Lars Iyer - Dogma

If I realised for one moment … If I had any real awareness … But it would be too much, W. says. I couldn’t know what I was, and continue as I am. I couldn’t come into any real self-knowledge.

‘That’s what saves you’, W. says. ‘Your stupidity’. If only he knew …: That’s what everyone thinks when they see me, W. says. That’s what he thinks.

Meanwhile, it’s left to him to bear the terrible fact of my existence , W. says. It’s his problem, not mine as it should be, W. says. Everyone blames him for me. — ‘What’s he doing here?’, they ask. ‘Why did you bring him?’ He has to find all the excuses, W. says. He has to be sorry in my place.

Our eighth Dogma presentation, our first overseas, we gave drunk, hopelessly drunk, and were almost completely incoherent. Only one person attended our ninth , so we went to the pub instead. For our tenth , we drank steadily through our presentation, cracking open can after can.

The Dogmatist must always be drunk , that’s the next rule, W. says. Drunk: yes, of course. We used to think drunkenness might come after thought, might follow a successful presentation, a fruitful discussion. But now we understand that drunkenness belongs to thought. In the current madness, close to the end, who can bear the thoughts that must be thought? Who can bear it — the coming end?

You have to drink, we agree. Drink to think; drink to present the results of thought. It’s a discipline, we decide. You have to start early and continue, steadily. We owe it to ourselves. No: we owe it to thought!

But for our eleventh presentation, we drank too much. W. was sick in the toilets before we started. I was green faced. Green lipped! Never again, he says. It should be a new rule: Dogma is sober. Especially sober! No, that’s a stupid rule, W. says.

How many rules do we have now? W. wonders. Dogma is collaborative —he remembers that rule. Dogma is clear —did we make that a rule? The presentation must be intelligible to everyone. Anyone must be able to follow its points, its logic. Dogma is fundamentally democratic , W. says.

Dogma is personal —we’ve agreed on that before, he says. Use anecdotes! Speak of your life and its intersection with thought! Speak of your friends! Speak of your passions and of your misfortunes!

Dogma is reticent —that should be a rule, too, W. says. What is spoken is not for publishing. Scorn publication! Publication is for fools! But then Dogma is studious : we need to remember that, W. says. Work hard on your presentation. Read everything. Nothing should be left to the last minute. There must be nothing slapdash!

W. names the next rule: Dogma is apocalyptic . Dogma accepts that these are the last days. Catastrophe is impending. Bear this in mind as you speak! You must only speak about what matters most !

Dogma is on the side of the suffering, we should remember that, W. says. We should think of the poor. We need to keep the memory of the poor before us at all times. Dogma is advocative ! W. says.

What next? Oh yes: Dogma is peripheral . It avoids famous names. It is shy of fashionable topics. Dogma stays on the outside, with the people of the outside, W. says. It has nothing to do with the centre! Dogma eschews the centre, W. says.

But we mustn’t forget: Dogma is affirmative . Ignore those with whom you disagree. There’s no point! ‘ Never let the critic teach you the cloth ’, W. says, quoting Burroughs.

A final rule, a kind of meta-rule, W. says: Dogma is experimental . More rules can be added, but only through the experience of Dogma .

We should shoot ourselves, W. says. Or maybe he should shoot me, and I him, in a kind of Mexican standoff. Then we would lie there under the sun, bullets in our heads, flies buzzing around us, and there would be a great rejoicing. But that’s just it, isn’t it: there would be no rejoicing. No one would see, no one would know what the world had been delivered from.

How is it that we’ve escaped detection? W. wonders. How is it we’ve got away with what we have? It would restore faith in the world if we were hunted down and shot. At the last moment, the gun held to our temples, we would laugh in gladness because we would know that justice had been done. It would all make sense! The world would be restored!

That we’re still alive, W. says, is a sign of the nearness of the end.

Zeno of Citium strangled himself, W. says. Imagine! He was already an old man by then, and felt he’d missed his appointment with death. Why had it overlooked him? Very well, he would bring death to himself. He would make his own appointment with the end.

And what about us? Should we strangle ourselves? Should I strangle W., and W. me? But that’s just it: death doesn’t want us, W. says.

If we die, it will be from some stupid accident, the most absurd of illnesses, an ingrowing toenail, for example. It will not be a matter of integrity, or an act of martyrdom. We’ll die for nothing, for no purpose. How could we presume to take our own lives?

Loving is stronger than death , muses W. — ‘What do you think that means? Do you have any idea?’ For Rosenzweig, W. explains, with love you leave behind the natural order, the boundaries of self and ego. Immanence is broken : that’s what it means to love. Love is stronger than death, stronger than solitude, stronger than autonomy: that’s what Rosenzweig says, it’s very moving.

Are we capable of love? W. muses. Is he? Am I? — ‘Have you ever been in love with anyone, I mean, really in love?’ W. doubts it. I read too many gossip magazines, for one thing. Love’s not based on fantasy, as I seem to think. It’s an ethical act. — ‘But you’re not capable of that, are you?’ I’m fundamentally a fantasiser , says W., and know nothing about the living reality of other human beings.

Broken immanence . Wouldn’t that be an altogether better name for our intellectual movement? Or for an ’80s style band, like Flock of Seagulls, W. says.

‘ The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born ’. W. is reading from his notebooks. ‘In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears ’. That’s Gramsci, he says. It’s from the Prison Notebooks .

Morbid symptoms — is that what we are? Is that our significance? Then we need to see it all the way through, W. says. We have to press towards the new, and all the way to death. We have to live the crisis, W. says. We have to become the crisis.

Sometimes W. feels like one of the pillar saints, like Simon Stylites in Syria in the first century AD, waiting for the Messiah to return. When’s he coming, the anointed one? When will W. be redeemed?

W.’s perched on his pillar, reading his books in the great languages of Europe. He’s reading, he’s taking notes in the great languages, ancient and modern, and there I am at the base, masturbating in the dust.

Omoi , that’s what W. wants to say. Or oy vey! Or yoy! What sound should you make at the end, to acknowledge the end? Yoy! It’s all over. Oy vey! We’re done for. Omoi, omoi : the lament of Antigone and her siblings as their father was taken away. No, that was popoi. Popoi, popoi, popoi , they said. — ‘Are you listening down there?’, W. says.

‘You’re never happier than when you make plans’, W. says. ‘Why is that?’ I like to throw plans out ahead of me, W. notes. I always have. It must be the illusion of control, a game of fort-da like that of Freud’s grandchild.