“I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, ‘proceeds’ from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing.” So said Jacques Derrida in the course of an interview with Jean Birnbaum of Le Monde during the summer of 2004. Expressed here in a particularly pointed and personal form is a claim about the nature of writing—indeed about the trace more generally—that can be found already in some of Derrida’s earliest works. In his 1971 essay “Signature Event Context,” for example, Derrida argued that writing “must continue to ‘act’ and to be readable even if what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, whether he is provisionally absent, or if he is dead.”²⁹ Though Derrida always insisted that this readability of the trace in the absence of the author is “structural” and not contingent upon the actual death of the author, that the author’s disappearance or death is implied in the trace whether he or she is already dead or still living, this final iteration of the claim during the summer of 2004 holds for us today an exemplary, even a testamentary value. Published here in English for the first time under the title Learning to Live Finally, Derrida’s interview with Le Monde both bears witness to his claim about the repeatability and survival of the trace and puts it to the test of a unique and unrepeatable event. For if Derrida’s death in October of 2004 changed nothing about the status of the trace or of his own writing, it will have done much to change how we are to receive, read, and translate him today.

This is the place where, in several previous works over the past two decades, we took the opportunity to thank Jacques Derrida personally for the encouragement and help he gave us in the translation of his work, help understanding his original French and, oftentimes, help finding an appropriate English translation. This time—this time for the first time—we could benefit from no such help, not from the author of the work and not from the one we always considered to be our first reader. While we will thus continue to feel and to express our gratitude for the life and work of Jacques Derrida, and while we will continue to look to his other works for clues about how to read and translate him, we must now rely more than ever on the help and readings of others.

We would thus like to thank our students at DePaul University for the many fine suggestions they made on the translation, both in a graduate seminar in philosophy at DePaul and during a Study Abroad program in Paris. Martin Hägglund of Cornell University also gave us many helpful comments on an earlier draft of the translation, as did Jean Birnbaum, who was able to supplement the written word with recollections of his spoken interview with Derrida.

Finally, we would like to offer our heartfelt thanks to Marguerite Derrida, who knows better than anyone what Jacques Derrida meant in his final interview when he spoke not only of a certain hope for the survival of his work but of an essential and irreducible uncertainty regarding its ultimate destiny and destination: for in writing, said Derrida, “one expropriates oneself without knowing exactly who is being entrusted with what is left behind. Who is going to inherit, and how? Will there even be any heirs?”