Grad Student Horror #3,781: All You Functions Are Under Erasure

I'd forgotten about this particular Tale of Scholarly Embarrassment until I commented on this post at the interesting new blog Perverse Egalitarianism.  Unlike most of the embarrassing material appearing on Acephalous, I didn't write this.  I did, however, seek and receive permission to mock its author; but sadly, the actual essay sleeps peacefully on the hard drive of a non-working laptop.  You'll have to make do with this vicious parody of it instead:

In her "Translator's Preface" to Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes "the structure of writing as the sign under [erasure] because writing has had the negative privilege of being the scapegoat whose exclusion represents the definition of metaphysical enclosure" (lxix).  In what follows, I will demonstrate that Spivak evinces a decided lack of commitment to writing-under-erasure: whereas an honest critic would connect writing-under-erasure to Foucault's conception of the author-function,  Spivak limits her thought (and therefore the radical possibilities thereof) to a wo(e/w)ful cleverness that can neither contain nor obtain the infinite of the aporia to which it points.  She ignores what Foucault calls the "complex operations" subtending and undermining the concept of "the author" in contemporary discourse.  I will not make the same mistake; instead, I will facilitate my reading of Spivak's translation of Derrida's reading of Rousseau via the dual/dueling concepts of "the author-function" and "writing-under-erasure" ...

Before you say anything, the author made one request (besides demanding anonymity): that you not take him to task for making absolutely no sense.  The point is that this person wrote an entire paper in which everything was under erasure.  And why wouldn't it be? 

This student was the sort of "uppity little snot" so many readers wished they had in their classes ... and while I'm sympathetic to arguments like Rufus's, I can't help but think that ... nevermind: I'm sympathetic to arguments like Rufus's.  Stupid as the above paragraph is, it must've been a blast to write.  Its author was alive with the ideas he abused, and that sort of enthusiasm should be encouraged.  No need to grind us down from the get-go, right?

Comments

[Mikhail Emelianov]

wow, it pleases me greatly to see that you have judged our effort to be "interesting" but i believe in our agreement (in which we pay and you casually mention our endeavor) we have discussed adjectives like "mind-blowing" or "gut-busting" or, at the very least, "knee-crushing"...

so if you write erasure and then erasure only one of them is under erasure, but if you say "under erasure" then it's a doulbe erasure - what does that mean then?

[Sisyphus]

Mikhail, you obviously forgot that anything not in writing is not contractual under the laws of bloggery and that a "Gentleman's Agreement" is anything but.

When I was younger and snottier, I was forced to write an essay on French feminism (which I loathe) for a grad seminar. I had a lot of fun showing just how impossible it is to subvert the linearity of patriarchal thinking. (think palimpsests, backwards and circular text, an entire page painstakingly written in white-out (ah, Cixious' white ink/breast milk metaphor!) holes cut in the paper, you name it.) Unfortunately I got in deep shit (written up!) for it and so can't post it, alas.

[Flowbear]

A professor once told me that, in the 80s, she encouraged her students to enable the print-setting that strikes through every word in a document. For the papers that she had to grade. She didn't seem to think it was all that funny, either.

If "wo(e/w)ful" is part of your vicious parody, and not some reflex memory of the original, I forever concede prime punsmanship to you.

[Mikhail Emelianov]

sisyphus, excellent observation, sadly, you are correct - i've been (very much) liking the word "cunning" lately and i'm thinking of a way to incorporate it into this comment but it's way past my bedtime and i just cannot think of a good use so i will leave it at that, unless i can somehow do it under erasure

[nnyhav]

Rapid Reading: This course will increase reading speed a little each day until the end of the term, by which time the student will be required to read The Brothers Karamazov in fifteen minutes. The method is isolating pronouns from one’s field of vision. Soon the pronouns are eliminated. Gradually the student is encouraged to nap. A frog is dissected. Spring comes. People marry and die. Pinkerton does not return.

-- Woody Allen, Getting Even

[Alex Leibowitz]

Why is it that when one tries to right about -- I mean to explain -- Heidegger, for instance, one starts speaking utter nonsense? I have before me a passage from Being and Time. I want to clarify it because I don't understand it. I start writing -- and out comes nonsense.

[James]

I vaguely believe that Agatha Christie once wrote something about higher truth and bad grammar. Does that cross Alex's comment?

I once read Being and Time, but I was far to young to fail to understand it in any interesting way.