Notes

All notes are numbered according to the order in which they were inserted into their respective texts, and not according to their position within said text. The illusion of the text as linear production is neither worthwhile in terms of the formatting required to create it, nor particularly convincing as illusions go.

Prolegomena

alpha. My choices of Greek letters as headings are not arbitrary. Within each text, click on the heading character for a concise explanation of the most relevant definition. If things look at all silly on this page, I would recommend that you get rid of Internet Explorer and get a copy of Mozilla Firefox. Also, this site is designed for a display resolution of 1024x768.

1. From Greek, hypostasis; in essence “that which lies beneath.” Though the term’s meaning as always exceeds its definition. The implication of this turn of phrase is that this trinity, according to the literal sense of the word, 'lies beneath' deconstruction as the foundation of its method. My usage of the word is also meant to evoke the trinitarian doctrine of Christianity, however, which takes the holy Trinity as one God existing in three hypostases. Deconstruction is immanent in the work of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud; its essence is shared amongst, and divided between, the three hypostases which make up this trinity of the unholy.

2. Particularly useful, perhaps: What is the tenability of the difference between a question and an answer?

3. That is: Not very far.

4. Of (post)modernity: I have used this term to denote the fact that my claim is applicable to modernity and what follows. "Postmodernity" itself, though the word should in fact denote all that which follows modernity, has come to denote an era. Thus, lacking a suitable term for what I mean, I have conjured one up.

Sigma

1. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. (London: Hogarth Press, 1963) p. 3.

2. Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams" (excerpt). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent Leitch, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). p. 923.

3. Consider, for example, how well-received this passage, from "Fetishism," would be in the contemporary psychological community:

"Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital. Why some people become homosexual as a consequence of that impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and the great majority surmount it, we are frankly not able to explain." (Freud, Sigmund. "Fetishism." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent Leitch, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). p.955.

4. Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent Leitch, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). p. 1632.

5. Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx." Transforming the Hermeneutic Context. Gayle Ormiston and Alan Schrift, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). p. 63

6. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy. David Savage, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) p. 4.

7. Ibid., p. 60.

8. Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction, Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 2002. p. 122.

9. This term is used to denote an error from which productive conclusions can be drawn, as employed by Jacques Lacan in "The Signification of the Phallus." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent Leitch, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). p. 1304.

10. In his "Sexual Theories of Children," Freud uses case studies of the misconceptions that children have about the genital development and sexual functioning of the opposite sex to support his claims about the role of the sexual in the unconscious.

11. This, of course, begs the question of whether the destructive impulses of capitalism can be traced to the unconscious drives of the id, or whether the material conditions of our reality are such powerful forces that they reach into the id and reshape it. The answer to such a question is best left to those with a compelling interest in poultry and their progeny.

12. Freud's life is contemporary with Nietzsche's, but curiously enough occupies a historically subsequent position in the canon. Paul-Laurent Assouin remarks that "Nietzsche and Freud are indeed contemporaries, but while the first had expressed himself since his thirtieth year, Freud would not find himself until his fortieth year, by which time Nietzsche has put the final touches to his own work. Freud will continue to unfold his work for nearly four decades after Nietzsche's death, which in a way obscures the fact of their contemporaneity." Freud and Nietzsche, trans. Richard L. Collier. London: Athlone Press, 2000. p. 4.

13. To say that every path through the text leads to the unconscious is not to say, of course, that deconstruction would admit that one could follow such a path its whole length. This path of signifiers is an endless one, which must necessarily approach the unconscious along a trajectory with no discernible pattern.

14. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy. p. 35.

15. Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent Leitch, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). p. 941

16. Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams," p. 921.

Delta

1. Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy. Chapter two, Second observation, from The Marx-Engels Internet Archive.

2. Citation from Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. Marx's philosophical project is thus somewhat parallel to Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics. "When Nietzsche undertakes the critique of nihilism he makes nihilism the presupposition of all metaphysics rather than the expression of particular metaphysics: there is no metaphysics which does not judge and depreciate life in the name of a supra-sensible world," in Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. p. 34.

3. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. First section, "Bourgeois and Proletarians," from The Marx-Engels Internet Archive.

4. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844," (excerpts). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent Leitch, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). p. 764.

Lambda

1. All noted citations in this column are from Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof," from Capital, Volume 1. As the Marx-Engels Internet Archive offers an excellent hypertext database of Marx texts, I will be linking these citations directly to the relevant passages in the remainder of this section to make them easily retrievable. This citation is here. The passage from Marx on alienation (estrangement) is too long to be included directly, but I have linked to it as well.

2. Baudrillard, Jean. "The Precession of Simulacra" (excerpt). from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent Leitch, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). p. 1733. The phrase Baudrillard uses is in turn derived from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, called On Exactitude in Science.

Xi

1. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. p. 65.

2. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 58. All citations from TGS are from the Walter Kaufman translation and numbered according to Nietzsche's own paragraph numbers. As the text is widely available in the public domain and most of my citations come from online sources, I have not included page numbers except where convenient.

3. Nietzsche, Friedrich. "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent Leitch, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). p. 878.

4. Ibid., p. 879: "Here one can certainly admire humanity as a mighty architectural genius who succeeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations, or even, one might say, on flowing water; admittedly, in order to rest on such foundations, it has to be like a thing constructed from cobwebs."

5. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. p. 95.

6. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy. David Savage, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). p.25.

7. Deming, Richard. "Strategies of Overcoming: Nietzsche and the Will to Metaphor." Philosophy and Literature 28(1), April 2004. p.60-73. Retrieved from Proquest Literature Online.

8. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. p. 560.

9. Nicole Anderson comments on the inaccessibility of the 'beyond' in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil as it relates to deconstruction: "It seems that Nietzsche, while being able to rise above the belief in grammar, cannot actually rise above grammar itself! This is a criticism often leveled at Derrida. However, I would argue that he does not believe there is a "beyond" grammar, and does not attempt a going "beyond" in the way that Nietzsche does. Rather, Derrida is well aware of the problems that this type of attempted transgression involves." From "The Ethical Possibilities of the Subject as Play." Journal of Nietzsche Studies 26 (2003) 79-90, p. 86

10. Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx." Transforming the Hermeneutic Context. Gayle Ormiston and Alan Schrift, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). p. 65.

Pi

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 2.

2. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. p.39.

3. Nietzsche, Friedrich. "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent Leitch, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). p. 875.

Omega

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 11.