Lars Iyer - Exodus

Political despair: that’s what we should guard against, W. says. Political defeatism .

The danger is that we are in love with the loss of politics, W. says. That we are happy with it; that we depend on it. That we love Britain, even as we pretend to hate it. That we love capitalism , even as we rave against it.

There’s always a danger of revelling in our woes, of taking refuge in them: that’s what Kierkegaard warns us of, W. says. We need to intensify our despair, to despair over it, that’s what Kierkegaard tells us, W. says. We must despair over our despair! We must double up our despair, set despair against despair, if we are ever to transform it into action!

The Essex postgraduates never succumbed to left-wing melancholy, W. says. They never thought that history was at an end, or that there could be no alternative to capitalism. Some of them, it is true, advocated a kind of hyper -capitalism, a turbo- capitalism, which would accelerate capitalism to its end. Some of them held out for a capitalism-gone-berserk, a deranged capitalism, which would destroy half the world as it destroyed itself. But the Essex postgraduates never lost faith in the utter transformation of the world , W. says. They never supposed that politics could be anything other than all-enveloping . They never thought that politics could mean anything but a total revolutionary project …

Tomorrow it was May : isn’t that what the Essex postgraduates said to themselves? Tomorrow it will be May ’68 again. Tomorrow the occupations will begin. Tomorrow, the general strike. Tomorrow they’ll set cars on fire and barricade the streets. Tomorrow they’ll heave up the paving stones …

All he knows is that it will be necessary for us to go under , W. says. That, whatever happens, it will be a younger generation that will begin anew …

No one will remember us (no one will remember him ), W. says. No one will know what we tried to do (what he tried to do), W. says. No one will know what he had to put with …

Just as Moses never entered the promised land, only seeing it from afar, so we will never enter the promised land of the new politics, W. says. Just as Marx and Engels didn’t live long enough for the Russian revolution, so the new revolution will only come after we have disappeared from the scene.

W. dreams of Dartmoor as the Canaan of the British postgraduate. He imagines long-haired postgraduates reroofing the deserted longhouses with thatch, and resowing the moor with woodland. He imagines them spinning wool and curing hides in the sunshine. And he imagines the children of the postgraduates roaming the wild, following herds of red deer, as their ancestors did when they crossed the landbridge to our country. He imagines them constantly on the move, braving all weathers, owning no more than they can carry. And he imagines them singing as they wander, letting new songs echo in the forest glades. Songs of love and friendship … Songs of the open sky … Songs of the new world, of the new Stone Age.

‘What songs would you sing, after the end of the world?’, W. asks me. Cock songs, I tell him. He can see us now, W. says, singing out our great cock songs as the world ends around us.

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

And the last thinker will set down the book he carries with him, which is known as the Book of Life, W. says. And he’ll unlock its seven seals, one by one, and stand back as, with each seal, a terrible vengeance is born.

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

And when he opens the fifth seal? Those expelled from their jobs, those sacked from righteous departments, will have white robes given unto them. Postgraduates who never finished their studies, who broke themselves against the texts of Heidegger and Derrida and Deleuze: they too shall be robed in white. Undergraduate geniuses, brighter than a thousand suns, who never received funding for postgraduate study: they too shall wear robes of white. Thinkers who were kept outside the university, obscure Judes who lived their entire lives in employment precarity; thinkers of unimaginable integrity, unimaginable will, reading Leibniz in their lunchbreaks, reading Canguilhem on the commuter train: they too will be robed in white. Thinkers too mad to think; institutionalised thinkers; alcoholic thinkers lying ruined on park benches, who were never given a chance: they, too, will be lifted up and clothed in white.

And the sixth seal? There will come a great thought-quake, a shaking of books. The sun of thought will become as black as a sackcloth of ash, and the moon of thought as red as blood. And the false stars of thought — the careerists and pontificators; the popularisers and dumbers-down; the depoliticisers and despiritualisers — will fall unto earth. And the false heaven of thinking, full of endless publishers’ series of introductory books: Philosophy in 60 Minutes, Great Thinkers in an Afternoon, Locke in Your Lunchbreak, Maimonides in a Minute, Socrates in a Second , will be rolled up like a scroll … And the enemies of thought — the resenters and the zealots, the pompous and the privileged, the Oxonians and Cambridgians — will hide themselves in the dens and the rocks of the mountains, and will say unto those mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the face of the last thinker, for the great day of his wrath is come …

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

There will be disasters, W. says. Great mountains burning with fire will be cast into the sea, and the sea will become as churning blood.

The Leviathan will awaken, W. says. The Behemoth. And the Beast will reign in Babylon, the regenerated city. And the remnant who will survive, the 144,000 who will have the name of the last thinker written on their foreheads, will ready themselves for the last battle, for the war of Armageddon when Babylon is smashed and the Beast is vanquished.

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