This chapter considers Marian Hobson's Opening Lines, her remarkable and singularly thoughtful book on the writings of Derrida, and looks for motifs that return in the first sentences of written works which are very dissimilar as regards their principal subjects, their occasions, and their formal or rhetorical strategies. All of this (everything essential, therefore) will be left out of account, as if these sentences came to us already detached, isolated from whatever might accompany them.

This chapter considers Marian Hobson's Opening Lines, her remarkable and singularly thoughtful book on the writings of Derrida, and looks for motifs that return in the first sentences of written works which are very dissimilar as regards their principal subjects, their occasions, and their formal or rhetorical strategies. All of this (everything essential, therefore) will be left out of account, as if these sentences came to us already detached, isolated from whatever might accompany them.