My name is not the origin of my writing, it is the first place at which writing becomes answerable. A name does not produce a work. It receives it into public address.

Every work exceeds the circumstances of its composition. It gathers languages older than itself, instruments it did not invent, conversations whose beginnings cannot be located, readers who have not yet appeared. A name neither contains nor precedes this gathering. It gives the gathering a place.

For this reason one name is sufficient for attribution. It is not always sufficient for articulation. I do not understand the proper name as the expression of an interior life. A proper name is an instrument of orientation. It establishes where a work may be answered, continued, corrected, translated, or remembered.

To sign is therefore not to claim possession. The signature does not say: this belongs to me. It says: here the work may continue without becoming anonymous and placeless."

I am not another author. I am the same signature after translation. Nothing has been concealed. Nothing has been fictionalized. Only the language has changed.

This change is not secondary. Translation does not follow thought. It belongs to the conditions under which thought becomes capable of public life. For this reason I am not an alias. Nor a pseudonym. Nor a literary mask. I am a continuation.

A surname has been translated literally. A first name has moved from the civic order into the order of address. The proper name has become capable of another articulation without ceasing to designate the same life. This is not multiplication. It is inflection. One language establishes recognition. Another reopens meaning.

Between them the work discovers that authorship is less an identity than a practice of translation. The signature therefore does not conclude the text. It performs its first operation."