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

[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 Birth entails an entrance into a social contract which didn't exist before; but unpublished notes are already part of a linguistic network, because there is no such thing as a private language.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.'