Author: Lars Iyer

The non-cosmos. The non-ontological. That's what W. sees in my damp, in my rats, the Japanese knot-weed, growing in the yard. That's what he sees in everything I have written and will write. In everything I have said or have tried to say. He hears it in my stuttering. My stammering. In the ‘hellos!’ I boom out to all-comers. And isn't it present in my dancing, too? In my stomach problems? In my ceaseless consumption of celebrity magazines?

Non-thought. Chaos. It's what he hears when I use to the middle voice, W. says. There was a dampening. There was a infestation of rats. There was a proliferation of knotweed. There was and will be writing. There was and will be the desecration of speech.

Faecal emergencies come, one after another. There will be a spattering of toilet bowls. The gods, blind and deaf and mad are screaming. The angels are weeping. The sky is darkening, W. says. The desert is growing. He can smell sulphur, W. says. He can see black wings.

Kurtz is heading upriver… Robespierre is sharpening the guillotines… Lenin is ordering more Kulaks killed… Danton dies again…

Pallasch. Pallasch, Pallasch.

In the beginning was the non-Word, W. says; in the beginning, there was no beginning. A kind of eternal seething instead. The licking of black flames. Nothingness turning in nothingness. The void, thickening, and thinning out …

The thought of despair, the despair of thought. What if there is no difference between thought and the failure to think? What if thought is failure, and failure, experienced rightly, a kind of thought? What matters is for W. to plunge more deeply into his idiocy. Into my idiocy!

We’re growing old, W. says. Our eyes are dulling and our hair is greying. Even my eyes, the one who he took as a protégé! Even my hair, the one he singled out for his youth!

Socrates taught Plato, W. says. Plato taught Aristotle. And Aristotle taught Alexander, who conquered half the world. Hasn’t W. dreamt of a pupil who would leap ahead of him? To be superseded in thought. To become a kind of springboard for a thinker who would leap yet higher, yet farther. Of what else does the true thinker want? To nurture the protégé who would blast new skies open …

Cohen begat W., who in turn begat Lars: isn't that the succession of which W. has dreamt? The unthought of Cohen, which begat W. The unthought of W., which begat Lars … But he's engendered only a monster of thought, W. says. A monster of non-thought, of the sacrifice of succession. I am the last of the family line: isn't that clear? Thought stops with me: isn't that what W. has come to learn?

Tottenham, emerging from the underground.

W.’s not surprised that one of the madmen of the underground sat next to us. Did he sense that we had something in common? Did he believe us to be akin, somehow? Like-minded, somehow? He was a religious man, as all madmen are religious. He was an apocalyptic man, as all madmen are apocalyptic.

He spoke of the end of the world. W. nodded in agreement. He spoke of the last judgement. W. affirmed what he said. He spoke of the remnant, of the last stand of the righteous. Yes, said W., a number of times. And then the madman rose and wandered down the carriage.

We musn't be afraid to see our world in apocalyptic terms, W. says. In religious terms. The language of the Last Days is wholly appropriate to our times.

We know what is coming. We know that a new dawn — the opposite of dawn — will spread its dark rays from the horizon. We know that the time will come to put down our pens and close our books …

Climatic catastrophe. Financial catastrophe. W. quotes the prophet Joel: ‘the rivers of waters are dried up, and the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness’. He remembers what the prophet Jeremiah saw in the ruins of Jerusalem: the earth without form and void. The heavens without light. The very mountains reeling …

I knew Reading would appal him, I tell W. How could it be otherwise? Driveways packed with Land Rovers and 4X4s … Mock Tudor houses … Mock Georgian ones, with pebbledash rendering and plastic windows, in great estates at the edge of everywhere … All the styles of history, and mocking history, laughing at it. All the styles, and all at once. This is the end of the world, W. said. The eternal end.

Reading University is a campus of the suburbs, W. says. He couldn’t think of anything worse. A campus on the edge of a town, like an out-of-town leisure complex. Like a DIY superstore …

Of course, so many of the interesting universities are buried in the suburbs, W. says. He thinks of Essex University. Of the University of Middlesex! But the suburbs of Reading are particular invidious.

It's so crowded!, he says. So congested! Labyrinthine estates with roads named after flowers, after colours, after days of the week. Hypermarkets and out-of-town retail parks. Death by Pet World! Death by Staples! And cars everywhere, cramming the roads. Big cars! Company cars, shining, pristine! BMWs, and that sort of thing. Cars and car-parks and front gardens tarmacked over and covered in cars.

Blank-box executive houses, inches apart, five to a plot in place of old bungalows. '70s semis with barn-sized extensions. New dormers on old houses. Gardens of gravel. Car-park yards. This is what prosperity looks like, W. says. This is home-counties contentedness.

The campus. Space at last. An expanse of grass. Yew trees. Don't be fooled!, W. says, as we follow the path. This is still Reading. He can already feel his thoughts becoming suburban, he says.

It was Kafka that led me from the south to the north, W. knows that. It was Kafka that led me into the university. Before Kafka, there was my warehouse life. My life as a finder of UTLs, unable-to-locates, searching up and down the warehouse aisles.

I stumbled when I tried to convey it to W., which is a good sign, he says. I spoke of the castle hill, veiled in mist and darkness, and of the buzzling and whistling on the telephone line. I spoke of the illusory emptiness into which K. looked up as he crossed the wooden bridge, and of his abjection and passivity as he sought to settle his business with the authorities. What was I getting at?, W. wonders. What was I trying to say?

The world around me was unreal, I told W. that. The warehouse was unreal. The suburbs in which I had grown up, and on which the warehouse had been built, were likewise unreal. Despair reveals the truth of the world: isn’t that what was revealed to me by Kafka’s book? Despair reveals the nullity of things.

I had a vision, I told W., he remembers. I saw the workers around me like rats in a rat-run. I saw the pristine buildings around me like rat-pens, like rat-mazes. Absurdity was doing experiments on us: that’s what I saw, wasn’t it? Madness had us caged in the suburbs like laboratory rats …

My soul was a UTL: isn't that what I saw? Life was an unable-to-locate, although no one seemed to know it but me.

The Castle made my life quiver like a compass needle. Things pointed in one direction: north! Out of the warehouse! Out of the south! North: to where dereliction, like The Castle, revealed things in their truth!  North: to where the destruction at the created order had worn through!

A chance, a promise. That's what they were given, the Essex postgraduates. Life was elsewhere … They lived in the wrong age, and in the wrong country. They were men and women out of time and out of place.

Their ideas weren't British ideas, or at least current British ideas, W. says. Their ideas weren't commercial ideas, ideas that belong to the new reality. Ah, in another country, they thought back then, they would have been taken by the arm and treated with great politeness and interest. In religious or recently religious countries, where they still revere philosophy.

How might they have been treated in Mediterranean countries, the Essex postgraduates wondered, where they pour you wine and sit down with you to discuss ideas over olives and chorizo? Wouldn’t they have found allies and admirers in the countries of Eastern Europe — in political or recently political countries — where you can still discuss Marx over your Weissbiers, where Weil and Kierkegaard are on everyone's minds?

Of course, they all study philosophy at school, in Old Europe, the Essex postgraduates knew that. Everyone knows a little something about philosophy. Everyone has something philosophical to say. It's in their blood. In the air! It's in the aether of Old Europe, they said to each another. It's in the cafés and wine cellars. It's in the city squares and riverside parks. And can't you see it shining out in the faces of children?

Old Europe, Old Europe. But its day was passing, the Essex postgraduates knew that. And so the promise of their day was passing, they who never really knew Old Europe. Their philosophy would die unnoticed: how could it be otherwise? The ideas of Old Europe would not take root here.

They would have to fly off elsewhere, the Essex postgraduates, as dandelion seeds of thought. They would have to take root in South America, perhaps — in Argentina, which is supposed to be a very thoughtful country, a real thinking country; in Columbia, which has philosophy departments like great castles; in Uruguay, which probably already harbours thinker-friends who will take the next great leap of thought.

Or they would have to reach fertile ground in vast China, vast India, or in overcrowded Japan. Somewhere, someplace else, there would have to find the countries of thought. Somewhere beyond Old Europe, itself no longer fertile soil for the ideas of its thinkers …

Ah, its time had come, Old Europe. It’s time was already overdue. Old Europe had already outlived itself, was already posthumous. But didn't it dream nonetheless? Didn't it send its dreams back from the other side of death? Were they its dreams, Old Europe's, the Essex postgraduates?, W. wonders. Were they the way Old Europe dreamed of coming once more to itself, now and in Essex?

Now and in Essex, now and in Essex. W. has always had a waking dream that our country might become the next country of philosophy. He's always dreamt — and he knows it's ridiculous — that something might begin in our Britain: a day, the chance of a day. That the sunrays from old Europe, from the sun-touched countries of the south, would burst through our northern clouds. That a heavenly fire would illuminate our ancient landscapes and break across our upturned faces …

Our tears would flow, W. says. Our hearts would melt, our knees buckle. We would fall into the arms of thought. Thought would be as easy as falling. We’d play with ideas as one child with another. We’d speak to each other at last. We’d hear each other speak – at last, at last!

A chance, a promise… How they dreamed in Essex! How ardently they dreamed, the Essex postgraduates! And was it Old Europe that dreamed of itself through them? Was it Old Europe that sought to reach them from the other side of death?

Why didn't he join them, the former Essex postgraduates, who fled Britain?, W. wonders. Why did he stay behind? W. remembers a Kafka parable. – 'Where are you riding to, Master?', the servant asks. – 'I don't know. Away-From-Here, that's my destination'.

Away-From-Here: that's where the Essex postgraduates went. Away-From-Britain. That's where he should have gone, W. says: Away-From-Britain. He should have stayed overseas after his studies.

Do I know what brought him back?, W. says. Do I know why he didn't stay in France? British humour, he says. Having a laugh, British style. Taking the piss. Having the piss taken out of you. That's what he missed, W. says. They don't take the piss in France, or have the piss taken out of them in Luxembourg. He saw nothing of taking the piss in the trains of Europe, or in the European archives. No one takes the piss out of the Germans …

Away-From-Here … But he'll never get away, will he?, W. says. There's Canada, of course, his Canadian dream. But the Canadian universities don't even reply to his job applications. They don't even send him rejection letters … 

He's been left behind, W. says. He and the other former Essex postgraduates, who found academic jobs instead of leaving Britain. He compromised, he says, he who had been shown that life is elsewhere, and that one should try to struggle into that elsewhere; that life flared into its fullnesss somewhere else, in another place; that life moved there like fire in fire, like weather on the sun.

Life was elsewhere. Life is elsewhere, that much is clear to him, W. says.

The Royal Observatory, high on the hill. This is where the first international terrorist incident took place, W. says, reading from a plaque. A young French anarchist attempted to blow up the Observatory, to blow up Greenwich Mean Time …

To change time, the order of time: isn’t that the aim of any revolution?, W. says. We have to recover the dimension of possibility. The dimension of the infinite!

Time touched by eternity: he’s always found Kierkegaard’s phrase very moving, W. says. There is the time that passes, Kierkegaard argues – this instant, then that, which we merely endure, which merely carries us along. And then there is that time touched by eternity, Kierkegaard says, which allows past, present and future assume their true role in our lives as phases of development. Once time has touched eternity, we no longer simply persist in time, but deepen and grow. We come to exist temporally, living towards a future that we earn by our deepening, earn by our growth: that's what Kierkegaard argues.

Time touched by eternity: isn’t that what is meant by revolutionary time?, W. wonders. Doesn’t the revolution turn in its light as a waterwheel turns in glinting water? The revolution means the shattering of politics, W. says. It means the destruction of politics-as-usual. Isn’t that why the French revolutionaries renamed the days of the week? Isn’t that why they remade the calendar?

Tarrday, that’s we should rename Monday, W. says. Krasznahorkaiday: it’s a bit of a mouthful, but that’s what Tuesday should become. And Weilday instead of Wednesday. Cohenday instead of Thursday. And Rosenzweigday, for the day of the Sabbath. Saturday can be Deleuzeday, and Sunday: Kierkegaard-day: why not?, W. says.

The view over London. The City, across the river, which its great towers to Mammon. The domes of Greenwich Naval College. The low rise estates on this side of the river to which they moved the poor of London, when they demolished their houses.

Sometimes, W. longs for a great explosion in the sky. For a nearby star to burst across the heavens. For a comet's head, blazing towards us. Ah, why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism?

There are turning points in our life, W. says. Conversions. Sometimes we’re called, he says. Sometimes we’re allowed to become better than we are. God knows, that’s what we need.

What set of events would let us come into our own?, W. wonders. He sees us in his mind’s eye, battling our demons in our monks' cells. He sees us with a band of hermits, heading out into the desert.

To disappear into a larger movement!: isn’t that what he wants?, W. says. To be dissolved anonymously into some great work of goodness … He'd have to bring me with him, that's the problem, W. says. I'd be trotting alongside him, tugging at his habit, and wondering when we could stop for lunch.

He's always understood me to be a kind of Bartleby of politics, W. says. I would prefer not to: that's what my indifference to social questions says. Or, better: Fuck off, I'm eating.

I’m antisocial: that much is clear. Reclusive. He’s seen the expression on my face during longer conference presentations. He seen the wild desire for freedom that burns in my eyes. I want to vault the walls! To scream! To escape! And doesn’t he want to escape with me, a whelk on the side of a whale?

I find the company of academics intolerable, W. says. Unbearable! And isn’t he the same? Doesn’t he share something of my dread, and my urge to flee? Isn’t he also becoming something of an academic savage?

But there are other ways of being-together, W. says, that's what I have to understand. Political friendship: do I have any sense of that? Of what it means to band together against a common enemy? Of what it means to share a commitment, to be part of collective work, free from all personal ambition?

W. remembers what Tronti recalls of the early days of operaismo, of sharing ‘a common knot of problems as “lived thought”’. In their meetings, Tronti says, ‘we would spend half the time talking, the rest laughing. We brought together a fine old madhouse’. Political joy; political laughter, W. says: can I imagine that?

Loyalty. That's another Canadian virtue, W. says. He recalls the dog they had to leave behind when his family left Canada for England. She was half-wolf, he says. Half wild! She starved herself to death, she missed them so much. She let herself die! She died for want of love. It's tragic.

Dogs are bred for love, W. says. They're bred for loyalty, over thousands and thousand of generations.

His political visions always involve dogs, W. says. Oh, he knows how much I dislike them. It’s a bad sign of me, he says. The dog-despiser is also a life-despiser. He knows it must be some Hindu thing.

The frozen north: that's where the purest kind of politics might be found, W. says. It’s only with other people that you can withstand the Arctic winter. Only huddled together for warmth – and what is politics but a huddling together for warmth?

W. speaks of the far north of Scandinavia, and the far north of Canada; of white expanses and trackless forests; of swirling snow and frost flowers spreading on the window. He speaks of the warm hearths of the far north. Of oil lamps hanging with crystal prisms. He speaks of Canadian laughter amidst the glittering light. Of Canadian merriment during the endless winters!

Canadians leave their doors unlocked in the frozen north, W. says. They leave their hearts open! The law of northern hospitality means that you have to take anyone in who knocks at the door. It's exactly like the Law of the Stranger in the Bible, which Celan found so moving: 'The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as a home-born, and thou shalt love him as thyself'. Unconditional hospitality: that's what the Canadian house offers. Hospitality without condition!

You can know nothing of human society until you stamp the snow from your boots in a Canadian hallway, W. says. Until you've been downed a glass of vodka at a Canadian table. The storm gathers outside; but you are inside. The winds blow from the far north; but you sit warm by the fire. The snow lies deep; but you drink and sing with your Canadian hosts long into the night …

Leuchars. Invergowrie. The farther north we go, W. says, the more civilised it becomes. The more socialist! Scotland is the refuge of socialism, for W. says. Think of Red Clydeside! Think of the Radical War!

Scotland is closer to the social democracies of Scandinavia, that’s what does it, W. says. Scotland breathes Scandinavian air. He’s always been impressed by Scandinavian social democracy, W. says. High public spending! The redistribution of wealth! Universal health care! Early retirement! That’s what civilisation means, W. says.

The only future for Scotland is to dissolve the Union, W. says. To dissolve it, and then set itself adrift like the stone raft of Saramago’s novel, heading north, only north …

Manchester lacks a river, W. says. It lacks an expanse. That’s why Mancunion thoughts are always claustrophobic thoughts, he says. It’s why Mancunion thinkers are constrained, trying to fight their way free.

And there’s the rain, the terrible Westerlies, W. says. Manchester is particularly prone to Westerlies, which roll across its plain. The weather is so heavy here, W. says. So crushing.

The Mancunion thinker has constantly to struggle against melancholia, and thoughts of suicide. He thinks of Alan Turing, eating an apple he’d coated in cyanide. He thinks of Ian Curtis, hanging himself from a clothes-airer.

Sometimes W. thinks that it is only the destroyed thinker who understands what matters most. That it is only destroyed thoughts that can think the whole. Is that why, despite everything, he reads my work so carefully? Is that why he still believes that I might have something to say? I am a destroyed man – that is clear enough. But a profound one? If I have depths, it is despite myself, W. says. If I have a significance, it's one that I myself do not grasp. But my life, in its own way, is a kind of witness to the end. My writing is what philosophy becomes before the last judgement.

But there can be no thought from a regenerated city, W. says, as we look up at the warehouses converted into luxury flats. There can be thought without dilapidation! No thought without urban blight!

W. sends me his essay questions to amuse me.

1. In Vino Veritas. What have you learned from drinking?

2. 'I am outside the truth; nothing human can take me there' – Simone Weil. Do you consider yourself to be inside or outside the truth?

3. 'Salvation always comes from where nobody expects it, from the depraved, from the impossible'. Explain what Rosenstock means by i) the depraved, and ii) the impossible.

4. 'Nobody can truly say of himself that he is filth'. Is Wittgenstein right? Are you filth? Explain why/why not.

5. 'Our talk of justice is empty until the largest battleship has foundered on the forehead of a drowned man'. Is Celan right? Explore with reference to badminton ethics.

6. 'I think joy is a lack of understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves'. Is Tarkovsky right? What do you think he means by 'the situation in which we find ourselves'.

7. 'There are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos'. Distinguish between what Tarr means by social shit, ontological shit and cosmological shit with reference to i) Damnation, and ii) your life.

8. Sports science is the enemy of civilization. Discuss.

9. What is the significance of the dancing chicken in Herzog's Stroszek? Explore with reference to i) human life, and ii) the cosmos.

10. 'Salvation will come, but only when we choose despair' – Kierkegaard. Have you chosen despair? Why/Why not?

Above all, we must be unafraid to remake Kierkegaard in our image, W. says. Hasn’t he dreamt of a Kierkegaard who stayed happily married to Regine?, W. says. A Kierkegaard who understood that the religious sphere is no higher than the ethical one, and that the love for God is really a love for the other person? Hasn’t W. dreamt of a Kierkegaard who never believed that Jesus was really the Messiah, or that the messianic could ever be understood in terms of the coming of a particular person?

For his Kierkegaard, W. says, Jesus never proclaimed himself the Messiah and the Son of God. For his Kierkegaard, Jesus is above all the man of the parable, the man who speaks in ordinary words to ordinary people. He is a man of everyday speech, who opens himself in dialogue to all comers, to anyone who wants to speak and to listen. Just as he, W., has to speak with great simplicity to me!, he says. Just as W. has to try and explain things so they can be understood by a simple person like me!

His Kierkegaard is turned to the world, W. says, towards politics. He is a Kierkegaard of the barricades, whose despair has caught fire, whose inwardness has become outwardness, whose religious faith has become ethical faith, has become political faith.

I’ve been institutionalised, W. says. Bureaucratised! It was when I became the perfect administrator that I stopped doing any real philosophical work.

What do I do in my office? Answer emails. Fill out spreadsheets. Take home management communiqués, and read them with bloodshot eyes.

My work is absurd!, W. says. I know it's absurd. But I thrive on absurdity. I want absurdity. I want to be the most absurd man alive, gleefully doing the most absurd of work. I want to concentrate the absurdity of the world into my life, and to do so with my gleeful smile, which says: the world has finished.

I don't suffer my absurdity, that's what troubles him, W. says.

It’s snowing on the streets, as we head to our rendezvous. It’s cold! I’m lucky I have the thick skin of a Scandinavian, W. says. Thick skin, to keep the Viking warm during the long winters.

There's blubber under my Scandinavian skin, W. says. I'm as warm as a walrus, no matter how cold it is, he says. As warm as a sperm whale, diving beneath the Arctic ice. I am insulated by my fat, just as my head is insulated by my stupidity.

A fathead, that's what I am, W. says. But perhaps you need a fat head to dive into the depths of thought. Perhaps you need a kind of insulation, to respond to what must be thought. Perhaps only the fathead can think, W. says. Only the whale of thought, who can dive deepest!

Well, he'll dive with me, W. says: a whelk on the side of a whale.

To speak is to bless the world, W. says. It is to offer salvation to all things. How can he explain it to me?

W. remembers a story I once told him about my monk years. Every night, before dinner, the monks would bless the garden with incense, I told him. Incense would waft through the leaves. It would waft into the night and towards the animals of the night, I'd told him. Towards city foxes and barn owls. Towards the slugs and the snails and the rats. Incense would waft to the people of the night, I'd said: to the prostitutes on the corner, and to the burglars who used our garden as a run-through. To the junkies looking for their fix, and the muggers waiting in their alleys.

It's similar with speech, W. says. We speak to the others. For the junkies and burglars. To the prostitutes on the corner. We speak to the outcasts, to the widows and the oprhans. We speak to the city foxes! The barn owls! We speak to the slugs and the snails and the rats! We speak to them, W. says. We address them.

The walker, the real walker, can have no destination, W. says. He walks as a means without end. As a pure means, uncoupled from the purpose that might channel him!

In this way, the street is as open as the desert. As open as an ocean — a pure expanse. You can wander this way, or that. You can make this turn, or that. Freedom — for you are without the aim that would determine your course.

My passivity. Every story I recount is in the passive voice, W. says. – ‘You're never the agent in your anecdotes. You're always acted upon, never acting.'

Of course, I always tell him I tell my stories in the middle voice, which is neither active nor passive, which has neither a subject nor an object. I would never say, I shat myself, W. says. There was a soiling, I’d tell him. There's been a faecal emergency, I’d tell him.

Origen has his cock cut off in order to think without distraction, W. says. Perhaps that's what I should do, if I could find it. You'd need a microscope, he says. A nanoscope. Ah, but it wouldn't make much difference in the end, he says. I've always had a low sex-drive. A low thought-drive!

We rub our bellies with our hands and then pat the tops of our heads. Then we pat our bellies and rub the tops of our heads. This is what our Edinburgh friend (W.’s Edinburgh friend) does when he’s stalled in thought, W. says.

Our minds are blank. We sit back in our chairs. We stretch our arms, then our legs. W. yawns and then I yawn. W. gets up and goes to the loo, and then I get up and go to the loo. Should we get something else to drink?, I wonder. Nothing else! We’re here to think, not drink, W. says.

We pause to finish the dregs of our pints and look around the bar. Do they sell pork scratchings?, we wonder. W. sends me to the bar to ask about pork scratchings. – ‘Fuck off and let me think’, he says.