494 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
of diff erences and repetitions, irritating or fascinating, Derrida
gradually draws us into his meditative path. Poetry is there, very
close, inseparable from philosophy.
This acknowledgement of debt, this IOU, was like a thing, a
simple thing lost in the world, but a thing already owed, already
due, and I had to keep it without taking it. To hold on to it as if
holding it in trust, as if on consignment, consigned to a photo-
engraved safekeeping. What does this obligation, this fi rst
indebting, have to do with the verb of this declaration that can
never be appropriated, ‘we owe [devons] ourselves to death?’
What does the obligation have to do with what the declaration
seemed to mean? Not ‘we owe ourselves to the death,’ not ‘we
owe ourselves death,’ but ‘we owe ourselves to death.’
But just who is death? (Where is it – or she – to be found?
One says, curiously, in French, trouver la mort, to ‘fi nd death,’
‘to meet with death’ – and that means to die.)^49