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There are those whose presence changes the space around them, whose presence is a kind of command, or that it bears of itself a kind of commandment: to think. And this by way of their gestures, the tone of their voice or the length of their silences, the way they look or do not look at you. By way of them – not as though they were not important, but that they are as traces, as signs of an experience that is at one with thought.

Blanchot remembers Bataille’s long silences when he spoke in public. Long, intense silences. And there was the seriousness of his tone, which others recalled. But he was not solemn – or rather, it was thought that was solemn – it was thinking that commanded of him a kind of solemnity. Bataille was a thinker; he thought, he struggled with thought. No, better: thought struggled with him, thought kept him; this was his seriousness – but a kind of lightness, too, for doesn’t Blanchot remember what he calls the play of thought that was at stake between them?

The play of thought: this does not make thought trivial. It lightens them, the heaviest thoughts, by letting them be spoken and shared. Spoken – or written. Didn’t Blanchot write of Bataille’s friendship for thought? A friendship which, moreover, meant Bataille had to do without friends? Bataille, in the years of Inner Experience and the other books of The Atheological Summa was indeed insolated; he felt abandoned by allies who once joined him in his communal experiments. They turned from him, he felt, even as he began to write a section of Guilty entitled Friendship.

Friendship – could this be the name of a relation to thought, to thinking? The name of a relation – and one, now, that lays claim, in some, to the whole of a life: to the same gestures, voice tones and silences, to a way of taking up space or not taking it up. This laying claim would be the presence of thought in the thinker: the way thought keeps a life, even as the thinker supposes that it is thought that must be kept safe.

Thinking of them again – not as friends, but as those who are friends of thought – what communicates itself to me is not the content of a thought – not this, or that idea, but the ‘that there is’ of thinking, and in another such as him, another such as her. Thought: in person. But there only as a mutliplicity of gestures, of tones and silences, as a way of moving or keeping still.

Thought, then as choreography; thinking as what demands all of life – and more than the life of any individual. For isn’t it that ‘more’ that reveals itself in multiplicity? Isn’t it that the thinker lives more than the life of an individual – or rather, such individuality is only a way thought has of folding itself up? The thinker lives a life – any life in particular. The thinker’s life is any life, and all life – or it is the ‘more’ of that ‘all’, and thought is what gives itself differently, each time.

Think. No: be thought, be the keeper of thought. Let thought claim you, and down to the most intimate details of your life. The thinker never stops thinking. The body thinks – the whole body in its movements and its stillnesses. Thought is there – in person. Thought relates itself to itself by passing through the body of the thinker.

The impersonality of the thinker. The thinker as no one. Thought has claimed her. Thought keeps him; he lives within the secret. She thinks with every part of her life. And thought reaches us, too, by way of her life, his life. Thought thinks – and not only by of the external ‘show’ of a life.

Every detail; each movement: thought thinks. Thought laughs and thought loves. Thinking is absolutely of the body, it is nothing but the body – but that of no one in particular. And so does the body of no one touch my body. So am I touched – called. So am I enfolded.

But it is only that thought has leapt across to me. Only that thought, like the fire that leaps from tree to tree in a forest fire, has reached me. My life is not consumed, but it burns. It is not burnt up, but burns, every part of it by the same thinking.

Yes, there is thinking – the same thinking, but it differs because it thinks with a different body – mine. Who am I, thinking? No one at all; no one in particular. Or rather, my body is joined to that no one and what I say, what I write is joined to another speech and another writing.

What joy! But then, disappointment, as I cannot give content to what I have thought. I have only been dazed. I was only dazzled. There was thinking; thinking passed across to me, and I, too am on fire. But thought has not resolved itself into determinacy. It blazes, but without determinacy.

Everything is thought – the whole, hen panta. That thought is my blazing, it is my friendship with thought, which reaches me singularly. Friendship – which turns me, for a moment, from my friends. I am alone – but am I alone? There is thought; there is thinking. I am kept; the secret maintains itself. Nothing can be communicated.

But then, by my gestures, by the tone of my voice and my silences, thinking is there, in person. Thinking relates itself to itself, by way of me. Its price: I have become no one. My body, my life has be joined to no one. I am pure figure. Thinking gives itself to itself – but what is left of me, who is sacrificed in this giving?

Thinking communicates. But what does it say? Only itself. Only the saying of itself, the ‘that there is’ of thinking. Only the surprise that thinking has incarnated itself, that it has found a body. This communication is the sign, the trace. But a sign of itself, without signification. A kind of doubling – a division between my body and a body, between my life and a life.

Thought burns; my whole life is burning, but nothing is consumed. Nothing is changed. Friendship, which demands solitude, changes nothing. The world will be restored to you; everything will come back; it is the same world, there is no other. And yet it has changed – yet the same is also what divides itself and does not cease to divide itself between individual lives and a life.

This is thought’s adventure; it is the adventure thought gives itself. But there is no one to give; nothing stands behind thought. It is only that thinking is adventure, and infinite movement. It is only that thinking is the stirring of the infinite in the finite, the fold which can only refold and unfold.

Let it come, then. But it needs assistance. It needs a body, a thinker, one whom it can keep. Hence those thinkers whose memory is precious to me, those who, for a time – a sunny afternoon, a room full of conference attendees, a brief conversation outside, as others smoke – incarnate thought, give to it their life, the whole of their lives.

We were never witty, W. and I agree. We are not raconteurs; we do not have conversation, as we imagine others have conversation. Of course W. can do an impression of a wit, of a conversationalist, he can sit with others at the high table, but he is at home, much more at home with crudeness and simplicity.

Strange chance both of us were admitted. Strange that we found our way in; we wouldn’t have a chance now, we know that. They do not even hate us – who, after all, are we? Would they hate us? We wouldn’t be acknowledged. Us least of all (and our friends) – we were admitted by accident; it was a mistake; it will not happen again. Still, we have learned a great deal about stupidity, and about our own idiocy. We’ve studied as we’ve wandered this strange, stupid land.

A simple distinction: stupidity is replete, and content with itself. Stupidity, sated, has no need of anything else; it has already been fulfilled. And idiocy? Idiocy wanders; idiocy is outside itself and this is what draws us together, us idiots. Outside ourselves – we are inside this stupid land, but we are also outside. W. does a good impression of an insider (I do not), but it is still an impression; they’ll sniff him out. Is he one of them? His wit is sham, and his conversation dries up in his mouth.

Idiocy, then, which begins only when idiot is joined to idiot; when idiots meet and idiocy speaks, if only by burning up words. Idiocy speaks. Idiocy addresses W. in me; and it addresses me in W. To address, to be addressed: this is idiocy’s relief; it lightens speech (the heaviness of words), it lightens stupidity. I no longer suffer alone (but can you ever be an idiot on your own?) Friendship: that’s how idiocy discovers itself. That’s how it lets itself be discovered.

Two of us, and the table between. A bottle of gin, and ice from the freezer. Slices of Emmenthal in a plastic packet. Open jewel cases and dirty CDs. ‘Listen to this!’ – ‘You’ve got to hear this.’ Speak, and there is idiocy; it is our speech itself, and all its reality is borrowed from outside it. Speak of this, of that – but only to clothe idiocy, only to give it form, only so that idiocy will have something to sacrifice. For doesn’t idiocy shake stupidity away as a dog shakes water from its coat?

Idiocy laughs. Everything said is a decoy, it is all indirection. Idiocy laughs: it is the laughing path of words crossed between us. Then idiocy laughs too hard and the words fall. But what does it matter what was said? ‘What were we saying?’ – ‘Where were we?’

Gin and the ice, sliced cheese and dusty, thumb-marked CDs: this red-walled room is a wicker man built to be set aflame. Laughter: what stupidity, and all around us. Stupidity of politics, stupidity of work, stupidity of honours, titles, and professional competence (of what Levinas calls ‘ontological tumefaction’).

Idiocy: a block, a break. How can we speak in that land, so strange and stupid? By what right can we speak? No wit; no ‘conversation’. Then idiocy is interruption, just as our lives, inside, are interruptions. We are tolerated – for the moment. But then they haven’t noticed us, not really. Tolerated – so long as we remain out of sight, in peripheral vision. We’ll disappear soon, they know that. And meanwhile? The idiots are in the room with red walls. Idiocy is laughing across the table.

Ah but to think from idiocy – to think stupidity out of our idiocy, our gift of idiocy: will that be our revenge?

‘Pull out another chair’, I say to W., ‘not for Elijah, but for idiocy’. But idiocy does not come to sit down; he’s already here. Between us. Idiocy is between us.

Plymouth Gin is the path; it opens the way. Plymouth Gin, the table, W.’s front room: now it opens: the route to idiocy. Now will we run up against what everyone is capable but us. Claustrophobia of idiocy, the sense of being pressed up against it. There is no escape. We are idiots, we are becoming idiots.

Plymouth Gin opens the way. Gin over ice, no tonic, no mixer. Gin: absolute alcohol. Alcohol that has burned everything away but itself. What burns? Alcohol burns; it has become a star. Alcohol, igniting itself, is sheer ardency. Drink, and speak of what you have not done. Speak of your failure; share it. Share your failure, and your sense of being outside. You are both apes, imitators. You are idiots, and your idiocy is growing pure, as pure as alcohol.

Burnt engine oil: that’s what opened the way to the Red Room in Twin Peaks. But now it is Plymouth Gin, and it opens nothing but our own idiocy. Let it complete itself, that idiocy. Let us experience its completeness, its fatality. From the first, our idiocy. From the beginning, and before the beginning.

How could it be otherwise? Idiocy set itself back in us. It was our fate, our fatedness. It set itself back, it fell into our past, and into the past before the past: the a priori. Idiocy was our a priori, our condition, our uncondition. It is what sets us apart, and apart from ourselves.

How could it be otherwise? But it was also our gift. A gift from idiocy to itself, and by way of our idiocy. Two idiots, drinking. Two idiots, invited by idiocy to drink in a room with red walls, a table between us, and ice, and two glasses, and a bottle of gin, of Plymouth Gin.

Blanchot recalls that passage in Bataille where he speaks of reading and drinking with X. We know who is, says Blanchot, but that does not matter: X. stands for friendship as much as the friend. And to drink with X.? To read? A kind of community happens, says Blanchot. Drinking, reading, are its condition.

Plymouth Gin opens the way. Drunkenness is the path, and this is what distinguishes us from Socrates, who knew he knew nothing. For we do not even know that (and isn’t it the same for Bataille’s’ Socratic College’?). We speak of our failure. ‘When did you know that you’d failed?’

We speak of the thinkers we admire. Do you remember X.? and Y.? and Z.? Ah, that conversation I had with Z.! And with Y., that summer’s day? And X., when we had him to ourselves for a whole evening? And more distantly, we speak of the thinkers we read. ‘How is it possible for a human being to write like that …’

Later, we will go up to W.’s study and look in wonder through the pages of Rosenzweig or of Spinoza. ‘How is it possible …?’ Above all, it’s not possible for us; that first of all.

It is enough that Rosenzweig and Spinoza existed. Enough that they were alive once and wrote these books. The books are like facts, great looming facts, like mountains, like the flashing stars. How was it possible? How could a human being write such books? And above all: how impossible it is for us, and especially for us. And the curse of that impossibility, its very impossibility.

So does idiocy presses us up against itself. Idiocy calls, and by way of the Plymouth Gin, the red walls of W’s room, and the open copies of Rosenzweig and Spinoza. We are idiots. Do we know we are idiots? Not even that. We are not even Socrates, who knows he knows nothing. It takes gin to get us to that point – gin, and the open books in W.’s study. And by that time it’s already too late. Know? What do either of us know?

Between us: what does it mean to share idiocy, to wander out in the mountains and the flashing stars, where books loom and thinkers are gods? To share it: now I wonder whether it can only be shared. For who can attain idiocy, pure idiocy on their own?

First sign of a thinker: the insistence there is a gap between them and their thought. Who are they after all? ‘I’m not very interesting’, said X. to W. and I two years ago, ‘but the book’s interesting’. He insisted on that. But W. and I scared him when we asked him to become our leader.

Another sign: the thinker experiences blocks and breaks when it comes to writing. Sometimes they write, and it is like the flash of lightning: everything is written, and all at once. But that ‘sometimes’ follows the darkness of many years. For a long time, there was no writing; and then – there it is, all at once. To write as by a single stroke – what does that mean? To write after thinking – but thinking is not the word, unless thinking happens in those blocks, those breaks. Unless thinking begins by facing its impossibility and then enduring it, riding it, that same impossibility, folding it into something that might be lived.

Not like us, I said to W., everything is possible for us. But for them, thinking is a risk, it is exposure. A kind of aloneness, that separates them from others, even if it allows them to return – even if it is all about return. I tell W. for the hundredth time about my two great conversations with Y., when he spoke of the category of repetition in Kierkegaard. The first time, with great urgency, on an afternoon when the sun blazed down. It changed everything for me, I told W. And then the second time, the following year, when he spoke to me of his relationship with his son. Pure repetition, he said, with incalculable joy. Did I understand him? I’m not sure. But he set fire to the word repetition; henceforward it would blaze, and Kierkegaard’s book became the urbook, the first book, from which others had cooled and fallen.

And the third time we could have spoken? W. and I remember it well. W. was speaking to Y, and I was not. Someone else – who was it? – insisted on talking to me. I was aghast; I moved my chair closer to W. and Y., I tried to overhear, to participate, but I had no chance. It was a great conversation, said W., unhelpfully. A great conversation! But I was being monopolised; someone thought I had something to offer. Couldn’t she see I had nothing to offer? Me, of all people! When all I wanted was to be drawn again into the circle of conversation. To listen as new words were set on fire; as books of philosophy became those scorched paths through which the thinker – thought in person – had blazed.

And a third sign, which is always marvellous to W. and I: the thinker has an absolute pellucidity with respect to  their ordinary life. It was like looking into the clearest of rivers, I said to W. after speaking to X. And it was true: how frankly and absolutely X. spoke of himself, and to everyone who asked. Frankly, absolutely: as though life was something to look through, and not to live. Or that life was lived at another level, at that of blocks, of breaks – a level of which we had no idea.

Complete seriousness, said W., not like us. He was right: we are the apes of thought. Complete seriousness! But isn’t there a sense for them, the thinkers, that there is a lightness in seriousness; that thinking is a kind of beatitude. What will W. and I know of the infinite pleasure of thought, thought’s laughter, which laughs in the eyes of the thinker? They know more about joy than us, I said to W. There’s no doubt about that. The play of thought, the game of thought: Blanchot’s phrase of which W. and I always remind ourselves.

Remember what he wrote about Bataille, says W. for the hundredth time. We remember: absolute seriousness, absolute play, both at once. And I remember Blanchot’s letters to Bataille (those that Bataille did not burn): almost contentless, expressing solicitude, expressing friendship, as friendship became a name for the play of thought between them.

Blocks and breaks: but now thought was a kind of turning, that orientation where speech, too heavy with itself, was turned to the other. A kind of shuttling (though Bataille’s letters do not survive) where speech lightens itself as it slips from the one to the other. Speech? Is that the word? Rather, the ‘there is’ of speech as it returns from the impossibility endured by thought. As it returns after the longest absence, having traversed the greatest distance, but still young, younger than either thinker, announcing only itself, and the possibility of the impossible.

And now we remember Z., around whom the room becomes quiet. She speaks, and everyone is quiet. Here is a thinker; here is thought, in person. She lives differently to us, we know that. She lives a different life, and silence is a sign of that difference. What does it mean, that she does not speak? What does it mean, when her speech is light, quiet? Everyone in the room knows: what is spoken so lightly burns with the greatest urgency. The room is blazing, but these flames are like those of the aurora borealis. Thought is here; thinking is here, and we are touched by a cold and fiery hand by what it is impossible to think.

Touched: and it seems for a moment that we have faces with which to face the impossible; that we can be brought there, to the edge of cold and fire. The dross is burnt away; the whole of our lives become clear and still, like pools of water in Northern forests. The play of light across us, across the whole of our lives: we live; we are alive. Everyone in the room knows it. The room – but this is scarcely a room. An expanse – we lean in, listening. She speaks so quietly, and we must be more quiet than her speech. To be that quiet! To listen, with the whole of our being!

Thought is here, we know that. Thought that needs nothing to think, that thinks itself, like a star that has burned its substance away. Philosophy is burning. All thought is burning. And don’t we each burn from that same burning? Hasn’t it set something of ourselves alight? Wow, I said to W. when we came out. We sat in the courtyard, completely quiet. No more chattering. No apishness. Wow: I said nothing, I said everything. To share what had happened was only to repeat that non-word.

All talk here is of blogging. X. (but what should his nickname be?) has started a blog. And as I told him, it took only four days for it to be linked to by Jodi. Four days! I told him to go with Typepad because of the Stats and Referers. That’s where it all happens, I told him, when he expressed surprise that I knew not only that he’d started a blog, but I’d already linked to it.

There are no secrets in the blogosphere, I said, remembering the novelisation of Flash Gordon, where Ming and Flash meet one another on the astral plane before they ever encounter one another in the flesh. Flash meditates; Ming sensed his presence from the other side of the universe. Who was he?, Ming wondered, impressed by Flash’s psychic force. None of this is in the film, of course.  But then the novel is only a novelisation of the film, its author intent on writing something profound.

I told X. I’d I felt a powerful new force in the blogosphere, and I knew it had to be him. But which one of us was Ming and which Flash Gordon?  You’ll be linked to by others pretty soon, I said. Stats and referers, I said.

The post I have most wanted to write would have a cat at its core. A cat – it would not be about her: wouldn’t she simply turn and walk away at such attention? Wouldn’t it bore her, writing which does not flash those lights around the room with which she loves to play: reflected lights, from the round handmirror we keep for her, and the laser pointer whose red point she will chase around and around in circles?

How intent she is, watching for lights, as if they are the only serious business in the world! 10.30 and the sunlight falls in a shaft through the pine trees in the garden and the kitchen windows. She knows; she is waiting. She comes in to call you. The light is there: bring the mirror. That was dad’s duty. He was a reluctant cat owner, that is true – he always was, for all three of our cats. Or is that only what he said?

Either way, come 10.30, or whatever time it was when the light came through the pines and the panes of glass, he would tilt the mirror so it caught the light and let the reflect light run along the cupboard doors. And then, later in the day, she’ll wait at the threshold of the living room, for when a shaft of light will slant in from the sun as it moves to the east, and so to the other side of the house.

Lights! The day turns around them. The round mirror lies on the coffee table. The laser beam pointer is close. She associates me with its silver shaft and a red moving spot. I and others like me – men, it tends to be; she knows who we are in advance, she’s sorted us out: he is a light-entertainer, the tilter of mirrors. He, another, is the one who plays rough.

For how much of my time in the South is she present, Keisha. And by her presence does she change my solitude, she keeps on its edges, sleeping close to me, stepping across the table towards the laptop, or crossing the computer desk to reach the window from where she likes to watch the world. And even when you are in another room, you can hear her, in this modern house, as she jumps down from the window sill to the carpeted floor and then makes her way downstairs.

Left alone for too long, and she will cry. When doors are closed against, she cries, disconsolate, and goes to find the makeup brush she once picked out of my sister’s make up bag. Picks it up and continues to cry, the brush in her mouth. Until you open the door and she drops it, that brush, which we imagine is a memory of the kittens who, we were told, were taken away from her too early.

No, you are not alone, although she only invades your solitude when she knows it’s time for lights, or food, or her 9 P.M. Iams. Not alone – though, infinitely solicitous, she will only reach a paw to you and lay it on your arm to attract your attention. A paw touches you softly. There: now you know her by way she would announce her presence. There.

At other times, and perhaps only with me, her playmate on the many days five years ago when I returned to the South when I fell out of employment, she likes to play roughly. There are signals that she and I have worked out: time for rough play, time for the swipe of paws, time for an open, sharp-toothed mouth and the infinite attentiveness of her eyes, watching. Rough play. She watches me through the slats of wood along the stairs. I am to dangle a piece of string enticingly and she to be enticed: those are the rules. Not alone: many times, I’ve said to myself, I would like to write of her, Keisha (not Keysha, as my mum spells it).

Keisha: where has he gone, the man who used to tilt the round mirror in his hand so she could follow the light? Where he is he, the one whose presence in the garden would encourage her to make her way in the grass? Outside, alert, she was only half our cat, watchful as she was of the big cats who came over the fence. And where has he gone, he who would make a noise when those bigger cats rattled the catflap?

But she is asleep again, on top of the amplifier we turn on so it will be warm for her who likes to sleep there. Asleep: so does her day pass in sleep, sprawled, limbs stretched, at the level of our chests. So when she wakes does she keep watch on us, until, in the evening, she jumps down to the floor, and then, crossing the table on which she is forbidden (pre-emptively will she open her mouth and make her cat’s growl as she crosses, knowing one of us will say, Keisha down!) comes to the sofa and lies, her white belly exposed to us.

Seven o’clock and I’ve finished the sausage I bought in honour of W.’s visit. Salami and Cava and the latest magazines. How was it, I asked W. today on the phone, or did he ask me?, that our Scottish friends can drink so much, all day, all evening and all night, and though they were dreadfully lairy when they rolled in drunk, they seemed perfectly cogent the next morning, when we, if we had tried to match them – and we began drinking with them in the afternoon, but gave up, as always, too soon – would have been wiped out by hangovers?

W. was tender this weekend, remembering the weekend when I stayed with him the time before last, and he spent the whole day preparing for the dinner he would cook us. First of all, the recipe, cut out carefully from a magazine. Then a shopping list, then the trip to the supermarket with Sal, making sure we had everything. Then the walk home, and the long process of cooking. I admit it, I was too hungry – W. has always known I’m a compulsive eater, and I went out for pork scratchings and a fourpack of Stella. Wine and chicken could wait, but when they came, when the chicken was steaming in the middle of the table, I went into a great ecstasy. W. remembers this lovingly.

On another day, I told the story of how W. and I went drinking with X., the esteemed keynote speaker, and walled him in with plates of Cumberland sausages. He was talking sense, he was sincere and serious, he who was also so witty, and we walled him in as he spoke with plate after plate of sausage, mash and gravy, 2 plates for £5. That was in Reading, and we drank the early afternoon and then the evening away. The worst conference we’d ever been to, we said, and we were right. The worst ever! Later, we all got lost in the fog that descended over the campus. X. found his way to the dining room, but W. and I., who were not eating, played pool and then billiards and then darts and chatted with the African students stranded there over the summer.

We were in Oxford last weekend, Zizek amongst us, very amiable. Delighted to see Y., for whom I thought the word pellucid was apt, for he is so clear and fresh and speaks so givingly of himself. With the smokers! R.M. had forgotten her camera. How is it that whenever I attend I think, this is it, this is the last time? We all hate Oxford, of course. It is oppressiveness itself, of course, but we are there to defile it, we are the bone in the throat and wander out looking for lock-ins, scarcely necessary now the licensing hours have been extended.

What are we doing in Oxford! Of all people! On the Friday and Saturday, my stomach playing havoc, I go from cafe to bar to cafe, trying to stay calm. Up the Cowley Road, I find an internet cafe when it is too late. The next day, I take the path which runs opposite Magdalen College, remembering Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy and his Thyrsis and quoting the lines I remember to R.M., who walks beside me. She remembers her mobile phone can take pictures, and we photograph each other in the same locations as I was photographed with others when we came up, my dad and I, for Z’s birthday, and we drank tea in her room before going out for a walk.

We looked for the festal lights of Christchurch Hall in vain. We’d been drinking with the others at The Turf all day, the traditional debriefing pub, pint after pint of Honey Bunny – one gleaming pint after another, sitting first outside, and then around a table inside. It was happiness itself; the hours passed, and I thought, I’m not going home tonight. So I stayed again at St. Hilda’s, crumbs of Lavash bread all over the floor, on condition, said the porter, that I was out by eight A.M. I was out; I cycled out to broad street and sat on the bench where the previous day a tour guide and then one of her party spoke to R.M. and I, the latter telling us of the Chicago Loop and Kansas, where she now lived.

Oxford. I was glad we went out to Jericho, which I had seen on the folding map I had bought from the Tuck Shop. Glad we found the marvellous Greene King pub (what was it called?), with such a solicitous barmaid. Plates of Cumberland sausage – what else? -, pints of another golden beer. The afternoon passed happily, but then W. and I had to find our way back, because he was chairing one of the speakers, whose book we had admired, and were glad to see join us from such a great distance. An hours’ walk, and the others, our Scottish friends, stayed back in the pub. An hour! But we made it in time, and I took notes from the talk, though I was still half-drunk, and even stammered out a question.

That evening, relieved, the speaker from the distant overseas told me what he’d heard happened to J. L., fascinating scholar who resigned from Yale after writing his extraordinary Proximity in 1979, a book I’ve admired as out 20th century equivalent of C.M. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, so strange and rare and intoxicating are its formulations. L. resigned, and after teaching in the Midwest for a while, gave up on academia altogether, slipping away from his friends and his students, and took to writing pulp novels. For my part, I told our speaker, I’d heard L. had become a Jesuit priest.

The pub was crowded, and though R.M., fresh up from London, wanted to stay longer, we were too tired to stay past one A.M. To bed! And didn’t I tell R.M. that we should give up on double beds in preference to the narrow single bed on which we slept enwrapped? The next morning was Sunday, and we went out to Broad Street and the tour guide and the visitor from Kansas. And the next morning, I sat on the same bench, with coffee from cafe creme and a toasted bagel. But I was on my own then, and knew my little holiday was at an end. Happily, I had Sebald’s Vertigo to read on the five hour journey back to my city, my bike hung up from its wheel in the front carriage of the train.

Oxford! And soon enough we will die and those who remember us will die, and we will have all passed from the earth. The planet that turns into light will turn into darkness for us, though there will be others still for whom it will be morning. And what will it have mattered whether we had lived or died? Always that sense when walking through Oxford’s ancient streets: here you matter less than ever, here you and your friends are lighter than dust.

And hadn’t I spoke to the second blogger I’d met in a fortnight? Hadn’t we spoken of the scandals of the blogosphere? Hadn’t she said she demoted my blog out of Denken by mistake? Had I even noticed?, she asked. Later I asked myself: is it immortality I would want by writing? Then the answer: it is to write as one already dead that I want. To write as one dead: hadn’t I looked for Gene Wolfe’s Peace on the shelves of Blackwells, although I already have it, and indeed brought it home tonight in my rucksack? Hadn’t we spoken, the Scots and W. And I and Sal’s delegate in Oxford, and even Y., the most philosophical of our company, of Tarkovsky’s Mirror (which Y. hadn’t seen)?

How exquisite that solitude when you know your friends are close, and you will see them again in the evening! Exquisite to wonder streets along when you know you will see them again, friends and half-friends – for many are companions of the pub, no less friends for that, but friends whose friendship turns around the great third term of alcohol. Half-drunk with half-friends and then wander out onto the streets, simmering with thoughts that haven’t formed themselves yet. Thoughts, half-thoughts, wander past the colleges that are closed for Easter. Remember everything that happened here, and as though you were already at the end of your life, and past it. Remember it all from the other side of your death, as though you were the spirit awoken when the elm tree that grew on your grave had fallen in the night.

A few days away, and I’ve already forgotten how to blog. Forgotten, that is, what it might have been to mark anything other than the act of writing. An act? Long Tuesday, half the day waiting, just like yesterday. I even came back here, to the flat, in the daytime which I never do. Here: for the afternoon, which never happens. But I needed something to distract me; I cleared up, washed the floor in the bathroom, polished the floor in the living room. Waiting – and still waiting tonight, receiving the message: a couple more days. A couple more? But I’m in London tomorrow. I thought it would be decided tonight. I’m not going to say what, though. Still secret.

About 5PM, to the pub for a pint. Time slowed down. Cigarette smoke around me. Much better. I unwrapped my CDs and read the booklets. Grey skies outside. Hoped to reach my hands out and part them to see the blue sky again. All my friends away, so I was on my own. On my own, but London tomorrow. 8PM, back at the flat, listening to American Music Club and waiting. Everything cleared up here, everything ready. Wait, says the tidiness. Wait, says the whole flat. I’ve opened a bottle of bad Tescos Cava. In honour of what? Celebrating what? Distract yourself, I tell myself. London tomorrow, I tell myself.

London: R.M. lives there. We were in Yorkshire over the weekend, near Stokesley. Walked up and down the hills. Ate fresh farm eggs and just-killed turkey. Slept in a room with a staircase to a room above it: two rooms, our bedroom and an attic. Outside the drafty window, the brown hills. I told R.M. as we walked that it suited her complexion, that brown. This was once Abbey land, she tells me. This valley was Catholic, she tells me. There’s a Shetland pony called Twix where we were staying. They’re easily spoilt, Shetland ponies, said R.M. on the phone today. Better surfing the net for Shetland pony information than working, she tells me. Why am I never on the blog anymore?, she asks me. Why haven’t I got my own category?

R.M.’s waiting with me. Everyone’s waiting. Champagne on ice in other parts of the country. But I have my bad Tescos Cava, with which I am waiting. Bad Cava: everyone’s away, and I’m here on my own. The flat smells of the fabric conditioner in the drying clothes. Two Regimes of Madness face down on my bed. Mercury, which I didn’t buy, but exchanged, is turning out well. But the Cava is bad – harsh and acidic. Bad Cava. You won’t get to tomorrow, says the room. No more past and no more future, says the room. The present’s broken, it says. The broken present: is that what it is? Broken, the order of days? Broken: the succession of one day after another?

Day by day. It used to be that time moved forward; the days were similar, it is true, but there was a forward momentum. I would have said: I have the whole of Easter, and then the whole of Summer. Time for work, time for writing. And didn’t I promise myself a whole year of writing whatever I pleased, here at the blog? Isn’t that what I promised myself, crossing the Byker roundabout? But there was the new book, the third book. Another book – as if I hadn’t done enough damage! A third book – as if the first and the second weren’t bad enough! And somehow or another, that third book led me to the present impasse.

R.M. phones. She’s in the office working for her exams. Her friend, the taxidermist Q.C. has written to her of his pathological loathing for velvet. Why then, he wonders, does he stroke the feathers of the stuffed bird in his office? He’s not sure. This amuses R.M.; she phones to share it with me. I tell her I’m writing about her, at last. And about Twix. And Yorkshire. She begins to read. ‘Bad Cava’. ‘Is that the stuff you get me?’, she asks. No, that’s from the Co-op. Co-op Cava is a step up from Tesco’s Cava; Marks and Spencers’ Cava, which comes in two grades, is a step up from the Co-op. Anyway, she’s glad I’m relaxing. There’s nothing else to do, I said. I wish I never began that third book!, I tell her.

But R.M.’s encouraging. She sends supportive emails. Everything’s going well, she says. It’ll all come good, she says. And phones me to share the Q.C.’s turns of phrase.

I’ll rest on my own strength, but I am not strong. On my own strength: but I am weak. Who am I to support myself? So much money spent. So much money – every day. To the cashpoint and again to the cashpoint, thirty pounds a time. Never any money. Crisis always. Used to it, though – but sometimes, feeling week, I am unused to it again and look up at the sky, and think: when will I have money so that it accumulates monthly in my bank account? When enough money not to worry very much about money? Enough to let it gather, month upon month.

Weakness: tired in my office and hoping no one will come in. Weak, and hoping to be left alone. What will I say? What am I to say? The crisis continues; it’ll continue until at least the end of the month. Crisis – but when I am strong, it never bothers me. Strong, I am a player among players. Dress smartly, I tell myself, wear your jacket. And so I do; wander about in my jacket. Work carefully, I tell myself, don’t be caught out – and so I work with great care, rounding off every task. How organised I am! But then weakness returns. I am weak again; my nose bleeds, rising nausea and the old, old tiredness. What will happen? How will it all turn out?

‘I remember.’ – ‘What do you remember?’ – ‘I remember.’ – ‘But what if memory does not permit the perdurance of the I?’ – ‘I remember.’ – ‘And if it is not the "I" that remembers, but memory that remembers itself, interiorising itself, hardening itself into a form with limits, with determinacy?’ ‘ -I remember.’ – ‘Unless what you are is given by memorising, by the contraction of memory into determinate events in linear sequence.’

‘I remember.’ – ‘And what you are is the folding of memory into interiority, the act of synthesis blind only to the need to secure the form of the self.’ – ‘I remember.’ – ‘The power of memory remembers itself in you. Memory memorises, and so is the remembering self born.’ – ‘I remember’. – ‘No one remembers; the "I" comes after, as an effect of memory’. – ‘I remember.’ – ‘Memory desired you. Memory wanted you to be born. Remembering asked for you. The power of memory asked for a body. Remembering wanted to be born a mortal. You are the avatar of memory’.

‘I remember’. – ‘Avatar, you are the game memory plays with itself. Once, the gods asked Shiva how it was he could live as an ascetic when he had never lived, as was required, as a householder? Straightaway, Shiva gave birth to himself as a mortal; he married, had children, lived a long life and died. When he opened his eyes, an instant later, it was as a god again among other gods. So with remembering, which is not even a god. So memory, which is the internalisation of the exteriority of time’.

‘I remember’. – ‘Proxy, yours is not the power of memory; you do not own it. The power to remember is given, not taken, and what is given can also be withdrawn. Do you remember? That is not your power. Remembering happens; memory invents a body for itself, the event reduces itself so it can lend itself to the fiction of interiority’. – ‘I remember’. – ‘Memory remembers itself; memory is the pearl that invents the shell; who are you that are born from the chance of remembering? Who that comes to himself when memory deigns to give itself an agent?’

You would like what you write to be the abode of – what? Who is it you would like to meet here, on the page (or in Post Introduction)? Who would you like to feel pressing towards you, as though from the other side of the computer screen?

I write to catch – what? To entrap – who? Even as know that by writing I must let you escape. ‘You’ – is this your word? ‘You’: word without horizon. ‘You’: word that keeps place for you, whoever you are. Word that is a cup. Word from which to drink, to take into your body.

And when I call myself ‘you’? When I address myself thus, in the second person? Who are you, the second person? Who are you, whom I can approach only with this word without horizon?

‘You’: that’s what I’ll call myself. ‘You’ – name of the one whose body is the place where you are arriving. Who will I be tomorrow? Who is coming tomorrow? ‘You, you …’

They piss everywhere, the men here. They piss, unashamed, and on the walls you can see where they pissed. A damp patch, darker than the wall, and then a trail across the pavement and into the road – someone pissed here. Smell it! Pungent, acrid! Smell it – evidence of a recent piss.

As you drive, you can see them pissing. Men, backs turned to the road, and an arc of urine, they do not spare us that – the golden arc. They piss by the roadside and drive off again.

Sometimes you will see children squat by the roadside, taking a shit. Shitting children and pissing grownups – how has it come to this? The adults are pissing, the children shitting: this is how it is.

And what of us, who are driven in our cars? Is our driver – one of them? Does he, too, when we are not looking, piss with his back turned to the road? Are the hands that turn the driving wheel of our car covered with piss? Are there germs even here, in our car?

We close the window as tightly as we can. The air-con is on as high as it will go. What of us, we ask ourselves – are we ever clean enough? Are we clean? At the dentists they give you a dye to show you were you are not brushing your teeth. And if there was a dye to show germs – germs all around us and all over us? We shudder.

We are in charge, we know that. We rule here, we know that, but for how long? How long with the germs multiplying, with men pissing and children shitting? Isn’t it the germs who rule? Aren’t we ruled by them – the germs? Germs: hold a magnifying glass to your skin and you will see them: men pissing and children shitting. Germs: pissing and shitting in our hearts.

The dogs are fucking in the sun. The dogs, back to back, fucking – in the sun. It’s sunny, and on the grass, away from us, there are dogs, a small group of them, one lying in the grass, one sniffing along the edge of the rocks – and there are two who are fucking. Fucking, the dogs in the sun, tongues out, panting, not ardent, not distracted, fucking just as they would do anything else, sniffing, playing – it’s all the same. Fucking, playing, sniffing: all part of the whole, part of a dog’s life.

Who owns them, these dogs? Whose property are they, these sandy coloured dogs you find from one end of the country to another? Why aren’t they neutered? Why can’t someone disperse them, or lock them up in pounds? For they are everywhere, these dogs, fucking contentedly. Resting in the grass, playing in the dust, sniffing along the pavements and then fucking, wherever it strikes them to fuck. In the sun, generally. In the sun, before everyone – fucking. Dogs! Fucking! It’s a long, hot day, and what else is there to do? A dog must fuck; it’s part of what it means to be a dog – to fuck. To play, to rest and then – to fuck.

In the dust, on the grass, along the pavements they go, packs of sandy-coloured, medium-sized dogs, inoffensive, really, keeping to themselves, pausing only now and again to fuck. Pausing, in the heat of the sun, in the long afternoon, for a fuck. Sometimes you’ll see the bitches with their teats hanging down. More dogs – always more to come. More dogs, and if there are dogs, aren’t there rats? Dogs – but where are the rats? Because dogs and rats go together. Where there is a dog there is a rat, and where dogs fuck, somewhere, not far away, rats are fucking.

Dogs – plenty of them, and rats – plenty of them, enough to crawl over the pavements and the dust and the grass. Enough to crawl everywhere, until the surface of the world is a million-footed rat-body. The dogs are the amiable counterpart to the rats. But if there are dogs, there are rats, that is the law. Wild dogs – and they are wild, for who owns them? Who lays claim for them? Who is responsible for them? therefore wild rats, one and the same. Dogs, check – and rats, check. I haven’t seen any, but they come with the dogs. The dogs chase the rats and the rats stay underground, but they are there, nonetheless.

And what about the cockroaches? Where there are rats, there must be cockroaches. For any one rat, a dozen cockroaches – two dozen. Do cockroaches fuck? It is hard to imagine them fucking, one hard-carapaced cockroach atop the other. One cockroach doing it to the other. But if rats do it, cockroaches must do it. First the dogs, then the rats – then the cockroaches. Everything is at it, all of nature is at it, in the grass, in the dust, along the pavements and beneath them in the sewers and the pipes, it’s all happening. Everything is fucking. There will be more and more of them, the dogs, the rats, the cockroaches. They’re on the increase.

Why doesn’t someone do something about it? Why isn’t something about them, the dogs. The rats are underground, but the dogs – above ground, unashamed. But if they did something about them, then the rats would come overground, that’s the truth. To lock up the dogs would be to encourage the rats. Rats, fucking in the sun – it’s unbearable. Rats, everywhere, brushing your ankles as they swarmed – terrible. And what if you got rid of the dogs and the rats – that’s the worst. Dogs, rats gone, then the cockroaches would be everywhere, crawling over your face as you slept, falling into your mouth. Cockroaches under your blankets and in your fridge. Better rats. And better still the dogs, who fuck in the sun.

There are so many of you and so few of us. So many, and then so few of us – or is this only how it seems? Does it only seem thus, that there are so many of you compared to us, who are few? Does it appear that way because of your strength and because of our weakness?

How quickly you move, from here to there, and how many of you there are! Hundreds of you come through the doors, this way and that way, and waiting for the lift, and going up and going down the stairs. How many of you there are, and how young you are! How young, how strong compared to us who are weary and have to rest every few steps! Yes, we rest, there is dust in our eyes, but you pass us by, moving quickly, speaking gaily.

There we are, by your feet, resting, doing all we can not to curl up and sleep, doing what we can not to give up, and you pass us by, you do not notice us, the world is one of transition, and you are going to a better place. This world – these rooms , these corridors – are only zones of transition for you who are on the way. And who are we? The ones who are not on the way. The ones who will stay where they are in these rooms and corridors.

What home have we but here? Where else do we belong, in these halls through which so many of you pass? We are the stay-behinds and the left-behinds; we remain while you do not remain. You pass; we do not pass. The way is closed to us, but what way could be open? In truth, it is all open, nothing keeps us from passing out of the gates and into the city; nothing keeps us here but our weariness, we for whom the gates are already unreachable, and the city infinitely far.

You will pass into the city, but we, who prepare you for that passage, will remain here, outside. You will pass, and we will stay. Ah but there are so many of you! How many more of you can there be? Every year, always more. Every year, more of you. And who are we who are supposed to guide you? Who are we who are supposed to teach you? Every year more of you and less of us. Every year we have to make do with less and there are more of you, streaming down the halls and in and out of the doors.

The halls are full of your chatter. You pass, you chat, and we sink down in quiet weariness. What future is there for us, who will never leave these rooms, these corridors? What hope is there for us, who are supposed to provide hope for you? Should we live vicariously through your triumphs, through your strength? Should we congratulate ourselves for the strength of those entrusted to us?

But in the end, we cannot understand it, your strength. In the end, our weakness is not commensurable with your strength; it cannot be measured by the same unit. In the end, it is not merely a deficiency of strength, our weakness, but the withering of the measure of strength. How many there are of you, and how few of us! How strong you are, how clear-skinned and clear eyed! Were we ever young like you? Were we ever young and strong like you?

We are lower than you, lesser than you, and we always were. How can it be otherwise, when you are the sons and daughters of the rulers of the world, of the rulers of the new world? Everything awaits you and nothing awaits us. Everything awaits you, who will leave us behind, and leave these rooms and corridors behind, and nothing awaits us. How is it that we’ve been entrusted with you, you whose strength is that of the new world and the new order?

They bring you, your parents, and they will take you home. You have come here from the city and you will return to the city. Like a great wave each year, you come, and in a great wave you depart. What would these rooms and corridors be without you? What would these halls be without you, you who come from the happier places in the world?

In the end, these three years are the last gap you are permitted in your life. A few years break, a few years holiday, and then back. What does it matter what you do here? What does it matter what you study? I speak, but I speak from old Europe. I speak to you, I hear myself speak and think: what does it matter what I say? What does it matter, when I am already outdated? What matters are competencies and competencies that are transferable. What matters are outcomes of competency and not disciplinary knowledge.

What do they matter, the books of this thinker and that writer? Old Europe is spread before you. Old Europe is made to spread itself before you. Everything can be learnt, everything known. So is Old Europe, its thinkers, its writers, mashed into that paste which can be fed from one to another. So is Old Europe regurgitated for you to swallow.

And what have you swallowed? Only stories of legendary, vanished worlds that sugar the pill of transferable competencies. Old Europe – what was that? The rest of the world – what was that? What matters is now and the eternal now. Brave new world! You will forget them, the stories of old Europe, even as the competencies harden your bones and brighten your eyes. Forget it, old Europe, its stories, its adventures; you belong to the bright now, you in your hundreds and thousands. Yours is the brave new day!

And who are we, exponents of old Europe, of the thinkers and writers of old Europe? A new page is turning; our page is done. A new page, a new chapter, and our chapter is done. For a few years, they will let us remain here, in the borderlands around the city. Yes, for a few more years, like a museum, like living artefacts in the museum, will we be permitted to remain here.

And then? They will record us; everything we have said and written will be recorded and archived. Everything recorded, everything written, and it will be accessible to all. Then we’ll be frozen into an icon on the monitor screen. Then all we have said and written will be instantly accessible to the ones who come in the next wave, and the wave after that.

Strip them down – strip down philosophy to a bare frame! Boil the humanities down to a simmering broth! Spoon it into the mouths of the young! Boil the bones of the big books and make them soft! Dissolve them, the big books, into indifferent mush! All is the same, everything is the same, it is a matter of competencies and a portfolio of competencies. Everything the same, and nothing must stick in the throat. So we chew that you will not choke on old Europe. So we chew that the thinkers and writers reach you as the same indifferent paste.

There is no history. There is no past, it’s been boiled away. Man isst, was man isst. Broth of the humanities: the big bones boiled to mush. Pass us, leave us behind, now we have fed you. How many there are of you and how well fed! You are leaving us for the city. You are going to the city, but there are always more to come, always more on the way and more academic broth to prepare.

What powers of digestion you have! And isn’t that your power, the power of digestion, of the conversion of the thinkers and writers of old Europe into competencies fitted to this brave new world? And doesn’t it occur there, in your bellies, the miraculous conversion? Yes, that is your strength, and that is our weakness, we who can digest nothing, we who can only choke and are choking on the bones of old Europe.

True life is elsewhere, but we are in the academy. True life is elsewhere, but the academy is all around us.

When I ask myself about the effects of mass higher education, this first of all: what of those who could have been arists? What of those who could have written otherwise than academic prose? When I see them, the million students, the student-hordes, I ask: what could they have become, given a few years on the dole? Then I know what has been captured: would-be artists and would-be writers. The clever, whom academia is so adept at capturing. The clever can be clever in academia. There are difficult books for them to read, those who are clever. The books will reach them, the clever ones, and have been prepared for them.

Introductory books lead the way, the clever ones. Introductions and critical guides prepare them for the difficult books. So are the clever captured. So do they enter the university they will not leave. And so does affect wither in them. So does intensity drain away. What of those years on the dole that saw bands form in cities like Manchester or Sheffield? What of the dole-culture and those groups who formed because there was nothing to do? Now there is everything to do; everything is interesting. Now there’s everything but affect.

If you want to write, enroll on a creative writing course; if you want to make art, there are art-schools and government-funded cultural regeneration schemes. Every region must have its art; every town its government-funded bohemia. Now the artist must paraphrase and explain her work. Now in advance must it be paraphrased and explained. Now must the introduction precede the work and void the work. Now is the day of the explainers and paraphrasers, who make funding bids as artists and create as civil servants. Now they come, the fund-raisers, adept at explaining and introducing their work, their own introducers. M.C. and performer in one; agent and artist in one, one and the same. With the right hand, I create and with the left hand, I introduce what I create.

So is creativity doubled and voided; so is it made to explain and justify itself. On what are you marked in the creative writing programme – on what you have written, or on the reflective commentary you write on what you have written? This is the day of the commenters; this is the day for introductions without risk. Everyone reads everything, everyone knows everything. Knowledge without subject, without object: everyone knows, everything is known. It is known what X. said and Y. said; the introductory book knows for us. Knowledge that is spread everywhere! Knowledge of everything spread everywhere! Nothing need be fought for, nothing won. Nothing need be struggled for, it’s already won, the path is prepared in advance.

I’ve read the introduction, you say, and blink. I’ve read the critical guide, you say, and blink. You can quotes chunks of X. and Y. and fit them together. You can quote X. and Y. and Z. and spatchcock their work together. X. sits happily with Y. Z. sits happily with X. and Y. Context does not matter and idiom does not matter; what matters is regularity, what matters is the common measure. X., Y., and Z.: you’ve brought them together in your commentary. You’ve brought them together in the expression of your creative practice. You’ve explained yourself; X., Y. and Z. are brought together in your explanation. You’ve explained yourself via X., Y. and Z. – how marvellous! What labour! What erudtion! Admirable work that passes via X. and Y.and Z.!

The introducer-engineers are coming. Everything must run on tracks of the same gauge. The train of academia must run along a standardised track. Every thinker must fit and every thought must be made to fit. Never mind, the introducers are busy. Never mind, they are working for all of us, for the whole, for the Dyson Sphere of academia as it encloses the sun of creativity. Everything will be enclosed, don’t fear; not a chink of light will escape. The academic engineers construct the sphere which will enclose the sun, and upon whose inner surface we will live. Not a scrap of energy must be unaccounted for.

The remark on religion will launch a thousand books on religion. The remark on sovereignty will launch a thousand books on sovereignty. Paraphrase is all; paraphrase and introduction is all. Nothing will be missed; not a scrap will be lost. Negentropic academia! Deniers of drift and randomness! All is caught and the nets are pulled in. Everything is caught, and the nets are pulled in, full of strange fish and creatures of the deep. Out went the nets until every thinker is caught and weighed and measured and then returned to its natural habitat with a tag so we can track them.

We need to follow the great migration of the thinker-beasts; we need to know what depths they plumb. We will not dive or travel; that is what they do, the thinker-beasts upon whom we live. We track them, with our tracking-devices. Not a scrap they write will escape. Not the most occasional of occasional scraps will escape. Every remark will be recorded; every performance videotaped. Truly we will follow them to the ends of the earth! Truly, just as the record companies understand maverick figures as boutique artists who sell to a particular group will we known out thinker-beasts as maverick figures who will appeal to a particular group.

Ah, you’re that kind of person, well go and read her. Ah, that’s the kind of thing you like, go off and read him. And just as Amazon will tell you what other customers who bought book X. have bought books by Y. and Z. thinker X. will lead to other such thinkers, Y. to Z., until you know the thought of all, until all is grasped and understood and you are part of the work of all, sun-encloser, academic engineer. All is grasped, all understood, and you will do your part to track the movements of another thinker-beast, another ur-theorist upon whom an introduction can be written.

The far sighted and long eared spot them – the new thinker-beasts. There are always more, it seems, always new things to be brought ashore. How profound is the deep! How deep and dark is old Europe! Always new thinkers to be caught! Always the new, one after another, one thinker after another, to be caught and introduced! What sport it is for the far-sighted and the long-eared to spot the new thinker-beasts! And how they rush when one is sighted!

Over here, away from the deep and the dark of old Europe, they become boutique thinkers, these thinker-beasts. They attract experts and expositors; they thought is paraphrased and introduced, and then the next stage of assimilation can occur: application. For the introductions and paraphrases serve the great academic commentary mill, where the oldest books and made new with the newest techniques. So does academia receive fresh blood! So does it come, the blood and meat of these great beasts! The academic whalers carve up the greatest beast! The whalers carve and dissect the greatest carcasses! And then they come, the appliers of thought. Then come those who take thought and apply it elsewhere, the adaptors and engineers of thought.

The Long Rot

The corpse of the university floats face down in the water. We are all poking it with sticks. Is it really dead, the university? Is that really its bloated, blue-faced corpse? Yes, it is dead, and there it is floating, face down. In the end, there is no point pretending, not anymore. The university is dead and there is its corpse.

Now the swelling and the rotting. Now it will swell and will rot, devoured from the inside. Now begins the rot and the creatures of the rotting, the maggots who will hatch into flies and leave the corpse. Now come the maggots, the managers who will devour what is left to feed themselves and fly away. How their salaries are rising, the managers! How much money they earn!

The lid has been taken off their salaries, that’s what is said. The lid has been taken off to encourage competition. Now there is no lid and no limit. Now begins the rot and the creatures of the rot, who live off the corpse that rots. Now the rot, the long rot, how long will it take? Now comes the long rot, and really it could take forever.

Now the long rot, now comes the eternal rotting and the creatures who live from the rot. There it is, the corpse of the university, blue-faced, swollen. But this is only the beginning. There are creatures who live from death, who are drawn to it. There are parasites who live from death and are produced from death. For the corpse, in truth, is a breeding ground. The corpse is where Capital comes to leave its eggs. The university is that rotten place where Capital deposits its eggs. Eggs in rotten flesh. Spores in zombied flesh. They are here, the ones who live from death and the long rot.

The Old Elite

But was it ever alive, the university? Isn’t it the worst kind of nostalgia to think it was once alive? After all, wasn’t it over ever the breeding ground for State-Thought, for State-Philosophy and State-Criticism and State-Sociology and State-Political-Science? Wasn’t it only ever a breeding group for the State and for Capital? The old professor said, it wasn’t always like that. The professor said, it wasn’t always like this. Once the meeting rooms were full, once the senior common rooms were full, once there were seminars everyone attended.

But is that how it was? Is that really how it was? Who were they, who filled the meeting rooms and common rooms? Who were they, who filled the seminars, the old crowd? The old elite, no doubt of that. The old elite, who are disappearing now. The old elite, who, stunned at what happened, are disappearing to the countryside and to their houses. The new breed replace them. The new breed, harassed and harried, take their places. But who have they replaced? The power of their predecessors has gone. The power they might have had is gone. The power is in the hands of the management, there’s no doubt of that. The power has passed out of the hands of academics and into those of the management.

Who have they replaced? No one at all; they have no ancestors. For it was then that the university died, in that gap between the old and the new, between one breed and another. It died – but wasn’t this death something liberating? Wasn’t the dispersal of the old elite something marvellous? Wasn’t there at least an afternoon or two when the university seemed to open to a new future, a future of the non-elite, a future welcoming those who would never have belonged in the university?

The dinosaurs had gone, and now the new breed had come, those who would never had had a chance in the old system. Then the death of the university was welcome, for this death was only that of the old elite. This death was welcome, and even the capitalisation of the university was welcome for a time, because it meant courses had to be offered to students outside the old paternalism and the old canon.

Yes, for an afternoon or two, a breath of wind passed through the university. The university had died; capital had killed it, but this was welcome, for the king was dead and there was no king to replace it. Capital swelled in the corpse. Capital ran in its veins, which meant, for a time, students had to be appeased: if they wanted to be taught Nietzsche or Hegel, that was at last possible.

In the late 80s, in most university philosophy departments, it was impossible to study Nietzsche or Hegel however much we wanted to, but now, in the mid 90s, it was possible, because the students brought in revenue and the students had to be appeased. Capital ran in the dead veins of the university, but this was welcome; it was novelty itself. But what happened? Capital was captured. Capital lent itself to new forces of accountability and quality.

Sublime Capital

There is no question but that there is a sublimity to Capital, a deathly beauty. It commands awe, like a starry sky. So the starry sky opened for a time over the dead university. The old elite were now irrelevant; whether they knew it or not, their time was up. The old paternalism was defunct. Students had a voice because they brought revenue to the university. Now they had to be appeased, whatever the old elite wanted. It was the new regime; the former polytechnics had research money for the first time.

This was welcome, at first: the former polytechnics, which were soon to become the new universities, had money to give to staff for research and to potential students for research. This was the new regime. The university had died, but it was opening and transforming and becoming something marvellous. Granted, it didn’t last long. It barely happened, but there was a moment when something marvellous began to open. Staff grumbled, but they were forced to widen participation. Staff moaned, but the university had to reconnect to the local community, if only to attract students. People who would never have gone on to postgraduate study were given grants to study. People who never would have gone onto academic jobs were permitted to do so.

The New Elite

Yes, the university was dead, but this was welcome. The chance of a new kind of educational system opened. No longer the divide between one institution and another, between school and university, between college and university, but a new whole. But what happened? The old universities organised themselves to make sure they would get all the money from government research funding. They quickly put together departments responsible for drawing up funding bids, and attracted money to themselves. The old elite, shaken, began to reform, albeit without the old set of values, the tedious old conservatism.

Wily professors, marginal in the old elite, came forward. Wily professors linked with wily administrators drew research money to themselves. The old distinction between old and new universities was reinforced; the old distinction between Oxbridge and the rest confirmed itself. But it was too late: the myth of the old elite had dispersed, and there was nothing to hold anyone staff but competitive bids for research income. The old elite was dispersed, staffing had been significantly reduced, student numbers were increasingly rapidly, and nothing held anyone together.

Now was the time of great movement and no achievement. Now there was only the long decay, the decomposition of the corpse and of the creatures of the decomposition. How quickly they came, the flies, to lay their eggs. How quickly they hatched, those eggs. Until the university was full of maggots, blind and wriggling. Until the university became a hatching place for the maggots who would grow fat from money. Now maggots appeared wherever there was surplus value. The maggots, non-academics, managers appointed from industry, soaked up all the money. And the academics, those who were left, were full of resentment.

Now the two great forces of the university were capital and resentment. A few wily professors were left, and a few of the new breed, who would exploit the chaos and open up small departments in the midst of the decay. New disciplines appeared here and there, operating very precariously. This was welcome; it was impressive, but these were local operations and very precarious. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, there is the great hubbub, the great activity. Meanwhile, there is only activity, albeit the activity of the decay.

Recourse to the Pub

What did you do today at work? What happened today? The philosopher bids for research money and the historian bids for research money. The political scientist bids for research money and the historian of art bids for research money. What happened at work? A little teaching, but that was nothing. Some teaching, pleasant enough, but that was nothing. Some teaching, some administration related to teaching, but what was that, really?

First of all, there was money to be raised. Firstly, the attempt to raise money. Then the attempt to consolidate your position as a teaching unit. Secondly, the attempt to lodge yourself more deeply in the rotting corpse of the university. Secondly, the insecurity, the contract you are on, which demands you lodge yourself more deeply in what-calls-itself-a-university.

Of what else do we speak, we the new breed? Of the insecurity of contracts and rsearch funding. Of the impossibility of any security, and the impossibility of attracting research income. And of our resentment, and the resentment of others, as it turns on those who attract research income. We would like to be the little-department-who-could, but in reality we are the little-department-who-can’t. We’d like to succeed, but in fact we are failing, as we must fail.

For, in truth, what’s in it for us? Paid on the lowest possible point on the scale, publishing as much or more as the professors, nothing matters but income generation, but who can be bothered. For a time, the quantity of research counted for something. I am of the generation in whom it was drilled that a great deal had to be published, and I published a great deal. But I am already antiquated, for this no longer matters, in fact it is irrelevant. You can publish whatever you like, but that’s something you do in your leisure time. Publish whatever you like, that’s up to you, but it is an activity for evenings and weekends and no longer the concern of the university.

What does it matter what you publish? What does it matter what you read or write? There’s no incentive to read and write. Reading? I’ve given up reading. Writing? Why bother? I prefer the pub to writing and the pub to reading. After work, to the pub, and to laugh at the impossibility of reading and writing, and the folly of those who thought we might survive in the new regime. For in time, we’ll go to the wall. In time, it won’t be long, we’ll be put out of our misery, and we’ll take our place on the dole. In the meantime, the pub, the glory of the pub. In the meantime, work’s over, so let’s go to the pub and laugh about the money we haven’t raised.

Corpse of the University

The corpse of the university floats face down in the water. I’m glad it was murdered. But why couldn’t it have mutated into something new? Why has it reorganised itself in a ghastly parody of the old elitism? Sometimes I dream of the great privatisation that will allow capital to loosen up the rigor mortis. But this is only a symptom of the disappearance of the old socialist dream – of the government that would force the university to connect with the region in which it is based and with the people of that region. And perhaps the government that would dissolve the university-form and the school-form and dream up a new educational system. (This is not idle utopianism: think of The Open University …)

The Topslice

The university is over, everyone agrees with that. The dream is over, the university is finished, everyone says the same thing. There are no universities; there are money making machines, that is true, but no universities. There are no universities, and there are no students, that’s clear enough. There are units of resource, but no students. And there are no lecturers. True, there are still some old professors, still a few left, but there are no lecturers. No one teaches. There is no teaching, just as there is no reading. Students don’t read, staff don’t read, no one reads, the university is finished.

Some old professors, stunned by the changes, wander about, but in truth they are lost, they don’t know what’s happened. Where is the university?: that’s what the look on their faces says. Only the most wily professors survive. Only those immured to change. The rest founder: where is the university?: that’s the look on their faces. What happened? Where am I?: that’s what their faces say.

Are there students? No doubt for themselves there are students. Students who say to themselves, we are students. But they are barely taught. The students are no students, but units of resource, and are barely taught. So too are subject areas units of resource, they barely exist. There is no Philosophy, not any more. There’s no English Literature, not any more. True, there are professors of Philosophy and professors of English Literature, there are still a few people who remember how it was when there were universities, but they are coming up to retirement. There are a few professors around, but the university is keen to pension them off, to get rid of them, so the takeover can complete itself.

‘The university’? I refer to what-was-a-university. What was a university and is a university no longer. They are leaving, the professors, stunned and bewildered. What happened? When did it occur? Get out, they tell themselves, and get out. Meanwhile, the new breed are taking over. I am one of them. Rat-like, desperate, looking to earn revenue, to bring money into what-was-a-university. Rat like, desperate, running along in the maze as quickly as possible and dreaming of ways to bring money into what-was-a-university.

For we have to earn money, we know that. We have to bid for money, we know that. What matters is to bid for money, to bring money in, and to swell what-was-the-university’s coffers. What matters is money, is revenue, and what-was-the-university’s topslice. Because the what-was-the-university has to make a little profit, there has to be a topslice. You teach to make a profit and your research must be tied to profit. Forget Philosophy, forget Literature, those are long dead. There is no Philosophy, no Literature. No Philosophy, no Literature, no Political Science, no Sociology, nothing.

Overteaching

It’s over, the university’s over and we live in the aftermath. It’s a numbers game. It’s a profit-making game. If it can’t be quantified, it did not happen. If it does not bring in money, it has no occurred. Nothing happens unless it makes money. The auditors will tell you you’re overteaching. You’re overteaching. A hour and seminar a week for the students: that’s overteaching. You should be concentrating on other things. Income generation, for example, or preparing paperwork.

Teaching is always overteaching. That’s why there are no students, not anymore. No one is taught and nothing is happening. There is no teaching, only income generation. Countable bodies, each a unit of resource, in what used to be called a lecture hall, but no lectures and no students. There is no university. No Philosophy, no Literature, no Politics and no History: there is nothing. It’s a smokescreen. Everywhere there is activity, but nothing is happening. The university is finished, and the takeover is nearly complete.

Do you remember teaching, do you remember that? Do you remember studying? Do you remember how it was, once upon a time? The older staff looked stunned. The wily ones survive, but the rest are stunned. It doesn’t matter what they write, not anymore. They can’t quite believe it. All their work for nothing. Everything they did, for nothing. For what matters now is only countable bodies. What matters is revenue, and the generation of revenue. What-used-to-be-called-courses have to be as popular as possible, that’s the criteria. What-used-to-be-called-courses for what-used-to-be-called students in what-used-to-be-called-a-university.

Resentment

You’ll be okay as long as you bring in student revenue, says W. That’s true, but what about the other great force of what-used-to-be-called-the-university, that is, resentment?, I say. You’re okay as long as you’re making a profit, says W. But what about resentment? Anything interesting and difficult must be hunted down and closed down. If they scent something interesting and different, they’ll close it straight down, there’s no question of that. Interesting? Difficult? Then resentment builds up. Resentment sets out to find you.

You’re enjoying yourself, they decide and in the wrong way. Your units-of-resource are enjoying themselves, and in the wrong way. One solution: to shut you down. The solution: get rid of them. Resentment spots you, and then sets out towards you, with one intention: to spoil your fun. You’re having fun, your units-of-resource (students) are having fun, so you’ll have to closed down. It happened to Cultural Studies in the UK. It happened to the CCRU. It was hunted down and closed down. They spotted it, the resenters, so it had to be hunted down, and then closed down.

Communist Russia

It’s like communist Russia, says W. If you don’t go over the top in your reports, someone will get shot. It’s like communist Russia, says someone else who lived in communist Russia, it’s exactly the same. I escaped to England from communist Russia and now it’s exactly the same in England, the same as communist Russia. If you don’t go over the top in your reports, says W., someone will get shot. This is no time for doubts and hesitations and constructive criticism, says W., it’s like communist Russia, where unless everything is fantastic and peerless and exemplary practice, someone will be shot. Of course they won’t be shot exactly, but there’s always a way of getting rid of people, of freezing them out. Take that professor who complained and was moved to a tiny office. He had a nice office with a good view and he was moved, when he complained, to a tiny office with no windows and no view.

Never complain, that’s the answer. Do everything you can to go unnoticed, that’s the answer. From the first, attract no attention, let them busy themselves elsewhere. Attract no attention, do everything you’re told, no matter how arduous it is, and maybe they won’t notice you. Because the way they’ll get you is through quality. That’s the way they’ll attack you, through academic quality. You may be the best department in the world, your units-of-resource might be happy, your staff might be happy, but if your paperwork is not up to scratch, they’ll get you.

Yes, that’s how they’ll get you, that’s how they’ll hunt you down, through your paperwork. Through the minutes of your meetings. Through your reports and minutes, they’ll go through them one after another. That’s why, as in communist Russia, you have to go over the top in your reports. Everything is improving tenfold. Every year it’s getting better, its all improving, your operation is becoming more and more streamlined. Every year, it’s getting better. Every year you’re learning and growing. Every year, quality is enhanced. Every year, quality improves. Every year! What a miracle! Quality is going up just as A-levels are going up and everything is going up! The world is improving, it gets better and better! We are already in paradise, and paradise is improving! It’s getting better, everything is improving!

The Probehead

It’s only a matter of time, says, W., and we’re out. We’ve not long left, says W., and we’ll be kicked out. It’s all over, says W., and we’ll be kicked out. Because they’re hunting us down. Because they’ve caught the scent and we are the quarry. Because they’ve set out towards us, they know something’s different, something’s interesting, they’ve caught the scent and now we are the quarry. What chance do we have? We can lie low and hope they don’t notice us. We can hope there’s trouble at the top, a change of governments, confusion, and they’ll have great concerns than us. But what chance do we have, really?

It’s all over, the university is over, there are only money-making machines and resentment machines. The double whammy, money-making and resentment. If it was down to money-making, we’d be okay, but there’s resentment as well. Resentment and quality. Quality is the probehead of resentment. Quality sends out its probehead like the Martian machines in War of the Worlds. Infinitely subtle, infinitely adaptable, the probehead is looking for us. Keep still. Hopefully the paperwork will be good enough. Hopefully we’ll survive another round. The probehead is winding through the corridors. Hopefully they’ll get someone else. Hopefully it’ll be someone else’s turn and not ours.

In the end, they’ll see us. In the end, they’ll know us. Capital is the all-seeing, all-knowing eye. Capital is looking out for us, as Sauron looked out over Middle Earth. Sauron and the Ring-Wraiths are looking for us. The auditors are Ring-Wraiths and in the service of Sauron. The auditors are made of resentment, they are nothing other than resentment. And they are great counters and scrutinisers. They’ll riffle through your minutes in a second. They’ll be through your paperwork all at once. They’ll have scented you and come for your paperwork. If your paperwork is not in order, nothing can save you. Then resentment has its day. Then resentment laughs, for it has triumphed.

Rats

Meanwhile the rats are swarming. Rats like me are swarming through the corridors. Look how quickly we run! Look how much we do in a day! Everything, it’s done, we do it, we can do more, there’s always more to do! Rats in the service of quality. Rats crawling over one another, rats crawling over the dead bodies of other rats, in the service of quality. Rats who know they will be hunted down if they keep still. Rats active because they know they are the quarry.

The rats are frantic. I am one of them. I am another rat, a rat among rats, and I scamper over rats just as others scamper over me. I disgust myself, I am a rat, but what matters is to keep going and not to stop. How I disgust myself! Has it come to this! But no matter, I am a rat, and I must keep going. Is this what it was all for? Is this what it’s come to? No matter. I am a rat, I have adapted myself, I am fast and I am frantic. Perhaps I won’t be caught. Perhaps I’ll run faster than the other rats, and I won’t be caught. But we know, each of us, that we will all be caught. We know the end is coming and we’ll all be caught.

I have an essay on Appelfeld at Ready Steady Book.

They are coming from the future, the auditors, prepare for them. They are coming, the auditors, turn your faces to the future. Soon, they’ll come, the auditors, the new barbarians. Soon, they’ll sweep over us, the auditors who have come from the future, soon from the future, they will come, the auditors, the new barbarians. They are coming, feared or unfeared, from the future.

The auditors are coming; be ready, ready your paperwork. The auditors approach, as they are always approaching. A surprise audit, a challenge audit, can happen at any moment; be vigilant. At any moment, a surprise audit, watch out, keep your paperwork prepared, ready it each day, make it ready at each hour of the day.

They are coming; your paperwork is vulnerable. Above all, what is written is vulnerable; what is said does not matter, what is written matters. They are coming, the future is bringing them, they will reach you from the future, so make sure your paperwork is in order, make sure everything you do is written down, make sure everything you write is written down.

The future belongs to auditors. The auditors are coming in great droves. We do not know what they’ll do. We don’t know what they are thinking. We have guidelines, it is true, but auditors are unpredictable.

They are coming, the auditors. From the future, they will come, the auditors, the marauders. Theirs is your paperwork. It is theirs from the start. Theirs are your minutes and your reports. There is no such thing as a private set of minutes; there is no such thing as a private report.

Coming, from the future, the auditors. Be ready. Prepare yourself, prepare your paperwork. When you meet them, be bullish, be upfront. Admit to no error, admit to no defeat. Show you’re prepared to learn, that’s important. Show you’re ready to learn, but admit no defeat. Show you’re ready to listen, but that you will not be pushed around. But in truth you have already been pushed around. In truth, you were pushed around from the first.

Quality is on their minds, the marauders. Every loop must be closed, they will search for open loops. Your paperwork is vulnerable, it is your soft and vulnerable flesh stretched out. Your paperwork is the sail spread and vulnerable, for the auditors can blow up a storm.

Be ready. Be prepared, spread your sail, but make sure it is patched up and enduring. Spread it wide, catch the breeze, but be prepared for the audit-storm, the storm of barbarians and marauders. Be ready, learn what you can of their language. Brace yourself against the future, catch the wind but not the storm.

Quality is all, quality is the sole measure, all is quality, the sun, the moon, the seas, your vessel: all is made of quality, everything is quality, and quality is assured. The cosmos is quality and asks to be assured. In the beginning, there was quality, and quality must be assured.

The loops must be closed, no that. Every quality loop must be closed, and nothing must escape. Quality must feed itself, it must flow, Ourobos, into itself, conserving itself. Quality circulates and returns to itself. Quality steers the moon’s orbit and the earth’s orbit, quality is the force that binds the sun to the galaxy and the galaxy to the core. Quality is cosmic or it is nothing at all.

Do not ask them to define quality. Do not ask for a definition. Do not press them, like Socrates, for a definition. They will only be able to gesture. They will only be able to say, quality is excellence, and excellence is quality. They will be able to speak only in great tautologies. For quality cannot be defined, just as excellence cannot be defined. They escape us; they belong to the gods. But even the gods are audited; even Poseidon is subject to quality reviews. The highest gods are audited by higher gods; and those higher gods, in turn, are audited by the cosmos itself. And who audits the cosmos? It is auditing; the audit audits, it gives auditing: formulations difficult because auditing does not give itself up all at once. Difficult formulations because there is something which withdraws at the heart of auditing, which allows the essence of auditing to be forgotten. But what is it that allows this essence to be forgotten thus? What, in auditing, hides the essence of auditing?

They come, the auditors, but even they do not understand auditing. They come to us, the auditors, but they are only its agents. Perhaps, beyond them, there are quality-mystics, great quality-seers and quality-prophets who look into the future and find quality there. Perhaps, at the heart of the Quality Assurance Agency, there are the great bodies similar to those of the Guild Navigators in Dune. Perhaps, half-blind, half deaf, but with great and swollen bodies, these quality-navigators steer the Quality Assurance Agency on its great path. Perhaps in their blindness, in their deafness, they steer the Quality Assurance Agency and steer us all on our celestial voyage.

The auditors are only agents of auditing, its minions, its worshippers. The auditors are only the servants of the audit, and are far from its heart. For the essence of auditing is nothing auditological. Its essence is such that it hides itself; it withdraws, even as its withdrawal is forgotten. Only a great seer, a prophet can know this withdrawal and speak of it to others. Alas, it is closed to us who know only the traces of this withdrawal as it reaches us in the vast forms we have to fill in and the reports we have to write. Alas, we do not know it, we can discern – but only in our greatest strength, our greatest ardency – the traces left by auditing. What would it be to stare the audit in the face? What glory! What roaring! But in truth, whoever sees the essence of the audit dies. In truth, no one can approach.

They have come, the auditors, and all around us is ruin. They have come, the auditors, the storm, and have left us with ruins. They have come like a great force, a great hurricane, and our ship is torn and leaking. Truly we tried to prepare our vessel for the storm. How we tried to make it firm, to repair any leaks! But we were vulnerable, our paperwork was vulnerable, we knew that. Our sails spread to catch the wind were what exposed us to the full force of the stream.

Be careful, voyagers on the high seas of quality. Be careful, you who cast out from a port and venture into the high seas, you great sails of paperwork spread to catch the wind. Caution, voyagers, look forward, know that a storm can come out of nowhere, know that surprise audits are now possible. Prepare, oh voyagers, mend your sails, go over them, inspect them to the neglect of everything else. What does teaching matter? What do students matter? For nothing matters that is not written down. Nothing matters that is not quantifiable.

A smile is not quantifiable; the time you give is not measurable. The time you are given, the time you give is not measurable, so do not give time. No smiles, no time given, for all time is the audit’s and all smiles must be smiled at the audit. Give no time; take it – take time and give it back to the audit. Take time from teaching, take time from teaching preparation, take the time you had to speak to a student you bumped into in the corridor and give it back to the audit. For time is what has to be taken back from your teaching, from teaching preparation, from anything that cannot be measured and written down.

Do not give time, be wary of giving time and those who would take time from you. For in truth, they are taking time from the audit, they are stealing the valuble minutes of the audit, they are preventing your from closing quality loops. Keep time, hoard time, take back a little surplus-value of time each day to feed to the audit and to quality. Do not give time, give nothing, but take time back, give the minimum and take time back. Take it back to go over your paperwork, take it back to prepare your reports, take it back to go over your minutes, for everything must be ready, do you understand?

The auditors are coming, and I’m afraid. I heard rumours, we are next, the auditors are coming, and I fear we are not ready. A storm is brewing; the distant sky is black, and it is from there they will come, the auditors. I am frightened. I fear for myself and for the others around me. I fear our vessel is not strong enough. We must tighten up the operation, I tell the others. Continual monitoring, continual inspection, we must be ready. Look to your paperwork, comrades, for that’s all that matters. Look to your paperwork, inspect your paperwork, scrutinise your paperwork, for that is what counts, and nothing else counts. If it isn’t written down, it does not count. If it can’t be quantified, proved and written down it does not matter.

Brace yourself, comrades, for they are coming, the auditors. Do not ask, why us?, do not ask, why did we deserve it?, for it was written that they could come and they are coming. It is fate, comrades, in truth, they were always coming and were coming from the first. Our fate, comrades, our destiny to brace ourselves against the coming storm. Be upfront and bullish, comrades, admit nothing. Be upfront and proactive, colleagues, look to your paperwork, give evidence of your vigilance. Give evidence that every quality loop will be closed.

Will I be strong enough? Will I be ready? I am drooping, comrades, help me up. I am afraid, comrades, for they are coming, the auditors, and I cannot understand their language. Help me, comrades, I pray to you, stand with me, hold me up, tilt up my chin so I confront the storm. Mind not my tears, comrades, mind not my protests, for they are coming and it is inevitable.

In my heart, I am afraid. In my heart, I know I care too little for quality and too much for everything else. My heart droops, I am weak, for I know there are others who speak the language of quality better than I, others, time-stealers, who can prepare without distraction! My eyes burn, comrades, but I am not ready. I am bent over my report each evening, comrades, but I am not ready. Teaching, comrades, what is that? It’s forgotten, comrades, everything is forgotten, everything forgets itself except for the audit. There is only forgetting and the audit, which is why everything has to be written down. Then at least there will be writing, forgetting and the audit.

Leave nothing to chance. Look to your paperwork, write, write, because otherwise it will be forgotten, otherwise we’ll have only our memories to rely upon, which are growing weaker by the day, for who can remember anything except that the auditors are coming. Write! Set it all down! Then at least there will be something that remembers, even if it is not us. Write, and what we write will remember for us. Write, and our reports will keep memory in our place, the archive will live as we will not. Write, above all write, set it down, let there be proof, let there be records. Nothing must be left to chance, for chance is on the auditor’s side, chance is what they possess, not us, initiative is theirs, not ours, for they can come at any time, the auditors, and they are coming.

Write, let there be writing, that is all initiative leaves to us, our freedom is only freedom to write and prepare, chance is theirs, time is theirs, they have everything we lack except our writing. Even they, the auditors, depend on our writing. True, they will pass quickly through our paperwork. True, they will pass quickly like a horde of locusts. How quickly they can read! How practised they are, how ready! They will read in the base room, and we will wait outside. In the base room they will read and we will wait, outside. Imagine them tearing open each box and opening each file! Imagine their eyes passing down our minutes and reports! I shudder, but I know the chance of such paperwork is their gift to us. I tremble, but such paperwork is the chance they give us, we are allowed at least this chance, this opportunity.

It is said that whoever sees the audit dies. I am dying, comrades, but not because I’ve seen the audit, but because I fear it will see me. Audit, eye, you sweep the horizon. Audit, I know you are staring up at me from my paperwork. Audit, I know you will see us in the eyes of the auditors. The all-seeing, all-knowing eye sees all, and all wither. Truly the eye of the audit sees all and measures all, truly this eye, this single, glaring eye, ever vigilant and never sleeping knows the measure and worth of all things.

We have spread our sails, comrades, and that’s all we can do. In truth, they must always be spread, must always be braced, for time is the auditors’ and chance is the auditors’ and we have nothing but our paperwork. Tonight, comrades, I do solitary vigil on the deck of our ship. You are asleep, but I am awake, as I know the audit is awake and watching me. Strange comfort, knowing it is out there, and I am seen! I am writing, it is true, but this is not a report. Is this permitted? I am seen; the audit-eye is watching me, and unlike Winston Smith I know there is no hiding place. Permit me this small writing, audit. Give me this small stretch of time, this midnight vigil. For tomorrow is the day you might come.

Day 1000 of our non-careers, coffee in the autumn sun up by the station. We speculate, as ever, about jobs. There’s a job coming up at X. There may be something at Y., but not for a couple of years. And isn’t there a research post at Z.? And the ongoing decline of our kind of philosophy. ‘Basically, we’re fucked’. And those who work around us in our department become like gods. What do they expect from us? What do they want? What are they thinking? And we’re getting older. ‘I’m 35 for fuck’s sake’.

Caffeine in the bloodstream, new hope. But you’ve got that article coming out, haven’t you? Why don’t you try and get something in sociology? I’m publishing in religious studies. I’ve got something coming out in cultural theory. We should got to a sociology conference. Who’s paying for coffee? I am. No, I am. Who of us can afford anything, let alone coffee? Small rebellion against the state of things: I’ll pay. Small potlatch.

Who of us in a position to understand whether we’ll be hired or not this coming year. If A. gets a sabbatical, then … If B. gets research leave, then … Autumn sun. The year is turning towards the new term. Who of us will get hired, and if so, for what? The sun falls equally on each of us. But who does the department favour? They might give the teaching to D., she’s just finished her Ph.D. No, they’ll probably give it to E., it’s his turn to get teaching experience. Yes, but F.’s very close to the head of department.

Then there are the wild cards, roving bands of part-timers who pass locust-like from university to university. They are pared down, hungry, hyper-efficient, the shock-troops of the new contractualism. They see a chink in the department and they are there, enlivening the research forums, attending the colloquia, joshing with the head of department in the corridor. Damn it, F.’s from Oxford, as well.

New term comes. F. hoovers up the hours. I’m given one hour a week’s teaching. One hour. F. is given several hours. The Head of Department, ‘He’s more experienced than you’. ‘He’s got more publications than you’. I’m going to write a letter to the Head of Department I tell my friend in the sun. Will I write it? The sun falls equally on each, but we are not all equally favoured. If I write a letter, what then? Will the department look upon me less favourably?

In truth, by this time next year, the Head of Department will have forgotten everything. It will begin again, all over again. For this year, F. is teaching in our place. F. who buys his own white board markers, his own chalk. F. who makes his own handouts. As part-timers, we are given neither white board markers nor printing privileges. The secretaries and administrators know we are scum. We know we are scum. In we drift and out we drift, like scum on the tide. But F. has bought a packet of new white board markers in several colours. F. has a packet of coloured chalk and a packet of white chalk. Damn it, F. even has transparencies.

Where did he get them from? I ask my friend in the autumn sunlight. Then we hear he is bringing in videos and arranging screenings. He wants to start up a philosophy and film society. He wants to get the students involved. How does he do it? He teaches – what – 8 hours a term. 8 hours for 20 weeks a year. How does he live on it? Independent means. They all have independent means. He’s come down from Oxford with his independent means. And then he has the Oxford manner. A bit of tweed.

He really does wear tweed. He wears tweed and what do we wear? We look like scum, we dress like scum. Dress for the job you want. What job do we want? We are scum on the tide, drifting in and out. The trouble is, we know we’re scum. How is it F. doesn’t know? He has the right attitude. He’s dressed for the job he wants. Here he comes with his briefcase. Don’t talk to him. He comes up to us, all friendly. Shall we kill him? God, he’s pleased with himself. In he goes with his briefcase full of transparencies, videos, coloured markers and coloured chalks. He’s got it all, the bastard.

Of course he gets a job elsewhere a few weeks into term. Of course he’s lined up a job somewhere else, he’s off. In a year a volume of The New X. has appeared, which he’s co-edited. In another year, he’s edited a special edition of a journal. Meanwhile, the department has rung us. Do you want to split F.’s hours between you. F.’s hours! Of course! We divide them between us. Coffee in the autumn sun, a few weeks into term, you have five hours teaching and so do I. It’s all turned out pretty well.

I have a column of sorts over at the new look Ready Steady Book. The latest piece is on Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden.

Desperate Need

October 2000, and I am on the dole for the thousandth day, the hundred thousandth day, for the millionth-and-first day, on the dole, working, but still on the dole, working a few hours for the university, but still on the dole, still claiming council tax exemption and housing benefit. Working, it is true, but not enough, there are never enough hours, so you’re on the dole. Working a few hours here and there, picking up what hours you can, but on the dole, on benefits, visiting the job centre, signing on every couple of weeks, standing in line and signing on every fortnight.

Working, yes, but you know you won’t get paid until February, that this is the deal, you begin working in September, you teach in good faith, you prepare your teaching, you get the bus to work, you attend the lectures on the courses you are supposed to be teaching and then supply the seminars. Working, but on the dole, because there is always the timelag, always that the university cannot manage to pay you for many months, always the six month lag, always that length of time when it cannot, for some reason, may a payment to you.

So roll on February, you say to yourself, February can’t come too soon, you say to yourself, because although you sign on, you are not entitled to full benefits, you work after all, though you are not paid for work, not until February, but you work nonetheless, which means you are not jobseeking, not entirely, so there’s always the suspicion, always non-comprehension, you have to make your case again each week, over and again, and they search each week on their database for lectureships in philosophy, no, nothing’s come up, they say, have you thought of anything else, they say, and you think to yourself, I’ve thought of everything else and that’s the trouble.

October 2000, housing benefit isn’t being paid, the City Council are months behind, and helping only those who are in desperate need. Those in desperate need are told to come to the Council to make their case. On the bus, up to town, across the squate, into the City Council, along the long corridors, through rooms which are only corridors, and there it is, the waiting room, but it is really a corridor, and the chairs lined up, take a ticket and take a seat, you will be seen, just be patient, so I take my place alongside the others, we sit, minutes pass, then hours pass, and we are asked to fill in forms about our desperate need, then to wait a little longer, and so we fill in forms about our desperate need and wait a little longer, and then we are told to submit our forms about our desperate need and come back another day, so out we go into the sunshine, another morning gone, another half-day wasted, we queued, but we were not seen for all our desperate need, this is the way of things, we are unemployed or half-employed after all, and the City Council is doing its best to sort out the mess, after all, and there is a great deal of good will in the civil servants we meet, everyone wants the best for us, everyone sympathises with us about our desperate need, no doubt they’ve been on courses on sympathising and empathising, no doubt they’ve also gone on courses for negotating and managing, no doubt they know how to deal with us and our about our desperate need, the long term unemployed, no doubt they are prepared to be tough, if necessary, and that they do not and cannot tolerate violence or verbal abuse. Out we go into the sunshine with about our desperate need. Another day, back on the bus, back home, moneyless, rentless, back home with no money and no chance of money, on the bus and wandering about those whose need is so desperate they never made it to the bus and to the City Council.

In desperate need, skint, cashless, rentless, hopeless, I phone the university, but nobody’s there, no one will take my calls, they’ve heard my whining before, they’ve heard my carping, they know what I’ll say, I always say it, the same lament, the same wailing. I go to the library to write a melodramatic e-mail, I’m in desperate need, I write, but am I in desperate need, not really, if I was in such need, I couldn’t write, I’m in desperate need, I couldn’t have made it to the library, couldn’t have logged into to my e-mail account, couldn’t have typed a line, nevertheless, I’m in desperate need, that’s what I write to my employers in the department of accountancy, I’m in desperate need, I write, and I need an advance payment, but it’s university policy not to make payments before February, that’s that. I know that, they know that, my silent correspondents. The issue’s been raised before. I raised it, they’ve heard me raise it. They’ve explained, they’re helpless, it’s structural, what can they do, they wish they could help, but they can’t help.

Should I go on strike? Should I withhold my services? Should I just not turn up to teach my Libyan students English? Should I just not get on the bus and not go to work to teach the students whose company in Tripoli is paying £16,000 to the university in fees but who are taught accountancy, yes accountancy, which is to say the English vocabulary used by accountants in England, by me, who knows nothing of accountancy, not a thing, who is the least qualified person to teach accountancy at the university, but I have to make a living,

I’ll teach anything, and so I teach in the business school, I take on those students who pay enormous fees to be taught by me, an hourly paid lecturer who receives £23 an hour, a fair amount, it is true, but then that includes preparation and marking and everything else, it includes the ride on the bus and the trips to the library, in I come, away I go, without an office, without a room, but in I come, away I go, promptly and efficiently, not overstaying my welcome, another of the ghosts of the academic world, another of the living dead of the academic world, the desperate ones who haunt the university, the ones no one wants to see, the untouchables and unpalatables and we might as well be unthinkable, we who barely exist, who exist only enough to deliver a course, who can be trusted only when all the other teachers have disappeared, only when they’ve vanished and can’t be contacted, then as a last resort, as the last of last resorts, always in a panic and at the last minute, I am contacted, they reach me by phone, after all what else was I doing, what else could I do, but wait by the phone, day after day, hardly existing, in which was never really desperate need, but what was need nevertheless, one day after another lived in need, a half life half-lived in need.

So the day passes, so another day is wasted, so another day am I too cross and frustrated to work, another day in obscurity, another day in vague if not desperate need, another day on the other side of the glass, another day dreaming of February, another day dreaming of payday, when will it come?, and of housing benefit, when will it come?, another day unemployed, but the unemployed have days to waste and time is on their side, all time is on their side, they have all of time, they can do what they please, their time can be wasted because they have time to waste, because all their time is wasted time, because they waste time and soil time, because time is wasted and soiled by them, because they destroy time, and especially work time, the time the civil servants spend at work, the time they spend working to process claims by those of us who do not work, yes we have all day everyday and all the hours of each day, and time stretches before us without markers, each day the same, pretty much, and each week the same, only the fortnightly signing on to mark time, only that fortnightly visit to the job centre, only that vague need that is never yet desperate need, only a vague need that fills the sky and fills the streets we see from the bus, only a need for the world not to be the world but to be something else, only that need which barely knows what it wants, but only that it refuses everything, loathes everything and wants done with everything.

It’s Good for Your CV

And meanwhile, for me, a few hours teaching here and there, a few hours teaching accountancy and economics, a few hours teaching business and politics, a few hours filling in for absent lecturers in philosophy, a few hours, sometimes unpaid – ‘don’t tell anyone about this’ – teaching in philosophy – ‘we can’t pay you, but it’s good for your CV’ – a few hours, sometimes unpaid, sometimes they don’t pay you, because it’s for your own good, it’s good for you – ‘we can’t pay you, we simply don’t have the resources’ – a few hours, they can’t pay me, they are victims just like me, we don’t have enough money, but still, it will look good on your CV.

And what do I teach my students? What do I teach my students in accountancy? I teach them about the fees they pay and where the money goes. I tell them where the £16,000 a year their companies pay in fees goes. I tell them I earn £23 an hour, quite a lot of money, but that includes preparation and marking, and of the conditions of my labour. I tell them this, they sympathise, and we go to the canteen because they like to feel life all around them, I tell them all about it, we talk about life in Libya, and we buy each other sandwiches and sit in the canteen and waste time, the time their companies have bought and paid for, the time for which the university pays me, I tell them about the secret lectures I give for which I am not paid, which are supposed to be good for me, for work experience, and how I am offered these hours as though they were a favour – ‘we can’t pay you, but it’s good experience’ – and that I spend several hours in preparation, several hours writing these lectures to impress, to make a good impression, I am not paid, it is true, but perhaps I can impress the students who will tell the lecturer for whom I’m covering that I was a good lecturer.

Yes, it’s important to impress, I tell them, to be seen to be one of the gang, to attend everything I can, to come to research forums and colloquia, to comment on papers and to drink with the others in the pub. Because there might be a job coming up, that’s the rumour. Yes, there might be a job, in the new year, that’s what we’ve heard. Not a full time job, it is true, but what they call a Teaching Fellowship, half-time, but quite dignified, a monthly wage, no having to wait until February, a monthly wage, not a bad one, considering, £9,000 will get you a long way, by comparison to what you earn now, yes, a Teaching Fellowship might be coming up, it’s a new rank, a new kind of post, ideal for the new academic, ideal for those looking to build a career, £9,000, you can live on that, it’s not a lot, but it’s a wage, and perhaps you can use the time to build up your CV, give a few papers, write a few papers, get a few publications, and then you can go on to another job. Yes, it’s probably unfair, but you’ll be in a better position than you are now, we wish we could offer a full time post, but you’d be unlikely to get it or even to be shortlisted, what you need is to build up your CV, to publish a few papers.

But the new academic year is a long way away. It is October, and I haven’t been paid. October and I haven’t been paid and I won’t be paid for a long time. We go out for a departmental dinner. The head of department: ‘we should do this more often’. The bill comes to £40 a head. I get £50 a week from the dole. It’s October, I won’t get paid by the university until February.

One fine September day after another; summer comes each year belatedly, after it is summer, arriving only in that autumn which is never quite autumn, transforming all of this month into a threshold. And of course there is the start of a new term, which, as it comes, surprises me, because I never think I will keep my job, or, before, that I would find one.

I remember how I used to have to wait to the last minute – a week or so before term began – before I knew I would have work that academic year. How merciless they were, Marxists or non-Marxists, heads of departments, heads of teaching who would make me work thus! How dependent I was on their impressions of me! With what petty gratitude did I welcome a hour of part time teaching!

The lesson is clear: there is absolutely no relation between the philosophy espoused by these same heads of department, heads of teaching and the way they treated the proletariat, the part time staff! An obvious lesson, but difficult each time – the completely inconsistency of thought and life! The mismatch between what was said and what was practised! Head of department, I thought to myself, you have a million-pound house and a cottage in Wales, you’ve had everything, every chance!

Head of department, you found your job when there was no need to publish, no need for a Ph.D., it was the late 1960s, jobs were everwhere, jobs came to you, and you rose through the ranks. You rose, and no one ever asked you to raise income before you were promoted! You never had to raise three times your own income in research income before your promotion! Head of department, lecturer for whom I took seminars, lecturer who spoke on this or that philosopher upon whom I had published a clutch of papers! I was told: you don’t have enough expertise in this area. You just haven’t got a background in ethics. I said, but I’ve published these papers, here, here and here – papers on the topics you teach!, and thought to myself: and what have you published, nothing, not one line, not one line in your whole career!

What have you published, to have this swarm of Ph.Ds wanting teaching around you? What have you published that you would have power over us, that you can seize one of us as from a cloud of protons and make us real! What have you done that would have given you this power, property-millionnaire, you who have done nothing, who have lived in the golden years of our country, when work was plentiful and wages were high, you who brought that great house with five bedrooms and married and had children! You’ve done nothing of course, blinking man, kind man, amiable half-friend who would have us round, we paupers to your great house every year!

Every year, and you would bring up wine from your wine cellar, and speak of the wine you bought, the wine you collected, you who opened wine for our starters, a different wine for our main course and yet a different one for dessert, you who served us aperatifs before dinner and brandy after dinner! What marvellous taste you developed, what a marvellous cellar you keep, how wondrous that you give us a taste of what distilled itself from your life, not just the wine, but your great house, your cultivation, the books stacked up in your library, the views over open fields!

Ah, we part-timers are less real than you, we are like the flies who circle in empty rooms, one of us has died, one of us disappeared, what does it matter, for there are always more flies, there will always be flies, well qualified flies, each year with more publications, each year with more credentials, each year with more respect won from academic peers! Yes, we are flies and our job is to circle in the big rooms in your big house, you will have us round, every year, this is your concession to us, this is what we are given, it is a sign of your kindness, but your kindness is impersonal, we know that, it is bestowed equally on each, we know that, next year one of our company will not be here, but what does that matter, next year another will join us, but that still does not matter because you have been in this business a long time, racking up your pension, dreaming of your retirement, dreaming of selling up and moving to France, to the sun, speaking to us of your holidays and asking us about ours.

Holidays?, we think to ourselves – what are they? Holidays – who has time for a holiday, we have to write, we have to read, to graft, to apply for this job and then that one, to fill out this form and then that one, to contact this university and then that for a half-time research post, we’re busy, too busy to have holidays, for what would happen if we missed hearing about a job with a short deadline for application? what would happen if we were contacted for interview and they failed to find us, and another took our place at the interview for the job that could have been hours?

Holidays! Don’t you understand we are flies, circling and circling, faster and faster, flies without hope, but without time to think about hope, flies who move too quickly for hope, who will not allow themselves that luxury, flies who circle with neither hope or non-hope, flies without jobs who only want jobs, flies who dream only of jobs, who circle in search of work, who want only to survive year by year. Another year of work, that’s all we want. Another year, and we’ll take anything.

But when asked about holidays, what can we say? When we are asked about holidays, what should we say? We should speak of our holidays whether or not we had holidays. We should speak of our foreign trips regardless of whether we have been abroad. Why? Because academia is still upper middle class and the head of department is upper middle class. Because the upper middle class know only how to deal with the upper middle class. Because the upper middle class want reassurance from those they’ve taken into their houses that they too are upper middle class. Because the condition of visiting the upper middle class is to pretend you are upper middle class. Because the condition of their hospitality is the marvellous theatre of the upper middle class.

And so we vie, we flies, to speak of our holidays. To particularise ourselves, to make ourselves more real to him, our employer. To hypostatise ourselves in front of him, to give ourselves substance, to make ourselves less than flies or more than flies, to make him care about us, to pick us out from the other flies, to tell that we are not just a fly, but a fly who takes holidays, who has a life outside all this, who lives not for work, though we all live for work, but the holidays we take, the dreamy holdays, three or four weeks of holidays, that open to us every summer. Ah the holidays, our holidays to Provence or to Tyrol! The week we spent in Florence! Holidays!

Have you ever taken a holiday, have you ever had time to take a holiday, to think of holidays, do holidays ever cross your mind? But we must speak of holidays, we each of us speak of holidays and what we ate on our holidays and what we saw on our holidays, if only to make our host feel comfortable, if only to let him know that we are like him, that we have something in common, and this dreadful academic business is not all we have in common. For after all, he sympathises with us, he grants that times are harder, that he might not have got a job as easily as he did, that academia is madness, yes he agrees with us, he is sympathetic, he has some idea of what it’s like, but we shouldn’t speak of it we know that. It’s the last thing we should speak about.

We are flies, circling in his rooms, in the rooms of his house, but we must not talk about our circling, must not speak of what we have sloughed off in that circling, of the life we have given up, of the standard of living we have relinquished, of those great gaps of unemployment between term ending and term beginning, of the humilations of the dole and housing benefit, of the visits from dole officers, of our forced participation on training schemes, of the temporary work we take, a few days here and a few days there, no, we will not speak of this, we must not. It’s the last thing we should say, we who are gathered here in this vast house, we who have taken our place in a house in whose many bedrooms his children once lived – children who, now, have gone to university.

Children he and his wife brought up in the golden 70s and the golden 80s, children to whom nothing was denied, who were taken abroad, children who were shown something of the world, children who were sent to good schools, who have learnt a good deal, children whom they are helping out at university, who, no doubt, have had a flat bought for them, for whom a flat and a car were supplied. We are not like them, his children, he knows that. We have not been blessed thus. But what can we do?, he says, our host. Terrible times, he says. I’m glad my retirement is coming up, he says.

Ah, graciousness! His wonderful graciousness! And now the wine is going round again, he is the most attentive host, our glasses are being filled again, the food is going round again, and soon we will have to leave. Soon, yes, it will time to leave, time for the summer to open before us again, time for the dole and for training courses, time to work and apply for jobs and write, time to wander through this city that does not want us and through the university that is indifferent to us.

Time to wander without shadow, to circle around and around, time to swarm but without solidarity, time to swarm, each of us separate, each of us circling, time to disappear across this city, time to go home to our bedsits and shared housing, time to flee back to the rubbish from which we were spontaneously generated, time to return to the skips of thrown out library books, time to join the concrete and rubble of destroyed buildings, time to be threaded in paper threading machines.

For where do they think we go over summer, these heads of department? To where do they think we disappear? Ah, they know we are born from rubbish, born anew from rubbish each September, resurrected from the dead each September when they ring around at the last minute, knowing we are all waiting by the phone, knowing we are all dependent, waiting for the phonecall that will allow us to circle around once again, one more time.

Yes, we are born from rubbish, for them, spontaneously generated from the dross of the university, spreading like some vile cancer from mutated dross, spreading disease-like from university decay. Born from the residue of universities, from its foul excresence, we hatch and we circle, we are born, our sticky wings glisten in the sun, our compound eyes survey the world, our probiscii seek fresh nourishment, we come to ourselves in September and fly into the air, and fly around again, one more time.

Yes, one more time, around again, swarming flies, who can only ask one another about job applications and publications, flies who can speak to one another of interviews failed and papers rejected, flies who speak of what is real, flies who alone know what is real, proletariat-flies in touch with the real conditions of the university, fly-proletarians who know what the upper middle class do not know. Scum-proletarians who the upper middle class do not want to see, the beggars outside the gate, the mendicants in the alley, the prostitutes on the pavement, vile proletarians who are the living refutation of the upper middle class world of academia, flies who are born from dross and return to dross, flies adapted to the mad circulation of the world, flies whose movement is as one with the real movement of capital, flies hatched from capital and returning to it, flies who live capital, who know only capital, flies in whom capitalism dreams of itself, of its return to itself.

Flies stripped down to themselves, who know of nothing but circling, flies without rest, pared down, prepared, perfect vessels of Capital, fles ready for the new condition of labour, for the great casualisation, flies ready for the subcontracting of education to Microsoft, flies honed down for the great sell-off, flies who will teach this and that and that without expertise or preparation, flies who will move from this end of the country to another, flies who will take any job and every job, flies who will overload themselves with what needs to be done, because next year there may be nothing to be done, flies who arise when they are needed and disappear when they are not needed, flies like the nanobots who will one day repair our bodies, nanobot flies who ensure the smooth running of capital.

For we know, we flies, that the future is ours. The upper middle class know it, too. They want to keep their hands clean, but our hands are dirty. They want to keep their good conscience, but we are bad conscience through and through. They can see it: we’ll do anything.They can see what the system from which they lived produced. They can see the new breed, the disgusting breed, the everywhere-and-nowhere breed. Ah, they don’t like us, but that is okay. Ah, they have some little power over us, but that, too, is okay. Because our day is coming. We can feel it in our antennae. Our day is coming, we know that. When they retire, when they disappear to France, when they buy up cheap houses all over Europe, it will be our turn.

And we will rise and we will swarm. In us, scholarship is dead. In us, expertise is unnecessary. We will serve. We fly round and round and we will serve. Everything, all knowledge, will be online and we will facilitate and serve. Everything, all knowledge, will be owned by Microsoft, and we will work for Microsoft, after the great privatisation. Oh you upper middle class, reading Plotinus in Provence, what have you done! Oh you heads of department, to what have you closed your eyes! For we are coming, the know-nothings and the scorners of scholarship. We are coming, without knowledge and without culture, pared down and ready.

Honoured Members of the University!

You have done me the honour of inviting me to give an account of the life I have led as an ape of the University.

It is now over ten years since I entered the doors of the university, a short space of time perhaps, according to the calendar, but an infinitely long time to gallop through at top speed, as I have done, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors and good advice. Above all, I have been served by my own capacity for mimickry, my apishness, if you like. This was the trait has served me most well in the academy, and one which led me to attain my comparatively elevated position.

I still remember how I was captured. I was happy on the savannah with the other apes, sitting back on my haunches and looking over the expanse. Food was plentiful and life harmonious. I was not the alpha male, but nor was I the omega one; as long as I did not threaten my fellow apes, baring my teeth as apes will, I would not be threatened. But something was missing. But something marked me out as different from the apes around me. Was I more intelligent than them? Or was it simply because I sought a from of stimulation I was unable to find on the savannah? Now, having studied a few theories of intelligence and evolution, I am inclined to put it down to a kind of aberration. My soul had been hollowed out a little too deeply. For this reason, I willingly let myself be captured by the University.

Once I was a free ape, free to stand and look all around me on the savannah. But now, in the University, I have broadened the circle of my freedom. True, I became a prisoner of an office, bent over a keyboard, my sore eyes fixed on the monitor, but I was a happy prisoner! I steered my apish body through the halls of the academy. I knew if I was to survive in my new world, I would have to imitate those around me. I learnt to walk upright and wear shoes; I learnt not to holler and whoop. I still dreamt of great bunches of bananas and clear pools in the middle of the jungle. Sometimes I remembered my ape comrades who would pick the lice from my thick fur. But I was resolved to make a success of myself in my new surroundings.

Most difficult was writing. It was hard enough to hold a pen or to type on a keyboard (our fingers are stubbier than yours) let alone compose a string of words observing the rules of grammar. We apes employ much simpler means of communication. Often, a simple whoop will do. Our sensitive nostrils tell us a great deal about one another. We have no need to read and no need to write. Besides, apes are not too inquisitive; we are not given to abstraction. For the most part, we are happy to get on with our lives, happy to be free from immediate danger. Writing, therefore, was always a tremendous labour for me.

On what should I write? It was clear to me that only foreign thinkers were worthy of accolade, and only difficult ones at that. What mattered was to hitch your little wagon to one of these great lumbering beasts, and to follow the trail of the books which dropped from them like dung. One book a year was not enough, for example, for X., nor for Y. Two, three, even four books a year sprung forth from their mighty pens. How much they had to say, I wondered! How much there was to write! And how much for me, a humble ape, to read!

Happily, there were books to guide me through the wilderness. How many of them there are! The message was simple: the French thought and the British paraphrased. They were very good at that, the British. I learnt that everything can be expressed in a calm and measured prose. The wildest thinker can be tamed. All thought can be measured; philosopher can be placed alongside philosopher. Reading one series of commentary after another, I felt ought to commend the editor of each series for the uniformity of their pages. Truly I was in contact with the great minds of the age, and with little effort required from me! I was up to date with what was most radical and new in European ideas! Now I only had one problem: to which thinker should I hitch my wagon?

I found a thinker around whom the wall of commentaries still let in a chink of light and wrote a book to block out that light. Then I wrote another to make sure it really was blocked out. Nor a chink of light should escape! Truly, these thinkers burn too brightly for our poor British readers! So I commented; and I was proud of my contribution. I thought: I have done as others have done; my book has disappeared into the library, and if I have had no thoughts of my own, this is appropriate, for we are not thinkers here in Great Britain. Others think and we paraphrase. That is the correct division of labour.

A colleague often jokes he can still tell I’m an ape. It’s the way I hold a pen, he tells me. Your hand curls in towards your chest, he says. Once that hand was a paw, I tell him. Apes are not made for typing or for holding a pen, I tell him. And there’s that look you get, my colleague says, when you have to do anything. As if you’re going to tear open your shirt and whoop, he said. This too is common to all apes, I tell him. We are not made for seminars and colloquia, I tell him, but for the savannah where we whoop to express our joy and our strength.

Alas, I know my apish spontaneity has long gone. Sometimes I wonder, busy with my labours, whether I am any better off than my miserable comrades in the zoo. There is so much to do, after all! My poor eyes burn from the monitor and my clumsy fingers miss the keys I want to type. I have translations to finish and essays to write; if I am to keep my job, I must make sure a steady stream of books flows from my printer. But even now, my boss tells me it’s not enough. You will have to raise money, he says, covering your pay three times over. It’s a lot to ask! But already I’m looking around, watching what others do and imitating them, aping the way my more diligent colleagues have as they say put in for funding.

Sometimes I ask myself – but how is this possible? – what would it mean to do what I do for real; to write because I have something to write, to think only with the aim of discovering what it might mean to think? I laugh in my apish way as I think of all I have written – all my books and articles. What foolishness! I copy others who copy others. But what am I? An ape, an ape among humans, not yet a human and no longer just an ape. Sometimes I wonder whether others around me were not once secret apes who came out of the savannah as I did. Sometimes I wonder whether our British academia is full of secret apes!

Once or twice, I have I felt the shock of encountering a genuine thinker from within our ranks. A thinker – imagine! How is it possible?, I ask myself. Is it true? Do I dare say it? Yes, there she is. A thinker. At that moment before her I am ashamed of my apishness, ashamed of everything I have said and done and written. I am ashamed too for all those whose activity conceals indolence and pretension. I am worst of all, no doubt of that, but then I am an ape. Perhaps, honoured members of the university, it not only takes an ape to recognise an ape but also to recognise non-apes! Perhaps we all know, secret and not-so-secret apes who the real thinkers are!

Too tired to revise my papers over again, I resign myself to a day without work. Just go to the office, I tell myself, and wait; after all, you can read this and then that, light reading, half-absorbed reading, where the surface of the page is merely grazed. And so I read, idly, indifferently, pages turn, and I think to myself – or is it just my tiredness speaking – what of pathos in all this? What of the sense of an experience gained and won, what about joy, what about the intensities of affect that attest to that gaining?

I am reading very good secondary commentaries, very clever and faithful, opening up the thought of X by discussing his relationship to predecessors Y and Z; it’s impressive, I’m carried on a journey the landmarks of which are familiar to me, but it’s pleasant to be reminded, pleasant because it’s easy enough, nothing has to be fought for and I can reward myself for a few years’ work that allows me to pick up this or that reference or to furrow my brow and think, I’m not quite convinced. The book reaches me as an expert; the book awakens an expert in me. Called forward is another inhabitant of the community of scholars, measured and calm, clear-voiced and versed well in a particular canon.

Because I’m tired, because tiredness leads to that kind of indifference Freud commended to his analysts, one resting on everything and nothing, I see what I might have been distracted from another time: if there is a kind of pathos of the primary text, a sense of a thought struggled for and gained, the joy of a thought granted, the grace of a thought that comes on light feet, whatever pathos, however warlike, however peaceable, it is one lacking in the secondary one. I am not bored by what I am reading; it engages, but it does so only with the expert who only half-lives in the world.

The old saying, before you study Zen, mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers, while you study Zen, mountains are no longer mountains, rivers are no longer rivers, and after you study it mountains are again mountains, rivers are again rivers: a world has been regained, reborn. The secondary commentary is the text for whom nothing has been regained yet, it lives as an abstract storm, a kind of fog; it is another of Job’s temptations, a challenge to his faith.

And to you, who would be faithful? Do not read me, says the modest commentary, read the original. Always that modesty. But a kind of reading has already happened of those same originals. Their secrets have been given up, you have a basis from which to read, a sound one, a scholarly-endorsed one, you can make an honest beginning, you were prepared, you know what’s to come, there’ll be surprises, to be sure, but nothing too surprising; the text has already been measured in advance, its length and its breadth are known, its weight calculable, its significance estimated.

What, then, am I advocating? The abolition of these useful stepladders? How else are we going to read what is around us? How else will we sort and catalogue? How else can an oeuvre be measured and a contribution assessed? How else might comparable worth be gauged? There’s a marketplace for ideas, said Johannes de Silentio in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and you can get everything for a knock down price. But at the price of pathos, too – that’s what you given up to enter that same marketplace. £8.99 will buy you Kierkegaard in 60 minutes or £10.99 the Routledge Guide to Fear and Trembling. This is valuble.

What have you lost? I could put it this way, once again like Kierkegaard: the discord between system and pathos, but this is too abstract. What have I lost?

And when you realise you’re no good at philosophy and nor will you ever be any good? When you realise you lack the brilliance? In truth, I could say I realised this a long time ago, straightaway in fact, that there was never any pretension and no matter how hard I work, night and day, week after week, nothing will happen in my thinking.

It’s hard to explain this to others working in different disciplines. Perhaps because they use what they call theory rather than try to grasp philosophy as such. On the other hand, because they use it and test it against some other area – music, say – their work is often more interesting than what, in the end, collapses in philosophy into interminable commentary. Of course the way I have described this model of ‘using’ thought is naive and objectionable – it is a matter, rather, of a double implication, the wasp and the orchid, where what is called theory changes as it meets the ‘object’ to which it is supposed to be applied. A double becoming.

But philosophy as philosophy – that’s difficult. Read Husserl, read Derrida on Husserl, reread Derrida on Husserl after reading Lawlor and Marrati. Read Deleuze, read Spinoza, Leibniz and Bergson to get some grasp of his thought – read Simondon and Ruyer and Tarde … Or again, read Foucault, read Agamben as a reader of Foucault, or still further, read Heidegger, read Nancy as a reader of Heidegger, chart the differences between Nancy’s and Derrida’s takes on deconstruction. Read Badiou, understand the differences between him and Deleuze and criticise his accounts of them, read some set theory, assess his readings of the philosophers who precede him …

Each of these tasks will take five years. Five years that will take you through your Ph.D. if you’re lucky enough to have a background in this kind of philosophy rather than playing catchup. Five years and it is likely your understanding of philosophy will be so strongly informed by the master thinker (I am thinking of Adam’s recent posts at The Weblog) you’ve picked that you will have no real, independent take on philosophy itself. Then the next five years begins, if you have time for it, if you have a job which will allow it, if you have a family life which allows it and perhaps you’ll have some independence with respect to the thinker you studied in detail. Perhaps you’ll have suspended that conditioned reflex through which you respond to philosophy and the problems which confront philosophy in a Badiouian, Deleuzean, Derridean etc. way.

Ten years at best before you can philosophise in your own name. How old will you be? 37, perhaps – the magic age of Hegel and Heidegger and others. But it’s likely you’ll be older. 45, say. And if you never had the staying power, the fortune or the powers of concentration to sustain you through years of thinking? If you never had the time?

Philosophy allows you to be young until those ten years or their equivalent have passed. Sometimes, this is enough to sustain a lifetime of thought. Sometimes that lifetime is sustained in a awareness that nothing that you say has any philosophical worth, that it remains commentary, or a kind of pathos that lifts itself too easily from commentary, that flaps about weakly.

But what of those who are able to think? What insights have pressed themselves upon them? What force of insight? I have been in the presence of thinkers, real thinkers. They are different beasts, marvellous ones, serious and calm. They have the strength of thought behind them. They rest in that strength. They speak seriously, calmly. And I, too, rest in their strength as it resists careerism and academic politics. As it is so obvious, everyone can tell, even if it scares them, that they are in the presence of brilliance. The careerists are scared, it’s beautiful. Because they know they’ll never be brilliant and that what they take as to be their youth is already old and crabbed. That they are the dullards, the mediocrities who’ve always stood in the way of thought.

I’ve reread the two papers on which I’ve been working on all summer (well, all of August, which is as much summer as I get). Laughter: this is supposed to be thought? One, written in the DOGMA style, is pure pathos, lacking in ideas. Pathos without direction, enthusiasm without rigour, borrowing from all and making a mish-mash of all. Postmodernism in the worst sense. A paper that asks to be put out of its misery like a sick animal that must be shot. And the other? This is where real laughter begins. An ‘ambitious’ paper, passing through this thinker and then that as if I should think myself capable of anything other than bad commentry. Ambition! How funny! By what right have I thought myself able to write such a thing? In the end, there is only laughter: how did I think myself able to write on the topic I chose? What imposture! What stupidity!

An imposture, it is true, that was always mine. Why is that hope that I could one day write something estimable not dead in me? Why is it I begin again with fresh hope and momentum? Why is it I can begin again in innocence and hope? I wonder whether the best thing to write would be a journal of failure, an unpublishable book on the way I failed thought and thought failed me. Still hope – every summer, still the hope that, if I do not speak it, I think bears me in my writing. Still that hope which bears, that youth, that dream of youth and being young, that attempt to reach the point where it might have been that I was brilliant. ‘His majesty the baby’ (Freud), that’s who I am, in hope. It is that ‘his majesty’ who hopes in me and in my place, the child-narcissist.

Every summer I am young and grow old in writing. And in the autumn? The alibi of teaching and administration. As I dream all academic year of being young again. As I say to myself, if only I wasn’t so busy with teaching and administration. Laughter: why won’t hope be crushed? Why doesn’t hope crush itself inside me? Comedy of that hope for hope, for a youth upstream of youth!

Everyone talks about everything, I said to H., everything is up for grabs. There’s everything to be said and nothing that cannot be talked about. They put questions to me, I said to H. They ask me things and I am meant to reply like an expert. I am meant to have an opinion on what divides madness from badness, or on animal rights – I am meant to speak first of all, and to speak on everything. To speak in the calm voice of the expert – assured, speaking for reason, speaking for all, and making arguments for anyone to follow and understand. Sure, I can make a show of my own doubts and hesitations, I said to H., I can proclaim my modesty and my lack of expertise on this or that, but I should be able to speak, I said, and that first of all. To discourse on this topic and then that, on the immortality of the soul and the origins of mathematics – to speak of all and for all, to give voice to what would divide this from that, the reasonable from the unreasonable. I am made to speak, I said to H., but I cannot speak – I will not. I have hardly anything to say, it is true, I was never any good at debating – I lack the skills, the speed, the memory; I am not quick.

They listen, I said to H., and I am meant to speak – I protest, they take my protests for false modesty and I know required of me is to join what I say to the speech of experts, to take my place in the virtual community of wise men and wise women and the community of those united in taste, for whom music means Schubert and literature Dickens, for whom there is only decline, and the twentieth century is a long sorry episode. How assured they are! How tranquil! We are in decline and they love decline. We are in twilight and they love the twilight. But really, they say of wild moods and turbulence, isn’t it all a bit much – a bit – French? We don’t have to be like them, do we? And I am supposed to smile and say, why of course not! Thinking to myself: what is meant by them, by us?

And when these men finally discover film when they finally admit televisions into their houses, it is the golden age of Hollywood they love – they protest about the decline of script and story and stars and speak of Now, Voyager and Bringing Up Baby. But I still keep my place among them, I said to H., there’s still in me that conditioned reflex which allows me to join them in speaking of decline and going-under, the twilight and the coming end. No doubt it is because they represent to me the opposite of the world from I wrenched myself, I said. No doubt there is still too much reverence in me, and thankfulness for the teachers and educators who picked me up and gave me home among their books. Yes, I benefitted from their generosity; they gave me a great deal; I was their charge. There’s no doubt of this, and I am thankful. And what they expected from me was to speak  with them of decline, of a horrible sensationalism and the decline of verse. I was supposed to speak of the novel’s end and music’s end and the horror of pop and the esotericism of Boulez and the unlistenability of Messiaen, I said.

So we spoke, my benefactors and I, over the nights, over the weeks, over the years, one armchair facing another, one man speak to another, one older, one younger – one assured, resting in all the weight of culture, cradled by it, content in his taste and his discernment, certain and fluent, the other without a word of his own in his mouth. So we spoke together in their flat-mausoleums to faded culture – or rather, they spoke, I listened – they discoursed, I studied, he held forth and I was the echo chamber of their words. They spoke on the immortality of the soul and the clash of civilisations, on the ethical challenges of stem-cell research and on Dryden’s neglected dramas. They spoke of the inability of anyone to read – ‘they haven’t the skill’ – or to pick up this or that Biblical reference or Homeric reference.

Always the decline, I said to H., always the great going under. So I listened, and the embers burnt on the imitation fire and they educator nodded and approved when I nodded and approved. ‘Quite’, you learnt to say; ‘quite so’ – just like Socrates’s interlocutors ‘yes, Socrates’. The evening passes in a million ‘quites’. And in the corner of the room, volume turned down, the television showed some TV show.  As a kind of temptation. So they could rest in the contentment that I could only watch it, like them, with disgust – that I now had good taste enough to be inoculated from Friday night television.

But they were generous, I said to H., understand that. There was a time when the house of books was paradise. The books piled to the ceiling, the piano, the records – the antique clock: all this was paradise when I worked in the world. I would examine each book on the bookshelf – the complete hardback edition of Trollope, two complete editions of Dickens, every reissued Everyman edition – it was marvellous, life itself. And in those hours we would speak and drink Aqua Vitae and I would be played symphonies by composers whose name I had never heard and send me home with gifts of books and music. My pronounciations of French, German and Italian titles would be corrected; librettis would be summarised and this or that pianist would be spoken about in great and generous gusts. How marvellously they could speak, this benefactor, that benefactor! What great gusts of speech! What knowledge! It was splendid to listen, to sit back and listen, to be present at a performance, to be struck dumb with wonder, to have left work and the misery of work and to come to this – this still unvanished world, this island of culture, this demi-paradise of music and books, this cave of a house set back from the wide, vile world.

I’m tired of old men, I said to H. Tired of the end, the endless end – the whole story of a world coming to an end and culture on its last legs and the great collapse and the great barbarism. The other day on the phone to a benefactor I heard myself say: but you don’t understand the conditions under which we work – you don’t see the question is not, why are books so bad?, but what are the conditions of production that determine their badness? I heard myself say: – I’m not defending the modern culture-industry, the modern university; I’m justifying nothing, but you have to see what’s on the end of your fork, how it was made, the conditions of its manufacture. And my benefactor said, surprised at my animation, – I shall think of you as a gladiator in the arena. And I said – yes, that’s how it is, even as I thought to myself, he thinks I’m being touchy, he thinks I believe he’s getting at me. I said, there are no scholarly ladies and gentlemen anymore – oh, perhaps at Oxford, but nowhere else. You can’t compare yourself with us, I said. And thought to myself: he thinks he’s wounded my pride, he who noted my desire to write in what he called brown style and who noted my inability to sustain a written tone – he to whom I sent my book when it came out and who I rang to say: I’m sorry – it’s terrible, I know -.

On the phone, I said, – you really have no idea; you’re not in a position to see. I had to raise my voice to be heard. Had to raise it against the marvellous streaming of a voice that belonged to a world and a culture that was never mine. To raise my barbarous voice against what had taken me in as a barbarian and sent me out, like Kafka’s ape, as something like an educated man – yes, his voice, their voices, the benefactors, the culture-experts, the decline-lamenters, their voice, all speaking as one, their conjoined voice with its plenitude and its mellifluousness, their voice and its confidence. Their one voice and what bore it – the richness of culture in its depth and its breadth, that great marvellous river in which everything was alive, which flowed intact from the Bible and from Homer through all the literature of all Europe and all its music. Their voice fluent in the tounges of Europe, ancient and modern that spoke as though from the other side of the window.

I thought: his old culture has died inside me. What have I to do with that world – what can that world mean to me? I do not inhabit it; it is not my element – what I have learnt I have done so by imitation – my voice is a borrowed voice, my writing style that of the ape who types with too-big fingers. I thought as I spoke: you have Europe, the unity of Europe, it speaks in you, it flows through you, but I am on the other side, in the world and up against the world. You have Europe, jolly, joshing Europe with your laughing knowing mockery of the French and the Germans whose great literatures you know and runs through you! I thought: Europe is all yours, old, old Europe in which you can pass as a traveller would have passed in the late nineteenth century!

I thought, the car parks and the town centre mall are the thick rind that has laid itself on top of the old world. I thought, the company cars pass over the crust that has formed across the face of the old world. I thought, the hi-tech industrial estate is built on ashes. I thought: some writers have seen it. Some writers understand. I said so. – But they were very cultured, says my old friend, my benefactor. ‘They were very cultured’ – yes, yes, but what they endured saw culture turned inside out, saw Europe become ashes and old Europe burnt away, saw death omnipresent and war omnipresent. And they sought to hollow out culture itself, to despise literary depth and literary richness, to loathe the triple-decker novel and the four movement symphony, to paint the wounds and the howling, to film the end of the end. How could I not love what despised what I despised! How could I not love what hated what I hated! – You won’t understand this, I said. You won’t see it, you’re not in the right position. – But you’re not exactly suffering, he said. And I said, – it’s not a question of suffering, but of hatred. And I thought: this is what Britain becomes in me. How contortedly, miserably British I am! How laughably 80s-schooled and 90s-broken British! How marvellously and happily broken! How thirsty for the books and music already baked in the fire to come! I thought, perhaps I understand nothing at all of art, of film, or books. I thought, perhaps they are just for me the opaque screen that is like the concrete rind that has formed across the surface of the earth. I thought, perhaps they are just the door of the world, the one which will not open, but on which are scratched dreams of the fire-to-come, the great revenge, the end of the end.

For the apocalypse is coming, I thought. They’re building robot warriors – think of that! Building robot tanks and drone fighting machines! Old Europe and its poets (‘Europe is unthinkable without its poets’ – Kundera) has gone under. The world is going under. There is the flat plane of the battlefield, and the battlefield will be everywhere. But what apocalypticism is this? Perhaps only the reflex of one who can only resent what he thinks he does not have and does not deserve. Who supposes he will be the cockroach that will survive the new wars. Who thinks, it is nice to be so reduced, so concentrated, and to scuttle under the feet of those who do not see the world has already destroyed itself. Who thinks, the apocalypse is already here, why do they not see it? Who thinks, the books are on fire and the concert halls are on fire, and only that art survives that is already baked to nothing. Who thinks, soon the fire will consume nothing but itself – not a sun, but an anti-sun, and these cockroaches will crawl hard-shelled over its surface, happy in its flames, happy that the world is burning and that they were right all along.

How stupid I am!, I said to H., how foolish! I haven’t understood anything at all, I said. It’s passed me by, all of it, all art, all philosophy. I’m an apocalypticist, I said to H., a resenter. I can only speak in generalisations, only read what is already in my breast, only speak in great dark gusts, mirror image of the men in culture who suppose they live in the twilight of art. I want to think it’s like Alcibiades’ betrayal of Athens, I said, that it’s like Phaedrus’s desecration of the Eleusian mysteries! It is the great betrayal, I said, the great devlishness, fallen angels fighting real angels, the battle around the throne! But in the end, it’s nothing, I said to H., another great gust, another garrulousness. The world is the world is the world, I said to H., think on that. It’s all the same as it was yesterday, the same Morrisons, the same roundabout, the same Kentucky Fried Chicken. We all run up against the same world, I said. The rind is getting too thick, I said, there’s concrete everywhere and nothing hatching. There’s no apocalypse, I said, no great unveiling, and that’s the trouble. The same thing bothers me as my benefactors, I said. In the end we are the same, and the world is the same, and that’s what appals us. Great gusts of conversation and nothing said, I said to H. All I say to you is as nothing, I said. The world is the world is the world, I said. There will be no end just as there was no beginning. It’s Bracknell all over again, I said. The Roman Empire never ended I said.

It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken, I said to H., not that I haven’t thought of you often. A long time, it’s true, but I’ve often thought of our talks, and what you allowed me to say. It’s nearly the end of the summer, I said. It’s time to look back and see what has been achieved. And what has been achieved? What have I done? What thoughts have I had, what books have I read, of what advances was I capable? Yes, it’s time to look back, I said to H., at the quiet days in my flat and in the office. Oh there was some teaching, I said, but not too much. A few students to see here and there, I said, but nothing too arduous. Above all, there was time, I said. Time to do more or less what I pleased. Great stretches of hours, swathes of time, time in great wounds and tracts.

Yes, I had time, time was given to me. And what did I do with it? What was I able to begin? What of my great labours was I able to carry forward? What was it given to me to achieve? Just think of all the others, I said, working their holidays away. Just think of those who never found employment, I said, working as others work in the world. I think of them all, I said, and then I think of myself. Here I am, with no excuses. Here I am, with nothing to stop me and plenty of time.

Oh I moan to my friends, I said. I complain to W. about my admin. I’ve so much admin, I moan to W. He says the same to me. But I’m glad I have admin, I said. Secretly I’m glad for all the bureaucracy, I said. Secretly, I’m happy there are so many forms to fill in, I said. Secretly, I know I need an alibi, even to myself. I know I have to be able to make an excuse. For in truth, I said to H., in truth I’ve done very little this summer.

In truth, very little has happened. I bought Spinoza’s Ethics, I said, but it was too hard. I read the introduction to Spinoza’s Ethics, I said, and it was too dry. I bought the Routledge Critical Thinkers Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics, I said, and it was too vague. I piled up commentaries on Spinoza, I said, Negri’s and Deleuze’s and others, they were all there before me, I said to H., but nothing, I could barely begin.

I phoned W., I said, and asked him how he was getting on. The same, he said. He was writing on Rosenswig, I said to H., and when he was done with Rosensweig, which he was reading in German, he was to begin on Spinoza. In Latin, I asked W., no not in Latin. How are you getting on?, I asked W. He’s getting on, I said to H., sometimes he feels he’s banging his head against the way, but W. is getting on doggedly, I said. W. is dogged, I’ll give him that, I said to H. He’s up in the morning, I said, turning open The Star of Redemption, I said, and reading it in German, I said, page by page. When I visited him last, I admired his edition of The Star of Redemption, I said, and all his other Rosensweigs, I said.

‘We’ve no hope’, W. said to me then, but he has his doggedness, I said to H., and his determination, and there may be hope for him for that reason, I said to H. He’s determined to read, I said to H., nothing stops him. He gets up in the morning and works all day, I said, reading in German, taking notes. He tries to understand every line, every page, no matter how difficult it is, taking notes all the while, I said to H., his own notes. W. doesn’t read the Introduction to The Star of Redemption, I said to H. He doesn’t read the Routledge Critical Thinkers Guide to Rosensweig on Redemption, if there is such a thing, I said to H. No, he reads it for himself, he begins at the beginning and works his way to the end, all the while taking notes, I said to H., careful, careful notes.

Occasionally he’ll send me sections of his notes, I said to H. Sometimes on what he is reading currently, but sometimes older notes, from what he was reading ten or even fifteen years ago, I said. They’re very impressive, those notes, I said to H. Very careful and meticulous. His notes on Being and Time go on for hundreds of pages, I said to H. Very patient and thorough and meticulous, I said to H. He scrutinises every line, I said to H., reading them backwards and forwards in German. It’s not that he had German and then read, I said to H., he’s like the rest of us, he knew no German, but he read nonetheless. He read and learned German as he read, page by page, I said to H., and sentence by sentence.

Of course in those days, I said to H., as he hells me, W. worked not just in the morning and the afternoon, but in the evening and the night, I said. There was no limit to his labours. Morning, afternoon and night, I said, without trips to the pub, without time with his partner, I said to H., because he had no friends and no partner. Morning, afternoon and night, and there was only work, I said to H., and not even the kind of work which led to writing papers and books, I said to H. It’s true that I too have worked for mornings, afternoons and nights for long stretches of my life. It’s true that it was only when he met me W. began to write papers and books, I said to H. He’s always said that was my gift to him, I said, but I’m not sure it was a gift.

It is well known that I’ve written a great deal, I said to H. A great deal and it’s all worthless! A great deal and all for nothing! I’ve said it a hundred times, I said it while I was writing and even before I started writing. I always knew I’d write a great deal, but that it would all be for nothing, I said to H. Yes, I have that facility, I said to H. but is it a facility? – isn’t it rather a kind of sickness? – isn’t it rather a kind of disease, an obsessive-compulsion, a manic prolixity, a writing without joy, a joyless trudge like soldiers across a marsh, I said to H. Oh I write, I said to H., it is given to me to write, but I do so without thinking, without thought. I do not think then write, I said to H., it is rather that I just write. And can I, while writing, be said to think? If only that were the case, I said to H. If only I had a single thought, I said to H., if only I had the capacity to think for myself. I write a great deal, it is true, I said to H., and where before a paper would take me six months work, it takes me only a month, and where my first book took me few years and my second book only a few months, this is no gain, I said, for it means I write more and more, I said to H.

It’s all very well W. saying I spurred him to write, but there is the question of what it is I was working on all these years, morning, afternoons and nights. There is the question where it led me, if it led me anywhere, I said to H. What was it all for?, I said to H. What does it mean, these thousands and thousands of words? It’s just meaningless prolixity, I said to H., a great streaming of words. Did I really think I would be able to read Spinoza this summer?, I said to H. Spinoza and then Leibniz? Spinoza and then Leibniz and then Bergson? And so I bought the Ethics, I said to H., and my Routledge Critical Thinkers Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics. I bought my Routledge Critical Thinkers Guide to Leibniz, I said to H., and I piled up the books in front of me. I bought Matter and Memory and the Oxford Thinkers introduction to Bergson and piled them with the other books in front of me. So many books, all mine, I said to H. So many books, and there they were all summer. Every day, I would come into the office and they would be there. Every evening, I would leave the office, and they would still be there. I took them on holiday to London with me, and I brought them home, I said to H. And still they went unread. Still not a page was turned. Still nothing happened, no pages were turned and I learnt nothing.

Oh once upon a time I read, I said to H. What little reading I did once upon a time, lying across my bed in 1996 has served me well, I said. I’ve got – let’s see – nine years out of those three or four difficult books I read in 1996, I said. They served me well, I said, those three or four difficult books which I know backwards and forwards. Meanwhile, W.’s read dozens of books and has all his notes on those books. It is not as if I have notes, I said to H. Oh I may have taken notes at one time or another, but they’ve since been lost, as everything was lost in one computer crash or another. Just this week I lost a whole sheaf of notes, I said to H., if a collect of electronic files can be called a sheaf. Just this week, the computer was hacked and it had to be rebuilt and all the notes on the C drive have disappeared, I said to H. What does it matter, I said to H., I’ll keep writing nonetheless. There’s always writing, I said, always the illusion of work. Always the illusion of moving forward. Always the sense that if sentence is placed after sentence, something has begun, something begins, thought is possible, hope is possible and I will have squeezed one more drop from my great period of reading in 1996, lying across my bed in the middle of that affair, I said.

Sometimes I think something has stopped with me, I said to H., that something great has come to an end with me. That I am a symptom of the end, I said to H., not of a decadence, I said to H, which suggests indulgence and luxury, but a miserable paring down, I said. Not of the indulgences of decadence, but a feeble dismantling, I said to H., where living has dismantled itself, where life is reduced to a bare frame. I’ve said it before, I said to H, I am the spawn of the R.A.E., I make no bones about it, I am the kind of thing that is produced when the R.A.E. spreads everywhere. I am the medocrity that gives itself the excuse of writing a great deal for the sake of the R.A.E. So what if what I write is bad, I tell my friends, it’s over anyway. So what if it’s no good, it’s for the R.A.E. And creatures like me, I said to H., have the whole publishing industry at our disposal, a whole industry of petty journals and periodicals and monograph pushers. A thousand ways of pressing ourselves into flesh, of producing a clutch of articles a year, a pair of books, a miserable trilogy, a deathly tetralogy, a stream of books, one after another, an oeuvre in a hundred thousand word batches, books placed end to end like Prufrock’s spoons.

I am an industry, I said to H., I am a little publishing factory, my few hundred thousand words part of the great streaming babble, the great streaming madness of publication, book after book after book. And I tell myself, just like everyone else, that this is the way to survive, that I have to publish to survive, whether it is true or not, I give myself that alibi, that great excuse, I tell myself as I tell others that I cannot be blamed for my books, that the interesting question does not bear upon whether they are good or bad, but on the conditions of their production, I said to H. I take as my excuse the madness of the world, I said to H., the madness of academia, which spins us younger academics like tops. Around and around we go, I said to H. and book after book spins out of us. Once you needed to show promise to get a job, I said to H., promise and one or two articles. Then it was four articles that was wanted, one after another, ready for the R.A.E. Then it was that one of those four submissions had to be a monograph – then two of them – and soon you will have to have four books, one after another, four books to get a job, four books to get on the lowest rung, four books to even begin to begin to begin. We’re spinning like tops, I said to H., and we even congratulate ourselves on our productivity and our symposia and dayschools.

Each of us an industry, I said, to H., a manufacturer of dross. Each of us is a paper mill, from each us streams several hundred thousand words, each of us writes this and then that, each of us introduces this thinker and then that, each of us chews the thought of this or that thinker into meaningless pabulum, each of us writes as dog food is squeezed into tins, each of us produces exactly the same book, each of us writes X and the political and Y and the ethical, each of us edits a book on the new Z, each of us writes for the latest series that seeks to explain the demigods of theory or the archangels of poststructuralism. How is it that every great and singular figure is surrounded by a dozen explanatory books? How is it that the innovator does not cry out for other innovators, the great writer for other great writers? How is it that brilliance makes a career for banality? How is it that the books of a great generation are seeds from which rise only mediocrity and careerism?

And I am worst of all, I said to H., I am first to admit it. I am the worst of all, the greatest sinner, the truest mediocrity, I said to H. Philosophy has crawled in me to die, I said to H. Philosophy finds in me a place to die and rot and fester. The death of philosophy has gone rotten in me, I said to H. Oh philosophy is alive, alive and well, but anywhere but here, anywhere but in our academia – anywhere except in the great mediocrity, I said to H. Philosophy is elsewhere, I said to H., but we are in academia.

In May 1968, Judith Miller passed out course credits on the bus, ‘the university is a piece of capitalist society’, she said in justification, and she would do her utmost to make it function ‘worse and worse’. Perhaps that is our hope, I said to H., our hope and our fever. Perhaps that’s what justifies this great plague of books, I said to H. But even as I say that, I said, I know the game will soon be up, and books will be unimportant. Capitalism is subtle, I said, and changes shape very quickly. Soon, I said, books will be as nothing, and it will be the income you bring into the university that counts. Books will be expected and writing them even indulged, but what will count is money. Forget research funding for books and articles, I said to H. If it is that books have become no more than tokens, the rapidity of their circulation volatilising what little content they might have, if books have become no more than abstract counters of exchange, then their worth as career markers will depreciate.

That is the smiling revenge of the university on those who have made their career by writing books from which the world would gain if they disappeared. That is the laughter of capitalism as it strips from people like me what passed as a measure of their self-worth. But I’ve written all these books, we will whine when the university expels us for not bringing in enough money. I’ve written an introduction to A and Understanding B; I’ve written a book that introduced C to first and second year undergraduates; I’ve made D accessible to bright sixth formers and laypeople; I’ve published an illustrated guide to E and an idiots guide to F: does this not count for anything? And the university, at once indulgent and cruel, at once smiling and vicious, will let our contracts run out and send us back out into the world. Yes, that will be our fate, I said to H. And we will deserve it, we who took the toreadors’s cape for our target. Who of us looked up at the grinning face of the one who made us run around the arena? Who of us will have seen that it is capitalism that laughs and that the house that wins every game?

You know the lie we tell ourselves, I said to H. You know how we want to survive like parasites, that we cling onto to the great beast sucking a little blood for ourselves. We moan, we complain about administration and bureaucracy, I said to H, but in the end it keeps us happy and active. We think we are alive, we write and think writing is living, we write and congratulate ourselves for keeping ahead, for having been able to squeeze another one out before being caught out. We think we’ve done well to have survived this far in such a hostile environment. But in truth, we have been indulged, we have played the game we were supposed to play. In truth, our writing is an alibi, and what we write is written across the void. Nothing has happened; nothing is happening; the world plunges into misery as into the night. Today and tomorrow are the same, I said to H., capitalism turns around itself as the tiger ran around the boy. And just as that tiger melted into butter as he ran, everything we take to be the world, the university, is melting into money.

1.

Let there be light. And so there was light. Who sees? God, can see nothing – he knows everything already, he is everywhere, and has no use for an organ of sight only a finite being could possess. But for the human being? The light is switched on; there is a world. Why did God create light? Because he knew the human being would be the mirror in which he would see himself as he was seen by a finite being. Cosmic narcissism: God witnesses himself as the human being witnesses the world.

And when God disappears? Magritte’s famous painting shows the back of the head mirrored where there should be a face. What is seen is what should not be seen. The self reflects the world, that is true. It reflects the world, but it is not the world and does not ground it. What does it see? Mystery. It sees what it cannot know and calls this unknown God. But this is human vanity, the desire to be witnessed by an indulgent parent, to be His-Majesty-the-Baby all over again. Narcissism redoubled: the human being witnesses itself in the witnessing attributed to God. It sings of its own glory.

That is why, one day, the self decides to ground itself insofar as it would mirror itself in its mirroring. Now the rise of reflexivity as philosophy’s method and its content. The subject appears, for this is what the self has become, as subiectum, that which is thrown under, which throws itself under what is to be discovered, only discovering itself and confirming its own measure, the natural light of reason. Subiectum and not hypokeimenon, which at least retains a sense of what is non-human, of lying outside what can be known. Of what is now known as the object, or what is throw against us. Narcissism shattered – or is it?

The next step: the subject must posit itself in what differs from it, that is, as object, before it brings itself back as subject (for it becomes a subject at this moment). That is, it posits itself in its self-alienation as an object before retrieving itself. So it is that alienation and objectivity are annulled. The subject continues to throw itself out of itself and draws itself back as it overcomes is own alienation.

Then, terribly, a blind spot reveals itself. How did this happen? Overwhelming weariness which reveals a groundlessness where you would have posited yourself. A kind of madness by which the abyss returns in the place of that self-mirroring you took as the mirror of the world. What do you see? The back of your head; the back of your eyes. What do you see? Your own blindspot.

The abyss: how can it fail to remind you of the place God once occupied? Of that abyss that was God’s abyss, and from which God looked out as the unknown? Tragedy: you cannot think the tain of the mirror. You cannot get back behind what gives itself as the world and gives you to the world. Now again, the old sense of destiny: you are thrown into the world and subjected to it. No longer a subject, but subjected, finite, and you do not command what you see.

You are seen – the eye of the abyss is upon you. You are tormented by dreams, by your unconscious as it gives unto what you cannot know. Vision is not enough. You see by blindness, by way of your blindness. You hear by your deafness a great roaring and nonsense. By blindness and deafness, by what you cannot touch, but what touches you, you are witnessed, known, though it is not God who knows you thus.

Anti-narcissism. Finitude in the double sense: you are born, thrown into the world, and you cannot know what escapes your measure. Finitude as subjection, as fate without gods and without witnesses. But now the new dream: to see blindly, to hear deafly, to know what cannot be known.

Continue reading “Extimacy”

What is marvellous, I said to H., is that they really do wear tweed. What’s wonderful is that they confirm every stereotype – tweed and elbow patches, I said, eyeglasses on a string and probably a pipe in their pocket. Nothing is hidden, I said to H., they wear tweed and are happy wearing tweed. It’s an instinct to them, I said to H., second nature. They wear tweed and hunt in packs, I said, in great tweedy packs. They have tweedy conferences and publish in tweedy journals.

If you get one on their own, a bit panicked, I said, because the others have left them behind, they are pleasant enough, I said. There’s nothing better when you run into one at a provincial university, I said, alone and blinking, half-dazed, working as though in purgatory, I said. Swallowing hard and saying to himself: just for a few years, I’ll get back. Whose contacts have not worked for them so they could find their way back, I said.

Perhaps it’s because they’ve gone wrong somewhere, I said. Imagine it: a tweed gone wrong, running amock, I said. A tweed who cannot hear the homing signal, I said, or have taken a wrong turn, I said. Who have been caught in the net of this or that provincial university, I said, ashamed and alone, their herding instinct thwarted, I said. Tweeds who receive messages from other tweeds to say, never mind, it will be okay, there’s a post opening up at X.

I like them very much, I said to H. Especially when they try to get to grips with what they call postmodernism, I said. Occasionally they visit me, I said. I’ll get one in my office, I said. And they test me, I said. They ask me about this or that, I said. What am I into? The history of philosophy? Is that what I’m into? They look round my office I said, half-panicked. They think they might have taken a wrong turn, I said.

Then, ‘the problem with postmodernism is …’ and they tell me. I like being told, I said. I like it very much. I like the tweedy types telling me what’s what, I said. Sorting me out, I said. Putting me right, I said. They’re like the smart young missionaries from the Mormons, I said, or like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Of course they don’t do door to door visits, I said, but when you get one alone, when one inadvertently strays into your path, they get panicked I said, and flap about.

The best thing is when the tweeds take you as one of their own. It’s true I’ve known a lot of tweeds, I said. I’ve lived with them and worked with them, I said. For along enough for the tweedy mask to slip, I said, to see little scared faces like hunted animals I said. To see little apoplectic faces full of rage and dislike for Derrida and Heidegger, I said. We invited this Deleuzian to speak, says the tweed, and it was drivel! awful! We invited this fellow to speak on Heidegger, says the tweed, and I couldn’t understand a word! It was awful!, said the tweed. I treasure these moments, I said. I’ve tried to read Levinas, says the tweed, and I couldn’t really make the fellow out.

Thankfully there are still conferences, I said, where they can assemble in great flocks, I said. Thankfully once or twice a year the tweed can travel home, to meet other tweeds, I said. It’s a marvellous sight, I said, dozens of tweedy types, I said, hundreds of them. Flocked together. No doubt there are friendships among the tweeds, I said, just as there are said to be friendships among sheep and cows.

But what is marvellous is the way they all move together, I said. It’s quite beautiful, hundreds of tweeds moving together like a great flock of birds or a shoal of tropical fish. How marvellously they turn in exactly the same way from the threat of danger!, I said. How marvellous they move with exactly the same instinct away from that stuff, the suspicious stuff, Derrida and Heidegger and all that, I said. Their students want to study Derrida and Heidegger and all that stuff, I said, but they know to avoid it. Their supervisors told them a little Merleau-Ponty is okay, I said, the early works, I said, but not the later books. They’ve read a book called Sartre for Analytic Philosophers, I said, and that helped them, it was quite interesting, but tosh really, interesting as literature, I said, but little else.

Yes, it’s very beautiful, the way they all move together and as one, I said. With the same instincts, I said. Each working on a tiny tiny problem, I said, but confident, nevertheless in the greater labour of the whole, I said. each focused on some small and managable problem, I said, but with great faith in the larger ensemble, I said. I like them very much, I said.

Nothing is hidden, I said to H., they cluster in great packs, I said. Oxford, Cambridge, that sort of place. It’s wonderful when they deign to go elsewhere, to travel in great packs to another place. To flock together at a provincial university, I said, to assemble in a great tweedy mass. They take the tweed with them, I said., it protects them. They know others for what they are – they wear tweed or they do not, I said. You are either a tweed wearer or a non tweed wearer, I said, the world divides.