Performed by the author as part of Kate McNamara’s Temenos: City under the Skin (directed by Catherine Langman), Festival of Contemporary Arts, Canberra, 2001

To Carlo Giuliani

Por todos nuestros muertos, ni un minuto de silencio. Toda una vida de lucha.
To honour our dead, not a minute of silence. A whole life of struggle.

… in the war of the enslaved against their enslavers, the only justifiable war in history …
— Karl Marx, The Civil War In France, The Third Address, May 1871.

I am a philosopher, so they say. I have studied all the great chaps … Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, John Stuart Mill, Ernst Bloch, Habermas, Adorno, Gramsci, Kierkegaard, Ortega, Jaspers, Sartre, even Heidegger … a veritable Philosopher’s Song of erudition. Unfortunately, since the Philosophy department was closed down I dwell in an imported cardboard box — the government has assured me that economic development is uppermost on its agenda and that I will eventually progress to a wooden one — and live off desktop publishing at the traffic lights.

To demonstrate my voluminous learning and qualify for my next Newstart payment, I shall now make the following observations (ahem):

1) Walter Benjamin killed himself on the Spanish border and built a reputation on his own blood.

2) Camus’s existential car accident can be compared to that of Jackson Pollock. The syrupy Nuptials at Tipasa leaves me cold. La Peste has no Algerians in it. The Fall was inevitable, if careless. Nor do I think Sisyphus is happy.

3) We should all remember Plato for his Big Lie and its footnotes by Alfred Rosenberg.

4) John Locke liked to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labour. Whereas Marx liked to transform his labour-power into intellectual surplus-value for class collaborationists and moustachio’d bureaucommunists to squander. As he said, ‘But although boots are, to some extent, the basis of social progress, and our capitalist is decidedly in favour of progress, he does not manufacture boots for their own sake.’ Thus boots and all the capitalist launches himself into an activity that would make Locke blush, As Marx further observes, ‘Our capitalist has two objectives: in the first place, he wants to produce a use-value which has exchange-value, i.e. and article destined to be sold, a commodity; and secondly he wants to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commodities used to produce it, namely the means of production and labour-power he purchased with his good money on the open market.’ He thus mixes other people’s labour with self-interest and is enlightened through this placing of his white man’s burden upon the shoulders of all those whom he exploits in the furtherance of the law and the profits.

5) … in order to know that I know, I must first know, said Spinoza , who was not certain that he was certain of nothing.

Do these scattered examples of scholarly name-dropping make me a phenomenologist like Husserl, Bachelard, or Merleau-Ponty who I am old enough to remember though I can barely call to mind their longeurs and feel more hope in reading about the riots in Genoa? (Sartre read detective fiction and discovered nothing, not even being.)

I am a philosopher, so they say, where ‘they’ are all the people, with their ‘police-tinged bourgeois mind’, who see no point in changing it.

Of course, I draw the line at disembowelling folks like some of my colleagues, such as Mr Mishima over there. And there’s no point in eviscerating me for beneath these robes I’m now as thin as a rake. That is, if I exist at all. I think, it is true (I think), but how can I know it is myself who is thinking? Though I am not the very antithesis of a solipsist in holding that I alone do not exist! Have you pinched yourselves recently?

Forgive me, or somebody … I am a philosopher. I have no steady, stimulating office job like most of you, head down and wage-slaving to the merry racket of the paper-cutting machine or the silent torment of the Productivity Meter. As Coleridge said,

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

By way of compensation, though, I do have an object, if not a subject (sujet) and I have learnt enough to confront the infinitude of my ignorance. And I do have the time, (pushing my shit uphill), if not always the inclination, to contemplate subversive streams of cerebration, such as whether or not there can be a ‘road map’ showing the way to Utopia, or a foolproof scheme to deny our present extraparliamentary corporate masters a similar but much more widely available road map to its opposite. Unlike Centrelink, I regard all this cogitation and scribbling as damned hard work.

Philosophy is for me the dangerous art of thinking outside this square! [gestures across Civic Square] A fit trade for outcasts. No wonder that Socrates was made to drink hemlock (better than Ouzo, however). Or that Hypatia was raped and beaten to death.

But … who wants to be a philosopher after Martin Heidegger? What is nothing, after all? Who the hell is Georges Bataille? Why all these middle class white men? Why me? Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers, said Nietzsche. Maybe that’s why he didn’t have kids. At least I shall never become insane as he did, in his ‘final collapse’, compassionately clasping a whipped horse’s neck, in 1889 — the year of the Führer’s birth, by the way — as I’m quite mad already. Mad enough, at least, to be appearing in this bloody Festival!

Foaming with intricate lies, a British Empiricist chases me round the box in which one of us has to go. Who today would still give anything for a well-executed death? (Especially if hangmen also die. ) Most of you are yearning instead for your little warm spot in front of the tv that watches you , a decent meal and a good fuck, and a good night’s sleep so you can once again go to work to earn the money to buy the bread to get the strength to go to work …
Oh, well, back to the grind. [Heads out into the traffic.] Got a novel in yer, squire …?