And when you realise you're no good at philosophy and nor will you ever be any good? When you realise you lack the brilliance? In truth, I could say I realised this a long time ago, straightaway in fact, that there was never any pretension and no matter how hard I work, night and day, week after week, nothing will happen in my thinking.
It's hard to explain this to others working in different disciplines. Perhaps because they use what they call theory rather than try to grasp philosophy as such. On the other hand, because they use it and test it against some other area - music, say - their work is often more interesting than what, in the end, collapses in philosophy into interminable commentary. Of course the way I have described this model of 'using' thought is naive and objectionable - it is a matter, rather, of a double implication, the wasp and the orchid, where what is called theory changes as it meets the 'object' to which it is supposed to be applied. A double becoming.
But philosophy as philosophy - that's difficult. Read Husserl, read Derrida on Husserl, reread Derrida on Husserl after reading Lawlor and Marrati. Read Deleuze, read Spinoza, Leibniz and Bergson to get some grasp of his thought - read Simondon and Ruyer and Tarde ... Or again, read Foucault, read Agamben as a reader of Foucault, or still further, read Heidegger, read Nancy as a reader of Heidegger, chart the differences between Nancy's and Derrida's takes on deconstruction. Read Badiou, understand the differences between him and Deleuze and criticise his accounts of them, read some set theory, assess his readings of the philosophers who precede him ...
Each of these tasks will take five years. Five years that will take you through your Ph.D. if you're lucky enough to have a background in this kind of philosophy rather than playing catchup. Five years and it is likely your understanding of philosophy will be so strongly informed by the master thinker (I am thinking of Adam's recent posts at The Weblog) you've picked that you will have no real, independent take on philosophy itself. Then the next five years begins, if you have time for it, if you have a job which will allow it, if you have a family life which allows it and perhaps you'll have some independence with respect to the thinker you studied in detail. Perhaps you'll have suspended that conditioned reflex through which you respond to philosophy and the problems which confront philosophy in a Badiouian, Deleuzean, Derridean etc. way.
Ten years at best before you can philosophise in your own name. How old will you be? 37, perhaps - the magic age of Hegel and Heidegger and others. But it's likely you'll be older. 45, say. And if you never had the staying power, the fortune or the powers of concentration to sustain you through years of thinking? If you never had the time?
Philosophy allows you to be young until those ten years or their equivalent have passed. Sometimes, this is enough to sustain a lifetime of thought. Sometimes that lifetime is sustained in a awareness that nothing that you say has any philosophical worth, that it remains commentary, or a kind of pathos that lifts itself too easily from commentary, that flaps about weakly.
But what of those who are able to think? What insights have pressed themselves upon them? What force of insight? I have been in the presence of thinkers, real thinkers. They are different beasts, marvellous ones, serious and calm. They have the strength of thought behind them. They rest in that strength. They speak seriously, calmly. And I, too, rest in their strength as it resists careerism and academic politics. As it is so obvious, everyone can tell, even if it scares them, that they are in the presence of brilliance. The careerists are scared, it's beautiful. Because they know they'll never be brilliant and that what they take as to be their youth is already old and crabbed. That they are the dullards, the mediocrities who've always stood in the way of thought.
I've reread the two papers on which I've been working on all summer (well, all of August, which is as much summer as I get). Laughter: this is supposed to be thought? One, written in the DOGMA style, is pure pathos, lacking in ideas. Pathos without direction, enthusiasm without rigour, borrowing from all and making a mish-mash of all. Postmodernism in the worst sense. A paper that asks to be put out of its misery like a sick animal that must be shot. And the other? This is where real laughter begins. An 'ambitious' paper, passing through this thinker and then that as if I should think myself capable of anything other than bad commentry. Ambition! How funny! By what right have I thought myself able to write such a thing? In the end, there is only laughter: how did I think myself able to write on the topic I chose? What imposture! What stupidity!
An imposture, it is true, that was always mine. Why is that hope that I could one day write something estimable not dead in me? Why is it I begin again with fresh hope and momentum? Why is it I can begin again in innocence and hope? I wonder whether the best thing to write would be a journal of failure, an unpublishable book on the way I failed thought and thought failed me. Still hope - every summer, still the hope that, if I do not speak it, I think bears me in my writing. Still that hope which bears, that youth, that dream of youth and being young, that attempt to reach the point where it might have been that I was brilliant. 'His majesty the baby' (Freud), that's who I am, in hope. It is that 'his majesty' who hopes in me and in my place, the child-narcissist.
Every summer I am young and grow old in writing. And in the autumn? The alibi of teaching and administration. As I dream all academic year of being young again. As I say to myself, if only I wasn't so busy with teaching and administration. Laughter: why won't hope be crushed? Why doesn't hope crush itself inside me? Comedy of that hope for hope, for a youth upstream of youth!