Happy Holidays, my friends! I hope you’re ready for one of the dorkiest projects of my college life. Derrida Goes To Denny’s!

One of the only required courses for my literature degree was Lit 101: Literary Theory & Interpretation. It was reputed to be the hardest course in the degree, and it was only available at 8am, which is about 4am in Standard College Time (SCT).

Our professor was Jody Greene, and every girl in class had a crush on her regardless of their orientation. Jody was just the absolute coolest and blew our little literary-interpreting brains every day.

But she had us studying incredibly dense translated texts by Jacques Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and more. It was hard as hell. One of Derrida’s essays (of which I can paraphrase approximately zero words to you to this day) was titled “Signature Event Context.” Get it? Because S.E.C. spells sec, which is French for dry! Because his writing was so impossibly dry! Ughhh. He spent a lot of time agonizing over iterability, which… I dunno man. But this is how scholars talk about it, and I dare you to get past a sentence or two, much less both paragraphs:

There was also an incomprehensible film about him called Derrida’s Elsewhere. Again, I remember nothing about it now. Absolutely nothing.

Anyway, it was incredibly freeing to learn that I could interpret a text with or without the context of history, authorial intention, language, etc., depending on my relationship to the text and what I was using it to illustrate. But oh, we suffered for those revelations! And we studied our asses off, because we did not want to disappoint our great and wonderful Jody.

Long story short, in a delirious haze of studying, a friend of mine and I conceptualized a series of comic strips about Jacques Derrida, which we gifted to our teacher at the end of the class (um and she LOVED THEM). The running gag is that Derrida keeps trying to get out of paying for his breakfast by using literary theory, and his frazzled waitress, Debbie, is tired of his shit.

Enjoy! Or smile, kind of puzzled, at what seems like a punchline, but…

DAMN THIS ITERATION OF EGGS!!