Derrida is citing Mme de Maintenon. The King takes all her time. Perhaps the King requires her presence, all the time. But even when he doesn't, she is still on the King’s time. Everything comes from the King, everything she is, this morganatic wife who is nothing without him, nothing after him. He takes all her time because all that she is is given her, time and all, by him. One does not see Mme de Maintenon, one sees behind her, or through her, the King. Mme de Maintenon is nothing, the merest index of refraction. What is left is nothing. Yet there is Mme de Maintenon. Another name for this remainder: Mme de Maintenon.

I have no time, things are always so busy. I give the rest to other things, without its being mine to give. It’s 8.20 pm, Tuesday 20 March 2001, and in the next room I can hear that The Bill has just finished. My daughter has just got back from drama, and I have just read my son our regular bedtime story. My partner is checking her email. We will both be asleep in a couple of hours. I have no time because other things, other people, others claim it. There is always work to bring home; I have no time to write these notes in, the University takes all my time, the family takes all my time.

This is not a complaint, a way of saying, It's all too much, if only others wouldn’t make these demands of me and my time, then I could be myself, on my own time! The point is more that these things are me. Take them away, and I don’t become more truly me, I collapse. It's an unthinkable vertigo. These are some of the things that are most precious to me, which I defend (okay, the University could have a far better industrial relations record and attitude, but I put up with it because, like all my colleagues, there’s something in the work I deeply love.) The moments when you most feel yourself, galvanised, are the moments when all your time is taken, by what you love passionately. (And the moments when time is all yours are the insupportable moments when it hangs leaden on you, like the metallic taste of 4am after a night of insomnia.)

Last thing at night, in bed, I will probably read, as I so often do, something which as often as not has nothing at all to do with the work of the day, something gratuitous, and part of whose pleasure will be in that gratuity, that small squandering. This book, this moment of private, unprofitable pleasure, this gift I give myself, makes claims on my time, and in its very pleasure. It wouldn’t be a pleasure if it didn’t make that claim on me. It takes up my time. It takes my time. Other things, from beginning to end, take my time. The only time there is is time that is taken. All of it is taken. What isn’t taken is nothing. And once again, there is a remainder, even though that remainder is nothing at all. It doesn’t have a name so much as a sort of place-holder: "I".