Spurious - Lars Iyer [7]
That I should have lived at all is a disgrace, W. says. It’s the disgrace, the disgrace of disgraces. But about the fact that I do exist, nothing can be done.
He could stab me. In fact he’s offered several times. Sometimes I’ve asked him to. Sometimes I’ve proposed a double suicide: he stabbing me, and I him. But then, of course, it would do nothing; it’s already too late. There’s only the fact that I exist, and the fact that his, W.’s, existence has already been utterly contaminated by my existence.
A double suicide—is that the answer? But who would stab who first? Who would string up the nooses? And could W. be sure, really sure, that I was really prepared to die as he was? Or even that he would be prepared to die as I apparently was?
Death seems as far away from us as ever. When will it end?, W. wonders. Isn’t the end overdue? Shouldn’t it have come already? When the apocalypse comes, it will be a relief, W. says. We’ll close our eyes at last. There’ll be no more need to apologise, or to account for ourselves. No guilt …
It’s our fault, it’s all our fault, we should at least admit that, W. says. It’s our fault and particularly mine. My fault, W. says, because my existence couldn’t help but contaminate his. And his fault, somewhat at least, because he continues to allow his existence to be contaminated by mine.
But what can we do about it? To whom should we apologise? Each other? I should certainly apologise to him, W. says. I owe him a lifetime of apologies. But doesn’t he owe me an apology, too? Doesn’t he, by his continual presence in my life, perpetuate the disaster?
He gives me license, W. says. He gives me encouragement—but why? In the end, perhaps I’m only a figment of his imagination, a kind of nightmare, he says. Can’t you see I’m burning?, I ask him in his dream. But in the end, he’s burning, W. says. He’s the one who set himself on fire.
Every summer, he begins work with great ambition, W. says. He’ll read more than ever, and more deeply! He’ll write as he’s never written before! But by the end of the summer, it’s all gone wrong. Why does he never learn?, W. muses. Why does nothing change?
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