Death Shall Be Dethroned is the shadow book of Los, a Chapter, Helene Cixous tells us. It came along after Los, but it was always there hidden in her notebooks, in the Beethoven notebook, say, the one Jacques Derrida gave her. But when it tapped at the window, she ignored it until the day she had to let it in. This is just of one the enigmas Death explores as it probes an old relationship between the narrator and Carlos. Another is her discovery on the Internet that Carlos’s archives were at Princeton, and that the archive containing their correspondence was closed to the public: Bluebeard’s closet. The fruit on the tree of Good and Evil. You shall not open.

Death Shall Be Dethroned is the logbook of Los, a Chapter. It owes its life to the death of a lover.