Date of Graduation

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

As the illegitimate daughter of one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing philosophers, at least to literary folk affiliated with universities of some repute, the author’s life has been suspended in the interstices of celebrity and ignominy, erudition and erethism, Stanford University Press and Sinclair Community College, and so much so, that her life seemed to be nothing but this conjunction, that is—and. Unwilling to cite her famous father (who, though absent, was nevertheless present to her mind as a wish or a hope) so that she might make her own name, the author moved about incognito in literary circles and suffered the typical abuses meted to no-accounts. Her university learning was nothing but the learning of her father, and all spoke in his name, though his name was to her, always (though secretly) more than a name. Her father died. She heard of it, as she had heard of him all her life—second-hand. And then she heard no more of him; it was as if, in death, he had become like her—a person of no account, a person literary folk were now willing to pass by. Enraged that what she had sought all her life was so readily discarded by those who formerly professed devotion, she pronounced herself her father’s heir and substituted his name for hers. Her act was, at first, an act of justice, of seeking it for herself, of administering it upon those who had disowned her—including her father. It was an act of and, an act of one caught between subversion and fidelity, judgment and mercy, the past and the future, and thus it was an act which mirrored the acts of her father, acts of literature and of religion, in perfect symmetry. By declaring the and bequeathed to her by her father, she also declared its deconjunction, its capacity, as her father had always claimed, to become other than and—something that is its own, and that the author, in the end, has called love.

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