaching, nor even of the benumbing vastness of the administrative structures which govern public affairs; it is too depressing. But how, amidst all this, can one bind oneself to the ‘old’ Europe of Adorno and Benjamin, of Bataille and Weil? How can one find time to read Castoriadis or Patocka, Levinas or Kristeva? Because in the ‘new’ Europe you will no longer have time to take time – or perhaps only when you retire.

I learn at a wedding over the weekend of the hire and fire culture which has already swept across London. Horror as I discover the devastation this visits upon those without a family network to support them, without money, but above all, without what I want to call the capacity to be which Heidegger called Sein-können. No, I’m not using this word in the Heideggerian sense, but thinking of Levinas’s translation of this word: roughly, the ability-to-be.

The ability-to-be, the capacity to sustain yourself across all the disappointments which befall you. Some can endure almost anything; others, delicate beings, crumble at the merest touch. You see them disappear into the City; some (only a few) triumph; others (many more) survive redundancies and relocations and get by; others (who are they) disappear altogether. Where do they go? Perhaps they return to live with their parents, as I once had to do for a short time. Perhaps they retrain and begin new careers -. Still, I wonder: what do the ones do who lack the ability-to-be? I remember one of the proofs of God’s existence in Descartes: God is the one who sustains the being of the universe from moment to moment. But if you have no God to sustain you? If you bear a void in your heart, what then? Disappear; vanish into the world of sheltered accommodation and medication. Some say that there were always beings of this kind, derelicts, vagrants, alcoholics. But we make them, these beings – they are made when life becomes a matter of assertion and the will (the will to will, as Heidegger says). When it is a matter of an aggressive struggle of all against all – or when this struggle reaches beyond the workplace and into the life which is laughably called ‘private’.

I was lucky to return to higher education after a couple of years spent temping and unemployed during the recession of 1992-1994 in which all my family lost their jobs. And if I hadn’t have found funding for a Ph.D.? I was attracted to the ‘old’ Europe which even then was disappearing – but also to a kind of apocalypticism: Surely, I said to myself, this can’t last, the world as it is, the spread of Americanism, of the American style of management? Surely politics will not become sheer management, sheer economism? And now? Those who are able-to-be are thriving. And those who are not? No longer is there the hope which would allow one to ‘opt out’.

I think of Duras’s remarks about her son’s generation in the wake of May 1968 – for her, they wanted nothing, there was a curious blankness to them, as if, from them, a new world would be born without the division between work and leisure – without alienation, perhaps without money. How we laugh at this naivety now! But we laugh because we are without hope. The generation who came to maturity in the 1960s had hope, the gift of hope; those of the 1970s knew they’d missed out on something, but in the 1980s (my generation)? The generation of shit, a colleague of mine called us - a colleague for whom everything was lies and the only thing to seek was money.

After that, I have no idea. I disappeared into the academy; I was lucky. And now that I am here? I have the survivor’s guilt that others, cleverer than I am, better than I am, should have the job I hold. And the yuppies’ secret pride that it was my ability to market myself, to network and to sound convincing at an interview which got me here. Above all, though, a shame, great shame which it would be irresponsible to blame upon anything else that I have no thoughts to offer, that my diagnosis of the ills of the world remains cliché, and that the typos in my book concern me before almost anything else.

I wonder, in the end, whether the notion of friendship of which I write is a function of a great privatisation of consciousness, that the books to which I assume myself to be linked bind me because I am afraid to turn to the ‘new’ Europe which is forming around me.