Lastly, there was a theory of derivation in Classical reﬂection on language: this showed how language, from the beginning of its history and perhaps in the instant of its origin, at the very point when it began to speak, shifted inside its own space, pivoted around on itself away from its primary representation, and deposited its words, even the very oldest of them, only when they had already been deployed in the figures of rhetoric; corresponding to that analysis, we now find the effort to conceive of an ever elusive origin, to advance towards that place where man's being is always maintained, in relation to man himself, in a remoteness and a distance that constitute him.