Two minor-league philosophers wander around in search of thoughts while on a lecture tour through England and Scotland in the third book of Lars Iyer's philosophical comedy, which began with Spurious and Dogma. As they travel, W. harangues protege Lars almost nonstop on the rigorous and unrewarding life a philosopher must lead and why they are doomed to fail in their pursuit of the pinnacle of Great Thought.
What it boils down to is that they just aren't smart or dedicated enough, especially not Lars. They aren't, for instance, like Alan Badiou, a real thinker, who they spot during a conference they're attending.
What would Alain Badiou make of us? What would he conclude? Enemies, he would think. No, not even that. Perhaps, he wouldn't think anything at all. Perhaps he'd just look through us, as if, like evil for Plato, we didn't really exist.
Even the great Badiou has a problem, though. There is nothing more useless nowadays than a philosopher. Capitalism has conquered the world, rather like a cancer conquers a body, which is to say, by destroying it: the situation is terminal. Even the fiercest enemies of capitalism have been forced to concede defeat. The revolution itself, the very notion of revolution, has been co-opted and commodified. The one thing that doesn't seem to be worth anything at all, that can't be made sexy enough to purchase and sell at profit is, alas, philosophy.
Dare we conjecture that it's very worthlessness makes philosophy the one thing that might stand against the hegemony of capital?
Maybe. But the answer can't be that simple can it?
W. has been downsized as a philosophy professor. He has just managed to hang on to employment at the university by taking a position in the physical education department instructing badminton students. He imagines all the would-be great philosophers like himself, great minds lost to philosophy forever, squandered in middling bourgeoisie jobs. A lost Spinoza working in Specsavers; a lost Descartes, company accountant in Earley; a lost Kant, working in Customer Services in Chipping Norton; a lost Buber, regional manager for a mobile phone company in Chalfont-St-Peter…
Is this really the End time or just the end of our particular line? Is this the end of philosophy and thought or is it just the end as we know it; is it just a matter that we can't see how to go on from here? Has faith died or is it just irretrievably lost to us? Is there really nothing left but ironic pastiche of old forms and once-legitimate passions, reactionary fundamentalisms, nothing but the dead-end before us, the sign staring us baldly in the face? Or is it only our own intellectual, artistic, cultural and spiritual glaucoma that makes it impossible for us to see the road beyond, the roads branching off to the right and left? Does the apparent dead-end exist….only for us?
Every generation wants to believe it's living in the most interesting of times, that it's the crowning culmination of all that's gone on before. But what if we're not, what if we must face the humbling thought that we're nothing but an infertile interregnum, a trough between waves, a silence between rising moments of a musical score, a dark ages? What if we're the people who must go under, who must stand aside, who must be buried once and for all so that something truly new may grow from the moulder of our bones?
This gloomy conjecture is entertained all through Exodus, but with a comic twist.
I would have read either Spurious or Dogma first but they were located in a different library branch, each one further away from home than the branch that had an available copy of Exodus on the shelf. Typically, a second and third book of a trilogy aren't as strong as the initial effort. I'll be curious to see if that's the case with this trilogy.
I've had this experience myself reading Gilles Deleuze:
W. carried Deleuze's Logic of Sense around in his man bag for a month. He never understood a word of it. The criterion for a book of worth is: does it make you think more. Did Logic of Sense make him think more?, I ask him. It made him experience his idiocy in a new way, which is a very valuable thing.
Idiocy isn't one thing, W says. There are kinds of idiocy. Tones of idiocy. His Deleuzian idiocy is very different from his Rosenzweigian idiocy. From his Kierkegaardian idiocy! He experiences the limits of thought differently with every philosopher he reads! And isn't that the only reason to read, to experience your limits anew? To experience your idiocy?
But its primarily Kierkegaard that W. is most obsessed with in Exodus. It probably has something to do with that "leap of faith" thing.
Kierkegaard: "What does God want? He wants souls able to praise, adore, worship and thank him—the business of angels. And what pleases him even more than the praise of angels is a human being who, in the last lap of this life, when God seemingly changes into sheer cruelty, nevertheless continues to believe that God is love, that God does it out of love."
Which leaves me out. I can't give God what he wants. At the age of seven, I can recall already reflecting in a kind of awed shock what a horror show life was. I already decided that it would have been infinitely better not to have been born at all.
Perhaps this says volumes about the condition of my childhood, but I can't say, philosophically speaking, that I blame my parents. They did me an inadvertent service in never introducing me to make-believe, in leaving me unshielded from the brutalities of the terms of life.
A great deal of "good parenting" seems to me to consist of nothing more than brainwashing your offspring into ignoring the truth and keeping the faith that life is a precious gift. That's how the mill grinds dumbly on, after all, generation after generation.
I feel that I've been staring into the open grave from the moment I opened my eyes and could discern what I was seeing. The bogeyman under the bed, hiding in the closet has always been a reality. I took it for granted that it was so. It's a parent's job to convince a child it isn't…at least until she's old enough to discover the truth for herself. By then, of course, it's her turn to lie to her child.
My parents never shielded me from the truth. Not because they didn't lie, they did, constantly, but couldn't spare the time to lie well. It was an oversight on their part, a grievous one from the point of view of society, as it was their job to prepare me to take my place on the shelf, another bag of fertilizer.
Instead, I've stood apart, outside it all, looking in wonder at the shock and sudden grief people feel when the ultimate happens—aging, sickness, death. How could they not have seen it all along? How could they not have lived in shock and grief every moment, every day, even on the very best day during the very best moment, of their lives?
Wake up you idiots, I think, but, of course, no one wants to wake up. No one wants to stare into the grave—or a face staring into a grave. And are they really wrong to stay asleep for as long as possible? Are they idiots for turning a blind eye? Surely the case can be made that it's better to go on believing there's no bogeyman until he comes out from under the bed at last to rend you limb from limb. Because what's the alternative? To lie there wide awake immobile in shock the entire time waiting? Because, awake or asleep, there is nowhere to run and no way to escape.
Philosophy gives substance to our suffering, W. says. Philosophy gives sense to suffering by communicating it to others. Speech, the capacity to speak: that's what overcomes futility. That's what does combat with the senselessness of the world.
I would have agreed with this at one time. In fact, I unconsciously took it for granted to be true. But I have come to believe that speech only compounds misunderstanding, only adds to and stirs up the existing senselessness of the world. Most people, I've come to learn, do not use speech to communicate, but as a proxy claw, a proxy tooth, to defend and attack. Others use it like an octopus uses ink to escape or conceal an attack. Communication becomes another weapon in the arsenal in the struggle for survival: strictly speaking, it isn't communication at all. At least not the way we conventionally understand it. What's worse, even with the best of intentions, communication often goes awry through the ignorance or unconscious motivations of one or both parties. Better, I've learned, to keep silent.
If writing alleviates suffering, it's the writing one does for oneself. If speaking alleviates the suffering one experiences faced with the apparent senselessness of the world at all, it's the speaking one does silently to oneself, beyond the hearing of others, whether in the dead of night or in a daylight crowd.
He has some sense that there's another kind of thinking, another order of idea, into which one might break as a flying fish breaks the surface of the water. He knows it's there, the sun-touched surface, far above him. He knows there are thinkers whose wings flash with light in the open air, who leap from wave-crest to wave-crest, and that he will never fly with them.
There is a dimension of thought, another dimension of life, which he will never attain. The murk of his stupidity has a gleaming surface…He half-understands, half-knows; but he doesn't understand, he doesn't know.
It's this glass-ceiling of ignorance that W. can't break through and that frustrates him just this side of madness and suicide. If only he could think like Hegel or Kierkegaard, Badiou or Bataille, even Kafka would do…if only he could have such thoughts as those thinkers had: that would be a life worth living!
But, alas, W is condemned to be nothing more than a third-rate thinker. He is just close enough to know he'll never attain the heights and to suffer for it. Lars, on the other hand, being no better than a seventh or eighth-thinker, suffers no such frustration. He plods on, a man perfectly suited to his degraded times: a blogger, a peddler of pop-philosophy, a harbinger of idiocy's coming apocalypse.
In the end, though, as university's become privatized by commercial enterprises and philosophy departments are eradicated, it's not so much being eliminated that W. objects to but the way in which it's done. Haven't we always thought we should be destroyed like rabid dogs? It's their indiscriminateness we object to. Haven't we always dreamt of receiving a great sentence and execution? We're not afraid of being judged, W. says. We're not afraid of answering for our sins. But they'll murder us in the night, these new executioners. They'll kill us in ignorance, without realizing why we should be killed, why we deserve it. We'll go down, but not in the name of anything in particular.
Here, then, is the greatest irony of all. The fascist purges and Soviet show trials of dissident intellectuals and artists have acquired a patina of romanticism. Those were the days, after all, when thinkers mattered! When they sent the Gestapo out to round up scribblers in their garrets. When they mattered enough that even all-powerful dictators of totalitarian states feared thinkers enough to jail or execute them, sent them for rehabilitation, or exiled them to mental institutions.
Capitalist totalitarianism is far more effective than that. Rather than persecute thinkers and artists, market tyrants have rendered them altogether irrelevant simply by ignoring them. Let the thinkers mouth off all they like. No one's listening, drowned out as they are by Lexus ads. Everyone's too busy watching the latest reality show. Everyone's too busy lining up for the newest iPhone. Today's intellectual can only pine wistfully for an era when what they said was considered important enough to be dangerous to the State. Now they are just a pipsqueak lost in the great howl of the Idiot Wind. No one needs to line them up against a wall and go BANG! BANG! BANG! If they are noticed at all, today's intellectual dissident can be even more effectively eliminated with a HA! HA! HA! Ridicule and disregard are the best weapons of all. There's nothing more worthless to people in a capitalist society than something you can't put a price tag on. And, as we all know, wisdom is priceless.
Still, W. is a true believer in philosophy. More than a believer, more than a professor, or even a thinker, he's a prophet of Philosophy. He envisions a philosophical Armageddon and the coming of the Last Thinker, who will set things back in order. At that time the scoffers, the mockers, the pretenders, the careerists, the publishers and promoters of such "false heavens of thinking" like Great Thinkers in an Afternoon, Locke on Your Lunchbreak, Maimonides in a Minute, Socrates in a Second will be rolled up like a scroll—in short, the enemies of thought—will get their long overdue dialectical comeuppance. Finally, the Last Thinker will redeem all the martyrs to philosophy past and present and establish a University of New Jerusalem.
This is W's dream—to live to see the day when this happens. Or, at the very least, lead his people across the desert of thoughtlessness that is our present time, like Moses led his people across Sinai, never himself expecting to see the Promised Land. Iyer recounts this quest in mock-heroic terms, or rather, Lars, his narrator-double does, and when the Apocalypse suddenly and unexpectedly announces itself in the form of a student uprising at W's old alma martyr they both race to the site to be present for the fireworks…only to witness them sizzle.
W remains quixotic to the end, and beyond the end, undaunted that the day of redemption will come, and, as a reader, one can't help but be tempted to take the doomed, hopeless Kierkegaardian leap of faith into the abyss right along with him.
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