# Parahuman Wagnerism



## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

Here is an extract from an article in *'The Opera Quarterly'* journal last year by Yale professor Gary Tomlinson:

====Begin====

In a 2011 article in the New Yorker magazine, apropos of a new Metropolitan Opera production of the Ring, critic Alex Ross drew attention to a ten-measure passage from act 2 of Die Walküre. The passage, or "microlude," as Ross calls it, occurs at the end of Fricka's fateful dispute with Wotan as she, having won the day, moves backstage and encounters the entering Brünnhilde (ex. 1). The passage captivates Ross, and in his essay, unusually musically specific for the New Yorker, he works smartly to illuminate it. He seeks out singers to comment on Fricka's role, musicologists to weigh in on Wagner's views of women, sex, and marriage, and, above all, conductors to comment on the meaning of the passage. For James Levine and Justin Brown, the microlude sums up Fricka's ambivalent victory, which effectively ends her relation with Wotan and her role in the Ring; for Simone Young and Simon Rattle, it quite literally overlays her outrage on top of Wotan's sorrow in its harmonic and rhythmic dichotomies; for Christoph von Dohnányi, it is the turning point in the Ring's critique of the will to power and domination.

All or none of these interpretations might seem right, but it is not their content that concerns me; instead I am interested that they consist of content alone. They are descriptions of the object that the microlude-as-sign represents. Ross's essay is a steadfast quest for the imitative; it is an exercise in Lacoue-Labarthe's mimetology. In this it swims in the mainstream of Wagnerist discourse. Ross and his experts all strive to say what the passage is about, and this focus on aboutness draws the microlude toward the realm of the leitmotivic-despite the fact, which Ross notes, that it bears no notable recurring motives. It is as if all signification in Wagner-even all signification in music-needs to be reduced to something close to either the iconic or the symbolic, the one displaying aboutness through likeness, the other through conventional connection. This obscures the primacy of indexicality in musical signification, of signs not so much representing as standing near to, gesturing at, pointing to, or indeed causing their objects. The fact that musical sounds are so inapt for referentiality of a linguistic or pictorial sort paradoxically draws the mimetic harness tighter around them, driving their interpreters to a referential specificity all the greater for the unrepresentable nature of the affective states indicated. The aboutness of this passage, in other words, is the more pressing an issue-the stakes of specifying it higher-exactly because the music moves outside the conventionalization of reference enabled by the repetition of those other gestures we call leitmotifs.

Focusing on aboutness, however, will always underestimate the dynamism of signification. It will shine a bright light on referential signs-again, symbols and icons-while leaving in the shadows the operations of index and interpretant. Listen closely to Wagner's microlude. It is a calling, more pressing than most, of its hearer to an activation and a participation. These are all the richer because of the resistance of the passage to both conventionalism and iconism-which after all stimulates Ross's and the others' fascination with it, as it allows no easy, referential pigeonholing of the music. Characterizing this calling, however, is not so much a matter of naming a mimesis as it is one of following an organismal instigation. We move in the wrong direction in trying to describe it as an imposing of signs on the listener-in the direction, in fact, of Wagnerist passivity, desubjectivization, and alienation. Instead we need a vocabulary to describe our participation as a process in which we make the music at every moment, fully as much as the singers and players of the orchestra. It cannot be otherwise, given that music is a transmission of information and a signification, and given the poietic, interpretant-driven nature of semiosis.

I hazard a description of the calling at this moment. We recognize, as the microlude begins, the contrast of mobility above and stasis below. We anticipate in the upper parts' rising trajectory an intensification of this agon, and we confirm this intensification, seeking order, in the repeated passing tones, striving to ascend. Building on this quickly established sense of a musical gradient-an instance of Cumming's directedness-we move toward a coalescing psychic formation as the Wagnerian stimulus increases harmonic complexity and dissonance. At the same time we accommodate the resting points won by resolution of passing tone and flat ii chord, first on a pellucid subdominant, then on the tonic. All this manifests the conditions of our psychic mobility and our grasping for signification as much as it reflects the shape of the stimulus. This mobility takes the form of interpretants and the perceiving through them of a bond between the music and other aspects of our environment-in this case, especially the dramatic presentation before us. At this moment and in a special, musical way, we envorganisms locate ourselves in an ecosystem.

Finally, we redirect our psychic resources, at a new beginning marked by a stable V7 chord and the reentry of voice and language. To say this is to affirm that we move on to the formation of new interpretants. As we do so, we encounter a familiar musical gesture-the curse motive, as it is usually labeled. Many have pointed to the fact that such leitmotifs are not simply referential in function; Badiou sums up and perhaps overstates this view by upholding a leitmotif's function in "a non-descriptive internal musical development, with no dramatic or narrative connotations whatsoever. "Internal" to the music, Badiou means; the specter of Beethoven's developmental procedures rises here (and I will come back to it). But the nonnarrative aspect of leitmotifs is not so much a matter of motivic development as it is about something else that is highlighted by Ross's microlude (and to which Badiou perhaps also alludes). The intrusion of the curse music right after this passage shows that the clearest leitmotivism is identical to nonleitmotivism in the arousal of the listener to sign making. Again: there are no nonsemiotic moments in Wagner, only successive instigations to audience action. Interpretants and indices, not referential symbols and icons, are the heart of the matter.

In retrospect, as the outcome of Peircean semiosis, we cannot not come to a weighing of a sign/object bond. Aboutness intrudes in human experiences of the world, inescapably, and the inevitability of this, which probably does not extend far beyond our species, is a general condition of which analyses of musical referentiality usually do not take sufficient account. If I were to name the aboutness gained through the semiosis of Ross's microlude, speaking in the most general terms in an effort to encompass many of the modes of participation it stimulates, I would adduce a calm in the face of insuperable denial, a resignation toward an external resistance to knowing and control that we could call, with a bow to Kristeva, abjection. It is an emotive response, then, of some complex sort that comes close to eluding capture in words. But even a return as general as this one to a concern with aboutness needs to come with a caveat: it is not a matter of a picture imposed-of anything at all depicted-but of a psychic state constructed by the listener in response to a sonorous environment. A musical envorganism, again, is at work.

Perhaps all this describes from a different vantage the "drastic" musicology that Carolyn Abbate forcefully advocated a few years ago but exemplified somewhat more vaguely. Perhaps, also, it begins to illuminate the mysterious phenomenology of charm that Abbate's muse, Vladimir Jankélévitch, also left ill-defined.15 At the very least it underscores the fact that something akin to a drastic music making is the prerogative of the audience as much as of the performers. If this connection is right, it reveals that the evil twin in Abbate's scheme, gnostic or "decoding" musicology, and the drasticism she favors are not opposed modes but instead entries from opposite ends onto the same path. And certainly the Peircean model of audience instigation I have described welcomes Jankélévitch's assertion that music generates meanings in huge numbers and of almost indeterminate breadth.

But even with this reconciliation, Abbate and Jankélévitch do not go far enough. The experience I aim to describe ultimately renders semiotic aboutness all but irrelevant. Music as a characteristic human activity is close to unique in its power to activate this kind of experience. It belabors the mind with indexicality, with the most embodied and palpable, and least referential, kind of sign. It turns the mind in on itself and on its semiotic activism, enabling an a priori to aboutness to emerge with peculiar force, an a priori I equate with interpretant. Though such a semiotic experience is an interim place for much human activity, it is the stopping point for most nonhuman semiosis and thus the human operation that opens out, connecting our experience to informational processes of wide
extrahuman dispersion.

In other words, the intrusion of aboutness (and with it hermeneutics, gnosticism, decoding, etc.) is a characteristic human telos of semiosis; but music forefronts the much broader semiotic labor on which it is founded. Music is a human semiosis that clearly beckons toward the extrahuman. For this reason we might find in musicology fertile ground for a parahumanism conceived as a multispecies expansiveness, opening our humanity out to primate, mammal, and perhaps even broader clades.

******************

The rest can be read here:

http://oq.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/3-4/186.full

Is there anyone who could make a precis of the above? I find it very hard to read for its syntax and style.

Thanks.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

He's saying, from the above, that Ross' and others' interpretations of the passage in question are inadequate to the task of fully explaining the music because the music exists on a different plane from simply the drama itself (calling attention in particular to the fact that there are no leitmotifs to direct our interpretation, and then denying that a leitmotif would itself aid our interpretation any more than not having one).

This is, of course, overloaded with extra verbiage, including cumbersome contraptions ("nonleitmotivism"), and descriptive words that do more to conceal than explain.

I must admit, though, that from now on I will call all subdominants "pellucid".


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## Revenant (Aug 27, 2013)

I avoid discussions of mimetology altogether. I dislike mimes. Find them annoying.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Xavier said:


> In other words, the intrusion of aboutness (and with it hermeneutics, gnosticism, decoding, etc.) is a characteristic human telos of semiosis; but music forefronts the much broader semiotic labor on which it is founded. Music is a human semiosis that clearly beckons toward the extrahuman. For this reason we might find in musicology fertile ground for a parahumanism conceived as a multispecies expansiveness, opening our humanity out to primate, mammal, and perhaps even broader clades.


Customarily, when people say "in other words," they are about to offer a clarifying summation of what they have just said.

In other words, "Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!!"


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> I must admit, though, that from now on I will call all subdominants "pellucid".


And we, Sir, are going to hold you to that!


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Xavier said:


> Here is an extract from an article in *'The Opera Quarterly'* journal last year by Yale professor Gary Tomlinson:
> 
> ====Begin====
> 
> ...


---
Charlantry _a la _Gadamer; or Derrida; or Habermas; or Adorno; or Hegel, or. . .

So unsupercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Funny how people don't buy tickets to see critics. . . or post-modernists for that matter.


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Revenant said:


> I avoid discussions of mimetology altogether. I dislike mimes. Find them annoying.


As much as Aristotle hammered Plato, he always had the good grace to never call him an opera critic.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

The sad thing about this - though, really, this is sad in so many ways! - is that the musical passage which evokes this steaming pile of verbal effluent is a moment of profound inspiration which grabbed me the very first time I heard _Walkure_ at the age of 16 or so. To anyone who understands - i.e., feels - the predicaments of Wotan, Fricka, and Brunnhilde at this crucial moment in their story, there is no difficulty understanding - i.e., feeling - the rightness and power of this music, situated between two scenes of profound agitation, its quiet solemnity laced with irony, and the beautiful transition it makes (Wagner was a master of transition, musical and psychological) into the dark hell of Wotan's despair. It's one of countless passages in Wagner's operas that show the incredible subtlety and specificity of which music, as a "language" of expression, is capable. For all we like to talk about diversity and subjectivity and relativity in musical signification, respecting our differing perceptions of music (and allowing us all to feel good about ourselves no matter how much or little innate sensitivity and/or cultivation of musical perception we may possess), I am constantly struck by how widespread and substantial is the consensus, among those able to articulate such things verbally, as to what given pieces of music mean. In opera there are of course obvious clues in the dramatic situations which occasion the music; but even there we can discuss in very specific ways how well a composer has or has not brought out the emotional implications of the drama. Unlike the author of the above steaming pile, I am not in the least troubled by this. In fact, I am unspeakably pleased by it and grateful for it. Attempts to get at musical meaning have the potential to lead outward in ever widening circles of comprehension and delight. But after they have led us as far as we can go, from everyday language to poetry, and then from poetry to humbled silence, we can only come back around to the music, which finally mocks - as does everything in life that really matters - our babblings about "aboutness."


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## mamascarlatti (Sep 23, 2009)

Mahlerian said:


> He's saying, from the above, that Ross' and others' interpretations of the passage in question are inadequate to the task of fully explaining the music because the music exists on a different plane from simply the drama itself (calling attention in particular to the fact that there are no leitmotifs to direct our interpretation, and then denying that a leitmotif would itself aid our interpretation any more than not having one).
> 
> This is, of course, overloaded with extra verbiage, including cumbersome contraptions ("nonleitmotivism"), and descriptive words that do more to conceal than explain.
> 
> I must admit, though, that from now on I will call all subdominants "pellucid".


Thanks for summarising. Since completing my Masters I have made it a principle never to read pretentious academic claptrap again, thank goodness you were there.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

mamascarlatti said:


> Thanks for summarising. Since completing my Masters I have made it a principle never to read pretentious academic claptrap again, thank goodness you were there.


Of the several things I've learned how to translate, academic claptrap is the one that _always_ comes out looking worse!

:lol:


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

mamascarlatti said:


> Thanks for summarising. Since completing my Masters I have made it a principle never to read pretentious academic claptrap again, thank goodness you were there.


I recommend reading this one, mamascarlatti--I had tears of laughter in my eyes by the end of the 4th-to-last paragraph.


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> Of the several things I've learned how to translate, academic claptrap is the one that _always_ comes out looking worse!
> 
> :lol:


---
Side note, but related, as it has to do with academic charlantry: Has anyone ever read Karl Popper's book _The Open Society and It's Enemies: Volume II- Hegel, Marx, & the Aftermath_? It's an absolute classic; if you're politically-inclined.

Well, in light of what Mahlerian just said above, it's pretty rollicking in parts; though unintentionally so. Sir Karl will quote a passage of Hegel, in his typically obscurantist, elliptically-written prose--- and then translate it into what Sir Karl at least thinks is the plain-English equivalent.

I wish I could remember the passage off the top of my head, but I can't. But it's some nonsense of Hegel's about how sound is "really" light; or heat is "really" sound-- or something to that effect. No doubt something Tomlinson at _Opera Quarterly _or some trendy post-modernist con artist at _Social Text _would find. . . 'profound.' Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Open-Soci...991&sr=8-1&keywords=open+society+hegel+popper

http://www.amazon.com/Fashionable-N...TF8&qid=1399502445&sr=8-5&keywords=sokal+hoax


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## Revenant (Aug 27, 2013)

I remember an interview with Behrens, Domingo and the ineffable Cornel McNeil concerning their performance in Tosca. The interviewer tied Domingo and Behrens in knots inquiring about the characterization of their roles and the significance. McNeil said that these types of discussions were like "dissecting ant [manure]." (I replaced the word that he actually used.)


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Revenant said:


> I remember an interview with Behrens, Domingo and the ineffable Cornel McNeil concerning their performance in Tosca. The interviewer tied Domingo and Behrens in knots inquiring about the characterization of their roles and the significance.  McNeil said that these types of discussions were like "dissecting ant [manure]." (I replaced the word that he actually used.)


Perfect! All of postmodernism flushed down a pismire commode! :clap:


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

Here is an essay I submitted to 'The Opera Quarterly'. It was not published.

*An essay on Der Ring des Nibelungen
*
While many learned professors have abandoned hope of ever discovering the truth behind Der Ring des Nibelungen, I for one feel that it is still a worthy cause for examination. In depth analysis of Der Ring des Nibelungen can be an enriching experience. While much has been written on its influence on contemporary living, Der Ring des Nibelungen is featuring more and more in the ideals of the young and upwardly mobile. Crossing many cultural barriers it still draws remarks such as 'I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole' and 'i'd rather eat wasps' from so called 'babies', obviously. Keeping all of this in mind, in this essay I will examine the major issues.

*Social Factors*

Comparisons between Roman Society and Medieval Society give a clear picture of the importance of Der Ring des Nibelungen to developments in social conduct. I will not insult the readers inteligence by explaining this obvious comparison any further. When Sir Bernard Chivilary said 'hounds will feast on society' [1] he shead new light on Der Ring des Nibelungen, allowing man to take it by the hand and understand its momentum. Much has been said about the influence of the media on Der Ring des Nibelungen. Observers claim it irons out misconceptions from our consciousness.

Primarily Der Ring des Nibelungen builds trust among the people. Society says that every man must find their own truth. While one sees Der Ring des Nibelungen, another may see monkeys playing tennis.

*Economic Factors*

The dictionary defines economics as 'the social science concerned with the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of goods and services'. We will study the Custard-Not-Mustard model, a complex but ultimately rewarding system.


*Oil
Prices*







*Der Ring des Nibelungen*

What a splendid graph. It goes with out saying that oil prices, ultimately decided by politicians, will always be heavily influenced by Der Ring des Nibelungen due to its consistently high profile in the portfolio of investors. What it all comes down to is money. Capitalists love Der Ring des Nibelungen.

*Political Factors*

The media have made politics quite a spectacle. Comparing the ideals of the young with the reality felt by their elders is like contrasting Der Ring des Nibelungen and political feeling.

Consider this, spoken at the tender age of 14 by the famous political Demetrius Rock 'People in glass houses shouldn't through parties.' [2] He was first introduced to Der Ring des Nibelungen by his mother. To paraphrase, the quote is saying 'Der Ring des Nibelungen wins votes.' Simple as that.

I wait anxiously. What will the next few years bring for Der Ring des Nibelungen?

*Conclusion*

In summary, Der Ring des Nibelungen has a special place in the heart of mankind. It replenishes the self, puts out 'fires', and most importantly it perseveres.

I shall give the final word to star Denzel Pfeiffer: 'I demand Der Ring des Nibelungen, nothing more nothing less.' [3]

[1] Sir Bernard Chivilary - Interestingly... - 1904 Badger Books

[2] Rock - Roll It Up - 1977 - F. Lower Publishing

[3] Smashing Hits - Issue 224 - Jazz Media


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

A plausible and persuasive, though ineluctably context-determined, deconstruction, Couchie. 

One has, however, to hope that its univocal hyperdissemination presumes no foregrounding of a paradigm of subculturally situated neotextual discourse privileging the principles narrativized in/through/by the superdecontextualized quasi-tropes of postphallogocentrist sensitivities.

If it does and/or does not, then nothing remains to be said except "Hojotoho! Hojotoho! Heiaha! Heiaha!"


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

> Woodduck: A plausible and persuasive, though ineluctably context-determined, deconstruction, Couchie.
> 
> One has, however, to hope that its univocal hyperdissemination presumes no foregrounding of a paradigm of subculturally situated neotextual discourse privileging the principles narrativized in/through/by the superdecontextualized quasi-tropes of postphallogocentrist sensitivities.
> 
> If it does and/or does not, then nothing remains to be said except "Hojotoho! Hojotoho! Heiaha! Heiaha


Well-said, Woodduck. Unchallengeably and unalterably true.

Clearly, in mathematical terms, it boils down to this:

_"Derrida's observation relates to the invariance of the Einstein field equation under nonlinear space-time diffeomorphisms (self-mappings of the space-time manifold which are infinitely differentiable but not necessarily analytic). The key point is that this invariance group ``acts transitively'': this means that any space-time point, if it exists at all, can be transformed into any other. In this way the infinite-dimensional invariance group erodes the distinction between observer and observed; the of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone."_

_Q.E.D._

from "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

_Pssssssssssst!_


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Nothing like the real thing, is there?


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## Revenant (Aug 27, 2013)

Marschallin Blair said:


> Well-said, Woodduck. Unchallengeably and unalterably true.
> 
> Clearly, in mathematical terms, it boils down to this:
> 
> ...


The _what_ of Euclid? The nothingness, the void perhaps, rendered as a syllogism?


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Revenant said:


> The _what_ of Euclid? The nothingness, the void perhaps, rendered as a syllogism?


Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. -- cool. I like that, Revenant. . . maybe you should teach post-modernism under Stanley Fish at Duke. . .

I don't know if anyone got the real joke or_ not_; but the gobbledegook nonsense I posted above was a actually practical joke by a quantum physicist, Alan Sokal. He said that he just cobbled together a bunch of pompous, obscurantist _*nonsense*_ and wanted to see if the trendy, prestigious, post-modernist journal_ Social Text _would publish it. . . Well, they did; and the egg remains on their well-basted faces to this day.

Full story here:

http://www.amazon.com/Fashionable-N...99582991&sr=8-1&keywords=fashionable+nonsense


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## Headphone Hermit (Jan 8, 2014)

Marschallin Blair said:


> I don't know if anyone got the real joke or_ not_; but the gobbledegook nonsense I posted above was a actually practical joke by a quantum physicist, Alan Sokal. He said that he just cobbled together a bunch of pompous, obscurantist _*nonsense*_


Oh dear! And there was me just thinking it was pure drivel instead of a joke


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## Revenant (Aug 27, 2013)

Actually, I thought it was right on the money; in fact I was thinking about the same postulate myself the other day. It differs only from mine in that mine had a capital letter between "Euclid" and "of". :angel:


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## mamascarlatti (Sep 23, 2009)

Wow, you guys are even funnier than the real thing:tiphat:.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

mamascarlatti said:


> Wow, you guys are even funnier than the real thing:tiphat:.


The Super Moderator is too kind.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Headphone Hermit said:


> Oh dear! And there was me just thinking it was pure drivel instead of a joke


You weren't the only one. That's why the joke succeeded. In fact I suspect that the joke succeeded too well and backfired on the jokers: they produced the real thing without even knowing it, for the simple terrifying reason that _anything written in this gobbledegook IS the real thing!_


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Woodduck has a pretty good turn of phrase. But I'm telling you, this is merely the _appetizer._

We need the main course.

If there are any post-modernists out there who will _defend_ Derrida, Irigaray, & Foucault from the anti-luminary academic con-firm of Dewey, Cheat'em, & Howe-- please, have the good grace to post.

I'm in the best of spirits this morning and I want a rollicking laugh to start the day off. . . _'right proper.'_

Cheers.


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