Spurious

There's Nothing Wrong With You

They were working class, almost all of them, the Essex postgraduates, W. says. That's what needs to be understood.

Working class, but grammar schooled, for the most part, and with only instinct driving them to Essex. Instinct - and luck. Because luck played a great role in getting them there.

All they had was a vague sense that life had gone wrong, somehow. That it had taken a wrong turn. That what had happened in this country - here - was, in its entirety, a wrong turn.

Some, it is true, had a kind of folk-memory of working class radicalism, of the Socialist Worker's Party, of the Revolutionary Communists, but beyond them, of the Spanish Civil war, of Peterloo and the Chartists, but most did not. Most had nothing except an instinct, only half awake, only half alive, that there was something wrong, and not merely wrong with them. That it was no merely a personal problem, that of not fitting in, that of chronic depression or chronic fatigue. That it was not merely a personal failure, a personal foible, a matter of idiosyncrasy or maladjustment.

There was nothing wrong with them at all: wasn't that what they discovered at Essex? Nothing wrong with them, and everything wrong with the world, especially Britain: wasn't that their first lesson at the University of Essex? Wasn't that put up on an overhead in the first lesson of Essex Postgraduate 101: There's nothing with you, and everything wrong with the world, especially Britain.

Deprogramming: that's what the University of Essex provided. Deconditioning. It was like emerging from a cult, arriving at Essex. They needed exit counselling, the new postgraduates! They needed to be deindoctrinated! 

This country, this terrible country, says W., shaking his head. What it does to people. What it might have done to him, were it not for his years in Canada! How it might have laid claim to him, if he'd spent his own childhood in the Midlands.

He thinks of those who didn't make it to Essex. Those who never got there, who had no idea of what waited for them there. Those that didn't even apply, and had no thought of applying.

Ah, no doubt there are lost British Weils, lost British Kierkegaards - even a lost British Rosenzweig, sitting paralysed in Doncaster. There are lost British Socrateses, who, like the original, will never write a line; lost Aristotles, great synthesisers of thought.

Lost Spinozas, lost Leibnizes. A lost Immanuel Kant, working in a Customer Services department in Staines; a lost Hegel, a regional manager for a mobile phone company in Yately ...

What might they have been had they passed through Essex! What might have happened if they'd washed up on Essex's shore! 

Left Behind

Ah, why didn't he join them, the former Essex Postgraduates who fled the world?, W. wonders. Why was he left behind in the Rapture of thought?

That's what they all feel, he's sure, those among the former Essex postgraduates who looked for academic jobs, who took them. That's how they must feel, those for whom there was a sense thatlife was elsewhere, and that one had to struggle into that elsewhere; that life flared into its fullness somewhere else, in another life; that life moved there like fire in fire, like weather on the sun ...

Life was elsewhere. Life is elsewhere, that much is clear to him, sitting beside me on the train, W. says.

Now and in Essex

Our day is passing, says W. In truth, we never had a day. The chance of a day, perhaps; the promise of a day. But even that is passing.

And back then, among the Essex postgraduates? The chance of a day, the promise of a day ... Its chance, its promise: but didn't they already know, back then, that it couldn't possibly become a reality? That they lived at the wrong time, and in the wrong country. That they were men and women out of time and out of place.

Their ideas weren't British ideas, or at least current British ideas. Their ideas weren't hardheaded ideas, ideas that belong to the new reality. Ah, in another country, they thought, they would have been treated like gurus. In religious or recently religious countries, where they still revere philosophy. In Mediterranean countries, where they pour you wine and sit down with you to discuss ideas, how might they have been treated? In the countries of Eastern Europe - in political or recently political countries - where you can still discuss Marx over your Weissbiers, where Lenin and Trotsky are on everyone's minds, wouldn't they have found allies and admirers?  

Of course, they all study philosophy at school, in Old Europe, W. says. Everyone knows a little something about philosophy. Everyone has something philosophical to say. It's in their blood. In the air! It's in the aether of Old Europe. It's in the cafes and wine cellars. It's in the city squares and central parks. And can't you see it shining out in the faces of children?

And they read, too, don't they, in Old Europe? They know what books are. They have rows of books, all kinds of books, on their bookshelves. Poetry, for example - they like poetry in Old Europe. And didn't the Essex postgraduates like poetry? Didn't they regard a taste in poetry as essential in the real thinker? They had the Penguin Modern European Poets on their shelves. They read Trakl and Char. They read Hoelderlin and Paul Celan. They read poets no one else had heard of - gutter poets, sewer poets, poets of the filth and shit. But never our poetry, never British poetry, but foreign poetry, European poetry, Old European poetry. Always poetry from elsewhere, if not from Old Europe, then from South America, and if not from there, China. India! Japan!

They kept their poetry books next to their copies of New Scientist. They kept them next to their philosophical books, again from Old Europe. Next to their Fichte and Jacobi, next to their Ravisson and Bergson. Next to treatises like The Ages of the World and Creative Evolution, The Gay Science and Cartesian Meditations ... Next to their history books, by Braudel and Veyne, Aries and C. L. R. James. Next to the great works of the social sciences, of the humanities that would soon count for nothing in the new world.

Old Europe, Old Europe. But they knew its day was passing, the Essex postgraduates. They knew their day was passing, they who never really knew Old Europe. Their philosophy would die unnoticed: how could it be otherwise? The ideas of old Europe would not take root here. They would have to fly off elsewhere, the dandelion seeds of thought. They would take root in South America, perhaps - in Argentina, which is supposed to be a very thoughtful country, a real thinking country; in Chile, which has philosophy departments like castles. In Uruguay - which probably already harbours the thinker-friends who will take the next thought-leap forward. Or they'd reach fertile ground in vast China, vast India, or in overcrowded Japan. Somewhere, somewhere else, there were the countries of thought. Somewhere beyond old Europe, itself no longer fertile soil for the ideas of its thinkers ...

Ah, its time had come, Old Europe. It was already overdue its time. Old Europe had already outlived itself, was already posthumous. But didn't it dream nonetheless? Didn't it send its dreams back from the other side of death? Were they its dreams, Old Europe's, the Essex postgraduates', W. wonders? Were they the way it dreamt of coming once more to itself, now and in Essex?

Now and in Essex, now and in Essex. W. has always had a waking dream that our country might become the next country of philosophy. He's always dreamt - and he knows it's ridiculous - that something might begin in Britain, a day, the chance of a day. That the sunrays from old Europe, from the sun-touched countries of the south, would burst through our northern clouds. That a heavenly fire might illuminate our ancient landscapes and break across our upturned faces ...

Our tears would melt. Our hearts would melt, our knees buckle. Wouldn't we fall into the arms of thought? Wouldn't thought be as easy as falling?

The chance of a day, the promise of a day ... How they dreamt in Essex! How ardently they dreamt, the Essex postgraduates. And was it Old Europe that dreamt of itself through them? Was it old Europe that sought to reach them from the other side of death?

Chouchani

There are said to be strange superstitions among those former Essex postgraduates who found academic employment, a conventional career. There are odd practices that would themselves be worthy of scholarly analysis. Is it really true that you have to leave your back door open in case a former associate raps at your window? Is it true that a place must always be left at your table in case a former Essex postgraduate arrives unbidden for a meal?

Some say that there is a secret fund into which the more solvent former Essex postgraduates pay upon which their poorer fellows might draw; that there is a shadowy Institute of Study, a secret society with secret rituals, akin to the Freemasons, to which all the former Essex postgraduates belong. That there are secret handshakes and secret winks; that certain signs allow one former Essex postgraduate to recognise another, even though they belonged to different academic years and might never have met at their alma mater.

How can he explain it to me?, W. wonders. He recalls the legend of Chouchani, the Talmudic master who taught both Levinas and Weisel.

No one knows anything about Chouchani, W. says, where he was born or grew up; where he acquired his immense learning which was not just about Judaism and Jewish matters, but mathematics, too - philosophy - the arts. How many languages did he speak? All the living languages of Europe, and a few dead ones besides. He spoke fluent Hungarian; fluent Basque. He lived like a tramp, unkempt, wandering, staying for a while with those he took as his pupils.

You had no choice if Chouchani took you as his student, W. says. He selected you, not you him. He'd bang on your window; he'd demand to be admitted to your home. And there he would stay, night after night. There, demanding nothing but attention to the intellectual matters at hand. Nothing but study, and seriousness in study. And then, just like that - did he think you'd learnt enough? - he disappeared. Just like that, he was gone, his room cleared - disappeared.

But we know now where he went, this Mary Poppins of Jewish studies. We can trace his path: one year he was in New York, the next, Strasbourg, the year after, Jerusalem. And didn't he die in Montevideo? Wasn't it in Uruguay that his tombstone can be found, and on it, the lines, 'His birth and his life are bound up in a secret'.

And it's still secret, despire the internet, despite Facebook. Still secret, despite all kinds of philosophical detective work. Whole books have been written about him, he who did not write a line. Whole websites have been set up about him, he who never allowed himself to be photographed. 

His mastery of the Bible, the two Talmuds, the Midrash, the Zohar and the work of Maimonides. His mastery of the latest theories in mathematics, in physics. His total knowledge of literature, ancient and contemporary. His philosophical learning ...

Can I imagine it?, W. says. Well, now I am to imagine an entire generation of thinkers who rose to the same heights. I am to imagine an entire generation of Essex postgraduates in whom thought was burning.

How harsh he was, Chouchani! How harsh they were with one another, the Essex postgraduates. How merciless in debate he was, Chouchani! But they, too, were merciless, W. says; they, too, would let nothing pass. How serious he was! But they too were serious, the Essex postgraduates. Thought, to them, was always a matter of life and death.

Had Chouchani really held a knife to the throat of one of his pupils, who was slow to understand the repercussions of Tossafot's commentary? Well, a knife had been held to his throat, W. says, in Essex University Student Union because of some misunderstanding or another, some slowness about Heidegger's commentary on Kant, and rightly so! He needed to be taught a lesson, W. says. He needed to learn!

And hadn't he, in turn, held knives to the throat of younger Essex postgraduates! That's another superstition: that the former Essex postgraduate keep a knife in the house at all times, blade sharpened. A knife that might be used against him if he becomes abetrayer of thought, or that he might use on one of thought's betrayers. So I'd better watch it when I visit him, W. says. 

Missing Thinkers

What became of them, the Essex Postgraduates?, W. and I wonder. What, of the would-be thinkers touched by the heavenly fire? Oh, not the ones who found jobs - not the state philosophers and state political theorists, but the other, the wild philosophers and wild political theorists - the thinkers driven out, and who drove themselves out.

What happened to them, those known thereafter only by the stray signals they sent back? What, as they loosened themselves from old bonds, old friendships, and contact with them became intermittent?

Some disappeared completely. Where did they go?, we wonder. Did they change their names? Did they go underground? Did they travel to the four corners of the earth in search of obscurity? Is that what they've found, in the mountains of Yaktusk: obscurity? Did they manage to disappear in the ice deserts of Antarctica? Did they lose themselves in the rebuilt Shanghai or in the Favelas of Rio de Janerio? Did they hole up in the Aleutian islands to write a magnum opus?

Did they wander like Japanese poets through the stone forests of Yunnan, leaving traces of their passage with fragments of as yet unwritten philosophical masterpieces? Did they take to the steppes to think and write in secret, getting ready for their magnificent return? Did their heads seem to explode as they lay beneath shooting stars on Goa beaches bombed out on ketamine? Did the pain seem to radiate out of them like light as they volunteered to be crucified in Pampanga?

Some devoted themselves to politics, we're sure of that, to militancy, joining the Zapististas, signing up with the Naxalites. Some joined the last of Maoists in Nepal, others to fight alongside Hamas in Palestine. Still others became partisans, became insurgents, became warriors of the scrubland, sleepers on the plains, ever on the move, ever watchful. Some deserted to head further into the wilderness, further into obscurity. Some were known only as missing persons, their relatives searching for them in third world jungles, their friends leaving tributes on Facebook pages.

Some became ill, mentally ill, we're sure of that. They wanted derangement, to derange themselves. They wanted insanity, seeking it by every means: by drugs, to be sure, but also by almost ascetic rigour. We must become what we are, they said to themselves. Each one of us is his own illness, they said to themselves. And so they sought to intensify their illness, to drive it deeper, and then to enter wholly into it as into a secret fissure.

Some sought solitude, silence, wanting not to express themselves, but to have nothing to say. Some gave up thought for art, for anti-art, making sculptures in the wild, sculptures out of the wilderness, for no one to see. Some wrote great poems, then burned them, watching the pages crispen and catch fire. Some wrote great philosophical treatises and threw the pages into the wind.

Some sought to lay waste their lives, to throw them away. Some sought to sacrifice themselves to nothing in particular, wanting only to squander what had been given to them. Some drank themselves into oblivion. Some smoked themselves into vacancy. Some bombed out of their brains on hallucigens.

Some wanted to become just like anyone else; no: more like anyone else than anyone, as anonymous as possible, as buried in ordinary life as possible, taking the most mundane of jobs, leading the most mundane of lives.

Some, in our minds, sought to think without thinking, to write without writing. What matters is to live this 'without', they said, very mysteriously. What matters is to live outside thought,outside writing, they said, and we had no idea what they meant.

Some gave in to bouts of despair, throwing themselves into rivers and oceans. Some gassed themselves in bedsits, some launched themselves through open sixth floor windows. Some reddened the snow with chunks of bloody brain and skull. Some broke their kunckles punching walls. Some pissed themselves in gutters, and shat themselves in holding cells. Some cut open their bellies and let their guts spill out.

Some took upon themselves all the miseries of the world; some believed themselves responsible for them all, the miseries of the world. Some cut their throats because of that responsibility for those miseries. Some drove sword blades into their chest because of what they hadn't done to prevent those miseries.

Some sought to side with the proletariat, earning no more than the proletariat, gleaning fruit and vegetables from market stalls, clothes discarded in warehouse bins. Some sought to live alongside the proletariat, and the lumpenproletariat, the thieves and vagabonds. Some lived among the subproletariat, the homeless, refugees who had escaped deportation.

Some half-drank themselves to death to live with the alcoholics. Some destroyed the bridge of their nose sniffing solvents, sniffing turps, to live among the solvent-sniffers and the turps-sniffers.

Some became recluses, shutting themselves up inside; some tookhikkikomori, living with their parents but not seeing them, living on food left outside their door. Some took holy vows and disappeared into monasteries. Some became self-flagellants and self-scourgers. Some joined cults; some started them. Some preached on the street about the end of the world. Some tried tobring about the end of the world, to bring the end closer.

Some sold themselves as mercenaries, some as prostitutes. Some joined the FBI, others the Israeli army. Some sided with the rats and the cockroaches, and dreamt of being eaten alive by rats and cockroaches. Some wanted to be devoured from the inside out, and longed for biting termites to crawl into their nostrils, to crawl into their ears. Some came to side with viral life, with bacteria and protozoa and dreamt of a world without humans, without vertebrates, without any kind of higher life.

Some, tormented by thought, and the demands of thought, sought to destroy their very capacity to think. Some sought to slice off their own thinking heads, some placed a bit to their skull and began to drill. Some drove pencils through their nostrils into their brain. Some shot themselves through one eye, and then another. Some asked - begged - for lobotomy. Some for their brains to be scooped out of their skull. Some to be left perpetually asleep, aging quietly. Some to be forced into an induced coma; some to be battered into a state of imbecility.

And did some of them know joys, too? Did some discover what it meant to live?

Thinkers

Essex, in the old days. The University of Essex ...

W. remembers the guest speakers of the old department. Envoys from Old Europe, taught by the Gods of Old Europe: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and who told them about the Gods of Europe; thinkers who were friends and contemporaries of Deleuze, of Foucault, and who told them of the world of Deleuze and Foucault; thinker-experts who'd spent their whole lives in the archives, or studying in seclusion with the works of a Master. Thinker-militants who'd hung out with Debord and Vaneigim, and who could pass on stories of Debord and Vaneigim.

Literary scholars who read in 27 languages; philosopher-scientists with advanced degrees in astrophysics and molecular biology; thinker-mathematicians fascinated by dissipative structures andcomplex systems; thinkers of irreversibility and indeterminism, ofstrange loops and paralogic ...

Neurophenomenological thinkers. Neo-Spinozists thinkers and Neo-Leibnizians. Nominalists and anti-nominalists. Mathematical thinkers and poetical thinkers.

Thinkers who had had distinct phases in their thought. ('In my early writings, I was convinced that ...'; 'Later on, I concluded that ...'; 'For a long time, I thought ...') Thinkers who were the subject of conferences and roundtables.

Thinkers who hated other thinkers ('Don't mention Derrida to him!'), thinkers who'd broken with old friends over intellectual matters. Over political matters. Thinkers at war, for whom philosophical enmity had become personal enmity, become name-calling, hair-pulling.

Thinkers who'd shot away half their faces in despair. Thinkers with deep scars across their wrists. Thinkers who wept as they spoke. Thinkers whose pauses were longer than their talks. Thinkers in breakdown, their lives careening. Thinkers who spoke in great gusts about the misery of their lives. Thinkers who told them why they couldn't think, why thought was impossible, why the end had come, their end and the end of the world.

Wild thinkers; drunk thinkers; high thinkers, nostrils flared, pupils tiny, staying up for whole weeks at a time. Thinkers with missing teeth, with a missing eye. Thinkers with missing fingers, and with great clumps of their hair torn out. Thinkers with terrible rashes around their mouth. Sick thinkers, walking with two sticks.Coughing thinkers, who could hardly get out a word. Thinkers who spoke too quietly to be heard. Thinkers who spoke too loudly, half-deafening the front row. Thinker-declaimers, thinker-prophets who all but set fire to themselves in the seminar room.

Exiled thinkers, forced out of their home countries for crimes of thought. Lost thinkers, leftover from vanished intellectual movements; thinkers in mourning for dead thinker-partners.Betrayed thinkers, who spoke of backstabbing and purgings, of auto-critiques and expulsions.

Thinkers with neck-kerchiefs. Thinkers with cravats. Thinkers with Hawaiian shirts (Jean-Luc Nancy, after a trip to the USA). Thinkers in plus fours (Marion, trying to impress the dons at Cambridge). Thin thinkers in roll-neck sweaters, with sharp checkbones and shaved heads. Tubby thinkers, epicureans full of joy, with great, jolly faces and thick folds of fat at the back of their necks. Worker-thinkers with thick, flat fingers and spadelike hands, who'd laboured alongside others in the fields and the mines.Serene thinkers, almost godly, looking into the infinite with widely spaced eyes.

Laughing thinkers, who laughed because they could think, because of they were free to think. Thinkers who'd escaped from imprisonment and war. Saintly thinkers, of unimaginable integrity, of unimaginable purity. Nomadic thinkers who, like swifts, never touched down, who moved only from conference to conference as invited speakers. Traveller thinkers, who had forsaken the lecture circuit for private voyages across ice-sheets and through jungles.Ascetic thinkers who spoke of great solitudes, great retreats. Thinkers who had seen things, lived things we couldn't imagine.

Thinkers who knew what it meant to live. Thinkers who served life. Thinkers who thought in order to live, and to be alive.

Thinkers who spoke of the ecstasy of thinking after their talk, in the student bar. Thinkers who spoke of the beatitude of thought. Thinkers who said the only thing that mattered was to think.

Ah, didn't they meet them all, all the thinkers of Old Europe, the Essex postgraduates?, W. says.

I am speaking as part of a series of philosophy events at the literary festival at Hay-on-Wye. The full catalogue is here. My events are as follows:

Weds 1st June, 12.00: Once Upon a Time the End, with Jesse Norman and Kabir Chibber. Venue: Globe Hall.

From rolling news to Twitter, attention spans are shrinking, and substantive messages are sharpening into slogans. Will postmodernity see a distillation of literary meaning into fewer (better?) words, or will our ability to tell big, expansive stories be destroyed by glib brevity, leaving us at the mercy of blurbs, stings, tweets and zingers?

Same date, 3.00: Writing the End Times. Venue: Talk Tent.

Lars Iyer talks about his philosophical black comedy Spurious. 'It is near to the end of days, shortly before the appearance of a "stupid Messiah". Two British men, employed somehow in academia, muse on their lack of success and incapacity for real thought while drinking too much gin...'

The Heavenly Fire

The Student Union bar. This is where he used to drink as a postgraduate student, W. says. It's where he learned to drink, he who had been near-teetotal before - and to smoke, he who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, with his fellow postgraduates.

Do I have any sense of what was like to feel part of a generation?, W. says. Can I understand what it was to have something expected of you, to have faith placed in you? How can I grasp what it meant to have a sense that what was happening could have done so onlythere and then - that the conditions were right for something to begin, really to begin?

Did they think they could change the world?, I ask him. Not the world, but thought, W. says. They thought they could change thinking. Thought they were the beginning of something, a new movement. Thought they augured what Britain might become: a thinking country, just as France is a thinking-country, just as Germany was a thinking-country.

This is where they spoke, and of great things. This is where theyspoke - can I even understand what that means? To speak, to be swept along by great currents. To be borne along, part of something, some ongoing debate. And for that debate to have stakes, to matter. For thought to become personal, a matter of where you stood in the most intimate details of your life. Ah, how can he convey it to me, who has never known intellectual life, intellectual friendship? How to one who barely knows what friendship means, let alone the intellect?

A life of the mind, that's what they'd chosen. A life of the mind for postgraduate students from all over Britain, and therefore a kind of internal exile. Because that's what it means to be a thinker in Britain: a kind of internal exile. They turned their backs on their families, on old friends. On the places of their birth. They'd turned from their old life, their old jobs, old partners. They'd travelled from the four corners of the country to be here, to arrive here, to be reborn here. Essex, Essex: what joy it was in that dawn to be alive ...

This is where they spoke, says W. very insistently. Do I know what it means to speak? This is where they argued. Do I know what it means to argue? This is where they fought in thought. This is where they loved, too. The Student Union Bar: this is where thought was alive, thought was life, thought was a matter of life and death ...

This is where they spoke. Voices trembled. Voices were raised. They laughed, and the laughter died away. Did they weep? No doubt there was weeping. No doubt some wept. This is where they promised themselves to thought. This is where they signed the covenant ...

It was like serving together in a secret army. Even now, when he meets them, the former postgraduates of Essex, he sees the sign. Even now, it's clear; they are marked - they were marked then. Thought was life. Thought was their lives. They were remade in thought's crucible. They flared up from thought's fire. 

They learned to read French thought in French, German thought in German. They studied Latin and ancient Greek. Imagine it: a British person reading ancient Greek! They crossed the channel and studied in Paris. They plunged into Europe and studied in Rome. They visited great archives. They read in great libraries.  

They were becoming European, W. says. Do I have any idea what it meant: to become European. Some of them even learned tospeak other languages. Imagine it: a British person speaking French. Imagine it: an Englander in Berlin, conversing in German ...

They went en masse to a two-week conference in Italy. Imagine it: en masse, British postgraduates at a two-week conference in Italy. They played chess in the sun, and drank wine until their teeth turned red. Italy! The Mediterranean! Who among them had any idea of Italy, of the Mediterranean? Who who had ever been to Italy, or to the Mediterranean?

The sun burned them brown. Their pallid British bodies: brown. Their teeth red. The sun turned them mad. They thought as Van Gogh painted: without a hat. Hatless, in the full sun, they became madmen and madwomen of thought.

Essex broke them. Essex rebuilt them. Essex broke their Britishness, their provincialness. Essex gave them philosophy. It gave them politics. It gave them friendship, and by way of philosophy, by way of politics. They were close to Europe, terribly close. Like Hoelderlin's Greece, Europe was the fire from heaven. Like Hoelderlin's Germany, Britain was to be set on fire by heaven.

Ah, what happened to them all, the postgraduates of Essex? What, to the last generation - the last generation of Essex postgraduates? Some got jobs. Some found work in obscure corners of Britain (where else could they find work but in obscure corners?). Some went abroad, back to Europe, back to the heavenly fire.

Some fell back into Britishness - fell into the drowning pool of Britishness. Some drowned, gasping for air, finding no air, in Britain. Hadn't they seen too much? Hadn't they learnt what they lacked? Hadn't they a sense now of great thought, of great politics? Hadn't their skies been full of light, of the heavenly fire?

 

Away for a few days.

(Will redo the couple of draft posts put up in error - apologies.)

'Conversations With Humans', brief interview with the Manchester branch of Blackwell's (Precinct Centre, Oxford Road). I'll be giving a reading there tonight at 6.30.