Peripherism

It's our great fortune to live at the periphery, W. and I agree. He feels an enormous love for his city in the southwest and I feel enormous love for my city in the northeast. Conversely, I am always overjoyed to visit his city just as he is always overjoyed to visit mine. There's nothing better than visiting a city on the periphery, W. says, just as there's nothing worse than visiting a city at the centre (although, he grants, there are peripheries to every centre).

And likewise our own peripheriness, W. and I agree. We are essential peripheral. Who is threatened by us? Who bothers with us? No one, we agree. We have been fundamentally left alone. No one watches out for us, but on the other hand, no one has really noticed us, so we can get up to what we like. We are blips on no one's radar. Our fates matter to no one, and perhaps not even to ourselves. That's one thing that marks us very strongly, we agree: indifference to our own fate.

For haven't we noticed that the world is shit? Isn't it the most obvious thing that it's all going to shit? You can't struggle against it. You can't do anything at all. Those at the centre don't realise it. They haven't grasped their essential powerlessness. Only we have grasped it, we who live at the periphery of our own interests, no longer advancing our own cause.

For what would that be: our own cause? What would we want in a world of shit? First of all, distrust yourself, burrow down. Destroy all vestiges of hope, of the desire for salvation. Because it will not come good. It's leading nowhere. Nothing means anything. The centre does not matter. There's suffering everywhere – agreed. There's suffering and horror everywhere – on that we're agreed. But the first step must be to peripherise ourselves, and to peripherise ourselves with respect to ourselves.