We are altogether too pathetic for our Middlesex audience, we agree, on the train back to the city. Our vague communism. Our communist pathos.
They were looking for someone else. Something tougher. They wanted axioms. They wanted programmes of action. What did they want to hear of Marx and Benjamin? What of the additional thesis of the Theses on the Philosophy of History? What of Marx's messianism, or Benjamin's Marxism?
'In his conception of the classless society, Marx secularised the conception of messianic time. And he did well to', we said, quoting Benjamin. 'You won't say that I hold the present time in too much esteem; and yet if I don't despair of it, it is on account of its own desperate situation, which fills me with hope', we said, quoting Marx's letter to Ruge of 1853.
This is no time for finesse, the crossed arms of the Middlesex postgraduates said. Less scholarship, more strategy, said their pursed lips. The banks are collapsing, and this is what you have to tell us?, said their filed-down teeth.
We told them, sensing their hostility, about the religious core of Marxism and the political core of Judaism. We nearly wept as we sketched our dream of a new political theology, and a new theology of politics. But the Middlesex postgraduates were unmoved.
W. read to them from his notebook:
The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for men who are able to cope with a new world.
That was Marx, writing in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848, he told them, and we saw their mood change. They sat back in their chairs, unfolding their arms. The reference is to the book of Exodus, of course, W. said. – 'You probably know it. Actually, you probably don't. You look like heathens'. Hostility once again. The postgraduates leant forward, and refolded their arms.
We knew we had to speak as never before. We knew we had to reach new heights of eloquence and emotion. Our voices quavered as we spoke, but then grew firm, and began to rise to a crescendo.
Moses and his people left Egypt, where they were slaves, and, in obedience to God's call, headed into the desert in search of the promised land, W. said. The desert: who would go there?, I said. The great and terrible wilderness, the Bible calls it, with no grass for pasture, where thirst and starvation would drive you mad. A wasteland, a damned place, the refuge of the devil: who would heed Moses's call for exodus?
But heed it they did, hundreds of thousands of them, W. said, taking up the baton, pursued by the chariots of the Pharoah. Go they did, with God amongst them, for wasn't God, too, a pilgrim with the children of Israel?
For forty years they wandered, W. said. It was forty years before they reached Canaan. Why so long?, I said, taking back the baton. Because they had to rid themselves of the memory of captivity, the memory of Egypt. Because a generation had to be born and raised who knew nothing of slavery. The young: everything depended on them; the young who were the fruit of the years of tribulation.
'Do you think it impressed them, our hymn to youth?' Marx, too, dreams of the young, W. told them. To go under means to be reborn, remade. The proletrariat are young, fiercely young. The proletariat are the last born, with no memory of slavery, of the land of captivity.
Of course, we were thinking of them, our audience, sitting around us in a semicircle, W. says. We were dreaming of those who will come after us, after our going under. We were dreaming of the young of Middlesex, with a dagger in their hearts and ice on their lips. We're not young enough, we agree. Not ardent enough! Aren't we a symbol of what needs to overcome?
Ah, what do we understand of the militant demand?, we ask ourselves as we get off the train. What of the risks that must be taken? We need to be purged, we agree. Put up against the wall as counterrevolutionaries. And only then, without us, might liberation begin. Only then might the world begin to overcome its bondage.
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