EXCERPT Many of my sentences are silently détourned quotes from elsewhere, including this one. Some in spite of myself and discovered after the fact, most deliberate. Apart from one exception, which was not an inventive détournement but a theft, albeit an involuntary one, I have not indicated their origin. My text is punctuated by a great many citations. There are several potential explanations for this, principal among them, I think, the one given by Jean Starobinski to Robert Burton: ‘The author, when he wants to speak in a more striking way, speaks in the voice of others. He […] speaks himself through the text of the masters, which he détourns to his own uses. […] The extent of the recourse to citation, in an author who declares himself melancholy, invites us once more to ask ourselves about the relation between melancholy and the perpetual insertion of a borrowed discourse within one’s own discourse. If on one hand there is here an attestation of knowledge, there is also, on the other hand, an admission of ‘insufficiency’ […] [of] melancholy consciousness: it needs supports, external contributions […]. It fills itself with foreign substance in order to fill its own void…