possible present — "heute nicht möglich"¹ — "impossible today"² — as though philosophy itself were dispossessed of its present just as the present may not allow for a philosophy, (heute and Heute, signifying, in Bachmann's German, both today and the present). Today's tautology is that it is foregone — "It merely signifies a day like all the rest"; undifferentiable, it is not situatable in time. Such a temporal coordinate (today) signals futility; it announces its mortific inevitability in the present in which it cannot subsist. To command it is to admit defeat by it. Because "today is a word which only suicides ought to be allowed to use; it has no meaning for other people. It merely signifies a day like all the rest,"³ philosophy's imperative is Sisyphean. There is a concordance between Selbstmörder (suicides) and alle anderen (other people) in which the murderous intent of language is made apparent; this intent is the vector of its inexorability. The inverse of death-giving in Derrida's French (with intimations, in translation, of Celan's death-bringing speech) is English's idiomatic life-taking. Between the two, mouth and body are indivisibly split. The tremor of