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Competition No 3924

Set by George Cowley, 27 March

We asked for an intellectual of your choice to be taken on to write for a national newspaper's problem page.

Super. Only Anne Du Croz attempted a woman (Germaine), so, sadly, there are four males below at the helm. £20 to the winners, the best of whom (Michael Cregan) also gets the Tesco vouchers.

Dear Mr Nietzsche, I am very unhappy because I'm being bullied at school. The other girls laugh at me and pull my

hair. I feel lonely and don't have any friends.

And a man came into the playground, crying: "God is dead!" Remember, what does not kill you makes you stronger. The will is judged by how much torture it can endure and turn to its advantage. And that includes hair-pulling and Chinese burns.

The will is the will to power, and happiness is the sensation that power is growing, ever growing. So next time you're attacked, smack one of the bleeders with a baseball bat or something. And you will have taken the first stride to becoming

the Superman (or, in your case, Supergirl).

Michael Cregan

Dear Mr Eco, my boyfriend of three years, with whom I am deeply in love, has sent me a txt msg to say he is breaking it off. He wrote: "0 in luv wt U 4get r gr8 sex."

Have you read Foucault's Pendulum? There you will come across hermeneutics, which is a philosophical technique concerned with the interpretation and understanding of txts. You can apply different meanings to words, which are simply a play between expectation and fulfilment of utterance. Look at the fields of meaning, rather than the string of meaning. The sex was great, so the relationship had an open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged frame. You gave good love, he sends bad txt. In Kant and the Platypus I argued that our perception of things depends on our cognitive ability. Pretend you have not seen his txt; therefore nothing has changed.

John O'Byrne

Dear Mr Derrida, I suspect that my wife is having an affair with a male, cross-dressing bell-ringer. What can I do?

I am a postmodern deconstructionist. That means your wife is not having an affair. Marriage is a patriarchal construct, the subtext of which is that husbands do not exist, though, of course, in the overtext

they do. Whether the subtext or the overtext

prevails is up to you. If you do exist, you exist only potentially as an aspirational

concept. As we know, aspirational concepts

are incapable of the feelings of "upsetness". The significant point here is that he is a bell-ringer. Since literally or metaphorically we all ring bells, you should seek to find with him a common praxis, stasis, or something else ending with "is" which I can't remember just now. If you can't afford the hardback, there is a paperback that contains a summary of all the points, Derrida's Digest, available from all good bookshops. Keep a sense of proportion. I mean, it's not happening to me.

J Seery

Dear Mr Scruton, I enjoy smoking, but my wife and daughter complain that it is a disgusting habit and imperils their health.

Should these arguments cut any ice with me?

Of course not. Though you are too civil to say so, I infer that the female members of your household are leftists who harbour an adolescent resentment of authority while themselves itching to control and regulate others' behaviour. Failure to understand transcendent obligations stops them from perceiving the distinction between power and authority. Power may be oppressive; natural authority, such as a hunt master's or head of household's, never, as it crystallises the well-being of individual, family and community. Mature subjects accept their

duty of obedience to non-coercive authority.

You may wish to point out to your distaff side that they are free to establish non-smoking domiciles of their own.

G M Davis

No 3927 Set by Dean Juniper

Condoleezza Rice has announced she is pregnant by Jack Straw. Headlines from: the Sun, Hello!, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Washington Post.

Entries in by 27 April. E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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