Free Dogma by Lars Iyer Page A

forgotten anything but teaching, endless, remorseless teaching. Former scholars snarl at each other in the college corridors. And there are rumours that the library will be torched, and that they’ll set up a gallows in the quadrangle. It’s like something out of Dante, W. says.
    The war is beginning, W. says. The armies are assembling. It’s as though the awful Hindu stories I tell are coming true. He feels like Arjuna in the great battle of the Mahabharata , W. says. He feels like the leader of the Pandavan armies on the Kurukshetra plains, facing his friends and relatives on the opposing side.
    Uncle was set against nephew, that’s what I told him, isn’t it?, W. says, pupil against teacher, friend against friend: the battle had torn families apart, old friendships asunder … Arjuna threw aside his bow and sank to his knees, I told W. Why should he fight?, he cried to his friend, Krishna. Why should he go on? And that’s what W. wails when he’s with me: why should he fight? Why should he go on?
    W. is going to commence hostilities with scholar-brothers from the old days, when his college was a place of reputation, when the department of theology and philosophy was the jewel in its crown. He’s heading into battle with scholar-sisters from the times when the college was a place of sanctuary for academics from overseas: when they took in scholar-refugees, scholar-survivors from war-torn countries, giving them an office in which to work, and a pass for the library.
    W.’s about to skirmish with fellow scholars of ancient civilisations, fellow men and women of the archive, who have spent their lives travelling from place of learning to place of learning. He’s pitted against scholars mesmerised by Old Europe, as he is. Mesmerised by Kafka, mesmerised by Spinoza. Mesmerised by the French and the German and the ancient Greeks …
    Krishna comforted Arjuna by granting him a divine vision, W. recalls. Arjuna was allowed to witness Krishna’s celestial form: to see the entire cosmos turning in his body. Arjuna saw the light of God, the Lord of Yoga, as a fire that burns to consume all things. He saw a million divine figures in the fire, and the manifold contours of the universe united as one …
    ‘What does your celestial form look like?’, says W. ‘Go on, show me’. Actually, he thinks he’s already seen it, W. says, or parts of it. My vast, white belly. My flabby arms. The trousers that billow round my ankles …
    And my dancing, my terrible dancing. It’s the end of thecosmos that W. sees in my dancing. He sees the destruction of the divine figures, and of the manifold contours of the universe. He sees primordial chaos , he says. He sees the putting out of the stars. He sees the extinguishing of the sun, and the night swallowing the day. He sees the opposite of the act of creation, the opposite of cosmogony …
    ‘ The floodgates of the sky broke open ’, he says, quoting Genesis . He sees ‘ the waters of the great Deep ’, and ‘ the Dragon of the Sea ’, he says, quoting Isaiah .
    How does the Mahabharata end?, W. asks. And darkness fell over India , I remind him.—‘You Hindus have a great sense of decline. And darkness fell over India … ’, he sighs. ‘That’s the way to end an epic’.

 
    Our inaugural Dogma presentation was on Kafka—the room was packed, and W. spoke very movingly of his encounter with The Castle in a Wolverhampton library. I spoke (very ineptly, W. said afterwards) about my encounter with The Castle in a Winnersh Triangle warehouse.—‘What were you on about?’ But Dogmatists stick together; a question for one is a question for the other. You have to stand back to back and fight to the last. Did we win? We lost, says W., but we did so gloriously.
    Our second Dogma presentation concerned friendship as a condition of thought. W. stole half his argument from Paolo Virno, and the other half from Mario Tronti. Virno and Tronti write of their ideas as though they