ABSTRACT
If, after 9 October 2004 — the ‘unique’ and unrepeatable date of the ‘end of the world’ — it were possible to collect the residue of an experience of thought condensed and plunged into terms like ‘tradition’, ‘inheritance’, ‘fi delity’, ‘testimony’ (four terms that guide, like a wind rose, Derrida’s itinerary and that of his interpreters), one could quote these words that seem to fall like stones in a pond in Circonfession: (‘I wonder, interested in the depth of the bedsore, not in writing or literature, art, philosophy, science, religion or politics but only memory and heart’) (Derrida 1993: 87). ‘Memory’ and ‘heart’ do not only represent the cross-reference to Augustine which pervades the writing of Circonfession, and even less do they incarnate an undefi ned nostalgic sentiment: poles of a theoretical oscillation that are both rigorous and open, hendiadys of a thought which never gave up seeking its own origin, they indicate the path of a gnoseological hypothesis, which the academic public prefers to call ‘deconstruction’, forgetting for this reason that the theoretical presupposition of each analysis which Derrida delivered during his long way of thought was, and is, the pursuit of a bond with the philosophical tradition, as well as the desire to allow this bond to react with instances — always new, unpredicted, unheard of — arising from reality.
