Author: Lars Iyer

Then another dream, where once again, I was preternaturally wise. Where once again, I had all the answers. A black sky. Animal cries. Chimp whoops, in the distance. Monkeys throwing their faeces about.  … 

‘What will people look like, at the end of time?’, W. asked me. They'll look like us, I told him, but with browner teeth. – ‘What will people talk about, at the end of time?’ They'll talk like us, but with more cock jokes, I told him. What will people wear, at the end of time?, W. asked. They'll dress like us, I told him, but in blousier shirts.

W. wants to see how it all ends, he says. He wants to see how it will all turn out. But this is how it ends: him on a train, travelling with an idiot. This is how it will all turn out …

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!

What is it that keeps us from cutting our throats?, W. wonders. Why don’t we book ourselves into one of those Swiss suicide clinics?

W. dreams that one day thought will ennoble him, he says, that it will touch him on both shoulders with its sword. Arise, Sir W., thought will say. Arise, philosopher.

A thinker should dress for thought, W. says. He’s lucky, because Sal dresses him.

A man should be judged by his shoes, W. says. By his shoes and by his haircut, his top and his tail.

Has it really come to this?, W. wonders. It has. Is it going to get any worse? Much worse. This is only the beginning. He feels like a Marie Antoinette being led out to the chopping-block, he says. He feels like Joan of Arc being bound to the stake.

When's the blow going to come? When are the flames going to leap up and surround him? It'll be a relief after everything that's happened, W. says. The horror of uncertainty will come to an end. The horror of not knowing how much further down I will lead him.

For where are we going? Downwards, that much is obvious. Down — and out — that, too, is obvious. We've long since left all friendly terrain. We've long since left the last human house behind. We're in the wilderness now, W. says, mapless and unsure.

Somerset House. They put up an ice-rink here at Christmas, W. says. We should come here to skate. It would be like Kafka and Brod on the frozen lakes of Prague. He can see them in his mind's eye, W. says: skating together, two friends, talking literature, talking writing. Skating and with arms linked with Oskar Baum, their blind friend, out with them on the frozen lake to feel the wind on his face …

And now we imagine Blanchot and Levinas, out skating on some Strasbourg lake, talking philosophy, talking Heidegger, arms linked … And, better still, Blanchot and Bataille, out skating in the winter of 1940, just after they they met. Blanchot and Bataille skating, scarves round their throats, talking politics, talking literature in an occupied France … 

Sometimes W. thinks we'll survive everything, that we'll last longer than anyone else. Perhaps it will be just us at the end, at the very end, like cockroaches, like vermin, running across the cindered planet. But sometimes, W. thinks we'll be the first to go, that we're being held out in front of the rest like canaries in a coalmine.

The corpse of the university floats face down in the water, W. says. We’re poking it with sticks. says. None of us can believe it. Is it really dead, the university? Is that really its bloated, blue-faced corpse? Yes, it really is dead, and there it is, floating, face down, W. says. There’s no point pretending otherwise, not anymore. The university is dead, and there is its corpse.

Oh, there are signs of life in the university, W. says. It seems that it’s alive. But that life is the life of maggots, he says, devouring the substance of the university from the inside, living on its rotting.

The corpse of the university is a breeding ground, W. says. The corpse is where Capital comes to lay its eggs. The university is that rotten place where Capital deposits its eggs …

He had a very strange dream the other night, W. says. The two of us were on trial for something serious – what, he didn’t know. The courtroom was deserted, W. says. There was no judge there to bang the gavel. No defence team, no prosecution. No policemen. But we were guilty, we knew we were. We’d found ourselves guilty …

‘Has our time come?’, W. asked me. Ages ago, I told him. – ‘Then what's keeping them?’, he asked. The judgement came too late, I told him. There are no hangmen, there is no firing squad. The army have all deserted their posts. The very institutions of the law are empty, their doors swinging open, files blowing about in the wind.

‘Then who will carry through the sentence?’, W. asked. There's no one to carry through the sentence, I told him. – ‘Who will lead us to the gallows?’ There's no one to lead us to the gallows. – ‘Are we to strangle ourselves?’ I'll strangle you, and you strangle me, and we'll see where that gets us, I told him.

He had a strange dream the other night, W. says. I had become a kind of priest. A Hindu priest, with lines of ash on my forehead, and my hair long and in a topknot.

I was speaking the Law, W. says. Not about the Law, but the Law itself, as if it could be spoken. As if I would know the Law.

I spoke in a low murmur, W. says, that was inseparable from a rumbling all around us. The skies were darkening, W. says. Stormclouds were massing in the sky.

It was like the Biblical disasters, W. says. The great flood. The plague of locusts. The destruction of Sodom. But it was worse, W. says. It was more terrible, even as it seemed to leave everything intact.

The destruction of the world was the world: that’s what suddenly became clear to him, in his dream, W. says. The end of the world was already present in every detail of the world. The eschaton was already here; the apocalypse was already happening.

The real philosopher has philosophical dreams, W. says. Leibniz dreamt of monads, and Spinoza of infinite substance. Heidegger dreamt of the Being of beings, and Levinas of the face of the Other.

He only dreams of me, W. says. What does that mean?

Sometimes, W. dreams of the book we might write together, which might appear under both our names. Our Anti-Oedipus, he says. Our German Ideology. Our System-Programme.

It won't be a book about a book, W. says, but a thing unto itself, standing on its own two feet. Not a book about books — a commentary-book, or an introductory book — but a book that would live its own life, running through the forest like Baba Yaga's hut.

What would our revolutionary names be, the equivalent of Lenin and Stalin?, W. wonders. Fatov, I’d be called. Twatov, he’d be called.

W. recalls Deleuze’s legendary seminars. Anyone could come to them! You could just wander off the streets. People did! Deleuze would speak for hours, lost in the cloud of cigarette smoke. When the hubbub from the audience became too much, he’d pause to take questions from the floor – mad questions, vagrants’ questions … Or he would simply pause, his tender eyes surveying his audience, half-amusedly, half-lovingly. And then he would begin again, as though he hadn’t been interrupted.

Idiocy is always unwitting, W. says. It doesn't really know itself. It doesn't really suffer itself, that's its lightness. The idiot is an innocent, a child.

Others laugh at him, the idiot, and he laughs along. Everyone's laughing!, he thinks. Great! He even laughs at himself – but what does he understand of what he's laughing at? Everything's funny. He's an idiot – and that's funny, too. Everything's funny! Everything's hilarious.

Do I think the former Essex postgraduates would publish a single line?, W. says. Do I think the former Essex postgraduates would seek philosophical immortality? Do I think they would care about what posterity made of them?

Do I think the former Essex postgraduates saw themselves as thought-archers, firing arrows ahead for others to find and shoot on? They shot their arrows upward, into the sky, upwards to the stars. They shot them into impassable thickets, into the surging ocean, into the deep desert. Or they held their bows at arm’s length and shot them into their own breasts …

Ah, the former Essex postgraduates wanted no legacy, W. says. They'd seen too much to want a legacy. They knew the end was coming. The knew the end was nigh. They knew that there was little time left, that the disaster to come laughed in the face of any endeavour of thought.

The former Essex postgraduates took the long view, W. says. The very long view. The view from eternity, from the other end of eternity, when everything was dead and the stars burnt out. They've seen it, W. says, the former Essex postgraduates: the end of all things, the great dispersal. It was going to end, and endlessly to end, that's what they knew.

Anxiety is the moment, W. reads from his notebook. Anxiety is the Øiblikket, the eyeblink, the moment: We have to understand what this means!

The key, of course, lies in the way we exist in time. Everything is about time!, W. says. There is the time that passes — this moment, then that — which we merely endure, which merely carries us along. Then there is that time touched by eternity, according to Kierkegaard, in which past, present and future assume their true role as phases in our development.

In the moment, when time is touched by eternity, our relation to time deepens. We must learn to deepen and grow in time. We must learn not merely to persist in time, but to exist temporally, living towards a future that we earn by our deepening, earn by our growth.

That's what W.'s trying to achieve, he says. That's what he's been searching for, as he works each morning, before dawn. To be carried along by the propitiousness of work! To be borne along by a sacred task … No, by sacredness as a task, like a waterwheel turning in glinting water … What idea do we have of that? What of sustained and patient labour without thought of reward?

We need fear anxiety only when we fail our humility; when we have yet to achieve self-realisation. But when we discover, through our patience, the ability to determine ourselves, to liberate our possibilities — when we separate petty concerns from profound ones?

Then our anxiety will no longer be called anxiety. Then the eternal bows down from the sky to kiss our forehead. Grace: is that the name for what anxiety becomes? God: is that a name for the eternal?

Did he really think he could escape the end of philosophy?, W. wonders. Did he really think he could make a philosophy out of the end times, when the end times means: the end of philosophy?

I'm not capable of sadness, W. says, not really. The apocalypse doesn't really perturb me.

Death is calling us, W. says, he can hear it. The waters are calling us home. Will I jump first? Will he? Will we hold hands and jump together?

But the river wouldn't want us, W.'s sure of that. We'd be pulled up from the waters, our stomachs pumped of the polluted water. They'd slap us round the face. Wake up! Wake up! And his eyes would open and see me. And he'd retch up the black river water from the bottom of his lungs.

We must live with the foreknowledge of death, Montaigne writes, W. says. We must live with death in our mouths: that’s how he puts it.

He knows the end of times suits me, in some way, W. says. He knows it might allow me to come into my own. My dreadful smile: that’s what W. sees every time he closes his eyes. My smile, which says, everything’s over. It’s all finished. My smile, which says, very simply, We’re all dead. We died some time ago …

His man bag is an ark, W. says. We’re carrying the most important ideas of old Europe into the desert of Britain. Somehow, the task’s been entrusted to us. Somehow, we have become the priests of the temple.

What could be a stronger sign of the eschaton, of the very end?, W. says.

The world's coming to meet me, W. says. Everything's heading in my direction.

Somehow I'm on the same side as the apocalypse, W. muses. I'm on the same side as everything that is wrong with the world.

There's my smile, my dreadful smile. As though I were taking some kind of revenge, W. says. A revenge on life!, W. says. A revenge on existence!

The times are against us. History is against us, W. says. Life is against us! The cosmos is against us! I’m against him, for God’s sake, W. says. He’s against me!

The end of times suits me, in some way, W. knows that. And he knows that it might allow me to come into my own.

My voice is changing, he’s noticed that, W. says. It must be the spores. It must be the mould entering my lungs. Inside, he imagines, my body is black with damp. Deep inside, changing me, changing my voice: black spores od damp.

I’m changing, W. says. I’m becoming completely new – a new kind of person. Amphibious. A skin-breather. In his imagination, gills are growing behind my ears, like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

W. thinks of the young in Robert Bresson’s films, full of life, full of beauty, but hopelessly lost in the devil’s playground of the world.

He thinks of the young suicides of Bresson’s films, driven to death because there is nothing for them in life, choosing to die by their own hand rather than live under tyranny.

They die of the truth, W. says. They die because of what they see in themselves of the world. They die because of the sense of the corruption of their innocence, because they are angels and because they’re tarnished, W. says.