Category: W.

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 question says. Or, better: 'Fuck off, I'm eating'.

'Are they coming for us?', W. asks. No one's coming, I tell him. – 'Can you hear sirens?' I can't hear anything except birdsong and faraway cars.

Ah, when will it end?, W. says. But it isn't going to end. It's going to go on forever, like a record in a locked groove.

We know what is coming. We know that a new dawn – the opposite of dawn – will spread its dark rays from the horizon. We know that we'll have to close our books, and cease our note-taking.

More questions. ‘How many people do you think you’ve offended?’, W. asks me. ‘How many people have you irritated? Have you angered?’ And then. ‘How many people have tried to sue you?’, because he knows that some have. ‘How many people have tried to run you out of town?’

W. begins again. ‘How many appetites have your spoilt? How many people have you put off their dinner?’ And then, 'What would you say is your most irritating trait? Your most rage-inducing one?' And then, ‘What do you think your clothes say about you? What about your hair? Your shoes? Does the way you dress befit your role as a thinker? As a would-be philosopher?'

Still more questions. ‘Do you think you have a noble face? A dignified bearing? Do you think you have the physiognomy of a thinker? An intelligent face?' And then, 'Do your rolls of fat make you uncomfortable? Do you think obesity gives you gravitas? Presence?' He pauses. 'At what stage would you consider gastric bypass surgery? Have you ever considered liposuction? Do you think you come across as a happy fat man, or as a sad fat man?' And then, 'At what stage will you have your mouth sewn up?'

'Of what are you most guilty?', W. says. 'What is your greatest source of shame? What is your greatest failing? Do you think you’ve failed? Do you think you should be ashamed? Do you have any real sense of guilt?' And then, 'What do you think you add to the world? What do you think you subtract? What is your net worth to existence? Do you think you’ve added to the balance of goodness in the cosmos, or evil? Are you on the side of the angels or the devils?'

‘How do you think you can make amends?', W. says. 'Do you think you can make amends? Reparations? Damages to intellectual reputation? Emotional damage? Digestive damage? How many people have you put off their dinner?’

Gin! W. demands. We wants a respite from his judgement.

W. is soothed by the Plymouth Gin botanicals. He can taste the oris-root and the coriander seeds. He can taste the orange peel.

Plymouth Gin is our realitätpunkt, W. says, our rallying point, our place of safety. Sipping Plymouth Gin is always a homecoming, W. says. Always a return to what is most important.

If only we had some Vermouth, we could make Martinis, W. says. In the Plymouth Gin cocktail bar, they swill your glass with Vermouth, specially imported from America, and then pour it out. Only then do they fill the glass with fresh Plymouth Gin and add a spiral of lemon peel, W. says. You need Vermouth only to pour it away, W. says, like an offering made to the gods.

My hotel room. W. takes his seat on the Chair of Judgement. It’s time to list my short-comings! It’s time to examine where I’ve gone wrong! To bury down to the root-cause!

‘Would you call yourself a moral man?', W. asks me. 'Would you call yourself a man of honour?', he asks. 'Do other people look up to you? Are others moved by you, inspired by you?' A pause. And then: 'Do you think you've touched other people's lives – in a good way? Do you see yourself as a man of thought, a man of profundity, a man who will leave a legacy?’

These are the questions that constantly circle in W.’s head, as he knows they do not circle in mine.

‘How do you think you’ll be judged?’, W. asks me. ‘As a serious man? As a man attuned to what matters most?’ And then, ‘Will you be remembered as a great soul? As a spiritual leader?’ A pause. And then: ‘How do you understand your failure? Who do you measure yourself against? What standards have you failed to meet?’

What was my significance?, W. asked himself, back then when we met. Did I illustrate some broader trend? Was I a man of our times, or against our times? And then the true horror dawned on W.: Lars is ahead of our times, he thought to himself. He’s a prophetic witness. He’s a living sign, such as you might find in the Bible.

W. thought of the later prophets, who are no longer speak with God as Moses and Abraham did – as with a neighbour, face to face, or as the Bible says, mouth to mouth. He thought of the prophets who God commanded to incarnate the message they were charged to deliver.

W. thought of Isaiah, told to wander naked and barefoot for three years, in order to send a message to the king of Assyria to parade his prisoners naked and barefoot to shame Egypt. He thought of Jeremiah, whom God told to make wooden yokes and put them on his neck; and when a false prophet broke them, to replace them with yokes of iron, in order to send a message that Israel will not put its neck under the yoke of Babylon …

But I was a prophet who didn’t know that he was a prophet, W. says. I was a sign who didn’t know what he signified. Didn’t his own role become clear?, W. says. Wasn’t it obvious what he was put on earth to do?

Philosophy gives substance to our suffering, W. says. Philosophy gives sense to suffering by communicating it to others. Speech, dialogue: that’s what overcomes futility, W. says. That’s what does combat with the senseleness of the world.

W. was going to let me speak: that was his role, he says. He was going to hear the suffering of the world as it resounded through me. He was going to decipher my bellowing. The Jew in him would redeem the Hindu, W. says. His Catholic atheism would redeem my Protestant atheism. He would bring fruit trees to my waste, and calm to my troubled waters …

The word, philosopher is an honorific, W. says. It’s a title that can only be bestowed on you by others. Do I think you deserve the title, philosopher?, W. asks me. Did I deserve it back then?

The desecrator of philosophy: that’s what I had become, wasn’t it? The destroyer of philosophy. I was at one with the apocalypse of philosophy, with the end times of philosophy. And wasn’t that why he was drawn to me?, W. says. Wasn’t that why he proposed our collaboration? I was close to the truth, W. says, despite everything.

‘True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves’: that’s Adorno, W. says. And I didn’t understand myself, did I?

I used to sleep in my office, W. remembers that. I’d unroll the sleeping bag I kept in the cupboard, and lie under my desk. All the better to get my work done in the morning! All the better to keep working halfway through the night! I’d wake up, bleary-eyed, and eat a day-old discount sandwich at my desk. I’d wake up, and brush my teeth in the bathroom, before anyone had arrived at work.

And then I’d get to it, W. says. Or imagine I was getting to it. I’d work, W. says. Or imagine that I was working. Because I wasn’t working at all, was I?, W. says. I wasn’t advancing in my thought. I wasn’t testing myself, running forcibly against my own limits, was I? I wasn’t reading philosophy, and I wasn’t writing philosophy. I was administering, W. says. I was lost in administration. I taught, it’s true, but I taught like an administrator. I gave lessons like a bureaucrat. Really, I’d become a galley-slave of philosophy. I’d become a drone of thinking.

In the meantime, in the southwest, W. would spend whole weeks preparing his lecture courses. Whole weeks, distilling his latest researches into something teachable. He would spend months carefully crafting his lecture notes, going over them again and again, writing up the research notes he made for his own studies. And what would I do?, W. says. Crib something together from Wikipedia, or whatever they had back then. Cobble something together from Sparks Notes, or some other online rubbish. Draw on one of the innumerable introductions to philosophy, the introductions to this or that thinker, this or that idea, that everyone’s writing.

Of course, that was before I bought my flat, W. says. It was before I made my amazing decision to invest in a property. It was before my damp years! Before the years of rats! I hardly knew what a slug looked like, did I? I’d barely ever seen a mushroom up close. And damp was something I read about in books, W. says. Something I associated with slums, with tenements.

W. invested in a Georgian town-house, he says. In a former ship captain’s house with three stories and marble fireplaces. He moved into a house which didn’t need a bit of work. He made a study of one of the third floor bedrooms. He rose early each morning, and was at his desk before the sun had even risen above the Plymouth rooftops.

And what about me, W. says. Dare he ask? Dare he even consider the mess I had got myself into? It was like The Blob, W. says. It was like X: The Unknown, he says. I was living in the wilds, W. says. I was living in the philosophical wastes …

The electricity failed in my kitchen, and began to fail in my living room. The walls turned green, then brown, then black. Rats settled beneath my floorboards. What horror! What horror! And how did I respond to my new surroundings?, W. asks. How did I hearken to the philosophical muse? I wrote, W. says. I blogged. Because that’s when they began, my blogging years, didn’t they? That’s when the years of raving began.

So the end of philosophy really has come, W. says. The philosophical apocalypse really is here. What has it shown? What’s been revealed? Lars lecturing. Lars publishing. Lars who actually has a job. If that isn’t a sign of the eschaton, what is?, W. says.

I actually think I earned my job, that’s the irony, W. says. I actually think I beat all the other postgraduates to full time employment because of my own merits.

‘What do you think they saw in you, your interviewers?’, W. asks. ‘Why do you think they gave you the job?’ Oh, he knows I struggled to find work. He knows that it took me years and years. I had a long period of whoring for work, just as W. had a long period of whoring for work. I had a long period of teaching an hour here, an hour there, of taking fractional posts in faraway places, just as he had long period of teaching an hour here, an hour there, of taking fractional posts in faraway places. I lived exclusively on discount sandwiches, just as he once lived exclusively on discount sandwiches. I drank only the cheapest vodka, just as he drank only the cheapest vodka. I worked, I worked night and day, just as he worked night and day. How I published! How he published! I spoke up at conferences! He spoke up at conferences! I tried to get my name known! He tried to get his name known. But I was a little more desperate than him, wasn’t I?, W. says. A little more keen.

W. got his job at his church college, where he taught no more than one hour a week, and I got my job at a northern university, where I taught no less than fifteen hours a week. W. worked with the warmest and gentlest of colleagues, who were genuinely interested in intellectual inquiry, and I worked with the most savage and difficult of colleagues, who had absolute contempt for intellectual inquiry. Administrative tasks at his college were equally shared out, W. says; everyone did his or her bit. Administrative tasks at my university were given to me, and only to me. W. was left to his own devices for research. He was given time – oceans of time! He was given lengthy sabbaticals of a year or more! I was denied any time for research. I was given no time – no time whatsoever; no sabbaticals, no research days. W. rose each morning and read and wrote all day. I rose each morning, and taught and administered all day. W. found it all very amusing.

I was a workhorse:  was that what the job search committee saw at the University of Northumbria? I would do anything whatsoever to keep my job: was that it? I was a man of desperation, that’s quite true, W. says. A man who feared unemployment above all other things: ytes, yes. But that wasn’t the only reason why they gave me a job, W. says.

It was because I was a man of the end that they employed me, W. says. Because I was a kind of wild man of thought, a man who’d emerged from the philosophical jungle. Not for my interviewers a candidate from a real university, like Oxford or Cambridge. Nor for them a properly scholarly applicant, a researcher fluent in several modern languages, and familiar with several ancient ones. Not for them a man of the archive, who had studied in the great libraries of Europe. Not for them a man of broad learning, a man of civilisation, a gentleman educated in the best independent schools of our country.

My interviewers knew things were at an end, whether consciously or unconsciously, W. says. My search committee knew the philosophical end times were here. So consciously or unconsciously, they decided to make a joke appointment, an appointment that laughs at the very idea of an appointment. They decided to create a parody of a lecturer, a position that satirisises the very idea of a lectureship. It was like Caligula appointing his horse as senator, W. says. It was like Cal, in 2000AD, appointing his goldfish as Chief Judge.

Will we have known what philosophy was?, W. wonders. Will we have understood what it might have become? No, they will never destroy philosophy, not entirely. Philosophy will survive so long as people suffer. But philosophy without an institution, philosophy without the university: what will it ever be but a cry of suffering, pure pathos? What will philosophy ever be but the roaring of the end?

W. thinks of Trotsky in exile, having been expelled from the Central Committee, expelled from Russia, staying in Turkey, then Paris, then Mexico, writing articles about the betrayal of the revolution, about his hatred of Stalin.

He thinks of Trotsky receiving news of his relatives, killed one by one. His son, poisoned, his daughters, hanged; his brother, shot, his sister, exiled.

He thinks of Trotsky in his Mexican stockade, the sword of Stalin hanging over his head, dreaming of a new revolution, a supplementary one, that would set the Russian revolution back on its course …

W. thinks of Lenin, after his stroke, being wheeled along in his basket chair, being helped to speak again, to read and write, using alphabet cards and basic exercises.

He thinks of Lenin, his brain dying, a twisted half-smile on his face, no longer able to say the words peasant and worker, people and revolution.

He thinks of Lenin, with only a few months to live, regressed to his second infancy, suffering paralytic attacks and spasms, whispering the nonsense words, vot vot, to express agreement or disagreement, a request or to express frustration. Vot vot, vot vot …

Philosophy doubles up our suffering, W. says. Not its redemption, but its witness. Philosophy gives sense to suffering in communicating it to others. Speech, dialogue: that’s what overcomes futility. That’s what lays waste to the senselessness of the world.

The word, philosopher, is an honorific, W. says. It's a title that can only be bestowed by others. No one should ever call himself a philosopher. No one has the right. We become philosophers when we speak, W. says. When we address others on matters of importance. We philosophise when we dialogue, W. says. When we take responsibility for our conversation, and drive it to deeper depths.

But when philosophy has no home? When there are no universities in which philosophy can take shelter? The danger is, that we might forget how to speak. The danger is that suffering voices will cry in the darkness, and there will be no one to respond.

Philosophy: will we have known what it was?, W. wonders. Will we have understood what it might have become? No, they will never destroy philosophy, not entirely. Philosophy will survive so long as people suffer, W. says. But philosophy without an institution, philosophy without the university: what will it ever be but a cry of suffering, pure pathos? What will philosophy ever be but the roaring of the end?

There must be departments of thought, just as there must be departments of history, and departments of mathematics, W. says. The university must be a place kept apart from capitalism, and from the ravaging of the world by capitalism. The university must remain a utopian space, if thought is to survive; if hope is to survive.

Because without philosophy there is no hope, W. says. Without thought, you can only return to the pell-mell of suffering from which thought begins.

In his dream, W. says, I am having one of my terrible nosebleeds. Blood running from my nose. Blood pooling in my philtrum, and along the top of my lips, my great fat lips …

In his dream, I am laughing, and blood runs back into my throat as I laugh. And then he hears them, my last words, spoken as blood runs from the corners of my mouth: I am become capitalism, destroyer of worlds.

Really, philosophy is only a training in despair, W. says. A training in the horror of the world!

The only way to think is with a man-trap shut around your ankle, W. says. With an ice-pick buried in your head!

He can't get through to his athletes, W. says. He can't make them understand the gravity of philosophy.

His sports science students lack a sense of the eschaton, of the end times, W. says. They lack any sense of millenarian eschatology. How can he make them understand that there is no hope?

His students are too full of health to despair, W. says. They exercise too much, jogging into the seminar room in their sports kits, with towels round their necks.

He misses the old days, W. says, before his college closed the humanities, when his philosophy students had to be forcibly restrained from throwing themselves from lecture hall windows. He misses the lamentations he used to hear in his tutorials, and the student keening that used to resound down the corridors of his department.

He's lost in marking, W. says. Piles and piles of it! He blocks out the horror of marking every year, he says. And this year it's worse than ever. It's like being in a bath filled with shit.

Maybe there's something wrong with his essay titles, W. says. Bela Tarr is the most important philosopher of our times. Discuss: the sports science students seem to struggle with that. And they object about being examined on Krasznahorkai's novels on a badminton ethics module. But Krasznahorkai is obsessed with ethics, W. tells them. Krasznahorkai writes about nothing but ethics!

He's been officially reprimanded for his teaching, W. says. Making his students watched Endgame over and over again has no relevance to badminton ethics, he's been told.

And they don't want to hear any more Jandek. Actually, he doesn't want to hear anymore Jandek, W. says. He can't bear it. But he thinks Jandek's good for his students, W. says.

The Essex postgraduates never succumbed to left-wing melancholy, W. says. They never thought that history was at an end, or that there could be no alternative to capitalism. Some of them, it is true, advocated a kind of hyper-capitalism, a turbo-capitalism, which would accelerate capitalism to its end. Some of them held out for a capitalism-gone-beserk, a deranged capitalism, that would destroy half the world as it destroyed itself. But the Essex postgraduates never lost faith in the utter transformation of the world, W. says. They never supposed that politics could be anything other than all-enveloping. They never thought politics could mean anything but a total revolutionary project …

Politics was the horizon of all philosophical thought: the Essex postgraduates were sure of that, W. says. All philosophical roads were also political roads: of that, they were certain. Their most intense thoughts were political thoughts, W. says. Their most intense friendships were political friendships. Everything is political: the Essex postgraduates knew that, W. says. Life is politics: that's what the Essex postgraduates understood.

Political despair: that's what we should guard against, W. says. Political defeatism.

The danger is that we are love the loss of politics, W. says. That we are happy with it; that we depend on it. That we love Britain, even as we pretend to hate it. That we love our own inertia, our attachment to failure.

Didn't Benjamin warn us of left-wing melancholy?, W. says. Didn't he fear that what interests us least is the possibility of politics?, he says. The danger is that we no longer believe in politics. That we do not hate capitalism strongly enough! That we do not hate Britain with sufficient strength!

How can we transform despair into hope?, W. wonders. How, a sense of the end of politics into the dawn of politics?

How did I put up with Manchester for all those years?, W. wanders. How come the city didn’t get to me, destroy me? ‘I wandered through that part of myself called Spain’, wrote Jean Genet in his Thief’s Journal. I wandered through that part of myself called Manchester: isn’t that how I thought of it?, W. says. Manchester is part of me, and not I a part of it: isn’t that what I said to myself?

I’ve always been a solipsist, W. says. I’ve never been part of anything. I’ve been involved in the world. I was reading Kafka, wasn’t I? Reading, and writing – in my own way. Trying to write. Failing to write. But continuing to write regardless.

I had my bedsit, W. says. I drew the city around me like a cloak. And when I graduated, I stayed on the plain of Manchester, lost on those plain, a man without ambition, a man without significance. What did I think I was going to do? I was dreaming of internal exile, W. knows that. I was dreaming of going inside, and never coming out.

He sees me, in his mind's eye, as a kind of Lenin, W. says.

The ideal revolutionary must submit himself wholly to the collective will, Lenin argued. A will that barely understands itself! That hardly knows what it wants! The militant can have no personal life, no feelings or attachments. What do ordinary concerns matter to him? What, sentiment, or vagueness?

Revolutionary purity: isn't that what Lenin sought? Revolutionary intransigence! The plough of the revolution must turn the world over … The people must be drenched in their own blood …

Because the people have no idea of what they want, according to Lenin, W. says. The people have no understanding of the collective will. So the revolutionary leader has to decide what to do on their behalf. The revolutionary leader has to massacre half the people, on their behalf …

It's for your own good! It's what you want!: Isn't that what I say to myself as I've ruined his career, W. says. You want to destroy yourself! You want to go under!: isn't that what I whisper to myself when I see W.'s former friends turning from him.

But I want the world to go under, too, W. says: he can see that. I also want to destroy the world, but in the name of no world to come. I am Lenin gone mad, W. says. A Lenin who wants nothing but destruction. God knows, I've destroyed his life, W. says.

We must watch out for the Kehre, for the turning point, W. says. We must watch out for the kairos, for the moment of conversion. We must watch out for the moment of History …

The trick of politics is knowing when to ask, according to Debord, W. says. You have to study the logic of politics. You have to learn lessons from it. And, sometimes, you have to set the rules yourself, and follow those rules through to the end.

We need a strategy! We need tactics! We need to aim our blow, as Clausewitz said, on the centre of gravity of the whole war. And it is a war, W. says. Politics is war, at the end of times.

I need to involve myself with something larger than me, W. says. With some kind of greater cause. Something I could live for – that would envelop all of my life. Something I could die for – can I imagine that? A cause that I might die for?

Actually, W. has always suspected that I am something of a fanatic – that if I found my cause- some kind of monstrous Hindu cause, then the maniac within would at last find release. I would go on some mad jihad to bring the apocalypse, W. says.

He sees me in his mind's eye, W. says, wading through blood, grinning. He sees me, like a child soldier gone beserk in the jungle. He sees me, laughing with blood-stained teeth, like a hyena feasting on a corpse. He sees me, blood running back into my mouth as I laugh ,,,

He has 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, W. says. Or, better: 'fuck off, I'm eating'.

Of course, he would prefer not to hang out with me, W. says. But he thinks that it is perhaps by spending time with someone who associates with no one (except him), and who has no real friends (except for him), that he might understand what politics might mean. That perhaps it is only by passing the day with someone who had failed to grasp even the most rudimentary of social rules, that he might discern the essence of politics.

'Vot vot': that's all Lenin could say, when his mind was destroyed by brain disease, W. tells me. 'Vot vot', to express agreement or disagreement, satisfaction or annoyance, as he was wheeled along in in a bath chair, wrapped in blankets, at his rest home. 'Vot-vot' to the visiting Trotsky, soon to be expelled from the Soviet Union; 'vot-vot' to Stalin, soon to become its absolute ruler.

Lenin's nurses trying to teach him the the word worker again, and the word revolution. His aides tried to tried to teach him the words peasant and people; they tried to teach him the words cell and congress. God knows, his wife even tried to get him to say kulak, a word he used to spit out in hatred …

What will be his last words?, W. wonders. What will he say, as his mind dissolves into mush? 'Lars's fault', he will gasp. 'Lars', he will say, when he can say nothing else. 'Lars, Lars, Lars …' 

W. looks through my notebooks. Notes on Robert Walser's confinement. Names and dates. Ah, very interesting, W. says. Didn't Walser volunteer to be taken into Herisau asylum?, W. says. Didn't he want to go there for the peace and quiet?

At the sanitarium I have the quiet that I need. Noise is for the young. It seems suitable for me to fade away as inconspicuously as possible.

One lies like a felled tree, and needs no limbs to stir about. Desires all fall asleep, like children exhausted from their play.

Walser was exhausted, W. remembers. He'd written himself out! He had nothing more to say! And there was no market for his feuilltons, W. says. He couldn't make a living. Why shouldn't the welfare state pick up the bill?

Notes on Celan's confinement. Of course, he was much worse off than Walser, W. says. He was much more ill!

'They're doing experiments on me', Celan said to a friend. 'They've healed me to pieces', he said to another.

And notes on Hoelderlin's confinement. Pallaksch, W. reads. - 'What does that mean?' Those were the words Hoelderlin repeated to himself in the 30 years he spent mad, I tell W. Pallaksch!, he sang out, as he played his piano madly. Pallaksch!, he cried up to the night, when he couldn't sleep for mania.