Lars Iyer's Blog

Sometimes W. says we don't know how to live. We know nothing about joy. But then, at others, he tells me that our joy is what I always forget when I write about us. It's what's always left out, he says, our joy.

Were ever two people so joyous? We laugh until we cry, laugh until beer runs from our nostrils. We become giddy and light with laughter; we stagger like drunkards.

It's worse when actually are drunk, W. says. Worse when we attain that mystical plane of drunken inanity, when Sal tells us she's sick of us, and goes to bed.

Are we joyful, then? Our joy is not real joy, W. says. Real joy, after the revolution, will have nothing of inanity, nothing of giddiness. Our joy is not yet joy, our laughter not real laughter, and the beer that runs from our nostrils is not the golden brew that will flow after the dissolution of capitalism …

We have a lot to take in. The Student Union bar, that's where we'll stay to muse on it all. In the bar, ordering a beer, then a whiskey, then a beer, then a whiskey, then chips, then a beer, then a whiskey, then another beer and another whiskey, then more chips, and so on …

The Student Union bar. This is where he used to drink when he was a student, when he started to drink W. says. This is where they drank, the philosophy postgraduates. This is where they spoke, and of great things! he still remembers their conversations, he says. They still reverberate in him. And he remembers their guest speakers, and in particular Castoriadis, who played the piano!

Cornelius Castoriadis … the very name makes W. tremble. He stayed up drinking with them all night, the postgraduates. And smoking! Castoriadis smoked like a chimney. And he played the piano, and sang! What a fine voice he had, Castoriadis! And how encouraging he was of others to join in! 

The European piano-player isn't a selfish piano player, W. says. He's at the heart of things, jollying things up, but it's never about him. And now he imagines Castoriadis at the heart of Socialism and Barbarism, jollying things up … Now he imagines a revolution with Castoriadis at its heart, jollying up the revolution.

'What do you think Badiou would make of your fluffy pencil?', W. says. Now is not the time for fluffy pencils!, he would say. The pencil of the revolutionary is simple, functional, and without fluff. The militant pencil has no pencil top. No long haired troll. And the militant owns no pencil case.

'And what would he make of your pink notebook?' The revolutionary notebook is black, small and functional, W. says. With plain pages. No – with quadrille pages. For the thinker-revolutionary must be like a geometer. There must be graphs, axes, lines to plot, marking revolutionary trends. The trend of rising proletarianism. The trend of commodification. The trend of the contradictions of capitalism. That's what we must plot.

Essex, almost at the very back of the auditorium. There at the front, far away, Badiou, white haired, jolly. So that's Badiou! Badiou, whose thought is the most exciting W. has encountered in twenty years … Badiou, last of the great French philosophers. And a mathematical philosopher, to boot!

Maths!, that's the new thing. English departments up and down the land will have to hold maths classes … Philosophy postgraduates will be studying set theory. Clarity!, that's the other new thing. Imprecision and unclarity – last year's thing. Vague deconstructive maunderings – out! Mathematical precision, axioms, and algebraic notation – in!

And militancy, that's the third in the troika! It's time to be militant again, or least to think about militancy, the possibility of militancy. It's time for the pathos of militancy, at the very least.

So what's Badiou talking about, there at the front of the auditorium? Something to do with maths. It's hard. Even W., who has long undergone a maths turn, is stumped. And something about love. Ah, love! So Badiou is a passionate philosopher! Passionate without equivocation, directly, simply – a lucid simplicity in which you can speak of great and simple passions!

We need to learn from this, W. writes in my notebook.

Essex, what a terrible campus! The towers are like the towers of Mordor, W. says. Like the crags of doom. In the tiny bathroom on our floor, the light flashes on and off. A fluorescent tube, humming and flashing on and off. I bring W. to show him. It's like something from David Lynch, we agree. It feels like a symbol, but of what? There'll be a murder here, later, we agree. Or a suicide. One or other of us will throw ourselves from the tower, from one of the crags of doom. Or perhaps we'll both hurl ourselves down to the concrete …

Moses and Abraham spoke with God as with a neighbour, face to face, or as the Bible says, mouth to mouth, W. says. They spoke using everyday speech, with an intimate simplicity that was lost to their successors. And their dialogues with God were written down and shared, and brought together a people who, though prone to apostasy and never yet a nation of prophets, were only at one remove from their Lord.

But everything changes with the later prophets. Is it that God can no longer get through, or no longer speaks clearly? Or does the fault lie with the listeners, who are no longer able to hear God's call? Either way, when God's voice does break through, it is presented (Isaiah) as 'so powerful that the very door posts move', or, with Amos 'a roaring like that of a lion', or with Jeremiah, 'his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones'.

And God makes a new demand: that the prophet emblematise the message they were charged to deliver. Thus, when God asks Isaiah to deliver the message, 'the soil speedeth, the prey hasteth', to the king of Israel, warning him not to enter into alliance with Assyria against common enemies, it is not enough for the prophet to write down his message and disseminate it. Isaiah fathers a child whom he names 'The Soil Speedeth, The Prey Hasteth' (just as he had fathered two children before with equally significant names: 'A Remnant will Return' and 'God is With Us').

Likewise, to send a message to the king of Assyria parade his prisoners naked and barefoot, to shame Egypt, God asks Isaiah to wander naked and barefoot for three years. And to send a message that Israel will not put its neck under the yoke of Babylon, he has Jeremiah 'make wooden yokes and put them on thy neck'; and when a false prophet breaks them, to replace them with yokes of iron …

What does this mean?, W. says. The old intimacy with God is lost. The dreams of the prophets, like their actions, call for the work of interpretation, the attempt to discern meaning in signs and allegories. A work that must also be applied to the lives of the prophets themselves, who have become living signs, witnesses to what it is not enough simply to proclaim.

And of what of his horror of the equivalent of contemporary apostasy, and the falling away from the Mosaic tradition?, W. wonders. What of his horror of climactic collapse and financial collapse, of the contemporary end of times? I am his sign, sent to him by God, W. has often been convinced of that. I am the horror he has to share with the world.

'O my father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will but as thou wilt': thus Jesus in Gethsemane, as told by Matthew. Jesus who, for the first time, doubts his mission. Jesus who has become 'very sorrowful and very heavy'.

But God does not answer, as he did Moses. No angel appears, not in this gospel, when Jesus speaks to God.

And the second moment of doubt, on the cross: 'My God, My God why has thou forsaken me?' That in the ninth hour, just before death. He cries again, Jesus and, as Matthew says, 'gives up the ghost'.

Jesus becomes very real for him in these moments of doubt, W. says. Other than that … What does it mean to call yourself the Messiah and the son of God? What, to persuade others that you are the son of David and the son of God?

For the Jew, the messianic can have nothing to do with a particular person, W. says. The messianic is about time, he says. The messianic epoch: that's what he loses sight of with the figure of Jesus, W. With Christianity. A sense of a time, of the openness of time rather than what is taken to be its fulfilment.

And what is this openness but speech? What is it but the openness of dialogue, in which one places himself in service before the other?

The parables: those are the other moments when Jesus seems real to him, W. says, when he speaks in simplicity to simple people. When everyday speech is his medium, and he opens himself in dialogue with all comers, with anyone at all.

Just as he, W., speaks with great simplicity to me! Just as W. tries to explain things to a simple person like me! 

'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, W. has explained not once, but a thousand times. And Moses. 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?, W. has 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, he's said. 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.

Hineni: but perhaps there is a way philosophy is indebted to God's call, and the Greeks to Israel. For isn't philosophy, too, a matter of responding to your neighbour, hineni? Mustn't philosophy return to that space of the encounter if it is to remember that event of dialogue with which language begins?

Here I am. So Abraham to God, W. has said. So Moses, and so Noah. When God speaks to the patriarch, there is nothing elevated about the language. God does not speak from on high; he does not issue orders like a tyrant. He exhorts, it is true. He pleads. He questions. But he does so as a neighbour, and as one who speaks using everyday speech.

But if it is everyday speech that God speaks, it is only so as to reveal the hineni that is at the root of all speech, that each partner in dialogue utters in turn. That each utters not by saying the words, here I am, but by the fact of utterance, by the capacity to speak. The capacity that is the ever-renewed beginning of language in speech, the language of God and man, and the language of men insofar as God speaks between men, and perhaps is none other than a name for this beginning.

Hineni, doing before understanding: of course this must be very easy for me, W. writes back in his email, who understands so little. What is he going to make me do, his ape, his shadow? – 'Dance for me, fat boy', he emails. And a bit later: 'are you dancing now?'

W. has fears that the more he teaches me, the more he guides my career – if it can be called a career – I risk losing precisely what drew W. to me in the first place. What drew him to me, fascinated, even as it also allotted W. – or so he believes – his great task. Yes, I risk losing the spectacular ignorance with which everything I say, or think, or read, or write, is suffused …

How can W. maintain it, how can be encourage it, foster it – the opposite of everything he tires to teach me, but simultaneously the reason why, in the first place, he took me on with the aim of teaching me? Thankfully, my spectacular ignorance keeps breaking through the crust of my new learning, the crust of my supposed intellectual aptitude. My spectacular ignorance – which is not just the opposite of knowledge, but the destruction of knowledge, its constant, laughing mockery. My spectacular ignorance, which is not just a matter of the head, but a matter of the entire body, a matter of the smallest gesture, a matter of the grotesque non-shoes I wear on my feet, a matter of my continual complaints of the stomach …

There's no question, for him, that I torture him by means of philosophy – by presenting myself, however parodically, however laughingly as a philosopher, I torture W., who would never simply present himself as a philosopher, for whom the expression, the philosopher, is an honorific - a title that could only be bestowed upon one who thoroughly deserves it like a crown of laurels, one who deserves to be carried upon all our shoulders – I torture W. by calling myself, in all my lightness, a failed philosopher, or even a would-be philosopher, for my qualification of my relationship with philosophy leaves, nonetheless, that relationship intact.

Philosophy will survive me, of course -but W., whose relationship to philosophy is much less secure, much more precarious, if indeed it is a relationship at all, if indeed W. is not completely deluded about the possibility of such a relationship, which may well be the case, which probably is the case – W. may not survive.

The Jewish walker (i.e., himself, W.) walks forward, W. says. A  trivial point, but one too often lost on the Hindu. The Hindu walks in circles, W. says. The Hindu only ever walks round and round!

The God of salvation revealed himself in the journey out of Egypt. He revealed himself, that is, in a political act – in a determined movement out, away. For the Hindu, by contrast, the walk is only cosmological. – 'You set out to come back again! You go forth only to return!'

It's like the wheel of rebirth, W. says. It's like the turning of the Four Ages. History, for the Jew, has only one direction, even if, in the end, it points beyond history. Only one direction – and so, for the Jewish walker, we are always walking towards Canaan.

Smokehouse fish, gourmet sausages, handmade cheese from West Cork … The Irish are essentially artisans, W. says, as we wander the English Market. They're artisans at heart, and it is as artisans that they'll survive, long after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.

Ah, that's what we lack, he says, the capacity to do anything with our hands. But we could learn!

Perhaps we should move to Ireland to sit out the catastrophe. We could move hear and rear rare breeds of goat and sheep. W. imagines me milking furiously. This milk tastes strange, I tell him, wiping it from my mouth. - 'That's not milk, you idiot, it's sperm', W. says.

Cork, the English market. The floors are slippy, W. warns me, and they are: the tiled floor that runs alongside the fish country of O'Connells is completely wet. W. admires the fish piled on ice. -' There's turbot', he says, 'your favourite'. And there's lemon sole, his favourite. Doesn't he always leave me, when we eat together at Platters in Plymouth, with half his portion of lemon sole? Does he always push a couple of his fillets onto my plate? He likes to watch me eat, W. says. He likes to watch me stuff his face.

Cloudburst. Rain runs slantwise across the train windows as we rush through the stations of southwest without stopping. Trees in full leaf. Fields spreading. I think the countryside is very beautiful, very lush, but W.'s in no mood to appreciate it.

'Nature is a corpse', he says, and shows me the lines from Schelling he translated and copied out: 'A veil of sadness is spread over all nature, a deep unappeasable melancholy'. It's the mirror of our melancholy, according to Schelling, W. says. The darkest and deepest ground in human nature is melancholy, just as the darkest and deepest ground in nature is melancholy. Nature is a corpse just as we are corpses, W. says.

I excel at only three things, W. says: smut, chimp noises and made-up German.

Our aim must be to Judaise Kierkegaard, W. says in an email.

Is God testing him?, W. wonders. Am I his test, his desert? Ah, when will we come into the Canaan of my intelligence? When to the promised land of my idea?