I was going to call this one ‘Nightshift’, although I'm not sure how orderly it is, or how strictly it keeps to the alternation between night and day. Or even if it ‘works’. (What would that mean?) But there is something here of dark and light, and I wanted or needed song, what the song ‘Nightshift’ calls ‘sweet sounds coming down’ or ‘voices coming through’ from Freud and Derrida and the others who light our way here. So I thought of the title ‘Nightshift’, or perhaps it should be ‘The Price of Tears’. In any case, I have an epigraph, from the great musician Ornette Coleman: ‘The theme you play at the start of a number is the territory, and what comes after, which may have very little to do with it, is the adventure’ – because this is not what I expected to write: things have moved on, and some have moved aside, taken a side-step.

I would like to tell you a story, something short, something with what Walter Benjamin – whom I'm bringing along for moral support – calls ‘that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis’. It isn't there yet. What I'm reading to you is happening in what you might call ‘real time’. I had a story, or what I thought was a story, rather a sentence that fell to me. Then I had the official cover-story of an abstract, and the abstract of the abstract as the first one wasn't short enough. None of these began to say what I love about Derrida and Freud and Derrida with Freud, nor did they begin to say how it is possible to speak about the night from which writing comes or to say anything with any integrity about these two figures, heroic riders out of, and into, that night. Furthermore, it had not dawned on me that I might want to address how Freud after Derrida might relate to the question of cognition in the Anthropocene. Perhaps what I have to say may be ‘shot through with explanations’ (‘The Storyteller’, p. 147). According to Benjamin, writing in 1936, that's often how it is these days, and it's still true. But I don't want only to explain.