One way of talking about ‘Derrida's event’ is to try to understand the event of Derrida, the perhaps philosophical or perhaps more broadly ‘cultural’ event that he was. It seems to be no accident that we might be inclined to do this upon the fact or event of Derrida's death, on the basis of his now (and henceforth) ‘being’ dead, to understand the philosophical or cultural event that he was, in the past, or perhaps more properly that he will have been, in a projected future past, a future perfect that is also a perfect future in which things will finally have been what they always were to be. That's certainly one kind of approach one might be inclined to make, and it seems to be invited by the event of Derrida's death: now that Derrida is dead, the thought would go, the time has come to have an at least preliminary stab at putting him in his place, assigning him his rightful position and importance in the philosophicocultural history of, say, Modern French Thought, or maybe Modern European Thought, or even just Modern Thought, or Western Thought, or (why not?) just Thought.

This kind of assessment, which seems to be essentially related to the fact (if not quite the event) of Derrida's death, appears to be fundamentally necrological, and wants, post-mortem, to get things straight, ordered and hierarchised, to deal with the estate and the legacy. It’s no accident that its most appropriate tense should be the future perfect, the tense of what will have been, what will have turned out to be in some projection or fantasy of a Last Judgement, and one of the favourite adverbs of this type of assessment is indeed ‘ultimately’.