Lars Iyer's Blog

Somerset House. Why are we heading for Somerset House?, I ask W. We don't belong in Somerset House! But W. won't be deterred from going to Somerset House. He wants to see the fountain, he says. He wants to see the jets of water rising and falling. And he wants to see me caper among those jets like an idiot child.

The bottle of wine I ordered arrives, with two glasses. – 'To us!', says W. 'To idiocy!' How do I think our lecture tour is going?, he asks me. Well? Badly? Have we come through with our reputations intact? Our dignity? Have we increased in stature in the eyes of our contemporaries? Ah, there's no need to answer.

This is our last tour, W. says. He feels that strongly. Something's going to happen. Something's about to happen … Why does he feel such a sense of dread?

In his dream, we're on the beach, and the sea's out, sucked out, as it is before a great wave comes. And only W. knows the tsunami's coming. Only he knows, but no one will listen to him. And there I am, inflatable around my midriff, running down the beach …

W. reads to me from his notebook:

The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for men who are able to cope with a new world.

That's Marx writing in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, W. says. Have we gone under?, W. wonders. Are we going under right now?

Only the young arrived in Canaan, we reflect. Moses himself died without entering it. And he bade the Hebrews to wander for 40 years in the desert, lest they bring Egypt, the memory of their captivity, with them to corrupt the promised land.

We dream of the young of Middlesex, with a daggers in their heart and ice on their lips. We dream of those who will come after our going under. What fools they'll think we were!

We're not young enough. Not ardent enough, we agree. Aren't we a symbol of what needs to be overcome? The escape from Egypt didn't happen once and for all. To be sure, Pharoah's horses and chariots were drowned in the Red Sea, but there is a Pharoah of the mind, too, and horses and chariots of the mind. We are all in bondage – especially us. We're all in bondage, and especially those whose communist dreams are so lacking in definition. 

Our communism is mystagogic, fanciful. At once pure obfuscation and childish whimsy. What do we understand of the militant demand? What of the risks that must be taken? 

To go under … We need to be purged! Put up against the wall as counterrevolutionaries! Only then, without us, might liberation begin. Only then might the world overcome its bondage.

We are altogether too pathetic for our Middlesex audience, we agree. Our vague communism. Our communist pathos.

We await our Marx, we agree. Perhaps he's somewhere on Middlesex campus, diagnosing the crisis of our time. Perhaps we'll meet him today, for whom we will only be the rubbish to be cleared away.

'Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against our self-styled friends than against our declared enemies', Marx wrote. Our self-styled friends: the phrase makes us tremble with passion. It's us! He's referring to us!

Idiocy!, that's what our Marx will scrawl in his notebook as he listens to us. Stupidity! underlined. Foolishness!, practically ground into the page …

You should never learn from your mistakes, W. and I agree. It's our basic principle. If we lived them over again, would our lives be any different? Not one bit! The same, they'd be exactly the same, and that's our strength, W. says. We are reliable in our idiocy.

Is that why thinkers – real thinkers – are attracted to us? They want to be amused, no doubt, and we are amusing, for a while at least. We have a kind of charm. We make them laugh, our thinkers, who are often lost in melancholy. We lighten their souls.

But we always go too far in our inanity. We alienate them, our thinker-friends, sending them into a new kind of melancholy. They walk away, shaking their heads.

Is that what's going to happen at Middlesex? Undoubtedly. We'll only send our Middlesex friends further into despair.

Middlesex is the crappiest of campuses, we agree. It looks like a primary school from the 70s. But from the crappiest campus, the greatest thought …

What are we doing here? Why did they want us? You'd have thought they'd have wanted us to keep away. That we would have been banned rather than invite us, although invite us they did.

There are people who can think here, for God's sake. And now we're here, who are in no way capable of thought. We'll have to depend on our charm (on W.'s charm). We'll have to use our natural wit (W.'s natural wit). I should do my monkey dance for them, W. says. That should buy us some time before they lynch us.

The slow train to London. Twickenham. Putney. And Clapham Junction, where the track braids together with myriad others, and trains like ours run a parallel course.

My life in Manchester, in contrast to the suburbs. What was I reading in my box room by the curry house extractor fans?, W. wonders. What, as cold air seem to run from the crack in the wall? Kafka, in my own way, which is to say, spuriously.

W. read Kafka as he travelled through Europe, as he surveyed the European scene from his train window. He read about the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse, as the train passed through Freiburg, and about the generation of German Jews in its final hour as he arrived in Strasbourg.

He read about Benjamin and Scholem who, referring to Kafka, discussed the fine line between religion and nihilism in their letters in a cafe in Berne, and about their attempt to develop, each in their own way, a kind of anarcho-messianism, an apocalyptic antipolitics even as they argued about the exile of the Jews from the meaning of Law as his train crossed the Alps. 

And me – what was I reading, to contextualise my Kafka studies? What, as I wandered through the university library? But I had no idea of Kafka's milieu. To me, he was only meteor who had arrived from nowhere. I read The Castle in the same astonishment with which I'd greeted it first, back in the warehouse when I borrowed it from my long-eyelashed fellow worker who wrote my name as L'arse. A meteor flashing through the sky of my stupidity … A meteor through the squalor, and the squalor of my mind, with my secondary modern education.

Sometimes W. wonders whether for all that my relation to Kafka is more pure, more intense; that the star of Kafka burns yet brighter in my sky. – 'You had nothing else to steer by', whereas W. had a cosmos, a milky way. And steer I tried to, paddling my coracle into the unknown. But where was I paddling but in circles? Where but in the spotlight of my single star?

And meanwhile, all around me, the city was regenerating. Meanwhile, they were promising to rebuild Manchester … The suburbs were coming: is that what I sensed? That the suburbs were looking for me, even here? I knew, as my studies came to an end, that I'd have to bury myself more deeply in squalor. I knew I had to disappear into the crack in the city.

'We're in the suburbs of a suburb', W. says. 'In the suburbs of a suburb of a suburb …' Through the suburbs on the slow train, travelling back to London. – 'Did you really grow up here?' I really did. - 'You're lucky to have escaped'. I know that. He's amazed I got out. What would have happened otherwise?

Winnersh, Winnersh Triangle … 'Nothing ever happens here', W. says. 'Nothing will ever happen'. And suburbs like these are spreading to every corner of the world … And everyone will live everybody else's life, and nothing will have happened.

'You'd have to be very strong to survive in such a place', W. says. 'You'd have to go into some kind of internal exile … And even then you'd go mad. Even then you'd lose your mind'. Didn't I nearly lose my mind, living in the suburbs?

He pictures me as a teenager, cycling out to every green patch I could find on the map. He pictures me making my way through fir plantations to the patch of scrappy woodland fenced off by the MoD where solders came to train for future wars. I listened out for artillery, but heard nothing but the wind in the trees and birds singing.

What was I looking for? What did I discover? There were the suburbs and the suburbs were everywhere. That my non-town was growing on the verge of every town; what does it matter where you are? And even the firing range was sold off, the last of the old woodland, to build a new housing estate. Didn't I see myself as Stalker's cousin, ready to lead others through the last patches of wilderness?

What was I looking for in the wide patches of grass between the plots on the hi-tech industrial estate where I first went to work? What, in the rain that was allowed to lie in long puddles in the grass and mud?

The gypsies came with their caravans and churned up the grass. We were warned about them on the tannoy. – 'Make sure you lock your cars'. They left quickly enough, and the companies organised for diggers to cut trenches along the perimeter of each plot. But beyond the trenches, beyond the new chain-link fences …

Once it snowed in April, and the last remaining lot, the biggest, the wildest, was one pristine snow bank, full of space, I thought. Full of time … And I saw my future there in some sense, that's what I told him, W. says. I saw a future.

'You should go to college while it's still free', said a fellow worker, who read Sartre on his lunch break. He lent me his book, I told W., and I underlined a passage. I'm bored, that's all. From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek. And did tears run down my cheek?, W. says. No tears, I tell him.

'So you went north'. I went north. – 'Of course you did, where else were you to go?' For his part, as a northerner, or a semi-northerner, a man of the Midlands, W. went south, lured by the promise of a course on which he could study Kafka in translation (he could only read Kafka in translation, then). But they'd lied, of course. He never studied Kafka, but he studied other things instead. He learnt things – great things. He studied overseas. He visited the great archives. He criss-crossed Europe on the great train routes of Europe.

'And you, what did you do?', W. says. I became Stalker's cousin all over again, looking for space, looking for time under viaducts and on the tow-paths of canals, climbing over rusting pipes and broken girders. I arrived in Manchester while it was still a rust-zone. I arrived just before its regeneration, and the city was still falling apart like Mir space station.

Fog descends as we head back to the campus. It's as thick as the cloud on Mount Sinai, when Moses went up to meet God. He descended with the Tablets of Law, but what will bring back with us?

We're lost, hopelessly lost. Our kidnapped speaker's worried. What about the conference meal? He's supposed to be sitting at the high table. – 'Never mind the high table', W. says. Of course, the speaker's too full of sausage and mash to be able to eat anything else. – 'You have a real appetite!', W. said to him, impressed.

Where are we going? It's a very verdant campus, we agree. Very lush. The Thames Valley's known for its humidity, I tell them. It's very bad for asthmatics. I developed asthma when my family moved out here. And eczema. And lice, says W. And anal crabs, he says.

In the thick darkness: that's where God was waiting for Moses, W. says. That's how God appears to the mystic, Gregory of Nyssa said. The mystic receives a dark vision of God. But what do we see? Not God, at any rate. Barely even each other! It's a real pea-souper, we agree, speaking like the commoners in Brief Encounter. Gor blimey, guv'nor.

I tell them about my schooling in the suburbs near Reading. It was the worst of schooling. I tell them about my early days at work, in the warehouse. It was the worst of jobs.

W. loves these stories. I tell them about my first office job, by the dry ski slope in Bracknell. W. loves these stories, too. And I tell them about my escape to college, my escape to Manchester, despite knowing nothing of Manchester. – 'You had an instinct', W. says. 'It's admirable'.

We still haven't met God, though. We still haven't received the Tablets of Law. 'Go on, say something profound', W. says to our kidnapped speaker.

With our kidnapped 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'. – 'I don't think they hate me', the speaker says. – 'They do!, they really hate you', W. says. 'And they hate us. Especially him', pointing at me. 'But who wouldn't?' And then, 'Seriously, though, why do you bother? Why do you come here?' And then, 'Why do we bother? Why do we come here?' We ought to run our conferences, W. says, just for our friends. Why don't we do that?

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.

'I didn't order sausage and mash', the speaker says. It must be a mix-up, we agree. – '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's 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. Yew trees. The lake. We're in enemy territory. How did we end up here? Who parachuted us behind enemy lines? What's our mission? A suicide mission, it can only be that. And why did we volunteer?

This can only end badly, W. says, shaking his head. He's full of dread, he says. Saturated by it. We're in the wrong place, he says. At the wrong time. – 'Surely other people feel it. It can't just be us'.

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. But he actually has ideas. It's true: he doesn't belong here, we agree, hearing him speak. He needs to be rescued! So we resolve to smuggle him off campus to the pub. We need to kidnap him, for his own good!

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

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

Of course, Reading would appal him, I knew that. Not the whole area. The Thames Valley, west of London, the endless suburbs, driveways packed with Land Rovers … He shakes his head. How did I manage to survive here? How did I to grow to adulthood?

It's suicide country, W. says. He's full of thoughts of suicide, not least because some visiting academic is bound to pun on the name of the town. The university of reading … oh God, oh God.

This has to be last time, W. says. This has to be the last one, the last dog and pony show. It's true, we came here against our better judgement. 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 bar!' 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'.

Origen has his cock cut off in order to think without distraction, W. says. Perhaps that's what I should do, if I could find it. You'd need a microscope, he says. A nanoscope. Ah, but it wouldn't make much difference in the end, he says. I've always had a low sex-drive. A low thought-drive!

Sometimes W. thinks we'll survive everything, that we'll last longer than anyone else. Perhaps it will be just us at the end, at the very end, like cockroaches, like vermin, running across the cindered planet. But sometimes, W. thinks we'll be the first to go, that we're being held out in front of the rest like coalmine canaries.

'How are things at work now?', W. asks me on the phone. 'Is it so mad that it's no longer bleak?' No, it's still bleak, I tell him.

I tell him about our endless management meetings. W. imagines me in them, a version of Shostakovich before the Politburo, of a political prisoner, moving between stupid defiance and complete compliance.

How abject I must be! How pitiful! How many fingers am I holding up?, my interrogator will ask me. – 'Fuck off!', I'll shout. And then, pitifully, 'How many do you want me to say there are?' Yes, he can see me in his mind's eye: a gorilla in a suit, pleading for his life.

Tomorrow it was May: but it's hard to believe it, we agree at we sit hungover at Stoke station. We're heading our separate ways: W. to the south, and I to the north. In separate directions! Ah, how will we ever form our political collective? How our new Party, always in search of members? There is no workers' movement, Tronti says, W. tells me. There is no workers' party, and therefore no politics. No politics! Then what is to be done?

Only thought, not practice is possible now, W. reads out from his notebook. Tronti says we can no longer think politics, but only the crisis of politics. Theoretical despair, that's what Tronti calls it. Political despair. Philosophical despair.

We are men of defeat, we agree, sitting on the bench on the platform. Should we hang ourselves now? Should we go out in search of strong rope and two stools? Ah, it seemed so simple last night in the pub! We felt so hopeful! And today, beneath the overcast sky?

What remains to us is only to chart our despair, to fathom it. What remains is only to understand our confinement. That's why Tronti commends us to read Kierkegaard, W. says. That's why he sends us to the philosopher of despair.

In Stoke, at the university, we speak, on the occasion of its anniversary, about the Events of May 1968, the general strike, of the battles between students and the police in the Latin Quarter, of the wrenching of paving stones and metal grilles from the streets, and the throwing up of barricades. We speak about the groupuscules, about the action committees that replaced the bureaucratic institutions of the state, about non-Leninist forms of organisation, of molecular revolution (Guattari) and the creation of moments (Lefebvre), of situations (Debord). 

We speak about a breaking with causality, a bifurcation, a lawless deviation (Deleuze and Guattari); we speak of the void of the zero point between hope and despair (Duras). We speak about the continuity of modern mathematics, of Dada and the Cubists, of Heisenberg's theories and the critique of representation extended by workers and students to society itself (Lyotard).

We speak about the Dziga Vertov Group, of the dissolution of individuality into the forces of the revolution (Gorin), of new forms of collectivity, of community. We show excerpts from the collective's British Sounds; we speak about sit-ins and teach-ins, about the collective production of handbills and posters, about graffiti and the refusal to disperse.

Towards lunch, our stomachs rumbling, we talk about the occupation of Nanterre, the Sorbonne and the Theatre de l'Odeon; we talk of the occupation of the six main plants at Renault, and of the closure of the ports of Le Havre and Marseilles. We speak of the men and women of the streets, about 'an inaugural moment of speech' – about the welcome that each could bid the other with no other justification than that of being another person (Blanchot). We speak of De Gaulle's fumbling address on French television, and of panic in government circles, and of the carnivalesque redoubling of the power of authority in the disarray of the marchers (Blanchot again).

After lunch, in a temporary food coma, we speak of the banning of far left groups in France, and of the retaking of the Sorbonne and the infiltration of the police into schools and universities. We speak of the workers returning to work, and the triumph of the Gaullists, returned to government with a good majority at the General Election in June. We speak of the Czechoslovak Spring, crushed by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact. We speak about the collapse of the Cultural Revolution into terror, and the suppression of Guevara-inspired guerillas in Latin America.

The room seems to grow dark. We feel depressed, terribly depressed. But we invoke, as the afternoon wears on, the title of one of the collectively written tracts of the Students and Writers Action Committee, whose participants included Butor and Roubaud, Sarraute and Duras: Tomorrow it was May. How moving! How beautiful!

Tomorrow it was May: and so we speak, too, about the Hot Autumn in Italy in 1969, and the British miner's strikes of 1973-4, about Italian workerism and Autonomia. We invoke the ghosts of Fourier, Blanqui, Luxemberg; we speak of Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Cabral, and then we drink with our fellow attendees through the night.

Up and down piss-smelling stairwells, heading to our rendez-vous. You can't walk in a straight line in this city, W. says. It wasn't made for the pedestrian.

We breathe more easily as we are driven out through the suburbs. One day there will be no more cars, W. dreams. The flyovers will crumble. Grass will grow on the motorway. And the concrete collars of the inner, middle and outer ring roads will fall off one by one.

The tower blocks will gambol like rams and the shopping centres like sheep, W. says. And above it all, the same sky as he glimpsed that day at his college, with the students sitting out with their barbecues.

I'll have to pay for the beer, W. says at the pub. He no longer carries money, he says. He's like the queen.

W. ponders why I always make my lips – my great fat lips – into a funnel before I take a sip. No doubt it's all the better to pour it down, pint after pint: a funnel for the two pints I always neck at the bar before I sit down, and for the dregs of pints other people leave …

Anyway, he has his story, W. tells me. He has a story so good that to tell it is to betray it. He pauses for effect. 'I got my job back', he says. He got it back! I gasp. How is that possible? How, when the college had taken such measures to sack him? A legal technicality, W. says. That's what saved him, which is ironic, because it was through a legal technicality that they tried to get rid of him.

But hadn't the college managment had him marched off campus? Didn't the college police enter his classroom and lead him away? He'd been seditious, they'd told him. He'd been stirring up the students with all that Marx. It wasn't on the syllabus. He was in breach of contract. But he'd said nothing directly about staff cuts and course cuts, W. told them. He'd said nothing at all about managerial incompetence.

But they suspected him regardless of leading the students on their protests. The students led themselves he told them. They festooned a banner across the humanities building and sat out on the lawn in peaceful protest, drinking wine and cooking lunch on disposable barbecues with no help from him.

Still, W. was becoming a folk hero, management worried. Hadn't he spoken up to management in the redundancy meetings? Hadn't others followed his example? Colleagues shook his hand in office corridors. They thanked him for his courage, which had in turn stoked their courage. And meanwhile, outside, the sky open above them, the students drank wine on the lawn.

It was a glorious time, W. says. Management had been quiet for a few days, holding meetings off campus. Rumours were the College president was close to resignation. But then the order came, and W. was led away from his classroom and banned from the campus. Life went back to normal. It was as if nothing happened. Students went to their lectures. Sacked staff stuffed their books and pot plants into their cars and drove away.

And then? He was permitted to appeal, W. says. He came along to the appeals meeting with the mightiest of documents. His defence was Talmudic, he thought. He'd gone through the college laws like holy writ. He'd gone through its financies. And then he'd made graphs, he says. He'd made charts and diagrams to expose the real reason for staff redundancies. But none of that impressed them.

The Union, meanwhile, had seized upon some technicality in their attempt to dismiss him, W. says. They explained their case to management, who then disappeared into a huddle. And then? Full reinstatement, W. says. It was to be as if nothing happened. And that's how it was, as if nothing happened.

It's a marvellous story, I agree. Marvellous and terrible, W. says. Still, W. wonders whether he wouldn't have been better off sacked. Whether he shouldn't have been forced to leave it all behind, the whole system.

We need to leave, W. says. We need to depart. What's that line Appelfeld has his characters say? 'After all, I'm not an insect'. We're not insects, W. says.

W.'s train was full of obese children, he says. – 'When did everyone get so fat?' The children ran up and down the carriages, unhindered by their girth. But W. got down to some reading despite their bellowing. He underlined passages and wrote in his notebook. The children on my train were wiry and lean, I tell him. They sat still with their pitbulls, full of spent hatred. – 'And what did you read?', W. asks. And when I tell him, he nods and murmurs. – 'Flusser again, oh yes … Mazzarri, oh you'll never understand him …'

W.'s been reading so much Tronti he's not sure which of his thoughts are his own, and which the Italian philosopher's. The development of capitalism is the truth of capitalism, he quoted in an email to me. The more that capital develops, the more it reveals the secret of capitalism.

And then, in another email: As soon a capitalism has conquered everything externally, the force of domination must become internal – capitalism has to be internalised, capitalism is now a matter of subjectivity. Brilliant!, I wrote back.

It is only by seeing ourselves as part of capital, immanent to capital, that we can possibly struggle against it, W. wrote. Exactly!, I wrote back.

He's reading Tronti's Twilight of Politics now, W. says. It's very despairing. Basically, there is no political subjectivity so there's no more politics. The workers' struggle is over … The credits are rolling … Tronti says we need to read Kierkegaard now, not Marx, if we want to understand the effects of capitalism.

He has things to tell me, W. says when I meet him at Birmingham New Street. Great things! But first he needs a pint. He needs to regroup.

There's no city more revolting than Birmingham, W. says. But there's no city he understands as well as Birmingham, he says. Wasn't it to Birmingham that his family fell to earth after their years in Canada? Wasn't it Birmingham that saw his first intellectual adventures in the library of his grammar school? Wasn't it there he was dazzled by the bright orange dustcovers of the Schocken editions of Kafka?

Perhaps we need something to think against, W. says. Would he ever have needed to think, if they'd stayed in Canada among the pine trees and the lakes? Of course not. His body and soul would have been one. He'd have known fellowship, harmony. But as it was, falling to earth in Birmingham, he had to think against the city. To think against it, which meant to think against England, this ridiculous country, he says. To think against England from the city at the geographical heart of England.

And isn't that why we've travelled here from opposite ends of the country, from our cities on the periphery, from W.'s Plymouth and my Newcastle? Isn't that why we agreed to speak here of all places?

Schelling, Malebranche … no one's safe when I begin to think. Maimon, Nicholas of Cusa … Is there anyone who might be saved?

A rumbling through the heaven: Lars is writing one of his commentaries! Angels' cries: he's defiling Rosenzweig! And Weil! And Kierkegaard!

W. shudders. No one reads a line he writes, he says. It's of no significance at all. But when I write – when I publish my reflections, if he can call it publishing, if he can call them reflections – he wants to clasp the entire oeuvres of Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard to his breast. Wants to build a big wall around the library and all libraries, posting sentries to shoot me on sight.

Don't let him get near!, he's tell them. But he knows, like the Red Death of Poe's story, that I'm in there already, that my reading has eaten away at those oeuvres like cancer.

Don't write about them!, W. cries of Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig and Weil. Leave them alone!

He, when he writes of them leaves his thinkers intact in their greatness, their distance. They remain remote and brilliant in the sky of thought. But when I write of them? I make others doubt, W. says. I make others despair.

Are Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig and Weil really so worthwhile if he's writing on them?, they ask themselves, looking at me. Were we wrong all along if he thinks they're right?

That I write on Western philosophy is really the destruction of Western philosophy, W. says. That I write on religious ideas is really the destruction of all religious ideas. And that I pretend to think is really the destruction of thought, affecting all thinkers, everywhere.

My non-intelligence. My non-integrity. My non-belief. The non- in each case is not merely privative, W. says. Not merely a lack of intelligence, or a lack of integrity. My non-belief is a desecration of belief, he says, my non-integrity a desecration of integrity. My intelligence a desecration of everything intelligence means.

'How stupid you are!', W. says. 'How measurelessly, infinitely stupid. How corrupt!' W. shakes his head. My non-belief is far beyond his. It's fallen into itself, collapsed, like a black hole. And it threatens to draw everything along with it. My non-integrity threatens to draw his into its abyss; my non-intelligence is the black sun around which W.'s revolves in a decaying orbit.

And if there are those we admire for their intelligence, integrity and belief, it is with the risk that they, too, despite their same intelligence, integrity and belief, will be dragged across the event-horizon of my non-intelligence, non-integrity and non-belief. Must he really fear for the oeuvres of Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig and Weil? Must he really fear for their reputation as I, like an idiot, begin to write on them?

'The glamour of thinkers, of thinker's lives, that's what attracts you, isn't it?', W. says. The glamour and distance of the lives of Kierkegaard, of Weil, or Rosenzweig, of their lives as thinkers: I have a sense of that, a real sense, and it humbles me. How could it not?

But in the end, I admire them only as I admire the celebrities in the gossip magazines I buy. Their brilliance is only the equivalent of a celebrity's beauty; their integrity, the fervour of that of an ingenue's rise to fame. But this means I admire them only because of what I lack. My stupidity places them at an infinite and glamorous remove.

It's different with W., he says. He's that little bit smarter than me, that little bit farther ahead, and it's enough that his non-intelligence, unlike mine, is commensurable with real intelligence, his non-integrity with real integrity. At least he has the glimmerings of the faith of Kierkegaard, of Weil and of Rosenzweig, W. says. At least his non-belief is of the same order as their belief.

Rosenzweig, Weil, Kierkegaard … what can they possibly mean to me?, W wonders. An answer comes to him as he watches me reading Hello!

'That look on your face … That raptness …': he recognises it, W. says. He's seen it before, when, in the early hours, we pore in wonder over the pages of Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard. – 'How is it possible that a human being could have such thoughts?' one of us will exclaim. How is it possible …?: but that's my only response to these thinkers, just as it is to the red carpet celebrity.

In the end, it's a sense of distance I admire, in the case of intellectual brilliance and my stupidity on the one hand, and airbrushed beauty and my unairbrushed grotesquerie on the other.

I eschew OK, National Enquirer and other celebrity magazines just as I eschew lesser thinkers. But I revere Queen Rania of Jordan in her photospread in Hello! just as I do W.'s collection of German edition Hermann Cohens.

My obsession with the Queen. My admiration for her outfits, almost always exactly the same, but in different colours, as though she had been dipped in a different tub of paint each time. My stories of having met her hatmaker, and of spending an afternoon with a lady in waiting.

She's a very down to earth woman, I've told him. She eats her breakfast from tupperware boxes, her corgis round her ankles, I've told him.

But I feel some leftist unease with respect to the Queen, he knows that. I know I shouldn't approve of the monarchy, or follow its activities in Hello!

My favourite quandary, which I mull over in airport check-in queues, or on platforms waiting for delayed trains: Would I accept an invitation to a royal garden party? Would I RSVP positively to an invitation signed in the Queen's hand? Of course I would, I murmur on some occasions. Of course I wouldn't, on others.

My obsession with celebrities, with minor royalty. My obsession with Hello! Why do I always bring it with me on our train journeys? Why do I insist on leaving it in his study when I come to stay?

'Who are all these people?', he wants to ask me, when he sees me reading. 'Why do they matter to you?' Because they do matter to me, that much is clear. The way I read. The way I nod my head over its glossy pages, like a Jew over the Talmud. He sees, as never before, a look of absolute seriousness on my face. He sees it there: an intensity of focus only the Husserl archives would warrant.

What are you looking for?, W. says, as I turn the pages. What, in Oscar dresses and airbrushed actresses? What, in the photospreads of Queen Rania of Jordan?