My Prizes: An Accounting

There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks about death.

We go through life impressed, unimpressed, we cross the scene, everything is interchangeable, we have been schooled more or less effectively in a state where everything is mere props: but it is all an error! We understand: a clueless people, a beautiful country — there are dead fathers or fathers conscientiously without conscience, straightforwardly despicable in the raw basics of their needs … it all makes for a past history that is philosophically significant and unendurable. Our era is feebleminded, the demonic in us a perpetual national prison in which the elements of stupidity and thoughtlessness have become a daily need. The state is a construct eternally on the verge of foundering, the people one that is endlessly condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness, life a state of hopelessness in every philosophy and which will end in universal madness.

We’re Austrian, we’re apathetic, our lives evince the basest disinterest in life, in the workings of nature we represent the future as megalomania.

We have nothing to report except that we are pitiful, brought down by all the imaginative powers of an amalgam of philosophical, economic, and machine-driven monotony.

Means to an end when that end is destruction, creatures of agony, everything is explained to us and we understand nothing. We populate a trauma, we are frightened, we have the right to be frightened, we can already see in the background the dim shapes of the giants of fear.

What we think is secondhand, what we experience is chaotic, what we are is unclear.

We don’t have to be ashamed, but we are nothing, and we earn nothing but chaos.

In my name and in the name of those here who have also been selected by this jury, I thank all of you.

Speech at the Awarding of the Georg Büchner Prize

Honored guests,

What we are speaking of here is unfathomable, we are not properly alive, our existence and suppositions are all hypocritical, we are cut down in our aspirations at the final, fatal conclusion of our lethal misunderstanding with nature, into which science has led us and abandoned us; appearances are deadly and all the hundreds and thousands of hackneyed words we play with in our heads in our loneliness, the words that are recognizable to us in any language and within any context as the monstrous truth revealed in monstrous lies, or better, monstrous lies revealed within a monstrous truth, the words we say and write to one another and the ones we dare to suppress, the words that come from nothing and go to nothing and serve nothing, as we know and keep secret, the words to which we cling because our impotence makes us insane and our insanity makes us despair, these words merely infect and ignore, blur and aggravate, shame and falsify and cloud and darken everything; by mouth and on paper they abuse by means of their abusers; the very character of words and their abusers is an outrage; the spiritual condition of words and their abusers is that of helplessness and catastrophic good cheer.

We say we’re putting on a performance in a theater that will last for all eternity … but the theater in which we’re prepared for everything and competent in nothing is, from the time we’re able to think, a theater of ever-increasing speed and lost shorthand … it is absolutely a theater of the body — and secondarily of spiritual angst and thus of the fear of death … we don’t know whether we’re dealing with tragedy or comedy, or comedy for the sake of tragedy … but all of it deals with the terrible, with misery, with mental imbalance … we think we should keep quiet: he who thinks destroys, annuls, metes out disaster, corrodes, demolishes, for thinking is consistent with the dissolution of all ideas … we are made up (and this is history and the spiritual condition of history) of anxieties, bodily anxiety, spiritual anxiety, and the anxiety about death that drives creativity … what we reveal is not identical with what is, being shattered is something else, existence is something else, we are something else, the unendurable is something else, it isn’t illness, it isn’t death, those relationships are quite other, as are those circumstances …

We say we have a right to what’s right and just, but we only have a right to what’s not right and what’s unjust …

The problem is to get work done, which means advancing over all one’s inner resistance and evident mindlessness … and this means advancing over myself and the bodies of dead philosophers, over all of literature, all of science, all of history, everything … it is a question of one’s spiritual constitution and one’s spiritual concentration, of isolation and distance … of monotony … of utopia … of idiocy …