Starting from the minimal principle of generative anthropology that human culture originates as the deferral of violence through representation the author proposes a new understanding of the fundamental concepts of metaphysics and an explanation of the historical problematic that underlies the postmodern end of culture. Part I begins with the paradoxical emergence of the vertical sign from the horizontal world of appetite. Two persons reaching for the same object are a minimal model of this emergence; their pragmatic paradox can be resolved only by substituting the representation of the object for its appropriation. The nature of paradox and the related notion of irony, as well as the fundamental concepts of being, thinking, and signification, are rethought on the basis of this triangular model, leading to an anthropological interpretation of the origin of philosophy and semiotics in Plato s Ideas. Part I concludes with an exploration of the psychoanalytic categories of the unconscious and the erotic.