I would venture to say that the French idiom has had no more consistently or ardently inventive practitioners over the last forty years than Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. As my subject, however, is not just the work of the one, the other, or both, but rather the one reading and writing on or about the other, one may begin to imagine how the appeal to the idiom has not merely to be doubled but raised exponentially. The original occasion for these remarks was a gathering of seasoned commentators of Derrida and Cixous who took as their theme precisely this exponentially expanding concentration of the marks of reciprocal reading between the two writers. Although both Cixous and Derrida had signaled in various ways their attention to each other's writing since the early 1960s, it was several decades before they began lifting the seals on these reading relations in published texts. In 1993, Cixous's essay “Quelle heure est-il?” appeared in a collective volume on Derrida; the following year Derrida's essay “Fourmis” staged a dialogue with Cixous on sexual difference; and then in 1995 the joint work titled Voiles paired a brief text by Cixous, “Savoir,” with a much longer essay by Derrida that wove a reading of “Savoir” into a complex fabric of autobiographical motifs. The next two stages were going to raise the stakes considerably, exponentially: in 2000 appeared H.C. for Life, That Is to Say …, the magisterial, day-long keynote lecture that Derrida presented at the Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium on Cixous's work (H.C.).