ABSTRACT
Forgive me for speaking in my own tongue. It’s the only one I ever spoke with Paul de Man. It’s also the one in which he often taught, wrote and thought. What is more, I haven’t the heart today to translate these few words, adding to them the suffering and distance, for you and for me, of a foreign accent. We are speaking today less in order to say something than to assure ourselves, with voice and with music, that we are together in the same thought. We know with what difficulty one finds right and decent words at such a moment when no recourse should be had to common usage since all conventions will seem either intolerable or vain.
