It is fair to wonder, can we deconstruct a deconstructionist?

“Morning class. Ah, ignore that. I mean to say, don’t read into it. Ah, no, let me start again. This is difficult. What I mean to say is… Language is a construct. I am a construct. You are all a construct…”

“Like Lego?” One of the students asked.

Poshki paused before his class of exceptional, class A, free-range students. He was lost for words. Lost for meaning. He knew language was a construct yet he couldn’t operate without it. It was academically debilitating. For the first time in a lifetime, he wondered if he was stupid. Everyone had told him he was clever throughout the course of his existence, but maybe that was the problem – he’d never heard a strong argument from the other side. That’s what happens when you only socialise atop an ivory tower. He’d been called a champagne socialist, which was code for lazy, pretentious arsehole. He’d argued against such a framing using a Hegelian approach and, in his opinion, he’d won the argument. The other person saw it differently and punched him in the nose. As he sat in A&E losing blood he wondered if maybe he should have drawn on Kierkegaard instead.

Back in the lecture theatre and back in the present day, Poshki looked out at his students. Then he noticed a pigeon which was visible through the skylight. It was as if this pigeon was glaring directly into his soul. Poshki had seduced many a person with his intellectual airs, but he couldn’t mislead this pigeon.

That’s when it hit him. His greatest discovery: Derrida’s Ankles.

They’re not ankles at all!

He returned the next day and taught with all the zest and vigour of a vintage foot stool. In the end, The Derrida’s Ankles Theory of Unexistence is how Poshki earned tenure but, to his own chagrin, it was not enough. In fact, as they decorated him with the esteemed academic blessing, all he could think about was the wonkiness of his nose.