No one ever accepts that they’re an idiot, Shiva, Livia said. No one ever calls themselves an idiot and means it. They think they’re smart enough to know their so-called idiocy. As though they could outwit it. As though they might master it, by calling it idiocy; and by that they are thereby most assuredly not idiots. And that’s what my literaro-philosophy was for me, she said: my method of mastery. Which was a method of denial!
But in the end, I could only fail. And fail failure! Fail my failure as a literary writer and as a philosophical one.
Did I really think I could outwit stupidity itself? That I’d made a move that changed the game? My role was only to deepen it, my idiocy. To fulfil it. To set the seal upon my idiocy. By writing the book that could only be the book of my idiocy. And idiocy in general. The book of the Mercia Philosophy Department. And even Livia’s idiocy. The idiocy of it all – all of the humanities. All of the university. And the universe too – why not?
My book of idiocy – Livia’s book of idiocy: the same. My iteraro-philosophical project – Livia’s idiotenprojekt: you couldn’t tell them apart. I was the official writer-up of the idiotenprojekt. Its anamnuesis. Its scribe. I was to write Livia’s magnum opus.
Work in Progress 