ABSTRACT
Every trace is in essence testamentary', Jacques Derrida goes on to say, and it is this testamentary 'structure of the trace' that has always haunted him. In a public discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Strasbourg on 9 June 2004, that is, just four months before his death, Derrida speaks of inheritance, survival, and, thus, mourning from the perspective of someone who seems to have known that the end was near. Just before evoking what he there calls his passion for leaving traces in the history of the French language, Derrida evokes a general theory of the trace in relation to the testament. In his 1971 essay 'Signature Event Context', Derrida is even more explicit and detailed about the way the trace is in its essence and by structure testamentary. To begin with his own death is yet another temptation of the philosophical tradition that runs from Plato to Heidegger.
