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The idea is an interesting one, even if one were not willing to take it very far: an ecology of conceptual life in which something of dead notions uncannily continues to exist, in however modified a fashion, in new notions that were not generated for the same purpose. Or perhaps one could describe such a survival in analogy to the principle of equilibrium in thermodynamics, or a Freudian homeostasis, or Benjamin's exposition of the impossibility of decadence. Be that as it may, when placed within a determinate semantic cluster, the concept of inheritance may fulfill a more important function today than one would otherwise have imagined. The most vehement sign of victory in the so-called canon wars, in spite of such forceful criticisms such as Guillory's (Cultural Capital), has been one of sheer linguistic usage, namely, the unconscious replacement in ordinary academic language, without any programmatic intention, of "tradition" and "traditional" by "canon" and "canonical." If both pairs of words have in common a reference to groups of texts, they differ sharply in their connotations. "Tradition," as we know, emphasizes continuity, the passing on of something, which, as a rule, is considered to be valuable, through a long process of assimilation. From the beginning, such handing down went against the inner thrust of capitalism, but it was only recently that tradition seemed to be deprived of meaning, turning into "either a questionable value or an imported article to be valued only as a curiosity" (Adorno, "On Tradition" 75). Even Adorno's polemical solution in a well-known sentence from Minima Moralia—"One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly"—runs the risk of having lost its edge today (52). "Canon," on the other hand, suggests a process of more or less arbitrary selection, thus representing a move away from the object and a strengthening of action on the part of a subject and/or institution. Among other things, it testifies to the currency, the ease with which power seems to have become an unquestioned and unquestionable, purely operational concept.1 "Inheriting" offers the possibility of thinking continuity without necessarily implying a continuum or an underlying notion of progress. Significantly, it also differs from "influence," which belongs together with tradition, and which, thanks to Harold...