Jeffrey Bennington writes at the top of the page "Derridabase", a peculiar software or database. There he presents in detail and systematically explains basic issues that Derrida dealt with: from point, writing, differance, context and signature to literature, the unconscious, femininity, sexual difference, donation, otherness, law, the relationship between transcendental-empirical and politics. Thus, a dense and transparent essay emerges, clarifying many difficult points of the French philosopher's thought, while simultaneously commenting on Derrida's complex relationship with major thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas.

Jacques Derrida responds at the bottom of the page with his most unexpected, perhaps, text, "Circumcision" - a work on circumcision and confession. He composes 59 period-phrases as he turns 59 and seeks to destabilize "Derridabase" by articulating completely unpredictable sentences. He writes them during his travels from California to Moscow, combining thoughts about his Jewishness and about his impending death and his mother's dementia. The text resembles a discourse of analysis or internal monologue - autobiographical, philosophical, and literary at the same time - and incorporates excerpts from his personal diary, from Augustine's Confessions, and from his experience in his homeland Algeria.

Among the many images in the volume, the one on the cover stands out: Bennington and Derrida are photographed in the same paradoxical pose in which a postcard, reproducing a medieval manuscript, depicted Plato and Socrates. And the questions remain open as to who speaks and who writes, who dictates what and to whom.