Finally, the day he had been so desperately waiting for arrived: October 25, 1995, a Wednesday. At precisely five o’clock, he walked into the Ecole’s packed lecture hall, where thousands of students were talking noisily in all kinds of languages—as though the children of the builders of the Tower of Babel had gathered there. Then came a sudden hush—Hazrat Derrida was about to appear. Puffing on his pipe, carrying a heavy bag, he made his way toward the desk in the middle of the stage. Derrida Sahib was wearing a great many layers, and as he approached the desk he began removing them one by one, hanging them on the back of the chair. He peeled off a raincoat, a jacket, a cardigan, a vest, a jersey, until his muscular torso was clothed in only a light sweater. The act seemed pregnant with meaning—a gesture toward the task before him, the layers of meaning that must be stripped away in the course of the seminar. Then Derrida took his seat, drew his papers from his bag, and lay them down. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “I assure you that what will be said over these weeks will be nothing other than the sum of the words of fictional people brought to life for a moment, and that their words will not bring us face-to-face with the possible. It is the impossible, instead, that we must confront. We will try to bring about something else, something ‘other,’ through an indefinable course that will be the source of our discussion—its goal—but that will forever remain outside its bounds. We will touch the impossible.”