How is it that our idiocy still surprises us?, I ask W. Isn’t that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy? Above all, I tell W., we are not complacent idiots. In fact, we are very active. The tragedy is that our activity is what confirms us in our idiocy, since it attests to the fact that we struggle with all our might not to be idiots.
I say tragedy, I tell W., but I mean farce, because it is the great farce of our lives that it has not been sufficient that we’ve run up against the brick wall of our idiocy not once but countless times, and that we’re about to run up it again today just as we will do so tomorrow, and it will always be thus.
The idiot, I tell W., does not want to be an idiot. But isn’t that precisely his idiocy? Oliver Hardy is very serious; Vladimir and Estragon have their moments of pathos; Bouvard and Pecuchet have their great project: the idiot has the ambition of becoming something other than an idiot.
In our case, I tell W., although we know we’re idiots, that knowledge does not prevent our idiocy; in fact it encourages it, insofar as we act in order to overcome our idiocy. If only we could remain still, in our idiocy. If only we could pause … but then we would no longer be idiots.
The essence of idiocy is activity; the idiot is the one who runs up and down, endlessly, who is able to tolerate anything but his own idiocy, when in fact his idiocy was the fact that preceded him and that he can only confirm.
It is rather like the film Memento, I tell W., except that the protagonist, instead of forgetting everything that happens each day, remembers it, but still does nothing to dissuade him of undertaking the most idiotic course of action given his circumstances – he kills those who would help him, and falls willingly into the hands of what, for him, will entail the very worst.
Farce , I tell W., and not tragedy, for we can never be said to run up magnificently against our limits. We have no dignity; it is not the limits of fate that we test – the great confrontation with our finitude, but only the limitlessness of idle chatter, that great spinning of puns and innuendo that anyone at all could accomplish.
Heidegger was right, I tell W., the philosopher must avoid the fall into such chatter: what is worse than gossip and idle curiosity? But nor is the idiot ever entirely ignorant: isn’t it precisely the way he is caught between knowledge and ignorance that makes his life farcical?
But there are different ways of living this ‘between’: like Plato’s Eros, the idiot is a wanderer, the son of Poverty and Plentiude. Unlike, Eros, however, he has drunk himself into a stupor with Aristophanes and the others over whom Socrates steps in order to make his way back into the marketplace.
And isn’t he unlike, above all, Marx’s proletariat who alone can repeat and retake the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century into order to become the true subject of history? The idiot is lumpen, I tell W., no question of that. But still, I get the impression the lumpenproletariat enjoy themselves in the moment, there and then – the idiot must always defer gratification. Isn’t he too busy dressing up as a philosopher in order to know he is only trying on ideas that will never fit him?
At first, our role is to amuse others, but soon we will only bore them, and worse, they will resent us for wasting their time and the time allotted to us. In the end, I tell W., idiots come in pairs because only their double will be left, eventually, to amuse. An amusement that depends upon one idiot thinking himself slightly less idiotic than the other: which of us is really as modest as we pretend? And besides, our modesty is belied by our activity, which is always frenetic.
You tell me I am happiest when I’m making plans, I tell W., but I could say the same of you. The idiot is always young for that he gives to the future the chance that he will not always be an idiot; possibility, he thinks, is his milieu. But in fact, the possible is so for everyone but him. How many brick walls will we run up against before we learn? But we are always too young to learn, awakening each morning into our idiocy.
Doesn’t Homer Simpson always have a madcap scheme? Aren’t Bouvard and Pecuchet perpetually beginning yet again to explore another branch of knowledge? It is always dawn for the idiot, who is too busy to notice the radiance of the morning, I tell W. Perhaps this is what tempted Dostoevsky to create a holy idiot, I continue, but Prince Mishkin is a solitary, and hence not a genuine idiot.
Brad Pitt’s character asks the serial killer at the end of Seven whether he knows he’s insane. I think it’s immaterial whether the idiot knows what he is or not; knowledge, for the idiot, has been dissevered from action: he knows what he is, but does it anyway, not with the resignation of a hero towards his fate, but in the eternal hope of one for whom the future remains open.
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