Nicholas Dames, editor in chief of Public Books, chooses My Weil as one of his books of the year.

Think Minima Moralia as a stand-up routine. You’ll want to quote whole pages. And then there’s the perfect, groan-inducing title. I’ll admit it: I’m a paid-up member of the underground sodality of Lars Iyer fans. Such groupuscules are, as it happens, the subject of Iyer’s work, particularly the one we call the humanities, fast becoming a semi-covert retreat within the neoliberal academy. In My Weil, the scene is the PhD program in Disaster Studies at the fictional All Saints University, set in a Manchester that has become a fiction to itself—the vintage Happy Mondays shirts selling for fifty quid, the conferences held at the renovated warehouse now called the Tony Wilson Centre. A loose collective of graduate students, including one who’s taken the name Simone Weil (“I wanted to live deliberately,” she explains), spend their days in a fugue of theory banter, loathing for the Business Studies students who are the targets of their inner monologues, self-loathing, booze and hallucinogens. They’re waiting for the world to end, because what’s the humanities now but a kind of eschatology? More than anything, Iyer asks us to relish it: the abjection, the dead-endedness, and the comic sublimity of philosophizing from within damaged life. Because maybe, just maybe, when there’s finally no hope for the humanities (or humanity), that abjection may show you a way out.