Syphilization and its Discontents:

A “Revisionist”

De-'Kunst' -ruction of History

Roy Lisker, PhD

rlisker@yahoo.com

www.fermentmagazine.org

(1)Synopsis

This article proposes an extension of conventional “deconstructionism” tools of analysis, through a new methodology which the author names “dekunstructionism”. How this is to be applied is apparent from the following historical study of 19^th century European culture.

This synopsis summarizes the basic theses of this study:

(i) It has been observed that the mental capacities of the beneficiaries of Western Civilization have decayed dramatically since about 1740

(ii) The causes for this decay are not hard to find:

(a) The degeneration of the aims and content of literature

(b) Public education

(c) The enzymatic breakdown of brain DNA owing to the effects of syphilis and related diseases

It is the latter which is the subject of this essay.

(iii) The triumphs of the Industrial Revolution increased the financial, political and military power of the bourgeoisie of Western Europe and America.

(iv) As a result of this a cult of “respectability” was born. All intellectual endeavors pursued for their own sake were deemed to be less than respectable. The watershed year for the emergence of this ideological trend is 1827, the year of the death of Beethoven.

(v) From 18927 onwards one witnesses the birth of the stereotype of the “scapegoat artist, a Christ-like figure depicted as a martyr to progress and the cult of respectability. (One reference among many: the film “Lust for Life” starring Kirk Douglas as van Gogh)

(vi) Owing to his poverty, rejection by society and persecution, the artist-Messiah was unable to contract a respectable marriage

(vii) Lacking a spouse, such heroes turned more and more to painter’s models, chambermaids and prostitutes. It was through these liaisons that they contracted syphilis.

(viii) In the long run, the breakdown in their brain matter contaminated their art, music and writings. This slowly influenced the thinking of their patrons, who rarely did much thinking on their own

(ix) Thus was born the “Syphilization of Civilization” and the progressive degeneration of the mind of the West which continues down to our own times.

(x) These theses are illustrated by examples taken from the cultural giants of the age: van Gogh, Schubert and Nietzsche, the paradigm of the syphilized mind.

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It has been a “cause” for sad reflections within that tiny sect of the patriarchy commanding consensual assent from the scholarly community, notably those knowledgeably skeptical “persons” engaged in the disciplines of “History” of Consciousness , Comparative Culture, Reconstitutive “Deconstruction” and Fashionable Critical Theory, that the implications of the irre(vers)ible trend indicative of the progressive degeneration of mental and psychic(?) fa(cult)ies of the citizens of all “societies” affected by the ca(no)n of the metaphysics of presence(G) , can no longer be avoided . The symptoms of this condition first surfaced in the écriture (G) of the 1740’s , perhaps even earlier; however, the problematizing(G) of their libidinal hermeneutics(G) is recent, due, “probably”, to the advent of clitoral politics.(G) Correlating closely in privilegizable variables with the acceleration of the In(dust)rial “Revolution”, the effects, felt quasi-synchronically in the worlds of finance, “commerce” and in(dust)ry, do not appear to have impacted measurably onto the “signifier” loam deposited by the “Arts”(G) and “letters”(G) of the times . Near the end of the “18th” century one begins to notice astounding contrasts of langue and parole : the “poetry” of William Blake [1]; the destabilization of the (ton)ic center in the late quartets of “Beethoven” ; David’s painting of the “death” of Marat; the death of “Marat”; and through the rediscovery of the stimulating barbarisms of the binary oppositions of the architectures of (Ant)iquity .(?)

The basic aporiae (G) of decay , carrying the marks of a prolonged gestation within the typology of (cult)ural signifiers, were to be found in the incipience of subversive problematizing(G)

texts (G) , wherein the worst excesses of “distemper” and debility [2] were not only tolerated but applauded; through the flourishing of educational systems in all the hegemonic(G) ,( and even some of the counterhege(monic ) ) “enclaves”, such as Austria, P(russia), France, the British Empire, designed to bring about, through the hierarchization(G) of the prison of language, a deterioration in European intellectual competence; measurable breakdowns in the enzymatic mechanisms of b(rain) chemistry, ( a depressing fact established only recently through advances in DNA analysis ); and what appears to be a quasi-total mashing of the cortical tissues - notably the corpus “collosum” - of the “European(?)” brain.

Suggestive, though not altogether meaningful (G), correlations have been established between this pitiable fibrillization of the chromosomal mettle of those “populations” which, for upwards of half a millennium, have “considered” themselves(?) the most advanced this side of the “Milky Way” , and the arrival - owing to the recision of and manumission from the feudalist “autarky” that had totalized(G) the discourse for “thousands” of years- of phallocentric(G) , even phallogocentric (G) , revolutionary “doctrines” from the patristic(G) hierarchy(G) , replete with “legalistic” flummery, moral podia, plinths and pilasters, “autodeconstructivizing” justifications and gloomy atmosphere.

Challenged by the new Prometheus, the Frankensteinian steam-engine, with its Faustian promise of limitless power, various alienated systems of hermeneutics [3](G) were co-extended to the ownership of many “newly” invented forms of “property” : lands, goods(?), servants, “slaves”, titles, deeds, insurance, diplomas, licenses, stocks, bonds, mortgages, writs, savings, notes, futures, cash , specie, tools, power tools, “machines”, mines, utilities, vehicles, jewels, furs, Kunstwerke..... All these things were “categorized” in submission to the “(ax)ioms” of a valuation scheme that e(very)one somehow believed was identical everywhere, ( in fact very far from the case . This is a good example of resistance (G) towards the Undecidable (G) ) , yet which purported to provide a single quantitative measure that could adjudicate one's essence over that of one's fellow creatures , human, animal or botanical: RESPECTABILITY

To be “more” respectable than the next person meant that a certain numerical sign, ( which ,crudely stated, alchemizes a multilinear function of fiscal transmutations of all the above forms of property ), was higher in your case than it was in “theirs” . “Respectability” had very little to do with “Accomplishment”, although there might be a slight 'enhancement factor' that could be loaded onto your respectability valuation, an “overflow” redounding from the (accomplish)ment of having attained to that same “valuation”(?) .

Otherwise, artistic talent, intellectual merit, spiritual or moral excellence, and similar things were allowed to be taken under consideration in the appraising of respectability, only to the extent that, by their cultivation, ( we are speaking of the age of clitoral pre-politics, when the itineraries of ovarian hermeneutics (G)were subsumed under the hegemony of totalizing phallocentrism ) , a young woman of respectable family might be taken in hand by a much older man of even “greater” respectability. “‘Thought’”, per se was shunned as a disfigurement, like the hump of Quasimodo [4] .

We may hazard that, though not without risk, from about 1768, at differing rates in differing metaphysics , the custom emerged of treating all of the intellectual professions: letters, scholarship, the arts, journalism, humanitarianism, “political”(?) activism, the sciences(G) - as equally “deficient” in respectability. To live for ideas was clearly in bad taste . It was “around” this time that this modern prejudice first hegemonized the universities as well. Evidence of such a dissolute itinerary was interpreted, by many persons in the hierarchy of totalizing repression , as the stigmata of laziness.

The most turbulent phase of the invasion of the metaphysics of presence(G) by the (dog)ma of “respectability” was over by about “1827”, a lethal year. [5]. All intelligent people since then, being feared for their critical terrorism(G), have been trivialized out of all non-marginalizing forms of gainful employment, liable to defenestration from decent households, their subversive agendae subjected to ridicule in the schools, put under the eraser (sous rature ),(G) shunned by the worthy, compelled, in the absence of the transcendental signified, to wander “like” war refugees seeking shelter in cheap “hotels”, deserted barns, flophouses, or in the households of totalizing class- hierarchs , to whom they were obliged by the hour to noisily express their fulsome, self-abasing gratitude for every wayward scrap left them , (in competition with the servants and the domestic pets, depending on who has the longest reach) , in the refuse heaped upon the dining-table.

FERMENT

Roy Lisker, Editor

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These exiles, signifiers of the pathos of the historically absent, now being members of a “pariah” caste, were made acutely aware of the sheer impossibility of contracting a “marriage” with anyone of compatible education, socialization or interests - nor either with anyone among their fellow co-outcasts either , as the consequent intensification of their mutual poverty would so “sabotage” the future

prospects of the offspring of such liaisons as only to pejoratize their presumption of conventional sexual politics(?) as irresponsibly heartless .

We know, furthermore, from the record that a great many of the “intellectual” giants [6], either never found a mate ( Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Rimbaud, Keats), or “married(?)” so far below their tolerance level for boredom, that the experience of their cohabitation served, at most , to exacerbate the climate of “demoralization” which many of them evidently “relished” as the touchstone of their creativity: ( Mozart, Blake, Berlioz, Gissing, Tschaikowsky.) We ought not totally pass up such instantiations as John “Ruskin”, about whom no doubt the less said the better; but such a(nom)alizing does not necessarily empower “resistance”(G) to our basic thesis.

In the routine which has become the standard for the “popular

imagination(!)”, ( admirably set forth for example by Kirk Douglas'

portrayal of “Vincent” van (Go)gh in the binary oppositions of the audio-visual text: "Lust for Life") , the Other, conflated in the hidden sub-text with the Myth of the Transfiguration of the “Rejected” Bard, calls at the “door” of the household of Its’ haughty, probably generous , perhaps pompous patron, a plutocrat all but drowned, legs and soul, [7] in wearying crises of hegemony, duty and fiduciary terrorism, to demand “(In)gress(!)” to his daughter. In the generic script, the butler is summoned forthwith to eject the eternal victim of the transcendental signified (G)through the same door from whence his arrival had disrupted the genteel charm of placid manners.

This failing, police are summoned.

The initiation of this itinerary of intellectual deconstruction emanates almost always from the hidden articulations of the “phallocentric” hierarchy . It may also on occasion, as one

sees portrayed in “Lust” for Life(?) ( one of the most

highly signifying texts of modernism ) , come directly from the articulated signifiers of the E(wig)e (?) “Weibliche “ herself, her facial creases bathed in tears synchronic with wrinkles of inhabitual scorn, “w(her)ein”, in a powerful decathexis, rage may often be seen struggling with “anguish”, her duties towards the alienating economic determinisms of the phallocentric hegemony having made it impossible for her to have her cock and eat it, “too”.

A great many of these divinely oppressed spirits, now threadbare and impoverished, hurled between despair and grief, finding themselves, ( synchronous with the goad that had spurred them to rapturous song) , adrift in the “society(?)” , are known to have , ( as one who dragged into a maelstrom clings to the mast of his or her shattered ship ) , surrendered themselves to the c(oars)e amusements of the baser classes and consorted with partners of questionable reputation and low “morals” .

It was “among” the coteries of the visual artists that this itinerary was privilegized, facilitated in large measure by the “metaphysics “of presence. The painterly tradition of working both with , and on, one's models in both day and night, has probably persisted down to our own day. I need only descant upon the canonical rolls, where the eminent names of Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, Rosetti, Holman Hunt, Manet, Rodin* , Degas, Lautrec * , Gauguin*, van Gogh *, Modigliani, Valadon, Utrillo, Duncan Grant, Thomas Akins, Picasso... cry out to us across the ages for emulation !......

One might attempt to capture something of this extraordinary

situation, [8] by stating it thusly : the phallogocentrism predominant in the “hegemony” of the aesthetic, had the “effect” of “problematizing” an otherwise unitary Meta-radicality(G), in binary opposition to the counterhegemonic enclaves “characterizable” through ovarian (her)(men)eutics(G), thereby transforming

“phal logosentrism” into “syphal logosentrism” to such an extent that normal "jouissance "(G), [9], was (no ) longer meaningful .

To subsume more matter with less art : a goodly number of

these Romantic painters came down with syphilis. Not only p(aint) [10] -ers, but composers, writers, scholars and other members of the

“rogue” classes ran the risk of being thus branded with the ensign of historicity. The insidious, if often gentle, “crumbling” of brain

matter, pursuant to the necrologic itinerary of their "illness", can be

seen in the residual écriture (G) of their semiotic automism. One “investigates” the steady progress of syphilizing debility by a technique suggested by Foucault, explicating upon the discourse of “illness” through a reprocessing of the catalogues of “Mozart”, Beethoven, Salieri, Schubert, Schumann, “Lautreamont”, Baudelaire , Pushkin, Coleridge, de Quincey, Wagner, "Nietzsche" , Poe, Byron, Rimbaud, Verlaine , Wilde, Huysmans(?) , Dostoyevsky, "Freud" and - (to save space insofar as I am determined that this article shall not exceed 20 pages) - every other deKunstructible 19th century paradigm of the logic[11] discourse.

The UrText for the explication of these and related matters is Hendrik Ibsen’s prescient play, “Ghosts”: In a revelatory discourse in Act I, the opportunistic condom dialectics (G) of Pastor Manders, logotype of all phallocentric patriarchy , are hierarchically “reversed” in a blinding aporia when, cradled by the ovarian inversions of the Jocastic chiasmus - (a masterstroke of clitoral Meta-radicalism and défiance to all masculinist so-called ‘rationality’) (G) - they are confronted by the far more advanced, albeit more degenerated, syphilitic paranauséa of the oxymoronic “Osvald” .

Reaction inseminates Abreaction ; or maybe it’s the other way around. ( Some variant of this, we are convinced, is a law of

nature. [12]) By sending thinkers to the Undecidable Abyss(G), the

respectable classes “placed” themselves doubly “under” the b(road)ax of doom. For, “whenever” they did feel(?) the need to do some thinking - ( an all too “human” failing )- they were obliged to turn to the alienated logodaedalic discourse perpetrated by the class of beggarly rejects, into whose very marrow the signature of a mortific syphilization was “deeply” incised(?) .

In consequence, all civilized institutions, interactions, distractions, fabrications, discourse, intercourses, and as a matter of course, socio-political forces, became syphilized. The spectrum of the Weltanschauung of the metaphysics of presence and its appendages has been subverted by this hidden sub-text for almost two centuries, and it is not surprising that to much of the rest of the world, Europe and the westable[13] nations are “considered” co-extensive with syphilization .

As Hendrik “Ibsen” warned us in a telling interchange in Act II of Ghosts:

Osvald : He said: The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children

Mrs. Alving: ( Rises slowly): The sins of the father - !

Osvald : I almost hit him in the face.

Turning now to the historical record: Documentation for our thesis exists in such abundance , that we hardly feel that we are advancing anything new, merely categorizing the rehashing of commonly accepted knowledge. A single meaningful synchronism sufficiently metonymizes the archival residuum:

On December 19,1823, Franz Peter Schubert wrote a letter to his good friend , Joseph Kenner, in which he describes the results of a visit paid to the mansion of his patron, Hofrat Baron von Schnutz. Schubert was in love with von Schnutz’s daughter, Adelaide. Having just come into a few talers from the sale of Der Erlkönig, Schubert fancied that his fortunes were on the upswing and he might begin to think about getting married and settling down. The Baron met him at the door:

“Well, Franz, to what good fortune do we owe this

Winterreise ?”

“ Ach, Hofrat, I fear that it may be my Schwannengesang !”

“Nonsense, Franz, come on in, You’re just in time for breakfast.”

They often made music together in the intimate soirées that von Schnutz organized in his salon, and the Baron was always glad to receive his favorite composer; but his face dropped when, halfway through the meal, Schubert revealed the real purpose of his visit. von Schnutz pretended at first that he had not heard the question. After a minute of deliberate silence, he replied:

“ You know very well, Franz, that whenever you are short of music paper, you need only come by and ask me for more.”

“ Vielen dank , Hofrat Schnutz. Verzeihen Sie bitte! Although Ich bin ein arme Musikant, yet, Sein Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön!”

“What?” roared the Baron, springing from the table, “Do you mock me, Franz? Recall the words you yourself have set: ‘Zum Wandern ist der Müller’s Lust!’ Your lust is for wandering not for my daughter! Don’t persist in your mad dreams, or you may find yourself hanging from the nearest Lindenbaum !”

Driven impetuously by the exalted passions that heaved ever in his Hyperion breast, Schubert spoke up more forcefully: “Hofrat Schnutz: Don’t treat me like a homeless Leiermann ! I’m already half out of my mind with love for your daughter! Already I’m seeing two suns in the sky, maybe three!” The Baron strode over close to him, blocking out his face with a hairy, pudgy, warted forefinger:

“Franz: you’re not going to see even one son from my daughter! But what are we fighting about? The last time you came you brought with you that exquisite song about the little trout. Could you play it for me again?”

Schubert sat down at the piano, von Schnutz hummed the melody and they gave themselves over to music - making for the next half hour. Clearly the Baron had been doing some thinking - always dangerous- during this interlude, and proffered several suggestions:

“ Franz, what about that Sylvia person? Was ist Sylvia? Some kind of innkeeper’s daughter I suppose. Go after her - or go seduce a junge Nonne ! You know very well, Franz, that you’re always welcome here. Come as often as you like, have a free meal, drink some champagne, pick up some more music paper - but, Gott in Himmel! Be reasonable: if you were my Adelaide’s father, would you marry off your daughter to a penniless bum? Let me give you some good advice, Franz: unless you stop running after women beyond your reach, your music isn’t going to be used in praise of fish, but for fish wrapping!”

Schubert’s letter to Kenner continues after this, relating how, in a fit of profound depression he returned to Vienna, where he ended up in a Bierstube in Hitzing. There he was served by a charming, busomy waitress, no friend to phallogocentrism. After consuming an entire pitcher of Münchenbrau, he gazed into her eyes and said : “Bist du meine Gretchen am Spinnenrad?”

“Nein, bitte. Meine Name ist Rosamunde.”

“ Ach, Rosamunde! How much I love that name!”

“ And, good sir, who might you be?”

“ Mein Liebchen : I will soon be a dead, white, male, European composer.”

Serious biographers are in agreement, that the syphilis that would eventually kill him in 1828 was contracted at around this time. Most totalizing scholarship prudishly asserts that he died of ‘typhoid’. One very eminent critic has suggested however, that when the doctor who wrote out the post-mortem report was so pre-occupied by the thought of Schubert’s future fame, that by a kind of mimesis of his own pattern of thought , his pen ‘pushed ahead’ from the letter ‘s’ to the letter ‘t’ : thus ‘syphoid’ became ‘typhoid’! Other DeKunstructionist critic have read the word ‘wife-oid’ into this diagnosis, and drawn their own conclusions. [14]

All of Schubert’s late “works” show the influence of extreme syphilitic disorientation. One “example” in particular in which the presence of this phenomenon is obvious , is in the Wanderer Fantasy, particularly in the “fugue”. We may also cite in evidence the “last” movement of the Great C-Major “Sym(phony)” , which goes on and on “forever” because he doesn’t know how to end it. Many other things are explained by this “theory” - why the (Un)finished “Symphony” wasn’t finished for example. He lost control of his mind in the “middle” of it, and when he got it back he was already thinking about something else.

The apotheosis of the syphilized “man” of the “19th” century is to be found , of course, in the life, career and writings of Friedrich “Nietzsche”. In many passages s(cat)tered through his “essays” and aphorisms, “Nietzsche” campaigns ardently for the syphilization of(?) civilization. This is the “text” that he is said to have uttered as he was “kissing(?)” a horse just before he went “mad” :

“ I have contracted the Abyss and I am made strong by it!”

The leaders(?) in thought and “culture”, he argued, were under an obligation to find some “way” of infecting themselves with syphilis , thereby “precipitating” the breakdown of their intellects and the liberation of the Übermensch “from “the shackles of “

slave (?)” morality. Through the work of brilliant deKunstructionist scholars, some of his celebrated catch-phrases have been deciphered as “code” words(?) for syphilis : the ‘Blond Beast’, for example. Even the most celebrated of his pronouncements, “God is Dead!” , has been deKunstructed in such a way as to show its connection to syph(?)ilization . Here is the argument:

“God” is the penis. One sees this by inverting the letter order to produce the word “dog”, and recalling that “Nietzsche”’s diaries in the last twenty years of his “life” are full of “observations” on the lengths of dog’s penises. The objection has been made to this “theory”, that the letters of the word “Gott” in German, do not invert into the word “Hund” ; yet in fact it is demonstrable, (though not rigorously ), from the relevant texts, “that” this aphorism was really directed against the British, and that what “Nietzsche” was really saying was that the English ‘God’, or British “Empire”, was going to be destroyed by the German ‘Gott’, or Reich, so that one possible reading of the phrase might be

“ ‘God’ ist Todt; aber ‘Gott’ lebt! “

By announcing the “death” of the penis, “Nietzsche” did not mean intend to prophecy the end of hierarchical phallogocentric hegemony, but rather the ascendancy of venereal “disease” over the metaphysics of presence. Whatever he meant, his bold gaze into the “vertiginous” depths of

the Abyss just about finished him.

( Figure 1):

L’Homme Syphilisé

When it was “learned” that he had attained to an advanced “state” of syphilization , his sister, Elizabeth Förster-”Nietzsche”, returned from “Paraguay”, (where she had “gone “with her husband to escape the

“ Jews “ (an option that most of us who are not Pa(rag)uayans wish the

“ Nazis (?) “ had exercised. Certainly the history of deKunstructionism would have been very “different”(?) .)) , and “spent” the rest of her life taking care of him. For a large fee she would bring “Nietzsche” out of his bedroom and exhibit him to gawking intellectuals as the first modern man.

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Conclusion

All “enlightened” historians free from the biases of meaning, know that the intelligence of the inhabitants of “Europe” and the

Americas (?) was much higher in the 18th century than it is now, that the average man in the street from 15th -century “Chelmo” was a genius compared to the “Yale” professors of the last 3 decades. How can one possibly compare “ Jacques Derrida” to “Jacob” Frank , or Paul de Man to Heinrich “Institoris”? deKunstructionism has at least demonstrated, , by methods that should “convince” the most hardened scientist, that the mental “capacities” of our scholarly community are at the lowest point in signified “history”. In one regard only have we “exceeded” our distinguished “predecessors(?) “ , and that is in the application across all “fields(?)” of knowledge of “Heidegger’s” startling discovery: that because nothing can be known, ( the underlying thesis of all European philosophy from Plato onwards ), it is therefore a waste of “time” to bother to learn anything(!) . This liberating “doctrine” , ( which is all that our syphilized brains are able to “handle” ) , “created” a revolution in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities. Its Meta-radicality, aided by the forces of “critical terrorism”, will stand with the “jouissance” of those valiant heroes who “resisted” the patriarchal hermeneutics of the backward phallogocentric hierarchy during the glorious decade of China’s Cultural Revolution.

The dialectics of the Übermench will never fall under the eraser, so long as “death” is a displaced name for a linguistic “predicament” (?) .

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GLOSSARY

Patriarch ...... Anyone who claims to know what he or she is

talking about.

Hierarchy...... The small faction of mankind who believe that ideas take precedence over words.

Hegemony ...... All forms of control, political or personal, including control of others, self-control, self-confidence, knowledge, equanimity, competence of any kind, and all forms of authority.

Rationality ...... A phallocentric conspiracy.

Ecriture ...... Meta-writing.

Text ...... Anything.

Science ...... The texts of rationality.

Art ...... The contents of a de’Kunst’ructionist’s trash-basket.

Letters ...... a, b, c, d, e, f, ............

Truth ...... Hypocrisy.

Discourse ...... Whatever surrounds a text.

Meta-radicality ....... Bohemianism.

Hermeneutics ...... An interpretive scheme, Marxist, Freudian, Hari Krishnan, Deconstructionist, De’Kunst’ructionist,etc...

Critical Terrorism ...... Deconstructionism

De’Kunst’ructionism ..... A deconstruction of Deconstructionism

Clitoral ..... A modifier invoked by a certain school of feminist scholars that vaunts the freedom to create one’s own orgasms without male assistance. More generally, all

forms of pleasure experienced by the oppressed, despite the intentions of the master classes that they should never know happiness.

Aporia ... Any symptom of spinning around in confused circles.

Problematizing ...... Calling into question.

Phallocentrism ..... The worship of penises ; not to be confused with phallo-eccentrism or penis-obsession.

Phallogocentrism, or Phallogosentrism : The ideological consequences of phallocentrism.

Sous Rature ... Literally ‘under the eraser’. A parole on parole, indicated by running a line through it.

Ovarian Hermeneutics .... Feminism.

Totalizing ... Any form of brain-washing that reduces all knowledge and thought mechanical schemes characterized by buzz-words and labels.

The Transcendental Signified ...... God.

The Absence of the Transcendental Signified .......

“God is Dead!”

The Metaphysics of Presence ........ Western Civilization.

The Eternal Victim of the Transcendental Signified ......Any Christ-figure.

“Heiddeger” ..... An abstract idea that may have some reference to some postulated historical figure, although this alleged person proved that ‘history ‘ is without “meaning”, although the label “Heidegger” itself is full of meaning.

Meaning ...... A synonym for Fascism.

“Jouissance” ...... A French word that means roughly, getting an orgasm while working on a deconstructionist critique of a text.

Itinerary ...... Trip, as in ‘to lay a trip on someone’.

The Abyss ...... An idea from a text by “Nietzsche”

The Undecidable ...... An idea from a text by “Gödel”

The Hidden Subtext ...... The ultimate abyss at the heart of any text, whose undecidability prevents us from appreciating it for its own sake.

Resistance ...... Anti-deconstructionism.

Opportunistic Condom Dialectics ...... A concept linking the exploitation of slaves on rubber plantations during the 19th century with the emergence of the AIDS-victim as the deferred signifier in post-deconstructionist America. This phrase is also a synecdoche for the decontextualization of the eternal struggle of Eros and Thanatos, such as one finds, for example, in the writings of Mannheim Bork.

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(G) See Glossary

[1]which although not a line was read by anyone besides himself for the next century powerfully impacted everywhere...

[2]or, as we would say in the language proper to Fashionable Critical

De Kunstructionism: Rapture (Baptist Fundamentalism), Rupture (English or French, though the French pronunciation is privilegized, and Rature(G) French )

[3]we are speaking here only of the hidden sub-text (G)

[4] Indeed, a recent "deKunstructuralist" explication of Le Bossu de Notre-Dame has shown conclusively that this subversive modifier was exactly Victor Hugo's intention.

[5] to such semioticians as Blake and Beethoven

[6]in the period being erased by our scrutiny of it

[7]like the itinerary of some savant traveller through crocodiled, mosquito-infested swamps

* See the movie.

[8]although “Heiddeger”(G) has taught us that nothing can ever be communicated anyway

[9]which in this regard can be taken in two senses

[10] The embedding of the word "ain't" in "paint" is surely not accidental.

[11] hard “g”

[12]although both “law” and “nature” were thoroughly deconstructed back in the 60’s.

[13] Those peoples amenable to the metaphysics of presence (G)

[14]All of this is quite reasonable, since “Schubert”, “syphilus”, “Vienna”, “Rosamunde”, etc., are just diacritical marks on a text relativized by a historical accident , and have no meaning(G) outside of themselves.