Landfill Thinkers

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?

Postgraduate Laughter

There's no laughter like postgraduate laughter, we agree. There's nothing as dark. Nothing as knowing. It's death-row laughter, we agree. It's the laughter of those condemned to death. Because they are condemned to death, the postgraduates. Exposed to the greatest of thoughts, the greatest of books, they're condemned to a life without meaning, without succour, to a life of shit in a world of shit …

The postgraduates wear us out, as they always do. It's like looking in a terrible mirror. It's like seeing ourselves, robbed of self-satisfaction, robbed of our pandering. To think that we, too, burned with the same black fire! And to think that by some strange miracle, by some lapse in the logic of the universe, we actually found jobs. To think that we – we – found ourselves in academic jobs.

Postgraduate Angels

The postgraduate is the angel of the academic world, we agree. They're between worlds – mediators between the world of full-time lecturers and the netherworld of the undergraduate. They teach – they often take seminars – but they are not a real part of the teaching staff. They study, it is true, but they're not entirely students, either.

They have a sense of what they want to achieve: an academic job, an academic career, but they know that there are very few such jobs, and very little chance of a career. They've fled from the world into academia, but they know they will most likely find themselves back there, as though they'd entirely dreamt up their postgraduate lives. 

Will they be workers in the world, dreaming of being postgraduates, or postgraduates, eternal postgraduates, who are dreaming of working in the world?

And then there is the torture of study itself. It's not enough to want to escape. Not enough to hole yourself up and dream. How many postgraduates fail to complete their dissertations! How many of them stumble in their studies, and fail to get up? How many of them fail their exams? 

And for those who pass? For those who work their way to an MA or a PhD? There are barely any jobs in the universities. There's barely anything for which to apply. Now it begins, the time of horror, when you and every other idiot's competing for a job. Ah, what horror, when you learn it is the same skills necessary to get on in the world that are necessary to get on academia!

But here we are among them, the angels, the postgraduates. How slim they are! How tall, all dressed in black, and smoking their cigarettes! How intense they are, talking of their work, and weighing up the conference speakers. How focused, talking of ideas and only ideas …

Among the Postgraduates

Sometimes, you need to be among the postgraduates, we agree. Sometimes you need to feel them alongside you, full of life, full of brilliance.

It's like swimming with dolphins, we agree. It's like snorkelling through a shoal of fish. You feel tiny electrical shocks on your skin. Your hair feels as though it's standing on end. Ah, what brilliance! What fleetness!

Haven't we always found ourselves drawn to postgraduate keenness? They have antennae for the new. What they don't know about the latest ideas! What they don't know about the latest thought from France! 

But it is the fact that they feel the horror of the world behind them that makes our desire to be among them essential. They know the horror of Britain. They're fleeing it; that's what drove them into further study. And it drives them through their studies, that horror. It stands behind them like a drover.

Let Me See The Postgraduates

Conference evening, on Greenwich lawns.

How many speakers we've heard! How many ideas! Sometimes, we have to admit, we were bored. We fell to drawing monkey butlers in our notebooks. Sometimes, W. wrote an obscenity in big letters in my notebook, or I drew something obscene in his. But at other times, we were exhilarated, set on fire by thoughts. Sometimes, we felt caught in the updraft of someone else's ideas. We felt flown like kites by the thoughts of others.

But now we're tired, after our day. Our limbs feel heavy; our eyes are closing.

There's only one thing for it. – 'Take me to the postgraduates', W. says.

Aphorisms from vagrants, collected by the Plymouth based artist, Robert Lenkiewicz:

The Bishop:

I'm what they call the unwanted guest and that's the way I'm always going to be.

There are tributaries and estuaries and they go into the great deep sea there to be obliterated.

It takes a lunatic to find out what is really going on. You are now talking to a lunatic, sir!  A lunatic is someone who takes an interest in something no one else takes an interest in.  For the rest there is no escape.

The Singer:

If you're goin' to prepare yourself for life, why not prepare yourself for death? College may prepare you for a bit of life, but what about death?

Why shouldn't a man prepare his own death? I'll go out gracefully with the flowers. I'll even clip my toenails for the pathologist so that he can't look at me and say, "The dirty bastard!"

Without suffering, I'm lost: I wouldn't know what to do without suffering.

Now I live in a church as well, you know, God's church, the only real one there is, not an architects' one, a proper one. No painted stars on my ceiling, but real ones; none of them silly statues, but trees and bushes.

Some time back now I knocked on the door of this vicar an' I asked him for some food; do you know I could see him thinkin' twice on the matter. I says to him, "Do you believe in God?" "Of course I do!" he shouts. "Well then," I says, "come on the road with me.  I believe in him implicitly.  Go lock up your car an' come with me." Well, he nearly cut my head off with the slammin' of his door.

Black Sam:

I went to Moorhaven once – injections, pills and all that. I realised it was a load of rubbish. I sees this psychiatrist bloke, only a young 'un. I was weighing him up.  He was like me; he knew nothing.

A tinker give me this dog. I went to the north of Scotland with him; I loved that dog.  He lay on me 'ead in any barn. He died, though.  It didn't make any sense.

A handshake can judge you.

We're all strange people; we're all escapin'; we're all fanatics.

You searchin' for somethin', but what? If I could have had one spark, just one spark.  There's some force that governs.  Some gigantic force, but what does it govern?

Is there a God? That's what they say. Bah! Nature's the god. Force, that's all, force and more force.  The birds know it; that's why they sing.

Diogenes:

I knows I'm a bloody fool and there's some bloody fools don't know it.

Harmonica Jim:

If you want to know what's on this earth, then be careful what comes out of your mouth. There's beauty on the world and you can get beauty out of it.  The little voice is stupid; if you let that control you, then heaven help you.

You've got to make them understand you, not you them, otherwise they'll soon make shit out of you; they're very powerful people.

I get more from talking to myself than talking to most of the buggers round here.

You can walk through a graveyard and some of them that's buried there could have been you.

Come and visit me any time, the doors are always open, so are the windows.  There's no floors in my house, so watch it!

Sons of the Book

We dream of the book we might write together, which might appear under both our names. Our Anti-Oedipus, he says. Our Anti-Duhring. Our System-Programme.

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

A book that made itself, somehow. The book granted Pinnocchio's wish to be a real thing. A living book, a living flame, a star which consumes only itself.

A book that does not need us, that's our dream. A book that has its own adventures, far away from us, cleverer than us and better than us, a book which surpasses us in everything.

And who will we be, cast into the outer darkness by its glory?, W. says. Who will we be, measured by our book, by the greatness of our book?  We will be sons of the book, we agree. We'll be fathers on the book which will give birth to us as its sons, that's what we dream of. That our book will give birth to us as it dismisses us and sends us away. As it pushes us away with a laugh and leaps into the world …

I'll be reading from Spurious as part of a discussion with Lee Rourke and Stuart Evers at Waterstones, Islington, on the 12th May, 6.30-8.00. Link (scroll halfway down).

There’s Nothing Wrong With You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Left Behind

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

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

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

Now and in Essex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chouchani

There are said to be strange superstitions among those former Essex postgraduates who found academic employment, a conventional career. There are odd practices that would themselves be worthy of scholarly analysis. Is it really true that you have to leave your back door open in case a former associate raps at your window? Is it true that a place must always be left at your table in case a former Essex postgraduate arrives unbidden for a meal?

Some say that there is a secret fund into which the more solvent former Essex postgraduates pay upon which their poorer fellows might draw; that there is a shadowy Institute of Study, a secret society with secret rituals, akin to the Freemasons, to which all the former Essex postgraduates belong. That there are secret handshakes and secret winks; that certain signs allow one former Essex postgraduate to recognise another, even though they belonged to different academic years and might never have met at their alma mater.

How can he explain it to me?, W. wonders. He recalls the legend of Chouchani, the Talmudic master who taught both Levinas and Weisel.

No one knows anything about Chouchani, W. says, where he was born or grew up; where he acquired his immense learning which was not just about Judaism and Jewish matters, but mathematics, too – philosophy – the arts. How many languages did he speak? All the living languages of Europe, and a few dead ones besides. He spoke fluent Hungarian; fluent Basque. He lived like a tramp, unkempt, wandering, staying for a while with those he took as his pupils.

You had no choice if Chouchani took you as his student, W. says. He selected you, not you him. He'd bang on your window; he'd demand to be admitted to your home. And there he would stay, night after night. There, demanding nothing but attention to the intellectual matters at hand. Nothing but study, and seriousness in study. And then, just like that – did he think you'd learnt enough? – he disappeared. Just like that, he was gone, his room cleared – disappeared.

But we know now where he went, this Mary Poppins of Jewish studies. We can trace his path: one year he was in New York, the next, Strasbourg, the year after, Jerusalem. And didn't he die in Montevideo? Wasn't it in Uruguay that his tombstone can be found, and on it, the lines, 'His birth and his life are bound up in a secret'.

And it's still secret, despire the internet, despite Facebook. Still secret, despite all kinds of philosophical detective work. Whole books have been written about him, he who did not write a line. Whole websites have been set up about him, he who never allowed himself to be photographed. 

His mastery of the Bible, the two Talmuds, the Midrash, the Zohar and the work of Maimonides. His mastery of the latest theories in mathematics, in physics. His total knowledge of literature, ancient and contemporary. His philosophical learning …

Can I imagine it?, W. says. Well, now I am to imagine an entire generation of thinkers who rose to the same heights. I am to imagine an entire generation of Essex postgraduates in whom thought was burning.

How harsh he was, Chouchani! How harsh they were with one another, the Essex postgraduates. How merciless in debate he was, Chouchani! But they, too, were merciless, W. says; they, too, would let nothing pass. How serious he was! But they too were serious, the Essex postgraduates. Thought, to them, was always a matter of life and death.

Had Chouchani really held a knife to the throat of one of his pupils, who was slow to understand the repercussions of Tossafot's commentary? Well, a knife had been held to his throat, W. says, in Essex University Student Union because of some misunderstanding or another, some slowness about Heidegger's commentary on Kant, and rightly so! He needed to be taught a lesson, W. says. He needed to learn!

And hadn't he, in turn, held knives to the throat of younger Essex postgraduates! That's another superstition: that the former Essex postgraduate keep a knife in the house at all times, blade sharpened. A knife that might be used against him if he becomes abetrayer of thought, or that he might use on one of thought's betrayers. So I'd better watch it when I visit him, W. says. 

Missing Thinkers

What became of them, the Essex Postgraduates?, W. and I wonder. What, of the would-be thinkers touched by the heavenly fire? Oh, not the ones who found jobs – not the state philosophers and state political theorists, but the other, the wild philosophers and wild political theorists – the thinkers driven out, and who drove themselves out.

What happened to them, those known thereafter only by the stray signals they sent back? What, as they loosened themselves from old bonds, old friendships, and contact with them became intermittent?

Some disappeared completely. Where did they go?, we wonder. Did they change their names? Did they go underground? Did they travel to the four corners of the earth in search of obscurity? Is that what they've found, in the mountains of Yaktusk: obscurity? Did they manage to disappear in the ice deserts of Antarctica? Did they lose themselves in the rebuilt Shanghai or in the Favelas of Rio de Janerio? Did they hole up in the Aleutian islands to write a magnum opus?

Did they wander like Japanese poets through the stone forests of Yunnan, leaving traces of their passage with fragments of as yet unwritten philosophical masterpieces? Did they take to the steppes to think and write in secret, getting ready for their magnificent return? Did their heads seem to explode as they lay beneath shooting stars on Goa beaches bombed out on ketamine? Did the pain seem to radiate out of them like light as they volunteered to be crucified in Pampanga?

Some devoted themselves to politics, we're sure of that, to militancy, joining the Zapististas, signing up with the Naxalites. Some joined the last of Maoists in Nepal, others to fight alongside Hamas in Palestine. Still others became partisans, became insurgents, became warriors of the scrubland, sleepers on the plains, ever on the move, ever watchful. Some deserted to head further into the wilderness, further into obscurity. Some were known only as missing persons, their relatives searching for them in third world jungles, their friends leaving tributes on Facebook pages.

Some became ill, mentally ill, we're sure of that. They wanted derangement, to derange themselves. They wanted insanity, seeking it by every means: by drugs, to be sure, but also by almost ascetic rigour. We must become what we are, they said to themselves. Each one of us is his own illness, they said to themselves. And so they sought to intensify their illness, to drive it deeper, and then to enter wholly into it as into a secret fissure.

Some sought solitude, silence, wanting not to express themselves, but to have nothing to say. Some gave up thought for art, for anti-art, making sculptures in the wild, sculptures out of the wilderness, for no one to see. Some wrote great poems, then burned them, watching the pages crispen and catch fire. Some wrote great philosophical treatises and threw the pages into the wind.

Some sought to lay waste their lives, to throw them away. Some sought to sacrifice themselves to nothing in particular, wanting only to squander what had been given to them. Some drank themselves into oblivion. Some smoked themselves into vacancy. Some bombed out of their brains on hallucigens.

Some wanted to become just like anyone else; no: more like anyone else than anyone, as anonymous as possible, as buried in ordinary life as possible, taking the most mundane of jobs, leading the most mundane of lives.

Some, in our minds, sought to think without thinking, to write without writing. What matters is to live this 'without', they said, very mysteriously. What matters is to live outside thought,outside writing, they said, and we had no idea what they meant.

Some gave in to bouts of despair, throwing themselves into rivers and oceans. Some gassed themselves in bedsits, some launched themselves through open sixth floor windows. Some reddened the snow with chunks of bloody brain and skull. Some broke their kunckles punching walls. Some pissed themselves in gutters, and shat themselves in holding cells. Some cut open their bellies and let their guts spill out.

Some took upon themselves all the miseries of the world; some believed themselves responsible for them all, the miseries of the world. Some cut their throats because of that responsibility for those miseries. Some drove sword blades into their chest because of what they hadn't done to prevent those miseries.

Some sought to side with the proletariat, earning no more than the proletariat, gleaning fruit and vegetables from market stalls, clothes discarded in warehouse bins. Some sought to live alongside the proletariat, and the lumpenproletariat, the thieves and vagabonds. Some lived among the subproletariat, the homeless, refugees who had escaped deportation.

Some half-drank themselves to death to live with the alcoholics. Some destroyed the bridge of their nose sniffing solvents, sniffing turps, to live among the solvent-sniffers and the turps-sniffers.

Some became recluses, shutting themselves up inside; some tookhikkikomori, living with their parents but not seeing them, living on food left outside their door. Some took holy vows and disappeared into monasteries. Some became self-flagellants and self-scourgers. Some joined cults; some started them. Some preached on the street about the end of the world. Some tried tobring about the end of the world, to bring the end closer.

Some sold themselves as mercenaries, some as prostitutes. Some joined the FBI, others the Israeli army. Some sided with the rats and the cockroaches, and dreamt of being eaten alive by rats and cockroaches. Some wanted to be devoured from the inside out, and longed for biting termites to crawl into their nostrils, to crawl into their ears. Some came to side with viral life, with bacteria and protozoa and dreamt of a world without humans, without vertebrates, without any kind of higher life.

Some, tormented by thought, and the demands of thought, sought to destroy their very capacity to think. Some sought to slice off their own thinking heads, some placed a bit to their skull and began to drill. Some drove pencils through their nostrils into their brain. Some shot themselves through one eye, and then another. Some asked – begged – for lobotomy. Some for their brains to be scooped out of their skull. Some to be left perpetually asleep, aging quietly. Some to be forced into an induced coma; some to be battered into a state of imbecility.

And did some of them know joys, too? Did some discover what it meant to live?

Thinkers

Essex, in the old days. The University of Essex …

W. remembers the guest speakers of the old department. Envoys from Old Europe, taught by the Gods of Old Europe: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and who told them about the Gods of Europe; thinkers who were friends and contemporaries of Deleuze, of Foucault, and who told them of the world of Deleuze and Foucault; thinker-experts who'd spent their whole lives in the archives, or studying in seclusion with the works of a Master. Thinker-militants who'd hung out with Debord and Vaneigim, and who could pass on stories of Debord and Vaneigim.

Literary scholars who read in 27 languages; philosopher-scientists with advanced degrees in astrophysics and molecular biology; thinker-mathematicians fascinated by dissipative structures andcomplex systems; thinkers of irreversibility and indeterminism, ofstrange loops and paralogic …

Neurophenomenological thinkers. Neo-Spinozists thinkers and Neo-Leibnizians. Nominalists and anti-nominalists. Mathematical thinkers and poetical thinkers.

Thinkers who had had distinct phases in their thought. ('In my early writings, I was convinced that …'; 'Later on, I concluded that …'; 'For a long time, I thought …') Thinkers who were the subject of conferences and roundtables.

Thinkers who hated other thinkers ('Don't mention Derrida to him!'), thinkers who'd broken with old friends over intellectual matters. Over political matters. Thinkers at war, for whom philosophical enmity had become personal enmity, become name-calling, hair-pulling.

Thinkers who'd shot away half their faces in despair. Thinkers with deep scars across their wrists. Thinkers who wept as they spoke. Thinkers whose pauses were longer than their talks. Thinkers in breakdown, their lives careening. Thinkers who spoke in great gusts about the misery of their lives. Thinkers who told them why they couldn't think, why thought was impossible, why the end had come, their end and the end of the world.

Wild thinkers; drunk thinkers; high thinkers, nostrils flared, pupils tiny, staying up for whole weeks at a time. Thinkers with missing teeth, with a missing eye. Thinkers with missing fingers, and with great clumps of their hair torn out. Thinkers with terrible rashes around their mouth. Sick thinkers, walking with two sticks.Coughing thinkers, who could hardly get out a word. Thinkers who spoke too quietly to be heard. Thinkers who spoke too loudly, half-deafening the front row. Thinker-declaimers, thinker-prophets who all but set fire to themselves in the seminar room.

Exiled thinkers, forced out of their home countries for crimes of thought. Lost thinkers, leftover from vanished intellectual movements; thinkers in mourning for dead thinker-partners.Betrayed thinkers, who spoke of backstabbing and purgings, of auto-critiques and expulsions.

Thinkers with neck-kerchiefs. Thinkers with cravats. Thinkers with Hawaiian shirts (Jean-Luc Nancy, after a trip to the USA). Thinkers in plus fours (Marion, trying to impress the dons at Cambridge). Thin thinkers in roll-neck sweaters, with sharp checkbones and shaved heads. Tubby thinkers, epicureans full of joy, with great, jolly faces and thick folds of fat at the back of their necks. Worker-thinkers with thick, flat fingers and spadelike hands, who'd laboured alongside others in the fields and the mines.Serene thinkers, almost godly, looking into the infinite with widely spaced eyes.

Laughing thinkers, who laughed because they could think, because of they were free to think. Thinkers who'd escaped from imprisonment and war. Saintly thinkers, of unimaginable integrity, of unimaginable purity. Nomadic thinkers who, like swifts, never touched down, who moved only from conference to conference as invited speakers. Traveller thinkers, who had forsaken the lecture circuit for private voyages across ice-sheets and through jungles.Ascetic thinkers who spoke of great solitudes, great retreats. Thinkers who had seen things, lived things we couldn't imagine.

Thinkers who knew what it meant to live. Thinkers who served life. Thinkers who thought in order to live, and to be alive.

Thinkers who spoke of the ecstasy of thinking after their talk, in the student bar. Thinkers who spoke of the beatitude of thought. Thinkers who said the only thing that mattered was to think.

Ah, didn't they meet them all, all the thinkers of Old Europe, the Essex postgraduates?, W. says.

I am speaking as part of a series of philosophy events at the literary festival at Hay-on-Wye. The full catalogue is here. My events are as follows:

Weds 1st June, 12.00: Once Upon a Time the End, with Jesse Norman and Kabir Chibber. Venue: Globe Hall.

From rolling news to Twitter, attention spans are shrinking, and substantive messages are sharpening into slogans. Will postmodernity see a distillation of literary meaning into fewer (better?) words, or will our ability to tell big, expansive stories be destroyed by glib brevity, leaving us at the mercy of blurbs, stings, tweets and zingers?

Same date, 3.00: Writing the End Times. Venue: Talk Tent.

Lars Iyer talks about his philosophical black comedy Spurious. 'It is near to the end of days, shortly before the appearance of a "stupid Messiah". Two British men, employed somehow in academia, muse on their lack of success and incapacity for real thought while drinking too much gin…'

The Heavenly Fire

The Student Union bar. This is where he used to drink as a postgraduate student, W. says. It's where he learned to drink, he who had been near-teetotal before – and to smoke, he who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, with his fellow postgraduates.

Do I have any sense of what was like to feel part of a generation?, W. says. Can I understand what it was to have something expected of you, to have faith placed in you? How can I grasp what it meant to have a sense that what was happening could have done so onlythere and then - that the conditions were right for something to begin, really to begin?

Did they think they could change the world?, I ask him. Not the world, but thought, W. says. They thought they could change thinking. Thought they were the beginning of something, a new movement. Thought they augured what Britain might become: a thinking country, just as France is a thinking-country, just as Germany was a thinking-country.

This is where they spoke, and of great things. This is where theyspoke - can I even understand what that means? To speak, to be swept along by great currents. To be borne along, part of something, some ongoing debate. And for that debate to have stakes, to matter. For thought to become personal, a matter of where you stood in the most intimate details of your life. Ah, how can he convey it to me, who has never known intellectual life, intellectual friendship? How to one who barely knows what friendship means, let alone the intellect?

A life of the mind, that's what they'd chosen. A life of the mind for postgraduate students from all over Britain, and therefore a kind of internal exile. Because that's what it means to be a thinker in Britain: a kind of internal exile. They turned their backs on their families, on old friends. On the places of their birth. They'd turned from their old life, their old jobs, old partners. They'd travelled from the four corners of the country to be here, to arrive here, to be reborn here. Essex, Essex: what joy it was in that dawn to be alive …

This is where they spoke, says W. very insistently. Do I know what it means to speak? This is where they argued. Do I know what it means to argue? This is where they fought in thought. This is where they loved, too. The Student Union Bar: this is where thought was alive, thought was life, thought was a matter of life and death …

This is where they spoke. Voices trembled. Voices were raised. They laughed, and the laughter died away. Did they weep? No doubt there was weeping. No doubt some wept. This is where they promised themselves to thought. This is where they signed the covenant …

It was like serving together in a secret army. Even now, when he meets them, the former postgraduates of Essex, he sees the sign. Even now, it's clear; they are marked – they were marked then. Thought was life. Thought was their lives. They were remade in thought's crucible. They flared up from thought's fire. 

They learned to read French thought in French, German thought in German. They studied Latin and ancient Greek. Imagine it: a British person reading ancient Greek! They crossed the channel and studied in Paris. They plunged into Europe and studied in Rome. They visited great archives. They read in great libraries.  

They were becoming European, W. says. Do I have any idea what it meant: to become European. Some of them even learned tospeak other languages. Imagine it: a British person speaking French. Imagine it: an Englander in Berlin, conversing in German …

They went en masse to a two-week conference in Italy. Imagine it: en masse, British postgraduates at a two-week conference in Italy. They played chess in the sun, and drank wine until their teeth turned red. Italy! The Mediterranean! Who among them had any idea of Italy, of the Mediterranean? Who who had ever been to Italy, or to the Mediterranean?

The sun burned them brown. Their pallid British bodies: brown. Their teeth red. The sun turned them mad. They thought as Van Gogh painted: without a hat. Hatless, in the full sun, they became madmen and madwomen of thought.

Essex broke them. Essex rebuilt them. Essex broke their Britishness, their provincialness. Essex gave them philosophy. It gave them politics. It gave them friendship, and by way of philosophy, by way of politics. They were close to Europe, terribly close. Like Hoelderlin's Greece, Europe was the fire from heaven. Like Hoelderlin's Germany, Britain was to be set on fire by heaven.

Ah, what happened to them all, the postgraduates of Essex? What, to the last generation – the last generation of Essex postgraduates? Some got jobs. Some found work in obscure corners of Britain (where else could they find work but in obscure corners?). Some went abroad, back to Europe, back to the heavenly fire.

Some fell back into Britishness – fell into the drowning pool of Britishness. Some drowned, gasping for air, finding no air, in Britain. Hadn't they seen too much? Hadn't they learnt what they lacked? Hadn't they a sense now of great thought, of great politics? Hadn't their skies been full of light, of the heavenly fire?

 

'Conversations With Humans', brief interview with the Manchester branch of Blackwell's (Precinct Centre, Oxford Road). I'll be giving a reading there tonight at 6.30.

The University of New Jerusalem

The last thinker of Essex Postgraduate legend will come on the last day, which the Germans call the youngest day, W. says. He'll come in the last hour of the last day, wreathed in clouds, in the last minute, and every thinking eye shall see him. He'll come in the last second, and all the enemies of thought will wail because of him.

And he will set down the book the carries with him, that is known as the Book of Life. And he'll unlock its seven seals, one by one, the Book, and stand back as, with each seal, a miracle is wrought, an alteration of the world as it is.

And when he opens the first seal? A white horse will go out, with a white rider, dazzling with light, and raze the universities of the southeast. And when he opens the second? A red horse will go out, with a red rider, dripping with blood, and raze the universities of the southwest. And the third? A black horse will ride out, with its black rider, cloaked in the night, and raze the universities of the northwest. And the fourth? A pale horse will ride out, with a pale rider, clothed in winding sheets, and raze the universities of the northeast.

And when he opens the fifth? Those expelled from their jobs, those sacked from righteous departments, will have white robes given unto them. Postgraduates who never finished their studies, who broke themselves against the texts of Heidegger and Levinas and Deleuze: they too shall receive white robes. Undergraduate geniuses, brighter than a thousand suns, who never received funding for postgraduate study: they too shall wear robes of white. Thinkers outside the university, who lived their entire lives in dreadful jobs, thinkers of unimaginable integrity, unimaginable determination: they too will be white-robed. Thinkers too mad to think, institutionalised thinkers, alcoholic thinkers of the gutter, who were never given a chance: they, too, will be lifted up and clothed in white.

And the sixth? There will come a great thought-quake, a shaking of books. The sun of thought will become as black as a sackcloth of ash, and the moon of thought as red as blood. And the false stars of thought – the careerists and pontificators; the popularisers and dumbers-down; the depoliticisers and despiritualisers will fall unto earth. And the false heaven of thinking, full of Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy, of Philosophy in 60 Minutes guides, of Critical Thinkers series, of Guides to the Perplexed will be rolled up like a scroll …

And the enemies of thought will hide themselves in the dens and the rocks of the mountains, and will say unto those mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the face of the last thinker, for the great day of his wrath is come …

And the seventh? When the seventh seal of thought is opened? No one knows what will happen then, W. says. No one can imagine it. Every enemy of thought shall seek death: that's what been prophesised, and they shall not find it. Every enemy of thought shall desire to die, and have death flee from them.

There will be great disasters: the trees will be burnt up, and all the green grass burnt up. Great mountains burning with fire will be case into the sea, and the sea will become blood. Flesh and blood will rain from the sky, and bodiless voices cry out in the night.

The Leviathan will wake. The Behemoth. And the Beast will reign in Babylon, the regnerated city. And the remnant who will survive, the 144,000 who will have the last thinker's name written on their foreheads, will ready themselves for the last battle, for the Armageddon when Babylon is smashed and the Beast vanquished.

And then? A new City will appear in heaven. A new dispensation. The University of New Jerusalem: that's what they'll call it. The University where all are students, and all teachers. The University without courses or curricula, where each learns from the lips of the other. The University of Speech, where each addresses to the other and is thereby awoken. The University in Flight, where what matters is to move with thought, to dance and sing with it, and not to remain still. The University of the Periphery, which will be at the edges of everywhere, and wherever you turn.

The Path of Idiocy

In the end, W. says, the last thinker might be each of us, any of us. He (W.) might be the last thinker, but so might I. There's nothing which distinguishes the last thinker from anyone else, not until he thinks in W.s mind, he says. Not until he speaks of what thinks.

It's a thought that will let you become the last thinker, W. says. It's only the thought that matters, W. tells himself. Having the thought, or letting the thought have you. Perhaps it's only being able to void yourself, unburden yourself sufficiently to let the thought come that will distinguish you as the last thinker, as the last of thinkers.

That's why we must follow the path of idiocy, W. says. That's why he must follow me, the perfect idiot. He's waiting for the clearing to open. Waiting for idea to be born inside him. Waiting to be spoken, ventriloquised. It's quite a process.

The Perfect Idiot

From the greatest stupidity, the greatest thought, W. sometimes thinks to himself, he's not sure why. Will the last thinker – the thinker who will wrap it all up, the Messiah of thought – be distinguishable from the perfect idiot? The last thinker, the perfect idiot: they're versions of the same figure, in W.'s imagination, he says. They're the same figure, viewed in different ways.

Is idiocy the path to thought, or thought, idiocy? Is idiocy the outcome of the process, of thought? W.'s not sure of the answer.

The Last Thinker

W. tells me of the legend among Essex postgraduates of the last thinker, of the thinker of the end of times, the alpha and omega of thought.

Of course, you'll never be able to tell who the last thinker is, W. says. He'll look like anyone else, W. says. At least that's how he (W.) sees it: the last thinker'll look exactly like anyone else. And perhaps he doesn't know he's the last thinker himself. Perhaps he has no idea of his mission, W. says, like a god who's forgotten he's a god. Like a son of God, unaware of his calling.

Perhaps it's the last thinker he seeks, attending early morning conference sessions. Perhaps that's what's he looks for in the thinkers he invites to stay with him in his home, W. muses. He's waiting, in his own way, W. says. At any moment, his guest will be revealed in glory. At any moment, it will be the last thinker, the messiah of thought, who sits beside him. 

Good God, perhaps that's why he even hangs out with me! Is Lars the last thinker?, W. sometimes catches himself thinking as he walks beside me on the street. Is he the thinker of the end of times?, he muses sometimes, watching me eat my chips, tomato ketchup staining my jumper. Probably not, W. thinks. 

Sons of the Book

W. dreams of the book both of us would write. The book under our names - not a book about a book, but a book. On its own two feet: a book. A book! And not a book about books! That's what we want, isn't it: to write a book that is greater than us, better than us? That will dismiss us as soon as it is written. A book that exists all by itself, with no need for us, that's what we want. A book that slams the door in our faces. A book that dismisses us, which says: go away! I'm too busy!

A book, and not a book about books, we agree. Not a commentary-book or an introductory-book, but a book that exists unto itself, that gave birth to itself from nothing and hangs there in the void. A book that does not need us. There it goes, we'll say, our Frankenstein's monster of a book. There it wanders, across the ice, sufficient unto itself, cleverer than us and better than us, the book that surpasses us in everything.

To make something we could not make. To write beyond our abilities. A book, and not a book about books: the book, on its own two legs, and running through the forest like Baba Yaga's hut. A book that made itself. A book that is not a fabrication, but something real. The book granted Pinocchio's wish to be a real thing. A living book, a living flame, a star which consumes only itself.

And who will we be, cast into the outer darkness by its glory? Who will we be, measured by our book? Ah, the book will not want us. It will lie in our hands, closed and inert. It sit on our bookshelves, dreaming its own dream. It will come, twenty-four copies of it in a big box, our free publisher's copies; it will come, ready to post out to our friends, to send out to the world … but the book will already be elsewhere. The book will already be having adventures of its own. The book will have already left us behind …

An, but it would redeem our lives, wouldn't it, our book, our son? It would justify our lives and redeem them, the swordstroke of the book. We will be the sons of our book, we tell ourselves. We will be fathers of our book, which will give birth to us as to its sons, that's what we dream of. That our book will give birth to us as it dismisses us, and sends us away, dreaming of what – somehow – we had done; dreaming, stunned, of what wrought itself from the mediocrity of our lives.

The Thought-Harvest

It's time to publish, W. says. Time for the thought-harvest. Time to bring in the crops of his thought, stunted as they are, withered as they are. W.'s going to publish his thoughts on Cohen and Rosenzweig. On messianism.

Ah, of course he never really understood Cohen, such an unusual figure. And he never really understood Rosenzweig, either. Or messianism. What could he possibly make of messianism?

Time for the archive doors to open, and for his paper to be ceremonially placed in the stacks. Time for the garland of renown to be placed around his neck, and for the laurels of thought-victory to be placed on his head. Time for space to be made for W. at the table of thinkers.

Yes, it's time for his paper to appear on the desks of his fellow thinkers. Time for W.'s thought-contemporaries to say half-resentfully, half-admiringly, 'So he's finally done it'. So he's finally done it: remembering the promise of the thinker they thought he might one day be. Remembering the promise of thinkers they might have been. Remembering the springtime of their lives, when they had burned with the desire to carry the thought-hopes of their teachers forward into the darkness like brands, and then to light their own brands, and to teach others so that their own thought-hopes might be carried forward. And remembering the drunken promises they made to one another back then in those halycon days not to betray thought. Not to trip it up and laugh at it. Not to kick thought in the ribs whilst it was down. Not to vomit over thought one drunken Saturday night. Remembering their sense of being part of a thinking generation, part of a wave of thought, part of a pack of hungry thought-wolves loping over the tundra …

Here is one who has laboured as we laboured, they will say, the old guard. Here is a rival of thought, a foe – because his thought, his Cohen, his Rosenzweig, his messianism will also mean the demise of our Cohen, our Rosenzweig and our messianism, but also a friend, because this is a time without foes, because even a thought-foe is a thought-friend, so few thinkers are there. Here is one who has made Rosenzweig and Cohen – those essential thinkers, so relevant to contemporary debate – be reborn in thought again, whose ideas on messianism – the idea of ideas – allow messianism to sparkle as though new.

Ah, but he'll know one day what it is to be challenged in thought by a newcomer. He'll know what we know: the joy of welcoming a new thinker, a fellow thinker into the fold, even as that thinker must also be a rival thinker, even as the new thinker's Cohen, Rosenzweig and messianism entails the demise, the going-under of his (W.'s) Cohen, his (W.'s) Rosenzweig and his (W.'s) messianism. He'll be busy with the attentions of the young scholars, the old guard think. He'll be busy inspiring others, dazzling others, spreading the word of his Cohen, his Rosenzweig, his messianism. But his time will come, as ours has come, and one day, his Cohen, his Rosenzweig and his messianism will be supplanted in turn.