1. [Birnbaum’s French title is “Porter le deuil,” an idiom meaning to be in mourning or to go into mourning. Birnbaum, following Derrida, is playing on the fact that “porter” by itself means to carry or bear and can be used to describe the carrying or bearing of a child.—TR.]
2. Let me recall that, in the Jewish tradition, the Kaddish is a prayer of sanctification recited in particular during the period of mourning. Kaddish for a Child Not Born, trans. Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson (Evanston, IL: Hydra Books, 1997).
The play performed at the Théâtre Ouvert was directed by Joël Jounneau, who, with Jean Launay, was also responsible for the script. The actor was Jean-Quentin Châtelain.
3. [Kertesz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.—TR.]
4. [Or “That it was I who taught her how to live.” As Derrida points out at the beginning of the interview, “apprendre” can mean either to learn or to teach, so that “apprendre à vivre” can mean either learning to live, that is, learning oneself to live, or teaching another (or oneself) to live.—TR.]
5. You will have recognized the exordium of Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), xvii; the emphasis here is Derrida’s.
6. Specters of Marx, xix.
7. “Abraham, l’autre,” in Joseph Cohen, Raphael Zagury-Orly, Judéités, Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 16, 20. 25, 40. [The French here is acte de naissance, literally, a “birth certificate.”—TR]
8. Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 42.
9. Specters of Marx, xviii.
10. Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 34.
11. “if tragen speaks the language of birth, if it must be addressed to a living being present or to come, it can also be addressed to the dead, to the survivor or to their specter, in an experience that consists in bearing the other in the self, just as one bears one’s loss or one’s mourning—and melancholy,” from “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—Between Two Infinities, the Poem,” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 159.
12. Aporias, 55.
13. “Circumfession” in Jacques Derrida, by Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 41.
14. [The word “alter-mondialist,” which Derrida returns to later in the interview, is most commonly translated “anti-globalist.” But since Derrida is proposing not to abandon all global or world initiatives but to transform them, to help fashion “another,” better world, we have opted for “alter-globalist,” a term that has gained some currency in certain international movements.—TR.]
15. Monolinguism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 47.
16. [1962 is the end of the Algerian “war of independence.”—TR.].
17. The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 184.
18. [In Monolinguism of the Other Derrida parses the French word Métropole as “the Capital-City-Mother-Fatherland, the city of the mother tongue” (42).—TR.]
19. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 6-7.
20. [On June 5, 2004, Noël Mamère, major of the town of Bègles in the Gironde region of France, presided over the first same-sex marriage in France. He was temporarily relieved of his duties as mayor for performing this illegal ceremony and the marriage was subsequently annulled by the courts.—TR.]
21. [The word pacs is an acronym (“Pacte Civil de Solidarité”) for the provision adopted by French law in 1999 allowing both heterosexual and same-sex couples to enter into a civil contract or, translated literally, a “Civil Pact of Solidarity.”—TR.]
22. In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), 1-24.
23. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” an interview with Giovanna Borradori, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in_Philosophy in a Time of Terror, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85-136, 186-193. The original French version of this interview appears in Le “concept” du 11 septembre (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2004).
24. Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 50-54.
25. [Robert Faurisson, a well-known Holocaust revisionist in France, was a professor for many years at the Université Lyon 2.—TR.]
26. Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2003) [this is the augmented French version of The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)]; “Rams” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, 135-163.
27. The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 12.
28. [“Pas” was first published in 1976 in Gramma 3/4, Lire Blanchot 1, and then republished in Parages (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1986).
29. “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 316.