We're conflicted, there's no question of that, W., says. On the one hand, we have a natural fear and loathing of our contemporary culture, of what our culture has become. But on the other, a Messianic sense of what it might have been, a wholly impractical sense of what it had been and what it could be again, and of our role in bringing it about.
On the one hand, a knowledge that our careers, such as they are, could only have meant the collapse of contemporary culture, and, on the other, a simultaneous and wholly unearned sense that we are part of a glorious European past, and indeed part of the glory of Old Europe, that we have a legitimate share in the world which the philosophies we teach was born.
On the one hand, a knowledge that we are connoisseurs of nothing, that we've come too late, that nothing we take to matter is of any importance – that the only reason we've been allowed to teach and speak on such topics is precisely because they matter to no one, and, on the other, an improbable sense that we are the last of the scholars, the last archivists, the last custodians of thought; that the preservation of Old Europe, all that really matters, has fallen to us.
On the one hand, a certainty that our learning (our enthusiasm for learning, for our philosophies) is of complete irrelevance, complete obsolesence and on the other, that it bears upon what is most important and riskiest of all; that we're like secret agents hidden in deep cover, and our cities on the peripherary will be like the Dark Age monasteries on the edge of Europe, that is, the only place in which the old knowledge will be preserved. Or that we're part of a secret cell, the secret police everywhere and our teachings samizdat, our reading is covert, clandestine, and that we're about to be taken away by the authorities.
Of course, when he says us here, he means him, W. says. And when he says we know nothing, he really means I know nothing, because he at least knows something, W. says.
Lars Iyer's Blog 