Jacques Derrida

From The Great Outdoor Fight

The 1960's and 1970's are remembered in popular consciousness as a time of a great breakdown and reconsideration of institutional and behavioral boundaries. Perhaps the most outstanding instance of such institutional breakdowns was when the Ruling Body invited the great post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida to give a lecture at the 1972 Great Outdoor Fight. Given the incendiary reaction of the contestants against the 1968 wave of hippie protests, the Ruling Body had an ulterior motive in inviting Derrida. They had assumed that when the fighters realized that instead of entertainment they were to receive a lecture by a cutting edge French philosopher the fighters would become all the more vicious and the spectacle would be made all the greater.

Against all expectations however, all fighting ceased during Derrida's lecture and despite his dense and digressive phrasing, his points were will comprehended by all contestants present. The lecture, which furthered Derrida's effort to deconstruct the underpinning assumptions of structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, turned into a calm but lively debate amongst Fight participants during the Q&A section afterward.

While several brilliant points were made concerning the lecture, the comments of one fighter have proven to be the most memorable. "Putrid" Pete Williams, an illiterate, tobacco spitting loner wanted for battering his wife and children to death, criticized Derrida's methodology as being a crude and naive mixture of Stoic rhetoric and Nietzsche's assault on metaphysics. In response, Derrida briefly surveyed the Acres, walked towards "Putrid" Pete Williams and screamed "There's nothing inside the text - and now there's nothing inside you," as he quickly disemboweled "Putrid" Pete with his sharp fingernails. Blind Chuck Carter, a friend of "Putrid Pete" stood up to challenge the philosopher, proclaiming "Deconstruct this, frog." Derrida continued to strangle Blind Chuck Carter with "Putrid" Pete's intestines. Derrida then proceeded to strangle a nearby onlooker with said intestines. When asked why he strangled the onlooker, Derrida calmly said in his native tongue, "Motherfucker was giving me the evil eye... can't have none of that."

After the assaults, Derrida went back to his podium and continued to answer questions and engage the remaining contestants until the Ruling Body realized that not only had they underestimated the intellectual capacity of the fighters, but that this debate could continue over the remaining time of the fight if left unchecked. Thus, a Tower One announcement was given that if Derrida did not leave the fight the Jeeps would be summoned. Derrida shrugged, said "Nice talking to you all and good luck!" and walked off the acres, giving a "jerk off" hand motion in the direction of "Putrid" Pete's corpse.

The remainder of the 1972 fight was fueled by ideological and philosophical divisions created by Derrida's lecture, with armies and alliances being created by those who shared similar interpretations of the lecture and with the greatest battles happening amongst those with the biggest disagreements in their perspectives.