Category: W.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W. sends me his essay questions to amuse me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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