542 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
Who is going to inherit, and how? Will there ever be any heirs?
This question is more relevant today than ever before. It
preoccupies me constantly. [.. .] When it comes to thought,
the question of survival has taken on absolutely unforeseeable
forms. At my age, I am ready to entertain the most contradic-
tory hypotheses in this regard: I have simultaneously – I ask
you to believe me on this – the double feeling that, on the one
hand, to put it playfully and with a certain immodesty, one has
not yet begun to read me, that even though there are, to be sure,
many very good readers (a few dozen in the world, perhaps,
people who are also writers-thinkers, poets), in the end it is
later on that all this has a chance of appearing; but also, on the
other hand, and thus simultaneously, I have the feeling that
two weeks or a month after my death there will be nothing left.
Nothing except what has been copyrighted and deposited in
libraries. I swear to you, I believe sincerely and simultaneously
in these two hypotheses.
Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally