stop making sense

The more one reads, the more one sees how peculiar and manipulated the literature emphasized at the undergraduate level truly is. Everything we read at the university has been contaminated by them, by 'it'. So much the less for all my literary admirations, and the authors that have penned them. So much the less for Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Marcuse, Marx, Plato, Derrida, Hawthorne, Milton, Austen, Nabokov, James, etc. ad infinitum, whose faces and work has been defaced and de-worked by the abstract concept and tyrannical reality called the university.

Come to think of it, I regret not conceiving to write an undergraduate paper on precisely this university 'contamination factor'. But what precisely contaminates? Is it the universality of the whole thing? The ugly trinity of mass-promotion, production and consumption? And why don't these authors have any say?

Seemingly, all of this falls under an ancient schema. To extend anything, to 'hyper'-ize it, through hyperbole, metaphor, duration, popularity, is always to subject it, in another way, to its opposite. Hyper-izing shrinks in another way. This is of course the brilliance of satire, comedy, and irony, and the way that mass-media and capitalism and its offshoots work (for instance fashion culture, etc.). Jonathan Swift succeeds in his claim that we should "eat children" precisely because of his hyper-izing, hyper-emphasizing, which shrinks the 'reality' or 'literality' of the claim and makes it recognizable as something else. But unforeseeable historical aporias result from hyper-izing, and they are irreducible. (1) One can 'extend' or hyper-ize without knowing. It can happen outside of knowing. And (2) Hyper-izing itself equally undermines knowing. Therefore, it cannot even really be said that we know or understand 'hyper-izing', since (it) by definition is inconceivable. The history of the metaphor, satire, irony, language, politics, etc., etc., has been to suppress this unknowability for the known. But in truth there is nothing hierarchical about irony. To privilege the supposedly 'true' or 'figurative' over the 'literal' is to err twice, because we are no longer even dealing with these terms, but the incalculable itself.

We cannot but calculate the incalculable. That is to say: calculate the incalculable, and simultaneously fail to calculate the incalculable. This is what it means to live and to think, and to experience the fleshly paradox par excellence. This is why these processes will always be subject to heterogeneity, and hence 'error', violence, or polysemy, if we still wish to pejoratate these things. 'There is no outside the text' means: there is no outside of this paradoxical calculation.