Notes and References

1. These terms/signs/signifiers are loosely connected to each other through contiguity [and not

synomymity] and belong to the discourse of illegitimate sexual activities.

2. Unlike the discursive spaces of legitimate and illegitimate sexualities which are based on hierarchy,

privilege and marginalization [of practices belonging to these diacourses], this heterogeneous signifying

plane is a decentralized space without either depth or height, and therefore inclusive of oppositions,

differences and contradictions. This is a space of difference [or différance].

3. According to Homi Baba's theories of dissent, the third space can be conceptualized as a place where

the oppressor [here, legitimate sexuality] and the oppressed [here, illegitimate sexualities] can come

together [maybe even momentarily], [a space that is itself free of oppression or privilege,] for the sake of

dialogue and interaction.

4. A neologism coined by Jacques Derrida by combining the older and Freudian Phallocentrism [the idea

of privileging the male phallus] and logocentrism [privileging of language].

5. Feminine Writing. "Hélène Cixous coined this term in the widely read essay 'Le Ride de la Méduse'

(The Laugh of Medusa) to describe kind of writing that is outside of the masculine economy of

patriarchal discourse" (Buchanan 145)

6. Here not an absolute otherness but a radical otherness that exists [and has existed] between the

respective voices of the two sexes.

7. Usually taken to be the years between 1770 and 1850, a time when a lot of revolutionary movements

took place over Europe and in America.

8. Shakespeare's poem draws its material from both Ovid's Fasti and Titus Livius' History of Rome.

9. Sophocles' tragic play about Oedipus the king of Thebes who blinds himself after realizing that he had

slept with his own mother (Jocasta) and killed in own father (Laius).

10. The third play of Aeschylus' Oedipus based trilogy [Laius and Oedipus being the first two].
11. This loss of language and the resort to verbal violence [a violence that is inarticulate] at the very

moment of communication illustrates the absence of parity, dialogue and understanding at the center of

the dialectical divide between rape and sex or the rapist and the victim.

12. Like the binaries of legitimate and illegitimate sexualities, Derrida in The Cogito and the History of

Madness explains that Foucault's division between madness and reason is also traceable to the question of

logos and the fact that language is grounded upon binary productions.

13. Subject position [either of the two] within the dialectic.

14. A combination of two words: cum and come, and two functions: conjunction and negation [erasure].

C[u-o]me is an undecidable trace term that has multiple [and sometimes opposite] significations.

15. This kind of agendered [sexual] brotherhood between two individuals who are otherwise bound by

law and social regulation, is characteristic of sexual dialogue and the language of C[u-o]me. This kind of

secret association between two individuals is also typical of secret societies such as the illuminati, the

Ordo Templi Orientis and the Rosicrucians, many of whom used subverted sexual practices as rites of

initiation or incorporation.

16. The dialogue of sex [the sex that is beyond the legitimate/illegitimate divide] historically has always

been marked by this kind of a secret or discretion.

17. This logic is consistent with Jacques Derrida's idea of différance which he defines as the becoming

space of time and the becoming time of space. The differential nature of sex and sexuality would mean

that it is always becoming something else [occupying a different space] in time. The economy of violence

and rupture, a rupture that breaks down the structure of sex and sexuality is thereby an integral part of its

overall structurality.

18. In the sense that one constantly needs to improvise, balance, budget, regulate and modulate linguistic

[or even bodily] performance.

19. As within this economy of c[u-o]me sex or sexual practice(s) is no more discursive in the Foucaudian

sense of the term [as this economy is grounded on the absence of any ground at all; it is grounded on

différance].