I am most intimately, most personally spoken to (as among gallows birds and pastors’ daughters), initiated, involved, drawn into complicity. Editors honor me with letters, fraternally presenting me with their ethical motives (not neglecting to add their passport photos), sibyls whisper their queenly wisdom to me in a uterine tone (with a profound gaze, a Mona Lisa smile around the vulva that appeals directly to my gonads). This is flattering, but it’s not meant for me; what is meant and addressed is something in me that is no longer my SELF but probably one of the countless sub- and co-selves of my experiencing self. I don’t want to be pedantic—that would promote total dissolution. But anyway it’s something embarrassingly general into which the substance of my self (perhaps slashed open by the categorical imperative) runs out—whether the ID of the psychologists (according to Sigmund Freud, the pleasure principle rules unrestrictedly there) or the ONE of the existentialists (according to Jean-Paul Sartre, the world of the salauds) makes no difference to me, it’s not my SELF—yet it is, but not really. . . There is evidently a collective self in me, into which any other self (together with its idiotic demands) can be projected, a communal multiplicity in which everyone can identify with everyone else, everyone with all the others, all with everyone. Otherwise, I couldn’t be expected to let myself be drawn into matters that are not at all my matters, utterly remote from the things that really affect me and certainly remote from the things that I can affect with my actions.

Here, the borders of no Middle Kingdom are respected. What in God’s name do I care about the Congo? What am I to do, what can I do about the extermination of the giraffes in East Africa or about Konrad Adenauer’s stubbornness? . . . Yet here, these issues are urgently presented to me as though my material and spiritual welfare depended on them, my happiness, my moral integrity, my ethical climate. This surprises me somewhat. I must admit: Until now I haven’t expected anything other than a shallow means of passing the time, distraction—at the dentist’s, for example, or at the hairdresser’s (when I’m waiting for a girlfriend haloed in blue light and hygienically decapitated by the barber’s smock fastened under her chin in the thin-walled cubicle, mysteriously deaf and dumb like the Trunk Lady in a carnival stall, giving me the absent smile of Brigitte Helm in Metropolis under a massive space helmet of glittering nickel, she likewise holding a magazine in her hands, which are no longer at all connected to her). It can presumably be traced back to this that I had the notion that one reads illustrated weeklies with one’s fly undone—