Chapters: Dr. No by Percival Everett April 2025

Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His most recent books include Dr. No, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Award; The Trees, finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; Telephone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; So Much Blue; Erasure; and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and the Windham Campbell Prize. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna.

Begriff und Gegenstand
In the philosophy of language, the distinction between concept and object is attributable to the German philosopher Gottlob Frege in 1892 (in his paper "Concept and Object"; German: "Über Begriff und Gegenstand").  

According to Frege, any sentence that expresses a singular thought consists of an expression (a proper name or a general term plus the definite article) that signifies an object together with a predicate (the copula "is", plus a general term accompanied by the indefinite article or an adjective) that signifies a concept. Thus "Socrates is a philosopher" consists of "Socrates", which signifies the object Socrates, and "is a philosopher", which signifies the concept of being a philosopher.

The distinction was of fundamental importance to the development of logic and mathematics. Frege's distinction helped to clarify the notions of a set, of the membership relation between element and set, and of empty and infinite sets. However, Frege's conception of a class (in his terminology an extension of a concept) differs from the current iterative conception of a set.

Frege's distinction leads to the famous difficulty or "awkwardness of language" that some expressions which purport to signify a concept — Frege's example is "the concept horse" — are grammatically expressions that by his criterion signify an object. Thus "the concept horse is not a concept, whereas the city of Berlin is a city."  Wikipedia

Il n’y a pas de hors-texte
"It did not hold, as many of its detractors thought it did, that there was no reality apart from language, and it’s wrong to translate Derrida’s famous ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ as ‘there is nothing outside the text.’ A hors-texte is an unnumbered page in a printed book. Derrida is saying that even the unnumbered pages count, just as an outlaw, in French an hors-la-loi, has everything to do with the law, since it makes him what he is."
Michael Woods, “We do it all the time,” London Review of Books Vol 38, 3