Jan Kott once called Dead Class a form of Kaddish, the Jewish mourner's prayer. Jewish law requires that the Kaddish be recited by selected mourners for the first 11 months after the death of a loved one, and then on each anniversary of the death. The Kaddish is a mourning prayer recited in Aramaic that praises the greatness of God, asking him for peace for all. It never refers directly to that which it is about: death. In Hebrew and other Semitic languages, the name of God is written without vowels, as it was strictly forbidden to pronounce it. In mystical theology, the supreme experience of being, that is, the perfect name of God, is the experience of meaning of the gramma itself, “word that is written but not read” (Quere wela ketib). As Agamben explains it, “as the unnamable name of God, the gramma is the final and negative dimension of meaning, no longer an experience of language but language itself, that is, its taking place in the removal of voice.” According to Derrida, the sign stands in for the thing it signifies; by being there, the sign signifies the absence of the thing it designates. The sign thus is a pure negativity. It establishes its meaning on the basis of difference from other signs, other negativities. Thus, language is a play of negativities that negate themselves in relation to themselves, and which negate the very things they signify.