‘And I am writing here at the moment when my mother no longer recognizes me, and at which, though still capable of speaking or articulating, a little, she no longer calls me and for her and therefore for the rest of her life, I no longer have a name, that is what is happening, and when she nonetheless seems to reply to me, she is presumably replying to someone who happens to be me without her knowing it, if knowing means anything here, like the other day in Nice when I asked her if she was in pain (yes) then where? It was February 5 1989, she had in a rhetoric that could never have been hers, the audacity of this stroke about which she will alas, never know anything, no doubt knew nothing, and which, piercing the night replies to my question: I have a pain in my mother, as though she were speaking for me, both in my direction and in my place. I stop for a moment over a pang of remorse, in any case over the admission I owe the reader, in truth that I owe my mother herself for the reader will have understood that I am writing for my mother, perhaps even for a dead woman, for if I were here writing for my mother, it would be for a living mother who does not recognize her son, and I am paraphrasing here for whomever no longer recognizes me, unless it be so that one should no longer recognize me, another way of saying, another version, so that people think they finally recognize me.’

JACQUES DERRIDA
CIRCUMFESSION
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1993
CIRCUMFESSION
EDITIONS DU SEUIL, 1991