Post-Depravity

Description

Post-Depravity describes a near future in which people are little more than vectors for strange desires — and yet the increasing ordinariness of strange desires causes a vicious circle, degenerates striving for ever more outlandish forms of sexual gratification. The result, "post-depravity," is an impending state in which perversity and normality become identical. Post-Depravity uses the method of a cross-sectional study, focusing on a representative population at a specific moment in time, to show the emergence of this paradoxical future. At the center of the cross-section is Dr Francis Malenkov, aka Dr God-Damn X-Ray Spex, a self-proclaimed prophet whose predictions are paradoxes: if they prove true, then they really were visions of the future; if they don't, then they were only symptoms of a new type of psychosis. Either way, Dr Malenkov exerts a galvanizing influence on a small circle of debauched followers, and Post-Depravity is the story of how these healthcare professionals utilize their expert knowledge of the human body to devise new perversions. Post-Depravity is a dismembered novel, its parts isolated like organs harvested from a cadaver. To read it, however, is to realize that a meticulously curated set of images and terms is distributed across its vitals. Neologisms, repetitions, trigger words that connect disparate regions of text — these reverberate and resound in the brain, causing the reading experience to mirror the obsessional mindset of Dr God-Damn X-Ray Spex. In that respect, Post-Depravity is not just a diagnosis but a means of derangement, an effort to use language to induce psychosis.