DYSSEMIA SLEAZE

{Gk dus -, cogn. w. Skt dus -, OHG zur - (G zer), ON tor-} difficult, abnormal, impaired sema sign, mark. Cf. SEMA, unit of meaning: ie. Dyssemia: (flawed information reception) Sleaze / sli:z/ v. Rough with projecting fibers.

Drawing from a number of differing and often conflicting and dislocatory lexicons, and through the continual questioning and reworking of traditional modes of language structures and usages, this book speaks to how language (a semiotic slough) functions as an economy of ruses, detours, complications; zones of problematization.

Inscribing a "marranic" writing, a writing that is simultaneously revealed and concealed, tentative, indirect, oblique and tortured, Karasick intercalates colloquial uses of language with the esoteric, the neglected and obscure. As both a private and public document, this book plays itself out within a politics of discomfort, exuberance, interference and desire, and language emerges as an ecstatic s/cite of uninhabitable habitance. A phantasmagoric arena of interlocking tunnels, passages, cryptog(r)ammatic networks of complexes and neuroses.

ISBN 0-88922-434-X