Lars Iyer's Blog

The human participates in the anonymous and collective flow, hum, movement of the street, but is not subject in this errant and unrestricted space. Blanchot refers to this hum elsewhere as chatter [bavardage]:

I have always been struck by the widely enthusiastic endorsement of Heidegger when, under the pretext of analysis and with his characteristic sober forcefulness, he condemns inauthentic speech.  A scorned speech, which is never that of the resolute, laconic and heroic ‘I’, but the non-speech of the irresponsible ‘One’. One speaks. This means: no one speaks. This means: we live in a world where there is speech without a subject speaking it, a civilization of speakers without speech, aphasic chatterboxes, spokespeople who report and give no opinions, technicians without name and without power of decision.

This chatter, rather than being degraded or inauthentic as the German pronoun man is for Heidegger, points towards the unknowable future for Blanchot precisely because it belongs to no one. Michael Sheringham argues that the chatter of the street in Blanchot brings us closer to the ‘essence of the everyday’, which, ‘in its radicality, its immunity from all origins, its anarchic destruction of all established order, will always provide a basis for the future’.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot

[C]riticism prepares the way for a different and unforeseeable affirmation, thus making it ‘one of the most difficult but important tasks of our time’ (LS 6). Why, Blanchot asks, can the work not speak for itself? Why between the reader and the work, between history and the work, is this strange hybrid figure of the critic imposed? Criticism, having no reality of its own, disappears in the affirmation of what is otherwise silent in the work; the accomplishment of criticism is signalled by its disappearance as the mediated becomes the immediate – here Blanchot seems close to Heidegger who is referenced in the early pages of his response – but any such relation to the immediate is impossible and both criticism and literature are perpetually turned outwards:

this sort of sudden distance, in which the completed work is reflected and which the critic is called upon to gauge, is only the last metamorphosis of the opening which is the work in its genesis, what one might call its essential non-coincidence with itself, everything that continuously makes it possible-impossible. All that criticism does, then, is represent and follow outside what, from within, as torn affirmation, infinite insecurity [inquiétude], conflict (and in all other forms), does not cease to be present as a living reserve of emptiness, of space, of error, or, better yet, as the power that belongs to literature to make itself while always maintaining itself in lack [en défaut]. 

The domain of literature cannot be stabilised because there is no outside point from which to delimit the parameters of the work. The lack that allows the work and criticism to proliferate offers the possibility of moving beyond metaphysical representation towards this torn affirmation, torn because erring between the yes and the no, between the inside and the outside, contesting all limits, including those of literature.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot

For me, Artaud and Bataille, Simone Weil, you know, all the emotional tribe, they had anticipated what was going to happen and they tried to forge little cells where a vaccine was being invented, a bit like the plague. It was a counter-plague, but if they managed to be contaminated in a ritualistic way, then it could go viral and counter the whole wave of massacres and violence that was going over the world. So I think they were creating little laboratories, using whatever was at hand. Artaud and Bataille were both Christian, and they thought of becoming priests, just like Hitler and Stalin. They were all in cahoots for this Christianity, attempting to compensate with a Christianity that might go beyond it. So I followed suit. I went on my horse and said, okay, just show me the way. I can go there and take what I need and face the unfaceable. I needed to have people who had their own itinerary that led them in the same direction, but I couldn’t take it. It was too much for me.

[…] It was in the air of the time, as I say: l’air du temps. It circulates from one to the other, and this reinforces my feeling that it’s not really the person that you interrogate. The person, the artist, is the access to the time. And this time was both exciting, because new things were happening, but also very dangerous because people had not begun to realize how much of a horror the First World War really was. It was an extermination of 20 million people. It entirely changed the relation of people to their country, to the earth, to everything. The whole generation we talked about, they were not so prominent, you know, Caillois and this or that. It was just a little group. But they were working on the environment. Artaud, in one of the last letters to Jacques Rivière,  says I don’t want you to think that my sickness, that what I feel, is just a symptom of the time. But that was what the time was about, and they were expressing it. And I think that’s why — in the same way the first World War introduced the technology for a bigger massacre — the war never stopped. It was a preparation for the Second World War.

These artists and thinkers were attuned to the degree of atrocity that had been committed, and the fact that society and the population were getting ready for it to continue. All the elements were there but they were the only ones trying to put all of this together. Céline was caught into it; Bataille was attracted to fascism, not because he was a fascist but because, to my mind, he realized that you cannot understand anything if you don’t have at least one foot in it. And that’s what I do with Artaud and Bataille and these people. I can’t really connect to what they went through at the time if I don’t connect with my own unimportant sensibility. What is important is not me or them. They were touching on something that had been touched upon with the First World War, but it was just the beginning.

Freud wrote about the death wish at the time, in 1920. Marcel Mauss wrote about the potlatch in 1925. Everyone was getting ready, but they didn’t know it. And some people were getting crazy enough to really go directly against it, or with it, or in it. My relation with all these people was that. Some people were floating with fascism, Bataille a little bit, Simone Weil in some aspect of her work towards the end of her life, when she accused the Jews of being murderers when they were being murdered in Europe. Jews are going to have a hard time acknowledging this, or accepting it, because she did it at the wrong time. But she was crazy. She was crazy for God. But what went on through God was a lot of feeling of despair and self-doubt and a sense of premonition.

My feeling is that the whole era was a laboratory. Some people participated actively while others were like the cattle that were led into it — the populations in Germany and Italy, with all the affect that was generated. Gustave Le Bon wrote about the crowd, saying that when people are together they become like a group of kids. All this was there, but it’s only retrospectively that historians and sociologists will really start putting things together. They did it at their own expense. They took the risk for it, and one of the risks was madness. I found that more convincing as an approach, maybe as the only approach. That’s why, at times, I felt insufficient, because I connected to something that was so strong that had nothing to do with me, that had everything to do with me, but not with me as a person. I was entering something that I didn’t know how to handle. It was not sacred, because the sacred has a sense of nobility. You acknowledge a person who is about to be killed or victimized. It’s like this ritual you have now among the Islamists, of cutting off people’s heads. Well I find that horrible, but there is a sense that they respect a person that they kill. But the way people were killed during the First and Second World Wars, that had no respect. It was not a sacrifice. It was not a way of solving the problem.

So people were dealing with what they had. They created these groups that were nothing like Tel Quel and that salon group. They were really working on a material that was deadly. You had to match it and you had to know what it is. That’s why they got very close to the point that Walter Benjamin said that Bataille was working for the fascists and all that. I work for the fascists, too, in a sense, because I feel what it could have been like at the time to be totally crazy. But at the same time I can’t express it and I can’t feel that way as a person. For me, that’s the whole attraction. They were there before it happened. Adorno has a famous saying that after Auschwitz you can’t write poetry, but I think this is bullshit. You can write poetry after, but he was right in the sense that, every time I see documents about that time, images of these skeletons that were slumped into trucks — it’s unbearable. That some people could have done that is just beyond the beyond. So I went to people who were emotionally on the same level with what had happened, and that is why.

[…] That was the difference between these two periods we’re discussing, the 1930s and 40s, and the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. They were using religious concepts in that earlier period in order to analyze society, which is why they had to go through rituals and sacrifice and death. For people who came later, at the time of May 68 and the consumer society which had invaded France, there was no God any more. The sign had replaced everything. Images were replacing everything. The society of the spectacle was taking over. So you had to envisage that as something very different, where affects were not vital, but viral. The sign connected signs to other signs. It was like the plague — the plague was a system that connected everything — so it was very different, historically.

And then there’s the society we live in today where everything is being abstracted by technology. Technology is engulfing the entire society and destroying the environment. We’re not in control anymore. The corporations are much more decisive than nations and presidents and there’s no one to stop them. They are on the way to the next massacre, the massacre of the environment, by creating a world that is basically unlivable. It’s part of the same continuation.

Sylvère Lotringer, interviewed

New interview with me as part of the Second Life bookclub.

Ahead of our discussion on Second Life Book Club tomorrow, Draxtor has some thoughts about My Weil.

In Dostoevsky, awareness of human insufficiency leads to an almost hysterical signalling of vice from characters who retain any vestige of social respectability, whether an old Karamazov, a Marmeladov or a Raskolnikov. These characters and many others intermittently seek exterior humiliation in the eyes of society while refusing to see the full contemptibility of their lives; thus they court punishment rather than mercy. They are honest enough to judge themselves harshly, but their pride in such self-condemnation – combined with an awareness that other people share their vileness without exercising a similar honesty of judgment – leads them to assume that they have seen the fullness of their debased condition. This is a false humiliation that, in the words of the old Russian proverb, is `worse than pride'. This false humiliation, if maintained, will lead its bearer to seek extinction. Dostoevsky mercilessly pushes the reader onwards to see that anyone who fully understands the depths of his own sinful negations can have only the response of complete humiliation, one so profound that it cannot speak at all except to ask for grace or extinction. Filaret, Metropolitan of Moscow for much of Dostoevsky's lifetime, explains this vision: `All creatures are balanced upon the creative word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them that of their own nothingness.

From, 'Beyond the will: Humiliation as Christian necessity', by Henry M. W. Russell

New written interview with me at Full Stop.

New podcast interview with me by Sam Jordison and Lori Feather at Across the Pond.

Katie Kadue reviews My Weil for Bookforum.

BY NOW IT’S CLEAR that the academic humanities—that supposedly disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, preserved from the whims of the market—are under threat. But that threat is perhaps best personified not by a powerful politician loudly looking to defund “ripoff” programs, but by an ordinary guy pursuing a PhD in Business Studies. This is a guy who’s getting an advanced degree not to save his soul or to preserve and expand the edifice of human knowledge but to destroy both. He is at once the ideal consumer and the ideal product of the modern university increasingly run like a corporation: a cog in the machine that converts qualities into quantities and meaningful language into the jargon of the deal, with devastating effects on higher education and culture in general. The fact that he’s getting a doctorate of philosophy in what philosophy graduate students might call anti-philosophy adds insult to injury: the same degree is awarded both to those who see value in arts and letters and to those who see only profit—or lack thereof.

 In Lars Iyer’s latest novel, My Weil, this Business Studies guy has a name: Business Studies Guy. A pure cipher in a nonspeaking role, Business Studies Guy is nonetheless a constant in the lives of Iyer’s main characters, a group of PhD students—real PhD students—at the philosophy-adjacent Centre for Disaster Studies at All Saints University, an apparent stand-in for Manchester Metropolitan University, where Iyer earned his PhD in philosophy. Self-consciously self-aggrandizing, this self-mockingly self-titled “League of Extraordinary PhD Students” rings in the beginning of the academic school year by scoffing at the “pretend” subjects of Business Studies (“Kleptocracy? Corporate raiding? Debt leveraging? Overgrowth? Financial engineering? The pillaging of the system before the final collapse?”) and rhapsodizing about their own forays into “the final academic frontier”: “A trial of the soul! A dark night of the intellect!” Into their midst arrives the novel’s title character, a new student in Disaster Studies who has adopted both the philosophical commitments and the name of the twentieth-century French mystic Simone Weil.

The merrily dyspeptic crew, also known as the All Saints Disaster Studies Collective, introduce themselves to Simone over post-orientation picklebacks (she does not partake) at Ruin Bar, their regular symposium spot. Their areas of expertise are exposited as if they were an assembled team in a heist movie: there’s Ismail (“Performance philosophy. Showing that films can think”), Valentine (“Religious anarchism and the anarchism of religion”), Marcie (“Lumpenproletariat revolt as ultra-politics”), Gita (“Something about late heterosexuality”), and the narrator, Johnny (“Ontological evil”). Their friendship is forged in bonds of mutual mockery: Ismail’s experimental films are pronounced “in the international elitist artwank style”; Gita’s interest in “queer communism” is derided as “very radical”; ultra-political Marcie, as a kind of joke of which she’s also the punchline, is ironically dating Business Studies Guy. Simone’s own project is more extracurricular. She spends most of her time ministering to the downtrodden denizens of Manchester, to the alarm of her peers, who worry she’s putting herself in danger. For Simone, this is what it means to devote oneself to Simone Weil’s philosophy: to abdicate the ego and give oneself over entirely to others and to God, in a process Weil called the “passive activity” of “decreation.”

Iyer was a longtime philosophy lecturer at Newcastle University; he is now, having renounced philosophy for fiction, on the creative writing faculty. The new novel is Iyer’s third in a row to center on a character who has taken on the name of a famous philosopher, following Wittgenstein Jr. and Nietzsche and the Burbs. He is also the author of the Spurious trilogy (Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus), and My Weil shares themes with those novels as well: academia, absurdism, friendship, the mysterious spread of a mysterious fungus. All Iyer’s novels rail, in one way or another, against the abyss of meaning into which Business Studies Guy and his ilk threaten to drag intellectual life. The alternative they propose to soulless business administration is “infinite philosophical eros,” or what the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, the erstwhile subject of Iyer’s academic work, called “the infinite conversation.”

The conversation in My Weil really does feel infinite. Characters speak in hypnotically anaphoric sentences, punctuated by italics and ellipses, that plow through the page with a pointed pointlessness, creating less a plot than an intellectual mood, a vibe of energetic ennui. Ismail’s admiration for Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, which Valentine has pulled out and randomly started reading aloud, both exemplifies and describes Iyer’s approach:

It’s like the opposite of a dissertation. Not defining his terms. Not stating aims and objectives. Not summarizing his position—or even having a position. Not having chapters or subchapters. Or an introduction. Or a conclusion. Or a method, probably . . . 

This droningly droll style, which has earned Iyer comparisons to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, whom he has called his favorite novelist, derives from his blog, where he first began the experiments with dialogue-based fiction that would eventually become Spurious. This novel, too, consists mostly of dialogue, interspersed with sparse stage directions that can feel like improv prompts (“Simone and I, walking to the bus stop”; “Sitting around the table”; “Pointing out our fellow Disaster Studies PhD students”) and Johnny’s immersive present-tense narration, which sometimes bleeds into the Greek-chorus-like first-person plural of the Collective. Like going through grad school or scrolling through social media, reading My Weil can feel like a cruel joke of a time loop, an endless slog that seems to be going nowhere, dialogue that lacks the direction of dialectic. 

This, Iyer might say, is the point. His depiction of graduate school sounds a lot like his depiction of the suburbs, and like the teenagers whiling away their time in Wokingham in Nietzsche and the Burbs, the PhD students in My Weil chafe against boredom, arrested development, and a nagging sense that real life is elsewhere. “Always the dissertation to write,” the Collective collectively muses. “Always stuff to read. Life goes on and on and on. . . .” These are characters in search of a method for finding meaning amid our multiple ongoing contemporary disasters, and though they know they won’t find it in Disaster Studies Methods class with “Professor Bollocks,” they aren’t sure where else to look. Mostly from humble beginnings and skeptical about the prospects of higher education, they in some ways identify with the lumpenproletariat underclass that is the subject of Marcie’s dissertation (“we’re spiritually lumpen,” Marcie insists), acting out their contempt for “the Man” through his proxy in Business Studies Guy. But they also fear the “mancunian madness” of the city’s mean streets, a fear that feels justified when Simone, in the course of her humanitarian work, gets stabbed. They are committed to their bits, and not much else. 

Nothing really happens in the novel that can’t be attributed to the magic of mushrooms, caffeine, alcohol, and the graduate student urge to procrastinate with endless riffs, self-parody, and meta-jokes about the metaphysical impossibility of finishing one’s thesis. These are clearly meant to be funny, but some jokes about tedium are simply tedious. A lecture from Professor Bollocks on tips for “time management” is met with hysterical outcry:

Rising rage. Tired anger. Not this topic . . . Anything but this topic . . . Is he actually going to couple the word time with the word management? TIME! MANAGEMENT! TIME! MANAGEMENT! Within the walls of a uni! As if Henri Bergson never existed! Nor Martin Heidegger! As if Deleuze had never formulated the three syntheses of time!

The conceit is a familiar one to anyone who has spent time in an academic humanities department: the practice of turning assignments in on time requires a different understanding of time than, for example, the theory of messianic time developed by Walter Benjamin. Graduate students like to make jokes based on such mismatches of theory and practice. How can we possibly complete essays on the poetics of incompletion? How can we possibly work on our thesis on antiwork politics? These one-liners can pass the time in the library or on social media. When cannily deployed, they might even invite us to think seriously about the contradictions that structure our lives. But they become tiresome when unrelentingly repeated over the course of multiple heavily italicized pages of a novel. 

When not sitting through lectures or engaging in what they call “drunken philosophy” at Ruin Bar, the characters float through a variety of other briefly indicated locations: the local café; the bus; the vintage clothing boutique where Gita works; the Ees, the spooky forest on the outskirts of town populated by fantastical folkloric figures and dubious mushrooms, including a giant “god-shroom” that leads to the novel’s hallucinogenic climax. Sometimes Business Studies Guy tags along to take abuse. Allusions to thinkers ranging from Zhuangzi to Terence to Shakespeare to Thoreau mingle with mock-melodramatic name-drops of modern theorists like Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (who lend their names to a two-headed rat who “might be a spy for the Man”), and Blanchot, whose first editions, notebooks, and even baby pictures show up in the private collection of a rich cryptocurrency-crazy student nicknamed Bitcoin. 

The Blanchot bit invites reflection on Iyer’s own relationship to his former career in academic philosophy. His pivot to fiction doesn’t seem to have come out of an investment in the novel as form; in interviews, he claims not to read any contemporary novels, and betrays no sign of having read any novels at all beyond those of Bernhard and Dostoyevsky. Instead, like his character and fellow Blanchot fan Ismail, he’s interested in the possibilities for philosophy when unyoked from current academic conventions. My Weil is a philosophical novel not only in its subject matter but also because it is a novel that knows, with Jacques Derrida, that generic distinctions are never stable, that there is perhaps no such thing as a novel. It is not a novel for “London Review of Books reviewers,” “Radio 4 contributors,” students at Manchester’s fancier Victoria University, and the other unfree thinkers who reside in the expensive suburb the All Saints Collective stumbles into to attend a student party: 

Didsbury intellectuals, reassuring us that everything can be thought, discussed, explained, and calmly . . . That everything can be written about in full sentences, not telegraphic bursts . . . That there’s no need for a single exclamation mark! never a single ellipsis . . . That nothing will ever have to be said IN CAPITALS . . .

Nor is it, we’re led to think, a novel for philosophy professors. The main action, such as it is, revolves around Ismail leading the group in the production of a film, first conceived as a high-concept “anti-film”—“A critical interrogation of high arthouse seriousness, of the piety of the long shot and le temps mort”—and then revised into a different kind of anti-film, a straightforward documentary of the friends’ ordinary daily lives, which they title Simone Weil. When the Collective wins a departmental prize for their film, they act offended that their avant-garde artwork has appealed to such conventional tastes. Their outrage is played for laughs, but they’re in on the joke. Their combination of pretentiousness and self-awareness creates the ideal conditions for both true sophisticates—namely, each other—and the middlebrow midwits of the prize committee to enjoy their work. These might be the conditions Iyer himself strives for. His ideal audience may be those enlightened souls who know better than to confuse what goes on in university humanities departments for thinking, who know that the London Review of Books is hopelessly bourgeois, who know more than Professor Bollocks—but the Professor Bollockses of the world will chuckle at the Deleuze/Guattari two-headed rat joke, too. Nonacademics love to laugh at the foibles of academics, but academics love it even more.

It’s also not, of course, a novel for Business Studies Guy, even though large chunks of it are directly addressed to him. “Bet you never talk like this in Business Studies,” Marcie murmurs to Business Studies Guy after a bout of drunken philosophy. “Bet it’s not all ecstatic nihilism, the lumpenproletariat and the void of God in Business Studies. . . .” Business Studies Guy doesn’t respond—here, and throughout the novel, his utter silence implies that he truly has nothing to say—but Simone does, by rising to leave, which prompts one of the group to cry, “Don’t leave us! God. . . .” The expletive doubles as an address: the Collective has overestimated its comfort level with the void of God, and when they realize that ecstatic nihilism isn’t the only alternative to Business Studies, they start to question if they really know how to do philosophy at all. Simone stands against their fragmentary aimlessness, a wholly holy figure of serenity and moral clarity. “Saints look for a way of living while renouncing being someone,” Simone says by way of defining “decreation”; say what you will about the paradoxes of Weil’s philosophy, at least it’s an ethos. 

Yet Simone exists almost entirely as an idea. This isn’t only because she’s ideologically and intellectually committed to asceticism and decreation; it’s also that she’s so barely fleshed out as a character that she seems almost not to have been created at all. Johnny is most taken with the strange new arrival, holding her up as a paragon of virtue, a Virgin Mary or a Beatrice whom he hopes might guide him out of the purgatorial, profanity-laced milieu of All Saints, an idealization made easier by her lack of personality. This Simone bears only passing resemblance to the historical Weil, whose flailing, almost zany attempts to live out her ethics—stepping into a vat of boiling oil while trying to assist the anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War; nearly starving due to a combination of self-imposed poverty and pickiness when it came to cuts of meat; getting repeatedly fired from factory jobs due to clumsiness—had a heartbreakingly funny aesthetics. The great philosopher, activist, and mystic is the same person as the gawky germaphobe; her travails call to mind Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory and klutzy rom-com heroines as much as medieval saints. Her physical awkwardness fits perfectly with her extreme embrace of suffering and her principled refusal, up to the self-denial of food that accelerated her early death, to feel comfortable in her skin. As Weil herself put it, “Affliction is ridiculous.” 

Iyer, in his way, takes the ridiculousness of affliction seriously. PhD candidates in a fictional branch of a subfield of philosophy may not be straightforwardly representative of the wider population, but any young person trying to find a method to live in the face of political, economic, and ecological crisis is, in their way, a student of disaster. My Weil looks for meaning in the desire to stave off the meaninglessness of a world increasingly run, within universities and without, by Business Studies Guys. The novel ends with Johnny and Simone living in dreamlike, postapocalyptic—or possibly psychedelic-induced—domestic bliss in a house in the Ees. Here, metaphysical horrors are survived not with a constant flow of coffee, bourbon, and riffs but “by doing ordinary things”: chopping vegetables, setting the table, emptying the washing machine, hanging clothes to dry. The stylistic repetition that for most of the novel feels like compulsion here becomes a ritual comfort; each of the twelve short paragraphs of this final section begins with “This is our house.” Maybe the real philosophy consists of the friends we make along the way, and maybe the only way out is through. But it’s an abrupt ending for a novel that seemed so committed to the open-ended pleasures of intellectual life, the infinite conversation in which all of us, though not Business Studies Guy, can take a small but meaningful part.

The Infinite Conversation is a collection of Blanchot’s writings where the philosopher stages meandering dialogues influenced by his long engagements with thinkers such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Pascal, Kafka, Heraclitus, and Sade. It is also a website, infiniteconversation.com, where AI-generated versions of Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek talk back and forth, forever. In answer to the question “Why did you do this?” on the site’s FAQ, its creator offers three reasons: “1) because I could; 2) as an awareness campaign over the powers of machine learning applied unscrupulously . . . 3) as a love letter to Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek, their brilliant ideas and their idiosyncratic speech.” Like infiniteconversation.com, My Weil can read like an awareness campaign: the forces aligned with Business Studies Guy threaten to nullify real conversation with technologies that mimic it for profit. And like infiniteconversation.com, the rote jokes of the novel can themselves feel like the machine rendering of philosophical ideas, even if they also lovingly parody the impulses to endlessness that make us most human, a bit like how, in Paradise Lost, Milton’s fallen angels pass the time of their indefinite stay in Hell in philosophical debate over fate and free will “and found no end, in wandering mazes lost.” Getting lost in the labyrinthine turns of such conversations can still be pleasurable even as it proves increasingly difficult to tell the difference between real philosophical exchange and its hellish simulacrum. Reading Iyer’s novel might lead to a similar aporia: is this a pleasurable suspension of finality, or a dead end? 

Markku Nivalainen interviews me for 3:AM.

The theme for the inaugural issue of the Journal for Discarded Daydreams comes an extract from My Weil, namely:

The plan is total creative destruction. A Year Zero reset, Jacobin-style. A new financial transaction system to replace the banks: that’s what’s coming. And a new global security system, to manage the transition. Biometric IDs for all. The digitalisation of all interactions. A new transnational governance system, so the Man can satellite-control us from afar like livestock.

More details here.

A cartoonist present at the Journal launch captured the occasion here:

Download Discarded Daydreams Cartoon

Nicholas Dames, editor in chief of Public Books, chooses My Weil as one of his books of the year.

Think Minima Moralia as a stand-up routine. You’ll want to quote whole pages. And then there’s the perfect, groan-inducing title. I’ll admit it: I’m a paid-up member of the underground sodality of Lars Iyer fans. Such groupuscules are, as it happens, the subject of Iyer’s work, particularly the one we call the humanities, fast becoming a semi-covert retreat within the neoliberal academy. In My Weil, the scene is the PhD program in Disaster Studies at the fictional All Saints University, set in a Manchester that has become a fiction to itself—the vintage Happy Mondays shirts selling for fifty quid, the conferences held at the renovated warehouse now called the Tony Wilson Centre. A loose collective of graduate students, including one who’s taken the name Simone Weil (“I wanted to live deliberately,” she explains), spend their days in a fugue of theory banter, loathing for the Business Studies students who are the targets of their inner monologues, self-loathing, booze and hallucinogens. They’re waiting for the world to end, because what’s the humanities now but a kind of eschatology? More than anything, Iyer asks us to relish it: the abjection, the dead-endedness, and the comic sublimity of philosophizing from within damaged life. Because maybe, just maybe, when there’s finally no hope for the humanities (or humanity), that abjection may show you a way out.

I accept the world – the whole world with its stupidity, obliqueness, dead and dry colours – only in order to fool this bony witch and make her young again. In the embraces of the Fool and the Buffoon the old world brightens up, becomes young, and its eyes become translucent, depthless.

Alexander Blok, in a letter from 1906

The liveliest and most perceptive children of our time are afflicted by a disease unknown to doctors of the body and of the mind. This disease has an affinity with mental diseases and can be called 'irony'. Its symptoms are fits of exhausting laughter which begin with a devilishly mocking, provocative smile and ends with violence and blasphemy.

I know people that are ready to choke with laughter at the very same time that their mother is dying, they themselves are starving to death and their beloved is betraying them. A man guffaws, and you don't know whether as soon as he leaves you he is going to drink some poison and you wonder if you will ever see him again. And to me this very laughter tells about this person, that he despises everything and abandons everything – as if it were nothing at all.

Don't listen to our laughter; listen to the pain in it. Don't believe any of us, but those that are behind us.

Blok, in an article from 1908

Patrick O'Connor interviews me for Thales' Well podcast. 

Photo of Maurice Blanchot.

Adam Potts interviews me about My Weil for the NCLA.

Alana Estelle reviews My Weil on YouTube. And on Instagram.

[This written interview was the basis of the recent interview/ profile in The Morning Star. Here it is in full:]

You’re one of the few contemporary writers who can make me laugh on the 0630 bus. From your perspective, what’s the attraction of a comic approach and where is the humour coming from?

Is the comedy a (Beckettian) coping mechanism? A provocation? The only viable means of critiquing the devastating impact of C21st capitalism?    

The novels are supposed to be fresh and funny: that first of all. Laughter is important – it’s necessary to breathe. ‘Everything I've written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, of suffocation. It wasn't from inspiration, as they say. It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe’: that’s E.M. Cioran in an interview. For me, that getting-free involves laughter: laughing at the Man. Laughing at the madness. Laughing at the po-faced and humourless absurdity that is all around us.

The attraction of comedy: it allows some freedom, and perhaps might grant freedom in turn. A way of diagnosing what’s happening to us, but not being crushed by it. Perhaps it might be the beginning of a critique, which is only possible if we can find others to laugh with.

In My Weil (and throughout your fiction) there seems to be a genuine and deep-seated sense of despair below the erudite wit and sharp observations. Do you believe we’re doomed? If so, why? If not, what do you believe will save us?

Definitely despair. About what? Numerous disasters on the horizon; perhaps as disastrous are the means meant to solve them.

Problem: ecosystem collapse, soil microbiology exhaustion, insect biomass erosion. Solution: the seizure and financialisation of the global commons; nature valued as a natural asset which can then be managed, controlled and, of course, profited upon.

Problem: inequality. Solution: human capital investment, which is to say, opening a new futures market by betting on the life-outcomes of prisoners, refugees and welfare recipients.

Problem: the financial crisis, unpayable debt (53 trillion dollars worldwide and counting; 31 trillion dollars in the US alone.) Solution: the Going Direct Reset initiative, as agreed to by the Federal Reserve and the big asset management corporations at Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 2019. This will see the replacement of currencies with the Central Bank Digital Currency, allowing complete control over every transaction, cutting off the wealth of deplorables. Tyrants of the past only dreamed of such power …

Are we doomed? Not if we awaken to what’s happening. What will save us? Human unmanageability, perhaps. It’s just such unmanageability that is shown in my characters’ laughter, in their friendship. Internal struggles between various factions of the powers-that-shouldn’t-be, perhaps … Something contingent, miraculous, perhaps …

My reading of Spurious, Exodus and Dogma is that there’s a focus on individual despair. In My Weil there is a collegiate spirit, but it’s mired in chaotic inertia. To what extent does this reflect an implicit rejection of the possibility of intelligent and impactful collective action?

The characters in My Weil consider various possibilities for collective action. There’s becoming lumpenproletariat – living like the raggle-taggle of criminal-types, unmanageable déclassés that Marx wrote about, who keep to the shadows. There’s becoming apocalyptic – gathering like the early Christians awaiting the Second Coming; only this time, they’re waiting for an incoming, shattering transcendence that would explode the present order of the world. There’s secession – going under the state, on the model of villages in Alpine valleys that that have their own currency, that keep low-tech – using mechanics, not electronics; or those parts of Mexico that just do their own thing, regardless of central government decree.

My characters have little faith in present institutions. My question would be whether and how we might make them more accountable, transparent and democratic. My characters are tired of all that. They say they only want to let the present world go down. I’m not sure I’d take them at their word. Perhaps we can see a viable form of collective action – or rather, collective inaction – in their common drifting, their vagueness, their abandonment of proper ends.

I’ve seen reviews of your work in which it’s suggested characters are secondary to ideas and comic situations. I don’t accept this. The dialogue fizzes and – while your characters knock lumps out of each other, with serious discussion lurching into banter and then drifting into invective – you give some serious consideration to the themes of friendship and intellectual affiliation. In terms of the Disaster Studies PhD candidates in My Weil, is this driven by a fascination with these types of personal/professional relationship, or is it rooted in the sentiment reflected in an David Bowie song: “While troubles are rising we’d rather be scared together than alone”?

Being scared together: yes, that’s the thing. Despairing together. Sharing such moods, being humorous about them, comically exaggerating them, ringing changes upon them, which means they’re no longer solely negative. Things might seem hopeless, but hope is there in our capacity to talk. We might think that we that we can’t do much about the disasters ahead of us – about neuroweaponry or weather warfare, about education capture and health capture, about destabilisation agendas, about transhumanism, but we can discuss and diagnose them. Laughing together at their folly, shaking our heads together at their evil, we needn’t be merely passive victims.

To what extent is the rejection of plot in your six novels tied into your apparent fatalism about the future (of academia, of our culture, of humanity)?

No fatalism from me. And there is some plot, at least in the last three novels. The end of Nietzsche and the Burbs sees its characters high as kites, full of wild plans. They’re together, joyful, engaged in what anthropologist Victor Turner has called ‘communitas’: a radically egalitarian, non-hierarchical community of associative friendship.

Communitas, Turner explains, can never last; its liberatory joy must inevitably give way to a restoration of order, of the ‘societas’ of familiar social bonds and roles, the usual hierarchies. The question my characters begin to ask concern the relation between the joy of communitas and the societas to which they have to return.

In My Weil, my characters, equipped with their studies in philosophy, are better able to consider this question. True, they don’t formulate it as such, but they’re constantly thinking about ways of escaping the system. The opposite of fatalism!

Focussing on your satirical take on academia. It’s particularly sharp in My Weil: how much of an exaggeration is Professor Bollocks and the notion of ‘accountability buddies’? Is it really getting worse?  [I’m particularly interested in this because, in the 1980s, under the Thatcher government, I worked in an Alvey-funded AI project – each of the research teams in receipt of his funding was monitored by a figure called an “industrial uncle” (sic). I wonder if that was when the Bollocks began in earnest?]

An ‘industrial uncle’: wonderful! – I’ll borrow that. Nothing of the novel is exaggerated. The language of management theory has colonised the university. Expressions like ‘best practice’ and ‘seedcorn funding’, used without irony … No one laughs or rolls their eyes … Everything, taken straight.  

In academia, at all levels: the emphasis upon self-motivation, self-directed action, self-management. The student, the academic as a self-initiating entrepreneur, realising themselves as a piece of human capital; as an economically significant commodity … Management is the task, distributing resources, actions, practices to make them more efficient, more productive. As if every problem that counts could be solved through administrative power – through correct implementation of the system.

The logic here is technological – it reflects the deepening of the technological system so well diagnosed by Jacques Ellul. Systematisation, schematisation, tabulation, bureaucratisation, qualification, rationalisation, mechanisation, standardisation, materialism and scientism: that’s what’s at work. The bollocks began long ago. To make it worse, this process of stripping away meaning, comradeship, a sense of the absurd is accompanied by the grotesque parodying of the same notions that this process hollows out: to the university as your ‘family’, to your fellow students as potential ‘buddies’, etc.

My characters, in response, cultivate counter-techniques of failure and ineffectiveness, of wandering and vagueness and of displacing ends from means. They aim at a deliberate incompetence, in which not finishing your PhD dissertation is more of a sign of honour than completing it on time; in which failure is a better sign of scholarly integrity than system-rewarded success. And they laugh – they have fun, which is pretty much forbidden in these over-serious times.

I’d argue that all six of your novels are literary fiction / new weird hybrid – based on the criteria of “[exploring] the boundaries of reality of reality and experience through philosophical speculation” (Jason Sanford, 2009). This is notable in My Weil, particularly in the supernatural (maybe?) sequences set in the Ees. [Would you be happy with the label critical realism?]  Did this approach an emergent property of the subject matter, or is it a style of writing you particularly enjoy?

The Ees, a scrap of woodland in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester – meant to resemble the Zone from Tarkovsky’s film Stalker – permits the wandering and vagueness, the displacement of ends from means to which I have referred. It’s about dis-activation, which is why it’s full of all kinds of junk.

As such, the Ees is an embodiment of the students’ relationship to their PhD dissertations and, more broadly, to study. It allows them to be stupid, ignorant, disoriented – but in a positive sense. In an antidote-to-Professor-Bollocks kind of sense.  

No coincidence that the character most strongly linked to the Ees is least committed to finishing his dissertation. In all things, romance included, my protagonist Johnny’s aim is to stay with potential without submitting it to an purpose, without actualising it in any course of action. And in the end, the Ees seems to ‘reward’ Johnny by letting him dwell permanently in the suspension of development.

Why Manchester? What fascinates you about the music and culture of that city in the 1980s?

The Manchester I discovered when I moved there in 1989 still had areas that were like the Ees of the my novel: unproductive areas, temporary autonomous zones such as the Hulme Crescents, an edgy zone of low-rise, system-built flats. They’re described an excellent recent article in The Guardian, and which I’ve tried to write about in my own way. It was from such places that so much great mancunian culture came.

Manchester was regenerated in the ‘90s. Investors and financiers, gentrifiers and speculators, transformed the cityscape with statement architecture, with steel-balconied warehouse conversions: monuments to cheap credit. My characters dream of battering back the mancunian regenerators, of re-opening the figurative cracks and the crevices where you used to be able live unnoticed and unbothered on government benefits. Only the Ees is left to them of that world now – the Ees and the great mancunian music to which they still listen.

What attracts you to the philosophers featured in your second (loose) trilogy, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Weil?  

All of them I regarded as philosophical ‘enemies’ – thinkers who were, I thought, were remote from my own philosophical allegiances and concerns, but with whose work I nevertheless wanted to spend time. And I’m glad I did. You sharpen your thought by working with what you’re against …

You’ve written two books on Maurice Blanchot – is he a thinker you believe can have a transformative impact on life in the C21st? Why?

Blanchot’s a subterranean influence on so many thinkers – think of Marcuse’s notion of refusal, for example. Currents from his thought run everywhere.

What led you from philosophy to creative writing? What can fiction achieve that philosophy can’t?

1. M. Cioran says regarding his own break with philosophy: ‘I realised that in moments of great despair philosophy is no help at all, and offers absolutely no answers. So I turned to poetry and literature, where I found no answers either, but states of mind analogous to my own’.

I don’t quite agree: philosophy helps in diagnosing the causes of despair, and thereby achieving some distance from the horror. Philosophy is about self-knowledge, but this is not about our inner selves so much as learning about how our inner selves are constituted. It is in this way that philosophy can provide answers about the sources of despair – about the sources of joy, too; about the meaning of friendship, about Turner’s notion of communitas and its relationship with societas.

But I agree with Cioran about poetry and literature, which can embody despair so directly, making it tangible, real. And I admit that sometimes philosophy is of no help. I want company. Thank goodness for Dostoevsky, for Mann, for Beckett, for Duras, for Blanchot, for Lispector, for Cixous and the others. For Bernhard above all! No doubt they’ll ban him soon …

In My Weil, Marcie veers from enthused earnestness to heartbreaking cynicism to naïve absurdity. Is this a satirical take on the trials and tribulations of writing a doctorate or a metaphor for the competing identities of higher education?

Although they have each other, my characters become increasingly deranged by what they fear. They know so much about what’s going on – about, say, the dangers of surveillance: behaviour tracking, compliance tracking, predictive analytics (‘pre-crime’), warning us when and where lawbreaking will emerge; even prescriptive analytics: programmes to prevent the possibility of that emergence, sending in robot dogs and supersoldiers to where our masters think a rebellion might break out; locking down the population of a troublesome district just in case …

Marcie’s Vision, capital ‘V’ – you’ll have to read the novel for context – shows her even more. She discerns the coming internal surveillance, too: synthetic biology that could see so-called ‘electroceuticals’ introduced into the bloodstream, keeping an eye on our insides. She senses the possibility of the live-editing of our DNA – of the so-called improvement of the human genome to make us more compliant, more useful. Just right for when attention turns from the enemy without to the enemy within, treating us all as potential threats to be neutralised in advance.

There’s more, much more, that Marcie sees. It’s unbearable. All she can hope for is human unmanageability, which she understands as the capacity to love …

Nothing satirical intended with my depiction of Marcie, who tries to revive a myth of sorts, the story of the Antichrist, to give her a sense that something might be done, to inflate the issue to the level of the cosmos …

New interview with me at Hermitix. 

'Simone Now': me in discussion with Simone Weil scholar Christopher Thomas about My Weil, courtesy of The Philosopher. 

Benji DeMott reflects on My Weil as part of his rich account of the Annual Anti-Gentrification Street Festival in New York at First of the Month: a Website of the Radical Imagination. There's a lot here, but here is an extract: 

My friend’s wife’s sojourn on the block—they came to last year’s party too—brought to mind one of my favorite figures in My Weil—the comic novel by Lars Iyer I rushed through during the run-up to the Festival. Iyer puts a subcontinental twist on his deft meld of Lucky Jim and 24-Hour Party People—including a posh Indian beauty in his fictional crew of rad Brit grad students who are failing to do PhD’s under the aegis of the “Disaster Studies” Department at a beat-down Uni in Manchester. Gita rolls with her mates’ punky mockery of “Prof. Bullocks,” “art-wank,” Business Studies students, to-the-tenure-born types at a tonier school, yet she also repeatedly busts their high trifling. She serves as a grounded, desirous contra to her cohorts’ other exemplar—the student invoked in the novel’s title who tries to walk like Simone Weil (“nun-shoes” and all). I was tickled to find Gita facing off with a character acting Weily (even if the would-be saint wasn’t up to the real Rosa) at the very moment when my brother’s name was going up on a sign a half-block away from the Riverside Drive plaque memorializing Weil’s season in exile in NYC.

My Weil leans on its Mancunian black sun setting. Iyer’s anti-heroes still get thrills from sounds of their city’s greatest depressives—Joy Division, Happy Mondays, Morrissey, New Order. There’s wilding in the streets and faux-lumpen scuffling about in overgrown commons at the city’s edge. Iyer’s students of low life seem to be on to something when they connect shattered urban street people with changing climes. A walker in my city now can’t help but become a Master of Disaster Studies. (I seem to run into someone broken every time I do my nightly constitutional on the UWS.) “There is a natural alliance,” the real Weil wrote, “between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute supplicants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence.” The screamers I pass by (more frequently than ever?) aren’t mute, but they may as well be since their shouts in the street are overwritten by blankest generation hopelessness. My Weil’s wiseasses do no-futurism with a comic vengeance. Yet author Iyer, with help from his Gita, isn’t afraid to take the piss out of their lumpen-identification (without dumping on their compassion). My Weil sallies past fashionable leftism of psychosis. Near the end of the novel, Iyer plays with the history of cinema (the beach scene in Malick’s Tree of Life) and pop lore (raves at The Hacienda) to conger up restorative places: “Where we’ve retired the words eschatology and Gnosticism. Where the word apocalypse never passes our lips.” My instinct says Iyer would’ve been at home in our hood last Saturday. An affirmation in one of his scripts for a peace beyond negative dialectics—”What we Want (with a capital W):…Not to have lived for nothing. Not just to have fallen.”—seems on point when I think of my late brother’s life and gaze at this festive photo.

I heard an echo from My Weil’s muse as I pored over more post-Festival pics of our public happiness. (Maybe I was under the influence of one grinning hombre who was wearing a t-shirt that read BENDICIÓN.) The saint of outsiders once recalled an instance when she felt Jesus’s presence (as she tried to soothe a migraine by reading George Herbert’s sonnet “Love” (III).): “…in this sudden hold Christ had on me, neither my imagination nor my senses played any part; I simply felt, across the pain, the presence of love, similar to that which one can read on the smile of a loved face…”

Podcast: Jon Day and I discuss My Weil at Liberia Bookshop.

New essay by me on Mark E. Smith. 

For a limtied time only, by request: discussion of My Weil, Joy Division and Manchester available for download:

Download David Collard MY WEIL audio

EGS Public Lecture, on My Weil. Transcript of my brief talk follows.

In Plato’s Laws, the Athenian stranger claims that there are two arguments in particular that foster the belief in the gods – the antiquity and divinity of the soul and the order of the heavens under the control of reason. No one who has contemplated the heavenly bodies carefully could suppose that celestial events happen randomly. And no one can govern the polis, the city, who does not understand that the stars are steered by a divine will and exist in harmony with customs and law [nomos].

Susan Taubes observes that this idea of an ultimate harmony between human and cosmic nature runs from Plato to the Stoics: the conviction that human beings are at home in the universe. This cosmic ‘optimism’, as she calls it, can reassure the Stoics even amidst complete disillusionment within the political sphere. If the polis, the city, doesn’t provide the laws we want, then we should muse upon the law-governed cosmos instead – we should become cosmopolitan, citizens of the larger Whole. Stoic contemplation provides the reassurance that the order of the soul mirrors the order of the cosmos.

But what happens when this contemplation reveals neither the order of the soul nor the order of the heavens? What happens with the awareness that the disarray of the universe mirrors the disarray of the soul and it is no longer possible to harmonize the affairs of state according to a nomos that encompasses heaven and earth? The polis is cast adrift; our condition becomes what we can call disastrous, remembering the etymology of this word, since the stars, astres, have fallen.

*

Late Antiquity saw the arising of a movement of thought radically antipathetic to Stoicism, for which the sense of a cosmos as meaningful whole has collapsed. There was no longer a meaning-making connection between human beings and the world. What is called Gnosticism rejects the notion of cosmic order, considering the world in which we live to be evil, fallen and meaningless. Whilst there is such a thing as radically transcendent divine meaning, it remains utterly alien or the hidden – accessible only in a gnosis available to the elect. Gnosticism posits an absolute dualism: on the one hand, our world, which is at the sway of evil and irrational forces and ruled by the sham god called the demiurge and on the other, the transcendent realm of the true, inaccessible creator-God.

Gnosticism, some argue, is a fantasy of late nineteenth and twentieth century historians of religion. But the life of this fantasy is interesting. For Jacob Taubes, ancient Gnosticism was the template of all revolutionary critique, offering a critique of existence as such, manifesting itself in the desire to negate, abolish or limit the effects of the worldly order. Gnosticism is antinomian, rejecting all laws, including the law of the cosmos. Such antinomianism is lived as an active revolt, as an attempt to live against the world.

What form does that revolt take? It could be religious apostasy, or deliberately immoral behaviour, thwarting the social mores of a time. We might also think of Paul’s advice to the Corinthians to live worldly relations and actions ‘as though not’ (hōs mē): ‘From now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions …’

*

The characters of my novel, My Weil, PhD students in Disaster Studies practice a gnostic rebellion against the world in a number of ways – drinking, drugging, doomery, truancy, contempt towards all institutions. I say gnostic and not nihilistic, because they hold on to a version of transcendence as it is able to give a minimal meaning to their lives, even if it is only as the spur to oppose the legitimacy of the world. (Of course this view is consistent with what Scholem calls religious nihilism.) Such transcendence is linked, in their imagination, with apocalypse which, if it does not redeem the evil of the world, can at least destroy it. (Scholem: ‘nihilism arises from the rejection of reality because this reality [ … ] is only worth of being destroyed.’) One of my characters, Marcie, has a vision of the Antichrist, of the demiurge, who will be the false messiah of the coming end-times. But her vision also awakens her faith in the true Messiah, who will actually destroy the world and lead the way to a new creation.

Into their midst arrives my version of French philosopher Simone Weil. She, like them, is a PhD student in Disaster Studies, an opportunistic rebranding of Continental Philosophy at a lower-league table university. She, like them, is disturbed by the the absence of justice, mercy and goodness in the world. But she, unlike them, sees this absence dialectically, as precisely a sign of divine justice, mercy and goodness.

This emphasis on dialectics was, of course, present in the real Simone Weil. And it’s what make her work seem close to Gnosticism. Indeed, Susan Taubes drew Weil’s thought into conversation with the notion of Gnosticism developed in modernist Jewish philosophy, writing her PhD dissertation on the topic and publishing a well-known article called ‘The Absent God’, in which she develops the idea of a ‘religious atheism’ – of a ‘religious experience of the death of God’.

This is a conversation I try to further in my novel, bringing my gnostically-inclined characters into the orbit of my Simone Weil. They quiz her about the silence of God, about her direct action charity work, about contradictions and why we should contemplate them, about decreation and madness. My Simone claims that the crucifixion has never been deeper than today, with general indifference to God, a denial of the interest or significance of the crucifixion. ‘It’s only now that Jesus is being put to death in the fullest and most radical sense’, my Simone say. Only now, that is, that the illusions of belief can be burnt away, and faith must pass through atheism as through a purifying flame.

This is a fascinating thought for Johnny in particular, the narrator and protagonist of my novel, whose initials add up to Job. My Job is the strongly affected by the suffering and violence he sees around him, as well as his own fear of madness. My Simone shows him how he might transmute his torment at the affliction of others. God might be powerless in the created order, but my Simone shows Johnny how, in the example of her charity work, it is possible to act for God. Compassion, properly acted upon, is God’s work in us, creating the meaning that painfully lacking in our lives.

Simone appears to be able to provide Johnny with the true gnosis sought by the Gnostic – the knowledge of God which can give meaning to the world. But this isn’t quite it. Because it’s not actually about knowledge at all. What’s needed is to maximize the dialectical power of the contradiction between God and the world, between good and evil, between the supernatural and the natural, between the eternal and the temporal – and to experience them in their harmony. It’s to deepen the distance between these terms, to plunge yet deeper into evil and finitude and suffering and loss in order to summon their opposite. A task that must appear mad, but whose madness is the correlate of the madness of God in creating the world.

But Simone Weil, in reality or in my novel, is no Gnostic. Where there was dualism, she wants to see ratio. Where true God and cosmos were set apart, she wants to understand the relation between them, the correlation of contraries. Where there is my character’s alternation between nihilistic churn and rushing apocalyptic ecstasy, there is Simone’s advocacy of contemplating contradiction – of what would, for her, reveal the dialectical unity or harmony of God and world, good and evil, supernatural and natural, and so on, thereby overcoming Gnostic dualism.

Who wins? Can Simone Weil really hold back the disaster? Is the harmony she seeks really possible? Does dialectics work? Can you really pull God out of the hat of Gnosticism, deeply felt?

Midwest Review

Foreword Reviews

In Lars Iyer’s comedic novel My Weil, a ragtag cohort of doctoral candidates studies at a Manchester university’s second-rate philosophy program—rebranded Disaster Studies. The members of this grimy and vibrant group spend a lot of their time together, pondering the politics of the apocalypse. They quote philosophers, bicker, and compete over hookup partners too. Still, they are their own family by choice, sharing esoteric knowledge, nicknames, and hangouts.
As a unit, the students bus and wander from the university to their regular café and their regular bar. Satire rules in the wild park space, the Ees, where they’re  creating a theory-heavy student film. Their discourses are funny, even as their surroundings become psychedelic and unmoored from England’s decaying rustbelt. Their intoxication and boisterousness contrast with their austere new friend, who has taken the very name of thinker Simone Weil as her own.

The book also revels in Manchester’s rich musical history. Joy Division’s doomed Ian Curtis, frozen forever in the big emotions of young adulthood, sets a  lovelorn tone for the story that mirrors that of its central narrator, Johnny. Johnny’s voice often disappears into the collective one, but he’s the one member of  the group looking outward. His friends are all thinking about themselves or their art—except for fascinating Simone, who seems determined to erase herself in the name of religious servitude.

Party scenes send them all out of their comfort zones; the book’s quick summaries of the other students lead to hilarity. The descriptions of the goth philosophical duo, Weep (allies to Johnny and friends) are delightful whenever they make an appearance, including in departmental badminton games.

A perfect comic novel, My Weil shares the intense, urgent feelings of close young friends who are out to save the world, whether it notices them or not.

MEREDITH GRAHL COUNTS (September / October 2023)

Lumpen Revolutionaries: A My Weil Playlist at The Quietus. 

Playlist for My Weil at Largehearted Boy.

Shepherd Express

The novel is a funny satire of post-everything academia, written in clipped sentences that reflect the fractured thinking of its characters.

As a satire of post-everything society, set in the post-common-sense environs of a culture studies graduate program, the novel My Weil is devastatingly funny. Many characters are enrolled in a subject called Disaster Studies—a field ripe for the actual insights that seldom arrive. Instead, Disaster Studies students bang on about “late heterosexuality” and “queer in theory but straight in life.” They are cynical—pessimists for whom getting drunk is a “refusal of our new teetato-totalitarian world.” But perhaps all hope is not lost. “We love Potentiality. We love what’s Possible.” They undercut the thought by adding, “We love Utopia.”

Into this morass wanders a woman calling herself—after the French philosopher—Simone Weil. And she actually believes in something—God? “Every meaning we give the word, God, is idolatry,” she says. “As for atheism … I think it’s possible to speak of negative faith.” Unlike her classmates, she is actually doingsomething, including working to help the poor, not just theorizing about it.

Author Lars Iyer is probably writing from his experience as a philosophy lecturer and creative writing professor at Newcastle University. Writing in the clipped sentences, the Twittergraphs that reflect the fractured coherence of contemporary discourse, Iyer captures the sense that we are all enrolled in Disaster Studies, even if only auditing the course work.

David Luhrssen