THE SCARLET AITCH
1. This is the grand finale of Hegel's philosophy of history: "Philosophy concerns itself only with the glory of the Idea mirroring itself in the History of the World … the justification of God in History. Only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the History of the World [which is] essentially His Work" (Hegel, Philosophy of History, 457). For Lacan the symbolic, i.e., all of human culture, is in the name of the father, which is the source of all law. [BACK]
2. Francis Ponge, The Power of Language, trans. Serge Gavronsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 8. [BACK]
3. The French poet Dominique Fourcade has claimed this. For a discussion see ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:" in this volume. [BACK]
4. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Norton, 1988), 4–34. [BACK]
5. Ibid., 23–24. [BACK]
6. "She gained from many people the reverence due to an angel" (ibid., 25). [BACK]
7. This was published on the internet on the Edge Foundation Web site http://www.edge.org/documents, accessed 1999. Rotman's Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St. Martin's, 1987) is an extraordinary book on the history of ideas related to zero. [BACK]
8. See James R. Newman, "The Infinite Abelian Group of Angel Flights," in The World of Mathematics, 4 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 1543. [BACK]
9. For an interestingly different way of looking at these matters see Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Although I use very different conceptual coordinates and don't agree with its conclusions, I have found part 1 of this book, "The Semiotic and the Symbolic," very useful for thinking about ways in which modernist poetries had "to disturb the logic that dominated the social order" (83). [BACK]