W. was moved, he says. I was moved. Our audience broke out into spontaneous applause. He’d thought my prophetic days had gone, W. says. He’d thought my oracle had shut up shop …
Almost all of them were working class, the Essex postgraduates, W. says. That’s what must be understood. Working class, and with only instinct driving them to Essex.
All they had was a vague sense that life had gone wrong, somehow, W. says. That life had taken a wrong turn. That what had happened here in this country was, in its entirety, a wrong turn.
Some of the Essex postgraduates, it is true, had a kind of folk-memory of working class radicalism, of Nye Bevan and Henry Hunt, and, beyond them, of the Chartists and the Diggers. But most did not. Most had only an instinct, half-awake, half-alive, that there was something wrong, and not merely with them. Most had only the sense that theirs was not merely a personal problem, that their chronic depression, their chronic fatigue, their simply not fitting in, were not merely personal failures, personal foibles, matters of idiosyncrasy or maladjustment.
In fact, there was nothing wrong with them at all: wasn’t that what the postgraduates discovered at Essex? Nothing wrong with them, and everything wrong with the world, especially Britain: wasn’t that their first lesson at the University of Essex? Wasn’t that put up on an overhead in their first lecture: There’s nothing wrong with you, and everything wrong with the world, especially Britain?
Deprogramming: that’s what the University of Essex provided. Deconditioning. It was like emerging from a cult, arriving at Essex, W. says. They needed exit counselling, the new postgraduates. They needed to be deindoctrinated!
W. thinks of those who didn’t make it to Essex. Those who never got there, who had no idea of what waited for them there. Those who didn’t even apply, and had no thought of applying. Those who applied nowhere, and would never think of making an application in their lives.
All those lost British Weils! W. says. All those lost British Kierkegaards! There may even be a lost British Rosenzweig, sitting paralysed in Doncaster, W. says. And lost British Socrateses, who, like the original, will never write a line, but who will never meet their Plato. W. sees in his mind’s eye a lost Diogenes, locked up in Strangeways for public indecency.
A lost Spinoza, W. says, working in Specsavers in Stevenage; 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 …
What might they have been had they passed through Essex! What might have happened had they been washed up on Essex’s shore!
The train southwest.
He’s been officially reprimanded for his teaching, W. says, reading his emails on his laptop. Making his students watch Damnation over and over again has no relevance to badminton ethics, he’s been told. And the students don’t want to hear any more Jandek, W. says. Actually, he doesn’t want to hear any more Jandek. He can’t bear it.
His sports science students lack a sense of the eschaton, W. says. They have no idea of the end times. How can he make them understand that there is no hope?
He misses the old days, W. says, when his philosophy students had to be forcibly restrained from throwing themselves from lecture hall windows. He misses the honest despair of philosophy seminars, W. says, when he and his students would speak of thwarted lives and strangled chances.
Philosophy should destroy you, W. says. Philosophy should break you to pieces. This is why Kierkegaard is so important. It’s what Kierkegaard understands more than anyone else!
‘Since I was a child, I have lived under the sway of a prodigious melancholy …’, W. reads from his notebook. Ah, what can we understand of the melancholy of Kierkegaard — of his despair and its attendant suffering, of which he said, ‘I was never free even for a day’? What, of the ‘premature aging’ of the Danish philosopher, which, he said, was caused by his melancholy? What, of his isolation, to which, he said, his melancholy condemned him — ‘For me there was no comfort or help to be looked for in others’?
Kierkegaard saw his melancholy as a kind of election, W. says. As a kind of calling. For it was only loneliness and misery that revealed to him what matters most. Wasn’t he to write, in the last period of his authorship, that suffering was the sanctifying mark of God? Kierkegaard thought that to accept suffering was the chance to invert its meaning, to regard it as an honour, as a source of pride. For isn’t our suffering the analogue of Christ’s on the cross? Isn’t it an echo of the abasement of the apostles, who lived in poverty and lowliness? And doesn’t it recall God’s own suffering, when He sees what His church has become? ‘There is truly a fellowship of suffering with God’, Kierkegaard writes. ‘A pact of tears, which is intrinsically very beautiful’.
But what happens when the pact is broken? W. wonders. What, when suffering is no longer, as it was for Kierkegaard, a sign of God’s love? W. reads me a quotation from Cesare Pavese’s diary:
Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time — is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenceless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.
He’s going to publish his essay on Cohen and Rosenzweig, W. says. His essay on the mathematical messiah. It’s time to publish! Time for the thought-harvest! Time for the doors of the great archive to open, and for his essay to be ceremonially placed in the stacks!
What will the legacy of his essay be? W. wonders. Fifty years from now, what will his essay have been? Will it have turned the world of Cohen, Rosenzweig and messianism scholarship on its head? Will it have given the world a new Cohen, a new Rosenzweig, and a new sense of messianism? Will it have transformed the scholarly field? Will it have become an obligatory point of reference for the scholars who came after it? Will W.’s name have appeared in a million footnotes, a billion bibliographies?
Will essays for and against W.’s interpretation of Cohen, Rosenzweig and messianism have been presented at colloquia and conferences? Will special editions of journals have been dedicated to his thought on Cohen, Rosenzweig and messianism, with W. having replied in turn to his scholarly respondents?
Will doctoral students have been unable to write theses discussing Cohen, Rosenzweig and messianism without referring to W.’s Cohen, W.’s Rosenzweig and W.’s messianism? Will a sense of the paradigm-busting significance of W.’s Cohen, W.’s Rosenzweig and W.’s messianism have passed into the popular imagination, into the pages of broadsheets and TV documentaries?