The Derrida International 1996–1999 493
When reading his late works, one needs to let oneself be borne
along by a quite particular breathing. A sentence by Derrida is
closer to Henry James than to Proust: it seems to coil indefi nitely
round itself, before making a sudden leap forward.^47 A 1996 text,
Athens, Still Remains, is highly revelatory in this regard. The whole
work turns on a tirelessly repeated phrase: ‘We owe ourselves to
death’ (‘Nous nous devons à la mort’). As if it were this phrase and
this phrase alone that Derrida was endlessly tracking, on the pretext
of a discussion of a series of photos by Jean-François Bonhomme:
Surgie d’on ne sait où, ladite phrase ne m’appartenait plus.
Elle n’avait d’ailleurs jamais été mienne, je ne m’en sentais pas
encore responsable. Instantanément tombée dans le domaine
public, elle m’avait traversé. Elle passait par moi, elle se disait
en moi de passage. Devenu son otage, plutôt que son hôte, je
devais lui off rir l’hospitalité, oui, la garder sauve, j’étais certes
responsable d’une telle sauvegarde, et du salut de chacun de ses
mots, comptable de l’immunité de chaque lettre alliée à chaque
lettre. Mais la même dette, le même devoir me dictaient de ne
pas la prendre, cette phrase tout entière, de ne m’en emparer
en aucun cas comme d’une phrase par moi signée. Elle restait
d’ailleurs imprenable.Having surfaced from who knows where, the sentence in ques-
tion no longer belonged to me. It had, in fact, never been mine,
and I did not yet feel responsible for it. Having instantly fallen
into the public domain, it had traversed me. It passed through
me, saying from within me that it was just passing through.
Having become its hostage rather than its host, I had to off er it
hospitality, indeed to keep it safe: I was, to be sure, responsible
for its safekeeping, for safeguarding each of its words, account-
able for the immunity or indemnity of each letter joined to the
next. But the same debt, the same obligation, dictated to me
that I do not take this sentence, not take it as a whole, that I
do not under any circumstances take hold of it like a sentence
signed by me. And it did in fact remain impregnable.^48The reader initially has the sense of a single long melody, which
could go on and on. In reality, the text is a series of short phrases,
with a great deal of punctuation, though they follow one another
in a series of tiny repetitions and displacements, repeating the
same syllables (-sable/-table/-nable), playing on the same words
(otage/hôte/hospitalité; garder/sauve/sauvegarder), even at the risk of
seeming immobile. It could be read as a Mediterranean syntax with
its discreet waves, its almost imperceptible ebb and fl ow. By a series
of insidious transformations, less slow than they seem, an interplay