Zombie!Nietzsche

[alixtii]

I always inwardly chuckle when I hear my professor talk about Nietzsche's "posthumous notes"--I always imagine zombie!Nietzsche writing The Will to Power. Am I just being weird about a phrase which is standard throughout (the relevant species of) academia, or am I the sane one and I should use some clunklier phrase like "posthumously-published notes"?

Comments

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Posthumously published, I think. No hyphen, though, for -ly adjectives.

Heh. I thought "adjectives," typed "adverbs."

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

But . . . it is an adverb. (Totally right about the hyphen, though. Bad Alixtii1)

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's an adverb. It's just not acting as one, exclusively, in that phrase. Which doesn't change its nature, I suppose.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

But "published after death" is a completely legitimate definition of 'posthumous.' Just like a posthumous child is born after the death of the father. I'm pretty sure the former definition arose as an analogy to the latter. The act of creation happened when you were alive; the 'birth' was just delayed.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I'm willing to accept this, as weird as it seems to me, which is why I made the post. (It wasn't just to make a zombie!Nietzsche joke.) Although I'm not sure about the analogy; birth and publishing don't, intuitively, quite seem equivalent to me. Birth entails an entrance into a social contract which didn't exist before; but unpublished notes are already part of a linguistic network, because there is no such thing as a private language. (And I'm way overthinking that, but I am writing a paper on Nietzsche and Derrida, so I have an excuse.)

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

That's where the word comes from.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

No, I'm perfectly willing to accept that a child born after the father is dead is posthumous, and that's the word origin (although I would more likely think of it as from it's mother's womb untimely ripped, as Macduff). It's that the act of publishing could be seen as equivalent to the act of birth which I find problematic.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

And again, while I'm willing (eager, even!) to continue the discussion for academic purposes, I recognize that my ability to problematize a commonly-understood usage does not invalidate the fact that it is commonly understood, which was the question I asked in this post.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

If the question is, "Should I ignore dictionary definitions of words because they are illogical to me?" I'd go with 'no.'

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I'm proud to know enough about how English works to realize I know comparatively little about how English works, so I'm willing to re-learn. But are you claiming that the "posthumously" in "posthumously published" has no part of speech beyond "first half of a compound adjective"? Although really, I'm having difficulty thinking of it as a compund adjective at all without the hyphen; my grammar-school-textbook-rules mind still insists on analyzing it as "adverb modifying an adjective modifying a noun."

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

It's not truly a compound adjective, but the phrase is acting AS an adjective. If you took it out, the meaning of the sentence would change considerably--so the words are bound together. There aren't really tidy titles for all of the stuff that happens in English.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, it's definitely an adjective phrase, no argument there--it's just that the constitutive parts of the adjective phrase have their own parts of speech, too--just like "published" doesn't stop being an adjective (well, a participle, which is at the very least is functioning like an adjective) just because its part of a noun phrase with the head "notes." (Which is to ignore the way in which "part of speech" is itself an incredibly simplistic "high school grammar" sort of concept, but I understand high school grammar--and, to some degree its limitations--in a way I do not higher advanced linguistics.)

[teh-no.livejournal.com]

I always imagine zombie!Nietzsche writing The Will to Power.

"God is dead... a slight correction of points..."

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, Nietzsche did write, "Some are born posthumously."