Lars Iyer's Blog

With our kidnapped plenary speaker in the pub, waiting for our plates of Cumberland sausage and mash. – 'You know they hate you', W. says. 'They hate us, God knows, and they hate you, too'. – 'Who hates me?, the speaker says. – 'Everyone. Everyone here', W. insists. – 'I don't think they hate me', the speaker says. – 'They do! They hate us, and they really hate you'.

They hate thought!, W. insists. Doesn't he, our kidnapped plenary speaker, understand that? They hate thought, and want to drive all thought away. Why did they invite him, then?, our kidnapped plenary speaker asks. It's a mystery, we agree. Perhaps there's still some instinct in them about what they lack, we speculate. Perhaps they feel some residual shame about their inability to think.

Our sausages and mash arrive on oval plates. It looks disgusting, we agree. Then a second set of sausages and mash arrive. We have two vast plates each of sausages and mash. He doesn't know where to begin, our kidnapped plenary speaker says, holding up his knife and fork.

Eat, man, eat, we urge him. He needs to keep up his strength! After all, very soon he'll have to go back in! We'll protect him, we tell our kidnapped plenary speaker. We'll flank him like the president's secret service bodyguards. We'll keep our sunglasses on and speak into earpieces. – 'The package is in the building', we'll say. 'The package is about to give his speech'.

'Go on, order some more sausage and mash', W. says, when the speaker disappears to the loo. I place an order at the bar. Soon, there'll be no space at our table but for plates of sausage and mash. They'll have to pile them on top of each another, W. says. He finds this very funny.

Reading University campus, and W. is full of dread. He has the feeling that it's about to go terribly wrong. What, our presentation? No, no – more than that, W. says. Something catastrophic is about to happen.

I knew Reading would appal him, I tell him. How could it be otherwise? On the bus out to the campus, he was already squirming. Driveways packed with Range Rovers and 4X4s. Mock Tudor houses. Mock Georgian ones. Mock Victorian ones, in great estates. All the styles of history and mocking history, laughing at it. This is the end of the world, W. says. The eternal end.

Did it ever have a history, Reading? Did anything ever happen here? But he knows it did. He's read about the Abbey, and he knows Oscar Wilde was imprisoned here. He might as well be imprisoned here, W. said on the bus. He might as well write his own Ballad of Reading Jail.

We're in enemy territory. We've been parachuted deep behind enemy lines. And what's our mission? A suicide mission, it can only be that, W. says. A soiling ourselves mission. – 'Go on, you start'.

This has to be our last lecture tour, W. says. This has to be the last time, the last dog and pony show. We came here against our better judgement, it's true. We were invited, personally invited, and how could we refuse? Our trouble is, we're too polite, W. says. We want to please people, despite everything.

How will we survive? We need a rallying point, for one thing. – 'Look for a pub!' We need a place of safety, W. says. We need a panic room. And we need a general strategy. – 'Keep your head down, talk to no one'.

Then we spot him in the foyer: the plenary speaker who W. feels is an ally. How did they get him here?, I wonder. – 'Just as they got us. Through flattery', W. says. Suddenly we feel a great surge of tenderness. We have to protect him, we decide. He doesn't belong here. For one thing, he actually has ideas. He needs to be rescued!

We resolve to smuggle him off campus to a pub. We need to save him, the plenary speaker. To save thought!

And in the meantime? Be careful. There are enemies everywhere.

The train south. We're heading into the belly of the beast, we agree. We heading into the great maw. We'll need to take special measures to survive.

We check our survival kit. Do we have our bottle of gin? Check. Of Plymouth Gin? Of course! What else? Now, books. What have I brought?, W. asks me. Ah, Georges Bataille, good. Inner Experience. Guilty: nothing better. And Simone Weil! A wild card. What drew me to her? What was she doing on my bookshelf? Perhaps there's something serious about me after all, he says. He's brought Karl Polyani, he says. We'll need Karl Polyani in the south.

Plymouth's in the south, of course, we acknowledge, but not in the south south. Plymouth's in the southwest, which is entirely different. In fact, W. thinks of Plymouth as being part of the north. In his mind, it's as far north in England as Newcastle is, he says.

And what about our supplies? Do we have any rations? A variety of snacks, I tell W. Snacks from many lands. W. approves. It's a long journey, he says.

The Town Moor: escape. We wander through the knee-high grass. What are those birds?, we wonder. What are those flowers? But we have no idea.

The Moor is like the world on the fifth day of creation, we agree – before Adam, before anyone, when everything went unnamed and unredeemed. It needs words, we agree. It needs a poet! Where is the Rilke of Newcastle to sing of the Moor?

I should at least dance, W. says. I should at least do a great Hindu dance of celebration …

Above us, a shore of clouds and then blue sky. – 'That's a weather front', W. says. Which way is it travelling? Where is it heading? And where are we heading, we who are walking beneath it, the shore of clouds?

Is the future open to us, or closed? W. can never decide. Are we making progress, or falling behind. – W. can never decide about that, either.

Alcoholics in the long grass, stretching their limbs and laughing, half-drunk bottles of cider by their ankles. Anyone can walk on the Town Moor, he likes that, W. says. Where the alcoholic can walk, he walks, W. says. And where the alcoholics cannot walk – where his way is barred by security guards or policemen – W. will not walk either.

Shouldn't we lie down in the long grass and drink ourselves to death?, we wonder. Shouldn't we just give up – give up everything – and let death come and find us on the Town Moor? But we consider ourselves to have work to do – that's our idiocy, and our salvation. We actually take ourselves to be busy – that's our imposture and the chance of our survival.

'What a racket! How do you do any work?', W. says. They're rebuilding the campus, I tell him. They're putting up new office blocks for the private partners of the university.

The sound of drilling, high pitched, then lower pitched as they cut through something. The fizz of a lorry's brakes. The clattering of metal poles being thrown onto metal poles. A massive chugging in the distance. The throbbing of engines.

He requires silence to work, W. says. Silence and calm, in the pre-dawn morning, just the pigeons flapping their wings and cooing to annoy him.

Stand well clear, vehicle reversing: a warning from a tannoyed male voice, very calm and reasonable. And now warnings overlapping with warnings, as many vehicles reverse: Stand well clear … Stand well clear … Stand well clear … And now a high pitched throb, very loud, like a helicopter landing. – 'Surely a helicopter isn't landing?', W. says. 'A helicopter couldn't be landing …'

We walk out through the campus through the narrow pedestrian routes left to us alongside the building works. W. feels so channelled, he says. We're being channelled, he says, staff and student alike, heads down and in lockstep. Where are they leading us?, he says. Where are we going?

A thick smell – is it tar? They must be pouring tar. They must be making some kind of route for the lorries. A hiss as of gas escaping. The high beeping of a reversing vehicle. – 'They're going to crush us', W. says. 'They're going to drive right through us …'

'How long do you think we'll last?', W. says. 'How long before we're closed down?' Because there's no room for us in this world. No room for Kierkegaard …

'Are they shredding trees?', W. says. Yes, they really are: we can see them cutting off their boughs with chainsaw, and feeding them into shredding machines. Leaves fly up over the fence. And the smell: sap. Life, destroyed. The stuff of life, being destroyed.

'It'll be our turn next', W. says. 'They'll cut off our limbs and feed us into the machines …'

Oh God, the building, the eternal rebuilding. The noise! We want to put our hands over our ears. We want to stop up our ears …

Stand well clear … Stand well clear …

He forgot about the spider people in his account of the effects of climactic change, I tell W. – 'Who the fuck are the spider people?' I thought I'd sent W. the article: hadn't he read it? With the carcinogens and teratogens, allergens and hormone disrupters, genetic disease is on the rise. Incapacitation!

Our phenotypes will the corrupted, I tell W. Impairment will be the norm. Vestigal limbs. - 'Ah, the spider people', W. says.

The spider people are not threatening or dangerous, that's the thing, I tell W. They're vulnerable, very gentle. They'll probably be eaten, the spider people. They'll probably be destroyed, their useless limbs cut off one by one.

They'll be mocked and then killed. And then probably eaten, I tell W., since there'll be nothing to eat in the new world. Nothing to eat except spider people.

W. finds my futurology very suspect, he says.

Until the seventh day, the Sabbath, some theologians say, the Creation was unfinished, W. says. 

On the first day, God made heaven and earth, but the earth was still without form and void – it was what the Hebrew Bible calls the tohu vavohu, W. says – and darkness lay on the face of the deep. On the second day, dry land appeared, and put forth vegetation, the plants yielding seed, and the fruit trees beating fruit in which there was seed.

On the third day, the stars were born, and then the sun and the moon, each set in the firmanent of the heavens to give light to the earth. On the fourth, the waters brought forth swarms of living creatures, and birds flew across the sky.

On the fifth, the beasts of the earth appeared and then, on the sixth, the first man, made in the image of God. Be fruitful and multiply, said God to Adam and Eve. Fill the earth, and subdue it.

But the Creation still wasn't finished. 'On the seventh day, God rested from all his work which he had done, and saw that it was good'. And was the Creation over then? The Creation was over, but the Destruction began.

What happened on the eighth day?, W. says. – 'You appeared, scratching your head'. On the ninth day, I published my first book, and the heavens wept. On the tenth, my second book, and the stars fell from the sky.

And on the same day, our day, there come the storms of financial collapse, which sweep the economies of the world into darkness.

And on the eleventh, there will come the fires of climatic collapse, which despoil the land, destroying the fertility of the soil. The rivers will dry up and the deserts grow, and snow will no longer fall on the mountains.

On the twelfth will come the mass extinctions - the fish disappearing from the acidic seas, and the birds dropping from the burning skies. On the thirteenth, the great extinction of the human population, survivors fleeing towards the south pole and the north pole – to Canada and Siberia, to Patagonia and the western Antarctic coast.

And on the fourteenth? The oceans will rise to drown the world, and it will all begin over again.  

Maimon was unkempt. Maimon was dirty. That's what I always protest to W. when he reprimands me for my personal habits. But Maimon was a genius!, W cries. A genius driven out of his home city for daring to philosophise. A beggar-genius, living on alms as he wandered for years, before being offered a position as a tutor.

Was it in those years that Maimon formulated the most decisive criticisms of Kantian thought ever made? Was it then, his begging bowl before him, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in his frozen hands, that the ideas came together that led him, in his final years, when he fell by chance under the protection of a nobleman who realised his worth, he published in a series of books?

Only Maimon understood me, Kant said, after reading the Jewish philosopher's Transcendental Philosophy in manuscript. He died soon after, and among the causes of death was thought to be Maimon's devastating criticisms of his work. How could he, Kant, go on in the wake of Maimon? How, when Maimon had with such great perceptiveness laid bare the fundamental problems that faced his thought?

But Maimon never succeeded in penetrating academic circles, or even the salons of enlightened Berlin Jews. To them he was an Ostjude, his manners rough, his gesticulations wild, and his German atrocious and heavily accented. And he was a difficult man, no doubt about it. He was untamed, and German – his fourth language, or his fifth – did not come easily to him. And he smelt awful, everyone said that.

Maimon stinks! Get him out of here! That's what you'd hear in Berlin salons. And out he went, out onto the frozen streets, out in the snow with The Critique of Pure Reason under his arm. And he was an alcoholic, too. He drank like a madman, W. says. He drank himself to death. In his last years, when he finally found someone who would support him, he drank himself into oblivion even as he wrote, even as book after book poured fouth from his pen.

Is that what's going to happen to me? Am I going to produce a great stream of books in my final years, which can't be far off?, W. says. He's offered me support, and now he's waiting. He brought me in from the cold, and now he's sitting by expectantly. But he thinks he's going to be disappointed.

I always take my trousers off when I visit – why is that? On one level, the answer is quite obvious: I am growing too fat for them, their waistband cutting uncomfortably into the vastness of my belly. But then I never take them off elsewhere, my trousers, W. has noticed. Only with him, with him and Sal. Only in his front room, whether the shutters are open or closed.

Once, when a friend of theirs called round unexpectedly, I leapt up, frantically looking for my trousers, before she entered the room. Too late! He always takes his trousers off when he visits, W. told her. I feel some sense of shame, at least, W. says. He didn't think I did, but there it was: shame over my trouserlessness. My public trouserlessness.

But why am I not ashamed of anything else? My ignorance, for example. My laziness. He thought he'd taught me, W. says. He thought I'd learnt something. But somewhere inside, I'm still an ape on the savannah. Somewhere, I'm still sitting back on my haunches and looking out over the expanse. Ah, food was plentiful back then, and life easy. I wasn't an alpha male, but nor was I an omega one; so long as I refrained from threatening my fellow apes, baring my teeth as apes will, I would not be threatened in turn.

But something was missing. Something marked me out from my fellow apes. Was that why I learnt to walk upright and wear shoes? Was that why I learnt not to holler and whoop? Ah, I still dream of great bunches of bananas and clear pools in the middle of the jungle. Sometimes I remembered how my ape comrades would pick the lice from my thick fur.

He can still tell I'm an ape, W. says. It's the way I hold my pen – the way my hand curls in towards my chest. And there's that distant look I get, W. says, as though I long only to tear open my shirt and whoop, he says. But he sees, too, that my apish spontaneity is long gone, and he wonders whether I am any better off than my miserable comrades in a zoo. My poor eyes burn from monitor glare, and my clumsy fingers miss the keys I want to hit.

And the books I try to read! The thinkers I try to imitate! Ah, there's no point, no point, W. sometimes thinks, and he'd put a stop to it if he didn't see something of himself in my efforts; if he didn't feel, too, as though he were part ape.

Sometimes, W. feels like my captor – as if he were the one who had trapped me on the plains. But it wasn't his fault! I came into his care; I fell into his arms like a foundling. It wasn't his fault … Didn't he tenderly look after me as he was once looked after by older Essex postgraduates? Didn't he suckle me as gently as an orphaned chick?

Ah, he knew very little when he first arrived at Essex, W. says. All he brought with him to the university was his Kafka enthusiasm, which was very great, he says. And a willingness to learn! A great willingness, W. says. As though thought were a way for him to struggle back to Canada. As though he might reach a kind of Canada of thought which paralleled the real Canada he left in order to come to Britain.

And when he saw postgraduates arrive years later, when he'd already won his scholarship for postgraduate study? When he saw them arriving from the four corners of the country? He was tender with them – fatherly, perhaps motherly, never laughing when the newbies mispronounced the words hyperbole and synecdoche, or when they said the last syllables of Derrida to rhyme with breeder, or said Del-ooze when the meant Del-euze?

He understood when the new postgraduates wept into their pillows when they thought of what their lives had been. He stroked their hair during their night sweats and bad dreams. He understood why they ground their teeth at night, why their jaws ached, why their eyes were dull: for wasn't he, too, British? Hadn't he, too, sought to escape his country at the University of Essex?

And he's tender still, W. says. He's tender even as he dreams of his Canada of thought. Once, I was an ape with no idea of trousers. And now, thanks to him? A half-ape, for whom trousers are a tyranny. A half-ape caught between worlds, but who's dreaming, with W., of becoming Canadian in thought. 

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!

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 that life 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.

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?

I was like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, W. says, with my Adam Ant dancing in that restaurant in Wroclaw. First, the postgraduates followed me in my Adam Ant dancing – the dancing from the video of 'Prince Charming' – the Polish postgraduates, who had been brought along to meet the British delegation of philosophers. Then the other members of the delegation, scholarly types, most of them, usually pale and withdrawn, soon they, too – the younger ones first, and then, more reluctantly, but giving a sense of liberation, the older ones – rose to follow me in my Adam Ant dancing.

And didn't our Polish hosts themselves, so generous in organising a meal in our honour – didn't they, too, feel moved to join us in their own rendition of the Adam Ant dancing from the video of 'Prince Charming'? But they sat smiling instead, drumming their fingers, perhaps wondering if there wasn't a British tradition – a British philosophical tradition – of Adam Ant dancing at the beginning of a conference.

And when we sat down, breathless, faces flushed, after our Adam Ant dancing? When we pulled our chairs back up to our table, ready for our dumplings at the dinner held in our honour, the visiting academics? W. felt a new kind of lightness, he said. A new dizziness. For what had he known, hitherto, of pure joy? What had he known of the sense of abandonment that marked pure joy?

Henceforward, I blazed a trail ahead of him that he knew he'd have to follow. Henceforth, it was joy that sprang ahead of us – ahead of me, and drawing me on, and now ahead of him, too, and drawing him along – a kind of laughter unattached to anything in particular.

Poland was the crucible. That's where it all began, in Poland, in Wroclaw, so many years ago now, we agree.

Is there such a thing as friendship at first sight, W. wonders? Well, that's what happened in Poland, in Wroclaw, W. says, when he saw my Adam Ant dancing: friendship at first sight.

Ah, he still remembers it, when, in the middle of the meal held our honour, the British delegation in Wroclaw, I pushed back my seat in order to demonstrate Adam Ant dancing. He remembers when I took to the dancefloor, recreating Adam Ant dancing from the 'Prince Charming' video. And he remembers how the Polish postgraduates followed me; how they, too, pushed back to their seats and took to the dancefloor, likewise recreating Adam Ant dancing from the 'Prince Charming' video.

Lars is a man who does not know shame, W. thought to himself. And he seems to encourage others, too, to forget their shame. And soon W., too, pushed back his chair, and took to recreating Adam Ant dancing on the dancefloor.

Mladen Dolar was the real thing, we agree. The real Central European intellectual. – 'How did you think you looked beside him?', W. says. 'How do you think you came across, chairing his presentation?'

I was having a bad morning, I told W. later, but that didn't excuse it. A bad morning! – 'That question you asked …', says W. He knew I was in trouble when Dolar finished reading, and the audience, taking in the many and rich ideas, were quiet. He knew I was finished when it fell to me, his Chair, to ask a question.

'You could barely speak!' It's true; I babbled incoherently. I raved. – 'Everyone was hoping you'd stop, but you didn't stop, did you?' I didn't stop. I carried on. Some fat idiot, carrying on, and next to a real Central European intellectual …

Ah, how many times have I covered myself in shame, and by extension, covered him, W., with shame? How many times have I covered us both in shame? He'd been too stunned to explain me to Dolar, as he should have done, W. says. He – who should have known it would be necessary – simply wasn't ready to provide the usual excuses.

Ideas, ideas. If only we had commitments, like Zizek and his friends in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis! If only we believed in something, be it Lacanian psychoanlysis and the necessity of rereading modern and classical philosophy through the lens of Lacaniasm or anything else for that matter! If only we had a project which genuinely opened from our beliefs, something akin to elaborating Lacanian theories of ideology and power, for example, or providing Lacanian analyses of culture and art! And instead? No projects, because we have no beliefs. No belief …

It's alright for them, we say half resentfully of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. They believe in things. They have projects. And ideas, too – they even have ideas! In the end, they're brighter than us, as well as having projects and ideas. In the end, they're out of our league, for all that Mladen Dolar said on his visit, looking round the dining room, that the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis began with evenings like this. Like this? And with people like us? He must have been mad, mad! Dolar was generous. He was munificent. That's another sign of people who actually have ideas, we agree.

What did Mladen Dolar, Zizek's old friend and comrade, tell us about intellectual friendship?, W. says.  What of his friendship with Zizek, Zupancic and the others; what of his old associations with Mocnik and Bozovic as they coalesced into the so-called Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis?

That they began with friendship, and were sustained through friendship! That they never departed from friendship, and a friendship in the face of Yugoslavian academia and Yugoslavian state departments. What chance did they have to get jobs? What, as they fell foul of the university authorities and the state authorities and were unemployed for many years? What, as they aroused their colleagues' suspicion because of their interest in French thought, in psychoanalytic thought, and brought the luminaries of Lacanianism to Ljubljana?

They formed the Journal for the Society of Theoretical Psychoanalysis to publish one another, said Dolar, to support one another in thought. And in the end, what was the Society of Theoretical Psychoanalysis? Nothing, Dolar said. There was nothing going on at the centre. Just he, Zizek and Zupancic drinking in a bar. It was the same with Zizek's series Wo es War, for Verso. It was a vehicle for Zizek of publishing his friends abroad!

Ah, how much we have to learn from the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis! Do we need to form a journal?, we wonder. Do we need to form a society? No: first of all, we need friends. We need to be friends, don't I understand? And we need to have ideas!

There's only one time W. has seen any love on my face, he says. It's in a photo Sal took on the Greyhound bus from Nashville to Memphis, W. looking forward into the camera, full of amiability, and I, head turned, looking at him, looking at his ear, in perfect love. Was it love, though?, W. wonders. Was it just an accident of photography, capturing in a split section a facial expression on the way to its usual apish sullenness?

Ah, but we really did learn about love on that Greyhound. I'd forced us onto the back seats, W. remembers. We'll get less travel sick there, right at the back, I'd said. And where did we end up? Next to the toilet! Next to the bus toilet! You'd have thought with my belly, I would've known to avoid the toilet, but no, there we were, next to the toilet, which reeked.

We had to press orange skins to our noses, didn't we? We had to eat up our oranges – part of the packed lunch Sal'd made for us – and cover our faces with their skins. The stench!

Then a passenger came to try the toilet door. – 'Don't do it!', we told her. But she opened it a crack, and the smell worsened. – 'My God', she said. She went back to her seat and returned with a portable air freshener which she sprayed in the sign of the cross as she went in the door.

We looked at each other. She went in! Is she mad? Minutes passed. We heard humming inside. And then she emerged, smiling. No sound of a flush. She cleaned the loo, W. says. She cleaned it for us, for all of us. For everyone! We looked at one another in awe. That's love, W. said.

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 a betrayer 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.

My dreams of publication. My dreams of redeeming all the rubbish I've published by writing another book, a better book …

Do you think a former Essex postgraduate would publish a line?, W. says. Do I think the former Essex postgraduates sought philosophical immortality? Do I think they cared about what posterity would make of them?

Do I think they thought of themselves as thought-archers, firing the arrows of their thought ahead for others to find and shoot on? They shot their arrows upward into the sky, upwards to the stars. They shot them into impassable thickets, into the surging ocean, the most barren desert. Or they shot them into their own breasts, laughing all the while. They shot the arrows of their thought into their own eyes and were drunk with laughter …  

Ah, the former Essex postgraduates wanted no legacy. They'd seen too much to want a legacy. They knew the end was coming. The knew the end was nigh. They knew that there was little time left, that the disaster to come laughed in the face of any thought endeavour.

The former Essex postgraduates took the long view, W. says. The very long view. The view from eternity, from the other end of eternity, when everything was dead and the stars burnt out. They've seen it, W. says, the former Essex postgraduates: the end of all things, the drifting apart of everything, the great cool down. It was going to end, and endlessly to end, that's what they knew.

Still, there were some signs left for the vigilant: a few lines, a diagram, traced on the condensated wall of a sauna, photographed by a curious passerby; a philosophical glyph sketched with a toe in the Painted Desert, preserved on Flickr; a Blanchot-like fragment carved in the bark of a petrified tree nearly at the arctic circle;

a few words written in code in a tourist's guide to Shanghai; an except from an abandoned treatise posted on the comments box of an anonymous blog deep in the internet; notes towards an original idea written as marginalia in an abandoned blockbuster on a Tenerife beach;

a sketch of a philosophical system on the back of a bar receipt blowing about in the backdraft of lorries passing through the Karamwanken mountain tunnel; notes on what one former postgraduate would write, if he had written, if he could be bothered to write, scrawled slantwise across a guest book in a B&B on Krk island;

some scattered remarks towards a decisive rebuttal to the philosophy of immanence, taken down verbatim in the diary of a drunk and non-comprehending companion; a snatch of Hoelderlin style poetic philosophy translated into Inuit as part of a translation exercise in an Arctic TEFL class;

snatches of an interview detectable in the squalling ambience of a Jamaican dub plate, blasted from a sound system; a Sappho-like fragment scratched into the run-off groove of a forgotten flexi-disc; the initials of a three word title for a philosophical masterpiece scraped out on the hull of a captured trawler in a Somalian drydock;

a few lines buried in a time-capsule buried by schoolchildren and due to be opened in the year 3012; the chapter titles of a treatise left as crossword answers in an abandoned Metro on the London Underground; the names of great concepts to come written into a Twombly-like canvas hung in a Manaus art gallery;

a draft chapter of an unfinished book burnt for warmth in the St Petersburg winter; a paragraph from an unfinished paper broadcast as part of a sound collage on a Jeff Magnum internet radio show; Heraclitus-like sayings recieved – who knows how – in a broadcast thought to be from an alien civilisation from the direction of Andromeda;

The letters of a few stray words uttered on a deathbed in the Peruvian jungle translated into European notation and used to score a chamber quartet; recorded table talk slowed down and distorted until they were indistinguishable from noise, on the 501st disc of a Merzbow boxset; Bataille-like poems that might be heard when you play a Motley Crue album backwards;

notes on faith and thinking bound by string and forgotten in a garage until they formed the basis of a new religion among the surviving people of a planet-wide apocalypse in 4012; the crucial missing pages of a fragmentary journal with the title 'On Nature' reconstructed by alien scholars who will visit the earth long after our extinction …

Signs, signs: how will I ever understand the abandonment of the former Essex postgraduate? How their neglect for themselves, let alone the neglect of their thought and for the legacy of their thought?

'Think of what others might have achieved in your place', W. says. 'Think of what other might have achieved if that had been given what you were given'. A desk. A computer. A set of bookshelves. And time, above all, that: time. – 'You're a usurper, aren't you?' I've occupied the place someone else should have had: someone cleverer than me, more hard-working. Someone kinder than me.

God knows, I've stolen his place, too, W. says. I've stolen his time. I've stolen everyone's time, everyone's who's had to listen to me, and God knows, to read me.

'Why do you write such bad books?', W. wonders. Of course, it's a sign that something has collapsed that I can publish anything at all. Do I think I could have published something in the old days, the good days? Do I think I could have brought out a first book and then a second book when there were proper publishers, proper editors?

Ah, how did I slip past the gatekeepers? How did I slip a first book and then a second book past them? I thought I'd been cunning – I thought I'd been clever, W. knows that. Here's a chance, here's a niche, I thought. No one's looking, I thought. A doorway has opened, and if I just sneak through …

I thought I'd seized an opportunity. Thought I'd seen something no one else had seen: a chance, an opportunity. Thought I'd got one over on the world, which in fact I hadn't. Thought I'd stolen a march on the real thinkers, the real writers, who were too busy procrastinating to seize the moment.

I thought: they might be able to think, they might be able to write, but only I'm hungry enough, avid enough to see the situation for what it is, and take advantage of it. Only I'm desperate enough: that's what I thought, pitying myself, thinking that I had no other choice. I've been out in the cold so long, I whimpered to myself. I've suffered enough, I wept to myself, and the tears glistened on my cheek.

Ah, how cunning I thought I'd been. How shameless – and I was proud of my shamelessness. Whilst the others dozed, what had I done? Whilst the real thinkers, the real philosophers, pondered the great questions, I'd written, I'd finished writing once and then twice, for a first time and then over again. How cunning!, I thought, and smiled to myself.

I was a member of the real world, not like the other procrastinators, I thought. I was in the business of marketing, of self-marketing, as you have to be in the real world, I thought. And whilst there was an opportunity – whilst there was a chance to publish, who was I to hold back?

I knew I was writing rubbish, this is what gets to him, W. says. I was gleefully writing rubbish, gleefully publishing rubbish … They'll publish any old thing!, I cried to myself. They'll accept any old rubbish!

Shamelessness: that was it, W. says. I am a shameless man. Let the others procrastinate, I have a book to publish, I thought. Let the thinkers think, the writers write, but there's an opportunity here … I'm going to slip by unnoticed. I'm going to pass through the gates of publication like a thief in the night …

But in truth, I'd slipped by no one. No sentries were posted at the gate, were they? No search lights were seeking to pick me up. No klaxons went off, no SWAT teams appeared at my door, no snipers to pick me off from rooftops. There was nothing – only eerie silence, as after heavy snow. Nothing – snowbanks, white and silent; the sky, white and silent. My first book was published – and nothing happened. My second book – and still nothing happened.

'Even you, even you thought you weren't getting away with it', W. says. Maybe I wanted to stopped, wanted to be punished. Maybe I wanted my gleeful smile to wiped from my face. – 'Something in you knows you've done wrong'. A bad review: isn't that I craved? Indignant emails from experts in my field. Letters of abuse from real scholars … And instead: nothing. Nothing. My book – and the million other books, there being more books published now than ever before – met with perfect silence, perfect indifference.

In truth, there's no one to offend, not any more, W. says. No one cares. It's collapsed – hadn't I taught him that? The academic system's collapsed. Academic publishing's collapsed. The university's finished, and we're in limbo, in some strange new space.

He sees it even in me, W. says, the desire to be judged, the desire to be told off, as by a stern by kindly headmaster. To be told off, punished, and then readmitted to class. I want standards. I want punishment … I want what's right to be right. I want not to be able to get away with it. I do not want to be cunning. I don't want to remain what I have become.

In truth, I only want to be shot, W. says. I want to feel a hot bullet in my temple. I want to feel it shattering my skull. I want the searchlight to find me, want to cut down by machine gun fire. I want to be bayonetted and collapse in the snow, W. says. He sees it in his mind's eye: a smile on my dying face, without glee. A smile which says, justice has been done.

Spurious (the novel) now has its own page at the Melville House website. Note the blurb by the great Stephen Mitchelmore. Details on pre-ordering here.

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 took hikkikomori, 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 to bring 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?

'Are you in your office?', W. emails me. Hineni, I write back. – 'So you speak Hebrew now?' Hineni, here I am: that's what Abraham said in response to God's call of course.  Here I am, ready for my task. Here I am, and this is all I am, waiting in response. And it is what Adam refused to say, when he hid from God, and Jonah, who caught a ship to the far ends of the earth to escape the call.

What does it mean to be called?, we've mused a thousand times. What, as Israel responded to God's call in Exodus? To do before you understand. To respond before thinking. It's the opposite of philosophy, of course, W. says. The opposite of the Greeks, for whom it is more important to know oneself than to walk in God's way, to keep the commandments.

'Know yourself', Kierkegaard wrote, 'and look at yourself in the mirror of the Word in order to know yourself properly'. The mirror of the Word. It is only when we stand before the God who, revealed in Jesus the Messiah, came into the world, suffered, and died for the sake of the sinner, that our despair might become hope. Only then that I might will be to be myself, which means assenting to one's existence as the gift of God, and to the task God sets us. To know one's creaturehood and sinfulness, but to know, too, God as our creator, our judge and redeemer.

Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the Messiah … W. has never understood what it means to call yourself the Messiah and the son of God, as Jesus does in the gospels. Jesus becomes real to him at other moments – when he doubts his mission, for example. When, as Matthew recounts it, Jesus's soul becomes 'very sorrowful and very heavy' in the garden of Gethsemane, or when, on the cross, he cries 'My God, my God why has thou forsaken me?'

And Jesus becomes real to him in the parables, too – in fact, whenever Jesus speaks in ordinary words to ordinary people; whenever everyday speech is his medium, and he opens himself in dialogue to all comers, to anyone who wants to speak to him at all. Just as he, W., has to speak with great simplicity to me!, he says. Just as W. has to try and explain things so they can be understood by a simple person like me!

Sometimes the melancholic doesn't know what he's lost, Freud says. He has only a vague sense of deprivation, a general sense that something has gone missing. An indeterminate loss, as immense as a storm cloud; a sense of loss without contour: isn't it from this that W. suffers?

He needs to localise his loss, W. says. To find its source! And he needn't look further than the idiot beside him in his cagoule. It must be his fault, the idiot!, he thinks to himself as we walk through the heather. He wants to shake me, to grab me by the lapels and bellow, 'It's all your fault!' Because it is my fault, he's sure of it.

But what if he's wrong? What if I'm only a scapegoat for his problems? The Hebrews sent a goat into the wilderness, which was supposed to carry with it the sins of the people. And wasn't that why W. brought me up to the moor: to send me into the wilderness, carrying all his sins away?

There goes my loss, he'd say, watching me disappear into the distance. There go my sins. And he'd walk more lightly on his way back to the busstop. He'd sing to himself. The clouds would part … 

But what if grief remained with him, and as heavily as before? What if melancholy never lifted itself from his shoulders? Horror: now he'd be alone with the storm cloud of his grief. Now he wouldn't have an idiot in a cagoule to blame for his melancholy.