Double Or…Nothing: Deconstructing Cultural Heritage

This paper draws on the deconstruction(ist) toolbox and specifically on the textual unweaving tactics of exemplarity, parergonality and supplementarity, with view to critically assessing institutional and ordinary tourists’ claims to authenticity as regards artefacts and sites of ‘cultural heritage’. Through the ‘destru[k]tion’ of claims to ‘originality’ and ‘myths of origin’, that function as preservatives for canning such artefacts and sites, the cultural arche-writing that forces signifiers to piously bow before a limited string of ‘transcendental signifieds’ is brought to full view (as the nihilistic secret behind and beneath the impossibility of self-presencing of the modernist axiology that underpins them). The stench of the aeons is thus forced to evaporate through a post-transcendentalist opening towards originary myths’ original doubles.