Jade
One friend must always go before the other; one friend must always die first. There is no friendship without the possibility that one friend will die before the other, perhaps right before the other's eyes. For even when friends die together, or rather, at the same time, their friendship will have been structured from the very beginning by the possibility that one of the two would see the other die, and so, surviving, would be left to bury, to commemorate, and to mourn.
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We prepare for the death of a friend; we anticipate it; we see ourselves already as survivors, or as having already been survived. To have a friend, to call him or her by name and to be called by him or her, is already to know that one of the two of you will go first, that one will be left to speak the name of the other in the other's absence... As Derrida has shown in numerous texts, the name is always related to death, to the structural possibility that the one who gives, receives, or bears the name will be absent from it... Mourning thus begins already with the name.
---Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Introduction to Jacques Derrida's The Work of Mourning
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We prepare for the death of a friend; we anticipate it; we see ourselves already as survivors, or as having already been survived. To have a friend, to call him or her by name and to be called by him or her, is already to know that one of the two of you will go first, that one will be left to speak the name of the other in the other's absence... As Derrida has shown in numerous texts, the name is always related to death, to the structural possibility that the one who gives, receives, or bears the name will be absent from it... Mourning thus begins already with the name.
---Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Introduction to Jacques Derrida's The Work of Mourning