526 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
is, in the end, rather common; it is what links me to more than
one friend, no doubt to all those one calls ‘best friends’.
But then why? Why wait for death? Tell me, why do we wait
for death?^22This was a question that Derrida asked every time that a loved one
died. He felt the same as at the death of his little brother Norbert,
‘this indefatigable surprise before the fact of what I will never really
understand or accept [.. .]: continuing or beginning once more to
live after the death of someone close’.^23 Michael Naas and Pascale-
Anne Brault, professors at DePaul University at Chicago, and
translators of several of Derrida’s works, took the initiative and
collected and introduced a series of texts written or spoken by him
on the occasion of the death of one his friends: Roland Barthes,
Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jabès,
Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas,
Jean-François Lyotard, Gérard Granel, and, just recently, Maurice
Blanchot... Derrida sent to Naas and Brault a few homages which
they did not know of, but insisted that it was their project. Many of
these texts were unknown in the United States, and he was glad they
would be published. But he was rather nervous about them appear-
ing in France. He was afraid that some people would laugh at him,
as if he were playing at being Bossuet or Malraux with his funeral
orations. He liked the title chosen for the American edition, The
Work of Mourning, but the ambiguity of the world ‘work’ – labour,
but also work of art – could not be reproduced in French. The title
À la vie à la mort (In Life and in Death) was going to be used, but
then it appeared on the sleeve of a new CD by Johnny Halliday.^24
The book was eventually entitled Chaque fois unique: la fi n du monde
(Each Time Unique: The End of the World), which was a way of
highlighting one of its fundamental ideas. Derrida had written it on
the death of Althusser:
What is coming to an end, what Louis is taking away with him,
is not only something or other that we would have shared at
some point or another, in one place or another, but the world
itself, a certain origin of the world – his origin, no doubt, but
also that of the world in which I lived, in which we lived a
unique story. It is a story that is, in any case, irreplaceable, and
it will have had one meaning or another for the two of us [.. .].
It is a world that is for us the whole world, the only world, and
it sinks into an abyss from which no memory – even if we keep
the memory, and we will keep it – can save it.^25This big book, with its light and shade, was well received in the
press. In spite of their past divergences, Bernard-Henri Lévy hailed