– And life ‘must be thought of as trace before Being may be determined as presence. This is the only condition on which we can say that life is death, that repetition and the beyond of the pleasure principle are native and congenital to that which they transgress’ (ED, 302/WD, 203). For ‘life is not first and foremost a full presence which, secondarily, would reserve itself: it “is” always already, death, trace’ – where ‘a configuration of traces … can no longer be represented except by the structure and functioning of writing’ (ED, 297/WD, 200).

Perhaps incredibly, life has an essential link with writing; a thought of writing and the trace is ‘the only condition on which’ life death can be thought out – it is the sine qua non of life as death, making an urgent demand for itself, in these early books at least – L'écriture et la différence and De la grammatologie – to be brought under analysis. One is lead before a scene of agonistic conflict between life and writing, Being and the graphematic, as if it were a further Act added, after the event, to what in the Introduction to Being and time is called the ‘γιγαντομαχια π∈ρι τ∈σ ονσιασ’, the colossal battle over what is. Derrida is emphatic: ‘one must … go by way of the question of being as it is directed by Heidegger and by him alone’ (DIG, 37/OG, 23).

In bringing writing into the domain of the question of being, of life, of presence, Derrida is unleashing a series of transformations, concatenation without pattern, that will leave literally nothing intact.