Below is my now-infamous deconstruction of Derrida. My friend Dana Gioia once read this to his dinner party guests.
Critics and Cannibals
Jeffrey Dahmer meets Jacques Derrida over a dining room table and they laugh over the coincidence that they share the same initials: J.D. Jacques is tied down and gagged but manages to chortle through the rag stuffed into his mouth. Jeffrey is sharpening a knife and eyeing Jacques's naked belly.
"The thing is," says Jeffrey, "we must realize that a man is nothing more than a bag of organs and bodily fluids: heart, lung, brain, spleen; blood, lymph, urine, bile. Our first task is to abolish the notion that it existed before this particular moment or to anyone other than me.
"We start here, then: A body on a table. Whatever the thing believes itself to be--brother, lover, father, son--is not to our purpose. There is only skin and blood, a pump at the center, a bellows of air, a labyrinth of excremental tunnels: a set of things we can disassemble and manipulate at our pleasure. Above all, we must ignore such special pleading as when, under critical analysis, it appears to say such things as 'stop doing this let me go whatever you do please please don't hurt me.'
"These seemingly significant expressions, when looked at closely, reduce to arrangements of sound--mere language, if you will, produced by air forced across strands of flesh and up the windpipe then given shape in the cavern of the mouth. I have deconstructed both the larynx and the brain and examined them in some detail and I assure you that neither is capable of transmitting anything like intention or meaning.
"You know this, of course, and have wasted no effort in trying to deflect me from my purpose, which, since you haven't already guessed, is to cut out your liver and eat it before your eyes.
"I will perform the operation with this kitchen knife, without benefit of anesthetic, and your reactions should provide some novel pleasures indeed. If you are still conscious after I extract your liver, like a floppy stillborn puppy from your side, I will chew it lovingly, savoring its many juices. Raw liver is a slippery sloppy thing, red and pungent with bitter bile, a swallow of oyster.
"But look at you: you already disappoint me. As if a word or trope could make one pale. I expected more: an amusing pun, perhaps; a bit of French drollery. For instance, a boring middle-aged man once told me that he expected a long life, as he was from a family of long-livers; yet upon cutting him open and examining the organ in question, I found it to be of no more than average size.
"Language is full of such pun-gent ironies, such nouvelle pleasures, no?--a phrase you might have noted earlier had you not been so frantically straining against your bonds.
"In any case, after you are stiff and cold, a corrupted corpus, I will anal-yze you further as I diddle your Derridean derriere. Then, after hacking you to pieces, I'll arrange your parts in ways hitherto unimagined: a heart on a dish; a kidney under a pillow; an arm wrapped and frozen beside a tin of summer strawberries.
"Art lies in subtle differences such as these.
"A month or two from now, your friends will say, `He was a man of many parts . . . with such an ear for language . . . and yet I see he lacked a certain presence . . . .'
"How fortunate that they can't see you now, sweating and straining against your ropes, as if you took me at my word, or had formed an image of me from reading the papers.
"We must guard against such logocentric views. If not, mon frere, I'll have many bones to pick with you over dinner."
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