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Notes Introduction: Bénédictions—‘‘traces in the history of the French language’’ 1. Derrida’s original French reads, ‘‘Laisser des traces dans l’histoire de la langue française, voilà ce qui m’intéresse [to leave traces in the history of the French language—that’s what interests me]’’ (LLF 37). 2. See C 21 ff., AP 6 ff., AOA 39, Hélène Cixous, Insister: À Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 60–61, and LLF 23. 3. On Derrida’s love of the French language, see MO 51. 4. See ‘‘Rams,’’ in SQ 135–63. 5. The subtitle of ‘‘Rams’’ is ‘‘Uninterrupted Dialogue—Between Two In- finities, the Poem.’’ 6. For other references to ‘‘benediction,’’ see SQ 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 55, and 69. 7. Interview with Mireille Calle-Grüber in ‘‘Où la philosophie et la poétique, indissociables, font événement d’écriture: Entretien avec Jacques Derrida,’’ C.E.S.P.R. (ULB), no. 20 (1996): 156; cited in Myriam Van Der Brempt’s excellent essay ‘‘Eloge et bénédiction,’’ Europe, no. 901 (May 2004): 29–43. Van Der Brempt looks at the theme of benediction in Derrida from Signsponge and ‘‘Shibboleth ’’ through Touching Him—Jean-Luc Nancy. See Derrida’s development of the benediction in HCFL, where he writes, for example, ‘‘an event, like a benediction , can only be a grace, namely, that which happens or arrives just where not expected, when one no longer anticipates or calculates anything’’ (126). The benediction, like the event, is thus a ‘‘leap’’ out of the calculable or the anticipatable . Derrida forges the word bondire in HCFL in order to gesture toward this good-word-leap-bond, this ‘‘bond of immortality into a benediction’’ (130), a letter ‘‘countersigned by the benediction’’ (132). 235 8. I am gesturing here toward Safaa Fathy’s very beautiful 2000 film ‘‘Derrida ’s Elsewhere.’’ 9. ‘‘When I recall my life, I tend to think that I have had the good fortune to love even the unhappy moments of my life, and to bless them. Almost all of them, with just one exception. When I recall the happy moments, I bless them too, of course, at the same time as they propel me toward the thought of death, toward death, because all that has passed, come to an end’’ (LLF 52). 10. Here are Derrida’s words: ‘‘Jacques n’a voulu ni rituel ni oraison. Il sait par expérience quelle épreuve c’est pour l’ami qui s’en charge. Il me demande de vous remercier d’être venus, de vous bénir. Il vous supplie de ne pas être triste, de ne penser qu’aux nombreux moments heureux que vous lui avez donné la chance de partager avec lui. Souriez-moi, dit-il, comme je vous aurai souri jusqu’à la fin. Préférez toujours la vie et affirmez dans elle la survie . . . Je vous aime et vous souris d’où que je sois.’’ Translated by Gila Walker in Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 462: ‘‘Jacques wanted no rites and no orations. He knows from experience what an ordeal it is for the friend who takes on this task. He asks me to thank you for coming and to bless you. He beseeches you not to be sad, to think only of the many happy moments you gave him the chance to share with him. Smile for me, he says, as I will have smiled for you until the end. Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival . . . I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I am.’’On deconstruction as affirmation of life, see LLF 51. 11. Derrida writes in Demeure, ‘‘the adverb désormais is for me one of the most beautiful, and one of the most untranslatable, words, in a word, in the French language’’ (D 102). In a postscript to ‘‘NW’’—yet another text of memory and of mourning, of birth and the future—Derrida writes, dating his words ‘‘July 15, 2000,’’ his seventieth birthday: [It is] as if I had said to myself, in short, yet one more time but once and for all, for good and forever: from now on, no more writing, especially not writing, for writing dreams of sovereignty, writing is cruel . . . Whence my definition of withdrawal [le retrait], my nostalgia for retirement [la retraite]: from now on, before and without the death toward which—as I...