say a word.”), means both of them, him and her, in the most ordinary and obvious sense (when “tous les deux” means the one and the other, both together, in chorus, equally, indissociably, of common accord, all two of them as one, in this inseparable) or “all the twos,” “reparation” and “separation,” the one and the other, the reparation which doesn’t separate itself from the separation, that is from the irreparable separation, the irreparable separation of the pair disparate in its very appearance. In this second hearing, what makes tous les deux inseparable includes also the separation which unites them, the experience of distancing or inaccessibility which conjoins them still.

But it’s only he who speaks. He speaks for a long time. All the time. She, she does not say a word. Between them, speech does not give the word [les paroles ne donnent pas le mot]. ⁴

Not to give the word, for speech, is strange. This complicates the questions of what it means to give the floor [donner la parole], to give one’s word [donner sa parole], which gives still something else, to give a thing and to give the word, to give in general, to give the given. So it happens now that wordless speech comes to us, in any case speech which, if it has the word, and maybe the closing word or the password, does not give it. Is speech which does not give the word the same thing as speech which does not give the floor? Not to give the floor to the other, to interdict the other or to deprive the other of the right to respond, and certain people who are also orators or rhetoricians know how, it is always in speaking that this operation takes place. But maybe we need to distinguish here between, on the one hand, “donner le mot” which can mean to unveil the password or the closing word, to turn over the secret or the key of a reading, for example of sexual difference and, on the other hand, something else entirely, “se donner le mot” [to give oneself or one another the word] (that is, just what we haven’t done, Hélène and I, today: se donner le mot is to agree together as accomplices to stage an operation, to plot, to sketch the “plot” of an intrigue; unless absolute conspirators, those who haven’t had to decide on their conspiracy with a contract, don’t even need to give the word to find themselves at the appointment, with or without contretemps, my other hypothesis being that there are no appointments without the space of the contretemps, without the spacing of the contretemps, and there is no contretemps without sexual difference, as if sexual difference were contretemps itself, a Story of Contretemps.)

(…)

I’ll resume my reading of FirstDays of the Year repeating a bit for memory:

-viii-