Certain recurrent ideas emerge through the rich diversity of papers collected here under the title Usure et Rupture: the necessity of cultural memory in finding an idiom, the rupture of form to provide a new text which makes sense of the past from the viewpoint of the present, the ways in which the image of usury plays an ambiguous role-both fructifying and economizing the text. A translator's delight, rupture in English can be variously rendered by break up, breaking up, parting, severance, split, rupture, clash, antagonism, discrepancy, gap, disjunction, disruption, discontinuity, reversal, change, etc., which should alert us to the treacherously shifting epistemological grounds onto which we dared to tread. Usure, this gradual process of wearing out, can also become usury: i. e. "excessive interest".