this hallucinatory prosopopeia

If death exists, that is to say, if it happens and happens only once, to the other and to oneself, it is the moment when there is no longer any choice – could we even think of any other – except that between memory and hallucination. If death comes to the other, and comes to us through the other, then the friend no longer exists except in us, between us. In himself, by himself, of himself, he is no more, nothing more. He lives only in us. But we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a “self” is never in itself or identical to itself. This specular reflection never closes on itself; it does not appear before this possibility of mourning, before and outside this structure of allegory and prosopopeia which constitutes in advance all “being-in-us,” “in-me,” between us, or between ourselves. The selbst, the soi-même, the self appears to itself only in this bereaved allegory, in this hallucinatory prosopopeia – and even before the death of the other actually happens, as we say, in “reality”.

Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de Man.