"never learned to live"

To learn to live, Derrida explained, is to learn to die, and he could never resign himself to death. His greatest fear, he said, was that 'a month after my death there will be nothing left. Nothing except what has been copyrighted and deposited in libraries.'

These were his beloved traces, which he hoped would outlive him. He died in October 2004, his last request, in defiance of Jewish tradition, that he not be buried too quickly. He wanted to give resurrection a chance.