The word deuil, mourning, seems scarcely to appear in Derrida's early work. Unless I am mistaken, not once in the ‘Introduction’ to the Origine de la géométrie, not once in La voix et le phénomène. Not once in Marges – de la philosophie. In La dissémination, the word appears, I think, only in quotations of Lautréamont (p. 47, in a note), of Gorgias (pp. 131–2), and in a gloss on the etymology of the word ‘hymne’ (p. 242). In the 436 pages of the French edition of L'Écriture et la différence, the word ‘deuil’ appears, I believe, precisely twice (once in a quotation of Jabès), and in De la grammatologie only once. For a thinker who in a later interview more or less claims that he ‘runs on’ deuil the way a car runs on gas, and whose encounter with the 'singular event of psychoanalysis' seems significantly to involve this concept of mourning, this might seem like an almost unbelievably small amount of fuel (really only two instances of his using the word ‘in his own name’, as he might have said), an extraordinarily energy-efficient way to cover the several thousand pages that one might otherwise have thought (that I, for one, have tended to think) laid down the bases for much, if not all, of the Derrida to come.