What kind of greeting does Derrida give to his friend Jean-Luc Nancy in Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy? What kind of address, salutation, salute and welcome? There is of course the slightly lurid dream Derrida reports of kissing Nancy on the mouth (Le Toucher, p. 339). We could also easily imagine something involving hugging, cheek-kissing and possibly some back-slapping, a classic French accolade fraternelle, although the blurb for this conference invites us – I'm afraid I might not manage this – to think ‘beyond the intimacy of the fraternal relation between Derrida and Nancy’. There is also a strange passage in Le toucher that, perhaps inadvertently, Derrida repeats in extenso and almost unchanged (pp. 125 and 160) in which he reflects dialogically on the strangeness of his own gesture, of his own ‘drôle de salut’, the first time because it looks as though he is trying to render the whole vocabulary of touch useless or forbidden, the second, slightly modified and expanded version, because it looks as though he is trying to reappropriate that vocabulary for the tradition or for a filiation, or to cordon it off in that tradition as though it were a principle of contamination or even a virus. So, for now at least, rather than jumping straight into the complexities of that configuration, trying as usual to keep things simple, as simple as possible, let's just start by imagining them doing that very French thing: exchanging (if ‘exchange’ is the appropriate verb here, which I doubt) – exchanging or giving each other [se donnant] a handshake.