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Introduction
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Introduction Bénédictions—‘‘traces in the history of the French language’’ In the days immediately following the death of Jacques Derrida in October 2004, I imagined that my mourning would go otherwise. (‘‘My mourning,’’ I say, as if I knew what mourning was and could identify it as ‘‘my own.’’) I imagined myself continuing to speak and write about the importance of Derrida’s work for me personally and for contemporary thought more generally. I imagined myself bearing witness to the kindness and hospitality Derrida always showed me and my work. I even imagined myself in the wake of Derrida’s death recounting some more personal stories about him—something I had never allowed myself to do before. And I also saw myself, of course, continuing to read him, especially, I thought, those final interviews, texts, and seminars, works that I imagined might tell me something about how he himself thought about a death he knew was approaching and how I myself should understand that death or my own work of mourning. In short, I imagined myself as a more or less ‘‘faithful heir,’’ bearing witness to Derrida’s life and work, introducing that work to students who have never had the chance to read it before, and defending it before those in the academy and the media who so often blindly criticize it. Today, more than a couple of years after the death of Jacques Derrida, it has become unmistakably clear that I had imagined wrongly, that my mourning has gone otherwise, demonstrating, no doubt, that mourning is never so predictable and that, in this case at least, it was never simply my own. Indeed the one thing I did not imagine myself doing in those 1 early days was returning to Derrida’s work—to all his work, early as well as late—with the same passion I had had for it before his death. I simply did not see myself having the heart to study him in that way again, at least not for a long time to come. But events dictated otherwise. In the days and weeks immediately following October 9, 2004, I was invited on numerous occasions to speak or to write on Derrida for various memorial sessions, conferences, and special journal issues. Out of what I considered to be a certain fidelity to Derrida’s work and memory, I accepted most every one of these generous invitations—and that’s when things began to change. What began each time as an attempt to say a few choice words about a person and an oeuvre I thought I knew well turned into a rereading , a rethinking, and, very quickly, a renewed passion for an incomparably rich and, I came to realize, still very much intact and unread corpus. What began each time as an exercise in memory and mourning ended up becoming an attempt to think along with Derrida about various themes and relationships in his corpus—themes such as sovereignty, hospitality, phantasms, autoimmunity, and the list goes on, and relationships such as that between Europe and the United States, religion and secularism, and so on—themes and relationships that are prominent in Derrida’s very last texts, to be sure, but that can all be traced back to very early ones as well. This work is the result of these rereadings of Derrida, rereadings that no doubt could have been carried out before Derrida’s death but that have been motivated and, the reader will hear, inflected by his death and by the events that have followed it. What I feel today is thus still, to be sure, an aching melancholy and a deep gratitude for the life and work of Derrida, but also a renewed desire to read and to encourage others to read him. At a time when Derrida’s work—indeed when Theory more generally—risks being forgotten, declared passé or irrelevant, it is important, I believe, to read ever more closely in order to demonstrate the extraordinary inventiveness and coherence , as well as the essential reserve and potential, of a work that has, for the most part, yet to be read and is still waiting for us out there in the future. While there will continue to be other appropriate ways to remember Derrida, other ways to pay tribute to his enormous influence in philosophy , literary theory, or the academy more generally, reading him is, I believe, the best way of doing justice to the traces he...