The mystery is why I want to parade my buffoonery rather than apologising for it. Or rather, why, in the guise of such apologies and self-castigation, there is simply a desire to parade my buffoonery, to perform it, to insist upon, and to thrust it into everyone's face.
I would have been happiest in the period of show trials and autoconfessions, W. says. I would have liked nothing better than to have confessed for imaginary crimes, the greater, the better, signing every confession the police brought to me and admitting my role in the greatest of conspiracies. And I would have liked my entire oeuvre to be swallowed up by the great confessional autocritique that would sprawl from volume to volume.
I did it, I would say. I was the worst of all. It was me, it was all my fault: what have I ever wanted to say but that?
W., by contrast, dreams of a mystical kind of buffoonery that is no longer dependent on masochism and exhibitionism. Before God, we are always in the wrong – Kierkegaard, in the guise of a Jutland Pastor wrote an edifying sermon on that theme. But before what is W. always in the wrong? Before what cosmic tribunal?
Lars Iyer's Blog 