The translation is impossible without commentary, which will be placed in brackets: “By means of the dates of these texts, we would like to indicate [marquer: to mark] that in order to bind them together [relier: to put between covers the pages forming a work, originally by sewing], in rereading them [relire: relier and relire are anagrams], we cannot maintain an equal distance from each of them. What remains here the displacement of a question certainly forms a system. With some interpretive sewing [couture] we could have sketched this system after- ward [après-coup; in German nachträglich. Cf. “Freud and the Scene of Writing” for the analysis of this notion.] We have only permitted isolated points [le pointillé: originally a means of engraving by points] of the system to appear, deploying or abandoning in it those blank spaces [blancs: Derrida’s analysis of Mallarmé, which was to be written in 1969, focuses on the role of the blanc in the text; see also the epigraph to this volume which refers to Mallarmé’s notion of espacement: “the whole without novelty except a spacing of reading.”