In the original feelings—”Felt,” as we say, only if they were suitable for a stone. Here now is the sentence I come back to: They kill the original, by discovering that the original was already dead.

      We are so used to violent imagery and “negativity” that it’s easy to pass by on the other side (the meaning side) of these words even after, or all the more after, they were seen and read by Neil Hertz as a remarkable instance of the lurid figures in de Man’s writing, and interpreted in terms of the “pathos of uncertain agency” that their oxymoron or equivocation—“kill,” “discover dead”—summons up. So I want to broach again the question of what it could mean to “find already dead” a text, a work, a figure.

      Instinctive knowledge that I’ll be saved by our time limits leaving me only a few more minutes alone enables me to take up this text. For I don’t want to think about its figures. I want only to spell out not a certain set of alternatives, but a sort of equivocal outcome that the figures may mean. “That two-handed engine at the door,” says “Lycidas.” Translation is such an engine, which, perhaps, “stands ready to smite once and smite no more,” but, so I’d translate, never once