There is, of course, something quite disgusting in my endless desire to parade my buffoonery before the world, W. says. It's born not from humility – an entirely warranted sense that I will achieve nothing with my life, improve nothing, in fact the very opposite – but from a dreadful exhibitionism that is part of my buffoonery, indeed is inseparable from it. For what else is buffoonery but the desire to endlessly parade one's shortcomings? To perform them, insist upon them, to thrust them into the face of everyone?
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 internal tribunal?
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