Another Life 1976–1977 297
of Søren Kierkegaard, published in March 1977 in the series ‘La
philosophie en eff et’, took the very free form of a ‘journal “of
reading” ’, a form which, the author writes, ‘seems to sanction
groping, wandering, and rehashing; it lifts the prohibition that
ordinarily falls on digression; in principle it is tolerant of a certain
disconnectedness’. ‘At any rate, should it be necessary to provide a
thread or gist here, then we might say that from one end to the other
end in every sense of the word, it will be a question only of breaks
or ruptures.’^29 It is as if the dialogue between Sylviane and Jacques
were being continued, in an admittedly encrypted way, through the
books they published that year.
The fi rst words of ‘Living on’ – a long essay meant for the col-
lective book Deconstruction and Criticism – echo with particular
force if we remember the period Derrida had just lived through:
‘But who’s talking about living?’ And the immensely long note at
the foot of the page that runs along at the bottom of the main text
opens with this note: ‘10 November 1977. Dedicate “Living On” to
the memory of my friend Jacques Ehrmann.’^30 Ehrmann had been
responsible for Derrida’s fi rst visit to Yale and was the author of,
among others, a text entitled ‘The death of literature’... The con-
straint which the fi ve representatives of the so-called ‘Yale School’
had imposed on themselves was that they would all discuss Shelley’s
poem ‘The Triumph of Life’ in their own individual way, but, in a
symptomatic reversal of expectations, Derrida referred much more
to Death Sentence and The Madness of the Day by Blanchot.
The tonality of ‘Cartouches’ was equally sombre. This text, which
was originally to be called ‘Log-book’, accompanied 127 drawings
by Gérard Titus-Carmel depicting little mahogany boxes in the
shape of tiny coffi ns, ‘pocket size coffi ns’ as Derrida called them.
The fi rst entry was dated 30 November 1977; the last 11 and 12
January 1978. Well before the meditation on ‘date’ that Derrida
composed a few years later in ‘Shibboleth: For Paul Celan’, the
themes of the ‘only time’ and ‘the crypt’ are powerfully set out here:
7 January 1978
When the date itself becomes the place of a crypt, when it
stands in for it.
Will they ever know why I inscribe this at a given date?
Throw of a die.
Le date [cf. la date “the date”] has also been used [in French] :
le date [the thing given, the datum]. There is the date of today,
they’ll never know anything about what was given to be lived in
it – and taken away.
The date itself will stand in for a crypt, the only one that
remains, save the heart.^31