It is very hard to select what to say here, in a few minutes, that could be worthy of this occasion, in this place, which means above all worthy of the one we remember today with such sadness in our souls—with, as one says in French, la mort dans l'âme. My memory of Jacques Derrida is so vast and so deep that I can hardly recall the flavor of my life before I first met him, in January 1974, in Paris.

I was then a graduate student starting a dissertation on Rousseau, which had been set in motion, a few years earlier, when I read De la grammatologie. That January in 1974, I began to attend Jacques's seminar at the École Normale-on Kant's Third Critique-as well as a special seminar for students from Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and SUNY Buffalo on Nietzsche's Zarathustra. I felt especially lost in the latter context, disoriented and uncertain at every moment. It remains, therefore, a great mystery to me how it happened that, one day in the Zarathustra seminar-it must have been in March or so-after Jacques proposed the theme of “la morsure” as a good subject for an oral presentation, I responded, before twenty or more witnesses, that I would do it the following week. La morsure, in other words: the bite. Jacques floated this suggestion for anyone to bite at.