Jim Powell - Deconstruction For Beginners

For Beginners LLC
155 Main Street, Suite 211
Danbury, CT 06810 USA
www.forbeginnersbooks.com

Text: 2007 Jim Powell
Illustrations and Cover: 2007 Joe Lee
Book Design: Paul Gordon
Book Editing: Merrilee Warholak and Beau Friedlander

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

A For Beginners Documentary Comic Book
Copyright 2007

Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the Library of Congress.

eISBN: 978-1-939994-03-5

For Beginners and Beginners Documentary Comic Books are published by For Beginners LLC

v3.1

Coyote: Well, I thought you had kicked the bucket!

Twain: Actually, rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. And who might you be?

Coyote: My name is Coyote, and I have been thinking of, ummm, going back to school, you know, to pursue an .... ummm .... education, and I was wondering if you would, ummm, care to advise me on this issue.

Twain: I would rather get tarred and feathered and run outta town on a rail than t get more schoolin, cause theres lots a fellow just cant get from books. But if youre dead set on book learnin I must tell you that our universities have been taken over by deconstructors and that youll be up to your eyeballs in textbooks with titles such as:

Screw Your Gender; The Revenge of the Margins; Splitting the Difference: Point of View in the Inverted Female Body: Kicking the Perpendiculars Outa Right Anglos; Teledildonics: The Queerying of Virtual Lesbianism; Wrestling with the Canon: Annals of Sodomy and Female Authority; and Expansions of Naught in the Intertextual Apocalypse of the Absent Body!

Coyote: For real, dude?!

Twain: I aint being economical with the truth.

Coyote: Then, tell me, how did all this come about?

Twain: Well, starting in the 60s the Algerian-born philosopher Jacques Derrida, father of deconstruction, published a series of revolutionary books. Many suspected that these works killed philosophy outright, and in cold blood at that. Derridas fingerprints were all over the crime scene. For this scholarly act Cambridge University awarded the murderer an Honorary Degree in Philosophy, although many at Cambridge opposed his being offered the award and felt that instead he should be dubbed Commanding Officer of Obfuscation, Prime Minister of Mystification, Emir of Evasion and Furher of Fraud!!!!

Coyote: Well, why did he get the degree?

Twain: Hes got a knack for writing books that mystify almost everyone who attempts to read them and for standing sober, mind you, in front of a sober audience, and carrying on and on about putting transcendental signifieds under erasure and disemboweling the cock-eyed metaphysics of presence, why just as if he were talking about nothing!

Coyote: Transcendental signifieds? Metaphysics of presence?

Twain: That Derrida spits out so many ten-dollar words youd swear that hes getting paid for them. Any professional lecturer knows better than to use the word metropolis, when he can get the same money for city.

But Derrida struts on stage, usually after a lengthy introduction made up of half a hogs share of two-bit words. He faces his audience; his face as inscrutable as the Sphinx. Not knowing quite what to expect, the audience fidgets and squirms and farts and squiggles. Suddenly, the Sphinx smiles, opens its mouth, and then the fountains of its eloquence spurt forth: Its tongue gets as busy as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest, raining down the thirteen parts of speech for forty days and forty nights, burying its audience under such a desultory deluge of linguistic debris that not a particle of sense survives undamaged above the tossing waves of dislocated grammar and discombobulated pronunciation.

At first, it seems to the audience that these soliloquies possess a certain inexplicable charma freshness and breeziness that conveys an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of moral conundrums, cares and responsibilities. This almost makes his audiences feel as if the years they had labored toiling and slaving to be properly understood had been a colossal waste of time!

Yet, soon enough, this same audience begins to learn that deconstruction is a dangerous weapon and a deadly weaponand a weapon with only one fault: You cant hit anything square with it.

Coyote: Well, why not?

Twain: Cause it dont shoot straight. If you were to aim it at a deuce of spades nailed to an oak, youd likely end up hitting a mule standing thirty yards off to the right. So if Derrida should start out talking about a Transcendental Signified or some other highfalutin philosophical fancy, hell shoot holes through every other notion within range before he hits the very varmint hes aiming at. This, in fact, is the actual method by which he kills his audiences!

Coyote: Kills his audiences??!!

Twain: Thats right! His audiences dont die right off, of course. But soon after he starts talking, they begin to sicken and suffer so that they WISH they was dead. And HOW they suffer! They suffer, and suffer and suffer!!! He goes on hour after hour as if he will never stop, till their eyes turn dreary, their eyelids start drooping down to their chins, and their heads start nodding down to their knees. Yet he stands there babbling with the absolute confidence of Adam, knowing that what he speaks no other man hath spoken before.

And just when you think the poor souls in his audience cant look any sicker or sorrier, well, they turn green and yellow and keel over like corpses. Of course that Sphinx pays no heed, but merely stands there pontificating while contemplating this growing sea of stiffs. After a stretch of time so long that most of the corpses have begun to stink, the Sphinx smiles with the tranquil satisfaction of one who has just relieved his mind of a considerable load.

Now, most listeners, of course, are not killed off. If they possess enough horse sense, they soon start questioning themselves as to what state of things hes talking about, and end up questioning whether hes talking about any state of things at all. They get up and high-tail it outta there before the lecture turns fatal. But those poor souls who lack this deep sagacity, those unfortunate souls who remain, those heedless souls who suspect there must exist some kernel of profundity hidden deep in that verbal deluge, why they begin to be swept along in that torrent of verbosity, that hypnotizing current that rolls along in its sweeping and incessant rippling rhythms like the wide, ever-rolling and rogue Mississippi, and they slowly succumb to the hypnotic sound of that mighty current, which is like the suction of a whirlpool sucking the spirit out of a swimmers strokes, and eventually they are swept into the very Center of that irresistibly chaotic verbal delugeand they drown!!!