Today, after what some had been whispering was an inordinately long time without a new book, Jean-Francois Lyotard has left us with three late works of consequence, in quick succession. A posthumous essay on Saint Augustine is forthcoming. Chambre sourde, an exquisite and spare disquisition on aesthetics in the wake of Andre Malraux, appeared earlier this year in France. And both of these are bright bursts out of the crucible that is Signe Malraux (Grasset, 1996). Defined by inextricable ties that mingle voice, confession, and story, vectors of speculation pointing toward the style of Lyotard's two final books are immediately recognizable in the chapter from Signed, Malraux (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press) that the editors of October magazine are prepublishing here. It was Lyotard's express wish that, in its translated avatars, Signs Malraux remain as it is in the original Grasset edition: unfettered, that is, by any matter that might be construed as explanatory in any way. "I think that the book doesn't need any preface-or else one by Hemingway," he wrote me from Paris on March 1, 1997, "and especially not for explaining-excusing ourselves to academics for a 'philosopher' who took interest in a writer. As for an afterword, you'd have to tell me more." A little further in that letter he added, "Eleven months to translate this: the agreed deadline terrifies me." Then, postscriptum and, to my mind, irrevocably: "On further thought my desire is that the book be produced as is, without crutches." In a response I sent on March 11 from Stony Brook, I wrote, "Of course, any afterword would have required your approval. I was really only thinking about la Redite: its capital role in the book and the difficulty in translating it precisely. So in writing these remarks to accompany "Coups de femme"-this foretaste of Signed, Malraux that I have the opportunity of placing outside the book to come-I am only partially in accord with Lyotard's expressed wishes. In allowing me to air a few thoughts associated with translating a book of which Lyotard was as proudly protective as he was with Discours, figure and Le Diffirend, this venue is distant enough from that book so as to leave it without "crutches." It nevertheless comments. It comments not so much on the book as it does around it. I must and