Transatlantic Studies: enticing like everything that is transcendent and puzzling like all synthetic notions designated by compound terms. What is puzzling about this one is the reversal of the natural order of meaning. Instead of bearing the phrase's semantic weight, as substantives typically do, here the word “studies” serves as a kind of suffix, almost as a qualifier of the adjective “transatlantic,” which alone denotes the object under consideration. Practically dispensable from the viewpoint of ordinary communication, “studies” nonetheless determines the pragmatic life of the concept by qualifying the cognitive object (whatever is or counts as transatlantic) as subject to a regime of academic programmability. Performative in J.L. Austin's sense (1975), the term “studies,” when invoked by the appropriate authority, institutes a discipline at the same moment that it names it. As it opens the umbrella of disciplinary legitimacy, the term shifts the cognitive object to an adjectival, subordinate position, turning it into a modulation of the self-founding and self-maintaining academic enterprise. Furthermore, the adverbial or prepositional particle “trans” adds a secondary mark of qualification. This prefix, meaning “across” or “beyond,” comprises a sense of adventure, of pioneering, and in a cognitive context applies to technological feats, to research at the frontier of knowledge. This specific connotation accompanies the spatial one in such terms as “trans-lunar injection,” a mystifying phrase for a fuel operation designed to bring a spacecraft to the Moon. But the particle “trans” may also connote the hazard and the menace of disturbed natural law, social normativity, or psychic balance, as in “trans-fatty foods,” “transgenic” crops or bacteria, “transgender” sexualities, “trans-Allegheny lunatic asylum.”