1. Chinen (2021).

2. Adorno (1990), 300.

3. Moten (2003), 85. See Best in this issue.

4. See Adorno (1990), 301: ‘History has left its residue in punctuation marks, and it is history, far more than meaning or grammatical function, that looks out at us, rigidified and trembling slightly, from every mark of punctuation.’

5. Said (2006), 139.

6. See esp. Gurd (2005), Michelakis (2006), and Haselswerdt (2022).

7. On the queer intimacy between Iphigenia and Artemis, see Haselswerdt (2022) and Rabinowitz and Bullen (2022).

8. See Gurd (2005), 9: ‘There is not one Iphigenia at Aulis, there are many Iphigenias at Aulis.’

9. On ‘stigmatology’, see Szendy (2018), 60.

10. Adorno (1990), 304.

11. On this OCT edition by James Diggle, see Gurd (2005), 67, who points out that the ‘new stability’ apparently achieved ‘is based on a systematization of the subjectivity and incompleteness of text-critical insight, replacing the notion of an original, law-abiding, and law-setting cause (Euripides the author) with a systematic calculus of probabilities’.

12. On sorority, see Butler and Sanyal in this special issue.

13. Chinen (2021): ‘I felt [the work] kind of flailing at, and pushing against, the shape that we tried to fit it into in Boston.’

14. I use the phrase, coined by Anker (2022), 9, to refer to the dynamic—modern as well as pre-modern—‘in which practices of freedom produce harm, brutality, and subjugation as freedom’.

15. Comay and Ruda (2018), 80 (my emphasis).

16. Yaszek (2005), 310.

17. Brody (2008), 71.

18. Brody (2008), 73. Berlant (2022), 125, notes that ‘the ellipsis can be cast as the dissociative diacritical mark that is rhetorically rendered as a falling apart of meaning and connection’ or ‘a call to connect the dots differently’.

19. On the tragic anti-catharsis of emesis, see Telò (2020a), 151 and 225f., and (2020b).

20. On the anti-teleology of emesis, see Brinkema (2011). The power of myth is both consumptive and digestive, for it both destroys and hierarchically arranges its objects: for the distinction, see Brinkema (2022), 193f.

21. See Warren (2018), 5 and 13: ‘Blacks…have function but not Being—the function of black(ness) is to give form to a terrifying formlessness (nothing)… Black being never becomes, or stands forth, but exists in concealment, falling, and inconsistency’.

22. On the concept of ‘beautiful self-elimination’ in relation to the suicides of the Middle Passage, see Best (2018).

23. Project description on the Octopus Theatricals webpage (n.d.), http://octopustheatricals.com/iphigenia.

24. Interviewed in Brooks (2021).

25. Brody (2018), 85.

26. See Butler (1997), 171: ‘There can be no ego without melancholia… The ego's loss is constitutive.’

27. On self-abolition and Black radicality, see Bey (2022); on subjunctivity as a possibility of Black poiêsis, see Quashie (2021), 28f.; following Audre Lorde, Quashie, 66, suggests that ‘experience is subjunctive because it merges what is deeply felt with what has not yet occurred’.