Me in my role as a punk children's entertainer
(c.1985)
Now watch closely little girl as I prick your red balloon
with a safety pin ...
I.
Last night I gave a short talk to the crowd gathered at Kant's Cave; a monthly meeting organised by Philosophy for All [1] and held in a first floor function room at the the famous Two Chairmen pub, in Wesminster [2].
The paper addressed the question of what constitutes dark enlightenment [3], so perhaps not ideal material for "shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats" [4] - or indeed young children.
Nevertheless, I was delighted to discover that one of the people Zooming into the event was watching it accompanied by her precocious four-year-old son, who was equally fascinated by my public persona and appearance as he was by the contents of the paper itself:
Mummy, why does he talk so fast? Why is he wearing such funny clothes? What's a zombie apocalypse?
II.
Deleuze says that children are born philosophers or, more exactly, natural Spinozans; by which I think he means they instinctively know how to map real (rather than imaginary) trajectories and experiment with immediate (rather than
representational) affects.
That may or may not be the case.
But what is undoubtedly true is that I should never have abandoned (my very short-lived) career as a punk children's entertainer in the mid-1980s, in order to become a failed artist and spectacularly unsuccessful poet-philosopher.
For it seems I have a real knack for amusing little ones (and corrupting young minds in the manner of Socrates), whereas I have strictly limited talents as a grown up intellectual and adult educator.
Not that I'm unhappy about this: for like Nietzsche, I think it is only by remaining a little childlike ourselves that we remain close also to the flowers, the grass, and to butterflies ... [5]
Notes
[1] Founded by Anja Steinbauer in 1998, Philosophy for All is an independent non-profit organisation that welcomes everyone with a love of wisdom - whatever their intellectual background or IQ - to attend its various events; walks, talks, film screenings, etc. Click here to visit the PfA website for full details.
[2] The Two Chairman is thought to be the oldest public house in Westminster and is housed in an 18th-century Grade II listed building in a part of Town at one time as notorious for cockfighting as political intrigue.
[3] I published a four-part series of posts on dark enlightenment on Torpedo the Ark in July 2024: click here for part one, on the politics of hate; here for part two, on exiting the present; here for part three, on the zombie apocalypse; and/or here, for part four, on rejecting universalism. These four posts essentially formed the heart of the paper given at Kant's Cave.
[4] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', 38, p. 102.
[5] See Nietzsche writing in Human, All Too Human, Vol. II, Part 2 ('The Wanderer and His Shadow'), section 51.
