“Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather,
the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain
so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or
the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or
death masks. The absent work, although it is unplaceable in any
precise chronology, thereby constitutes the written works as
prolegomena or paralipomena of a non-existent text; or, in a
more general sense, as parerga which find their true meaning
only in the context of an illegible ergon.”