… stupidity…

“ … For the writer, the problem of stupidity occupies a place of deliberate latency; ever on the prowl for your moment of greatest vulnerability, it prepares another sneak attack. Unless you really know what you re doing – and then it s in your face, all over you, in fact, showing no pity. It seizes your autobiographical effort, taking the place of you „I“, henceforth enfeebled, dominated by shame. Thus Barthes, delicate and watchful, writes of himself when he s on himself in the third person: „It is curious that an autor, having to speak about himself, is so obsessed by Stupidity, as though it were the inner thing he most feared: threatening, ever ready to burst out, to assert its right to speak (why shouldn t I have the right to be stupid?); in short THE THING.“ Attempting to exorcise it, Barthes, in his Lacanian phase of dreading the thing, plays the fool: „He puts himself inside it. … In a sense this whole little book, in a devious and naive way, plays with stupidity – not the stupidity of the others (that would be too easy), but that of the subject who is about to write. What first comes to mind, ist stupid.“ If Barthes puts himself in the third person, then stupidity is the first person, what happens first, what has happened agelessly, at the time, which is all the time, when the subject is about to write, endeavouring symbolically to repair the lesion induced by the THING. … “

Avital Ronell: Stupidity