It would have been sometime around the year 2000 (the same year as the lecture to the Estates General of psychoanalysis) that Jacques Derrida expressed himself in these terms to his interlocutor in the dialogue that, a little while later, will be published with the title De quoi demain …, For What Tomorrow … In these sentences, Derrida is categorically and rather uncharacteristically firm in hammering home the superlatives, in naming “the most significant and most stupefying fact, the most stupe- fied as well in the history of Western philosophy” (Tomorrow, 145–6). Upon reading and rereading the superlatives issued by this philosopher who is so stingy, so one says at least, with his positively superlative propositions, I remain stupefied by them. Upon reading and rereading these lines, I hear the slap that his tongue administers to language. I must therefore also set out from this signifying and stupefying blow delivered by means of his language.

Upon rereading these sentences—but remember I am speaking as one who is stupefied—I would say: it is as if Derrida, as philosopher (which is what some call him), as if this highly-renowned philosopher (many call him, in the superlative, the greatest philosopher of his age), it is as if Derrida, in the name of philosophers or philosophy as such, were giving (himself) a big smack, delivering a slap to “the history of Western philosophy.”