By Your Leave

Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

—Hamlet 5.2

To so many, I want to say thank you. To Akira Lippit, Natania Meeker, and Erin Graff Zivin, who planned and organized the symposium at which most of these essays were first presented. To Akira and Erin, again and again, for conceiving, editing, and introducing this issue. To the colleagues and students at the University of Southern California (USC), first of all in French and Italian, in Comparative Literature, and in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture but also elsewhere in the college (Hilary Schor, Elinor Accampo) not only for their presence and testimony at the symposium but especially for the years of comradeship at the university. Last, but not at all least, to the friends whose gifts are gathered here, wrapped in memories but also in examples of the kind of work that has bound our friendships together for many years.

Thank you.

I received these gifts with a recognition, a reconnaissance, that was each time very specific, very specifically tied to a tonal register, to something like the signature of a voice or the voice of a signature. It is these specific tonalities that touched me, each one with a different pressure, a different resonance, a different taste. I'm mixing up the sense impressions—touch, sound, taste—because the powerful recognition I'm talking about occurs as the synesthesia of memory (Charles Baudelaire avec Marcel Proust).

Ellen Burt, to take a first example, reminds me that we met in 1978 around a dinner table at the home of my thesis adviser Phil Lewis. Touch, sound, taste, sight, and smell revive in her anecdote, but it is the savor of her prose that is most telling for me. It so compelled me that I didn't recognize at first how this memory had to be out of place or out of time. Ellen says, "I met Peggy in 1978 while teaching as an ABD at Cornell. … I found myself a few seats away from her at a crowded table at Phil and Cathy Lewis's house. I'd read and admired her first book on Rousseau, so I studied her." Since my first book was not published until 1982, I conjecture that Ellen's memory has lapsed back to a time when she was finishing her own dissertation (she was, she said, an ABD at the time), which, I believe, was largely or even exclusively on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is another tip-off in Ellen's memory, for she credits me with a "book on Rousseau," which would be a book I never wrote unless you count my unpublished doctoral dissertation that was, indeed, exclusively on Rousseau.¹ But in my first published book, Fictions of Feminine Desire, only one of its five chapters had to do with Rousseau, his Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse, a title that helped to buttress my book's own second title: Disclosures of Heloise. Heloise was my personal heroine at the time (already in 1978, but the scene Ellen recalls more likely occurred in 1984), which reminds me that my own memory of that dinner table scene is that I blurted out something about Abelard and "real castration" that embarrassed me even as I said it. I prefer Ellen's memory that I talked about chickens. The point is, however, and this is abundantly clear from the rest of her luminous essay, that she is an unequaled reader of Rousseau's "invention of the modern signature," as I called it but as Ellen actually documents it, materially, while she moves effortlessly between the strictest historical scholarship and the deconstructive reading strategies that our teachers, Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, modeled for us and particularly on the example of Rousseau.

Ellen has always signed with the initials E. S. (yes), which brings me to Geoff Bennington's accumulation of initials. His exercise with J. J. (in French that's pronounced gigi, like the eponymous ingenue in Colette's novella who is initiated into the life of a courtesan) prompted me to word...