Lars Iyer - Spurious

It’s a great mystery to him, W. says, his eternal capacity for hope and the eternal destruction of his capacity for hope. He lives and dies a whole lifetime over summer, W. says, and is reborn every autumn, a little more stupid.

How are his studies of messianism progressing? I ask W. on the phone. He’s burrowing back through Rosenzweig and Cohen to Schelling, he says, whose books he can only get hold of in Gothic script. He can barely read Gothic script, he says. It drives him crazy. But nevertheless, he’s made some discoveries. — ‘It’s all to do with infinite judgements’, he says. ‘And the infinitesimal calculus’.

Above all, messianism’s got nothing to do with mysticism, says W. He can’t abide mysticism. — ‘It’s maths, it’s all about maths!’ He can’t do maths, W. says. This is the great flaw which prevents him really understanding messianism. But then too it might have something to do with the two kinds of negative in ancient Greek, W. says. The two kinds of privation, the second of which is not really a kind of privation. ‘It’s like the in- of infinite’, W. says mysteriously, ‘which is not simply an absence of the finite’.

But W.’s studies of ancient Greek are not progressing well, he says. It’s the aorist, it defeats him every time. W.’s bumping his head against the ceiling of his intelligence, he says. I often have that feeling, I tell him. — ‘No, you’re just lazy’, W. says.

‘What are your thoughts on messianism?’, asks W. I don’t have any thoughts on messianism, I tell him. What about him? W. isn’t able to think about messianism, he says. He’s not capable of it, and neither am I.

Perhaps that’s all messianism could mean to us: the possibility that one day we might be changed so radically that we would be able to think about messianism, says W.

‘What have you done today?’, W. asks me. ‘How do you actually spend your time?’ Weeks and months and years pass, but I seem to do nothing, W. says. ‘What have you read? What have you written, and why haven’t you sent me any of it?’

‘Friends should send each other what they write’, W. says. He sends me everything— everything , and I barely even read it. He doesn’t know why he thanked me in the acknowledgements of his new book, he says. I tell him I was surprised to find myself thanked as part of a long list of friends and colleagues. Didn’t I single him out in my acknowledgements for very special thanks?

W. says I didn’t even read the chapters he sent to me. He could tell: my remarks were too general. I did read them, I tell him, well, nearly all of them. — ‘You didn’t read chapter five’, says W., ‘with the dog’. He was very proud of his pages on his dog, even though he doesn’t own a dog. ‘You should always include a dog in your books’, says W.

It’s a bit like his imaginary children in his previous book, W. says. — ‘Do you remember the passages on children?’ Even W. wept. He weeps now to think of them. He’s very moved by his own imaginary examples, he says.

He wants to work a nun into his next book, he says. An imaginary nun, the kindest and most gentle person in the world.

What we lack in intellectual ability and real knowledge, we make up for in pathos, W. says.

He’s learnt everything he knows about pathos from me, he says. He can make himself weep at the pathos of his writing. I must be constantly weeping, W. says, night and day, since my writing is based only on pathos and has virtually no other content.

Yes, I am a pathetic thinker, W. says, if I can be called a thinker at all. Of course, so is he. He learned it from me. In its way, it’s quite impressive — the way everything I say is marked with urgency, as though it were the last thing I will ever say! As though I were going to expire at any moment!

Then there’s the way I raise my voice in my presentations, reaching great bellowing crescendos entirely arbitrarily, W. says. They bear no relation to what I’m actually saying. And then I like to go all quiet, too, don’t I? W. says. All hushed! As if I’d drawn everyone back to the dawn of creation! As if something momentous were about to happen!

All in all, it’s always an amazing performance from me, W. says. I always look as though I want to start a cult. Schwärmerei , W. says, that’s what marks everything I write. It means swarm and enthusiasm, W. says. I’m one of the enthusiasts that Kant hated. It’s all Schwärmerei with me, isn’t it? W. says.

Sometimes he thinks it’s because I’m working class. I can’t get over the idea someone is actually listening to me, W. says, that I have an audience. Which, come to think of it, is rather extraordinary. I think I’m speaking to people better than me, more refined. Which is, of course, almost always true. I hate them and I love them, W. says; I want only their approval, but at the same time I don’t want it; it’s the last thing I want.

W. has his pathetic moments, he admits. Sometimes he feels the Schwärmerei rising in his breast. Sometimes his voice begins to climb the decibels. But then he knows that I am to follow him, and who will notice his excesses then? I make audiences flinch, he says. I make them twitch in involuntary horror. All that Schwärmerei! All that pathos!

It’s our great fortune to live at the periphery, W. and I agree. He feels an enormous love for his city in the southwest and I feel an enormous love for my city in the northeast. Conversely, I am always overjoyed to visit his city just as he is always overjoyed to visit mine. There’s nothing better than visiting a city at the periphery, W. says, just as there’s nothing worse than visiting a city at the centre (although, he grants, there are peripheries to every centre).

And there is our own peripheriness, W. and I agree. We are essentially peripheral. Who is threatened by us? Who bothers with us? No one, we agree. We have been completely left alone. No one watches out for us, but on the other hand, no one has really noticed us, so we can get up to whatever we like. We are blips on no one’s radar. Our fates matter to no one, and perhaps not even to ourselves. That’s one thing that marks us very strongly, we agree: indifference to our own fates.

For haven’t we noticed that the world is shit? Isn’t it the most obvious thing that it’s all going to shit? You can’t struggle against it. You can’t do anything at all. Those at the centre don’t realise it. They haven’t grasped their essential powerlessness. Only we have grasped it, we who live at the periphery of our own interests, no longer advancing our own cause.

For what would that be: our own cause? What could we want in a world of shit? First of all, distrust yourself, burrow down. Destroy all vestiges of hope, of the desire for salvation. Because it will not come good. It’s leading nowhere. Nothing means anything. The centre does not matter. There’s suffering everywhere — agreed. There’s suffering and horror everywhere — on that we’re agreed. But the first step must be to peripherise ourselves, and to peripherise ourselves with respect to ourselves.

W.’s street. The houses at the bottom are no longer derelict, he says. You used to be able to see the faces of children behind the cracked windows, like ghosts, but now developers have moved in.

This part of the city was once very wealthy, he says. His house was once owned by a ship’s captain, he says — imagine it! We stand back and admire its storeys.

The railway to London used to run through here, he tells me a little later. Passengers would disembark from their cruise liners onto the train, and go straight up to London. The houses are still grand, W. says, although most of them have been turned into flats now. They’re full of alcoholics and drug addicts, he says. No one wants to live round here.