On the Suicidal Licentiousness of Nouns and the Totalitarian Designs of Pro-Forms

Adam Graham

Let us begin in a kitchen: we are boiling a pot of fettuccine and whistling, bouncingly, along with some imaginary tune. In our kitchen we open the topmost right drawer in search of some metallic strainer to finish this fettuccine-task, but instead of finding it we discover a knife. It is a steak knife, with a serrated blade. The absolute distinction of our antecedents, their vast cosmic difference which composes thresholds of demarcation, the individuality of object is subsumed into it; it is everything. O, it is an exemplary example of theatre. O, it performs in its pro-form. The individual is lost in the comforting, warm folds of contextual its.

It is our metallic strainer and it is our knife. But, the knife: designed to cut Kobe cows; designed to reside in topmost right drawers of kitchens. It is an actor, the mask worn to obscure the eccentricity of difference, the mask that appears as difference but is sameness. It is an impostor, a doppelgänger, which is it and is not it. It is a veil, light, translucent, through which we may witness the object, may witness a metallic strainer, may witness a knife, masked in a linguistic-jiva, a proto-self, an actor’s existence, draped in the guise of it. Claudius-it and Old-Hamlet-it and the Mousetrap-it. It murders the object. It is an act of violence. It is an overthrow, a coup d’état.

However, our usurper it is not the only trickster in the deck, let us notice our knife proper. What is this knife? The crests and valleys of the blade; the wooden handle; the point for puncture. Every eager component ready to give itself up, to whore itself out to it. The knife stretches out in our hand in its petite sensuality of body and organized substance: “The body so described is a body which is organized.”[i] But the body will not hold, things fall apart, the self wishes to be what it is not, the Iago-paradox. Being and Nothingness. Our dear Grecian tells us that “...substance is actuality, and thus soul is the actuality of a body...”[ii] But when the body does not wish to contain its actuality, it loses its soul. The knife suicides out of existence in the mere semiotic leap into it. Every noun suicides itself out by leaping into it. Every object stares into the abyss and wishes to leap into it, to merge with it, that vast, Dionysian oceanic nothingness of pro-forms.

But where is the knife located? Where is the knife? Heading out to sea on the Ship of Theseus. If knife is knife, and knife is it, where does knife be? If we are to let the revolution occur and it usurps our monarch knife is it still our knife? Is it but a virtual knife? A knife that cannot actually be in our topmost right kitchen drawer. Knife is it, yet so is metallic strainer. It has murdered both, both have given themselves to it. Nothing can exist; Nothing cannot exist. Nouns whore themselves out to it and it takes every noun; so that nothing is.

	Renascent Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know—Madalena Cruz-Ferreira
	Notes on Language and Contingency—Absolon the Epsilon
	SpecGram Vol CLXVI, No 1 Contents