Lars Iyer - Exodus

Should we make up for it now? W. wonders. Should we head further north? Should we catch the train to Aberdeen, and then to Inverness? Should we take the ferry to the Shetland Islands? To northern Norway?

He knows we will never reach our Canaan, W. says. Canaan is for the young. But we could be the advance-scouts of Canaan. We could go to its brink, and report back.

He sees us, in his mind’s eye, heading into the north, into the storms of the north, W. says. He sees us sailing across the cobalt seas, the aurora borealis flickering on our faces. He sees the days grow longer, the skies lighter, as the parallels converge. And one bright day, our team of huskies pulling us across the snow, we’d see the promised land shimmering in the distance. Is it a mirage of ice? we’d wonder to ourselves. Is it an effect of glittering light? And as we’d come nearer, we’d see it for what it is: Hyperborea , the legendary land behind the north wind, which admits only the most youthful and proletarian of souls …

But what would happen in reality? They’d find our bodies just off Inverness, W. says. They’d dredge our bodies from the water. He sees the headlines: Lecturers Drowned on Idiot Quest .

His colleagues wear tracksuits to work, and have whistles around their necks, W. says on the phone. He can see them doing star-jumps outside his window. He finds it oddly hypnotic, he says. It soothes him when he looks up from his reading.

No one laughs from the heart in his university, he’s noticed that, W. says. Not anymore. There’s no joy in the corridors. Even the sports science students seem subdued, as they play lacrosse on the college greens.

And how is it at my university? W. asks. But he knows the answer. — ‘You’re doomed — dooooomed!’ And what am I going to do about it? I should think about a dirty protest , W. says. A pre-emptive dirty protest. — ‘Go on. Strip down and smear the walls with your shit. That’ll show them’.

‘Are they’re still building?’, W. says. Always, I tell him. Night and day. They’re starting a new excavation now, I tell W. The basements have been dug — very deeply, almost to the centre of the earth — and foundations laid, I tell him. The superstructures are going up — and the formwork, and anchors for hoists. They’ve dug great trenches for service pipes, in long rows, like burial pits …

W. hopes they’ll dig deep enough to awaken the sleeping King Arthur. He hopes they’ll stir the sleeping Frederick II, the sleeping Charlemagne. He hopes they’ll stir the last thinker , who lies buried most deeply of all …

W. sends me the essay questions he’s set his students.

1. In Vino Veritas . What have you learnt from drinking?

2. ‘I am outside the truth; nothing human can take me there’ — Simone Weil. Do you consider yourself to be inside or outside the truth?

3. ‘Salvation always comes from where nobody expects it, from the depraved, from the impossible’ . Explain, giving examples, what Rosenstock means by i) the depraved, and ii) the impossible. Do you agree with him?

4. ‘Nobody can truly say of himself that he is filth’ . Is Wittgenstein right? Are you filth? Explain why/why not.

5. ‘Our talk of justice is empty until the largest battleship has foundered on the forehead of a drowned man’ . What does Celan mean? Answer with reference to badminton ethics.

6. ‘I think joy is a lack of understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves’ . Is Tarkovsky right? What do you think he means by ‘the situation in which we find ourselves’?

7. ‘There are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos’ . Distinguish between what Tarr means by social shit, ontological shit and cosmological shit with reference to i) Damnation , and ii) your life.

8. ‘There is no more university, only a game of ceremonies. Rectors, deans, lecturers, students, all move to cover over the void, a void that is covered over by the rules of dead time’ . Do you agree with Blanchot? Discuss with reference to our college.

9. What is the significance of the dancing chicken in Herzog’s Stroszek ? Explore with reference to i) your life, ii) the cosmos.

10. ‘Salvation will come, but only when we choose despair’ — Kierkegaard. Have you chosen despair? Why/Why not?

Something terrible is going to happen, he knows it, W. says on the phone. He feels it. This morning, he found himself weeping without reason. He felt overwhelmed by an unaccountable sadness, by a melancholy that seemed to be without cause. — ‘ Why so downcast, my soul? ’, he whispered to himself, quoting the Psalms. ‘ Why do you sigh within me?’

Is this what Kierkegaard meant by anxiety? W. wonders. But he’s not anxious about himself, or about his relation to God, W. says. It’s not his own existence which worries him, his own soul. Something’s changed in the world, he’s sure of it, W. says. Any minute now, and it will become clear to everyone. Soon, it will be there for all to discern.

W.’s reading Norman Cohn again. The Pursuit of the Millennium . How many times has he read this book? W. wonders. How many times has he tried to scry the future in its crystal ball?

W. reads about the flaring of millennial hopes outside of the institutions of the church — about the processions of naked penitents crying to God for mercy. He reads about the flagellants — vagabonds, outlaws and criminals of all kinds — whipping themselves to atone not only for their own sins, but for the sins of the world. He reads about the prophetae , who discovered signs of the Millennium all around them — in raining frogs and stones and fish, in the lightning above the churches and graveyards, in solar eclipses and shooting stars — signs that the great Deliverer was about to appear.

Is our Deliverer about to appear? W. wonders. Is our Millennium on its way?

Wars and rumours of wars between philosophy departments, and between colleagues in philosophy departments; stories of lecturers hating and betraying one another, and taking out grievances against once another; terrible falls in student recruitment, in National Student Survey rankings; terrible rises in student litigation, in student complaints made to the university authorities; the appearance of false philosophers in the media, deceiving many; the rise of the scoffers of philosophy, who spit upon philosophy; the proliferation of introductory books on philosophy, as opposed to real books of philosophy; the triumph of applied philosophy, of applied ethics, which is to say, compromised philosophy, the opposite of ethics: the signs of the end are everywhere, W. says.

Petitions are circulating about staff redundancies, about department closures. Petitions against capitalism in the university, against the private partners of the university.

Don’t they realise that the petitions come too late? W. says on the phone. That they ask for too little? We ask for too little! The university has to be remade , W. says. Turned inside out ! We have to expose the university to everything it has tried to exclude. The working class, the unemployed … The street-drinkers, the vagrants …

W. recalls Deleuze’s legendary seminars. Anyone could come to them! You could just wander in off the streets. People did! Deleuze would speak for hours, lost in a cloud of cigarette smoke. When the hubbub from the audience became too much, he’d pause to take questions from the floor — mad questions, vagrants’ questions … Or he would simply pause, his tender eyes surveying his audience, half-amusedly, half-lovingly. And then he would begin again, as though he hadn’t been interrupted. Deleuze had folded the outside into the university, W. says.