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.