Category: W.

We think with our tears, without our sadnesses, W. says. We think with our strangenesses and idiosyncrasies. We think from our stubbornness and pride. We think from our humiliations and compromises. In the end, only we could have our thoughts.

Sometimes, W. believes an idea is lying in wait for him. Sometimes, he believes it's out there, his idea, the idea that will let his life make sense at last.

What is the opposite of philosophy?, W. wonders. Schwarmerei – enthusiasm? Fanaticism or fundamentalism? W. ponders for a moment. – 'You', he says. 'You are the opposite of philosophy'.

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

W. dreams of a kind of group thought, he says. To think as a shoal might, or a flock of birds. To be part of a scintillation of thought, like light spreading itself across the water. To bow one's head with others …

In the end, thought is shy, W. says. You mustn't disturb it with your din.

We must stalk our ideas like a hunter of old, W. says. A hunter who becomes what he hunts. Who dresses in its skin, who moves like it and thinks like it. Who becomes-buffalo, or becomes-auroch. A hunter who asks permission of the beast to hunt it, and offers it to the heavens when he slits its thought.

To think is to stray. To think is to err greatly: who was it who said that?, W. wonders. Well, there's erring and erring. There's straying and straying.

In the end, thought will run you through with its sword, W. says.

Thought is the hangman, your hangman, W. says. Thought has its noose ready, just for you.

His dream of thought, his thought, calling him home, W. says.

In a sense, the thought precedes the thinker, waiting for him, W. says. In a sense …

W. dreams of the thought that he might habve, which awaits him at the end of his Denkweg, his thought-path.

But he knows that the path to thought is never linear. That you never come to thought through some kind of methodical process.

Thought comes from without, W. says. Thought reaches you from outside.

It is oinly when you wander from the path, that thought comes. Only when a vista suddenly opens, when your thought-path opens into a glade, that thought becomes possible.

If only we could sleep, really sleep, W. says. If only we could rest.

W. dreams of the profound slumber from which we would rise reborn, ready for the morning, ready for work. He dreams of the great day that would follow our night of rest, and of the great ideas that would flash above us like diurnal stars.

How is it still alive in him, the belief that he might wake into genius, W. says. How is it that he still believes, despite everything, that he is a man of thought?

If he were just to work hard enough, W. tells himself. If he were just to wake early enough, study enough and read enough … What, what then?

Thought might be possible, W. says. He might be able to overcome his idiocy.

What is philosophy?, that is W.'s question. It's the question every philosopher has to ask, late in life.

What is philosophy? What have I been doing all along?: To answer these questions is to try to make sense of your struggles at last. To redeem them.

Ah, the life of a philosopher. Was it all worth it? Where has it led him? W. thinks of Rutger Hauer's great speech in Bladerunner:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears, in rain. Time to die …

Well, he's seen things too, W. says. Great things. That's what you can never explain to anyone.

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.

It's like having a laurel wreath placed on your head, being called a philosopher. It's like having a garland of flowers placed round your neck. Who would ever crown himself a philosopher? Who would ever hang flowers around his own neck?

In the end, thought is dread, W. says. It is indistinguishable from dread.

In the end, thought is only the absence of all hope placed in the possibility of thought, W. says.

In the end, the thinker is only an obstacle to thought. The thinker is only a hindrance to thinking, W. says.

In the end, we think only when we abandon thinking, all efforts at thinking, W. says. When we've been abandoned by thinking in turn.

We think only when thought has turned its back on us, just as we have turned our backs on thought.

Who thinks?, W. says. No one thinks. The thinker become no one, that no one who is there thinking instead of you …

The passion of thinking, W. says. The experience of thinking. That's what he wants to think.

To double up the act of thinking. To think thinking in turn. To give the act (the passion) of thinking some kind of solidity, some kind of density …

Ah, but how to catch thinking unawares? How to surprise thinking at its thinking?

We must experience our thinking, which is to say, the impossibility of thinking, W. says.

Do I know, really know, what the word experience means?, he asks. It means to suffer, to undergo. It means to be passive with respect to what is undergone. It means an alteration, a kind of passion. At its heart, the word experience means the same as miracle, only that. It means the impossible, which is to say, the imexperienceable. Nothing but that!

We can only experience what we cannot possibly experience, W. says. We can only think the impossibility of thinking.

We must think against ourselves, W. says, that first of all. We must, as thinkers, despise ourselves and calumny ourselves.

We must think from our shortcomings, and think only of our shortcomings, he says. We must think from the impossibility of thinking, and think only of the impossibility of thinking.

We must think from our failure, from our finitude, and think of nothing but our failure, of our finitude, W. says.

The last thought concerns the impossiblity of thinking, of ever thinking, W. says.

The last thought marks the uncrossable distance between thought and its object, and the impossibility of correspondence or corelation, he says. The last thought concerns the failure of our thinking and the fatuousness of our ambitions.

The last thought is really a thought against thinking, W. says, against the imposture of every thought, and the whole tradition of thinking. It is a thought against the imposture of the thinker, and the very effort of thought.

But is it not, for that reason, the truest of thoughts, the thought that all thoughts aim at?

That there is thinking: how many times has W. meditated on that phrase? That there is thinking at all, that we have been permitted some leeway, some chance to lift ourselves from the life of the animal – isn't that the great surprise?, W. says. Isn't that the miracle?

Sometimes, he believes thinking to be a kind of curse, he says. Sometimes, the desire to think, the drive to think, seems like sheer perversity, sheer waywardness, and W. envies the base stupidity of animals, the silence of grass, the quiet growth of mushrooms in the forest glade.

But at other times, he knows that these same animals, these plants, are redeemed by thinking, that it is their only chance.

We think when we cannot think, W. says, aphoristically. When it's quite impossible for us to think.

We think only when we've reached the end of all our attempts to think, when we've exhausted thinking. Only then – in the final hour, right before the end – might thought be possible.

It's only when you've entirely given up the possibility of thinking that you can think, W. says.

We think when we no longer believe in our power to think, and we no longer believe in thinking. We think when we've forgotten what thinking is, and what ambition we might once have had as thinkers.

Tomorrow it was May: but it's hard to believe it, we agree as we sit hungover at Stoke station. We're heading our separate ways: W. to the south, to his hometown of Plymouth, and I to the north, to my hometown of Newcastle.

What might happen if we lived in the same city?, W. wonders. What, if we and our friends lived in Plymouth, or in Newcastle, and we saw each other every day, meeting in cafes and pubs?

We might start a new political party, W. says. A new collective! Oh, he knows how foolish it sounds … A new vanguard – can I imagine that?

The times are against us. History is against us. He understands that, W. says. It’s inexorable. Life is against us! The cosmos is against us! I’m against him, for God’s sake, W. says. He’s against me!

W. would demonstrate against me if he could, he says. I’m against Lars, his placard would read. Kill the Tosser!, written across a picture of me.

Ah, but we are only signs, W. says. Symptoms. We’re the way something is wrong, not the disease itself.

These are not political times, that’s the truth of it. There’s no working class struggle, no party, no organisation, and therefore no politics, according to Tronti, W. says. Capitalism has conquered the external world, Tronti says; now it’s going to conquer the internal one, too.  

What remains to us is only to chart our despair, to fathom it, according to Tronti. Because that’s all that will be left of us, our despair. That’ll be the last incorruptible part of us. We should read Kierkegaard alongside Marx, if we are to understand the contemporary disaster, according to Tronti, W. says. We must turn through the pages of the philosopher of despair.

Staffordshire University. We roll up our shirtsleeves and rub behind our ears with our wipes. It’s time to begin!

Speech: that’s what the Events of May 1968 were about, we tell our audience. The capacity to speak, to speak to anyone without formality. That’s how they spoke as the occupied the campuses of Nanterre and the Sorbonne, we tell them. That’s how they spoke during the teach-ins and sit-downs, during the refusals to disperse. And that’s how the walls spoke, the famous graffiti which were of all and for all, continuing the freedom to speak into another medium.

‘Under the paving stones, the beach’; ‘Dream is reality’; ‘Poetry is in the street’; ‘I have something to say but I don’t know what’; ‘I have nothing to say’ … To have nothing to say but saying itself; to speak the very act of speaking, to address the demonstrator alongside you in the crowd: this was the miracle.

We break for tea. – ‘It’s going well, isn’t it?’, W. says. It is going well.

When we return, we speak of the General Strike and the occupation of the main plants at Renault. We speak of de Gaulle fleeing France, and of parliamentary disarray. We speak of the Action Committees, of direct democracy. We speak of ‘wildfire, effervescence’ (Blanchot), and ‘fulguration’ (Levinas).

But we speak, too, of the vulnerability of the movement, of the gradual return to normality. We speak of the banning of far left groups, and of the retaking of the Sorbonne. We speak of the murder of militants and the infiltration of schools and universities by police. We speak of the factories reopening, and of workers returning to work. We speak of the triumph of de Gaulle’s party, returned to government with greatest majority they had ever received.

A pause for tea. He thinks we’re beginning to depress our audience, W. says.

Must there always be a betrayal of speech?, we wonder, when we return to the seminar room. Must the revolution always be betrayed? May ’68 failed, we tell their audience. Of course it did! But how could they have succeeded? Perhaps, we tell our audience, the Events were sufficient unto themselves. Perhaps they give us the idea of a revolution that need achieve no fixed goal, that has nothing to do with political results. And perhaps nothing to do with politics, either.

The room brightens as we invoke the title of one of the collectively written tracts of the Students and Writers Action Committee: Tomorrow it was May. And perhaps tomorrow – in another kind of tomorrow – it will be May again.

Tomorrow it was May. How moving! How beautiful! And we speak about the Hot Autumn in Italy in 1969, and about Italian workerism. We invoke the ghosts of Fourier, Blanqui, and Luxemburg; we celebrate Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Cabral, and then we drink with our fellow attendees through the night.

The pelican of mythology feeds its young strips of its own flesh torn from its breast, W. says. And isn’t that how he’s fed me: by tearing strips of flesh from his own breast?

How generous he’s been! How unselfish! But in the end, it’s left him even more alone, his generosity. In the end, the equivalent of a great, overfed chick is no company.

In the end, I excel at only three things, W. says: smut, chimp noises and made-up German. That’s all my scholarship has amounted to.

And isn’t it the same with him? Ah, what does he really know? Of what is he really certain? Biblical Hebrew, of course…. The classical guitar…. The history of philosophy in the German tradition, in the French tradition…. Something of the Greeks.… But it’s nothing, nothing, W. says. He knows nothing at all.

If he’s cruel to me, it is with the same cruelty to which he subjects himself, W. says. If he's cruel, it's out of love, W. says. It is meant as a sign that he expects better. Would that he had a similar tutor! Would that he had someone to list his betrayals and half-measures!

We’re landfill thinkers, W. says. Landfill philosophers. But he doesn't mind. He has the sense of edging forward in the darkness, he says. He has the sense of digging his burrow, of pushing on in dark times.

And what kind of burrow am I digging?, W. wonders. What kind of tunnel can a mole make without claws, a mole that's gone mad underground?

Hope. What is it that keeps us going?, W. wonders. Why do we bother, in spite of it all, in the face of it all?

That we know our limitations is our strength, we're agreed on that. We know we fall short, desperately short. We know our task is too great for us, but at least we have a sense of it, its greatness. At least we know it passes above us, like migratory birds in the autumn sky.

Foreign seeds make their way into Britain in the updraft of passing trains, W. says. They spread along the sidings, following the railway …

And along what path do foreign ideas enter our country?, he wonders. Ah, the British want nothing to do with Old European ideas, we agree. They want nothing to do with our ideas, which we’ve borrowed from Old Europe, and are bringing along the railway in our own way.

Britain is essentially a unphilosophical country, we agree, just as we are essentially unphilosophical. Oh, we love philosophical ideas, that’s true. We have the highest enthusiasm for such ideas. But we love them from without, that’s our problem. We don’t understand what we love.

We love reading about philosophy because we know nothing whatsoever about philosophy, we agree. We love reading about politics because we know nothing whatsoever about politics. We love reading about God because we know nothing whatsoever about God …

On the crowded morning train to Stoke, preparing for our presentation. The sky’s darkening, the air’s gone heavy. Bad portents, W. says.

Our host, accompanying us from Birmingham, sits down the carriage from us, reading his Cavailles. What’s he going to make of our presentation?, we wonder. How’s he going to his colleagues, having invited us? Wasn’t this supposed to be part of our rehabilitation? Wasn’t it our chance to make our way back into the academic fold?

An idiot drools: that's our thought, that drooling, W. says. An idiot scratches his head: that's our philosophy, that scratching, W. says.

Ah, what do we know of the Events of May 1968, our presentation topic? What do we really know about the general strike in Paris, and the battles between the students and police in the Latin Quarter? Our knowledge is secondhand, derivative. The protestors wrenched the paving stones from the streets: we saw it on Youtube. They threw up barricades: we saw that, too. They marched – how they marched! They overturned cars, set fire to them: yes, we’ve seen the footage.

But we know nothing of politics, real politics, we agree. We know nothing of revolution, of the world turned upside down. Britain is an essentially apolitical country, we agree, just as we are essentially apolitical.

What is it that keeps me from cutting my own throat?, W. asks. Why don't I book myself into one of those Swiss suicide climics?

In the end, perhaps I'm only a figment of his imagination, a kind of nightmare, he says. Can't you see I'm burning?, I ask him in his dream. But in the end, he's burning, W. says. He's the one who set himself on fire.