PD: What does it mean to be anonymous?
AK: Being anonymous might have a direct impact with death. How can one go into ‘being anonymous’? Is it about not leaving any trace of past movements? Does not being anonymous mean operating from a clean slate each time?
PD: I have played with being anonymous in the past by using a number of pseudonyms and I always found that there was fear behind it in some form or another. In justifying my right to anonymity, it feels that I was really protecting myself from all sorts of imagined difficulties in my relationship to the rest of society. But this fact that one protects oneself in a relationship is itself an anonymous fact — it doesn’t have a name to it, belonging to one person or another. So there seems to be a difference between the desire for anonymity and anonymity per se. There is the idea of anonymity as a cloak or a cover; and there is the fact of anonymity which is wide open to the world. Can we love one another anonymously? Does that work? Or it is only by coming out into the open that we discover together the anonymity of love.
In the same way, then, to discover together the anonymity of death and the anonymity of the clean slate. It is not my death or my clean slate. Is this the difference? When we artificially induce or make claim to a clean slate there is motive behind it, so it is no longer an anonymous…
