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Folie a deux, the madness of lovers separate from the world. Levinas will condemn it as a solipsism; Blanchot will discover in this madness the link to the communities outside constituted politics – the protestors who remembered those killed at the Charonne metro station in 1962, for example, as they demonstrated against French colonialism, or those who rose up in the streets of May 1968 in Paris: those streets which, beneath a sky no longer cosmic – no longer linked to a particular world (kosmos), to a given people or nationality, where there arose a horde of no one in particulars, each the anyone whatever sharing what affirmed for each in what he calls, after a book of Char’s poems, common presence.

So too the presence of the lovers, one to another in Duras’s The Malady of Death: each is wagered according to the attempt to love. An attempt formalised in his accession to the contract she offers to him. How did it work (I’ve forgotten): seven nights, was it, together in a room by the sea? In the end, he finds it impossible to love – do not assume he was homosexual – and she departs. To where does she go? To find others whom she might love and from whom she might receive love.

Common presence: this names the ‘people of Paris’, as they were called (though Blanchot is quick to say these were not a Volk): marchers who marched without leader in memory of those killed. Who marched and then dispersed, without being given the order to gather or disperse. In silence and in memory, though great strength was there. The same, perhaps, as the one of which Blanchot writes in relation to the demonstration against De Gaulle’s return to power, helped by mercenaries, in 1958. Refusal: that is Blanchot’s model. A word to which he will return, just as Duras will take it up in her turn, in her books.

Common presence: I think at once of those little groups who were gathered in political hope in the wake of 1956, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the triumphs of Guevara. And in the face of the French Communist Party which expelled Duras, Antelme and others. I think of the group who gathered at the Rue Saint-Benoit, who were they? Mascolo, Schuster, Duras, Antelme (and later, his wife, who still lives), and of course Blanchot whom, as a correspondent once wrote to me, came like Gandalf from the South, full of magic and mystery. They assembled in the evenings to eat. Feasts were prepared. They would edit the collective paper 14th July, to aid the movement of refusal of de Gaulle’s return but also that of French colonialism in Algeria.

Marvellous to read of those days and the efforts which succeeded them – the failed International Review which drew Barthes to the rue-Saint Benoit (Lacan, too, was a visitor – and what of Bataille?) and saw Blanchot write to Gunter Grass and Iris Murdoch, to Enzenburger and Vittorini (another friend of the group, whose Red Carnation was admired by Bataille (I still haven’t read it)) with the aim of establish a review adequate to the overcoming of colonisation, to the achievement of a world citizenry and, perhaps, to the common presence of all, the great sharing of the world. Then came May 1968, and the dispersal of those at rue Saint-Benoit: Blanchot became too ill and retired from the world (he no longer saw even his closest friends whom, strange irony, he would outlive, all except for Derrida, who outlived Blanchot only by a year), Duras turned to film-making, the others continued to work …

Common presence. But what if this model of politics, of a democracy that would answer those who refused and were capable of refusal – strange capacity, as it involved a receptivity to receptivity, a responsibility which begins in a response not to the Other as for Levinas but to world as it was what Deleuze might call virtual, to the possibility of a countereffectuation of what is, that same responsibility which Gillian Rose, for one, will find wholly objectionable and a symptom of a postmodern lability to endless melancholy – itself fell short of what was announced in Char’s poems: to the common presence of all – of the reserve of being, to the refusal implicit to matter?

Char is not a bucolic poet; beware the attempt to celebrate nature for it is still cosmic – still belongs to that order which would find stars in the sky to steer by. What if the stars have fallen? What if it is not to the cosmos we belong (celestial order, the appeal to nature) but to the disaster (des-astres, without stars)? How pretentious! Blanchot sought with the International Review the creation of an anonymous fragmentary writing which, he thought, was so lacking in those who tried in their writings to alert their readers to the fate of the world (Jaspers, for one). This is admirable. He sketched many topics for his contributors to write about. He asked for translators to make the journal available for those of many languages. In the end, the project failed. Barthes, for one, was angry; Blanchot dissuaded him from commemorating the project, aware of the fate of those groups whose brilliance was eclipsed by the brilliance of their disputes (Surrealism).

But what was my point? Oh yes: common presence would draw also on those forces outside the human – on reserves of fresh water, on supplies of energy, and the revolution cannot be one of refusal, of marches in which the plight of the world (the plight of the fixity of the world, its determination) is witnessed, but of those relations to impersonal forces. No longer is the subject the centre of political science. No longer is it the mulitude which must awaken. Now it is impersonal, transpersonal forces which much be engaged. Unless this is what the multitude and refusal already mean; unless it is a question of that counter-effectuation which return to each of us that commonwealth of fresh water, fresh air and fresh food …

Not the molar revolution, perhaps, bodies on the street – or rather, not just that. The scientist who struggles to unleash new energies and those energies themselves is also part of the revolution, as are those who make sure our monocultural agriculture is not vulnerable, because of the paucity of seed varieties (am I right to think our crops are grown now from a handful of seed-types which could be wiped out quickly?) to obliteration. As are those who work to control the flow of finance capital, not just to steer or to administrate it (our new model of government), but to regulate its devastation of peoples and of the environment.

All this without the suspicious return to the pathos of the ‘natural’ (itself part of the cosmic order), of nature. To the cosmic, Blanchot will also link a molar image of writing. He dreams of a new collectivity, each responsive to what can only be received in a kind of passivity: that opening to each of what being is not, of the becoming of being, of being’s virtuality (however it might be put) and hence for the chance of counter-effectuation, of counter-memory, of forgetting (however that might be put). Why do I entertain the idea that this writing is present in Will Oldham’s songs?

Watch the G8 concerts and you will see what were called in Rock school ‘rock positions’: a system of codes which would express the rock performance, codes which have long voided their content and now repeat themselves not even as farce (the spectacle of, say, Whitesnake in the early 80s) but as the worst kind of postmodern cynicism – every style is up for grabs; even U2 can play punk. Listen to Will Oldham, watch him speak or perform and at every stage there is a refusal of position. Not by chance will he write over and again of an unspecified ‘it’ – peculiar object, peculiar, impersonal agent which acts upon those of whom he sings. No consolation for him of the great cynicism. Reborn is a new a commitment – not for what was called rock and not even for punk (though punk is a different word to rock, is its refusal). Songs of part-objects and fragmentary things (always the word things in Will Oldham’s songs). Songs of couples in rooms. And passing through the words, flowing with them, sometimes, but also against them, forcing the singer’s voice to rise and break, there is a music which allows there to be sung something like the heart of being, the lining of the world.

These are beginning songs, but what begins are receptivities and new alliances, new relations. There are no stars above Will Oldham. Old verities have disappeared. Begin again; you can rely on nothing. The old forms have been hollowed out and the new a form of form must open. Not by chance does Will Oldham speak of the importance of Big Black and the Minutemen to him, and of the new collectivities which gathered around these groups. Punk repeated itself in them, as it did, later, in Slint and then in Will Oldham (his first album sees him accompanied by several members of Slint), which is only possible if the punk is repeated as a revolution, and not as a repetition of empty forms. When Will Oldham writes of God, this is not the God of monotheism. Not is a postmodern and cynical God, meaning everything and nothing. God now names a kind of relation: the one who asks for a wager. Will Oldham’s music is then exemplified by Abraham’s journey to the mountain in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The knife is held over Isaac, which is to say, over himself as singer, over what he has taken himself to be (and what is taken as being). But God intervenes and a new Will Oldham is born.

Who is Will Oldham? Not the actor who hides himself under pseudonyms, but the one who knows that there are no names but false names, and each of us is the monster who cannot be named. A monster? Rather a horde of monsters, a whirling multitude. Who is Will Oldham? Interviewee who responds differently to the questions he is asked each time he is asked them again. Singer who begins anew with each album, working with new people, working differently each time. Who is he? One who watches over punk as it names the being of becoming.

You know their type, I said. Brooding, resentful, middle aged, their too-large bodies shifting in their chairs, their fat necks in collars and neckties. You know the old style bullies, great, lumbering, stupid beasts who have had years of sabbaticals and research leave, who were promoted on the back of a mediocre book or a clutch of average articles. You know them, I said, gas-filled and stupid, with stupid blank eyes that search the horizon for new objects of resentment.

You know them, you suffered from them, you were directly oppressed by them when they employed you to cover their teaching for free (‘it’s great experience’) or organised large conferences without credit (‘don’t you take a summer holiday this year’). Yes, you know them, shambling from one international conference or another, professing from lecterns from Sydney to Seattle, surrounded by a little cloud of academics who want favours. You know the ones I mean, I said, writing on Marxism while they employ you on a part-time contract to do their teaching, their administration and their conference organisation. You know them, I said, filling the committees and the Q.A.A. panels.

You remember what they confessed to you that day in their office, when puffed-up with power, chest pushed outwards they boasted they could destroy a department if they wanted to and that no one could escape their grasp. You remember being told your career would be destroyed, I said, that they would destroy your career, that wherever you went you’d be in danger, I said. You remember them telling you to run upstairs and fetch their printing, I said. You remember being led round the canteen like a shire horse, like a tamed dumb beast.

You remember having to kow-tow to idiots, I said, to speak the language of idiots, I said, to speak idiot-speak when they asked you questions after your paper, I said. You remember being told how important it was to impress them, I said, these idiots I said and how you went cap in hand to their great offices to ask for a little more teaching I said. You remember, I said, as a part-timer having to attend the lectures for which you were to provide seminars, having to attend team meetings and quality meetings and, to impress the department, to attend and be an active member of the Research Seminar, I said.

You remember them whispering in corners I said, scheming and plotting in pubs, I said. You remember them as transmitters of gossip and rumour, I said. You remember when they favoured you with a conversation, I said, and they led you like the lumbering beast they had brought under control from this corridor to that, I said. You remember calming them down after their tantrums, I said, and all but wiping their brows. You remember how they told you teaching 4 hours a week was difficult, I said. You remembering being advised to attend their postgraduate courses even though you had your doctorate, I said, to get into their good books, I said.

You remember their idiocies and lies, I said, and smiling at their idiocy and laughing at their idiotic remarks, I said, and feigning to admire their power, I said. You remember indulging their fantasies, I said, of letting them wallow in their sense of their importance, I said. You remember telling them how much you enjoyed their book, I said, and how much you looked forward to their reckoning with Bonhoffer, I said. You remember them telling you about the good old days, and how it didn’t used to be so hard, I said.

You remember them, I said. The memory is burnt into you, I said. Because you have been everybody’s monkey, I said, everybody’s jester, I said, the bells of your cap jangling as you passed down the corridors, I said. Because you were everybody’s carthorse, everybody’s houseboy, the slave who danced in his chains, I said, the dancing bear and the grinning court dwarf. You were the department idiot I said, the department ape and buffoon. Of what did you dream, I said, but of becoming the confidante of the manager, her favourite. Of supplanting all the other rivals in her affection, I said. Of being the most docile seminar-wallah, the best listener-wallah and the most loquacious flattery-wallah, I said.

How you loathed it, I said. How keen you were to escape, I said. ‘No one would believe what goes on here’, you said to the other monkeys. You longed to stand upright, I said. You longed to have the blinkers removed, and your iron collar unlocked, I said. And you longed for the bit to be removed from your mouth. To speak, to stand, to see at last.

There he is in his velvet cowboy hat, I said, the puffed-up mediocrity, I said, the editor of several publishing series and a prestigious series of edited collections, I said. Cultivator of admirers and dependants, I said. Like the lord of a little feudal town, I said, throwing gold coins to the peasants just to see them dashing about and then tipping their caps. ‘Bless you guv’nor, god bless you’. 

The Vice-Chancellor is in her suite and the lecturers in their offices. The desperate ones are wandering the corridors, officeless and baseless, writing on films they cannot afford to pay to see and on books they cannot afford to pay to read. The desperate ones, I said, wandering the corridors for years, pitied by all and despised by all (‘why don’t they just give up?’) because they see in you the truth of their own condition, its disgusting price.

Do you think it’s possible to die of hatred? I asked H. Do you think a creature could have been who was so stupid they died of sheer stupidity? I said. Not as a consequence of that stupidity, I said, but from stupidity. And shame, I said, – do you think you could die of shame, I mean literally die? And what about boredom, I said, do you think you could die of that? Because I’m burning up with hatred and stupidity and shame and boredom, I said. I’m burning up and I think I will explode from hatred and stupidity and shame and boredom, I said.

I feel like one of the scientists on the space station orbiting Solaris, I said. Orbiting round and round and round the planet of my stupidity, I said. Round and round I go until I’m bored. But I cannot help but be fascinated, I said. It’s like my first book, I said. It mesmerises me, I said. Sometimes I pull it down from the shelf and open its pages, I said. I already know what I’ll find there, I said, but I want to find it again. I want the fact of my own stupidity to be confirmed, I said. And I want to enter my stupidity, to fall into it, to be embraced by it even as it bores me, I said.

Boredom is the modality of my fascination, I said. It’s still boredom, I said, but it’s boredom fascinated, I said. And in this case with what I sought to make with my life, I said. This is it, I say to myself, I said to H., this is what I worked for? A book published by a company which barely checks what it publishes, barely deigns to proofread it, barely deigns to publish it, I said, letting it creep out in the tiniest of editions, I said, effectively printing on demand from the first, I said. Printing on demand, I said, in short runs – it is little different to the way Zara operates, I said, constantly updating its stock, changing direction once a fortnight, moving rapidly, very rapidly I said. So too with the publisher in our late capitalism, I said.

This is the great lie of academia, I said, the great capture of creativity. That the book you wrote – the second rate commentary on this or that French thinker – is a badge of your creativity, a form of struggle against Capital, a little negentropic island in the midst of general decay. Phew, I finished it,  that’s what you say to yourself, despite everything, I finished it despite everything – which is to say, despite Capital and the new demand it places on you. And what is that demand? Production, I said. To produce spreadsheets and funding applications and material for the audit – all that, I said. To produce virtual learning environments and reports on teaching, all that, I said.

The great lie: against the dumb production of administrative nonsense, you managed to write a book. You took your evenings and weekends back to write a book. You crept into the office in the evenings and at the weekend to work not on administration, I said, but on your book. So it is I orbit the planet of my stupidity, I said. Around and around the book that is supposed to be the concrete manifestation of my freedom I said. Bad commentary, I said, that’s my great cry of rebellion! Badly written and badly argued I said, and that was all the revolt I could manage!

Worst of all, I want always to excuse myself, I said. To say: but I wrote it in nine months in my spare time, in evenings and weekends, I said. And that is the great joke, I said, because this excuse is also a kind of pride. It says: oh, what I could have produced if I’d have had more time! It says: I will have to begin again, to write another book if only to erase the memory of the first book I said. And so it goes on, I said. Book after book after book, I said. Like a great sickness, I said.

Academics are like skeleton crew left on the space station in Tarkovsky‘s film, I said. We’re half-mad, I said, and living from the phantom products of our creativity, I said. Academia seems to grant our desires, I said. It seems to give flesh to our desires, I said. Capital repeats what was lost, bringing it to life again, I said, just as the protagonist Kelvin, meets his lover, Hari, who killed herself a long time ago. He meets her again, beautiful, loving, but also empty. And when, disturbed by this emptiness, he tries to leave her behind, to move into another part of the space station, she walks through sheet glass and metal doors to be with him, I said, wrecking herself. And when he blasts her off into space, she returns to him, I said, as if from returning from the dead. Only she remembers nothing, I said. Each time it is as though she is born again from Kelvin’s dreams and from his youth.

Isn’t there something of this in romance under the current conditions?, I said. As though the romantic scripts themselves had failed and romance itself had worn out, I said. Everyone’s working, I said, night and day. Working and moving around the country, from this place to that, I said. And everyone is contactable, I said, night and day. It’s hot desking in the office and working from home, I said, until worktime is all time and the home, too, is an office.

Romance – what of romance in the midst of all this? A kind of repetition – youthful ardour repeated, the sense that there is something to live for apart from Capital, I said. As though what returned in romance was the ability of laugh at Capital, I said. Laughter at Capital as it demands you move from here to there and then away from your lover, I said.

What is age when compared to this youth? Conservatism and foolishness, I said, adjustment to the fact of Capital and the sense of its inevitability. Strategy and careerism. But it is that your body has been wrecked, walking through sheet glass and metal doors to follow your career, I said. You’ve torn yourself up and torn up your youth I said. So it is with the academic monograph, the great incarnation of freedom, I said. Disinterested research, I said. Pure intellection, I said, how marvellous! And you’ll do anything to complete it, I said, working alone, as other academics are also alone on the space station I said. Each of you alone and working on your monograph I said. Alone and hoping you’ll get away with it, that you can snatch a few hours for yourself each day and complete it, I said.

But all along we are orbiting the planet of our stupidity, I said. The planet of Capital, I said, from which are born the ghostly correlates of what we take to be the work of our creativity. What I produce does not matter, I said. It is not anti-production, it is not the gift that breaks with the economy of production, it is simply a bad book in the great streaming of bad books, I said. That’s what we’ll be known for, I said: bad books.

The dream is ending, I said. Soon, books will count for nothing. Only income generation will count, I said. Monographs will cease to be of any importance, I said. What will matter is research funding, I said, the flood of money the government releases for academics to bid for, I said. Even in philosophy, I said. Especially in philosophy, I said. Philosophy will be a way the State returns to itself and confirms itself, I said. There will be only State Philosophy, I said, building elaborate new space stations to orbit the great planet of stupidity, I said.

When you ask me, ‘what are you working on?’, I said to H., I’ll say, ‘deepening my own stupidity’. ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘The perfection of State Philosophy’. ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘Allowing the State to perfect itself into the administrator of Capital, the limbs of Capital, it’s little mandibles, its pseudopodia’. ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘I’m trying to quicken the movement of Capital, to allow to return more efficiently to itself’. ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘I want to perfect myself as an instrument of Capital, a conduit which offers no resistance. I want to feel Capital steaming through me’.

Meanwhile there is the lie that the torn and shattered book, like Kelvin’s Hari, answers my youthful dreams of creativity. This lie confirms itself even as I whine that it is not the book I wanted to write. The book lies, I said, on every one of its pages. It is my alibi, that I can show people to justify poor pay and poor working conditions. ‘I wrote this – it is not the book I wanted to write, but …’ It is my pathetic act of rebellion, I said, the prize awarded me for giving my youth to Capital.

It’s marvellous, I said, universities now employ administrators expert at translating poorly written funding proposals into sleek and efficient funding proposals. They get paid more than us, I said, and rightly so. They’re doing the real work, I said, and can only approximate the officialese at which they are so adept at writing, I said. It’s only right they get paid more, much more than us, I said. They are the translators of academic funding proposals into the terms Capital can understand, I said, which is to say they translate everything into nonsense, I said, but officialese nonsense, written in that non-language that laughs at us, the poor academics who have yet to upload ourselves into the movement of Capital, I said.

Academics are the dross of the university, I said, but never mind. Microsoft will roll out the great teaching Encarta soon, I said. They’ve spent billions on it, I said. Billions, and they feel it is pure philanthrophy. And after Encarta, what need will there be for lecturers or seminar leaders?, I said. Research will survive, I said, but only the universities far sighted enough to employ administrators who can efficiently translate the poorly written funding proposals that come to them from academics, I said.

In the end, a new breed will appear, as I said, as it is already appearing: the administrator-academic, the all-purpose university robot, I said, adept in the languages of funding proposals and quality management. Fluent in all the tounges of Capital, I said. Ready for all weathers and all terrain, I said. With little caterpillar tracks instead of feet, I said, rolling around from here to there, I said, efficient and ever ready I said. We’ll keep them in empty lecture rooms, I said, switching them off at night and on in the mornings. And they’ll roll about, I said, ready for every challenge, I said.

I have happy memories, I said to H., of that Away Day with the Quality team which we took in a room of the Houses of Parliament, I said. We rented that room at a discount, I said, and it was our room for the day. What a bonus for us academics, I said, to be treated to lunch at the Houses of Parliament, I said. And what joy it was to be joined by the imperatrice of Quality, that marvellous individual who instructed us about branding and how we should be proud of our university! Every module outline should have the university brand on it, she said. You should be proud of working for the university, she said. But then she said, ‘as the university should be proud to have you’.

It was the run up to our QAA. As a Lecturer on a one year 0.5 post, earning a full £9,000 in the Home Counties, it was clearly important that I attend such meetings. I was to be trained in matter of quality, and I gladly received that training. I listened to the imperatrice of Quality with great concentration. Yes, I should think about university branding, I thought, and I should think about personal branding, too. How was I to brand myself? How to develop my own personal brand? What did I stand for, after all?

That year, I told H., I was given an office in the former stables of the house in which an American senator lived during the war. I had my office, but no keys to the office, so I could never get into it. It was designed thus, I found out. There was no need, after all, for me to have an office. On the other hand, somewhere on paper, I should be seen to have an office.

Even if I had got into the office, there was nothing there. A few rotten mattresses were all I could make out through the windows. And some mould on the wall. Effectively, I had no office. Instead, I rented a room from the university, a little room in which I could stay in the evening so long as I cleared it out every morning. I would take my personal effects to the porter to look after, I said, and then wander around the Senator’s former mansion, up the stairs and down the stairs, and then around the courtyard and past the old greenhouses. The campus was mine, I said, because it was no one’s.

I had no office and no computer, I said. The little campus was mine, however. I wandered about the campus in the evening, I said, where there were no bars and nothing to do. There was the library, I said, so I went there. I went to the library and photocopied books. I abused my privileges; I still have piled-up photocopied books in my filing cabinet I said.

They let me teach Husserl, I said. Husserl, but not anything after Husserl. ‘My supervisor warned my about Merleau-Ponty’, said the Head of Department, ‘and he said he was dangerous. I’ve never read him’. Often, I would wander into the Philosophy corridor and gaze in admiration at the clippings from the newspapers stuck to the walls. They included the piece in the Guardian published just after Deleuze’s death, where he is impugned for his intellectual impostures. Then there were carefully photocopied paragraphs from other lofty newspapers on Derrida and others. ‘Pure bunk’; ‘arrant nonsense’. Finally, there was a glass case containing the lofty publications of the philosophy department themelves. How busy they had been! How ambitious they were! Photocopied front pages of their articles at jaunty angles were arranged beneath glass panels on the wall. I marvelled at their industry.

Truly I was among giants! I was a fool, a dwarf among giants! They were taller and better than I! I was a skulking thing, half-dead, wandering in obscurity around the campus! I was a skulking disgusting thing who could never think of anything to say in the long Research Forums where visiting academics, some from Oxford and Cambridge, would give not one but two papers, with dinner at a local restaurant in between. Not one but two papers. Two papers on the Philosophy of Mind. Two papers on why it was wrong to stick pins in babies. What joy it was in that dawn to be alive! What joy I experienced among the men and woman of Oxford and Cambridge who came to visit us!

The academics drove round in their cars and I walked on my poor feet. The academics lived in the surrounding towns and I lived in a rented room on campus. They passed me and I waved. Had they seen me? In the evenings I wrote a flood of poor papers and by day I received a flood of rejection letters. I received a Bad Writing award and the academics drove around in their cars. I was a Bad Writer, but their careers were like their cars, large and established. On they sped. It was good and it was right. I was base matter and they were the gods.

What will happen to them now, these lofty academics? What resistance will they put up against Microsoft and its minions? Because I know they are the old breed, the dying breed and that for all their strength and magnificence, they will fail, I said. Better than me, stronger than me, but rather like the boastful tree in the children’s story, the tree which said: I am stronger than you, grass, but was felled in a storm. But I am not grass, I said, I am something which will survive the death of grass.

Crawling through the grass are the survivors, I said, those degraded creatures who will survive all disasters. They are waiting for the disaster, and out they will swarm, I said. I am not one of these creatures, I said, but the scum that grows on their chitin, I said. I am a little patch of sickness that grows on their hard black casing, I said. I am not a survivor, I said, but the scum that grows on the backs of survivors. For there is something knowing about me, I said. I have learnt bitter lessons and live from bitter lessons. I am adjusted and ready for the disaster, and I am even looking forward to it, I said. I dream feebly of the great takeover when Microsoft rolls out its educational software and people like me will move from university to university, slaves to the great servo-mechanisms of Capital.

The grass will be dead and the earth singed and the great beasts with whom I used to work will have starved to death. Their cars rust by the roadside; pages from their articles blow in the wind. Meanwhile, I will be one of the technicians of learning appearing in a 2 inch by 2 inch window on your console, having been brought in by Microsoft to deliver what will pass for teaching.

Humanities academics take their real business to be doing what is called research, I said. What they want is all the other stuff to be taken care of so they can get down to some work, I said. The academics are dreaming of Introductions and Critical Readers, I said. They are dreaming of new books whose name begins with Understanding … or ends in … in 90 Minutes. They dream of edited collections and special issues of journals.

Ah, creativity, I said – the capture of creativity, it’s marvellous. There is a whole technology to capure creativity, to seize it as it seems to give itself as soon as it appears. To seize creativity from the second it appears. It is easy to laugh at academics, I said, but they deserve to be laughed at. It’s happening all around us, I said, the world is changing as it has changed only a few times before, and it’s passing us by, I said.

The only way we think this change, I said, is under the sign of apocalypse. And I am the best example of this, I said. Or the worst example. I write over and again that the world is about to end, I said. That it’s all coming to an end. But there has been one version or another of this apocalypticism for the last century, I said, and probably before that, I said. A feeble milleniarism is the driver of all sorts of books, I said, best sellers or not. To write in this way is only another kind of self-loathing, I said. It is another kind of imaginary revenge on a world that is indifferent to you, I said. A world that is leaving you behind, I said, and in truth had always left you behind.

There’s no role for us now, I said to H. For a time the R.A.E. has funded research in the humanities, I said. This gave thousands of academics a chance to flood the world with books, I said. Thousands upon thousands of books, good and bad, I said. Where would I be without the R.A.E.?, I asked. After all, I come from a bad university, I said. I was a mediocre student, I said, and now I’m a mediocre writer. B0ok follows book and I leave a slug’s trail of mediocrity across the world, I said. Follow me by the signs I leave, I said. Mediocre signs. I used to be able to get away with commentary, I said. But even a slug knows when it’s done enough commentary, I said. Even a slug feels a distant, gnawing shame.

So now it’s necessary to take my revenge on the world, I said. The world which blame for my own mediocrity, I said. I got a job by chance, I said. And then acted like I’d deserved that chance, I said. As if it were natural and right, I said, and my due. But it wasn’t my due, I said, and it wasn’t my right. If I published a great deal, this was because of sickness, I said. There’s no an idea in any of the publications, I said, nothing of worth. I published and published, I said, and there’s nothing in this. For have there ever been more places to publish? I asked.

Once, it is true, I struggled to get published. I had more rejection letters than anyone. But that is when I aimed high, I said. Then I learnt to aim low, I said. I learnt that quantity was the rule. And then, when I found myself in a good university, the publishers came to my office and asked me if I had anything to publish. They came to my office, I said, one by one. There they were, aimiable and pleasant and in my office, I said. What had I done to merit that! For years I had been carrying round a mediocre manuscript which no one would touch, I said. Not because it was bad, but because it wouldn’t sell, I said.

I sent it off to that idiot in a cowboy hat in the states, I said, that velvet cowboy hat on which I spilt my Guinness, I said, and he never wrote back. That happened any number of times, I said. No one was interested, and rightly so. And now the publishers came to my office I said, and they asked me if I had a manuscript they could look at. Of course, what they were really looking for, I said, was a textbook, but they gave me a contact to whom I could send a monograph, I said.

There was no problem getting a book out, I said, once I was in a good university. It was like sneezing, I said. There it was. Barely copy edited, barely edited, with errors the Malaysian proof reader added herself, I said (they had subcontracted everything to the Far East, the publishers), but there it was, a book. And now I was free to act like the author of a book, I said. Like a player. Now I could refer people to my book. ‘Just read the book’, I could say. Meanwhile, I knew the book was mediocre, I said, and not even that. Barely mediocre, I said, and full of typos, I said. A book written in gibberese, I said.

Even with my poor standards I knew something was wrong, I said. The second book’s coming out without any publisher’s referees seeing the whole manuscript, I said. It costs too much to employ referees nowadays, I said. They pay you in books. They give you two or three copies of your own book if you referee someone else’s book, I said. But that usually means only looking at a proposal and perhaps a sample chapter, I said. No more than that.

Even mediocrities know something is wrong, I said. Even mediocrities feel an obscure sense of shame. It’s getting worse with me, I said, I feel more shame than ever, I said. You might think this would mean the beginning of thinking, I said. The first two books would have been ‘prentice works and now the real work begins, I said. But no. What is left to me now is only a vague apocalypticism, I said. One which is basically resentment at the system which gave me job, I said.

I am enacting an imaginary revenge on the whole system, I said, but it’s only imaginary. God forbid I ever accomplish a deed, I said. God forbid I ever do something. A resentful, hate filled little soul has hollowed itself out in me, I said. A little place has been scooped out in me where I dream of revenge, I said. A little place of shame and hatred I said, which cannot bear itself, I said, and seeks to blame everything on something else.

This could be my saving grace, I said. It could be this which leads me to accomplish something, I said. Because casting about for someone to blame led me to strong thinkers and strong books, I said. I blame Capital, I said, and, happy chance, I was right to blame Capital, I said. Somehow or another Capital led me to discover its truth, I said. The truth it laid like flies’ eggs in my own soul, I said. In my soul which is the soul of Capital I said, as it is has seized and destroyed academia, I said. In my soul which is full of writhing maggots, good maggots and bad ones, I said, much like academia itself.

Write from shame, I said. And write from loathing. For there is something to be ashamed of and there is something to loathe. The blog is a threshold, I said to H. It is that place where Capital becomes aware of itself, I said. Where the maggot realises he is a maggot among maggots, I said. Everywhere the flies’ eggs are hatching, I said. Culture is only the dung heap in which maggots crawl, I said, and I am one of those maggots. How is it then I know I’m a maggot? How is it that my maggotry revealed itself in me? I said.

Winston Smith in 1984 wrote a diary he kept secret from Big Brother. He wrote and discovered his soul. But it is the other way round, I said. The soul was born because of Big Brother and only because of Big Brother. The strong have no need for souls, I said. The soul is not a womb, nothing is born there. The soul is a place for flies’ eggs, I said, that hollows itself out from sheer resentment, I said. Then the flies eggs hatch and maggots crawl around, eating out our insides, I said. Then the maggots turn into flies and the flies buzz around, I said, and buzz out of our mouths at symposia and colloquia and buzz through the pages of our books.

The ancients thought flies were spontaneously generated from base matter, I said, and they were right. Only the base matter is the walls of our own souls, I said. Those souls resentment and shame have hollowed out. Happily, unhappily, that resentment and shame are entirely legitimate I said, when directed at Capital, I said. All they need to do is to understand their genealogy, I said, and the shifting planes of force which produced them, I said.

Dream of a kind of writing, I said, where the soul uncovers itself as a hatching ground, I said. As a hollowed-out place for maggots and maggot breeding, I said. Dream of scorpions which sting themselves to death, I said. Dream of open wounds that are cauterised by the sun. It is not the recovery of the soul that should be sought, I said, but it’s extirpation. Send Ripley into its caverns with a flamethrower, I said, and then let the whole thing close up, I said. Then you will find yourself outside, I said, in empty space. Outside, and what you were was only a pleat of Capital. Outside, and you see, as in a vision, that there are only the folds and pleats of Capital.

But then, the greater vision: Capital itself is only one way of organising those folds and pleats, I said. It has seized life and seized everything, but it is only a transcendental illusion, I said. Capital is the usurper, I said, that has usurped all of life, I said.

The academics to come will be stronger than us and better than us, I said to H. They’ll be taller, for one thing, and have magnificent haircuts. They’ll have enough money for great haircuts and great shoes, I said. And they’ll exercise more regularly than us, I said. They will achieve an exemplary work-life balance, I said.

They’ll look at our 3 or 4 books and laugh; they will have produced 3 or 4 books while they were studying. It’s no struggle for them. Their books will write themselves and no one will read them, I said. You think few people read our books today, well in the future, no one will read anything, I said. Books will pour from the academics to come and no one will even notice them, I said. It will be pure career capital, I said. Proof of an ability to teach and to profess, I said.

The real business will be raising income, I said. They’ll learn from interactive programs how to put research proposals together, I said. They’ll be taught that from the first. And every university will have a Centre for this or that, an Institute for this and that. Two lecturers and a postgrad will make for a Centre, I said, and three lecturers and two postgrads will make for an Institute, I said. There will no departments as such, I said, only self-funding Research Institutes, linked together in order to maintain the interactive programs which will teach future students, I said. They will allow the virtual learning environment to sustain itself, I said, and concentrate on the real business of the university, which is raising money, I said.

They’ll all be 6 foot tall or more, the new breed, I said to H. They’ll be taller than us and better than us. They will find us amusing. How they thought they suffered, they’ll say to one another, that lazy generation before us! How they whined about the simplest task! But of course they will not be hampered by archaic management structures. Privatisation in 2010 will do away with them. Now the university will become a network, a superefficient rhizome, I said, spreading out all over the world.

University will link to college which will link to school, I said. And the whole education system will be wrapped around the idea of life-long interactive learning, I said. The worker will be responsible for herself from now on, I said. She will have to find suitable courses for herself. Her skill-set is everything; she will carry a portfolio of such skills from one temporary job to another, I said. It’s a brave new world, I said. So much initiative! I said. Forget the Foucauldian idea of a disciplinary society, I said. This will be a society of control, I said. Worktime is all time, I said, and the network is all.

Wages will rise, I said, as older, less productive and adaptable academics are laid off. There will be efficiency savings as layers of management are cut away. The network will make sure of that I said. It will spread its tentacles into everything I said. The network will be used to justify everything, I said. No more human agency, just the network, I said. The network and its priests, I said. The philosopher-priests who sing about the network and its marvellous power of autopoesis, I said.

But what they love is capital, I said, and what capital has made of the world. They love the idea that capital is a self-organising system. They have simple boyish wonder at the inventiveness of capital, I said. They love capital and they are the agents of capital. Nihilism completes itself, I said, when capital believes and desires in our beliefs and desires. When the takeover is complete, I said. When there is nothing but the network and the circulation of information, I said.

The men and women of the new world will be taller than us and better than us. Now and then they will break down, but they will be repaired again. A few days out, a month’s sabbatical, the new regime will be infinitely flexible, I said. Now the worker is responsible for herself, she can take career breaks and sabbaticals, I said. And those periods between jobs she’ll annex for personal development. Time to work with the interactive programs from Microsoft to update her skills. And there will be a great deal of updating, I said. The world will be moving, and she’ll have to move with it, I said.

The tall ones, the better ones, the machines who never break down will soar above us. Oh they’ll take care of us, I said, they’ll appear at charity functions, I said. Money will flow from them to us, I said. But they’ll jaunt from country to country, I said, they’ll flow as fast as capital. Capital will sing and celebrate itself in them, I said. Capital will shine in the brightness of their eyes and the whiteness of their teeth. LASIK and veneers, I said, they’ll have had that from the first, I said.

How white their teeth and how bright their eyes! The teeth and eyes of capital!, I said. LASIK and veneers, I said, and plenty of exercise. For their bodies are sleek, too, I said. Their bodies are bodies of panthers and tigers. They slink from place to place, I said, and couple in dark corners. Capital loves itself in their slim arms and tanned backs, I said. There’s no excess fat in the network, I said. You’ll have to move and move fast. You’ll have to be on the ball, a self-motivator. There will no room for the word ‘we’. Local affliations, yes, little teams, sometimes – teams who will barely meet face to face. But no ‘we’.

But what they don’t understand is that this new appeal to nature, the new rhetoric of evolutionary theory is an extension of the same vile network which laughs in their laughter. That laughing in their laughter in their bright eyes and bright teeth is the laughter of capitalism. The fittest survive, they laugh, those with the broadest skill-set, those who are tallest and slimmest and have had LASIK and veneers. It’s evolutionary theory, they laugh. Darwin said it all, they laugh. It’s the selfish gene, they laugh. They’ll never say any of these things, they hardly know they think them, but it laughs in their laughter and flashes from their white teeth and their bright eyes. It believes in itself in their slim bodies. It prays to itself in their gym-trained muscles.

Capital is stripping itself down to a bare frame, I said. It is emerging as such and is unashamed. Sheer and unadulterated Capital is coming out into the open, I said. That’s what the 80s and the 90s prepared us for, I said. Capital is here and it is obvious. Capital is natural and eternal and falls everywhere like light. No transcendence need be posited. There is no mysterious abyss, no night of the world. Nothing is hidden, everything is here and it is quantifiable and measurable.

There are those who can work and those who cannot work. There are those who are able and those who are unable. And to those who can work will come the fruits of work. And to those who are able will accrue the skills that are needed for work. The others will be divided into the deserving and the undeserving poor. For the former, skills training and a subsistence income. For the latter, alcoholism, madness and drug abuse and all of them beneath the indifferent light which falls on everything. Alcoholism, madness and drug abuse beneath the sky which has driven them to alcohol, madness and drug abuse.

No one can see the light of capital like the alcoholic. No one faces the face of capital like the mad. No one can know it like the one unemployed and undeserving, the one who is exiled from work. It is unbearable and it is streaming down. And it will find you. The madness of that light will find you. It is indifferent to you but it will find you. You weave between the three-wheeled pushchairs but it knows you and it follows you. It is only in that light that you will know your shame.

H. and I ask the police for directions. Where’s Morden Tower? we ask. They don’t know, but they’re helpful. We’re polite and they’re helpful. ‘We should hate them’, I said to H. a little later. It would help us if they were brutal, I said. But they’re considerate and pleasant, I said.

When the auditors came, it was the same, I said. They were pleasant and helpful people. They wanted to do a good job, to see justice was done. One of them was a fan of Will Oldham, he told me. He liked Will Oldham and Nine Inch Nails and he was an auditor. This wasn’t a contradiction, I said to H. He might have been anguished, but auditors can be anguished. They’re just like you and me, I said to H. No doubt one of us will have to audit a department soon enough, I said.

When they had the two minute’s silence for 9/11, I was in an induction meeting at the university where I worked, I said. I had worked there for years, I said, but they’d finally thrown me a bone: I had a half time post for a full year. I earned £9,000 and was ecstatic, I said. Well, the Vice Chancellor came to meet all us new staff, I said. When the silence began, we stood heads bowed. One woman couldn’t bear it and she went into the corridor to cry. The Vice Chancellor hugged her. She held her and hugged her. It was a beautiful scene, I said. How kind the Vice Chancellor was! I would have liked to have been hugged by the Vice Chancellor. To feel a Vice Chancellor’s arms around me, I said. How protected I would have felt! How soothed! How warm! But I would not have been close to the source of her power. Power would not have pressed me against its bosom.

They’re all very nice, I said to H., and that’s the trouble. If you went to see them with a legitmate complaint, they’d be sympathetic, I said. They’d sit you down and have their secretary bring you tea, I said. And they’d say: well, there’s little I can do. It’s the system, you see. It’s the way things are done.

In the end, they can imagine themselves in your place just as you can imagine themselves in theirs. They say: I would never have made it to this position in the current climate. You say: I would certainly have made it to their position if I was allowed to write then as much as I write now. Why, she only has 1 book to her name and I have 3, and while she has only 4 published articles, I have 12! On it goes. The point is that I would have never written 3 books except in the current climate. And she would have done the same as me in the current climate. It is the system that works; we are only its nodes.

Is it possible, then, to speak like the Greeks about fate? Is it fate that measures out what is to happen to us in this great system? Not even that, I said. For the network is curiously random. One day, you’re without a job, things look bleak, the next you have one. One day, your mediocre colleague finds a way to get a promotion. The next you find your contract ending and having to move to the other end of the country. Fate is not the word, I said. It is too grand, and besides it would still be linked to the genre of tragedy where human beings are still revealed in their glory as they batter themselves against their destiny.

No such glory for us, I said. There is no destiny, not for us. If you lose your job, you disappear, I said. No one notices. You are forgotten all at once. The only consistency you can maintain, the only stability, would be that of your life at home. The Vice Chancellor comes home to her grandchildren, the auditor to listen to Will Oldham in a dark room. Home is a place for recuperation. You can complain to your partner about the injustices of the day and prepare yourself to go back to work tomorrow. What if you have no partner? There are your parents, your relatives and your friends, I said. And then there are counselling services – a whole network of support, I said.

You can claim the worst victimisation, I said, and someone will believe you. Claim you’ve been abducted by UFOs and you’ll find a support group. There are support groups everywhere, I said. There is every kind of therapy. There is no grandeur or glory in your life, I said, but there are support groups. Everywhere there are victims of capital, but no one understands they are victims of capital. If you survive, you will have to return to work. If you go mad for a year or two, if you undergo treatment for cancer, soon you’ll have to be back at work. The daylight is everywhere and there’s no escape. Above your mad head or your bald head it’s the same.

The white, bland light is the same above the housing estate as above the industrial estate and there’s no escape. You disappeared for a year or two, but you will be back in the workplace. You were unemployed, you became a job seeker, you were on the sick, but you’ll be helped back to work, don’t worry, I said. What matters is that money be extracted from you. What matters is that you contribute, I said. The world is heading for collapse but you’ll be made to contribute right up to the last minute I said.

You can take maternity leave for a while, I said, but you’ll soon be back at work. You can give your child over to schools, which will open ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. The new kids will be the new drones, I said. They’ll be capitalised from birth. Capital will stream through them. Capital will pour through their limbs and sinews. Every lesson they learn will be subordinated to capital. Every class they go to will be justified in terms of the broadening and deepening of their skill set. Every learning outcome will map onto the learning outcome of the university and the learning outcome of capitalism, I said. Every aim and objective will map onto the aims and objectives of the university and onto the aims and objectives of capitalism, I said.

But there are no learning outcomes in capitalism, I said, and there are no aims and objectives. Capitalism means nothing, I said, it aims only at its own increase, its not rational, there is no rationality of the market there is only the madness of the market as it permeates every part of our lives. There is a great roaring I said, as what you’d hear at the centre of the sun. A great senseless roaring and that is capital I said. There is a great roaring senselessness and nothing else.

It’s like my endless babbling at the weblog, I said. My endless babbling is simply the converse of the endless babbling of capitalism, I said. My inane babbling, senseless and relentless is the inanity of capitalism which desires only its own increase, I said. The inanity of what I write mirrors the inanity of capitalism, I said. Everything I write is stupid, I said, but so is capital. I am as stupid as capital, as prolix as capital, as senseless as capital, I said.

This is no time for sobriety I said. Capitalism is drunk with itself and why shouldn’t we be. That’s why everyone drinks so much I said. Academics drink and students drink. The Vice Chancellor drinks and the auditors drink. We’re all drinking all the time. Because this is an infinite audit culture, I said. Because I audit you and you audit me, I said. Because we all audit each other and we audit ourselves. Because we are made up of little homunculi who audit one another, I said. Because the Quality Assurance Agency are auditing our hearts, I said. Because we have a little Q.A.A. inside our hearts, I said. Because my heart is the heart of the Q.A.A. I said. Because I’m auditing myself and auditing everyone I said.

Of course what I say to you, I said to H., and what I record here at the blog has nothing to do with philosophy. That’s very important, I said because philosophy’s important. Thinking’s a serious business, I said, of which I fall far short, I said. At best, what I write here with its lyrical laziness and would-be poetic flourishes is only the converse of sterile academicism.

There’s no thought here, I told H. You’ll look in vain here for any sign of thought. It’s a waste of time, I said, I’ve no doubt of that. And there’s no time to waste, I said. We need to find weapons, I said, and no amount of pathos about expenditure and excess will justify writing this nonsense in the teeth of the disaster. It is a matter of paying attention to what matters most, I said, of training and disciplining the attention.

Sitting in my office listening to Arab Strap and writing blog posts helps no one, I said. For a start, there are plenty of others who should be sitting in my office in place of me, I said. I feel them all the time. I am ashamed before them. How is it that I ended up here and they did not, I said. Look at me with my sagging flesh and my indolence, I said. I am already old, I said, too old.

Writing my books, I said, book after book and all of them bad, I said. And writing this here, trying to excuse myself for writing those bad books, but in fact just producing more overcooked prose, I said. I haven’t the sense to stop, I said. It’s a kind of illness, a mad prolifigacy, I said.

Truly it is as though I was born from the R. A. E., I said, truly it is only in our insant system that something like me would have found a job, I said. To think, I am partly paid to write I said. And I write this baloney, I said. Think of all the people who could write sensible things in my place, I said. Think of what they could do with this office, I said. Instead of whining on about their former life and the badness of their books they could actually do something, I said.

They wouldn’t start a blog like this, I said. Above all, that’s not what they’d do, I said. They’d use the internet for sensible things, I said. They’d write in the teeth of the disaster and write about the disaster. No preliminaries, I said, no messing about. No bad parody of Bernhard or Beckett. You’re running on empty, that’s what W. always says to me, only the last time he said not that but: your tank is dry, that’s what he said: your tank is dry, not an idea left, he meant, nothing left of all the reading I did so long ago, and even that reading, I told W., was casual and random and underdeveloped, it was dry from the first, I said.

My tank is dry, no question of that, I said, it was always dry, I said. It’s a sickness, I said, someone should put me out of my misery I said, I am like the chimpanzee who is teletransported in The Fly and becomes a singed mass of bones, flesh and fur. The destroyed chimpanzee who still emits a little gasping noise, or one the strange creatures of Bacon’s Three Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, trussed up, turned upon himself making what I imagine is a subdued whining. His wings have been severed and all he can do is whine. Or I think of the creature of Zarathustra who is all ear, one big ear and then, attached by a stalk, a little envious face. Only I am all hand, a monstrous typing hand and my face is flushed with shame.

I am ashamed, I tell H., it’s terrible. And now I’m awaiting the proofs from the publisher. They’ll be here soon, I said. In the teeth of the disaster, I said. And the proofs of my book mocking the disaster, laughing at it, squandering time. Writing as though it were still 1950, I said. As though Kafka and Surrealism were the newest thing, I said. As though all that mattered was Giacometti and psychoanalysis, I said. Taking refuge in the 1950s, I said, without even confronting what was worst about the 1950s, I said. Think of the uprisings crushed by the Soviets, I said. Think of Guevara, I said. Those writers you admire were thinking of Hungary and Guevara, I said. They wrote their essays in the morning and came together in the evening to print clandestine newspapers, I said.

W. tells me my tank is dry, I said, but he’s not quite right because it was never full, I said. I never had a full tank, I said, not once. It was always empty, I’ve never had a thought, I said. I’ve never had a single idea, I said, I was the echo chamber of the ideas of others, I said. For a time, their ideas would bounce around inside me, I said, and then they would disappear, I said. My entire intellectual history was a series of such bouncings, I said. I was an empty space, I said, a hollow, a pocket in which every idea would lose itself and become banal, I said. It had been repeated a million times elsewhere and in me it was repeated for the millionth and first time. It had lost all context, all meaning and importance, I said. The idea was abstracted from the struggles of which it was a part, I said. They were busy printing banned newspapers, demonstrating and being arrested, I said, and you sit in your office listening to Arab Strap, I said.

And now I’m writing here, I said. Writing, hardly writing. Whining, and not even whining. A writing so contorted, so bent upon itself, all it can imagine is a half-mute mewing. The most pathetic noise. But not mewing, that can still be elicit some kind of pity. I am beyond pity, I said. Think of a kind of scraping, I said, and a kind of gnashing. Think of the noise a stuffed dog’s teeth would make as they bit through its skin, I said. Think of the creatures in the taxidermist, I said.

When did it become acceptable to write like this? I asked H. At what point would one have had the temerity to moan in this way? Once, I imagine, those with troubles kept quiet. They kept them quiet from themselves and from others. What use was it to bother others with your troubles? What sense was it to return to them yourself? While Kafka suffered, I said, he also wrote literature. In the diaries, I said, there are passages of fiction intermixed with passages which bewail his inability to write. But he wanted to burn his diaries, I said. Grete Bloch had begun to feed them into the fire along with his notebooks. What we have are the remnants, I said, and it is not as if Kafka intended to leave them for us.

Then there was Artaud, I said. He wrote about his sufferings to Riviere, the editor of the journal to whom he sent some poems. Their correspondence began when those poems were rejected. True, Riviere would soon suggest publishing the correspondence in which Artaud writes so eloquently about his suffering, but the poems were the thing; the rejection of the poems was the occasion of the writing, great as it was.

Then there was Beckett, I said, who is badly read if it is in terms of defeat and failure, I said. Beckett writes in the teeth of despair, I said, and so does Kafka. They despair, but they write anyway, and far from being writing of despair, I said, theirs is a writing of magnificent humour, I said. But there is nothing funny about a teleported chimpanzee, I said. But it wasn’t as though there was an intact and healthy chimpanzee to begin with I said.

It’s clear to me, I said. I am a nightmare the R.A.E. has about itself, I said. The R.A.E. wants to die and to die through me I said. I am the place where the R.A.E. cannot bring itself to death, I said. I am that site where it rots, I said, where it festers and all thought festers with it, I said. Thought has become stagnant here, I said. Thought festers and hatches strange kinds of maggots, I said. Blind wriggling maggots unashamed of what they are, I said. They are the new breed, I said. Soon they’ll sprout wings and fly about I said. They’ll fill the air with their buzzing I said, and that buzzing will be what is said at colloquia and on funding applications, I said. That buzzing will be heard in a million strategy meetings, I said.

You should have battered me to death while you still could, I said. You should have shovelled me into a bag and thrown me into the bushes, I said. But you didn’t and it’s too late. The blind wriggling maggots are wearing tweed jackets with elbow patches, I said. They’re driving the big cars their mothers bought them, I said. They’re driving to and fro from meeting to meeting I said. Their little teeth are grinding with excitement, I said. They drive from here to there to here. They drive round and round the M25 talking about surds, I said.

They’re not even dead, I said, because they were never alive. They do not rot or decompose, I said. And they are without shame, I said. There’s no shame in them, I said.

Once, I told H., I was relatively content in my warehouse. I was neither alpha male or omega male, but somewhere in between. Days passed contentedly; each weekday I would arrive early, resting my heading on a desk and napping for an hour. Each Saturday, I would come in for training, learning to navigate fork-lift trucks and order pickers through the racks of boxed products. I was one among others, I told H., and could use the word ‘we’.

How wonderful that was, I told H., the word ‘we’. It belongs to another age, I told him. The warehouses are disappearing from Winnersh Triangle, I told him. No doubt they are being reborn on the other side of the world, and a new group of workers are using the word ‘we’. But it is likely they labour in much more unpleasant circumstances that our own, I said to H., and would have only rare occasion to look up from their labours and say the word ‘we’.

But there was definitely a sense of solidarity, I told H. There we were, men and women together in the warehouse, men and women of the warehouse and therefore infinitely different from the men and women of the offices, I said. They would hardly dare to visit us in the warehouse, I said. They would search for us by telephone I said, but we were always hard to find. We’d hide behind the boxes, I said, and in the racks. No one could find us, I said. Of course we were not busy at all, I said. We larked about. We climbed up the racks like monkeys.

My job was to find UTLs, I told H. – unable-to-locates. But it was less bother, I said, to destroy what I found rather than filling in the paperwork. I never found a thing, I said, and no one minded. I worked with a small team – Cowboy Pete, in cowboy boots and a cowboy shirt who would always tell me about his debts, and a scrawny guy who was always pulling sickies. Our little team never found a thing, I told H.

Once a month, there would be a motivational meeting. We were encouraged to look ever more carefully for UTLs. We were told to hunt high and low. But in reality, the insurance would take care of missing products; our boss knew as we knew that we were there only for show. When my boss could report we couldn’t find a UTL, it was written off. When we did find one, it bothered everyone, so we were encouraged to hide what we found or to destroy it, I said. Later, our team was abandoned and I became the standards man, in charge of regulating the flow of goods through the warehouse to conform to British Standards. I oversaw the processes of the warehouse, from goods in to goods out. I was to make sure that everything passed through the warehouse with speed and efficiency.

No one bothered me, I said, and I bothered no one. I found a staircase that was supposed to lead to another story of offices but that led only to the roof. I would take The Mammoth Book of Fantasy to those stairs to read. All day I would read in that quiet space, leaving only to visit coffee machines.

I bring the same rigour and hard work to my academic work, I tell H. I am just as thorough and diligent. Yes, I work with the same focused concentration as I did in the warehouse, lightly skimming this or that book and then going for tea. And don’t we all? We’ve read everything, I tell H., but we’ve read nothing. We leave that to others. In truth, we prefer introductions, I said. We like our thought predigested. We like it prechewed and uniform. We want to read books in a standard format, we told H., all exactly the same.

We want them to conform to British Standards, I said – to appear in a series from Routledge or Continuum with uniform covers and uniform contents. We want the prose on the page to be broken up by useful summarising boxes, I said, and conclusions to follow at the end of each chapter, setting out the main points. On no account, I told H., do we want to encounter thinkers in the raw. We would withdraw like a vampire from daylight from the real pages of a real book. What is more horrifying than catching sight of a page of real philosophy?

British Standards, I said, require that all continental thought be reduced to certain standard measurements. You know the attitude, I said: If they cannot write clearly themselves, we must write clearly for them. That’s the attitude, I said. The French think and the British paraphrase, I said. It is a marvellous industry, I said, like a great sausage factory. In one end come books of all shapes and sizes, books of ideas. Out of the other end comes a standard product, I said, books of exactly the same size and with the same cover. Publishers won’t touch anything resembling real thought, I said.

We British are underlabourers, I said, and we are happy being so. The Germans used to think, the French think and the British translate and comment. Of course we have no choice, I said. How else can you have a career?, I said. At least it’s meritocratic. Research is measured by volume, not by quality. We can all agree: it is the weight of the research that matters, its bulk. You have to produce as much as you can, I told H. and all this because real thought is hated.

This is what Britain has become, I said. The annihilator of thought and ideas, I said. It appears we are most hospitable of all, that thought pours into Britain from all directions, I said. But in truth we are reducers of thought. We reduce it to nothing. I am worst of all, I said to H., I’ve always maintained that. I am still the man of British Standards, I said. I’m happy to contribute to the great stupidity, I said.

It’s not that I can go back to Winnersh Triangle now, I said. The warehouses have all gone and solidarity has disappeared. It was disappearing then, I said, but it was boom time, and if you were sacked by one temping agency you could find employment by another. But those times have passed, I said. Companies have contracts with only a single agency nowadays, I said, and the contracts are longer and more exacting. The worker is expected to manage herself, I said. She is expected to develop her skills, I said. And the same is happening in academia, I said. Now you will have to cover your salary three times over. You’ll have to bring in money to the university, I said. It’s not enough to teach – teaching is already nothing – nor even to write. No, money is the measure of all things, I said.

That’s what British Standards mean, I said. There are no warehouses and no UTLs. There are no objects anymore, I said. Nothing manufactured, not in the UK. There is a pure flow of services, I said, which is really the pure flow of capital. That’s all anyone deals with now, I said. Goods come in from overseas and we provide services. And what are services? I said. Money chases money. Money creates more money. We are a trading floor, nothing more than that, I said. When I close my eyes and think about Britain all I see is a great streaming. And the same for academia, I said. The age of monographs and scholarship has passed, I said, and the age of the introduction and the commentary is passing. Soon we will be dealing only in money.

Only the income generators will be left, I said to H. Interactive software from Microsoft will teach for us. Lectures will disappear even as seminars as disappearing. Assessment will be by means of online multiple choice. Learning will be self-directed, I said, which means directed by Microsoft. Men and women of British Standards will oversee the process. It be a benign takeover, a kind of liberation. Now learning meets the individual midway, they will say. There’s no need for lecture rooms and staff offices. What matters is the virtual learning environment. What matters are electronic resources. The real business of a university is the flow of information, they will say. Now everything can flow more smoothly, they’ll say, now you’ll have time to make out our funding applications. What matters are capital and information, one and the same.

I went to a meeting of Nobel Prize winners for science lately, I said, and I’ve met several fellows of the Royal Academy. The uploading of consciousness, I said, that’s what they talk about. Consciousness will become pure information, I said. Our physical bodies can be liquidated and there will only be consciousness swarming around. It’s like Buddhism, I said, it’s exactly the same thing. The environmental disaster is upon us, I said, and all the scientists talk about is uploading consciousness. They’ve given up, I said, it’s like Bush and the belief in the Rapture.

What will become of the world?, I asked H. It hardly matters, I said. You’ll find everything you want to learn in the virtual learning environment. Never mind the real enviroment, I said. Never mind the desecration of the planet, I said. Never mind real suffering and real poverty, I said. In the future there will be no pain, that’s what the Nobel Winner told me. In the future, we will live forever, he said. We’ll be barely individuated, said a Fellow of the Royal Academy. We won’t love or fear or hate any longer. We won’t need to work, he said. We’ll just enter the great flow of capital and information. We’ll be at one with the cosmos, I said, which is to say with capital.

No one cares about Joyce and Tarkovsky and Mann, I said to H. And no one cares about the more difficult equations in maths or counterpoint in music. It’s information that counts, I said. Information into which everything can be translated. It begins with the Routledge Critical thinkers I said, but then it spreads everywhere. Can you feel it passing through you? I asked H. Can you hear it whispering? What’s frightening, I said, is that it’s unintelligible. It does not speak words, but babbles. It is not rhythmical. It has no shape. The Greeks called it the aperion, I said. It has no limits and no contours, I said. And we will not be able to draw aesthetic satisfaction from it in the manner of the sublime, I said, no more than those killed by the whirlwind admire the beauty of the whirlwind. We’re caught up in it, I said, and it is indifferent to us.

Can you hear it traversing you?, I said. It is not glorious as Van Gogh’s starry night is glorious. It does not appear for itself but nor does it hide. It is indifferent to us, I said, and it streams indifferently. The Nobel Winners know it, I said, and that’s why they want to upload our consciousness to other media. Eventually, I said, they would like to do away with media altogther and just disperse the human race, I said. They want to dissolve us into the flow of information, they say, which is to say, pure capital.

In the end, there is no human history, I said. There can be no memory and no biography. It’s all a thin film covering the movement of capital, I said. Our dreams are dreams of capital, our philosophies are philosophies of capital. It’s closer to us than we are, I said. It’s no good becoming Buddhist, I said. There’s no need to meditate to experience the Nothing. It’s here, I said, and its everywhere.

Can you see it in the eyes of the Vice Chancellor, I said, or in the career academic? Can you see it the eyes of Deans recruited from industry and the marketers and advertisers brought in to rebrand the university? They are reptilian, I said. Or they are insects. I am frightened by what I see in them, I said. It is a new kind of nihilism and one which will do away with everything, I said. They hardly know it, I said, they don’t know what they embody. The Vice Chancellor goes home to play with her grandchildren, the Dean does charity work for Guide Dogs for the Blind. But they are filled with reptiles and insects, I said, just as we are all filled with reptiles and insects, and not even them, I said, but just an insect buzzing and a reptile hissing.

The apocalypse is upon us, I said, and what we will see will be nothing because we’ll have no eyes with which to see and no bodies. Our descendants will upload themselves directly into capital. We will give birth to capital, to the streaming of capital. It’s no good talking about the new earth, I said, or dreaming of wild new territorialisations. There need be no places, no terrains, no topoi except the utopia of capital. The darkness of space will be filled with capital, I said. And capital will draw all light and energy into itself, I said. That’s how the universe will end, I said.

There’s no doubt about it, academics hate practitioners, I said to H. last night. Aestheticians hate artists, music theorists hate musicians, English department theorists hate authors, on it goes. Above all, I said to H., philosophy academics hate philosophers. There’s nothing they dislike more than philosophers, I said to H., to the extent that they try and banish all notion of the idea of philosophers by calling themselves philosophers. As if any real philosopher would call herself a philosopher! It wouldn’t be necessary, I said, it would be obvious to all! Even the ones who call themselves philosophers can sense a real philosopher, I said. That’s why they call themelves philosophers, I said. It’s to avoid thinking about philosophy.

I don’t deny that I am worst of all, I said to H. I have to go through the typescript of my second book one more time before it goes out for copy editing, my editor told me. It was terrible, I told H. What happened? What catastrophe has made it so that a book like mine could find its way into print? Was there ever a time when books flowed from publishers like a cascading stream? Was it ever that book after book spouted forth, each as pristine as the other? It seems so, I said to H., given the open sewer of bad books that is now polluting that stream, mine included, I said. Mine especially!

There is no question that the new book is weak, I said. Weak for all that it tries not to be weak, to experiment with its prose style, to launch itself in a new, non-academic direction. Not, for example, to reference all quotations, I told H. – that used to be permitted in the 1950s, I said, and I always liked it. When Blanchot quotes he will often do so from memory, he says. As if he didn’t have the books to hand. Well, who knows, perhaps he didn’t. But I’ve always liked that: to quote from memory and then to garble the quote. To garble the quotation and not to worry about it. To allow what is quoted to be reborn into the tissue of your text. To change what is quoted as you quote it. This would be marvellous, I said.

It’s as if everyone has forgotten the third of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, I said. The essay against scholarship. They should all read it every day, I said. It should be close to their hearts. They should repeat it to themselves every day. I know I do, I said. But then that’s half my trouble, because I can’t carry off non-scholarship. In the new book, I cut and paste bits of the first book. I like the fact that Zizek is cavalier just as I like him very much for putting so much on the internet, I said to H. Everything should be on the net, I said, and it should be free. Authors are paid so little anyway, so why don’t they simply leak their books onto the net (here is an excellent example, which comes, no doubt, via Questia (it’s an excellent book, a real book)).

But still, there’s never a thought in my head, I said to H. That’s part of the trouble. Of course, those who are called philosophers hate philosophy, I said. The philosopher in the academy is the enemy of philosophy, I said. And don’t object that the UK is unfriendly to philosophy. There’s the internet, I said, and plenty of room on the net for philosophy. It’s easy to find readers, I said. I don’t think I hate philosophy, I said to H., it’s just that I know it’s out of my reach.

That’s already a step forward, I said, but I have to distinguish myself from Socrates. He knew he knew nothing and I don’t know what I know. What happens, rather, is that I read this or that strong book and I am carried on the wind of that book, my sails full. Yes it is as though I wrote it myself and earnt the right to think myself when in fact what I write is always derivative, I said, and dreadfully so. What’s worse is that it’s dressed up as though it were not derivative, I said. It looks as though a real wind filled my real sails and bore me along. As if the good ship Spurious bobbed along on the open seas, journeying from this place to that. As though it were buffetted by the great winds that come from science and the arts.

But I read no science, I said to H., and my taste in the arts remains conservative. You see, I came to the high arts late, I said, when it was a way out of the warehouse. I came to it too late and venerated what intellectual content I could find there, even though I would learn that that was no way to read. I read and sucked dry what I read, going through the book and underlining every abstract passage, I said, but that’s what prevented me from reading. All the same, it felt as though Joyce and Tarkovsky and Mann had rescued me from the warehouse. The doors were opened, I said. The whole sky was open before me and the vacant lots where new office buildings were yet to appear. I could walk to the station, I said, and sit against its wooden walls, reading A Portrait of the Artist or The Magic Mountain.

True, I said, I had always sworn I would never pass over into what was called literature and what was called classical music, I said. But I did pass across. How could I not? You have to understand Winnersh Triangle was a void, I said, and I had to get my stimulus from somewhere. It was a void, there was no internet then, no one said a word, I said. Once I decorated my office cubicle with photocopies of Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love, where he is depicted as a Hindu god. Anand, the only brown skinned man in a warehouse of white skinned men told me it would bring me luck. I thought to myself: what is more distant from this warehouse than the gods, and the Hindu gods in particular.

Once it snowed in June. That it snowed was a great fact. It broke the law of Winnersh Triangle. It was snowing and Winnersh Triangle’s law was incomplete. Winnersh Triangle could not determine the behaviour of the heavens. The weather was out of the control of my boss and his boss and all the bosses, all the way up to the Managing Director. The M. D., a slim man, went jogging every lunchtime. That day, he didn’t jog. It was snowing and the snow and ice made the pavements slippery. He’d had a heart attack, the M. D., that was why he was jogging, but today he couldn’t jog. Because it was snowing in June. In June!

You will never understand what it was to read The Magic Mountain in the warehouse, I said. Those for whom low art is their playground will never understand what it was to happen by chance upon Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I’m still stunned by those discoveries, I said. I was the ape of Kafka’s story who saw through his cage the activities of real people. He taught himself to speak and walk like them, but he was still an ape. Thereafter he would only have a dim memory of the jungle from which he came. So too have I forgotten. The grimness of the warehouse exists for me only in counterpoint to the glory of Mann, of Tarkovsky and the others. The light of the latter illuminates the former so it can emerge from the darkness of forgetting. But it was forgotten. It was my jungle, I said, and forgotten.

Why do I write such bad books? I wondered to H. What is missing in my education? What course did I miss, which school year? Because there is something missing. When I read myself, the typos always horrify me. But when they do not (and the new book is better than the first one in this respect) it is the prose itself, I said. It unfurls across a void, I said, as though it were a very thin film, a bit of grease to be rubbed away. There’s no depth to it, I said, it’s all surface learning. There’s an element of scholarship, I said, but it barely believes in itself. The book resents itself. An ape writes knowing he’s an ape, I said. Then when I try to be non-scholarly, I am simply a bad scholar trying to be what he is not, trying to justify not learning this or that language with some vague pathos of rebellion. But there’s a difference between rebellion and bad writing, I said, just as there’s a difference between philosophy and sham philosophy.

It’s true, I said, most academic philosophers dress up sham philosophy as philosophy, I said. But this is the case for almost any subject. Young scholars who appear who’ve written three monographs in five years. Three of them! For an obscure university press which runs at a loss! Which keeps these hardbacked books in print for a year! As if the printing of 50 hardbacked books constitutes a publication! As if that’s what it would mean to be published! Books and more books, I said to H. and nothing in them, not one idea! And I’m the worst of all, I said, a product of the new meritocracy that allowed people from bad universities to compete with those from good ones!

In truth, I said, I am the spawn of the R.A.E. which I affect to despise. The Research Assessment Exercise produces overpublished monsters like me. Benign monsters, it is true, monsters who wave aside their books saying ‘none of it means anything’. Monsters who when asked what they’re working on, say ‘nothing in particular’. What are you working on?, I said, that’s always the question. And what does it mean? The Marxist intellectual, famous for many books, barely sees his supervisees, I said. He’ll do anything to avoid them. He draws a huge salary and helps no one, the Marxist intellectual, I said. Then there’s the philosopher of religion who is also a property investor, I said. He is a man of God, he teaches students about Jesus and he owns a string of houses, I said.

There’s no shame, I said to H., but I least I feel shame. I write very bad books, I said to H., and no doubt I’ll finish three books in five years. I have no trouble writing, I said, but who does? The young academics with their three books in five years hate the older academics, who publish little. They hate them, their savage little teeth gnashing. They tear about like piranhas, I said. I’m editing a collection, they say. I’m putting together a colloquim, they say. I’m running a book series. It’s a sickness. I, as an ape, understand this better than anyone. I remember what it was to read Mann and watch Tarkovsky. I wasn’t brought up with all that stuff, I said. It wasn’t my legacy, I said. I didn’t discuss Mann and Tarkovsky at dinner parties, I said.

Yes, I am an ape, and this allows me at least to know my disgrace.

I’ve been given a lift; we’re off to London. I’m in a car with a philosopher of mathematics. Only gradually do I realise why he gave me a lift. He gave me a lift because he wanted to tell me at length how much he hates Deleuze. We are driving to London and he is telling me why Deleuze got it all wrong. I am in a car with a man who genuinely wants to understand Deleuze, he says, but who can’t, for the life of me, understand him. He is a man of good faith, the philosopher of mathematics. of good sense and of common sense and he wants to understand, he says. I just wish he would write clearly, he says.

Why bother with him at all then? I ask him. Because it’s humbug, he said. And I think to myself: how marvellous it is to hear this word, humbug. Humbug, I think to myself, who would use such a word? Humbug, I say. Yes, he says, he gets it all back to front. He’s been talking to mathematicians, he says, that much is clear. But I don’t think Deleuze understands what he’s writing about.

We’re on the M25, circling London, looking for an exit. The philosopher of mathematics is explaining surds to me. That’s what Plato’s all about, he says, surds. We’re circling round London and listening to Hank Williams. ‘I like Hank Williams’, I tell him. The philosopher of mathematics tells me about his band. ‘We’ve just done a song about exchange students’, he says. I am happy, because he’s not talking about surds or about Deleuze.

Horror of the afternoon: a blank, white sky. Terrible to be becalmed beneath such a sky. Think to yourself: most of my life has been like this. And then think: that’s why Debord drank, and Duras. This was not a failure or a dereliction for either of them.

Eight days until the new book has to be sent off, chapter three is perhaps completable today, then chapters four and five to revise and the preface to be written. This, I said to myself, is a kind of writing under constraint, my own OULIPO. One of the rules of the new philosophy dogma movement is: love your constraints, don’t resent them.

I put Jason Molina’s The Pyramid Electric Company on the CD player to give myself a sense of urgency and have my first book open on the desk to give myself a sense of shame. I will make sure I am faced with this post as it is exactly the kind of post I dislike. Nothing happens, no work done.

The badger of Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’ wants to bury himself so he cannot be found. He constructs a vast system of interconnected tunnels in the earth. Can he escape the predator who awaits him outside?

The inner space protects us from what is outside. We are cosy in our dwellings with our televisions and the internet which present us with a simulacrum of what is happening outside. But the outside, here, remains distant. Outside there are the streets where strangers lurk. We instruct our children not to talk to them and drive them to school in 4 X 4s. What matters is safety, and safety is inside.

But what if the interior defines the outside in such a way that it, too, remains parasitical upon the economy of interiority? Even as it is outside, exteriority, according to the conventional understanding of this word, is interiority’s other and can be measured by a common spatial unit.

What would it mean to think an exteriority that is not so interiorised – an exteriority which is never simply outside the interior? No longer is it a question of what can be withheld by a border which maintains the spatial limits of an inner domain. Think instead of the ‘other’ exteriority, one which is no longer organised by a logic of places, by the topology which would keep everything in its place.

Unfold the ‘other’ exteriority of which interiority is only a series of folds and upon which a whole tradition of interiorisation depends upon. What does this mean? The border which would separate the inside from the outside depends upon another border, a limit internal to the articulation of interiority itself. Less clearly defined, hidden in the inner space itself, is a place of struggle against the ‘other’ exteriority upon which it depends.

How should one think this place? Is this akin to the space between tectonic plates from which lava – a figure for the exteriority in question here – would well? This tempts us to think the ‘other’ exteriority spatially, losing precisely what would allow it to remain ‘other’. What, then, if we sought to understand the ‘other’ exterior non-spatially? This would mean we are in the position of Descartes trying to understand how non-extended mind comes into contact with extended body. His solution, which satisfied no one, was to claim the pineal gland permitted a mediation of extended body with non-extended thought.

A third alternative: what if the ‘other’ exteriority were understood to produce interiority? What is the outside if it cannot be so understood – as what, indeed, organises the very economy of spatiality? This drama of interiorisation, its secret struggle, occurs at the heart of interiority. The ‘other’ exterior is not a hidden place but an opening implied in the very interiorisation of the interior. It is ‘there’ as a matter of structure, of constitution. Interiority is inscribed in an exteriority it cannot control. Interiority itself is only a fold of the ‘other’ exteriority.

On this account, the whole complex of tunnels dug by the badger is no more than a series of convoluted pleats. The burrow is only contorsion of the ‘other’ exterior, its invagination. The ‘other’ exterior, then, is ‘within’ what is both inside and outside the burrow. Within both, but also outside both. It is the outside inside. Or rather, it shows there is no interiority which can ever exclude the ‘other’ exteriority. This means the badger is as exposed as he was outside his burrow. Considered in relation to the ‘other’ exteriority, he is on the plain, in the expanse of the desert, with nothing sheltering him from his enemy.

One might go further. Recalling the novel by Philip K. Dick (Eye in the Sky) whose protagonists are turned inside out, is it not that the badger himself is only an invagination of the inside? That at his heart, too, or perhaps in his stomach, there is an ongoing struggle against the outside (the stomach is an excellent example of a kind of internal frontier against exteriority. It cannot digest itself: it remains inside the body, of the body. It digests what is outside the body and allows itself to be incorporated by the body. But what if the stomach itself was only a pleat of the outside?)

Descartes writes of the idea of the infinite which is included within the finite in such a way that it reveals itself to have originated from without. It is the idea of God. Here we have a glimpse of the way in which the outside inhabits the inside. This is not to be conceived on the model of Ridley Scott’s alien, which, after a period of incubation, bursts through the stomach and into the world. It would be the glistening wall of the stomach inside and out as it is only an involution of a single smooth space.

The infinite inside the finite. This is strange to think. But only if the finite and the infinite are thought oppositionally. Perhaps the finite is only a fold of the infinite.

W. and I were impatient this year at All Tomorrow’s Parties. Many of the bands were unimpressive. But we were attracted to the charming whimsy of The Naysayer and the facile humour of Neil Hamburger. ‘He’s like us’, I said; W. agreed. We have always thought of ourselves as lacking wit; we rejoiced in a comic whose comedy was based around rude words. Later W. summed up our tragedy: ‘we’re intelligent enough to recognise genius, but we’re not geniuses.’ And then he noted that the ideas of the thinkers we admire are often simple, or can be stated simply.

‘Have you ever had an idea?’ W. asks me. ‘No. Have you?’ – ‘No.’ We’d like one – and what we’d like, too, is that indefatigability which also marks the thinkers in question: it is a matter of making the same point again and again. The same simple point, which can be reformulated in a number of ways. At some point, we talked about Blanchot. W. reminds me that among the extras on the DVD of Requiem for a Dream, Hugh Selby Jr. recalls he began to write after he came close to death. ‘It’s the same for Blanchot’, W. said, ‘you have to die twice.’ Then we spoke of Heidegger on boredom. ‘You can tell Heidegger was never bored’, one of us said.

Watching the bands, W. and I agreed that a number of criteria could be specified as to what constitutes a good performance. The Naysayer aside, we liked anger – angry men. This is why we admired Sean Garrison and the Five Finger Discount. The band were ragged, half-rehearsed, unlike the precise Spoon whose mediocrity horrified us; ‘we don’t play much’, said the stetsoned guitarist when we spoke to him later. Their music could be described as country-rock, I suppose, but Garrison was a shouter, and this was important. He was a middle aged shouter with paint bespattered jeans. He shouted – this was important to us. So, too, was the fact that his band were tattooed. They looked as though they had just come out of prison. They were muscly and menacing but they played sweet country music.

Slint, for some reason, have incorporated jazz and guitar solos into their sound. This was horrible. We were far from the stage and couldn’t see much apart from David Pajo and Todd Brashear’s head nodding up and down. We liked Todd; we saw him playing Staremaster; he looked amiable and wise.

Festivals are not about bands you know, but bands you don’t. W. and I didn’t like many of the bands, we’ve become impatient. We leave if we’re not immediately impressed. I spoke often of The Naysayer. W. said: ‘you’ve become whimsical.’ I agreed, and pointed out that the band were so charming. There was a song about kittens which was particularly lovely. Later I told Anna Padgett the songwriter, how much I enjoyed her music. S., W.’s girlfriend, said that when Anna smiled all of Anna’s face smiled.

Tequila is an excellent festival drink. It’s important, we learnt last year, to bring plenty of nutritious food if we were to avoid stomach upsets. The Guinness is always off – ‘dirty pipes’, said W., and I agreed.

Inadequacy is a beautiful word. Inadequacy, the lack of adequation, the interruption of truth understood as adequatio, as the relationship between a statement and a state of affairs. As though it were a matter of tumbling into this gap and, falling, of being seized not by falsehood pure and simple, but a kind of errancy, an exile which carries thought far from itself. As though thinking were also a matter of being seized by such an errancy, by the force of error.

Is this not irresponsibility itself: the disappearance of accountability, a high-minded nihilism which erodes the possibility of collective action and rational thought? I think of Marx and those who today remind us of his words: truth is universal, although it is only a universality of which the proletariat would be capable; awaken to this universality and the revolution, too, might awaken.

Zizek’s Lenin is a rational man of action, a calculator, but also a risk-taker, the one who knows when to leap and who then leaps; the one who burns, in that moment, with absolute ardency. How would he have appeared to his contemporaries? Like a madman, Zizek says, and he is thinking, too, of Kierkegaard’s Abraham, the Abraham of Fear and Trembling who does not speak because he fears what is called the ethical sphere of existence whose gentle tyranny allows you to speak but steals the words from your mouth as you speak (perhaps Marx would say they become words of the bourgeois universal, hypocritical words, words born from the streaming of capital). When speech can never be the speech of a madman, it is better to be silent. Abraham does not speak (but the poet Silentio speaks …)

Does democracy, our worldwide democracy, belong to what Kierkegaard calls the ethical sphere of existence – that sphere of universality where to speak is always to speak in the language of the banal, the universal? Dream with Marx of a new universal, the truth to which only the proletariat can awaken. But it cannot be merely a matter of dreaming: it is necessary to work, to build new collectives.

Still the desire to call someone, comrade, as if, when I said that word, every revolutionary in the world would also speak and would have spoken. Yes: comrade, where in this word would resound a kind of pledge, an engagement from the future, from the call that would summon each of us as it reveals the usurpation through which we come to ourselves. Where what resounds is the placeless opening whose place each of us has usurped, that utopia which opens only when the other is met, welcomed, as the other.

Is it a matter, here, of the truth of what Kierkegaard calls the ethical sphere or the truth only Marx’s proletariat could realise? What if, alongside the truth and the movement towards truth, alongside solidarity, comradeship there was an experience of another comradeship – a friendship, now, with the one who arrives as though from the place you have always usurped? Or a friendship where what is held in common is the experience of inadequacy you know only as you fall from your tasks and fall from work?

Lenin summons the workers and leaps with them into the revolution. The revolution is the leap, the turning of the world, the blazing wheel. But what of the ‘other’ Lenin who reaches you when you are far from the possibility of the collective and the universal? The dream-Lenin who, with Kierkegaard (a dream-Kierkegaard), addresses you in your weariness, out of your weariness: the Lenin who whispers: comrade, to fall is also to leap?

R.M. visits for a week to prepare for her viva. We are in my office and picnic on snacks bought in the surrounding city. Superb wensleydale cheese and caramelised carrot chutney sandwiches from Marks and Spencers (the same shop mentioned in Bernhard’s great novel Correction which I am finally finishing), prawn crackers in honour of the Chinese New Year. A pot of Tzatziki and old favourites: tubs of reduced fat tuna and sweetcorn and egg and onion. These are to be eaten with ricecakes, which I bulk order from Tescos and bring to the office in my rucksack. Every day, we buy a new gossip magazine to read; R.M. is reading Hello! as I type (yesterday Heat, the day before OK).

All this, of course, is a slight return of the Great Summer of Work last year: 14 hour sessions in the office, the whole day sprawling ahead of us, swathes of reading and writing to be done. Tonight, we have no social engagements, which makes the work day sprawl yet longer; there is time, therefore, to prepare oneself for the day: to assemble snacks, write a preparatory post (to get in the right frame of mind), tidy the desk …

Commemorate these moments of preparation, one almost exactly like another, forgotten when, later, you reckon how many hours you spent writing on this or that day, or in that week. ‘That was a productive time’; ‘that was an unproductive time, couldn’t write, was becalmed, nothing began …’

1. Žižek: the ideal is an ideological effect. Keep it distant, faraway, and you know you are safe from the present. The book you’re writing now can be as bad as you please because you are dreaming of the book to come.

Of course I write too quickly and too much; I write – or I used to write – a great deal. As if by rushing I would draw myself towards the fiery book which did not yet exist and could not exist. And if it existed? I would lose my purchase on the future. No future, no escape, only a present which collapsed in itself and drew me with it into that infinitely dense point from which nothing escapes.

‘You fear the present?’ – ‘I fear the present unbound from the future, a present that turns in itself, which can find nothing itself, sterile repetition’.

2. On one of those infinite afternoons in Manchester(2001), I took Feinstein’s biography of Tsvetayeva to the delicatessen. It had just arrived, that biography, but I had read it first many years before, at a university library. Tsveteyeva’s letters. I have only read quotes from those letters – quite long ones. As I read, I know they take the place in me of the one who strives and breaks himself in striving. Intensity without form or limit.  To escape the present, the afternoon, unemployment or underemployment …

True, I can write this because I did escape. A job; another city. Only as I write the new book I find myself in the same eternal present and experience the same infinite wearing away …

3. Foolishness: over Christmas, finding myself back in the house in which I grew up, I reread the diaries I wrote as a teenager. What did I find? A fear of afternoons, of the everyday. Record of a conversation with an older friend who had said to me (it was 1992): you are lost. Yes, lost, unemployed or underemployed. Data entry in what is called the ‘Silicon Valley’ of the South. Cycling to the university library where I would first read Tsvetayeva. Without a future.

No future: it’s endurable. More recently (1999), I found myself back in that same ‘Silicon Valley’, learning to drive and, in doing so, inventing a little future for myself despite the absence of a job, the absence of work. I was writing, I think. What was I writing? A draft of the first book. I passed my test, drove once on my own and moved back to the North.

Why, this morning, am I writing about the infinite wearing away rather than working on the book? To reawaken the ideal, to give myself that blazing future which would allow me to close my eyes to the present. Even the words ‘Tsvetayeva’s letters’ allow this. As if, by reminding me of her suffering, her ardency I can conjure away the bad pages of my new book.

When I moved back to Manchester – when was it? – I had with me a book which allowed me to dream that dark city in the North was also Petropolis and that my dark Levenshulme room was Pluto’s cave. That book contained a partial translation of Mandelstam’s Tristia and rather than read it again here (I don’t have it with me; I’m too busy – up until what time was I up last night?) I want to remember the protection it gave me when I lived in a house with a mad landlady.

The day after I moved in and signed a contract, a chance meeting with a woman from across the street who said: ‘oh my God you live there – we had to rescue the last tenant – she’s quite mad you know’. And she was, but I was dreaming I lived in Petropolis, protected by Mandelstam. But I also know as the ogre of the fairy story whose heart is locked in a chest and buried in a lake far away that my heart was far from me. It was in the book; a book I had to watch over in turn. Tristia watched over me; I watched over Tristia knowing that when that heart was pierced there was no more illusion: Manchester, Levenshulme would reveal itself as it was and always had been.

That was ten years ago – or it was ten years ago when I escaped that house for another. What I know now is that Tristia, a book written by a man in his late twenties, was a name for my youth just as surely were the soft toys I played with in my childhood. That the books piled in my office, away from here where I write, keep my childhood between their covers. Just as one day it was time for the soft toys to go into the loft where they remain, it was one day or another time for my heart to be drawn from my books and release itself elsewhere. What happened? That’s another story.

Last night, rereading the manuscript of the second book I said to myself: would that my heart could find a new place, far from me, that would allow me to dream, still, even now I am old, of becoming a writer. So it was that in the moment I knew the second book was botched I dreamt of the third. And that in a year or two, it will be the fourth, then the fifth …

… Last year I at last reread the books I used to have time to read. Began reading what is called literature again. And wrote here – at this weblog – of reading and writing. Knowing that Spurious – this blog – keeps watch over my heart, my eternal childhood.

Childhood: books of Duras, Cixous, Bernhard, others. Childhood: writing about reading and writing.

Derrida died last night, the 8th October. If I were less of a miserable hack, I would be able to write fittingly of Derrida’s life, remembering his own generosity in writing of others, close to him, who had died and the generosity, too, of his own writing, voluminous and yet each time specific.

What did it mean to read and write while Derrida was alive? Alongside him (he was always there, on the other side of Channel or on the other side of the world. He was in Moscow, Shanghai, Sao Paulo … and sometimes in Britain, too, passing through one colloquim or another)? There was always another book by him waiting to be read, always another in the great avalanche. And if there was nothing translated into English, more were waiting in French. If you were disappointed, or felt that he had repeated himself, or that, despite his intentions, he was becoming formulaic, there were always waves of commentators to challenge his view. Who could have dreamt, on reading Faith and Knowledge , of Hent de Vries’ great mediations? Doubtless more recent essays, like those collected in Without Alibi or The Eyes of the University will find their advocates and expositors. For the rest of us, there are old favourites: Writing and Difference, Monolingualism, The Gift of Death, Margins of Philosophy, Signsponge …

For myself, lazy reader that I am, I loved his interviews; Points is a marvellous collection; Negotiations, The Taste of the Other, Echographies and For What Tomorrow are also fine. I loved to read about how he wrote, the tasks he set himself each time he began to write, meeting the challenge of writing anew, according to the occasion and according to the authors whose work solicited him. Each time he would try to incorporate the signature of the other, the author upon whom he was working, into his own signature. Each time, he would resist the urge to pronounce upon an oeuvre, to reach a definitive conclusion; he worked from the corner, he began in the middle: it was Kant’s neglected writings on the university which caught his attention, or Nietzsche’s lectures on education; it was the theme of hospitality he focused on in Levinas, or the topic of testimony in Blanchot.

What of his books, the books themselves? Sometimes, it is true, they were a disappointment. The heaviness of that disappointment attested to our expectations: we wanted more from him, sometimes, because we knew he had more he could give. We took him for granted, perhaps, for there were always more books, and no doubt there are many more to come. I am thinking of the transcripts of the seminars themselves of which only fragments have appeared (the massive Politics of Friendship is, I think, only one eighth of the whole seminar series on friendship).

I know for myself that I avoided taking issue with his work because he was perpetually under attack from Analytic philosophers. This is my weakness: a kind of paranoia prevents me from being able to turn on those philosophers whose work, it seems to me, needs protecting. Whenever I read a book by Derrida I feel as though I have committed a great transgression, as though I had committed a crime (at the university I studied, Hegel was deemed unphilosophical; we were not allowed near Nietzsche, let alone Husserl. At that university we focused for the most part on texts published in the English speaking world over the last twenty years. Nothing older, nothing French or German, nothing ‘Continental’).

Yes, I am too paranoid. But didn’t Derrida ask for a kind of protection from those who read him? Wasn’t there always something of Derrida which felt in need of protection, as though his place in the academy, in the history of philosophy, were never secure enough? I’ve heard this from a number of individuals: Derrida was a man who needed appreciation, just as I have also heard of his dislike of stuffy academic protocol; invited to speak on a stage at one university, taking his place with other staff, he chose to speak from the audience, where the students were gathered. I saw him speak on only one occasion; I was disturbed at his patience: his interlocutors were facile, they barely knew his work, but he was courteous, too polite. I asked myself: why was he here, in this ridiculous town in this dreadful part of the country? Why come here and meet them, his old antagonists …? Perhaps I will learn more about his desire to travel from Counterpath.

Still, it was interesting to see him: a handsome man, dark skinned, shorter than I thought he might be and more stocky. He was graciousness itself; elaborately courteous and even-tempered, speaking with great fluency and amazing recollective power. I have marvelled at his personal history: his office was near Paul Celan’s; for a time, Blanchot would visit him there, then Genet. He frequented a salon, I forget who ran it, where he encountered Sarraute; then there were the Tel Quel years. He shared a summer house with Lyotard, I think, and was always on good terms with Deleuze. Wouldn’t you have loved for him to have spoken of his friendships with these figures as he had spoken of his relationship with Althusser (I am thinking of the interview ‘Politics and Friendship’)?

Best avoid the obituaries in the papers tomorrow. The boorish British Media have rarely published anything favourable upon what is called Continental philosophy. I cannot forget, on Deleuze’s death, the praise of that stupid book by the faux scientists in the Guardian beneath a picture of Gilles Deleuze himself, that great man, that great philosopher: the picture where he stands by a mirror in a fedora. Doubtless the mocking of Derrida will continue tomorrow.

Summer nearly over, R.M. here for a last weekend before she starts her job in the city; term starts next week. What happened this summer? 5 84 hour weeks in the office – not to work (R.M. worked, who was here all along) but to drift, reading this and that, writing little, wandering out into town to find snacks. What happened? Deleuze and Guattari, a paper on money and time, a half-written essay on Heraclitus, little work on the new book (untouched since June …) Vague summer illnesses, incapacities (but these are not unpleasant) …

The perpetual struggle: to wrest a day of work from the fog. A day of work – one hour of writing takes five hours of surfing and wandering, of reading newspapers and grazing. Temptation to drink coffee – but you’ll pay tomorrow when you are more tired still, with dark rings under the eyes. Or to drink – but there are too many hours between now and bedtime to lose in the haze.

Still stranded before the tasks ahead, you make excuses: too much administration. Secretly, you find it liberating; it allows you to say to yourself after another unproductive day: I’ve done something. Filled out some forms. Filed a report. Prepared a document in officalese …

What to do when the administration is done and what is called ‘research’ is impossible? Post. Write about the impossibility of writing when there’s an essay to complete and a review and a book. Dream vaguely of another kind of writing. Then post about the impossibility of that …

Now and again, simple contentedness when nothing seems impossible: it is a state which is dangerous because what is born or created is not wrenched from what resists such birth or creation. Never a sense that to make something, to write a line, is to have lost something, to have missed exactly what called for writing. In contentment, everything is possible, especially writing. Vile loquacity. No longer is your misery implicated in the misery of the world. Nor that bitter laughter which arises from a sense of enormous folly.

Today, there is nothing to write, nothing to say. Summer looms behind me. And the future: the plunge towards Christmas, always eventful, sometimes joyful: life, life. In the meantime, the simple desire to mark this day by posting here. To leave a mark whereby I might retrace the path back to the expanse of these weeks in the office with R.M. working alone and together (she at her desk, I at mine). Back through the door to summer …

Kerans, protagonist of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, scrawls on the wall of a ruined building in the sunken London through which he passes on his way South: TIME ZONE. Where is travelling? Back to that expanse of time unmarked by minutes. To the great past. But I am travelling back North to the measured time of tasks and projects …

We know the old story: God was once the name for the unnameable, for what comes to language, to determination. The sacred, with Hölderlin, is a name which no longer covers up the unnameable. It is a placemarker for what the poet cannot name except as the unnameable, maintaining it there, keeping the space open. This is what according to some (Heidegger, for one – and perhaps Blanchot, too) Hölderlin achieved, and, after him the authentic poet stands guard over the absence of the gods, maintains this space, the sacred, as the sacred (the absence of the gods). And over the name God (the name God in Hölderlin’s poetry – the Christian God of the poetry whom Heidegger will always play down)?

The great danger of the modern period is that the death of God is confused by the movement through which creation, the power to create, is isolated by the most important trait of God, the one the human producer wants most to imitate. Art, for example (it’s not just any example) is seen to be a matter of the powers of human creativity – but here the human creator is only an imitation of one aspect of God. Whence Feuerbach’s critique and its aftermath: the death of man must follow the death of God, etc. etc., we’ve all heard this. And if the isolation of the power to create was a sign of an alienation of the human being from itself? Of a transformation of the sense of work, of the power to transform the world, to produce? Then the death of God and the death of man both name phantasms, for what has died can only be thought in terms of that which occured with the appearance of homo laborans. The death of God, the death of man name an attempt of human beings to kill themselves and be reborn under a new sky, and not a sky without God, without gods. To be reborn on a new earth.

What happened in the period of these great discourses (Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx …)? The determination of the human being as the worker. The elevation of the status of work. What died? The death of God and the death of man are only the death spasms of a particular conception of the human being. What does the name God name? And the human being? Before any affirmation of theism or atheism there is the question of what trembles in the name of God and in the name of the human being. Of what these names allow to tremble. And of what of the gods? What trembles in their names? Or even in their collective name: the gods?

(Heidegger helps and hinders with respect to these questions. On the one hand, he passes over the question of Hölderlin’s Christianity. On the other, he provides an account of the appearance of homo laborans as part of a broader determination of being as actualitas. Hegel and Marx, according to Heidegger, answered to this conception. Reread them from this perspective (hasn’t Axelos done this?) But Heidegger himself neglects to provide a theory of commerce and his conception of the political is too narrow. On the other hand, the appearance of the gods, of the last God in his later work …)

Do not think the world in terms of the representation of a destiny; its sense is immanent, not transcendent, and each being opens to the other in distance and nearness. It is the world that has become infinite; it comprises things, persons which have been set apart from one another even as they lie together. Think the whole as a coherence which is no longer part of a order or a plan. The co-presence of things: the roundplay of substitution through which everything can take the place of the whole, in which anything is infinitely mysterious and refers, in its mystery, to the mystery of all things.

Think the affirmation of beings in their common destitution. No longer are they part of a system which provides them with an assured signification. And even the word universe only designates the endless expansion, expansion without end through which the whole presses itself further into itself. Every being is adrift; each singularity is as singular as any other.

Some moving lines from a manuscript I am reading:

Our private lives have become so invaded by economic necessity that we no longer any idea what love might or could be. Our intimacies might be nothing more than a flight from reality, a flight whose condition is the very world it flees.

Meaning of communism I would like to articulate. Not only would private property be abolished, but the propriety of the self with respect to itself, its powers, its autonomy, its ‘ontological tumescence’ (Levinas). Profound insight of Levinas’s philosophy: that place where I am, the place from which I speak and take to be mine, is already an usurpation. Pascal was right: mine is the place in the sun – the great evil of the world begins in that assertion. Doesn’t Bataille indicate the same when he writes about laughter? Or Deleuze about immanence?

I won’t present an argument here. Still, when Marx and Engels insist that communism is not an ideal but real, when they claim it is something which begins through strategic negotiation here and now, today, it is to those experiences which break from the molar form of the worker to which they point. Work, identification: the labour which permits you to carve out a place in a world, to make a home for yourself, to set yourself back from the elements, to pull a roof over your head – this same labour has as its price a terrible usurpation.

What is to be done? There is no room for good conscience, that first of all. And no room for that great elevation which would allow you to become the judge of all, surveyor of the field, like Zeus above the battlefield. Yes, it is necessary to judge, to act, but this is local, provisional – it begins in the middle as Deleuze likes to say. It begins as soon as you are there, which is to say, straightaway. Politics is there first of all – yes, everything is political however bland and indefensible this sounds. Your self-relation is political. Relation itself is political. What matters is to bind relations to the great struggle, to understand its implication in the great struggle for the world. For the world – yes, to call forth the virtuality of this world – the great potencies which work against the molar form of work.

Meaning of communism: affirmation of the being-together which answers to the usurpation that has always occurred. This recalls the communism to which Marx will sometimes allude: non-fetishised relation to nature, non-fixity of social roles: all of this is announced in the laughter which bursts contagiously across you and others. Announced there, though it has hardly begun. Laughter reaches you from the day after the revolution – that impossible day in which we will live without a place to occupy. That impossible day from which we live today: place without place, u-topia.

Well, that’s it for Spurious for the time being. This weblog has been up for almost exactly 6 months. I’ve got a book to finish by December 15th, so I’ll post only very intermittently until then.

Herodotus is said to have called an end to the time of myth and opened the period of history, at least here in the West. This is still an age of myths, as if we belonged to the era Herodotus had already left behind – the time of the epic, of great causes and triumphal victories. The mythical age is not over – it lingers yet in the war without end which opened more than two years ago – itself the continuance of what perhaps the word ‘war’ cannot reach: an unsettled and impersonal struggle that has long spread across all the nations on the globe. Yes, it is still mythic, this war, for as long as Bush pretends to be the conscience of the world.

And Blair? Who is Blair pretending to be? ‘Do you pray together?’ Jeremy Paxman asked him of his relationship to Bush in a studio not far from here? ‘No we don’t pray together, Jeremy’, said Blair. Then I remember Alistair Campbell’s comment of the PR machinery that surrounds the Prime Minister: ‘we don’t do God.’ What do they do instead? Appeal to the great end which would justify the means: democracy for the Middle East, an end to a destructive regime etc.: a humanitarian cause. Impressive if it were true – but we are too sceptical to believe that and to believe anything from our politicians. There is a strange severing of the populace from their leaders. A dream: the public becomes unpredictable, wayward; apathy gives way to militancy; there is a general refusal of myth.

And the Enlightenment dream that myth will disappear? This is perhaps our hope, and it may be a vain one: the great evil against which we are enlisted to struggle will be exposed as the last shadows of an ancient myth. And the great good? The great humanitarian cause? Wake up, sober up: the broken, humilated body of the Iraqi prisoner refuses to be reappropriated by a mythical humanitarianism. Do not try and justify torture as royal road to happiness for all. This would be to accede to oldest theodicean and cosmodicean myth which survived right up to the concentration camps: everything will be justified, everything will come right in the end.

Is it the absence of myth that we see in the photographs of the tortured bodies of Iraqi prisoners? Will others see it, too? This is the time of the digital camera and the internet. Of technology and the atom bomb. Horrible and wonderful, it could be the new technology which allows us to witness evidence of the tortured and the dead which will finally drive myth from the world. This is naive, hopelessly so – who would counterpose myth and technology in any simple minded way when it was technicians who designed the great places of extermination? And why should one expect the public to believe incidents of torture are anything but exceptional?

Dream of the end of the myth, of a new age in which a utopian future does not justify terror in the present. When every day is as the last day, the day of judgement and no theodicy or cosmodicy could justify a present injustice.

One reads with Heidegger of the first beginning [Anfang], the Ereignis, the originating event of the West through which the great names physis, aletheia, logos appeared etc., etc. What then of the event called Auschwitz – or for which the name ‘Auschwitz’ is a synecdoche? Did it give us a new set of primal words, or does it exacerbate the ones we already have? Did it accomplish a glorious new Dichtung, bringing names forward in the fire of a new experience of the logos, or did it, rather, mock that same Dichtung and that same fire?

Adorno on Beckett, in the famous ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’: ‘Understanding it can mean only understanding its intelligibility [Unverständlichkeit], concretely reconstructing the meaning of the fact that it has no meaning’. It has no meaning? It is set after an indeterminate disaster; the apocalypse has happened. In postwar Europe, ‘everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realising it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own damaged state [Zerschlagenheit] useless’. They talk, the characters, they repeat lame jokes, they babble and mutter. There is nothing to talk about, nothing to do. Movement is ritual without meaning. What happens will happen again. Dead time.

In the face of this, understanding cannot, as for Kant, bring intuitions under concepts. Do not try to understand Endgame – but do not try, likewise, to grasp it under the heading of Heideggerian Dichtung (which itself bestows understanding, bringing beings to a stand). Does it call for a new beginning – for us to dream of a new Dichtung, a new happening of the Ereignis? Or does it attest, rather, to the impossibility not only of such a happening but of the ‘first’ beginning [Anfang] of which Heidegger writes?

More notes in the margin of Philip Goodchild’s book Religion and Capitalism:

What matters most? This book presents us with four insights which have not, according to Goodchild, been thought in their interrelation. Firstly, there is the truth of suffering: human life is not sustainable, but the ecological catastrophe is preventable; secondly, the awareness that money has become the self-positing measure of all values; thought and values themselves must be understood in terms of their monetary value; thirdly, the awareness of what Goodchild calls the “experience” of God and fourthly, the awareness of the “murder of God” as this reveals the nihilism of the European tradition – the values which devalue themselves.

Traditional accounts of this murder will not suffice. It is not the development of nominalism, or the displacement of religious authority from ecclesiastical institutions to individual conscience in the Reformation, or the rise of the experimental method in the sciences which transformed the concretion of knowledge and prepared the way for secularism and atheism; none of these accounts for their condition, which is, Goodchild argues, a shift in pieties – a shift from God to Mammon, which is to say, the murder of God happens because of the emergence of the self-regulating market as the basis for the organization of the social order.

What is to be done? How might one alter the currency? Might one hold out for a redirection of attention – for a new piety, a new religion, a new conception of God and with it, a new understanding of truth and goodness? For Goodchild, to alter the currency is to redirect attention. It is to understand economics and economism as a kind of piety – as a way of directing attention away from what matters. But it is also to counterpose a religious piety to economic piety as it is founded upon excess and not conservation. One might object that this talk of piety nostalgic. Doesn’t scientific progress already testify to the anachronism of the appeal to piety? But, for Goodchild, the currency of truth must be altered, since the apparent stability purchased through abstraction wagers the real. When truth is understood as immutable, incorporeal and identical over time, it threatens to pass over what is changeable, material and discontinuous. The objects of astronomy or mechanics are indeed regular and ordered in their behavior – but this is not the case with the ostensible object of economics.

Pierre Bourdieu writes of the mason who forewent the ritual meal that was supposed to be eaten in the mason’s honor after he had constructed a house. He asked for 200 francs in exchange for the meal in addition to the 1,000 francs for the construction itself. What is wrong with that? The event of the meal – the taste of the food, the animals killed to supply that food, the friendships which are formed and reaffirmed over that meal, conversation and conviviality – is not substitutable. Trust is everything in the system Bourdieu describes; therefore, the temptation is to cheat by feigning trustworthiness.

One might understand the transition of ritual to historical piety to occur at this point, although Goodchild warns us against any simple understanding of this transition. The God of historical piety is understood as being able to bestow reparations for suffering in the present: He will punish deceit and wickedness; the righteous will prosper and the wicked will perish. Piety, here, is no longer directed towards the ritual repetition of a past event but to the future. Abraham, trusting the promise of God, leaves Ur because of a promise; he ventures his life on this uncertainty. Ritual piety is put to death when he is called to sacrifice his son; meaning and value spring out of this gesture. Hebrew monotheism depends upon a rejection of idolatry: one worships one God; the past, and the ritual piety in which one returns ceaseless to the past, is sacrificed in view of a universalism. Piety is now oriented towards the future – to the coming of the Messiah, or, with Christianity, to the return of Christ which will bring about the Kingdom of God.

But here, already, the divine economy allows God to resemble Mammon. The event of the murder of God has already been prepared; historical piety is perilously close to the economism that will allow commodification and reification. But religion does not collapse into capitalism. Broadly speaking, for Goodchild, religious piety is still able to embrace the singular and exceptional: it can attend to suffering because it is pluralistic in a way capital is not. Doesn’t Marx show this when he allows that money “is the god among commodities” – that it is “the incarnation of exchange value”? The monism of capitalism allows it to as it were worship itself; piety synthesizes time such that the future becomes, for the financier, the object of speculation even as, for the householder, the future harbors catastrophe: the threat that he or she will be unable to subsist.

It is perhaps because only the philosopher of religion can understand the stakes of what Goodchild calls apocalyptic piety – an experience which directs itself towards the singularity of suffering in a way outside the consensus. Apocalyptic piety opens what Goodchild calls the “chaotic interval” which other forms of piety conceal (indeed, other forms of piety, whether economic or religious, are precisely an attempt to shield themselves from chaos). One cannot bring oneself into such piety through an act of will. Rather, it reveals itself only in an experience of excess which overwhelms the consensual determination of what is real. Philosophy of religion, understanding apocalyptic piety in its philosophical and political stakes, which is to say, as a way of revealing a future no longer bound by chains of necessity to the present, rises to its vocation to alter the currency. Such a philosophy must be a critical theory of religion because otherwise the experience of God which gives itself in apocalyptic piety will be misunderstood. Only thus might the thinker plunge into the reality of change and discontinuity – to the becoming and affect of the world as it exceeds economic determination and is bound, in that opening, to what Goodchild calls absolute faith.

Reading these pages, I am reminded of Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. We first meet Domenico as he is prevented from his attempt to cross the hot pool dedicated to Saint Catherine of Siena in the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni, where the protagonist of the film, the Russian poet Gorchakov is staying. Domenico, we learn, locked himself in the house for seven years with his family, waiting for the end of the world. Gorchakov is taken by this stranger. When he is told Domenico is mad, he replies: “We don’t know what so-called insanity, or madness, is. First, they are inconvenient, they get in everyone’s way. Their behavior, their wishes lie outside the generally accepted rules. And then, we simply don’t wish to understand them. They are terribly lonely, but I’m sure they are closer to the truth than we are.” Later, Domenico immolates himself after preaching to the army of solitaries he has gathered about him for three days and nights. Before he sets himself on fire, he cries: “What is this world worth, what is the value of its truth if some unhappy mental patient, as you call us, tells you: ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves!’ While there’s still time!” Tarkovsky shows us Domenico’s death is not beautiful. He falls and crawls along the ground, crying out. In the interval between the immolation and his death, he is just a man who has set himself alight. His is the mad attempt draw the whole world into the fire of sacrifice and bring it shuddering back into birth. But it is, perhaps, the act of madness which reveals the madness of the world and thus the chaotic interval between one future and another. Meanwhile, far away, Gorchakov has heard of Domenico’s death. He takes the stub of a candle and begins to walk across the drained pool. This is not an act of ritual piety (the repetition of an eternal past) nor even an act of historical piety (it is not performed in the service of righteousness). Dazzled by the chaotic interval, it honors an apocalyptic piety.

I wonder whether Goodchild’s philosopher of religion must embody both Domenico and Gorchakov, answering to the opening of the chaotic interval and then, afterwards, patiently transmitting that experience, along with the singularity of suffering to which it is linked. The first apocalyptic experience, the experience of the interval, leads to death, or at least a kind of dying (Domenico’s self-sacrifice; the shattering of self-consciousness which Goodchild himself describes). It gives way to a second – the affirmation of difference as a potency of which nothing can be known. Such difference is wondrous – to think, henceforward, is to answer what is unthinkable; it is to direct attention to an experience whose source one cannot render explicit. But Goodchild maintains a third apocalyptic experience is necessary through which one comes to understand the experience in question, the affirmation of difference, as an experience of God. I will close with a quotation from the last chapter of Religion and Capitalism, which, if I do not yet understand, is a sign, for me of the necessity of rereading this book:

Apocalyptic piety has no name for the God it experiences, no identity on which to cling. It is merely an experience after the death of God, the subject and the world. It follows the dissolution of reality and the dissolution of the will. If it awakens to God as Truth, Goodness and Awareness, this is not a God it can condition, possess or will. It is merely an experience. Apocalyptic piety stands outside itself: it is a capacity to laugh at, relinquish and forgive oneself; it is a capacity to attend to suffering; it is a capacity to bear within oneself little fragments of heaven and hell. It is compassion.

Some notes in the margin of Philip Goodchild’s impressive book Religion and Capitalism:

The risks of inflation, until the eighteenth centuries, meant that total coinage could only be introduced with the conquest of new territories. With overseas investment, the asset-stripping of the conquered territories, the organization of the slave trade, such an increase in coinage could occur. But the greatest step came with the nationalization that created the Bank of England, which allowed a secure value to be attached to bank notes, enabling long term, low interest loans which could be secured against future taxation. Thus, the economy could function on the basis of an infinitely deferred redemption of a promise of value. Money is thus created as a loan on the basis of a debt. But this means production is always increased in order to obtain a profit on the loan. The value of assets is now determined through a speculative anticipation of its rate of return. But just as currency is circulated in the form of banknotes which never have to be cashed in, the value of assets is determined by a future which never arrives. Since the market will not crash (the government can always raise more taxes), there is now no limit to the amount of money that can be created. Our material and social reality is wagered on the basis of an ideal future; the national power which creates the Bank of England it is seized by what it seized. The issuing of government bonds and, later, trading on financial futures and derivatives, exacerbates already set in motion.

What follows? Prices are determined for commodities, excess production is encouraged and new needs are created with the consequences of ecological devastation and financial uncertainty. The operation of the free market sees labor subordinated by debt bondage, slavery, the threat of unemployment or the outsourcing of labor to countries where it can be bought more cheaply. Labor has no choice but to participate either because of debt or because it is enthralled by the idea of making money.

One may object that we live in the most humane of human societies; that we enjoy prosperity as never before. But we are blinded by the self-evidence of economics as it serves to uphold the apparently benevolent despotism of liberal humanism. Economics cannot take account of the suffering which results when the social and material condition of the present is wagered on the basis of an ideal future. Abstractions like Gross Domestic Product, which purport to provide us with the value of an economy, cannot calculate the repercussions to the environment; a cost-benefit analysis does not permit sufficient attention to be paid to the threat of financial catastrophe.

For a happy minority, credit is plentiful and goods are cheap. But for the majority, the future – the immediate future – is grim; the main question is one of survival. All of us stand before the same horizon, the same looming catastrophe, whether we want to or not. Why don’t the terrifying claims of the report on the results of climate change commissioned by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall, grip us before any other problem? Our attention is misdirected. Is this the effect of our governments, which no longer answer to international law or to the wishes of their people?

Politics is possible only for as long as our attention is uncoupled from the magic of image, spectacle and glamour as they circulate in the mass media. It is possible only when we extend the scope of that which lays claim to our attention. Vaster than the number of countable voters is the polity of those who will have to live in a world which becomes progressively less inhabitable as well as those outside our country with whom we are bound in networks of interdependency.

Our political system encourages short-termism and populism: the political candidate must be adept at handling the mass media; it is necessary to look and speak the part, which means wealth, appearance and debating skills supplant the ethical sensibility which would allow the politician to respond to what matters. A political response articulated out of a universal awareness is barely conceivable. But the catastrophe may still be preventable which means nothing is more pressing that developing this awareness.

Our attention has been captured. How to bind apathy in the face of politics into a universal politics which works on a local and a worldwide level that can struggle for the world? But there is no one to listen; the commonwealth has disappeared. There is no public when the European tradition of reason with its faith in a public standard of rationality has collapsed, and when there is only suspicion of the same values which once united us: truth, wisdom, the human being.

The most pressing task is the awakening of a new universalism – of a commonwealth alert to ecological and financial catastrophe.

This, via James Ward’s Heidegger’s Politics:

According to Otto Pöggeler, Heidegger would write, in a passage omitted from the published version of G53: “Perhaps the poet Hölderlin must become a Geschick of decisive confrontation for a thinker whose grandfather was born at the same time the ‘Ister Hymn’ and the poem ‘Andenken’ originated — according to the records, in the sheepfold of a dairy farm in Ovili, which lies in the upper Danube valley near the bank of the river, beneath the cliffs. The hidden history of Saying knows no accidents. Everything is dispensation [Schickung] ( “Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding”, p. 223).