'My Weil' by Lars Iyer
As a satire of post-everything society, set in the post-common-sense environs of a culture studies graduate program, the novel My Weil is devastatingly funny. Many characters are enrolled in a subject called Disaster Studies—a field ripe for the actual insights that seldom arrive. Instead, Disaster Studies students bang on about “late heterosexuality” and “queer in theory but straight in life.” They are cynical—pessimists for whom getting drunk is a “refusal of our new teetato-totalitarian world.” But perhaps all hope is not lost. “We love Potentiality. We love what’s Possible.” They undercut the thought by adding, “We love Utopia.”
Into this morass wanders a woman calling herself—after the French philosopher—Simone Weil. And she actually believes in something—God? “Every meaning we give the word, God, is idolatry,” she says. “As for atheism … I think it’s possible to speak of negative faith.” Unlike her classmates, she is actually doingsomething, including working to help the poor, not just theorizing about it.
Author Lars Iyer is probably writing from his experience as a philosophy lecturer and creative writing professor at Newcastle University. Writing in the clipped sentences, the Twittergraphs that reflect the fractured coherence of contemporary discourse, Iyer captures the sense that we are all enrolled in Disaster Studies, even if only auditing the course work.
