Extract

derrida, jacques. Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-Franc¸ois Bonhomme. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Fordham University Press, 2010, 73 pp., 34 b&w illus., $17.00 paper.

On a Wednesday, the third of July 1996, Jacques Derrida was returning to Athens after a visit to the nearby Artemis sanctuary in Brauron. Sometime around noon the following oracular thought suddenly struck him: “nous nous dévons à la mort” (“we owe ourselves to death”). Derrida was already carrying a set of photographs of Athens, taken over a period of fifteen years by Jean‐François Bonhomme, on which he had promised to “write something for the publication of these photographs” (p. 1). The conjunction of sun, noon, Bonhomme's photographs of Athens, and this sentence that had just come out of nowhere all provoked the occasion for an essay originally published in 1996 and reissued in 2009, from which this careful English translation of 2010 is derived.

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