Category: W.

We need to read if we want to live, W. says. We may have forgotten how to live, but they – the authors of the books in his man bag – have not.

We should always carry a life-book along with us, W. says. A life-book, a life-buoy. We need buoyancy on choppy waters. We need to be able to stop being dragged under.

He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters … Why aren't our souls restored as we wander out to Jericho? This is the day the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Because our day is a mockery of the Sabbath; it laughs at it. Because our day is the day that unmade the Lord …

Ah, what do we know of rest, real rest, as would come after real work?, W. says. What of righteous tiredness, of the satisfaction of a good job done? Not that we're lazy – not that he's lazy, at any rate, but we don't know how to begin.

W. dreams of smoothing down a page, picking up his pen, and writing – what? What is he supposed to write? Sometimes he dreams it has been revealed to him, the secret of the universe. He wakes, scrawls down some notes, but in the morning? Nothing, just nonsense, W. says.

We need a realitatpunkt, W, says. A point of absolute certainty, from which everything could begin. But all he can be certain of is the eternal crumbling of our foundations, the eternal stop sign of our idiocy.

Every day is only the fresh ruination of any project we might give ourselves. Every day, the fresh revelation of our limitations and of the absurdity of our ambitions. What have we learnt except that we have no contribution to make, nothing to say, nothing to write, and that we have long since been outflanked by reality, overtaken by it, beaten half to death by it.

Still, it's good to be out of the city, we agree over our pints. Why, almost as soon as we arrive in Oxford, do we try to escape it? But the answer is obvious. What do we see that others do not? It's finished, it's all finished, and never more so than there: in Oxford (though Jericho, too, is in Oxford, the periphery to its centre).

The sky has become a great door shut against us. And the earth, too, is a shut door. We live in two dimensions, not three. Our world is a thin film, a kind of stain to be rubbed away. And it will be rubbed away.

And in the meantime, our non-Sabbath, our parody of rest. Meanwhile, our pints, and pint after pint. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. Consider the idiots of Jericho, how they drink …

Manchester was good to us, W. says, back at Piccadilly Station. It was good. We gave our talk, fielded questions, didn't get lynched …

Did we convince anyone? We convinced ourselves, at the very least. We even moved ourselves, talking about the transformation of work. The transformation of time.

For us, for people like us, there's no more time, we observed. Time has been broken up, sold off. Time has been broken up into short-term contracts. Time is for consumption, and commercialised leisure. There's no long term, not for the worker, nor the consumer. Nothing connects. Experience no longer accumulates. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships dissolve into the air …

The Manchester postgraduates seem to understand what we meant, we agree. They understood Manchester!

There's no long-term, for the worker, not now, we said. Deferred gratification need bring no reward. For the new elite, it's all about contacts, about their network, not about the firm. Self-discipline without dependency: that's what they show, the editors of the new media, the advertising creatives, living in converted warehouses. Free-wheeling initiative: that's what they exhibit, the floor traders in brokerage firms, the internet entrepreneurs who buy apartments redeveloped by Urban Splash …

And for the rest of us, the non-elite, around whom their firms are constantly changing?, we said. For those for whom work means constant insecurity, the constant re-engineering and restructuring of their workplaces, constant delayering and outsourcing, constant downsizing and networkisation? Casualise your labour pool: that's what the consultants recommend. It's what the market wants, they tell their clients: labour flexibility impresses the investors.

So what is to be done?, they asked us, our Manchester audience. What are we to do? We didn't know, we said. They didn't know. But all around us, we could see from the window in the winter afternoon, the city was being rebuilt.

'And then you fell in with the monks …', W. says. It's the most mysterious of episodes to him, W. He's never had it satisfactorily explained to him how I ended up living with the monks. What drove me to them, or them to me?

How did I, who had no religious belief, no experience of religion, no understanding of religion, end up living among the monks as their guestmaster? Why, out of all the other candidates – and there must have been other candidates, other monk hangers-on, who would have wanted my job – was I the one who became Guestmaster to the community?

He sees in his imagination, W. says. I was the opposite of one of Dostoevsky's holy fools. A Prince Myshkin without humility and saintliness, an Aloysha without goodness, a Saint Francis without mercy. I was a Saul who never converted, a Judas after his betrayal … Maybe they wanted to reform me, W. says of the monks. Maybe they wanted to test their spiritual strength.

He sees it in his mind's eye, W. says.  He sees the unholy fool standing between the monks and the world, letting in their guests, preparing them lunch or dinner, and showing them up to their rooms, which he had carefully prepared. He sees it, although he doesn't understand what he sees: the unholy fool making beds and running his cloth along the dado; the fool in the supermarket fetching food for dinner; the fool taking coats and hats and making pleasantries in the oak-parqued reception room; the fool arm in arm with a monk he's escorting across the icy pavement. He sees the unholy fool sitting in attendance on nut-brown Copts with twinkling eyes at ecumenical dinners and calling taxis for white-robed Dominicans heading to the station.

How it confuses W., for whom the story of my life, otherwise, is relatively clear. The monks took me in: but why? why me? What recommended me to them? What, when I had no idea of what living a spiritual life might mean?

W., by contrast, has every idea of what living a spiritual life. He, too, lived among monks, and for a time -over a long summer on the Isle of Man - even thought of becoming one.

Ah, but he can say little of it, not to me, who puts everything up about him, W., at his blog. A veil has to be drawn over some things. A kind of silence has to observed – and W. took a vow of silence, back when he was thinking of joining the Trappists. But he came to know what it meant, a spiritual life. He came to understand the essence of religion.

And isn't that where it began, W.'s real sense of religion, of religiosity, which has nothing to do with sighing after a world beyond this world? Isn't that where he understood that the question of religion wasn't to be left to philosophers and metaphysicians, and with the philosophical and metaphysical conceptions of religion?

W. was silent, he says. He spent days in solitary prayer. In the time between services, he wandered the beach, meditating upon religion, the essence of religion. He'd begun to understand, he says, that it was the world here and now to which religion attended. To world as it currently is! As it is, and insofar as it harbours its redemption.

And what did I come to understand, from my years with the monks? What did I make of the icons on my bedroom wall, and of Athanasius's Life of Saint Anthony on my bedside table? That, too, is a mystery to W., for whom it has always seemed clear that I know nothing whatsoever of religion. There I was, nonetheless, a Guestmaster, and for several years. There I was, masturbating in my attic room as the monks around me prayed unceasingly for the world.

We are altogether too pathetic for our Middlesex audience, we agree, on the train back to the city. Our vague communism. Our communist pathos.

They were looking for someone else. Something tougher. They wanted axioms. They wanted programmes of action. What did they want to hear of Marx and Benjamin? What of the additional thesis of the Theses on the Philosophy of History? What of Marx's messianism, or Benjamin's Marxism?

'In his conception of the classless society, Marx secularised the conception of messianic time. And he did well to', we said, quoting Benjamin. 'You won't say that I hold the present time in too much esteem; and yet if I don't despair of it, it is on account of its own desperate situation, which fills me with hope', we said, quoting Marx's letter to Ruge of 1853.

This is no time for finesse, the crossed arms of the Middlesex postgraduates said. Less scholarship, more strategy, said their pursed lips. The banks are collapsing, and this is what you have to tell us?, said their filed-down teeth.

We told them, sensing their hostility, about the religious core of Marxism and the political core of Judaism. We nearly wept as we sketched our dream of a new political theology, and a new theology of politics. But the Middlesex postgraduates were unmoved.

W. read to them from his notebook:

The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for men who are able to cope with a new world.

That was Marx, writing in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848, he told them, and we saw their mood change. They sat back in their chairs, unfolding their arms. The reference is to the book of Exodus, of course, W. said. – 'You probably know it. Actually, you probably don't. You look like heathens'. Hostility once again. The postgraduates leant forward, and refolded their arms.

We knew we had to speak as never before. We knew we had to reach new heights of eloquence and emotion. Our voices quavered as we spoke, but then grew firm, and began to rise to a crescendo.

Moses and his people left Egypt, where they were slaves, and, in obedience to God's call, headed into the desert in search of the promised land, W. said. The desert: who would go there?, I said. The great and terrible wilderness, the Bible calls it, with no grass for pasture, where thirst and starvation would drive you mad. A wasteland, a damned place, the refuge of the devil: who would heed Moses's call for exodus?

But heed it they did, hundreds of thousands of them, W. said, taking up the baton, pursued by the chariots of the Pharoah. Go they did, with God amongst them, for wasn't God, too, a pilgrim with the children of Israel?

For forty years they wandered, W. said. It was forty years before they reached Canaan. Why so long?, I said, taking back the baton. Because they had to rid themselves of the memory of captivity, the memory of Egypt. Because a generation had to be born and raised who knew nothing of slavery. The young: everything depended on them; the young who were the fruit of the years of tribulation.

'Do you think it impressed them, our hymn to youth?' Marx, too, dreams of the young, W. told them. To go under means to be reborn, remade. The proletrariat are young, fiercely young. The proletariat are the last born, with no memory of slavery, of the land of captivity.

Of course, we were thinking of them, our audience, sitting around us in a semicircle, W. says. We were dreaming of those who will come after us, after our going under. We were dreaming of the young of Middlesex, with a dagger in their hearts and ice on their lips. We're not young enough, we agree. Not ardent enough! Aren't we a symbol of what needs to overcome?

Ah, what do we understand of the militant demand?, we ask ourselves as we get off the train. What of the risks that must be taken? We need to be purged, we agree. Put up against the wall as counterrevolutionaries. And only then, without us, might liberation begin. Only then might the world begin to overcome its bondage.

We sit under the tree, a few of us, some smoking. Zizek is going by. – 'So this is where they exile the smokers!' he cries, with great vigour. W.: 'Yeah, it's shit, isn't it?' Zizek agrees, nodding vigorously as he goes by.

Where's he off to?, we wonder. He's got better things to do than hang round Oxford, we agree. He's probably going to see his wife, who's an Argentinian model, or something. A model-psychoanalyst. No, they got divorced, someone else says.

We remember the photograph of Zizek and his model wife the day they got married, which was circulated on the 'net. He looked hungover, regretful, vaguely surly. We felt he was one of us. How else would we look on the day of our weddings? 

W. won't hear a word against Zizek, he says. In fact, it's only the petty, small-minded and envious who speak against Zizek, and when they do so, it is only as an excuse to exercise their pettiness, small-mindedness and enviousness.

He's what we all should be, Zizek, W. says. He's a grafter, just as we should be grafters. He fills bookshelves with his publications, just as we should fill bookshelves with our publications. He has a sense of his impending end, which makes him work ever harder, with ever greater ambition, just as our sense of our impending ends should make us work ever harder, and with ever greater ambition.

They've set up twelve fan sites for him on Facebook, but he ignores them all. He's has 214 invitations to speak by email, but he doesn't even open his inbox. His voicemail's full. Ranciere's been calling him. Badiou. Laruelle is wondering how he is … But Zizek's busy writing his latest magnum opus – is it his third? His fourth? He's busy writing his 1200 page reckoning with Hegel …

W. knows why everyone hates Zizek so much, he says. Zizek's got their number, he says. Zizek knows what he would have been had he not be banned from teaching by the Yugoslavian academia. He knows he would have been 'a poor stupid unknown professor from Ljubljana, probably dabbling in a little bit of Derrida, a little bit of Heidegger, a little bit of Marxism and so on'. A poor stupid unknown professor just like all the other poor stupid unknown professors. A dabbler, writing on this and then that, lecturing on this and then that …

Zizek's off, possessed by the most urgent of philosophical questions. And where are we going, who sit smoking under the tree? What possesses us, we dabblers, we poor stupid unknown idiots …?

Oxford, again. Why do we come here? Why, year after year? W. feels as though he's suffocating, he says. As though his hands were clawing the air. Still, at least we didn't bring Sal, though she wanted to come. She'd run amok, we agree. It's like matter and anti-matter, we agree. Bringing Sal to Oxford might destroy the universe.

Still, here we are, suffocating again, buried alive again. Being buried alive is bad enough, W. says, but being buried alive with an idiot! At least I should amuse him. At least I should do something funny. But Oxford even gets to me. It's like going round with a sulky ape.

Why does Oxford always make him think of Poland?, W. wonders. Perhaps because Poland is the opposite of Oxford, W. says. Because Poland is a place of thought, where thought is valued, and Oxford is a place without thought, and where thought is despised.

Poland: ah, that's where it all began, so many years ago now, we agree. Our collaboration, our dog and pony show.

Is there such a thing as friendship at first sight, W. wonders? Well, that's what happened in Poland, in Wroclaw, W. says, when he saw my Adam Ant dancing: friendship at first sight.

Ah, he still remembers it, when, in the middle of the meal held our honour, the British delegation in Wroclaw, I pushed back my seat in order to demonstrate Adam Ant dancing. He remembers when I took to the dancefloor, recreating Adam Ant dancing from the 'Prince Charming' video. And he remembers how the Polish postgraduates followed me; how they, too, pushed back to their seats and took to the dancefloor, likewise recreating Adam Ant dancing from the 'Prince Charming' video.

Lars is a man who does not know shame, W. thought to himself. And he seems to encourage others, too, to forget their shame. And soon W., too, pushed back his chair, and took to recreating Adam Ant dancing on the dancefloor.

Oxford Spring. It's always spring in our Oxford. Every year we come back. Every year, the new spring, which is to say the same spring. And the same Oxford, too. And the same gloomy thoughts about Oxford. And the same desire to get out of Oxford immediately.

'It's happening just as you predicted', W. says. 'The collapse of the universities. The collapse of civilisation'. Don't you realise how good we're having it?, I've always said to him. These are the best of times, I've said, over and again. It's going to get worse, much worse, I told him, and I was right.

Why did it take an idiot to tell him that?, W. wonders. Why, when it should be obvious to everyone? They're destroying the universities: of course they are. How could it be otherwise? They're destroying the humanities: shrugged shoulders; so what else is new? Let them destroy it all, W. says, looking around him. Let it all come down.

I read from my notebook:

There is no more university; there is a great and venerable, barely camouflaged hole, a game of ceremonies. Rectors, deans, lecturers, students, all move to cover over the void, a void that is governed over by the rules of dead time.

That was Blanchot during May 1968, I tell him. No more university … Or might we dream of another kind of university, another kind of lecturer, and another kind of student?, we wonder. Might we dream of a dispersed university, a university in motion, in exodus, without walls, without buildings? Of a university of the periphery that flashes up around certain bars, certain havens in the city – of a kind of learning that appears and then disappears, in nearly one and the same moment, leaving its students and lecturers dazed and wondering what happened.

Was I the student, and you the lecturer – or was it the other way around? Did I teach you something, or you me? Or was it something between us that spoke – was it the relation between us, the movement of conversation that took us as its terms?

Oxford after the end looks quite like Oxford from before it, we decide, walking through the city. The same colleges, the same river. And the same walk for us, through Christchurch Meadows.

After tragedy, farce, we agree, remembering Marx. And after farce? This. Us. Christchurch Meadows.

'You really are the snack king', W. says. Is there any kind of snack I haven't brought with me? He admires me for it. There's something very true about my hunger.

I lay my snacks out on the table between us. I've gone for an Indian theme for this trip, I tell W.: chevda, Maharashtra-style, I explain, with dried fruits; banana chips fried in coconut oil (upperi, it's called, I tell W.), and the snack of snacks: murukku, from Tamil Nadu, which is well nigh unobtainable in England, but was sent to me by Indian relatives. It's wrapped in Indian newspapers for an authentic touch. And the wild card – an American snack, this time - corn nuts, too – the only snack I know wholly invented by one person, I tell W.: by Albert Holloway in 1936.

W.'s brought nothing to eat in his new man bag, he tells me. It's a souvenir from his recent Columbian trip. He was flown all the way to Bogota to give a seminar. They looked after him very well over there, of course. He'd expect nothing else from South Americans. They're not like us, limited people. They're full hearted, open. And they love philosophy! The philosophy department was massive. There were dozens of philosophers, young and old, crowding his seminar.

W. tells me about the snacks he met on his trip to Columbia. Puntillitas, he thinks they were called: battered squid, delicious. And guindillas – picked chillies. And there were various kinds of chorizo sausage – various cold meats, the Columbians are into those. And they each pork scratchings, which is very reassuring. When you're a long way from home, pork scratchings are just the thing. They're called chicharron, with a crisp later of fat under the skin, as in its British version.

I tell W. about flaeskesvaer, Danish pork scratchings, served in great packets, and W. tells me of the Hungarian pork rind one of the fellow members of the Plymouth Bela Tarr society bought from Budapest to share. Apparently, they fry the pork rinds in lard, he tells me, and eat them with bread and spring onions. In fact, that's what Bela Tarr's probably doing right now, W. says, eating pork rings with bread and spring onions.

'Jesus, what is that noise?', W. says on the phone. 'Are they still building up there?' They're still building.

They've been driving pylons into the earth, I tell W. And great cranes have gone up, the drivers in their cabs on eye level with me, on the twelfth floor.

Great drill shafts 100 foot high, boring slowly through the layers of soil and rock. The new buildings will be bolted to the earth by the pylons, that's clear. The new buildings will be driven into the earth, and will drive upwards from the earth, silver-windowed, steel framed, ready for the future …

They're keeping the facades of some of the old buildings, I tell W. The elaborate entryways, some doorframes and ornamentation: the Victorian shell around the new obscenity.

Because they've hollowed it out, the university, I tell W. They've drilled out its core. They're cored it out just as they will core us out. Because they're going to scoop out our insides, that much is clear. They're going to unscrew our skulls and dig out our brains. They'll chip out our teeth – our yellow teeth – and replace them with veneers.

'We're in the suburbs of a suburb', W. says. 'In the suburbs of a suburb of a suburb …' Through the suburbs on the slow train, travelling back to London. – 'Did you really grow up here?' I really did. - 'You're lucky to have escaped'. I know that. He's amazed I got out. What would have happened otherwise?

I point out my old school from train window, in the suburbs near Reading. It was the worst of schooling, I tell W. No one knew anything. We didn't know anything. Our teachers didn't know anything, I tell them. The blind led the blind. The blind stabbed out the eyes of the sighted. They stabbed out our eyes, I tell him.

I point out the warehouse where I went as a contractor when I left school. It was the worst of jobs. We stood about doing nothing. Sometimes management would come downstairs and tell us to get on with our jobs. From time to time, there'd be a cull; they'd sack a few of us. But we'd reappear in the warehouse sooner or later, employed by another agency, and go back to standing about and doing nothing, bored out of our minds.

And I point out the twin buildings of Hewlett Packard's UK headquarters, by the dry ski slope in Bracknell, where I worked as an office contractor. It was the worst of offices. I tell him of days and weeks of data entry. I tell him of wandering from coffee machine to coffee machine, of reading trade magazines in the company foyer, and of visiting the koi carp in their pond by the carpark.

And I tell him about my escape to university, my escape to Manchester, although I knew nothing about Manchester. – 'You had an instinct', W. says. 'It's admirable'.

The suburbs, the suburbs … He pictures me as a teenager, cycling out to every green patch I could find on the map. He pictures me making my way through fir plantations to the patch of scrappy woodland fenced off by the MoD where solders came to train for future wars. I listened out for artillery, but heard nothing but the wind in the trees and birds singing.

What was I looking for? What did I discover? There were the suburbs and the suburbs were everywhere. That my non-town was growing on the verge of every town; what does it matter where you are? And even the firing range was sold off, the last of the old woodland, to build a new housing estate. Didn't I see myself as Stalker's cousin, ready to lead others through the last patches of wilderness?

What was I looking for in the wide patches of grass between the plots on the hi-tech industrial estate where I used to work? What, in the rain that was allowed to lie in long puddles in the grass and mud?

The gypsies came with their caravans and churned up the grass. We were warned about them on the tannoy. – 'Make sure you lock your cars'. They left quickly enough, and the companies organised for diggers to cut trenches along the perimeter of each plot. But beyond the trenches, beyond the new chain-link fences …

Once it snowed in April, and the last remaining lot, the biggest, the wildest, was one pristine snow bank, full of space, I thought. Full of time … And I saw my future there in some sense, that's what I told him, W. says. I saw a future.

'You should go to college while it's still free', said a fellow worker, who read Kafka on his lunch break. He lent me his book, I told W., and I underlined a passage. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upwards at the seeming emptiness …

'So you went north'. I went north. – 'Of course you did, where else were you to go?' For his part, as a northerner, or a semi-northerner, a man of the Midlands, W. went south, lured by the promise of a course on which he could study Kafka in translation (he could only read Kafka in translation, back then). But they'd lied, of course. He never studied Kafka, but he studied other things instead. He learnt things – great things. He studied overseas. He visited the great archives. He criss-crossed Europe on the great train routes of Europe.

'And you, what did you do?', W. says. I became Stalker's cousin all over again, looking for space, looking for time under viaducts and on the tow-paths of canals, climbing over rusting pipes and broken girders. I arrived in Manchester while it was still a rust-zone. I arrived just before its regeneration, and the city was still falling apart like Mir space station.

Fog descends as we head back to the campus. It's as thick as the cloud on Mount Sinai, when Moses went up to meet God. He descended with the Tablets of Law, but what will bring back with us?

We're lost, hopelessly lost. Our kidnapped speaker's worried. What about the conference meal? He's supposed to be sitting at the high table. – 'Never mind the high table!', W. says. Of course, the speaker's too full of sausage and mash to be able to eat anything else. – 'You had a real appetite!', W. said to him, impressed.

Where are we going? It's a very verdant campus, we agree. Very lush. The Thames Valley's known for its humidity, I tell them. It's very bad for asthmatics. I developed asthma when my family moved out here. And eczema. And lice, says W. 

In the thick darkness: that's where God was waiting for Moses, W. says. That's how God appears to the mystic, Gregory of Nyssa said. The mystic receives a dark vision of God. But what do we see? Not God, at any rate. Barely even each other! It's a real pea-souper, we agree, speaking like the commoners in Brief Encounter. Gor blimey, guv'nor.

We ask our kidnapped plenary speaker about his ideas. Where are they taking him? What's to be his next project? But he seems distracted. He's very full up, he says, and now he's got to and have another dinner.

It's our duty to talk, we know that. We need to settle his nerves, our kidnapped plenary speaker. We need to settle his stomach! So we tell him of our Kierkegaard project, of our collaborative paper, for which we are constructing an elaborate dossier. We tell him about the intimate link we expect to discover between Kierkegaard and contemporary capitalism, about the Danish philosopher's despair and our despair.

Our speaker's feeling really ill now, he says. What will we do? The fog's thickening. We need to stay close! To keep a head count! And it's darkening, too. Are we really going to meet God? Do you think we'll receive the Tablets of Law? - 'Go on, say something profound', W. says to our kidnapped speaker.

With our kidnapped plenary speaker in the pub, waiting for our plates of Cumberland sausage and mash. – 'You know they hate you', W. says. 'They hate us, God knows, and they hate you, too'. – 'Who hates me?, the speaker says. – 'Everyone. Everyone here', W. insists. – 'I don't think they hate me', the speaker says. – 'They do! They hate us, and they really hate you'.

They hate thought!, W. insists. Doesn't he, our kidnapped plenary speaker, understand that? They hate thought, and want to drive all thought away. Why did they invite him, then?, our kidnapped plenary speaker asks. It's a mystery, we agree. Perhaps there's still some instinct in them about what they lack, we speculate. Perhaps they feel some residual shame about their inability to think.

Our sausages and mash arrive on oval plates. It looks disgusting, we agree. Then a second set of sausages and mash arrive. We have two vast plates each of sausages and mash. He doesn't know where to begin, our kidnapped plenary speaker says, holding up his knife and fork.

Eat, man, eat, we urge him. He needs to keep up his strength! After all, very soon he'll have to go back in! We'll protect him, we tell our kidnapped plenary speaker. We'll flank him like the president's secret service bodyguards. We'll keep our sunglasses on and speak into earpieces. – 'The package is in the building', we'll say. 'The package is about to give his speech'.

'Go on, order some more sausage and mash', W. says, when the speaker disappears to the loo. I place an order at the bar. Soon, there'll be no space at our table but for plates of sausage and mash. They'll have to pile them on top of each another, W. says. He finds this very funny.

Reading University campus, and W. is full of dread. He has the feeling that it's about to go terribly wrong. What, our presentation? No, no – more than that, W. says. Something catastrophic is about to happen.

I knew Reading would appal him, I tell him. How could it be otherwise? On the bus out to the campus, he was already squirming. Driveways packed with Range Rovers and 4X4s. Mock Tudor houses. Mock Georgian ones. Mock Victorian ones, in great estates. All the styles of history and mocking history, laughing at it. This is the end of the world, W. says. The eternal end.

Did it ever have a history, Reading? Did anything ever happen here? But he knows it did. He's read about the Abbey, and he knows Oscar Wilde was imprisoned here. He might as well be imprisoned here, W. said on the bus. He might as well write his own Ballad of Reading Jail.

We're in enemy territory. We've been parachuted deep behind enemy lines. And what's our mission? A suicide mission, it can only be that, W. says. A soiling ourselves mission. – 'Go on, you start'.

This has to be our last lecture tour, W. says. This has to be the last time, the last dog and pony show. We came here against our better judgement, it's true. We were invited, personally invited, and how could we refuse? Our trouble is, we're too polite, W. says. We want to please people, despite everything.

How will we survive? We need a rallying point, for one thing. – 'Look for a pub!' We need a place of safety, W. says. We need a panic room. And we need a general strategy. – 'Keep your head down, talk to no one'.

Then we spot him in the foyer: the plenary speaker who W. feels is an ally. How did they get him here?, I wonder. – 'Just as they got us. Through flattery', W. says. Suddenly we feel a great surge of tenderness. We have to protect him, we decide. He doesn't belong here. For one thing, he actually has ideas. He needs to be rescued!

We resolve to smuggle him off campus to a pub. We need to save him, the plenary speaker. To save thought!

And in the meantime? Be careful. There are enemies everywhere.

The train south. We're heading into the belly of the beast, we agree. We heading into the great maw. We'll need to take special measures to survive.

We check our survival kit. Do we have our bottle of gin? Check. Of Plymouth Gin? Of course! What else? Now, books. What have I brought?, W. asks me. Ah, Georges Bataille, good. Inner Experience. Guilty: nothing better. And Simone Weil! A wild card. What drew me to her? What was she doing on my bookshelf? Perhaps there's something serious about me after all, he says. He's brought Karl Polyani, he says. We'll need Karl Polyani in the south.

Plymouth's in the south, of course, we acknowledge, but not in the south south. Plymouth's in the southwest, which is entirely different. In fact, W. thinks of Plymouth as being part of the north. In his mind, it's as far north in England as Newcastle is, he says.

And what about our supplies? Do we have any rations? A variety of snacks, I tell W. Snacks from many lands. W. approves. It's a long journey, he says.

The Town Moor: escape. We wander through the knee-high grass. What are those birds?, we wonder. What are those flowers? But we have no idea.

The Moor is like the world on the fifth day of creation, we agree – before Adam, before anyone, when everything went unnamed and unredeemed. It needs words, we agree. It needs a poet! Where is the Rilke of Newcastle to sing of the Moor?

I should at least dance, W. says. I should at least do a great Hindu dance of celebration …

Above us, a shore of clouds and then blue sky. – 'That's a weather front', W. says. Which way is it travelling? Where is it heading? And where are we heading, we who are walking beneath it, the shore of clouds?

Is the future open to us, or closed? W. can never decide. Are we making progress, or falling behind. – W. can never decide about that, either.

Alcoholics in the long grass, stretching their limbs and laughing, half-drunk bottles of cider by their ankles. Anyone can walk on the Town Moor, he likes that, W. says. Where the alcoholic can walk, he walks, W. says. And where the alcoholics cannot walk – where his way is barred by security guards or policemen – W. will not walk either.

Shouldn't we lie down in the long grass and drink ourselves to death?, we wonder. Shouldn't we just give up – give up everything – and let death come and find us on the Town Moor? But we consider ourselves to have work to do – that's our idiocy, and our salvation. We actually take ourselves to be busy – that's our imposture and the chance of our survival.

'What a racket! How do you do any work?', W. says. They're rebuilding the campus, I tell him. They're putting up new office blocks for the private partners of the university.

The sound of drilling, high pitched, then lower pitched as they cut through something. The fizz of a lorry's brakes. The clattering of metal poles being thrown onto metal poles. A massive chugging in the distance. The throbbing of engines.

He requires silence to work, W. says. Silence and calm, in the pre-dawn morning, just the pigeons flapping their wings and cooing to annoy him.

Stand well clear, vehicle reversing: a warning from a tannoyed male voice, very calm and reasonable. And now warnings overlapping with warnings, as many vehicles reverse: Stand well clear … Stand well clear … Stand well clear … And now a high pitched throb, very loud, like a helicopter landing. – 'Surely a helicopter isn't landing?', W. says. 'A helicopter couldn't be landing …'

We walk out through the campus through the narrow pedestrian routes left to us alongside the building works. W. feels so channelled, he says. We're being channelled, he says, staff and student alike, heads down and in lockstep. Where are they leading us?, he says. Where are we going?

A thick smell – is it tar? They must be pouring tar. They must be making some kind of route for the lorries. A hiss as of gas escaping. The high beeping of a reversing vehicle. – 'They're going to crush us', W. says. 'They're going to drive right through us …'

'How long do you think we'll last?', W. says. 'How long before we're closed down?' Because there's no room for us in this world. No room for Kierkegaard …

'Are they shredding trees?', W. says. Yes, they really are: we can see them cutting off their boughs with chainsaw, and feeding them into shredding machines. Leaves fly up over the fence. And the smell: sap. Life, destroyed. The stuff of life, being destroyed.

'It'll be our turn next', W. says. 'They'll cut off our limbs and feed us into the machines …'

Oh God, the building, the eternal rebuilding. The noise! We want to put our hands over our ears. We want to stop up our ears …

Stand well clear … Stand well clear …

He forgot about the spider people in his account of the effects of climactic change, I tell W. – 'Who the fuck are the spider people?' I thought I'd sent W. the article: hadn't he read it? With the carcinogens and teratogens, allergens and hormone disrupters, genetic disease is on the rise. Incapacitation!

Our phenotypes will the corrupted, I tell W. Impairment will be the norm. Vestigal limbs. - 'Ah, the spider people', W. says.

The spider people are not threatening or dangerous, that's the thing, I tell W. They're vulnerable, very gentle. They'll probably be eaten, the spider people. They'll probably be destroyed, their useless limbs cut off one by one.

They'll be mocked and then killed. And then probably eaten, I tell W., since there'll be nothing to eat in the new world. Nothing to eat except spider people.

W. finds my futurology very suspect, he says.

Until the seventh day, the Sabbath, some theologians say, the Creation was unfinished, W. says. 

On the first day, God made heaven and earth, but the earth was still without form and void – it was what the Hebrew Bible calls the tohu vavohu, W. says – and darkness lay on the face of the deep. On the second day, dry land appeared, and put forth vegetation, the plants yielding seed, and the fruit trees beating fruit in which there was seed.

On the third day, the stars were born, and then the sun and the moon, each set in the firmanent of the heavens to give light to the earth. On the fourth, the waters brought forth swarms of living creatures, and birds flew across the sky.

On the fifth, the beasts of the earth appeared and then, on the sixth, the first man, made in the image of God. Be fruitful and multiply, said God to Adam and Eve. Fill the earth, and subdue it.

But the Creation still wasn't finished. 'On the seventh day, God rested from all his work which he had done, and saw that it was good'. And was the Creation over then? The Creation was over, but the Destruction began.

What happened on the eighth day?, W. says. – 'You appeared, scratching your head'. On the ninth day, I published my first book, and the heavens wept. On the tenth, my second book, and the stars fell from the sky.

And on the same day, our day, there come the storms of financial collapse, which sweep the economies of the world into darkness.

And on the eleventh, there will come the fires of climatic collapse, which despoil the land, destroying the fertility of the soil. The rivers will dry up and the deserts grow, and snow will no longer fall on the mountains.

On the twelfth will come the mass extinctions - the fish disappearing from the acidic seas, and the birds dropping from the burning skies. On the thirteenth, the great extinction of the human population, survivors fleeing towards the south pole and the north pole – to Canada and Siberia, to Patagonia and the western Antarctic coast.

And on the fourteenth? The oceans will rise to drown the world, and it will all begin over again.  

Maimon was unkempt. Maimon was dirty. That's what I always protest to W. when he reprimands me for my personal habits. But Maimon was a genius!, W cries. A genius driven out of his home city for daring to philosophise. A beggar-genius, living on alms as he wandered for years, before being offered a position as a tutor.

Was it in those years that Maimon formulated the most decisive criticisms of Kantian thought ever made? Was it then, his begging bowl before him, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in his frozen hands, that the ideas came together that led him, in his final years, when he fell by chance under the protection of a nobleman who realised his worth, he published in a series of books?

Only Maimon understood me, Kant said, after reading the Jewish philosopher's Transcendental Philosophy in manuscript. He died soon after, and among the causes of death was thought to be Maimon's devastating criticisms of his work. How could he, Kant, go on in the wake of Maimon? How, when Maimon had with such great perceptiveness laid bare the fundamental problems that faced his thought?

But Maimon never succeeded in penetrating academic circles, or even the salons of enlightened Berlin Jews. To them he was an Ostjude, his manners rough, his gesticulations wild, and his German atrocious and heavily accented. And he was a difficult man, no doubt about it. He was untamed, and German – his fourth language, or his fifth – did not come easily to him. And he smelt awful, everyone said that.

Maimon stinks! Get him out of here! That's what you'd hear in Berlin salons. And out he went, out onto the frozen streets, out in the snow with The Critique of Pure Reason under his arm. And he was an alcoholic, too. He drank like a madman, W. says. He drank himself to death. In his last years, when he finally found someone who would support him, he drank himself into oblivion even as he wrote, even as book after book poured fouth from his pen.

Is that what's going to happen to me? Am I going to produce a great stream of books in my final years, which can't be far off?, W. says. He's offered me support, and now he's waiting. He brought me in from the cold, and now he's sitting by expectantly. But he thinks he's going to be disappointed.

I always take my trousers off when I visit – why is that? On one level, the answer is quite obvious: I am growing too fat for them, their waistband cutting uncomfortably into the vastness of my belly. But then I never take them off elsewhere, my trousers, W. has noticed. Only with him, with him and Sal. Only in his front room, whether the shutters are open or closed.

Once, when a friend of theirs called round unexpectedly, I leapt up, frantically looking for my trousers, before she entered the room. Too late! He always takes his trousers off when he visits, W. told her. I feel some sense of shame, at least, W. says. He didn't think I did, but there it was: shame over my trouserlessness. My public trouserlessness.

But why am I not ashamed of anything else? My ignorance, for example. My laziness. He thought he'd taught me, W. says. He thought I'd learnt something. But somewhere inside, I'm still an ape on the savannah. Somewhere, I'm still sitting back on my haunches and looking out over the expanse. Ah, food was plentiful back then, and life easy. I wasn't an alpha male, but nor was I an omega one; so long as I refrained from threatening my fellow apes, baring my teeth as apes will, I would not be threatened in turn.

But something was missing. Something marked me out from my fellow apes. Was that why I learnt to walk upright and wear shoes? Was that why I learnt not to holler and whoop? Ah, I still dream of great bunches of bananas and clear pools in the middle of the jungle. Sometimes I remembered how my ape comrades would pick the lice from my thick fur.

He can still tell I'm an ape, W. says. It's the way I hold my pen – the way my hand curls in towards my chest. And there's that distant look I get, W. says, as though I long only to tear open my shirt and whoop, he says. But he sees, too, that my apish spontaneity is long gone, and he wonders whether I am any better off than my miserable comrades in a zoo. My poor eyes burn from monitor glare, and my clumsy fingers miss the keys I want to hit.

And the books I try to read! The thinkers I try to imitate! Ah, there's no point, no point, W. sometimes thinks, and he'd put a stop to it if he didn't see something of himself in my efforts; if he didn't feel, too, as though he were part ape.

Sometimes, W. feels like my captor – as if he were the one who had trapped me on the plains. But it wasn't his fault! I came into his care; I fell into his arms like a foundling. It wasn't his fault … Didn't he tenderly look after me as he was once looked after by older Essex postgraduates? Didn't he suckle me as gently as an orphaned chick?

Ah, he knew very little when he first arrived at Essex, W. says. All he brought with him to the university was his Kafka enthusiasm, which was very great, he says. And a willingness to learn! A great willingness, W. says. As though thought were a way for him to struggle back to Canada. As though he might reach a kind of Canada of thought which paralleled the real Canada he left in order to come to Britain.

And when he saw postgraduates arrive years later, when he'd already won his scholarship for postgraduate study? When he saw them arriving from the four corners of the country? He was tender with them – fatherly, perhaps motherly, never laughing when the newbies mispronounced the words hyperbole and synecdoche, or when they said the last syllables of Derrida to rhyme with breeder, or said Del-ooze when the meant Del-euze?

He understood when the new postgraduates wept into their pillows when they thought of what their lives had been. He stroked their hair during their night sweats and bad dreams. He understood why they ground their teeth at night, why their jaws ached, why their eyes were dull: for wasn't he, too, British? Hadn't he, too, sought to escape his country at the University of Essex?

And he's tender still, W. says. He's tender even as he dreams of his Canada of thought. Once, I was an ape with no idea of trousers. And now, thanks to him? A half-ape, for whom trousers are a tyranny. A half-ape caught between worlds, but who's dreaming, with W., of becoming Canadian in thought. 

They were working class, almost all of them, the Essex postgraduates, W. says. That's what needs to be understood.

Working class, but grammar schooled, for the most part, and with only instinct driving them to Essex. Instinct – and luck. Because luck played a great role in getting them there.

All they had was a vague sense that life had gone wrong, somehow. That it had taken a wrong turn. That what had happened in this country – here – was, in its entirety, a wrong turn.

Some, it is true, had a kind of folk-memory of working class radicalism, of the Socialist Worker's Party, of the Revolutionary Communists, but beyond them, of the Spanish Civil war, of Peterloo and the Chartists, but most did not. Most had nothing except an instinct, only half awake, only half alive, that there was something wrong, and not merely wrong with them. That it was no merely a personal problem, that of not fitting in, that of chronic depression or chronic fatigue. That it was not merely a personal failure, a personal foible, a matter of idiosyncrasy or maladjustment.

There was nothing wrong with them at all: wasn't that what they discovered at Essex? Nothing wrong with them, and everything wrong with the world, especially Britain: wasn't that their first lesson at the University of Essex? Wasn't that put up on an overhead in the first lesson of Essex Postgraduate 101: There's nothing with you, and everything wrong with the world, especially Britain.

Deprogramming: that's what the University of Essex provided. Deconditioning. It was like emerging from a cult, arriving at Essex. They needed exit counselling, the new postgraduates! They needed to be deindoctrinated! 

This country, this terrible country, says W., shaking his head. What it does to people. What it might have done to him, were it not for his years in Canada! How it might have laid claim to him, if he'd spent his own childhood in the Midlands.

He thinks of those who didn't make it to Essex. Those who never got there, who had no idea of what waited for them there. Those that didn't even apply, and had no thought of applying.

Ah, no doubt there are lost British Weils, lost British Kierkegaards – even a lost British Rosenzweig, sitting paralysed in Doncaster. There are lost British Socrateses, who, like the original, will never write a line; lost Aristotles, great synthesisers of thought.

Lost Spinozas, lost Leibnizes. A lost Immanuel Kant, working in a Customer Services department in Staines; a lost Hegel, a regional manager for a mobile phone company in Yately …

What might they have been had they passed through Essex! What might have happened if they'd washed up on Essex's shore!

Ah, why didn't he join them, the former Essex Postgraduates who fled the world?, W. wonders. Why was he left behind in the Rapture of thought?

That's what they all feel, he's sure, those among the former Essex postgraduates who looked for academic jobs, who took them. That's how they must feel, those for whom there was a sense that life was elsewhere, and that one had to struggle into that elsewhere; that life flared into its fullness somewhere else, in another life; that life moved there like fire in fire, like weather on the sun …

Life was elsewhere. Life is elsewhere, that much is clear to him, sitting beside me on the train, W. says.

Our day is passing, says W. In truth, we never had a day. The chance of a day, perhaps; the promise of a day. But even that is passing.

And back then, among the Essex postgraduates? The chance of a day, the promise of a day … Its chance, its promise: but didn't they already know, back then, that it couldn't possibly become a reality? That they lived at the wrong time, and in the wrong country. That they were men and women out of time and out of place.

Their ideas weren't British ideas, or at least current British ideas. Their ideas weren't hardheaded ideas, ideas that belong to the new reality. Ah, in another country, they thought, they would have been treated like gurus. In religious or recently religious countries, where they still revere philosophy. In Mediterranean countries, where they pour you wine and sit down with you to discuss ideas, how might they have been treated? In the countries of Eastern Europe – in political or recently political countries – where you can still discuss Marx over your Weissbiers, where Lenin and Trotsky are on everyone's minds, wouldn't they have found allies and admirers?  

Of course, they all study philosophy at school, in Old Europe, W. says. Everyone knows a little something about philosophy. Everyone has something philosophical to say. It's in their blood. In the air! It's in the aether of Old Europe. It's in the cafes and wine cellars. It's in the city squares and central parks. And can't you see it shining out in the faces of children?

And they read, too, don't they, in Old Europe? They know what books are. They have rows of books, all kinds of books, on their bookshelves. Poetry, for example - they like poetry in Old Europe. And didn't the Essex postgraduates like poetry? Didn't they regard a taste in poetry as essential in the real thinker? They had the Penguin Modern European Poets on their shelves. They read Trakl and Char. They read Hoelderlin and Paul Celan. They read poets no one else had heard of – gutter poets, sewer poets, poets of the filth and shit. But never our poetry, never British poetry, but foreign poetry, European poetry, Old European poetry. Always poetry from elsewhere, if not from Old Europe, then from South America, and if not from there, China. India! Japan!

They kept their poetry books next to their copies of New Scientist. They kept them next to their philosophical books, again from Old Europe. Next to their Fichte and Jacobi, next to their Ravisson and Bergson. Next to treatises like The Ages of the World and Creative Evolution, The Gay Science and Cartesian Meditations … Next to their history books, by Braudel and Veyne, Aries and C. L. R. James. Next to the great works of the social sciences, of the humanities that would soon count for nothing in the new world.

Old Europe, Old Europe. But they knew its day was passing, the Essex postgraduates. They knew their day was passing, they who never really knew Old Europe. Their philosophy would die unnoticed: how could it be otherwise? The ideas of old Europe would not take root here. They would have to fly off elsewhere, the dandelion seeds of thought. They would take root in South America, perhaps – in Argentina, which is supposed to be a very thoughtful country, a real thinking country; in Chile, which has philosophy departments like castles. In Uruguay – which probably already harbours the thinker-friends who will take the next thought-leap forward. Or they'd reach fertile ground in vast China, vast India, or in overcrowded Japan. Somewhere, somewhere else, there were the countries of thought. Somewhere beyond old Europe, itself no longer fertile soil for the ideas of its thinkers …

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

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

Our tears would melt. Our hearts would melt, our knees buckle. Wouldn't we fall into the arms of thought? Wouldn't thought be as easy as falling?

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

I was like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, W. says, with my Adam Ant dancing in that restaurant in Wroclaw. First, the postgraduates followed me in my Adam Ant dancing – the dancing from the video of 'Prince Charming' – the Polish postgraduates, who had been brought along to meet the British delegation of philosophers. Then the other members of the delegation, scholarly types, most of them, usually pale and withdrawn, soon they, too – the younger ones first, and then, more reluctantly, but giving a sense of liberation, the older ones – rose to follow me in my Adam Ant dancing.

And didn't our Polish hosts themselves, so generous in organising a meal in our honour – didn't they, too, feel moved to join us in their own rendition of the Adam Ant dancing from the video of 'Prince Charming'? But they sat smiling instead, drumming their fingers, perhaps wondering if there wasn't a British tradition – a British philosophical tradition – of Adam Ant dancing at the beginning of a conference.

And when we sat down, breathless, faces flushed, after our Adam Ant dancing? When we pulled our chairs back up to our table, ready for our dumplings at the dinner held in our honour, the visiting academics? W. felt a new kind of lightness, he said. A new dizziness. For what had he known, hitherto, of pure joy? What had he known of the sense of abandonment that marked pure joy?

Henceforward, I blazed a trail ahead of him that he knew he'd have to follow. Henceforth, it was joy that sprang ahead of us – ahead of me, and drawing me on, and now ahead of him, too, and drawing him along – a kind of laughter unattached to anything in particular.

Poland was the crucible. That's where it all began, in Poland, in Wroclaw, so many years ago now, we agree.

Is there such a thing as friendship at first sight, W. wonders? Well, that's what happened in Poland, in Wroclaw, W. says, when he saw my Adam Ant dancing: friendship at first sight.

Ah, he still remembers it, when, in the middle of the meal held our honour, the British delegation in Wroclaw, I pushed back my seat in order to demonstrate Adam Ant dancing. He remembers when I took to the dancefloor, recreating Adam Ant dancing from the 'Prince Charming' video. And he remembers how the Polish postgraduates followed me; how they, too, pushed back to their seats and took to the dancefloor, likewise recreating Adam Ant dancing from the 'Prince Charming' video.

Lars is a man who does not know shame, W. thought to himself. And he seems to encourage others, too, to forget their shame. And soon W., too, pushed back his chair, and took to recreating Adam Ant dancing on the dancefloor.

Mladen Dolar was the real thing, we agree. The real Central European intellectual. – 'How did you think you looked beside him?', W. says. 'How do you think you came across, chairing his presentation?'

I was having a bad morning, I told W. later, but that didn't excuse it. A bad morning! – 'That question you asked …', says W. He knew I was in trouble when Dolar finished reading, and the audience, taking in the many and rich ideas, were quiet. He knew I was finished when it fell to me, his Chair, to ask a question.

'You could barely speak!' It's true; I babbled incoherently. I raved. – 'Everyone was hoping you'd stop, but you didn't stop, did you?' I didn't stop. I carried on. Some fat idiot, carrying on, and next to a real Central European intellectual …

Ah, how many times have I covered myself in shame, and by extension, covered him, W., with shame? How many times have I covered us both in shame? He'd been too stunned to explain me to Dolar, as he should have done, W. says. He – who should have known it would be necessary – simply wasn't ready to provide the usual excuses.

Ideas, ideas. If only we had commitments, like Zizek and his friends in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis! If only we believed in something, be it Lacanian psychoanlysis and the necessity of rereading modern and classical philosophy through the lens of Lacaniasm or anything else for that matter! If only we had a project which genuinely opened from our beliefs, something akin to elaborating Lacanian theories of ideology and power, for example, or providing Lacanian analyses of culture and art! And instead? No projects, because we have no beliefs. No belief …

It's alright for them, we say half resentfully of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. They believe in things. They have projects. And ideas, too – they even have ideas! In the end, they're brighter than us, as well as having projects and ideas. In the end, they're out of our league, for all that Mladen Dolar said on his visit, looking round the dining room, that the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis began with evenings like this. Like this? And with people like us? He must have been mad, mad! Dolar was generous. He was munificent. That's another sign of people who actually have ideas, we agree.

What did Mladen Dolar, Zizek's old friend and comrade, tell us about intellectual friendship?, W. says.  What of his friendship with Zizek, Zupancic and the others; what of his old associations with Mocnik and Bozovic as they coalesced into the so-called Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis?

That they began with friendship, and were sustained through friendship! That they never departed from friendship, and a friendship in the face of Yugoslavian academia and Yugoslavian state departments. What chance did they have to get jobs? What, as they fell foul of the university authorities and the state authorities and were unemployed for many years? What, as they aroused their colleagues' suspicion because of their interest in French thought, in psychoanalytic thought, and brought the luminaries of Lacanianism to Ljubljana?

They formed the Journal for the Society of Theoretical Psychoanalysis to publish one another, said Dolar, to support one another in thought. And in the end, what was the Society of Theoretical Psychoanalysis? Nothing, Dolar said. There was nothing going on at the centre. Just he, Zizek and Zupancic drinking in a bar. It was the same with Zizek's series Wo es War, for Verso. It was a vehicle for Zizek of publishing his friends abroad!

Ah, how much we have to learn from the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis! Do we need to form a journal?, we wonder. Do we need to form a society? No: first of all, we need friends. We need to be friends, don't I understand? And we need to have ideas!