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Taking up Heidegger’s definition of metaphysics as a recognition of the difference between Being and beings, Bass notes heidegger’s conclusion that the study of being, ontology, must simultaneously and necessarily be theology. For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power overlooks this difference and results in a negative theology, whereas Freud’s postulation of the unconscious core of our being in the hungry baby’s hallucination of the breast constitutes the possibility of onto- theology. The so-called external object has the transcendental possibility of becoming the object of theology since its absence is equated with the wish for eternal presence, as is exemplified in the fetish. The subject is indeed an ontotheological subject, between absence and presence (castration and noncastration), the subject of the wish. Derrida considers Lacan’s doctrine of the phallus as signifier, derived from Freud’s phallic monism, as inevitably elaborating a transcendental metaphysical doctrine of lack and reappropriation. Rather than achieving fixed identity, there is a more difficult oscillation between difference and opposition.