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301 Overture 1. Michelle De Mooy emphasized this to me while imagining a house without organs. 2. Barbara Flanagan asked me this on a beach going out to Nappatree Point in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. 3. As I remember, I discovered it by accident in 1977 while paging through the 1970 issue of an amazing publication called: Source: music of the avant garde. 4. Alvin Lucier’s first recording of the piece is available online at: http:// ubu.artmob.ca/sound/source/Lucier-Alvin_Sitting.mp3. It is also for sale in a more recent recording of his at: http://www.lovely .com/titles/cd1013.html. 1. Yes and No 1. I owe this way of generalizing the possibility of tragedy to the writing and conversation of Michael Mendelson. These considerations are not unrelated to Derrida’s use of the ever-present possibility of play in his various discussions of iterability. 2. David Hawkes pointed me to a use of worms parallel to Nietzsche’s: Blake’s use of worms to mock Christian virtues in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The cut worm forgives the plow” (Blake 1977, 183). Nietzsche discusses swamps and worms at a number of different places, for instance: It is on such soil, on swampy ground, that every weed, every poisonous plant grows, always so small, so hidden, so false, so saccharine. Here the worms of vengefulness and rancor swarm, here the air stinks of secrets and concealment; here the web of the most malicious of all conspiracies is being spun constantly—the conspiracy of the suffering against the well-constituted and victorious, here the aspect of the victorious is hated. N o t e s 302 Notes to pages 22–29 And what lying is employed to disguise that this hatred is hatred. (Nietzsche [1887] 1967a, 3.14) 3. In 1973, Deleuze and Guattari offered the following criticism of the “Mouvement pour la Libération des Femmes,” an activist French group: In this sense, wouldn’t the highest aim of the M.L.F. be the machinic and revolutionary construction of the non-oedipal woman, instead of the confused exaltation of mothering and castration? (Deleuze and Guattari 1973a, 102–3.) In 1980, they wrote: It is, of course, indispensable for women to conduct a molar politics, with a view to winning back their own organism, their own history, their own subjectivity: “we as women . . .” makes its appearance as the subject of enunciation. But it is dangerous to confine oneself to such a subject, which does not function without drying up a spring or stopping a flow. The song of life is often intoned by the driest of women, moved by ressentiment, the will to power and cold mothering. . . . [But] it is no more adequate to say that each sex contains the other and must develop the opposite pole in itself. Bisexuality is no better a concept than the separateness of the sexes. It is as deplorable to miniaturize, internalize the binary machine as it is to exacerbate it; it does not extricate us from it. It is thus necessary to conceive of a molecular women’s politics that slips into molar confrontations , and passes under or through them. (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 276) 4. The failure of double negation to attain what in the first paragraph of this section I called “joy” recalls Derrida’s logic of the supplement, which if it is needed, that is, if there is something to be supplemented at all, cannot be completely or fully supplemented because any supplement could never be more than supplemental (see Derrida [1967a] 1976). 5. Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft was originally published in 1882. In 1887, it was republished in an expanded edition with a new subtitle: la gaya scienza . In the introduction to his translation of this book Walter Kaufmann draws attention to the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “gay” includes: “The gay science: a rendering of gai saber, the Provençal name for the art of poetry,” and the OED dates this use of the English expression to the first half of the nineteenth century. La gaya scienza thus refers to the art of the troubadours , and it is this which puts me in mind of medieval knights and courtly love. Courtly love, itself, was a term invented in 1883 (Bowden 1997, ix). 6. “Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to...

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