So wrote Jacques Derrida in 1986.

So he writes in “Aphorism Countertime.”

These two assertions attempt to say something about the legacy of one who was an unflinching thinker of inheritance and legacy. Between them, the first in a dated past tense and the second with its descriptive present tense, they conjugate the times of a survival into a present without limit, which is also and at the same time the limitless future of a promise. This “at the same time” points, at the same time, to the contretemps of a survival, a living on, that was already given by the law commanding “every given word” in every duel. Already, which means not just in the wake of a dreaded, lamented event that can be dated and that happens only once. Already before that date there will have been living on, before and therefore also beyond the event. The impossible happens, the impossible event happens every day, and not merely on that day when “The sun for sorrow will not show its face,” which is recorded and dated as the beginning of mourning in “objective reality.”