At the next class meeting, Everett informed us that we would be taking an essay examination that day.
"You said 'no tests,' " one of the women said.
"This is an examination," Everett said.
"That doesn't make sense," she said.
"Well, be that as it may." He passed around the exam. "There are three questions, and I urge you to divide your time unevenly on them, as they are of equal value. Since one hundred is not divisible by three, there is no way for you to achieve a perfect score. Unless of course we decide that ninety-nine is a perfect score, and I wouldn't mind that at all."
The examination:
1) Imagine a radical and formidable contextualism that derives from a hypostatization of language and that it anticipates a liquefied language, a language that exists only in its mode of streaming. How is a speaker to avoid the pull into the whirl of this nonoriented stream of language?
2) Is the I one's body? Is fantasy the specular image? And what does this have to do with the Borromean knot? In other words, why is there no symptom too big for its britches?
3) How might it feel to burn with missionary zeal? Don't be shy in your answer.
We students looked at each other with varying degrees of confusion, panic, and anger. And like idiots, we set to work. At least they did. I read the questions over and over and after the numbers 1 and 2 on my paper I wrote, I don't know. After the number 3 I wrote, Awful, then added, damn it.
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