The Work of Mourning (review)

[W]hat I thought impossible, indecent, and unjustifiable, what long ago and more or less secretly and resolutely I had promised myself never to do (out of a concern for rigor or fidelity, if you will, and because it is in this case too serious), was to write following the death, not after, not long after the death by returning to it, but just following the death, upon or on the occasion of the death, at the commemorative gatherings and tributes, in the writings “in memory” of those who while living would have been my friends, still present enough to me that some “declaration,” indeed some analysis or “study,” would seem at that moment completely unbearable.

(Derrida,The Work of Mourning, 49-50, original italics)