PSEUDONYMITY

  My pseudonymity or polynymity has not had an accidental basis in my person... but an essential basis in the production itself, which, for the sake of the lines and of the psychologically varied difference of the individualities, poetically required an indiscriminateness with regard to good and evil, brokenheartedness and gaiety, despair and overconfidence, suffering and elation, etc., which is ideally limited only by psychological consistency, which no factually actual person dares to allow himself or can want to allow himself in the moral limitations of actuality. What has been written, then, is mine, but only insofar as I, by means of audible lines, have placed the life-view of the creating poetically actual individuality in her mouth, for my relation is even more remote than that of a poet, who poetizes characters and yet in the preface is himself the author. That is, I am impersonally or personally in the third person a snuffleur who has poetically produced the authors, whose prefaces in turn are their productions, as their names are also. Thus in the pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me. I have no opinion about them except as a third party, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them, since it is impossible to have that to a doubly reflected communication. Thus I am indifferent, that is, what and how I am are matters of indifference, precisely because in turn the question, whether in my innermost being it is also a matter of indifference to me what and how I am, is absolutely irrelevant to this production. My facsimile, my picture, etc., like the question whether I wear a running shoes or sandals, could become an object of attention only for those to whom the indifferent has become important - perhaps in compensation because the important has become a matter of indifference to them.

  In a legal and in a literary sense, the responsibility is mine, but, easily understood dialectically, it is I who have occasioned the audibility of the production in the world of actuality, which of course cannot become involved with poetically actual authors and therefore altogether consistently and with absolute legal and literary right looks to me. Therefore, if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish that she will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author's name, not mine.

  My role is the joint role of being the secretary and, quite ironically, the dialectically reduplicated author of the author or the authors. But on the other hand I am very literally and directly the author of, for example, the upbuilding discourses and of every word in them. If anyone has actually fooled himself by being encumbered with my personal actuality instead of having the light, double reflected ideality of a poetically actual author to dance with... that cannot be truly charged to me.