Richar Burt1
Read After Burning, I Pray You, or la carte posthume::
Derrida Destroyed . . . Derrida Archived . . . Derrida Published . . .
Derrida Perished [Ableben] . . . Derrida Died [Sterben] . . . Derrida
Survived [Uberleben] . . . Derrida Posted . . . “Jacques Said . . .”
This is literature without literature.
Postcard, 197
Hence, if my letters and the like could be
important at all, no collection of them should be
published since such a collection only serves the
curiosity and the comfort of those who want to
evade the ask of thinking.
--Martin Heidegger, “On Preserving What Is
Attempted”2
What would happen if the pack of the curious
once throws itself at the “posthumous works”! It
cannot be expected from this commotion grasp
anything at all or to transform what is grasped
into the futural. [G428] For the gang of the
curious only longs for that which completes this
1
gang’s own already established calculation and
confirms it in each case.
--Martin Heidegger, “On Preserving What Is
Attempted,” in Mindfulness (Besinnung). trans.
Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, Continuum,
2006, 270-78, to 277.
If deep down these “posthumous works” do not
possess the power of ‘letting-go-ahead’
[Vorlassen]—do not posses[sic] the power of
path-opening-grasping-ahead into an entirely
other and quite drawn-out questioning—these
“posthumous works” would not be worth being
pondered upon. The mere enlargement of what is
already published is superfluous.
--Martin Heidegger, “On Preserving What Is
Attempted,” in Mindfulness (Besinnung). trans.
Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, Continuum,
2006, 270-78, to 277.
One day, please, read me no more, and forget
that you have read me.
2
--Jacques Derrida, The Post Card1
We cannot develop this analysis here; it is to be
read elsewhere.
--Jacques Derrida, Post Card2
“And moreover, says J. J., a postcard is a
publication.”
James Joyce, Ulysses3
A hundred similar instances go to show that the
MS. so inconsiderately published, was merely a
rough note-book, meant only for the writer's
own eye, but an inspection of the pamphlet will
convince almost any thinking person of the truth
of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy
was about the last man in the world to commit
himself on scientific topics. . . . I verily believe
that his last moments would have been rendered
wretched, could he have suspected that his
Although it is not customary to give citations with page numbers in epigraphs in
academic publications, I will give them in footnotes. See Jacques Derrida, Post Card:
From Socrates to Freud and Beyond Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1980), 36.
2 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, 466.
3 James Joyce, Ulysses Ed. Hans Gabler (Random House, 1986), 264.
1
3
wishes in regard to burning this 'Diary' (full of
crude speculations) would have been
unattended to; as, it seems, they were. I say 'his
wishes,' for that he meant to include this notebook among the miscellaneous papers directed
'to be burnt,' I think there can be no manner of
doubt. Whether it escaped the flames by good
fortune or by bad, yet remains to be seen.
--Edgar Allan Poe, “Von Kempelen and His
Discovery” (1850) 4
What must we do to allow a text to live?
“Living On [Survivance],” Parages5
At about the same time as Descartes, Pascal
discovered the logic of the heart in contrast to
the logic of calculating reason. The interior and
the invisible of the heart’s space is not only more
inward than the interior of calculating
presentation, and therefore more invisible, but at
Edgar Allan Poe, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1850) , in Edgar Allan Poe ,
Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick Quinn (New York: Library of America,
1984), 466.
4
Jacques Derrida, “Living On [Survivance],” Parages trans. John Leavey , Tom Conley
and James Hulbert (Stanford , CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 178.
5
4
the same time it also reaches further than the
realms of objects that are merely produced. Only
in the invisible innermost of the heart does man
tend towards that which is to be loved:
ancestors, the dead, childhood, those who are
coming.
--Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets,” in Off the
Beaten Track6
Those who remain will not know how to read.
--Jacques Derrida, The Post Card7
Le spasme terrible d’éffouliment subi tout a
l’heure peut se reproduire au cours de la nuit et
avoir raison de moi. Alors, vous ne vous
étonnerez pas que je pense au monceau demiséculaire de mes notes, lequel ne vous deviendra
qu’un grand embarrass; attend que pas un
Feuillet n’en peut server. Moi-même, l’unique
pourrais seul en tirer ce qu’il y a. . . . je l’eusse fait
si le dernières années manquant me n’avaient
Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege] trans. Julian Young,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 200-241; to 229
7 The Post Card, 249.
6
5
trahi. Brûlez, par-conséquant: il n’y a pas
d’héritage littéraire, mes pauvres enfants. Ne
soumettez même pas à l’appréciation de
quelqu’un: ou refusez toute ingérence curieuse
ou amicable. Dites qu’on n’y distingeurait rien.
C’est vrai de reste , et, vous, mes pauvres
prostrées, les seul êtres au monde capabale a ce
point de respecter toute en vie d’artiste sincere,
croyes que ce devait être tres beau.
Ainisi, je ne laisse un papier inédit excepté
quelques bribes imprimées que vous trouverez
puis le Coup de Dés8 et Héroiodae terminé s’il
plait au sort.
-- Stéphane Mallarmé, “A Marie et Genvieve
Mallarmé [le 8 septembre, 1898]
Recommendation quant a mes Papiers
(Pour quand le liront mes chéries)” 9
The footnote (“8”)reads as follwos: “L’édition définitive du Coup de Dés, alors en
préparation chez Didot, ne parut qu’en 1914 chez Gallimard.” Stéphane Mallarmé,
Correspondance, complète : 1862 - 1871. suivi de Lettres sur la poésie : 1872 - 1898;
avec des lettres inédites. Éd. Bertrand Marchal. (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 642.
8
Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, complète : 1862 - 1871. suivi de Lettres sur la
poésie : 1872 - 1898; avec des lettres inédites. Éd. Bertrand Marchal. (Paris:
Gallimard, 1995), 642
9
6
Hölderlin is the forerunner of the poets in a
desolate time. That is why no poet can overtake
him. The forerunner, however, does not go away
into a future, rather he arrives from it in such a
way that in the advent [Ankunft] of his words
alone the future [Zukunft] presences. The more
purely the advent takes place, the more
essentially, the more essenced, it remains. . . .
That is why it would be erroneous to say that
Hölderlin’s time would arrive come only when
“everyone” understands his poetry. It will never
come in such a deformed way. . . . What has
merely passed away is already, in advance of its
passing away, without destiny. What has been in
an essential way, by contrast, is the destining. In
what we suppose is eternity, something merely
transitory [Vergängliches] has been concealed,
but away into the void of a now without
duration.”
--Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets,” in Off the
Beaten Track [Holzwege] 10
Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets,” in Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege] trans. Julian
Young, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002) 200-241; to 241.
10
7
What is at stake in analytic discourse is always
the following—you give a different reading to
the signifiers that are enunciated . . . than what
they signify . . . In your analytic discourse, you
assume that the subject of the unconscious
knows how to read, but you assume that it can
learn how to read. The only problem is that
what you teach it to read has absolutely nothing
to do with what you can write about it.
--Jacques Lacan, “The Function of the Written,”
On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and
Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Encore
XX 1972-1973), 37 Ed. Bruce Fink, Jacques-Alain
Miller.3
The strange nature of posthumous publications
is to be inexhaustible.
--Maurice Blanchot, "The Last Word," in
Friendship4
8
Courage! Courage, now! You need heart and
courage to think . . . the living dead.
--Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign
Vol. 211
No dead person has ever said their last word.
--Helene Cixous, Or, les lettres de mom pere12
[. . .] J’arrive donc le dernier, une fois encore,
avec ma letter, apres la fete.
--Jacques Derrida
The posthumous is becoming the very element
mixes in everywhere with the air we breathe . . .
--Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2,
op cit, 181 (258) and 179 (256).
This is what I dream . . . Before my death I would
give orders. If you aren’t there, my body is to be
pulled out of the lake and burned, my ashes are
to be sent to you, the urn well protected
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 2 trans. Geoffrey Bennington
(Chaicgo: University of Chicago Press, 147 (215).
12 Helene Cixous, Or, les lettres de mon pere, 25; cited by Derrida, H.C. for Life, 125, n.
113, p. 170.
11
9
(“fragile”) but not registered, in order to tempt
fate. This would be an envoi of / from me un
envoi de moi which no longer would come from
me (or an envoi come from me, who would have
ordered it, but no longer an envoi of / from me,
as you like). And then you would enjoy mixing
my ashes with what you eat (morning coffee,
brioche, tea at 5 o’clock, etc.). After a certain
dose, you would start to go numb, to fall in love
with yourself, I would watch you slowly advance
toward death , you would approach me within
you with a serenity that we have no idea of,
absolute reconciliation. And you would give
orders . . . While waiting for you I’m going to
sleep, you’re always there, my sweel love.
The Postcard, 19613
Before my death I would give orders. If you aren’t
there, my body is to be pulled out of the lake [lac]
and burned, my ashes are to be sent to you, the
urn well protected (‘fragile’) but not registered, in
13
The Postcard, 196
10
order to tempt fate. This would be an envois of /
from me [an envoi de moi] which no longer would
come from me (or an envoi sent by me, who would
have ordered it, but no longer an envoi of me as
you like). And then you would enjoy mixing my
cinders with what you eat (morning coffee,
bricohe, tea at 5 o’clock, etc.). After a certain dose
you would start to go numb, to fall in love with
yourself, I would watch you slowly advance
towards death, you would appraoch me within
you with a serenity that we have no idea of,
absolute reconciliation. And you would give
orders . . . While waiting for you I’m going to sleep,
you’re always there, my sweel love.”
Jacques Derrida, Cinders (Derrida’s ellipsis)14
Use of ellipses in first line of Passions PostScriptum [ . . .] as on the back cover of Papier
Machine
Jacques Derrida, Cinders, Trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln, NB: University of
Nebraska Press, 1991), 74-75; quoted from The Post Card, 196, from a letter dated
31 May, 1979 but quoteded without the date in the letter on The Post Card, 196.This
is the last citation in Cinders, which is a composite translation of both the 1982 and
1987 versions of Feu la cindre. (note 77, p. 77. This quotation frm the Postcard has
the sources of the citations in Cinders listed below it on p. 76.
14
11
Tom Mueller “CSI: Italian Renaissance,” Smithsonian magazine, July-August
2013,50-59 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/CSI-ItalianRenaissance-213878331.html#Italian-Renaissance-female-skeleton-1.jpg
Such work is not without its critics, who brand scholars such as Fornaciari as little
more than grave-robbers, rejecting their efforts as a pointless, even prurient,
disturbance of the dead’s eternal rest. Yet paleo-sleuthing has demonstrated its
value for the study of the past and future. As Fornaciari has solved some of history’s
oldest riddles and murder mysteries, his work also holds life-and-death relevance.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/CSI-ItalianRenaissance-213878331.html#ixzz2Ye6XzvOt
Jane Buikstra Charlotte Roberts, The Global History of Paleopathology: Pioneers and
Prospects Oxford University Press, 2012
“there is never a choice between what is to be read in an open book (as visible as the
nose in the middle of one’s ‘face’!) and the most hermetic script. It’s the same—
insupportable support. I didn’t dare say “like a post card,” the atmosphere was too
pious. On the way out, diverse presentations. “With you, one can no longer present
oneself,” a young American (I think) woman says to me. She gives me to understand
that she has read (before me, therefore, she was just coming from the U.S.) “Moi, la
psychanalyse” in which I let play, in English the so difficult-to-translate cvocabulary
of presentation, of presentations, of “introductions,” etc. [Me—Psychoanalysis,
trnaslated in Psyche Invention of the Other.
The Postcard, 197
Even the dead are not safe from the enemy if he wins “Sixth Thesis on the
Philosophy of History” (GS 1.2: 95/SW 4:391) (1988c, 255).
12
This can’t go on like this
Imperative will always be the question of principle, the question of principles, and
the question of the principle—of the principial, of the sovereign prince, and of
princedom. Freudian psychoanalysis—psychoanalysis as science, psychoanalysis
that never abandons its aim to be a science, although a science apart from others—
will have reckoned a lot with principles, as is well known.
Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches” Without Alibi, 257
Derrida Glas corpse Hegel mourning burial citizen
Dearrida, I miss you.
The Gelke psassae is in book two SPirt, of The henomenology of Spirit, pp. 269-778.
A.V. Miller trans.
Levinas discusses the same passage in “From the Science of Logic to the
Phenomenology,” in God, Death, and Time, 79-87; to 83.
Since the Gee text remains to be read, I re-form here its ellipse around two foci:
(the) burial place), the liaison between brother and sister. . . . in its essentiality,
singularity can only disappear, can posit itself as such only in death. If the family
thus has the singularity of its own proper object, it can only busy itself around death.
Death it is essential object. Its destination is the cult of the dead; the family must
consecrate itself to the reorganization of the burial (place). . . (2142) The pure
singularity, stripped but incapable of passing to universality, is the dead—more
precisely the name of the dead—is the corpse, the impotent shadow, the negation of
the living being-there inasmuch as that singularity has not yet given rise to the life of
the citizen. Already dead (as empiric existence), not yet living (as ideal universality).
If the family’s thing is pure singularity, one belongs to a family only in busying
oneself around the dead: the toilette of the dead, institution of death, wake,
monumentalization, archive, heritage, genealogy, classification of proper names,
engraving on tombs, burying, shrouding, burial place, funeral song, and so on. . . .
Entrusting with death, the guardian of a marrowless body, on the condition that the
woman erect his burial place after shrouding the rigid corpse (unction, bandages,
etc.), maintaining it thus in a living, monumental, interminable surrection. (143)
What is a corpse? What is it to make a gift of a corpse?
Pure singularity: neither the empiric individual that death destroys, decomposes,
analyzes, nor the rational universality of the citizen, of the living subject. (143)
“Haven’t finished vindicating myself to those two suicides (two drownings also, you
know what I’m talking about)” Post Card, 196
13
People Who Die
HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT, L’ASSASSIN HABITE AU 21 (1942)
14
15
Monsieur -le Prefet
Veuillez agréer, Monsieur le Prefet mes hommages posthume.
Monsieur Prefect
Yours faithfully, Monsieur Prefect, my posthumous respects.
16
Monsieur G is the prefect, or head, of the Paris police. Edgar Allan Poe “The
Purloined Letter”
17
18
Can Derrida Die?
Is Derrida Dead?
Final Words are ot planned by Derrida by the way Édouard Levé planned the
posthumus publication of Suicide trans Jan Steyn (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011)
Shoving Off
Derrida insists on the divisbility of the instant and on the divisbility of the letter.
“I didn’t know where to start reading, looking, opening.”
The Postcard, 209
8 July 1979
19
and even if I had wanted to, I would not yet have confided this secreet to you, it is
the place of the dead being for whom I write (I say the dead being, or more htan
liviving, it is not yet born despite its immerial advent. . . .”
The Postcard, 202
“insteaof reachign you, it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you.
And you love and you do not love, it makes ofyou what you wish, it takes you, it
leaves you, it gives you.
Back cover of The Postcard
Try to translate “nous nous verroons mourir” (‘we will see ourselves / each
othedie.”
The Postcard, 202
Vismann, Cornelia. “The Love of Ruins”
Perspectives on Science, Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2001,
pp. 196-209.
Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology, trans Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008)
Cornelia Vismann, “The Archive and the Beginning of Law” in Derrida and Legal
Philosophy Ed. Peter Goodrich. (Palgrave Macmillan, November 2008), 41-54.
Yesterday, during the symposium, a Candadian friend tells me that in montreal,
during a very well atteded lecture, Serge Doubrovksy had wanted to get a certain
effect from some news he beleieved he could bring to the knowledge of his
audience: I was supposed to be in analysis! . . . This friend whom I have no reason to
20
doubt, tells me in tthat context was more or less the following: do you know that J.D.
is in analysis as I myself (S.D.) have been, this is whay I have written what I have
written, let’s see what is going to happen with him!! I tell you. The big deal here,
what truly fascinates me in this story is not the stupefying assurance with which
they invent and drag out the sham, it’s above all that they do not resist the desire to
gain an advantageeous effect from it (revelation, denunciation, triumph, enclosing, I
don’t know, in any event something that suddenly gets bigger from the fact that the
other is “inanalysis”: what is true in any event is that this would really please S.D.).
Remark, I’m not so surprised. Once that upon the appearance of the Verbier and of
Fors Lacan let himself go at it right in his seminar (while running the risk of then
retracting the faux-pas under ellipsis in Ornicar—I’d really like to know what made
him feel contstrained to do so, but I have several hypotheses), the rumor in a way
became legitimate. Why does one wish to say that someone be inanalysis? Of whom
does one say iin this case: if it’s not true it it has to be invented? And by the same
token it becomes “true”: true that for Lacan and Doubrovsky, for example, it is
necessary that I be inanalysis. . . .To be continued, in any event, I’m sure that it won’t
remain there.
The Postcard, 8 July 1979, 202-03
I believe in effect htat it is better to erase all the pictures all the other cards, the
photos, the initials, the drawings, etc. The Oxford card is sufficient for everything. It
has the iconographic power that one can expect in order to read or to have read the
whole history, between us, this punctuated sequence of two years, from Oxford to
Oxford, via two centuries or two millenia . . .
21
The Postcard, 204
Sometimes I wish that everything remain illegible for them—and also for you. To
become absolutely unowable for them.
The Postcard, 205
The Postcard, or with readers that I come ot privielge transferntially, with Socrates,
my posthumous analyst 203
Like the “envois,” are what remains of a dated series of supposedly private texts that
are nowpublic—like a published coresopondence, or a series of intercepted post
cards. Alan Bass, “Translator’s Introduction: L before K,” The Postcard, xi
“K should come after L. Why? Why not L before K?
Alan Bass, “Translator’s Introduction: L before K,” The Postcard, xi
I remember only the celluloid baby doll that was aflame in two seconds . . . That I
burned the baby doll instead of taking it out on her—if I publish this people are
going to believe that I am nventing to suit my compositional needs. The Postcard,
253
Leaving Words
From Freud to Heidegger and Beyond . . . the Grave
Did=fferent prier d’inserer’s and publicationntoes inFnrech not cotorlled by Derrida,
necessarily, even though the same press published all htree books.
Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath, Trans. David Wills (,Stanford
University Press, 2004) Chapter 16 “Correspondences” with subtitles for
22
“Telegram”; “Stamp”; “Postcard”; “Telephone”; Fax”; and “Telepathy.” Chapter 12:
The Postal Principle.” Subtitles “In the Beginning Was the Post” and “Epochs of the
Postal”
Photo of Bodleian with a citation from the Postcard serving as the caption on p. 187
n chapter 17 “The Oxford Scene” and the page facing the table of contents has a grey
box under the with the word “CORRPESONDENCE “ all in capital letters, then this
stennce, without a period, aligned as follows:
Letters and Postcards (Extracts)
Jacques Derrida writes to Catherine Malabou
during his travels from May 1997 to May 1998,
as he waits for, then reads her essay
“The Parting of Ways”
xvii
There is a note to the reader following stating that the chapters have been placed in
random order and a reference to an appendix with a table of contents contiang a
“logical” order. “Note too the reader “xviii
Can one read The POSt Card without reading the pessay on Tepeahty” as a missing
chapter?
A Tale of Two Jacques
InteStates of Exeption
In the horror film After.Life (dir. Agnieszka Wójtowicz-Vosloo, 2009), Anna
Taylor (Christina Ricci) wakes up on an autoposy--just after we saw her apparently
23
die in a car accident after walking out on her fiancee of a restruant--on the table of a
mortician who doubles as a spiritual medium named Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson)
who can talk to the dead. Unable to move any part her body below her neck, she
defiantly exclaims “I’m not dead.” 15 But Deacon says otherwise. He knows she’s
dead and he’s got her death certificate to prove it. She was D.OA. In horror movies,
it would appear, corpses always arrive at their destination whether they know it or
not, sometimes even ahead of schedule.16
http://www.afterlifethefilm.com/site.html#/home
On the death certificate, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the
Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International trans Peggy Kamuf (New
York: Routledge, 1994): “In short, it is often a matter of pretending to certify death
there where the death certificate is still the performative of an act of war or the
impotent gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution” (48). See also Derrida’s
comment: “The response echoes, always, like a response that can be identified
neither as a living present nor as the pure and simply absence of someone dead,” in
Jacques Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s
Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 213.
15
16
24
25
Death, as Derrida knew, is always a matter of paperwork, the death certificate, a
paper that does not necessarily reassure. 17 In the rest of the film, she discovers she
is buried, then survives in the mortuary, and hten is was actually alive all along, but
then is buried alive, and hten seemingly found alive by her fiancee but it turns out he
too diedinacar accident and wakes up in the morgue with Eliot telling him he is
relaly dead..
(The movie continues, she is buried, but “survives” in the morgue and
is eventually discovered alive by her boyfriend.18
For a comic version, see the scene in The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939)
in which the coroner declares that the Wicked Witch of the East is dead: "As coroner
I must aver, I thoroughly examined her. And she's not only merely dead, she's really
most sincerely dead." On the death of the actor who played the coroner, see Bill
Blankenship, “Oz coroner most sincerely dead Raabe appointed a Shawnee County
coroner to ink Wicked Witch's 'official' Kansas death certificate
http://cjonline.com/life/2010-04-10/oz_coroner_most_sincerely_dead For a fine,
Derrida-friendly analysis of American and British nineteenth-century literature and
paperwork, see Kevin McLaughlin, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper
Age Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
17
“Dead” Hospital Patient Woke Up As Doctors
Prepared to Remove Organs
(http://gawker.com/dead-hospital-patientwokeup-as-doctors-prepared-to-724808296) n October 2009, the St.
18
26
Thre is sno signature on the certificate, nor is there a name of the dead. It is
“there”to be read, presuambly readable by her. All that matters to us and ot her is
the time and date of death.
While After.life is not worth a Derridean reading, I begin with it because it
provides an orientation to The Post Card through the lens of the posthumous, rerouting the carte postal through what I call the carte posthume a reading that
involves Derrida’s returns to The Post Card after Lacan was dead in resistnaces of
Pychoanlaysis and his turn, for the first time, to prayer and corse disposal (Derrida
doesn’t investiage lws protecting corpses). the post card in relation to the prayer
and to posthumous publication, not only because of its with its repeition
compulsion, fetishism—alive or dead played out in a horror suspense—am I am
not? Is she or not? But because it relates
Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse ruled a woman
dead and, with the permission of the woman's family, prepared to remove
her organs for donation. Then, as she was on the operating table,
surrounded by doctors and hospital staff, the woman opened her eyes. She was alive.
Colleen Burns had overdosed from a combination of Xanax, Benadryl, and
muscle relaxers several days before. . . . When Burns awoke in the operating rooms, doctors
realized she had been
in a deep coma, and had not suffered “cardiac death,” as they initially
determined. . . . Tragically, Burns committed suicide 16 months after the incident.
27
“Life without life” or survivance Instant of My Death and Demeure
Not taking Beast and Sovereign as Derrida’s last will and testament. It’s the way the
posthumous poses a limit or does not that is at stake in a way of organizing Derrida
to be read than it is in a sending that precedes all reshelvings. A priori. Definition of
a letter, dead letter, of a post card versus a letter (but not a visiting card in purloined
letter? Is there a diffference between the letter and the card? A love letter.
Learning by heart.
Jacques Derrida, « Le survivant, le sursis, le sursaut », dans La quinzaine littéraire, n°
882, 11-31 août 2004, pp. 15-16.
“For renvoi signifies putting off to later the repreive [sursis] that remits or defers
[sursoit] democracy until the next resurgence [sursault] or until the next turn
around . . . .” Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2005), 38.
In both senses of différance, then, democracy is differential; it is différance, renvoi,
and spacing. That is why, let me repeat, the theme of spacing, the theme of the
interval or the gap of the trace as gap [écart], of the becoming-space of time or the
28
becoming-time of space, plays such an important role as early as Of Gramatology
and “Différance.” Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2005), 38.
Jacques Derrida, “Différance” Trans Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp 3-27.
Derrida in “Fichus” (in Paper Machine in English) on the letter WB wrote about his
dream while in a concentration camp.
Letters reproduced as works of art, effectively, in Simon Hantai, Jacques Derrida,
and Jean-Luc Nancy, La correspondence des textes: Lecture d’un manuscript illisble
(Correspondances) Letter by Hegel in The Age of Hegel; letter in Demeure
Derrida on his nightmare about having to defend Bush and Saddam Hussein in Beast
and Sov 2,tenth session, pp. 260-61 when Derrida had the flu then the nightmare
becoming a dream, p. 273, then the dream of Kant becoming nightmare (274) in
“Conjectures on the Beginnings” about Noah’s Ark (Noah was 600 years old) and
Kant on people living to be 800.
“As always, I invite you to reread all of it, well beyond the passage that, for lack of
time, I must extract.” Beast and Sov 2 283
“the one being the archival transcription of an academic speech, a doctrinal teaching
of a philosophical or metaphysical type, the other a so-called fictional and literary
piece of writing, etc” (262)
29
“a sovereignty of the last instance” Beast and Sov 2, 278
The Last Instance of My Death
“It is a word and above all a writing gesture, a singular pragmatic use, signed by
Heidegger who, presenting himself as . . . Beast and Sov (2982)
Extends Freud’s resistance to death ( Compare “I’m not dead” in After.life. Versus
“We’re all going to die” in disaster movies) but because it deals with Derrida’s
concenrs with regard to the disposal of corpses and democracy , the posthumous,
and a strictly posthumous publication.
Derrida makes some rather astonsihing claims for this note. A prayer.
What Derrida calls Pascal’s “strictly” posthumously published note has arrived
at a future even if that future never arrives. Derrida almost says that the note would
arrive at its destination. It does, any case, have a destiny, not a destinerrance:
Let us now come back to <this> “Writing Found in Pascal’s Clothing After His
Death.” There can be little doubt that this little piece of paper was destined,
if not for someone, then at least to remain, to survive the moment of its
inscription, to remain legible in an exteriority of a trace, of a document, even
if it were readable only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of
repetitions to come. The note remains readable, even if only to Pascal. For
generations to come. But can it be read? Derrida places the first word of
Pascal’s note, “Fire [feu]” (212) in the middle of the page, as if it were the title
of the note that follows. And then Derrida says he is not sure he can read it:
“This word ‘fire,’ is, then, isolated, insularized in a single line, I’m not sure I
30
can interpret it; I’m even sure that I cannot interpret it in a decidable way,
between the fire of the glory that reduces to ashes and the fire that still
smolders under the ashes of some cremation (Ashengloire).”19 The note has
been “destined” to remain, and to remain legible, “even if it were readable
only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come.” That
generation is apparently infinite.20 Derrida writes:
This is indeed what has been called a memorial, to use the word of a witness,
Father Guerrier.
Does the destiny of the posthumously published depend on the burning, as it were,
of the support, on Pascal’s burning by heart his note already on fire and yet
extinguished?21
Derrida situates Pascal in a session on prayer focused on Heidegger, and in the
following session, continuing the question of prayer, recalls Freud on the uncanny in
Derrida alludes here to his earlier discussion of Blanchot’s quotation from Paul
Celan’s poem Strette, the first word of which, Derrida notes at the end of a sentence
linking cremation to Nazi concentration camps and to Blanchot, is “ASCHENGLORIE
[ASHGLORY]” (capital letters in the original): “as for cremation, and the ashes that
from now on, in modern and uneffaceable history of humanity, the crematoria of the
camps, let us forget nothing,” Beast and Sovereign 2, op cit, 179.
20 On Derrida’s account of a material archival support related to Pascal’s doublet,
namely, the wallet, see Richard Burt, "Life Supports,” op cit.
21 At the very end of “Why Poets?,” an essay from which I take an epigraph on Pascal
and the heart, Heidegger consigns or co-signs the future to remains that has no. I
cite the line again:
What has merely passed away is already, in advance of its passing away,
without destiny. What has been in an essential way, by contrast, is he
destining. In what we suppose is eternity, something merely transitory
[Vergängliches] has been concealed, but away into the void of a now without
duration.
See Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege] trans. Julian Young, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 2002) 200-241; to 240-41.
19
31
relation to Hediegger’s Being and Time and Lacan’s reading of Robinson Crusoe in Le
seminar V: Les formations de l’inconscient (1957-58), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris:
le Seuil, 1998), pp. 342-43. P. 23637 ((330-31; 246-51 ending with “there is, it
seems to meme, a profound congruence between Lacan and Heidegger.” 251. (ninth
session)
Faut pouvoir (power, to be able to) Derrida says he shall not give examples after
“faced with an exploit that one admires or condemns, one exclaims in stupefaction:
“Ah! They dared to write that, faut pouvoir, eh . . . Ah! That idiot dared write and
publish that shameful thing at a given moment, this or hta weekly dared to go in for
that abjection, faut pouvoir, faut pouvoir, implying faut pouvoir le faire, it takes ome
doing to be abject, it’s quite something [faut le faire].
Freud and Heidegger on uncanny, pp 242-43
It is not the difference between different Xs” 252
“traces remain, hen, that he would have wished to be both effaceable and
ineffaceable. Could he [MH] that in the posterity of the probable improbable archive,
the day would come when a French animal [i.e. Derrida], in turn conducting a
seminar on the seminar and every Wednesday sniffing out the footprints or the
track of an impossible Friday, would come to worry away at these “pas d’avue (non
avowals, steps of avowals],” on these traceless traces . . . yesterday, now, and
tomorrow? 240-41 (335-36)
Heidegger is speaking of prayer and of God, but he is neither praying to nor
addressing a God who would not be the God of the philosophers and onto-theology.
Robinson Crusoe . . . is writing a book which . . . is a sort of prayer . . . The book itself
32
does not pray, but Robinson nevertheless quotes, and several times, which
Heidegger never does, insistently quotes prayers, and prayers that are essentially
linked to the Christian revelation: (208-09; 293-950)
I shall start out again from prayer as a crossing point between Heidegger’s seminar
or problematic and Robinson Crusoe. I shall not go back over wheat we said about
the new apprenticeship of prayer by Robinson . . . the training in view of a prayer
the vocation of which—if I can put it this way—is Christian. There is, in the course
of Heidegger’s seminar, a moment where an allusion to prayer—to this odd type of
statement that prayer is, but then evoked in Greek in a context marked rather by
Aristotle and from which Christianity appears to be absent . . .”206-07 (290-91)
Begins the Eight session, dated March 5, 2003
What is it to pray, How to pray? How not to pray? More precisely, if prayer consists
in doing something, in a gesture of the body or a movement of the soul, what is one
doing when one prays? Is one doing something? . . . I am not choosing to begin with
this question because we have spoken so much these last weeks of death, of
consigning to earth or fire, of cremators and inhumers, and because it is difficult
even when a church does not take charge of the thing, is that so-called atheistic
milieu, it is a difficlt and rare thing not to give voice, during ritual ceremonies,
during ones thoughts or one’s experience, to a movement that resembles prayer.
And so to some hymn or oration. No, without for the moment linking prayer to
death, to the the theme of death and the posthumus, to death and dying, to such and
such a death, to the eve and the day after such and such a death (and in the French
33
the day after a death is its veille, its wake), no, I shall give this question, “what is it to
pray?” a more general and apparently neutral scope [portee]. Pp. 202-03 (285-286)
[Tranlators note:] je vous en prie, which can mean “I pray you (for it),” is more often
the standand polite response to thanks, as in “you’re welcome” or “don’t mention it.”
Note 4, 203 (286)
But can one say sincerely to someone: “forget me?” can one say “forget me” other
htan to mean: do not forget to forget me, remember me, at least enough to forget
me. Or to get off my back! . . . So, remember this question about prayer that I
abandon here, that I am abandoning to you here—to keep it in your memory. 205
(289)
What is one doing whenone says to someone “Ipray you,”Je vous enprie, “I pray you
to”? Can one pray wihtout praying to soeone, i.e. without “addressing” one’s prayer
ot the singularity of a “who”? Cane one [ray without praying to . . . ? Can one pray
without asing or expecting something in retreturn? Is there a link between the
quotiddian and trivial “je vous en prie” and the orison or chant of religious and
sacred prayer that rises and lifts itself above the quotidian, even if it lifts itself every
day, at fixed times, or some solmenly once a year [is there a link and analogy]
between the anemic and mechanical “je vous en prie” and, on the other hand, prayer
in the strong sense, with or wihtout active faith, which grips one, and brings with it a
sort of ecstasy beyond automatic triviality? 203 (287)
The back cover copy of the Post Card is a signed prier d’inserer. 22
Not just this paratext insolation, but as a prier d’sinder, as one different form
others, as a prayer, as precarious, or preycarious or praycarious. Can you pray
without preying upon? Does prayer reinscribe enemy and frned?
22
34
The 1999 Galilée edition of Donner la mort was accompanied by the following text in
the form of a flysheet (Prière d'insérer)” in which Derrida begins by explaining that
despite appearances, Donner la mort is not a sequel to Given Time: 1. Counterfeit
Money.” viii-ix; to viii.
A four page insert accompainies the book—“please (I pray you) insert”: prière
d'insérer (is that a command? a law? an invitation? a prayer?) links Sauf le nom with
Passions and Khôra as a triptych on “the question of the name: (Sauf, Prière d'insérer
1/ON, xiv), thre texts that were subsequently gathered together in one volume only
in the English translation On the Name (ON). John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears
of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion, Indiana University Press, 1997, 42
Jacques Derrida Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices Derrida and Negative
Theology Trans. John P. Leavey,
Ed Harold G. Coward, Foshay, Toby Avard (SUNY Press, 1992) 283Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation trans. Jane E. Lewin
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Chapter five, “The please-insert”, 104-116 The please-insert [le prière d'insérer] is
definitely, at least in France, one of the most typical elements of the modern
paratext. It is also one of the most difficult to consider in historical detail for in
some stages of its evolution it takes a particularly fragile form; thus, to my
knowledge, no public collection has been able to accumulate these PIS for purposes
of research. 105
“Another uncertainty has to do with the meaning of the verb inset: it is
sometimes—wrongly—related to the fact of inserting a losse sheet ointo a volume;
actually , it has to do with inserting the text of the plese-insert into the bewspapers .
. . Note 1, 104.
In the first stage of what Genette says are four stages n the history,, the PIs were
written to editors, critics, and published and resembled “today’s ‘just published’
notices” (108)
In the second stage, “these inserts are no longer reserved for the presses’ copies but
are made available to all buyers. That, it seems to me, is a phenomenon of
remanance(rem·a·nence (r m -n ns)
n.
The magnetic induction that remains in a material after removal of the magnetizing
field.
[From Middle English remanent, remaining, from Latin reman ns, remanent-,
present participle of reman re, to remain;), a lagging of form behind function3 . .
These inserts were printed in limited numbers; they were no longer meant for
35
publication (a fundamental difference); and their addresses, after using them
however they saw fit, really had no reasons for holding on to them—hence our
difficulty in finding them. Here, as in other areas, private collectors could help
scholarship, for surely collections of these inserts exist.
Note 3 but the precariousness of the insert, like the precariousness of the band, may
have its function, even with respect to the reader: Robbe-Grillet emphasizes that
the PI of Projet pour une revolution was printed “on a apiece of paper to be thrown
out,” and gets half annoyed at the fact that some people thought they had to stick it
into the book. 108
But economics inevitably brought this ractice to an end: it is unnecessarily
expensive to insert by hand texts that could,. ,ore hcepaly and effectively, be
imprinted someplace else, most often on the back cover.This seems to be the current
stage, the one msot common in France, and , it seems to me, thorughout the
world.109
This transfer form the extratextual epitext (a press release for the papers) to the
precarious peritext (an insert for critics, then for anyone and everyone) and finally
to the durable peritext (the cover) is defintitely, in and of itself, a promotion that
entails, or mainfest, some otherpromoitions.
If the person who reads the PI makes do withhtat information, apparently deterred
from going beyond it, theaddressee remains “the public”; if reading the PI induces
the erson to buy the book or get hold of it in some otherwya, the addressee becomes
a a potentialreader; andoncehe becomes anacutal rader, hewill finally put the PI to a
more sustained use, one more relevant to his understanding of the text—a use the
writer of the PI may aniticpate and prepare for. The sender, too, may well have
changed. 110
Duirnganinital period(when the target was “the papers”), the putative sender of the
PI ws the publisher; during a second period (target: the public), the purtative sender
was the s the paper itself. The PI’s promotion to the perritext gradually modified
these particualrs, and some inserted PIs were already obviously taken on bythe
author and evensigned with his initals. 110
Raer, but likewise ymptomatic of a literary promotion of this eleemntof the paratext,
is the case of the allographic PI, I mean PI that is officially allographic and signed
byits author 5. Note5. I also mean: for an original edition. Allographic PIs for
translations or reprintings, especially posthumous ones, area different matter .. .
111 For example, Mathieu Benezet’s Dits et recists du mortel (Flammrion,19770
contains, on the onehand, a PI on the cover which is anonymus but has a distinctly
authorial look and, on the other hand, an inserted PI four pages long, explicitly
entitled “Please-Insert” and signed by Jacques Derrida. 111
We also see PIS with their own epigraphs, like that for Derrida’s de lat
grammatologiue (Rousseau) 112
36
prière d'insérer. A reading inserted, a prayer an address and a date, whether to God
Pascal) or Heidegger(atheist).
The prière d'insérer on the back cover of of The Post Card is a prayer, not just a
prgamatic address to the reader, as Genette thinks.
Derrida “Le suriviant, le sursis, le sursaut”
The please-insert is a highly fragile and precarious paratextual element, an
endangered masterpiece, a baby seal of publishing, for which superfluous. This is
indeed an appeal to the public.
At the moment . . . I see nothing else to ask you to please insert. 116
Sometimes, as is evident ifor these posthumus reprints, there isanallogrpahic text,
signed (Imaginaire, GF) or sunsigned. . . 114
What still needs explainign is the strange name: please-insert. “Please-review”
would seem more appropriate, altough it’s a bit self-evident that the mere fact of
addressing a work to icritics is enough to constitute such a request. The explanation
is undoubtedly that . . . the name is already a little out-of-date and lagging behind
its object, or, if yur prefer,is a little anachronistic (in advance) in relation to the term
it defines. . . . [In the nineteenth century] please-insert was a completely clear and
literal expersion, indicating to newspaper editors that the book’s publisher was
askinghtem to insert this little text, in whole or in part, into their columns to inform
the public of the work’s appearance.” 105-06
Derrida on “Bande a faire satter (Boundto take off) in Signsponge, 148ff.
The please-insert is on the back cover of Ulysses gramphone, but a prier-d’inserer for
the series in which hte book came out, Philosophy in effect” is glued into the library
copy as a fly leaf on the back inside cover.
The text glued on was the flyleaf of the poriginal, which was rebound. Papier
Machine has the sameback cover PI and flyleaf inside theback cover.
In other words (in my words), the please-insert is a short text (generally between a
half page and a full page) describing, by means of a summary or in some other way,
and most often in a value enhancing manner, the work to which it refers—and to
which, for a good half-century, it has been joined in one way or another. 104-05
“displacement of one stage by another” 109
37
Derrida ends with a final section not named in the title. (each word in the title gets
its own section). In it Derrida activiates pun please insert and prayer.
“Prier’ d’inserer. Ja’I deja un mal a me reconnaitre , pour y souscrire, dans chachune
ds images que he viens d’exposer. Je me suis putot expose et lasisse prendre, une
foisde plus: par un autre pour un autre. Je me suis laisse prendre en photographie
(instantane ou photomaton) ou surprendre par un radar qui juge et snctioone la
viteese sans vous laiser le temps ni la place de prendre la parole pour faire valoir
vos driots, come il le faudrait. Je signe toute fois sincerement ce que vous venez
peu-etre de lire. Non comme le symptome d’une “verite”, la mienne, plutot come
une priere, , celle dont Aristote dissit si justement qu’elle n’est “ni vrai ni fausse.” Le
mai 2004 , 16
“Prier’ d’inserer”—a prayer. Is there a shift from Post card to strictly posthumous
and Pascal from post card to prayer?
What counts as a prier d’inserer? Is it inhte article a kind of postface, the way the
back coer isalso a postface as well as a “blurb” (or will be misrecogized as a blurb, a
s written by someone other than the author, or leftunsigned if written as an
allographic blurb?
“Prier’ d’inserer”—
38
Publication as a kind of prayer to be inserted. A text that is already detached,
probably lost. See Genette on “Prier’ d’inserer”
Is The Post Card an archive? Hat does it include of the the unpublished? What does
it leave behind?
What does not get dessiminated?
To pray is to address, to recall, to remember. So it is a kind of guaranteeing of the
archive. The prayer sends, like the card, even if it is never heard, even if there is no
one to hear it. 23
One always prays the other to be present t one’s own presence.
Canthisexperience of prayer be limited, circumscribed? Or does it invade the while
field of experience tfrom the momeent one enters into it, i.e. without ever waiting,
since the other is what is alrady, whether I’m expecting it or not, whether I wanty it
or not, etc.? And can this experience of prayer be true or false, authentic or
inauthentic , , ?
203-04 (287-88)
23
I have confirmed that everytime one speaksto someone else, one asks him or her at
least to remember, one prays him toor her to rember—at least thebeginning of tha
sentnece os as to understand the end and what follows (posterus or posthumous). I
cannto speak to someone without praying him or her, at least impliitly, not only to
pay attention, but by that very fact to retain the memory of what I am saying to him
or her, be it only from the beginning to the end of the sentence. By praying the other
to listen, from the start, I’m praying him or her to retain the memory, to retain in
memory; and perhaps every prayer, to whomever it is addressed, comes down to, or
begins, by saying or letting be understood: “remember, retain the memory, and first
of all remember me, remmeber what I’m saying to you.” As we have spoken a great
deal of death by devouring, or living death, of being buried alive . . . (fire will soon,
remember this, be returning again, fire what will burn in what we are going to say
about another fire and another cremation) . . . the “remember” and “do it in memory
of me” is also what is said at the oment when Christ, in the sense of the Eucharist or
of transubstantiation, in a sense gives himself to be eaten alive by his disciples in
the form of the real presence of bread and wine. . . . Jesus prays his disciples to eat
him, in a sense, to eat him alive, to rememberorinorder to remember him. And this
prayer that he addresses to them while still alive will be the condition of thhe future
prayer of his disciples and their posterity, of their followers, of all Christians, but
39
http://www.prayerrequest.com http://www.bennyhinn.org/prayer/prayerrequest
“reprinted in the posthumous book by Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis, ed
Marie-Louis Mallet (Paris: Galilee, 2006), pp. 163-91,” Beast and Sov 2, 237 (331),
note 8.
The question is whether prayer as neither false nor true, is excluded form
Heidegger’s account of truth as empirically truth and untruth (revealing and
concealing), and his reinscription of a different kind of atheistic nonpolitical
theological sovereignty, one closer to the God of onto-theology than those who pray,
kneel and offer sacrifices to are . . .
Is there a posthumous principle or posthumous structure that differs from the
postal principle or postal structure, whether the postal be subsumed by the
posterous, the phantasm, and the posthumous.
Even before it was posthumously published, apparently even if it had never been
published, Pascal’s writing would have remained readable even it was never read.
Derrida engages the “phantasm” in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, and the
posthumous publication is a note Pascal wrote. The note just happens to begin with
the word “fire.” Derrida’s discussion of Pascal’s note occurs in relation to the
also the condition of Christianity itself, the condition of the New Testament, named
literally at this point in in Mark and the condition of resurrection, etc.
204-05 (288-89)
The book itself, the narrative or the journal, does not pray (unless it is implciitly
praying the reader to read it with God as his or her witness, but Robinson
nevertheless quotes, several times, which Heideger never does, iisstently quotes
prayers, and prayers worthy of the name. And htese are prayers that he learns, that
he learns to relearn, and that he quotes as though he were risterating htem inhis
very writing, 209 (294)
40
phantasm, the survivance of a text, which is not the same thing as the survival or a
corpse decaying. His interest in Pascal’s paper lies partly in the way it is “strictly
posthumous,” that is published after Pascal’s death:
As you well know, it is a posthumous piece of writing (now, of course, all
writings are posthumous, within the trace as structurally and essentially and
by destinal vocation posthumous or testamentary, there is a stricter enclave
of the posthumous, namely, what is only discovered and published after the
death of the author or signatory). Pascal’s writing on the god of Abraham
was strictly posthumous in the latter sense, even though we are not sure
Pascal wanted it to be published. This piece of paper initially takes the form
of a journal, a note to self, dated in Pascal’s hand—Pascal, who like Robinson
Crusoe, here dates the signature. He inscribes the year, the month, the day,
and the hour . . . 24
Derrida survivance and a prier d’inserer. Note reocvered on the body, worn. (cf
Derrida on the wallet)
The reader may recall that Derrida, who kept the least little scrap of paper, in his
last public conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe related
how, one day, he had destroyed a correspondence ‘with grim determination’: ‘I
destroyed a correspondence that I should not have destroyed and I will regret it all
my life long (rue Descartes no. 52, 2006, p. 96). Like other people, no doubt, I first
24
Ibid, 209.
41
though that these destroyed letters were those from Sylviane Agacinski. But this
auto-da-fe is also referred to in The Post Card as having occurred several years
before Jacques and Sylvane met: [think of Jontahn [[Culler]]and Cynthia
[[Chase]]and other proper names of will known critics] “. . . I burned everything ,
slowly, at the side of the road. I told myself that I would never start again’ (The Post
Card, p. 33). I do not know where the letters sent by Agacinsku to Derrida are now;
but it is known htat he did not destroy the, And, according to acquaintances, nearly a
thousand letters from Derrida have been preserved by Agacinski. In the pages of the
present work, the reader will have had a chance to appreciate how talented a letterwriter Derrida was; so one may indulge in dreaming of these letters [Derrida in
Fichus on dream of Walter Benjamin in a letter] and hoping they will be published
one day, even if far in the future.
Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, 244, asterisked footnote.
Il y a divers etats de la disquette, que je ne garde pas, en general. Il m’est arrive une
fois ou dexus, pour Circonfession, de garder quelque etapes. Mai pour la plupart des
textes, je me garde rien, ca se trasforme et ca ne laisse pas des traces. 68
“Derrida entre entre le corp ecrivant et l’ecriture”
Genesis 17, 2001, 59-72.
Jacques Derrida, « Le survivant, le sursis, le sursaut », dans La quinzaine littéraire, n°
882, 11-31 août 2004, pp. 15-16.
Derrida says
some things about his work that are the exact opposite of what he says
42
in the other interview published in Genesis.
J. DERRIDA : Peut-être. Quand je serai mort, il y aura un oiseau, une
fourmi qui dira « moi » pour moi et quand quelqu’un dit « moi » pour
moi, c’est moi. Mais alors pour enchaîner sur ce que vous avez dit
tous les deux sur vos papiers, moi, j’ai détruit une fois une
correspondance. Avec un acharnement terrible : j’avais broyé – ça ne
marchait pas ; brûlé – ça ne marchait pas… J’ai détruit une
correspondance que je n’aurais pas dû détruire et je le regretterai
toute ma vie. Pour le reste – et là on va parler du problème de
l’archive – je n’ai jamais rien perdu ou détruit. Jusqu’aux petits
papiers, quand j’étais étudiant et que Bourdieu ou Balibar venait
mettre sur ma porte un petit mot disant « je repasse tout à l’heure »…
Ou de Bourdieu : « Je vais t’appeler », et je l’ai toujours – et j’ai
tout. Les choses les plus importantes et les choses apparemment les
plus insignifiantes. Toujours en espérant, bien sûr, qu’un jour – non
pas grâce à l’immortalité, mais grâce à la longévité – je pourrais
relire, me rappeler, revenir, et en quelque sorte, me réapproprier
tout ça. Et puis, j’ai fait l’expérience cruelle et amère – maintenant
que toute cette correspondance est archivée et classée pour la majeure
partie hors de chez moi – que malheureusement je ne relirai jamais ces
choses…
http://www.cairn.info/revue-rue-descartes-2006-2-page-86.htm
43
-- Derrida entre entre le corp ecrivant et l’ecriture
Genesis 17, 2001, 59-72.
Niave: Benoit Peters—fantasy of preservation somewhere.
Footnote: Benoit Peters Jacques Derrida: A Biography on Derrida saying he
destroyed correspondence. p. 244
Cite the Post Card as if it were evidence. I found a note in Benoit Peeters biography
of Derrida (attached the
capture). he says that Derrida did not destroy the correspondence
with Sylviane (though he says he does not know where the letters are).
I've requested Penser avec Derrida, the source he cites in which
Derrida says he did destroy a correspondence but does not say which it
was. . Apart from Peeters says Derrida never destroyed a scrap of
paper on which he had written, which is the opposite of what Derrida
says in the Genesis interview. However, Derrida's assertion that he
destroyed all drafts except for 1 or 2 floppy discs he used for
Circonfession is belied by the existence of the Derrida archive in UC
Irvine and the facsimiles of pages of notes and of a notebook of
Derrida's printed in the very same interview (lol?). Peeters use of
the Post Card as autobiographical evidence of Derrida's NOT burning of
Sylviane's letters is exceedingly stupid since the letters in the PC
are unsigned, just sent off. He reads the letter writer quite
literally--"I burned everything" even though on the first page of the
44
"Envois" Derrida suggests that one read the correspondence that
follows as if it had been destroyed, burned. Peeters also clams that
Sylviane has preserved 1k letters of Derrida but not published them.
Footnote: Benoit Peters Jacques Derrida: A Biography on Derrida saying he
destroyed correspondence. p. 244
Cite the Post Card as if it were evidence. I found a note in Benoit Peeters biography
of Derrida (attached the
capture). he says that Derrida did not destroy the correspondence
with Sylviane (though he says he does not know where the letters are).
I've requested Penser avec Derrida, the source he cites in which
Derrida says he did destroy a correspondence but does not say which it
was. . Apart from Peeters says Derrida never destroyed a scrap of
paper on which he had written, which is the opposite of what Derrida
says in the Genesis interview. However, Derrida's assertion that he
destroyed all drafts except for 1 or 2 floppy discs he used for
Circonfession is belied by the existence of the Derrida archive in UC
Irvine and the facsimiles of pages of notes and of a notebook of
Derrida's printed in the very same interview (lol?). Peeters use of
the Post Card as autobiographical evidence of Derrida's NOT burning of
Sylviane's letters is exceedingly stupid since the letters in the PC
are unsigned, just sent off. He reads the letter writer quite
literally--"I burned everything" even though on the first page of the
45
"Envois" Derrida suggests that one read the correspondence that
follows as if it had been destroyed, burned. Peeters also clams that
Sylviane has preserved 1k letters of Derrida but not published them.
Derrida “Le suriviant, le sursis, le sursaut”
“Prier’ d’inserer. Ja’I deja un mal a me reconnaitre , pour y souscrire, dans chachune
ds images que he viens d’exposer. Je me suis putot expose et lasisse prendre, une
foisde plus: par un autre pour un autre. Je me suis laisse prendre en photographie
(instantane ou photomaton) ou surprendre par un radar qui juge et snctioone la
viteese sans vous laiser le temps ni la place de prendre la parole pour faire valoir
vos driots, come il le faudrait. Je signe touteffois sincerement ce que vous venez
peu-etre de lire. Non comme le symptome d’une “verite”, la mienne, plutot come
une priere, , celle don’t Aristote dissit si justement qu’elle n’est “ni vrai ni fausse.” Le
mai 2004 , 16
If it is true that for a certain Freud, “our unconscious cannot conceive of our
mortality” (is unable to represent mortality to itself), then it would seem to follow
that dying is unrepresentable, not only because it has no present, but also because it
has no place, not even in time, the temporality of time. . . Nothing can be done with
death that has always taken place already: it is the task of idleness, a nonrelation
with a past (or future) utterly bereft of present. Thus the disaster would be beyond
what we understand by death or abyss, or in any case by my death, since there is no
46
more place for “me”: in the disaster I disappear without dying (or die without
disappearing).
--Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster,
118-19.5
When I wrote one day, in “Circumfession,” if I remember correctly, “I posthume as I
breathe,” that’s pretty much what I wanted to have felt, that’s pretty much what I
wanted t have felt, rather than thought, or even speculated, or it’s pretty much what
I wanted to have myself pre-sense. . . . In truth, posthumous, posthumus, with an h,
appears to be a faulty spelling, the grammarian tells us, and the spelling error in it is
apparently induced by the proximity with humus, earth. . . . It’s like for differance,
with an a, which is yet another way to posthume by differing or deferring life or,
what comes down to the same thing, deferring death. In truth, postume, without an
h, apparently corresponds to the superlative of posterus. Posterus qualifies the one
who comes after, the one who follows. Posterus is the follower of the descendent, the
one who is going to come, or even the future itself, posthumous, the superlative here
meaning the last follower of all, and above all the one who, being born after the
death of the father, child or grandchild, posterity, bears the testamentary future and
the fidelity of inheritance.
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 173-1746
and I focus on The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2 in part because it is a posthumous
publication that engages posthumous publication and takes up a posthumously
published note Pascal wrote that his servant found when he discovered Pascal dead.
47
(The note by Pascal is coincidentally entitled “Fire,” and happens to, like Derrida’s
and burned papers in The Post Card, parts of which Derrida quotes in Cinders, and
Derrida’s ash of the archive in Archive Fever.) This note, however, emrges not just
as a letter, like the letter form Blanchot in Demeure, but in a discussion of the prayer.
Letter cited by Derrida in seesion 7 of Beast and Sov 2 has gone missing, according
to a note.
Because of publication and archive, effects are always tied to material support of an
edition; anarchivity limited to page layout in “Tympan,” in Margins of philosophy,
the columns in Glas, --with banks, a kind ofMallarmean aesthiec, eccentric ways of
using bibliographic codes; so the coherence of a tropological reading—aporia, and
the questioning of an internal reading, its limits, all depend on publication, just as
for Genette the threshold or “seuil” of reading is always something published. The
post Card is a publication. The post card is sent a priori.
Anarchivity from the way the published works are like a general text overflowing a
given text to render it readable. Or unreadable.
Simulacra of destruction. Corpse.
What remains—passage by freud. So the general text is not ashen the way the
arhive is
Quasi-machine of survivance, de Man and Rousseau on Typewriter Ribbon Ink
Archive means a psychoanalytic reading—Freud burns
No book history could sort out the references and so on, create a file, since Derrida
refers to the Post Card as a post card., cites passages in his own anacrhivic archive,
Cinders..
Question of animal and human
Of prayer and Post card
An posthumous publication
Writng on the support for –so a radical empiricism.
Fire in Bodeleian anecdote.
Yet Pascal—posthumous—a certain breakdown aroundHiedegger and prayer.
Heidegger—no death—in Why Poets? No destiny either.
Derrrida’s sending is the limit of his reading.
Because no one knows whether the publisher has intervened. Case of ON the Name.
Nt up to the translator.
48
Publication constitutes its own kind of anarchvity.
Derrida often respects the distinction between published and unpublished,, private
and public.
Quesiton of the animal is a question of the archive—a question about death of the
writer. Or about the way death enters in a biological sense in derrida’s writing even
as he pursues tsurivance and publication and unreadability (went back tohe text to
add “Maurice Blanchot is Dead,” also the Beast and the Sovereign 2 (identified in an
editor’s note). Editor as caretaker.
Post Marks / Like a Prayer: Reading Around Derrida with(out) Derrida (Still)
Around
The reader may recall that Derrida, who kept the least little scrap of paper, in his
last public conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe related
how, one day, he had destroyed a correspondence ‘with grim determination’: ‘I
destroyed a correspondence that I should not have destroyed and I will regret it all
my life long (rue Descartes no. 52, 2006, p. 96). Like other people, no doubt, I first
though that these destroyed letters were those from Sylviane Agacinski. But this
auto-da-fe is also referred to in The Post Card as having occurred several years
before Jacques and Sylvane met: [think of Jonthan [[Culler]]and Cynthia
[[Chase]]and other proper names of will known critics] “. . . I burned everything ,
slowly, at the side of the road. I told myself that I would never start again’ (The Post
Card, p. 33). I do not know where the letters sent by Agacinsku to Derrida are now;
but it is known that he did not destroy them. And, according to acquaintances,
nearly a thousand letters from Derrida have been preserved by Agacinski. In the
pages of the present work, the reader will have had a chance to appreciate how
talented a letter-writer Derrida was; so one may indulge in dreaming of these letters
49
[Derrida in Fichus on dream of Walter Benjamin in a letter] and hoping they will be
published one day, even if far in the future.
Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, 244, asterisked footnote.
“Those who remain will not know how to read,” Derrida writes in The Post Card,25
“those who remain” meaning, I take it, “those who have survived.”
I will read The Post Card in relation to “For the Love of Lacan” in part because
Derrida wrote it after Lacan’s death and returned to the engagement with Lacan in
The Post Card if only to skip it, in relation to the archive. I attend at great length and
in great detail to their publication history and at even greater length and detail to
what Derrida does with the publishing history of the writings he reanders as a
“scene” in The Post Card, with two tenses—the future anterior and the future
anterior conditional—he uses in “For the Love of Lacan,” thereby making questions
about recording, archiving, and reading the speech of the dead questions both about
what was published and about what was said, hence questions of rumor and
testimony, and prayer as neither true nor false.
However, unlike psychobiographers and unlike genetic critics, I do not give any
priority, chronological, biological, or otherwise, to one of these texts over the
other.26 It is precisely the boundary of publication htat Derrida sometimes draws
The Post Card, 249.
Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the
Archive, trans Beverly Bie Brahic, (Columbia University, 2008), 61.
25
26
50
that I calll npblishability, like and not like unarchiviability. One could organize a
reading of The Post Card according to a bibliographical and editorial logic in relation
to its self-ruination and self-fragmentation (Envois are liked to burned letters; “To
Speculate—‘On Freud’” is a fragment) and texts Derrida published after The Post
Card in which he referred to it, discussed it, or added to it, as he did in “Telepathy.”27
This logic, however, is pre-critical. It always arrives at its destination, as it were, a
dead end. Moreover, it glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future
publications.28
In the headnote to “Telepathy,” Derrida wrote for its republication, Derrida says
that he meant to publish it as part of The Post Card and explains, how seriously is
open to question, why he had to publish it separately:
Such a remainder [restant], I am no doubt publishing it in order to come
closer to what remains inexplicable even to this day. These cards and letters
had become inaccessible to me, materially speaking at least, by a semblance
of accident, at some precise moment. They should have appeared as
fragments and in accordance with the plan [dispositif] adopted at that time in
"Envois" [Section One of la carte postale [Paris: Aubie-Flammarion, 1980]. In
a manner that was apparently just as fortuitous, I rediscovered them very
close at hand, but too late, when the proofs for the book had already been
sent back for the second time. There will perhaps be talk of omission through
"resistance" and such other things. Certainly, but resistance to what? to
whom? Dictated by whom, to whom, how, according to what routes
[voies]? From this bundle of daily dispatches that all date from the same
week, I have exacted only a portion for the moment, for lack of space. Lack of
time too, and for the treatment to which I had to submit this mail [courrier],
triage, fragmentation, destruction, etc., the interested reader may refer to
"Envois," 7ff. In “My Chances / Mes Chances,” Derrida returns to the Post
Card and “telepathy”: “Permit me to refer once again to the fragment
detached from La carte postale that I titled “Telepathy” (191 above), 368;
Lacan follows Freud to the letter on this point, when he says that a letter
always arrives at a destination. There is no random chance in the
unconscious,” 369. See Psyche: Inventions of the Other vol 1. Trans. Peggy
Kamuf (Stanford UP, 2007), 344-76.
27
Consider the conspicuous attention to promises of future publications in
footnotes in The Post Card: “the last sentence of the long quotation of a preface that
is a note: “Other fragments of the same seminar will appear soon in book form,” 293
28
51
Derrida self-thematized his own works and words:
As this problematiic has become invasive, I will not give any determined
reference here. In the course of the chapters that follow, I will take the liberty
of specifying certain of these references, sometimes in order to spare myself
a development already proposed elsewhere. Oriented or disoriented by the
themes of speculation, destination, or the promise, The Post Card referred to
the seminar “Given Time” and signaled its forthcoming publication
(p.430/403).
Second note to the “Foreword” of Given Time: Counterfeit Money 1, x
The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret (University of Chicago Press;
2 edition 2007) trans David Wills, image in black and white only on the cover. The
Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret (University of Chicago Press; first
edition 1995) trans David Wills
These questions about what remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s
writings are also biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical
questions concerning the archival operations by which performed all the time by
editors and translators on all of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and
posthumous publications, a question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving
Note 6. Donner—le temps (To Give—time, in preparation, to appear later. Other
essays (to appear) analyze this figure under the heading of “double chiasmatic
invagination of the borders.” 391 8. An allusion, in the seminar Life death, to other
seminars organized, or three years running, under the title of La Chose (The Thing)
(Heidegger / Ponge, Heidegger / Blanchot, Heidegger / Freud), at Yale and in Paris.
Perhaps they will give rise to other publications later. 401. Footnote 10, p. 403
52
operations Derrida performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own
works, from which he sometimes quoted.
Posthumography has a kind of priority mail status, a kind of a-priority mail status
“within” what Derrida calls the postal network, a status that permits us to take a
detour, follow a pathway off the beaten track, and rephrase Derrida’s Heideggerian
question “is there death as such?” as a question of whether, for Derrida, the letter is
always sent, even if it does not always arrive at its destination, whether it is always
given even if never received, left unclaimed in a poste restante, whether it is always
in the mail on the way whether or not there is a sender to return to whom one could
return it, whether it is sent quasi-automatically rather than by an organic being,
whether sending always has priority over whatever is sent, even if whatever has
been sent is a residue that amounts to nothing, that “adds nothing,” even if the letter
rests “en souffrance” (undelivered, never claimed, never returned to sender), even
the letter is divisible because it is material, even if what us said cannot be sorted out
conceptually into letters and post cards, dead and living letters, even if the letter is
always sent “c/o,” in care [Sorge] of, or sometimes “in care-less-ness,” even if
sending always involves distinerrancy that amounts to something like an OCCD, or
Obsessive Compulsive in Care of Disorder. To put the question more paradoxically
and concisely, framed as a question, is burning the post card the same thing as
sending it, and hence the condition of its reading, of what is or remains to be read of
it?29 Derrida continues: “As for the “Envois” themselves, I do not know if their
See “A priori,” Post Card, 457 and “dead too soon” Post Card, 456. See Derrida’s
note on Heidegger and “Shuldigsein [being guilty]” which ends: “As concerns
referring Being and Time to The Genealogy of Morals in the question of
29
53
reading is bearable. You might consider them, if you really wish to, as the
remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence. Destroyed by fire or by that
which figuratively takes its place, more certain of leaving what I like to call the
tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are (s’il y a là cendre)” (PC, 3).
Derrida can thereby go on to say in the “Envois” both “burn everything, forget
everything” and “publish everything” while occasionally deconstructing the
opposition between burning and publishing.30
Burning by Heart: What Remains to be Read(?) and for Whom?
This question I have just raised about whether sending [schicken] as burning
has priority over the letter’s address under the heading of the word
posthumography, is not only a question about repetition. It is a question of whether,
on the one hand, reading or rereading is guaranteed by repetition, insured as it
were, even before it is dispatched, always given back, the “envoi” always already
backed up, copied, deposited in vault when sent, such that publishing can become of
Schuldigsein—I will attempt it elsewhere (264n10).” On the Postal network and the
a priori, see Derrida’s rephrasing of Heidegger’s question about death as such in The
Beast and the Sovereign Vol 2, “Is death merely the end of life? Death as such? Is
there ever, moreover, death as such? If I said “I am going to die living [mourir
vivant],” what would you have to understand? That I want to die living? Or that I
want above all not to die living, not to die in my lifetime? Derrida, “Fourth Session,
January 23, 2003,” The Beast and the Sovereign Vol 2, 93 (145). See also Derrida,
Aporias: Dying--awaiting (one Another At) the "limits of Truth" (mourir--s'attendre
Aux "limites de la Vâeritâe") Trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1993). On “adds nothing,” see the “REnd note” at the end of this
article.
30 The Post Card, 23; 43; 171; 176; 180.
54
a form of destruction rather than preservation, or, on the other hand.31 In the
“Envois” in The Post Card, Derrida asserts that reading is always already rereading
and reroutes rereading and the “origin of the post card” (59-60) through a Freudian
post office to memory, and repetition burning after reading:
But in fact, yes, had understood my order or my prayer, the demand of the
first letter: “burn everything,” understood it so well that you told me you
copied over (“I am burning, stupid impression of being faithful, neverthelss
kept several simulacra, etc.,” isn’t that it?), in your writing, and in pencil, the
words of that first letter (not the others). Another way of saying that you
reread it, no? which is what one begins by doing when one reads, even for the
first time, repetition, memory, etc. I love you by heart, there between the
parentheses or quotation marks, such is the origin of the post card.32
See “It now resembles a rebroadcast, a sinister play-back (but give ear closely,
come near to my lips) and while writing you I henceforth know what I am sending to
the fire, what I am letting appear and what you give me back even before receiving
it. Back could have been orchestrated all of this starting from the title: the back of
Socrates and of the card: all the dossiers that I have bound, the feed-back, the playback, the returns to sender, etc., our tape-recorders, our phantom cassettes” The
Post Card, 225.
32 Post Card, 59-60. See also Derrida’s comments on memory, the proper name, and
“the mechanics of the ‘by heart’” in “The Night Watch (“over the book of himself’)” in
Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts Ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press,,2013), 97. Derrida writes something similar about learning by
heart in “Play: From Pharmakon to the Letter,” the last section of “Plato’s Parmacy”
in Dissemination. Ventriloquizing someone who stammers or whose reception
comes with interference (puncutation marks indicating pauses or ellipses), Derrida
writes:
One still has to take note of this. And to finish that Second Letter: “. . .
Consider these facts and take care lest you sometime come to repent of
having now unwisely published. It is a very great safeguard to learn by heart
instead of writing. . . . What are now called his . . . Sokratous estin kalou kai
neou gegonots . . . are the work of a Socrates embellished and modernized.
Farewell and believe. Read this letter now at once many times and burn it . . . .
31
55
The origin of the post card consists of words placed in a space by quotation marks
and parentheses (they are identical puncutation marks in French), words already
cited, iterable, and so on. But are they also words that have been redeemed or
words that can always be redeemed, that are to be redeemed because they have by
heart, the origin being a love letter? Even if the letter cannot be amortized, as
Derrida insists it cannot, can the letter be “morgue-aged,” a word I coin at the risk of
sounding merely facetious; that is, is the letter credited as such by virtue of having
been stored before any sorting, an partition, even if what is stored cannot be
retrieved, restored, revived, or reanimated? Is the heart that learns a bleeding
heart? a heart that never stops pumping yet never stops bleeding, that just keeps
hemmorgueing, that survives by refusing to know it is dead?
These questions about survival and the priority of sending in Derrida’s postal
network can be productively addressed, I think, if we closely read, even microread, a
shelving operation Derrida performs on the contents of The Post Card in the first
page of the book. Derrida reshelves the book’s table of contents (given on p. 551 in
la carte postale but m.i.a. in the English translation) as a kind of preface to a book
“not written” but that Derrida nevertheless dispatches the book by prepping it, by
publishing only a selection of envois that were “spared or if you prefer ‘saved’ (I
already hear murmured ‘registered,’ as is said for a kind of receipt)” (3). Echoing
the first sentence of Dissemination (“This will therefore not have been a book”),
I hope this one won’t get lost. Quick, a duplicate . . . graphite . . . carbon . . .
reread this letter . . . burn it. Il y a là cendre. And now to distinguish between
two repetitions.” --, 170-71
Derrida repeats the same passage from Dissemination in Cinders (48).
56
Derrida begins the “Envois” writing: “You might read these envois as the preface to
a book I have not written” (3). 33 Derrida goes on to draw distinction between the
last three parts of the book, preserve, and the the first part, “Envois,” destroyed.
Derrida binds the heterography of The Post Card, the second chapter of which
Derrida calls a “fragment” (292) he “extracted from a seminar” (PC, 259n1): and the
last two chapters previously published, by dividing the book into two parts, in other
words: “The three last parts of the present work, “To Speculate—on ‘Freud,’” “Le
facteur de la vérité,” “Du tout” are all different by virtue of their length, their
circumstance or pretext, their manner and their dates. But they preserve the
memory of this project, occasionally even exhibit it (3).”
Let me rephrase the question I raised above about burning being the condition of
what is to be read, of what may be rendered as readable, a condition that is similar,
perhaps transposible, to the condition of the archive as articulated by Derrida in
Archive Fever and Cinders , that condition being the incompleteness of the archive,
the archive’s inability to archive the ashes it necessarily leaves “outside” it. Does
Derrida’s reshelving of The Post Card’s four parts into two parts on the first page of
the book mean that sending is a p/repetition, as it were? Is sending a priori even
“before” one sends off or gets off [s’envoyer]?34 Has sending been sent, as it were,
Derrida repeats the passage in the “Envois” (3) from The Post Card cited above in
Cinders twice, on two successive pages. “Surviving it, being destined to this survival, to this excess over present life, this œuvre as trace implies from the outset the
structure of this sur-vival.”
34 See Derrida’s assertions about “yes, yes” in relation what is “’prior’ to all these
reversible alternatives, to all these dialectics” and what is sent a priori the post card:
“This is what I call the gramophone effect. Yet gramophones itself and
telegramophones itself a priori. . . . Affirmation demands a priori confirmation,
repetition, the safeguarding and keeping of memory of the yes. . . The yes says
33
57
before any preface, even if that preface is inside the text rather than a paratext, sent
before the repetition that makes reading always rereading? Does burning what has
been sent, as I suggested above, guarantee that what is “to be” read survives what is
to be reread, even if what is “to be” read is not destined, not fated, not fatal, not
archivable, but always “to come,” even if there is no one (even no machine or quasihuman, quasi-machine) to read it or who will know how to read it when it arrives?
Is the sending of the letter—writing is always posted-- a given, always a gift that
may be gone from the start and thus never given? Are the cinders of what survives
as a publication to be read a gift, a legacy, an inheritance? Is there a difference
between sending a letter and publishing a book, between a post card and a
publication?35 Is sending the post card (or a publication) like answering the
telephone call? Yes “must be taken for an answer. It always has the form of an
nothing and asks nothing but another yes, the yes of an other which we will see is
analytically—or by an a priori synthesis—implied in the first yes. . . . The self-position
in the yes . . . is . . . a priori for any constantive theoricity . . . . The self-affirmation of
the yescan only address itself to the other by recalling itself to itself, by saying to
itself yes, yes. The circle of this universal presupposition, quite comical in itself, is
like a sending to oneself, a sending-back from oneself to oneself that at the same
time never leaves itself and yet never arrives at itself. . . . It is thus a question of
sending oneself,” Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramof: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in
Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts Ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 56; 65; 73; 74; 76-77; 78.
35 Derrida reheases and appears to endorse J. L. Austin’s drawing an “equivalence
between a post card and a publication” on the grounds that neither is a private
document. See Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Derrida
and Joyce: Texts and Contexts Ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 2013), 41-86; to 44. Derrida says he does not think the distinction
between letters and post cards to be a rigorous one, and he compares post cards to
identity cards, as if anticipating machine-readable passports. See Derrida, “Imagine
a city, a State in which identity cards were post cards. No more possible resistance.
There are already checks photographs. All of this is not so far off. With the progress
of the post the State police has always gained ground,” The Post Card, 37.
58
answer.”36 Did Derrida take that collect call from Martini Heidegger after all?37 If
The Post Card will not have been a book (3) despite its having been published, does
Derrida effectively shelve what is “to be” read by rendering publications as marked
cards (or Tarot cards?), cards that he reshuffles, perhaps using Heidegger’s deck,
and then, taking his chances as the dealer, telling his readers, if I may mix my
gambling metaphors, “faites vos jeux . . . rien ne va plus . . . les jeux sont faites,” as he
deals the cards from a stacked deck in order to play a hand he can read or to tell
someone’s fortune by turning defaced cards face up, perhaps at random? The force
of these questions, I suggest, is that for Derrida the surival of a critical practice—
psychoanalysis or deconstruction—necessarily depend on its sending through
publications and therefore on titles and proper names.
Derrida’s use of the death certificate to question life and death and his questioning
of the destruction of documents and destroyed. “As for the “Envois,” Derrida writes
on the first page of The Post Card, “you might consider them . . . as the remainders of
a recently destroyed correspondence. Destroyed by fire or by that which
figuratively takes its place, more certain of leaving what I like to call the tongue of
Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Derrida and
Joyce: Texts and Contexts Ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2013), 48
37 See Derrida’s asterisked footnote about not taking a collect call from a person who
identified himself as “Martini Heidegger” in The Post Card, 21; Sam Weber’s
discussion of this footnote in "The Debts of Deconstruction, and Other, Related
Assumptions" in: Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (eds). Taking Chances:
Derrida, Psychonalysis and Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984), 33-65; to pp. 34-36; 58-59; and Avital Ronell’s discussion of Weber’s
essay in The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln,
NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 74-76.
36
59
fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are (s’il y a là cendre)” (3).38 Unsigned
letters—other letters open up death. Both lines of questioning, of deconstructing
life and death, or biothanatopolitics, and of published and destroyed materials,
The book printed on paper can also, of course, be destroyed by drowning, wind,
and burial. See Prospero declaring “I’ll drown my book” in William Shakespeare’s
The Tempest and scenes of pages of books being blown away in Peter Greenaway’s
film adaptation, Prospero’s Books. In Ghostwriter (dir. Roman Polanksi, 2010)
pages of an incriminating, ciphered unpublished typewritten mss are blown away
after the ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) dies off-screen. Stationary camera. Pages
turn into end titles which are themselves radically ghostwritten (no pseudonym for
their authorship, no authorship at all.) On this example, see Richard Burt and Julian
Yates, What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? (New York and London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). In Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books, a book may be
“buried alive” (109) in an obscure corner of a library, and Swift notes in A Tale of a
Tub, presented as a found manuscript (13), the numerous ways books may be
destroyed: “But your governor perhaps may still insist, and put the question, What
is then become of those immense bales of paper which must needs have been
employed in such numbers of books? Can these also be wholly annihilate, and so of
a sudden as I pretend? What shall I say in return of so invidious an objection? It ill
befits the distance between Your Highness and me to send you for ocular conviction
to a jakes, or an oven, to the windows of a bawdy-house, or to a sordid
lantern. Books, like me their authors, have no more than one way of coming into the
word, but there are ten thousand to go out of it and return no more” 16-17. See
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley
(Oxford, 2008). There are numerous English novels in which characters take
unpublished letters and various papers to their graves. For one example, consult
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, ed. John Sutherland, 2nd edition (Oxford University
Press, 2008). See in particular the letter housemaid Rosanna Spearman leaves in a
box on a chain the sand by before she drowns herself, a letter later recovered by the
detective Sergeant Cuff: “Not even my grave will be my marker” (310); see the
“Fourth Narrative” made up of extracts from the unfinished journal making up
written by the opium addicted and disgraced doctor, Ezra Jennings, and comments
about Jennings’s death bed request in the “Seventh Narrative”: “At his request I next
collected the other papers, that is to day, the bundle of letters, the unfinished book,
and the volumes of the Diary—and enclosed them all in one wrapper, sealed with
my own seal. ‘Promise,’ he said, that you will put this in to my coffin with your own
hand.” And that you will see that no other hand touches it afterwards . . . He said ‘Let
my grave be forgotten. Give me your word of honour that you will allow no
monument of any sort—even the commonest tombstone—to mark the place of my
burial. Let me sleep nameless. Let me rest, unknown’” (456). Burned manuscripts
and libraries are perhaps the most common mode of destruction. See Haunted
Hotel, Aspern Papers, Rilke, Notebooks, Don Quixote
38
60
biobiblothantopolitics do not depend on a coterminus of author and writing. All
writing is death, all signatures, all publications posted. rest on Derrida. We can go
closer to the Post Card—questioning of letter and dead letter, or letter and post card,
and , following J.L. an equivalence between a post card and a publication. In Paper
Machine, finitude of the support versus intifnitude of the text to be read.
Posthumographic oriented, like the archive, to the future, rather than exclusively to
empirical contents of the archive that make up the infinity of texts for Genette and
genetic criticism in French (infinitely editable, readable text). Finitude of the body,
corpse disposal also the ocus of Beast and Sovereign 2. Blind spot to ways in which
texts can be destroyed—the eco-specificity—as well as to the ways in which corpses
can be disposed—burial at sea—but Sometimes archive, unarchivabiltiy is
unpublished, and Derrida as he returned to survivance, the quesiton of legacy posed
in To SPecualte on ‘Freud’” and interviews, his own writing practices, dsitinguished
his own pre-publication aterials from his publications. Alos the question of the
body. And he also in Beast and the Sovereign, for the only time, engaged posthumous
publication. and also a quesiton of what was said to what will have or would have
been said.
to say a few things about posthumography so that it will not be confused with a predeconstructive, pre-psychoanalytic psychobiography or psychobiohagiography of
Derrida that takes his biological death as the basis for linearizing his publications
and highlighting certain themes he wrote on toward the end of his death thought to
be key due to their proximity to his death, nor do I divide his posthumously
61
published publications from his “humous” publications.39 The question I pursue in
relation to publication in Derrida is a questio of destruction and sending of an
rchive, a slef-divison and raqdical destrucitbbiity that is false or true or neither false
nor ture like a prayer and of the analogy between a post card and a publication.
Derrida’s own autobiographical recountings of his rleation to different media nd his
return to surivance as a “key” word, as it word. Derrida’s own reshelving operation.
And his eccentric bibliogrpahical practices with respect to publications, not to say
his frequest retention of remakrs made on the oral delivery of the printed essay, of
what was said (Foucault Cogito and Madness) or of what will have been said but
also of what would have been said. .
Argument: is that Derrida draws a line between pre-publication (what is lost or not)
and publication (not lost; an archive that anyone can retrieve. So there is an
See Craig Saper’s introduction “Posthumography: The Boundaries of Literature
and the Digital Trace” and my essay "Putting Your Papers in Order: The Matter of
Kierkegaard's Writing Desk, Goethe's Files, and Derrida's Paper Machine, or the
Philology and Philosophy of Publishing After Death" in Rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010).
http://www.rhizomes.net/issue20/ For an example of a posthumographic reading
of Derrida, see Hélène Cixous, "The Flying Manuscript," trans. Peggy Kamuf. New
Literary History Volume 37, Number 1, Winter 2006), 15-46, to pp. 24-24. Cixous
tells the story of her discovery of a handwritten manuscript Derrida had left with
her in an envelope he told her not to open and that she had misplaced, forgotten,
and then found and then found again (by chance?). The manuscript was a draft of
Derrida’s “A Silkworm of one’s Own,” first published in in 1997 and translated in
Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,,
2002 and republished Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida. Stanford University Press,
2007, 53-120 Cixous reproduces two pages of the manuscript Derida has cancelled,
as if he were a kind of post man stamping letters and invalidating the stamps, taking
them out of circulation (except among stamp collectors, Cixous operating here as a
collector rather than an editor). See pp. 38, 39. But she does not reproduce a
facsimile of the entire manuscript, that is to say an edition. Cixous’s strory reads as
if it were a response to Derrida’s story about her leaving him with the manuscript of
her first book. See note 8 below. Derrida tells a similar story about her in Genese
Archive,
39
62
intenral split in his own filing system or reshelving practices between what is like a
destroyed crorrespondence and what is destroyed. Also, the epistlolary form of
Envois and the first person, anecdotal autobiobiliogrpahies he gave in interviews in
Paper Machine and afterwards. He says he destroyed a correspondence. (Note
reducible to a biographical reading). Only because the letter is always send can the
letter equal a post card equal a publication. What is the force of the “like” of a
comparison between the publication and an unpublished coorespondence that hs
been destroyed? What does it mean to archive the ashes, the ashes that cannot be
archived, in Archive Fever. What does it mean for “unreadabiltiy” as used in Living
On (surivivance)? What does it mean to do that under a proper name? Name as
adjective? psychaonalsysis Derrida lays out, in the first pages of Archive Fever,
certain conditions on which he says any archive depends: there can be no archive
‘without substrate nor without residence’, no archive without archons as guardians
and interpreters of the law, ‘no archive without outside’, no archive without
psychoanalysis (AF, pp3-4; p11).
Whatis sending is not a priori? What is some letters are never sent, never destined
to remain? POsthumographic criticism, as opposed to genetic criticism, would
engage that quesiton. Posthumography a way of considierng publication that does
nto reduce it to genetic criticism, in hich case published or not does not matter
(book on Cixous). Answer: a return to Hedeigger, a turn to the strictly posthumous
under the heading of a note on fire that has disappeared (orginal is gone), and from
post card to prayer. In Derrida’s analysis, a certain “repression” of Pascal’s writing
style in general and publication history. A kind of limit of archiving, a limit that is
63
not the same as ashes and publication., no mattre meerely a matter of likeness, but
of false testimony (what Derrida did or did not destroy, Derrida citing Banchot’s
letter in Demeure as evidence,) to a prayer that is neither flase nor true. A Post-Post
Card or Pre-Post Card.
Spell out that I am anchoring my reading arund a certain bibliogrpahy related to
The Post Card, a series of returns to Lacan and to psychoanalyssis involving the
archive, media, and surivance and the destruction of the archiv e, the “like” a
destroyed coreposndnece. Or corners. . They turn on equation of the post card and
publication. Posting as publicationgg, sending, versus a prayer. So a return to
surivance (from Parages) in last works, that are not the last Blacnhot) and
Heidegger (Lacan as Heideggerian) on the prayer. Pascal and the prayer. Balzac
discusses Pascal in le peau de chagrin.
Fort : Da, Can’t You See I’m Burning?40
Before proceeding to discuss “For the Love of Lacan” and The Beast and the
Sovereign, Vol. 2, I need to make two general points about the kind of
posthumographic reading Derrida does of Lacan. Both points concern what is to be
read in relation to what remains, whose remains, “remains” understood both in the
biological of a corpse or cremains and in the bibiliographic sense of papers left to be
read either unpublished or published. First, the remains in both sense involve the
survival a reading practice like psychoanlaysis or deconstruction in relation to the
proper name. As Derrida writes of Freud, “that he hoped for this survival of
I follow Derrida’s silent change from “Fort / Da” to “Fort : Da” on page of The Post
Card, 321.
40
64
psychoanalysis is probable, but in his name, survival on the condition of his name:
by virtue of which he says that he survives it as the proper place of the name.”41
Deconstruction was often pronounced dead during Derrida’s lifetime, but the
survival of deconstruction under Derrida’s name is not my concern here.42 Rather I
am concerned with the erasure and rephrasing of a question about Derrida and
psychoanalysis that did not survive, a question that was also to be a title of a
colloquium organized by René Major and the title of the published conference
proceedings, namely, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?”43 The proposed title
the colloquium, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?,” was replaced by the title
Lacan avec les philosophes, and the conference proceedings were published as a
book bearing that same Lacan avec les philosophes. Derrida tells this story in the
Annexes [appendices] to Lacan avec les philosophes, a post-script entitled “Après
Tout: Les Chance du College.” In the “For the Love of Lacan” in the republished
version in Resistances to Psychoanalysis, Derrida does not tell this story but twice
refers his reader headnote and again in the third endnote to the “Annexes” [my
emphasis ] of Lacan avec les philosophes, the publication in which “Love Lacan” first
appeared. Derrida both archives and “X-s” out, as it were , the story he to
concerning the erasure of his name in the two notes to “Love Lacan”, the story he
does not retell but leaves to waiting be told to the reader who takes up Derrida’s
The Post Card, 334.
See, for example, Mitchell Stephens, “Jacques Derrida,” New York Times Magazine
January 23, 1994, 22-25.
43 “For the Love of Lacan,” in Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans
Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 39-69; to 50-51 was written and published three years
before Archive Fever (1994) but published again in Resistances of Psychoanalysis
(1996) of two years after Archive Fever? (These are the French publication dates.)
41
42
65
invitation to consult the postscript. More crucially, Derrida revises the suppressed
question of the collouquim title “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?” in “Love
Lacan” by taking out the proper name alotogther. Derrida’s “last point” (69) is that
the “question of knowing whether or not there is some psychoanalysis—X-ian, his,
yours, mine that the degree—that can hold up or that is coming, this incalcaluable,
unimaginable, unaccountable, unattribuable question is displaced to the degree that
the analytic siutation, and thus the analytic institution, is deconstructed, as if by
itself, without deconstruction or deconstructive project” (69). Ordinarily, one would
not read the the letter “X” in the sentence above. One one would simply pass over it
as a variable for which any proper name could be substituted and move on. I will
take the letter in the “word” “X-ian” (and Derrida’s use of the phrase “X without X”)
to be the something like a crux, survival of psychoanalysis under someone’s name,
turning on a letter, a letter that is neither a proper name nor the lack of one. The
letter “X” in “X-ian,” the substitution of a letter for a proper name, any proper name,
turned into an adjective becomes something to be glossed by virtue of the relatively
“ex”terior paratextual space in the endnotes of “Love Lacan.”44
I will unfold and these quasi- cruxes by glossing them, which is perhaps not the
same thing as reading them. I do not consider the distinction between glossing and
reading to be rigorous because “to gloss” is a kind of anthiteical word in Freud’s
sense; on the one hand, it secondary to reading, a varitation of annotation, a
paratext that sometimes appears on the margins of a page that unveils and makes a
given text’s opacities at least relatively transparent; on the other hand, one may
“gloss over,” that is miss something crucial in the text and let it remain out of sight,
or erhaps hiding in plain sight. Moreover, glossing may serve reading, but any
services rendered by glosses will be difificult to settle because since the borders
between reading and ronreading as well as between reading and unreading are not
givens.
44
66
My second point regarding reading Derrida’s Post Card under the heading of
posthumography concerns the way does Derrida tends to separate the two
meanings of “remains” I noted above into bios and biblios, thereby keepinge seprate
from bibliopolitics. In a sentence I cited above from The Post Card, Derrida writes,
“Those who remain will not know how to read.” I take it that “those who remain”
means “those who survive.” 45 In The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 2, however,
Derrida asks a question about the remains of those who will have been survived by
others:
What is the other—What is the other—or what are others—going to make of
me when, after the distancing step [pas] of the passing [trépas], after this
passage, when I am past, when I have passed, when I am departed, deceased,
passed away, gone, absolutely without defense, disarmed, in their hands, i.e.,
as they say, so to speak, dead.” The other appears to me as the other as such,
qua he, she, or they who might survive me, survive my decease and then
proceed as they wish, sovereignly, and sovereignly have at my disposal the
future of my remains, if there are any. . . .”
The human remains are very much a political question for Derrida. In the ninth
session of the Beast and the Sovreign Vol 2, Derrida discusses the disposition of the
corpse as a biopolitical question he relates to the democracy to come. I quote at
length:
Would not the democracy to come gain by opening still wider the spectrum
of possible choices? For one can not indeed imagine and see coming another
45
The Post Card, 249.
67
epoch of humanity in which, tomorrow, one would no longer deal with
corpses either by cremation or by inhumation, either by earth or by fire?
Would not the democracy to come gain by opening still wider the spectrum
of possible choices? Will one not invent unheard-of techniques, fitted like
their predecessors to the dictatorial power of a phantasm as well as to
technical possibilities and which would then deliver them over corpses, if
there still are any, neither to the subsoil of humus, nor to fire of heaven or
hell? In this future, with these other ways of treating the corpse, if there still
are any, today’s institutions, today’s orders, would appear as vestiges,
anachronistic orders or sects of a new modern Middle Ages. People would
speak of cremators and the inhumers . . . as oddities that were both
unheimlich and dated, as archaic curiosities for historians or anthropologists
of death. . . .You have to be to dream. 233 (326).
Derrida limits the political question about the disposal of human remains to two (he
forgets burial at sea and cryogenics, but no matter). Although Derrida also
discusses the survivance, living on of a published work, recalling the title of an essay
published in Parages, and as living death, also under the heading of the phantasm,
he does not examine either the ways the written remains, or cremains, are stored or
question the politics of their storage.46 Is there no such thing as a living will when it
Following Derrida’s practice of citing numerous passages Lacan in footnotes to
“Le facteur de la vérité” without comment, I offer these passages on survivance of
the book and the corpse from The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2: “In Robinson
Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks and the one
keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have desired
is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and the
character called Robinson Crusoe. . . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book
46
68
comes to the survivance of one’s papers? Does the specificty of eco-destruction of a
given support or subjectile matter? Or not?
Just Saying
What wouldn’t Derrida have said!
What will he not have said!
This is an exclamation, not a question . . .
In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida tells two anecdotes about the two times he
met Jacques Lacan in person: “I remark that the only two times we met and spoke
briefly one with the other, it was a question of death between us, and first of all from
Lacan’s mouth. In Baltimore, for example, he spoke to me of way in which he
bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted,
taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated, filmed, kept alive by millions of
inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead” (130); “The book lives its
beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this
alliance of the living and the dead. I shall say that this finitude is survivance.
Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a
sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death”
(130); “like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a
living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars,
urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that
resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or
the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by
animating it, like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not
Körper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional
spirituality” (131); “in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as
treatment, by the family and / or the State, of the so-called dead boy, what we call a
corpse.,. . . not just in the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral
itself, in the organized manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical
procedures whereby we . .deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of
a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics
of dying alive or dying dead” (132).
69
thought he would be read, in particular by me, after his death.”47 Furthermore,
Derrida devotes a paragraph summarizing his relation to Lacan as one of death:
So there was a question between us of death; it was especially a question of
death. I will say even only of the death of one of us, as it is with or chez all
those who love each other. Or rather he spoke about it, he aloe, since for my
part I never breathed a word about it. He spoke, alone, about our death,
about his death that would not fail to arrive, and about the death or rather
the dead one that, according to him, I was playing.48
Will how we read The Post Card, a text to which Derrida returns in “Love Lacan,”
have changed now that its author is dead, in the ordinary sense of the word?49 Can
we read it? Or can we gloss what remains of its burning, its ashes, its considers,
“gloss” being a synonym for luster and derived from Old English, Scandiavanian, and
Icelandic words for flame and glow? Does reading mean glossing over the question
of glossing?50
“For the Love of Lacan,” in Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans
Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 39-69; to 50-51. I will hereafter frequently shorten the title
to “Love Lacan.”
47
Ibid, 52.
On the two editions of Parages, 1986 and 2003, see footnote 2 above. A number
of essays Derrida wrote on the occasion of the death of a friend were gathered
together in an book, first published in English as The Work of Mourning, trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
On the many paratextual oddities of The Work of Mourning, see Richard Burt,
"Putting Your Papers in Order: The Matter of Kierkegaard’s Writing Desk, Goethe’s
Files, and Derrida’s Paper Machine, or the Philology and Philosophy of Publishing
After Death," Rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010).
48
49
Although gloss is a shimmer or shine in Germanic languages, a more likely source
historically for the word in the sense of "elaborate, define." “Glossa” means "tongue"
50
70
So You Say
In response to this question, let me cite two passages in The Post Card, both of
which concern and a Lacanian reading of Derrida Lacan’s reading of Derrida that
will help us begin glossing what I have called quasi-cruxes. The passage from the
Post . . . I will cite first will recall Derrida’s exclamations, not questions, in “Love
Lacan” about what Lacan will or would have said or not have said. This passage
concerns Lacan and Derrida did (not) saying about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined
Letter in the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” and in “Le facteur de la vérité.” The
passage is remarkable not only for the absence of bibliographical references but for
about who said what but for having an anonymous third party tell this story about
who meant to say what according to someone who goes mentioned and is therefore
not exactly saying anything in the future anterior in the conditional:
Lacan, in truth, meant to say what I said, under the heading of dissemination.
What next! As for me, all the while apparently speaking of dissemination, I
reconstituted this word and therefore into a destination. In other words, if it
can be put thus, Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I am
only doing what he says he is doing. And there you are, the trick has been
played, destination is back in my hand and “dissemination” is reversed into
in Greek, and then passes to Latin and Romance languages to mean, initially, a hard
word and then the explanation one puts in the margin to elucidate it. It enters
English first as "gloze" then changes to gloss mid 16th century (see the OED, s.v.
gloss). This sense is no doubt primary--although phrases like "gloss over" probably
fudge the difference. Fortuitously, I think this brings us to the distances between
glossing and reading. I thank Jacob Riley and William West for drawing my attention
to the etymology of gloss.
71
Lacan’s account. This is what I had describe to you one day, three-card
monte, the agility of the expert hands to which one would yield oneself
bound hand and foot.51
Who is speaking here in this envoi? Derrida? Maybe. Why is “dessimination” put in
scare quotes? The speaker’s analogy between three card monte and what was said
about Derrida merely repeating Lacan clearly serves to imply that a shell game has
been unjustly played on Derrida’s texts / lectures about Lacan: “Lacan already
meant what I will have said, and myself I am only doing what he says he is doing.”
Derrida has been falsely said (but said by whom?) to have said what Lacan meant to
have said then shrink-wrapped into one of three cards and entered into play in a
game which Derrida will always lose. But Derrida does not say that. Is Derrida
rigging the reading of what is still to be read, not just defensively and preemptively
having someone voice a complaint about an injustice done—by who knows whom-to Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter?”
In “For the Love of Lacan,” a text that Derrida wrote, as I have said, after Lacan
was dead, Derrida returns to the other passage in The Post Card I mentioned above,
a passage which Derrida retells a story about Lacan misreading Derrida: “Lacan
made a compulsive blunder; he said that he thought I was in analysis . . . The thing
has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card (202-04).”52 Derrida
spares the reader the task of rereading it but also allows any reader to stop reading
“Love Lacan” and go to the Post . . . and reread it. Yet if the reader were to go to
pages 202-04 of the Post . . . he or she would find that Derrida does not quote
51
52
Op cit, 151.
Op cit, 68.
72
Lacan’s words when discussing what Lacan mistakenly said about Derrida was in
analysis. See for yourselves. Only very near the end of “Love Lacan” does Derrida
deliver the story along with the quotation from Lacan he left out of The Post Card:
“In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever withdrawn
from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the syntax and the
reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about whom I did not know that
–to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not know that he was in analysis—
about whom I did not know that he was in analysis—but this is merely a
hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who has written a preface to this
Verbier.”53 We will return to this passage later and attend several times in a
necessarily paratactic fashion to Derrida’s retellings of this story. For now, I wish
only to say that in “Love Lacan,” Derrida retells the anecdote he had already told
before in the Post . . . in a way that makes it fully readable. Only in this later text,
“For the Love of Lacan,” does Derrida retrieve Lacan’s words from the archive and
cite them. Having retrieved them, however, Derrida does not read them. Nor does
he quote Lacan’s next sentence in which Lacan reads Derrida’s preface “Fors” as
evidence for Lacan’s supposition, not declaration, that Derrida is in analysis. Does it
matter that to a reading of “For the Love of Lacan” that Derrida returned to what
Lacan said about him and to what Derrida said about Lacan in nearly twenty years
earlier, by Derrida’s count, in The Post Card, after Lacan died? Does the media
Ibid, 68. “Verbier” is translated in English as “magic word.” Aubier-Flammirion is
the name of the press that published Abraham and Torok’s Cryptonymie. Lacan
refers here to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s Cryptonymie: Le verbier de
L’Homme aux translated as The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans
Nicholas Rand, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
53
73
Derrida references with respect to the archive in “Love Lacan,” the tape recorders in
front of him recording what he says as he speaks, matter in relation to Lacan’s death
the way the fax matters to Derrida when discussing Freud’s reliance on letters in
Archive Fever?54
Say again?
As I have said, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” for a colloquium on Lacan organized
and held after Lacan was dead, and “Love Lacan” was published first as an article in
Lacan avec les philosophes (1991) and subsequently as the second chapter of
Derrida’s book, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996). The three sentences with
which I began the present essay paraphrase the first three sentences of “Love
Lacan.” These sentences of “Love Lacan” are set off typographically on the page as
three different lines:
What wouldn’t Lacan have said!
What will he not have said!
This is an exclamation, not a question . . . .55
Derrida repeats the phrase three times, the second inverting exactly the first, and on
the same page just after the first paragraph: “What will Lacan not have said! What
wouldn’t he have said!” This second, inverted repetition of the first two sentences,
printed continuously on the page rather than broken into two separate lines as the
first two sentences are. Derrida exclaims the nearly the same words a third time
54
55
See Derrida’s aside: “(look at the tape recorders that are in this room),” op cit, 40.
Ibid., 39.
74
near the end of the section Derrida calls the “third protocol”: “what would Lacan
have said or not have said!”56
As I have already said more than once, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” after Lacan
died, and Derrida sends off “Love Lacan” as if by he, Derrida, were already dead,
already taking Lacan place, as if looking to how he, Derrida, will be read after his
death. In this case, however, Derrida significantly leaving out the first of Derrida’s
first two sentences about Lacan and the second of the second two: “What will I not
have said today!”57 Derrida retains only the negative formulation for himself, allows
only what he will not have said, not what he will have said. He thereby leaves, as if
shut, access to the exclamation of what he will or would have said today by erasing
the published half of his archive in the form of an article.
JustUs
I must you to wait patiently for just a bit longer before we return to the passages
in the Post . . . I cited and attend further to these stylistic repetitions concerning
what will or wouldn’t have been said or not said, Derrida’s insistence that they are
exclamations, not questions, and Derrida’s subtle but deliberate different
rephrasings of the opening two lines, his division of Lacan and his division of
himself from Lacan. For the moment, let me note a similar stylistic repetition to
which we will need to attend alongside, or “with” the those I have just cited above:
Derrida uses the words “I say good luck” twice, although he punctuates them
differently:
56
57
Ibid., 62.
Ibid., 39; 69.
75
to those who are waiting for me to take a position [“saying Lacan is right or
doing right by Lacan”] so they can reach a decision [arreter leur judgment], I
say, “Good luck.”58
And:
I say good luck to any narrator who would try to know what was said and
written by whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not have
said! 59
Derrida’s repetition of the words “I say good luck” invert the order of Derrida’s
repetition of what Lacan and Derrida would or would not have said. Two inverted
repetitions bind, a word I use advisedly since Derrida uses it when discussing the
publication of Lacan’s Écrits in “Love Lacan,” these repetitions bind Derrida to Lacan
in relation to their reading and publications: in the first set of repetitions, Derrida
takes Lacan’s place (at the end of the essay, after Lacan takes his place a second time
in reverse) as someone who will or would not have said in one case and Lacan takes
the place Derrida had earlier assigned himself in the second instance.60
Ibid, 58.
Ibid, 62.
60 Other stylistic repetitions are equally deliberate. In The Post Card, one finds
similar stylistic repetitions such as “To be continued (la séance continue)”; 36; 190,
320, 337, 362, 376, 409, 451. [add other examples to speculate on Freud] Derrida
also uses nearly the same word to describe his reading practice in The Post Card and
“Love Lacan.” For one example, see “extremely careful and slow, bringing
micrological refinement “For the Love of Lacan” (op cit, 44); and “microscopic
examination” (ibid., 45). Derrida uses frequently uses “I have said” and variations on
the phrase customarilty to be found in academic prose, none of which are
necessarily mean anything but all of which nevertheless carry a charge, however
small, given the repetitions of phrases about what Lacan and Derrida “said.” These
repetitions are beyond the limits of my capacity to gloss. Derrida sometimes
reduces the problem of distinguishing between glossing and reading or between
reading and not reading to effects that he has noticed and those that haven’t yet
58
59
76
In binding these two repetitions together within the same sentence, Derrida
makes the question of what Lacan or Derrida has or hasn’t said under the heading of
the archive (and under the subheading of “death”).61 If we cite the lines preceding
Derrida repeats the lines “what will Lacan not have said today!” at the end of a
discussion of the archive:
The future of Lacanian thought as it moves beyond the Écrits is all the more
difficult in that Lacan was an incomparable listener and his discursive
machine was one of such sensitivity that everything could be inscribed there
with finesse or discretion. (This is quite right; who doesn’t try to do the
same?) But, what is more, it is inscribed there in the spoken words of a
seminar that, by giving rise to numerous stenotyped or tape-recording
archivings, will have fallen prey not only to the problem of rights . . . but also
to all the problems posed by delays in publishing and of an editing—in the
American sense—that was of the most active sort. Since all of these things
hang by a hair, since the stakes get decided in a word, an ellipsis, a verbal
modality, conditional or future anterior, especially when one knows Lacan’s
been noticed but are waiting to be noticed. See, for example, “I will say the same the
same things I have deliberately left out of this defense, works such as Eperons: Les
styles de Nietzsche or la carte postale, which each it its own what, nevertheless
extend a reading (of Freud, Nietzsche, and some others) begun at an earlier stage,
the deconstruction of a certain hermeneutics as well as the theorization of a the
signifier and the letter with its authority and institutional power . . . to locate their
effects where I could spot them—but these effects are everywhere, even where they
remain unnoticed.” “Punctuations,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2,
trans. Jan Plu & Others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 124.
Derrida’s distinction effectively shelves his readings under the heading of his
autobiography, or, in this essay, under the heading of an apologia pro sua vita.
61
62, 66.
77
rhetoric, I say good luck to any narrator who would try to know what was
said and written by whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not
have said!62
As we shall see, Derrida similar situates his comment about what he will not have
said in relation to the “problem of the archive.”63
In “Love Lacan,” Derrida places the “just us” of saying or not saying or saying you
are not sure you will say about the dead (who include the living, who always dead,
Derrida says, when you speak for them) is placed under the title “love,” a title that is
of course reversible, about loving Lacan and what Lacan loved. Derrida does not
comment in the essay on “love” and whether he will say that he and Lacan loved
each other more marks the limit of what can or can not have been said by Derrida in
“Love Lacan,” and by extension about what each of the said about the other when
they were both alive and what Derrida still says about Lacan now that Lacan is dead.
Lacan’s archivization the future reading of Lacan, or anyone else, as the archive is a
question of the future, not the past, in Archive Fever.64
The same sorts of things happens to Derrida’s published seminars. See Richard
Burt, “Putting Your Papers in Order,” op cit.
62
Ibid., 43.
In “Love Lacan,” Derrida never actually directly “says” anything about his
relationship with Lacan—first he says he “is not sure if” he “will say” that he and
Lacan loved each other very much, then he asks if he has not said that they did:
“Now, wasn't this a way of saying that I loved and admired him greatly?” Is Derrida
saying that he and Lacan did love each other very much without saying so or saying
and not saying they did? If so, is Derrida’s manner of not saying just given that
Lacan is dead? What is the relation between justice and saying or not saying in
Derrida’s lines? (See Derrida’s note on“the undeconstructible injunction of justice”
in Specters of Marx, op cit 267, n73.)
63
64
78
Après tout: ‘Pas’ “Du tout”
In order to address these broader questions, let us attempt to grasp more exactly
what motivates them, especially Derrida’s turn to the archive, by proceeding in an Xcentric manner now to gloss another set of cruxes, with respect the way Derrida
makes reading Lacan a question of the archive, in the last chapter of The Post Card,
“Du tout,” and parentheses in a passage in “Love Lacan” the end of the sometimes
forgotten last chapter “Du tout,” left untranslated as is “Le facteur de la vérité.”65
First, let me pause to gloss the title “Du tout.” In The Post Card, Derrida several
places talks about the Paratext as a book and its paratexts in different ways, as not a
book, as a book with a false preface, as a book with four chapters, of “Facteur” as an
appendix.66 At one point, Derrida goes so far as enter a chapter of “To Speculate--on
‘Freud’” as a paratext even though the chapter is not finished: Of “Seven:
Postscript,” Derrida says that “it resembles another postscript, another codicil, the
postscript or codicil to the entire book this time. . . . This is the end: an appendix that
is as reduced as possible, free, detachable too, a play appendix.”67 The most
anarchivic of Derrida’s remixes of his book is “Du tout,” a chapter that is arguably a
long paratext to Derrida’s discussion of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,”
the “Facteur,” an epitext when published as an article but then turned peritext when
published in The Post Card. Yet Derrida never reads “Du tout” as a paratext. He just
On the first page of “Love Lacan,” Derrida immediately places his introductory
exclamations about Lacan’s saying under the heading of the archive: “To deal with
this enigma of the future anterior and the conditional . . . is to deal with the problem
of archivization” op. cit, 39-40.
66 You might read these envois as the preface of a book that I have not written”
(ibid., 3); “Beyond all else I wanted, . . to make a book” (ibid., 5).
67 Ibid., 387.
65
79
refers to it as one of the “three last parts of the present work.”68 “Du tout” is most
“anarchivically” archival insofar as its inclusion is not motivated, not read as such,
and therefore resembles the “seventh chapter” of The Post Card that “in certain
respects adds nothing.”69
Les mots juste
Rather than catalogue the ways in which Derrida routes Lacan to the archive, I
want to make two points that bear on the quasi-crux, “X-ian.” First, Derrida makes
the titel the condition of the archive. In “Title to Be Specified,” he writes: “the noun
titleer would signify two things. In Old French, a titleer (titrier]—was a monk
responsible for the archives of a monastery. He was an archivist, the archivist par
excellence, for if every archivist must prevail over the order of titles—how can there
be an archive without a title [pas d’archive sans titre]—what is to be said of the
guardian of titles?”70 I have spoken earlier of Derrida’s use of “faux-tires,” and offer
in a footnote below an example of variations Derrida or a publisher made the title
Ibid, 3.
“Title to Be Specified,” in Parages, ed. John Leavey (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2011) 193-215; to; 386. For an even more curious case, see
translator Thomas Dutoit’s note to Derrida’s On the Name : “On the Name
compromises three essays . . . the three essays appeared in France as a Collection of
three separately bound but matching books published by Editions Galilee. On the
Name, the title this book published by Stanford University Press, thus is not a
translation of any French book title by Jacques Derrida; it is a name given to what is
a hypothetical book in France. The title On the Name would in French be Sur le nom.”
“Translating the Name?” in On the Name, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1995), ix.
70 Ibid; 198-99; Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986, 219-47; to 227. A ssecond edtion
includes Blanchot’s name in the title of the last chapter, “Maurice Blanchot est mort,”
Parages, revised and augmented edition, Paris: Galilée, 2003, 267-300. This chapter
is nto incuded in Leavey’s translation, ibid.
68
69
80
from a different chapter of Parages.71 Second, translation complicates ableit in
microscopic ways, the philological task of determining what is to be glossed and
how it is to be glossed. I offer an example of the different ways the letter “X”
appears typographically in a passage from Parages on “X without X,” a phrase to
which we will return, in French and in the English translation in the footnote
below.72 I want to pursue the anarchivity of Derrida’s archive as the limit of what
can ne archived not only to translation and media but to the storage and publication
In a note, 103, Derrida gives the original title and subtitle of this chapter, first
published in English, as “LIVING ON. Border Lines” but does not explain why he
dropped the subtitle. See Parages, 1986, 118. In Parages, 2001, the typography
appears as “Living On / Border Lines,” 102. In Deconstruction and Criticism, the
typography is as follows; “Living On . Borderlines.” (the dot is the middle of the
space between “On” and “Border”; it is not a period). The subtitle is dropped from
the first page of the essay but then appears as LIVING ON: Border Lines” on 75; 76.
In the second edition, the subtitle has been removed from the table of contents and
the first page of the essay, 9; 62; 63. If anyone thinks that this kind of microphilological attention is de facto a waste of time, let him or her consult Derrida’s
reading of the differences between the titles in the reverse order of Blanchot’s name
and the title “un reçit” in two versions of Blanchot’s Folie due jour [Madness of the
Day] in Parages, ibid, 113-123. To be sure, Derrida never paid that kind of attnetion
to differences in translations and editions.
72 Here are the passages, first in French, and then, the relevant part, in English:
Atopie, hypertopie, lieu sans lieu, cette voix narrative en appellee dans le texte du
sans qui vient si fréquemment, dans le texte de Blanchot, neutraliser (sans poser,
sans nier) un mot, un concept, un terme (X sans X). Sans sans privation ni negativité
ni manqué (sans sans “sans”) don’t j’ai tenté d’analyser a nécessité dans Le “sans” de
la coupure pure et dans Pas. . . . “Lieu sans lieu”, nous l’avons lu, et voici maintenant
“à distance sans distance” . . . .
“Survivre,” Parages, ibid, 151
A word, a concept, a term (x-less x): without (or “-less”), without privation or
negativity or lack (“without” without without, less-less “-less”)l the necessity of
which I have tried to analyze in “The Sans of the Pure Cut” and “Pace Not(s).”
“Living On,” Parages, ibid, 103-215; to 132-33. Derrida references Parages in
relation to the phrase In this graphics desire is without “without,” is a without
without without” in “To Speculate on Freud”: “9. A Cf. Pas and Le Paeregon in La
Veritie en peinture. [The phrase here is “un sans snas sans.]” See note 9, p. .
71
81
of Derrida’s texts, including their publishing history, errata, editions, editions,
bindings, copies, and so on.73 Derrida uses the word “anarchivic” in Archive Fever to
mean “the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence”.74 Reading
Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida finds that Freud’s concept of the
“death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say archiviolithic. It will always have
been archive –destroying . . . . Archiviolthic force leaves nothing of its own behind . . .
The death drive is . . . what we will later call mal d’archive, “archive fever.”75
Anarchivity is the radical destruction of the archive and the remains of what can
never be archived, the ash of the archive.
By unfolding, carefully and patiently some specific quasi-cruxes in Derrida’s
various archiving of his publications related to The Post Card, we may grasp how the
question of reading Derrida now, after his death, is also a question of the anarchivity
of his archived texts, anarchivity being a force which may not properly brought
under the heading of a pre-fabricated, ready-made term like “performavity” since
this anarchivity puts into question any binary opposition between publication and
ash, between the legible or readable and the illegible or unreadable, between
between memory and the present and past tenses—it is archived or it has been
archived—and forgetting and the future anterior--it will have been archive
On Derrida’s interest in the archive and the shift from print to electronic media,
see Richard Burt, "Life Supports: 'Paperless' People, the New Media Archive, and the
Hold of Reading," in New Formations special issue on "Materialities of Text: Between
the Codex and the Net," eds. Nicholas Toburn and Says May. Forthcoming, 2013.
74 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans, Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University
Of Chicago Press, 1998), 7.
75 Ibid., 10; 11.
73
82
destroying.76 As Derrida says of Lacan, “since the legal archive covers less and less
of the whole archive, this archive remains unmasterable and continues on its way, in
continuity with the anarchive.”77 The same thing, more or less, could be said of
Derrida’s archive.
The delirious anarchivity of Derrida’s publications puts the limits of their
reading, or their future anterior (in the conditionl) reading after (the fact of)
Derrida’s death, into question, such that as we turn now to what I am calling quasicruxes, or cruxes for the sake of economy, we are no longer talking about the
symptom or even a “parerpraxis.”78 I want to compare a crux in “Du tout” to a crux
in “Love Lacan.” Here is the crux in “Du tout”: there is a remote relation between
Derrida’s discussion of how to read an error in the first two editions of Lacan’s
Écrits and a story Derrida tells involving a dead friend, a story that inverts a story
one of the letter writers of the “Envois” tells about a mistake Lacan made about
Derrida.
The mention of someone’s death occurs a few pages (513-15) after a lengthy
discussion of whether Lacan’s misquotation of “dessein” (“plot,” “scheme,” or
“design”) from the last lines of Poe’s The Purloined Letter as “destin” (“destiny” or
“fate”) in the last sentence of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” “an altering
citation,” Derrida says, but one about which “’Le facteur de la vérité’ did not say all
that I [Derrida] think, but that in any event carefully refrained from qualifying as a
For the catalogue, I refer the reader to note 13.
“Love Lacan,” op cit, 68.
78 My neologism is designed to give the Freudian lapsus, or parapraxis, a Derridean
inflection by punning on Derrida’s interest in the parergon, the frame, and the
border. I mean to suggest as well that the limits of a “Derridean” reading, Derrida’s
name turned into an adjective are also broached.
76
77
83
“typographical error” or a “slip,” even supposing, you are going to see why I am
saying this, that a somewhat lighthearted analytic reading could content itself with
such a distinction, I mean between a “typo” and a “slip.”79 Derrida then permits
himself to cite what he said before launching into a full-scale assault on François
Roustang’s reading of the mistake as a slip, not a typo:
Now here is the most ingenious finding: what remains a typographical error
two out of three times in given Écrits [Derrida does not specify the editions
or give the relevant page numbers] becomes Roustang’s “slip,” Roustang
having contented himself, somewhat quickly it is true, with reproducing the
ur-typo, everyone including its author, turning all around that which must
not be read.80
Prompted by a request from René Major, one of the conference organizers, Derrida,
supplies the name of a friend he had hitherto kept secret: “She probably had in
mind someone whose name I can say because I believe that he is dead.”81
As I Was Saying I Would Have Said
The question of what is an error is an typo or a slip is what textual critics
would ordinarily regard as a crux. The mention of the dead friend would have no
bearing on the story about the error in the Écrits involving a crux the meaning of
which Derrida aparently wants to leave undecided. In order to understand what I
Ibid, 513. In Lacan’s Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, ed and trans,
Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007) As I note above, Fink leaves
the error Lacan made at the end of “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” in mistaking
“dessein” for “destin” when citing Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter.
80 Ibid, 513.
81 Ibid, 519.
79
84
take to be a remote relation between mention and the story, I now move to what
will be perhaps the most X-centric or perhaps the most XOXXOOOX-centric of the
cruxes Derrida uses in “Love Lacan” and The Post Card, among all of those I will
gloss. I say they are perhaps most X-centric because they are perhaps the hardest to
notice; Derrida is not deliberately drawing his reader’s attention to them as he does
the repetitions and inversions we saw in “Love Lacan.”
The crux I gloss bears directly on the questions we will have been asking
about Derrida’s effacement of both the proper name and the title. In the first
repetition and inversion, Derrida says Lacan told about him to a similar story
someone else told Derrida at a conference, both of which Derrida tells with
reference to a dead friend. In a passage in “Du tout” that repeats, or precedes,
“p/repeats,” as if in reverse order, the passage in “Love Lacan” in which Derrida
parenthetically mentions a dead friend while discussing Lacan’s blunder, Derrida
tells a story soon after castigating Roustang about saying that what may have been a
typo was actually a slip, Derrida says that he would “prefer to tell [us] a brief story,”
a story that bears a remarkable, Derrida might (not) have said uncanny,
resemblance to “Derrida’s story about Lacan saying that Derrida was “inanalysis”
(sic).82 The story Derrida reverses Derrida’s relationship to the analyst. This time
Derrida himself is said to be the analyst. At a conference, someone came up to tell
Derrida she knew he was psychoanalyzing someone but didn’t give Derrida a name:
‘I know that so and so has been in analysis with you for more than ten
years.” My interlocutor, a woman, knew that I was not an analyst, and for my
82
Ibid., 518; 202.
85
own part I knew, to refer to the same shared criteria, that what she was
saying with so much assurance was false, quite simply false.83
In addition to the way the two stories invert Derrida’s position as analyst and
analysand, both stories mention, as I have said, a dead friend of Derrida’s. This is
the second repetition and inversion. Immediately after this story, in the telling of
which Derrida leaves the woman unnamed, René Major invites Derrida to state the
name of the person who was not in analysis: “Given the point we have reached,
what prevents you from saying who is in question? To state his name now seems
inevitable.”84 Major does not ask Derrida to give the name of the woman who said
she knew who Derrida was (not) analyzing. Derrida responds as follows:
René Major asks me the name of the analyst in question. Is this really
necessary? Moreover, my interlocutor did not name him. She contented
herself with characteristics . . . No name was pronounced. It was only after
the fact, reflecting on the composite that she had sketched, that I attempted
an induction.85
Here is the first narrative repetition. In the last pages of “Love Lacan,” repeats and
inverts the woman’s story he tells in “Du tout”: this time Derrida tells the story of
Lacan having said that Derrida having been an analysand, a story also about an
error, the dead friend is mentioned in a parenthetical sentence within Derrida’s
story about what Lacan said rather than before it or after it: “Lacan made a
Ibid., 518.
Ibid., 518.
85 Ibid., 518-19.
83
84
86
compulsive blunder,” Derrida writes; “he said that he thought I was in analysis.”
Derrida proceeds to quote Lacan’s unofficial version. I now quote it again:
In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever
withdrawn from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the
syntax and the reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about
whom I did not know that –to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not
know that he was in analysis—about whom I did not know that he was in
analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who
has written a preface to this Verbier.”86
Derrida then introduces in parentheses an anecdote in “Love Lacan” about the death
of the a friend: “(Lacan . . . was then obviously unaware of the fact that one of the
two [Derrida and his supposed analyst], was dead by the time I wrote the preface in
question, which was this written to his memory, as homage, and in his absence.”87
Only after inserting this parenthentical remark about a dead friend does Derrida
return to Lacan’s blunder and ask “How could Lacan have made his listeners laugh . .
. on the basis of a blunder, his own . . . ? How could he insist on two occasions on”
Derrida’s “real status as noninstitutional analyst and on what he wrongly supposed
to be my status as institutional analysand, whereas he ought to have been the first to
. . .”88
So You (Would or Will Have) Said
Op cit, 68.
Ibid., 68.
88 Ibid., 68-69.
86
87
87
Having glossed these narrative repetitions and inversions, we may also gloss
stylistic repetitions and inversions in the passage we have just not “read.” Just as
the story in “Du Tout” repeats the story about Lacan in the “Envois,” so in “Love
Lacan” Derrida refers the reader back to the same story in the “Envois”: “The thing
has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card.”89 These repetitions
come with omissions and additions that may be glossed, if one can still call what I
am doing “glossing,” as having inverted each other. For example, Derrida does not
give the quotation from Lacan in “Envois,” but he does give it in “Love Lacan”;
inversely, Derrida names the dead friend in “Du tout” but does not in “Love Lacan.”
One could go even further and point out the parentheses uses in “Love Lacan” to
mention his dead friend and to say Lacan was mistaken recall the figurative
parentheses in which Derrida places the anecdote about Roustang in “Du Tout”: “A
few words in parenthesis”; “I will not close this short parenthesis”; “Here I close this
parenthesis.”90
These cruxes are at the outer limits of the borders of glossing, or of any glossing
to come. As with the title “Du tout,” we come at these limits to the anarchivity of
Derrida’s own texts the question of reading after death becomes a question of the
title, anecdotes, and publication. In the last crux, I will gloss, Derrida again tells a
story about an error, in this case, an error Lacan made, one of many, when speaking
about Derrida. Derrida puts this story in a long parenthetical paragraph and to the
way that paragraph follows the second anecdote Derrida tells about meeting Lacan
in person, an anecdote Derrida that involves dates and a posterous order of
89
90
Op cit., 202-04.
Ibid., 512; 513; nd 515.
88
publication and that Derrida defers for so long that he finally begins telling it by
saying “I am not forgetting.”91 Here are the first and last sentences of the paragraph
that follows the first anecdote: “Prior to any grammatology: “Of Grammatology” was
the first title of an article published some five years before Lacan’s new title of an
article published some five years before Lacan’s new introduction and—and this
was one of the numerous mistakes or misrecognitions made by Lacan--it never
proposed a grammatology. . . The book that treated of grammatology was anything
but a grammatology”) (52).92 Derrida does not put write of grammatology with
initial capital letters, as it should be written, Of Grammatology. Why not? And why
does Derrida enclose this very general accusation about Lacan’s mistakes with
parentheses?
We can best respond to these questions, I think, by turning the the anecdote that
immediately precedes this paragraph in parentheses, an anecdote Derrida tells a
story about what Lacan told concerning the publication of, a passage that I cited as
an epigraph and cite yet once more :
I am not forgetting the binding which all of this is bound up. The other worry
Lacan confided me in Baltimore concerned the binding of the Écrits, which
had not yet appeared, although its publication was imminent. Lacan was
worried and slightly annoyed, it seemed to me, with those at Le Seuil, his
publishers, who had advised him not to assemble everything in a single large
Op cit, 52.
The title of the text to which Derrida refers is not properly capitalized here. The
text is Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivack (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1974; second, corrected edition, 1997.
91
92
89
volume of more than nine hundred pages. There was thus a risk that the
binding would not be strong enough and would give way “You’ll see,” he told
me with a gesture of his hands, “it’s not going to hold up.” The republication
in the two-volume paperback edition in 1970 will thus have reassured him,
in passing, not only to confirm, the necessity of placing the “Seminar on the
Purloined Letter” at the “entry post” of the Écrits, but also to fire off one of
those future anteriors (antedates or antidotes) that will have been the
privileged mode of all the declarations of love that he so often made to me, by
mentioning (I dare not say by antedating), and I quote, “what I will literally
call the instance prior to any grammatology’.”93
This is what the first of what Derrida says are two first anecdotes about meeting.
Lacan. Before returning to the question of Derrida’s use of all lower case letters for
his book Of Grammatology and his use of parentheses, let me gloss this potentially
unlimited crux even further. the anecdote he defers telling, just after talking about
his reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” followed from the way
Lacan published the Écrits and before returning to “the republication of the
paperback edition in 1970”:
Now if there is one text that stands more than any other in this position and
at this post of binder [sic], it is the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” As
you know, the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” is given a “privilege,”
which is Lacan’s word; I quote Lacan: “the privilege of opening the sequence
[the sequence of the Écrits] despite its diachrony. In other words, Écrits
93
Ibid, 52.
90
collects and binds together all the texts out of which it is composed, with the
exception of the seem which, by coming at the beginning, is thereby given the
‘privilege’ of figuring the synchronic configuration of the set and thus binding
the whole together. It therefore seemed legitimate to me to take a privileged
interest in this privilege. If I use the word binding here, the binding that
holds the moment of reading and rereading, it is because on one of the two
sole occasions in my life on which I met Lacan and spoke briefly with him, he
himself spoke to me of binding and of the binding of the Écrits.94
With the borders of this gloss thus expanded to include a question of textual
criticism and publication as a question of reading and rereading in ancdote told in
reverse order and conspicuously deferred, we may now return to Derrida’s
parenthetical paragraph in which he writes “of grammatology.” Through the use of
parentheses, Derrida allows himself to say some things about Lacan with greater
force and even more decisiveness descisvely outs does two partly. Derrida corrects
Lacan by appealing to dates (“five years before”), but does not bother to archive all
of Lacan’s many other mistakes or misrecognitions. At the same time, Derrida
allows himself to depart from the bibliographical norm for titles. By citing the title
of grammatology in lower case letters and introducing a pointless yet conscipuous
error, Derrida turns the relation of his own work and its title inside out, then stating
only what his book was not about. Whatever “of grammatology” is about, or why it
bears that title, or why Derrida waits to make such a bold and general accusation
right after telling the anecdote, all remain completely unclear, at rest and arrested.
94
(52);
91
The crux implodes and explodes: One wonders what kind of mistake Lacan is
supposed to have made by antedating his texts. Derrida’s reading, in the past tense,
of Lacan’s use of the future anterior, becomes Derrida’s non-reading of his own
works. “Was anything but” is perhaps echoed in the equally negatively stated
sentence near the end of “Love Lacan”: What I will not have said today!”95
The least—or the most—we can say is that it is not clear in “Love Lacan” that one
can one use the future anterior to speak of the what the dead will have said that
differs significantly from speaking of the dead using the past tense; that is, it is by no
means clear whether or not the future anterior just reappropriating, hence unjustly,
what has been said not only about by the dead by the living but of what the living
said or will have said about the living. When Derrida says Lacan fired “off one of
those future anteriors (antedates or antidotes)” (49) he uses the future anterior to
describe Lacan’s use of the future anterior as an act of love: “that will have been the
privileged mode of all the declarations of love that he so often made to me” (49). Yet
Derrida puts this point about Lacan’s mode of declaring his love in the past tense:
“he so often made to me.” When Derrida comes to the end of “Love Lacan” and
accuses Lacan of having made a “compulsive blunder,” Derrida equates Lacan’s use
of the future anterior quite negatively with reapproriation: “Here is a better known
episode that occurred some ten years later after Lacan used the future anterior
several times to reappropriate by way of antedating when he said, for example . . . )
In a session of the seminar [XXIV] in 1977 (still “l’Insu-que-sait”), Lacan made a
95
(69).
92
compulsive blunder.”96 By collapsing the future anterior into the past tense, Derrida
leaves us to wonder whether any declaration of love is not also a declaration of war,
as if psychoanalysis and deconstruction could only make love and war, not “make
love, not war.”
Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead
Having unfolded the cruxes above, we are now in a position to route the
question of what it means to read Derrida after Derrida’s death, a question that has
informed our glossing of Derrida’s attention to the future of a reading Lacanian
discourse in “Love Lacan,” to a question of the effacement of the title and of the
proper name. Before turning to the next crux let me point out that Derrida several
times excuses himself in “Love Lacan ”from rereading passages or summarizing
what he said in the Post . . . in one case on the grounds that he has already
“formalized readability” in general: “I have already sufficiently formalized
readability under erasure and the logic of the event as graphematic event—notably
as event of the proper name, in which the little devil arrives only to erase itself / by
erasing itself—to be spared having to add anything here for the moment” (48).97 I
turn now now to very last crux, there always being a last gloss after the last, to the
very, very last crux I will gloss before returning to the one with which I began,
(67),
Derrida also states “It goes wihtout saying that my reading [in Facteur] concerned
explicitly . . the question of Lacan’s name, the problems of legacy, of science and
institution, and the aporias of archivization in whichthat name is involved. (LL, 41)
96
97
93
namely the letter “X” in “X-ian.”98 In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida comments on a
condition made on his giving a lecture at a colloquium on “Lacan avec les
philosophes”: “they put forward the pretext of a rule according to which only the
dead could be spoken about here and therefore, if one insisted on speaking of me,
one could so only under the pretext that I play dead, even before the fact, and that I
be given a helping hand when the occasion arose”(47).99 In an anecdote Derrida
relays or relates about meeting Lacan, Derrida says Lacan said something very
similar to Derrida: “At our second and last encounter, during dinner offered by his
in-laws, he insisted on publicly archiving in his own way, with regard to something I
had told him, the disregard of the Other that I had supposedly attempted ‘by playing
dead’”(61). Although Lacan made his comment about playing dead to Derrida
before the conference at which Derrida is speaking happened, but Derrida tells that
anecdote about what Lacan said only after Derrida states the condition unnamed
For another crux I won’t gloss, see Derrida’s comments in Love Lcan on “we” and
“I” in relation to “who will ever have has the right to say: “’we love each other’?”
(43); to the death of the one of whom one speaks; and to “what is getting archived!”
(43). This instance concerns Derrida’s uses of “I” and “we” in the body of the text
and in the third endnote of the book, Resistances of Psychoanalysis. All three
headnotes are uniformly preceded with the word “NOTE” in all capitals followed,
but the first person pronouns used in each vary. In the first note, someone uses the
plural “Our thanks” 119, and in the second note someone similarly writes “we
thank” but then Derrida identifies himself as the writer by using the singular first
person pronoun “I.”
99 “Love Lacan,” 47 and 121n3. The repetition of the word “play” is not as exact in
the French versions as it is the English translation, and it is possible that Derrida
deliberately chose not repeat the same words exactly. In “Pour l’amour de Lacan,”
Derrida uses two different verbs rather than one, “je fasse le mort” (Lacan avec les
philosophes, 403; Resistances, 65) and “en jouant du mort” (Lacan avec les
philosophes 406; Resistances, 69). I by no means fault the translator of the English
edition for translating these two different French verbs as “play” rather than, for
example, as “act” dead and “play” dead. The crux is as much about Derrida’s
variation in word choice as it is the translator’s repetition of the same word.
98
94
colloquium conference organizers put on his speaking only if he played dead: “That
is (was enough just to think of it) to make me disappear nominally as a live
person—because I am alive—to me disappear for life” (“Love Lacan,” 47). Derrida
adds that he would not allow himself to be offended or discouraged by the
“lamentable and indecent incident of the barring of my proper name from the
program and that he was “shocked” by the “symptomatic and compulsive violence”
of forcing to act as if he were dead in order to speak at the conference, but refers the
reader in an endnote to the appendices of Lacan avec les philosophes and does not
make anything of the way Lacan’s words “playing dead” repeat those Derrida used
when speaking of the colloquium.100
Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead
Having glossed these cruxes, we are ready to return to “Love Lacan” and gloss
Derrida’s use of “X-ian” to stand for any proper name that would modify the noun
“psychoanalysis.” Let me begin this gloss with a gloss from another text by Derria
related to the letter “X.” It is getting late, I know, to introduce another text. Please
follow along. You’re almost not there. The degree to which Derrida’s sentence
about “X-ian” psychoanalysis and deconstruction, let us consider the investment
Derrida has in psychoanalysis with relation to “X” in the title by turning to an
endnote to “Marx & Sons,” that is, in Derrida’s response to a group of academic
readers commenting on Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Derrida glosses the phrase “X
without X,” a phrase in which X may stand either for a noun or a name in a title.
100
47.
95
Derrida writes—rather scathingly—of Terry Eagleton’s adoption of the phrase “X
without X” in the title of contribution to the volume:
Eagleton is undoubtedly convinced that, with the finesse, grace and elegance
he is universally acknowledged to possess, he has hit upon a title (‘Marxism
without Marxism’) which is a flash of wit, an ironic dart, a witheringly
sarcastic critique, aimed at me or, for example, Blanchot, who often says –I
have discussed this at length elsewhere—‘X without X.’ Every ‘good Marxist’
knows , however, that noting is closer to Marx, more faithful to Marx, than
this Marxism without Marxism was, to begin with, the Marxism of Marx
himself, if that name still means anything.101
In citing from a text related to Specters of Marx, I mean to move us closer, nor
further, to the question of reading Derrida reading Lacan after Lacan’s death amd
our reading The Post Card and “Love Lacan” after Derrida’s death by using “X
wihtout X” to link even more strongly these questions to the way deconstruction
turn on the displacement of the question of psychoanlaysis having a proper name,
any proper name, in front of it. Derrida introduces the phantasm in Specters of Marx
Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 213–69; to 265.n. 29. On the “x without x”
formulation itself, see also Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. The Instant of My
Death and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 88–9) and “Living On,” op cit, 132-33. See
“Marx & Sons,” for “messianicity without messianism” see Derrida (ibid: 265, n.29
and 267, n.69. For Derrida’s variations on the “x without x” formulation, see “Marx
& Sons,” op cit, wherein Derrida explains the meaning of his formulation
“messianicity without messianism” see Derrida (op cit, 265, n.29 and 267, n.69),
where the translator supplies a helpful commentary on Derrida’s phrases “death
without death” and “relation without relations(s)”). On “community without
community” see Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London:
Verso, 1997, 37, 42, 46–7, n.15; 1999: 250–2); see also Derrida’s discussion of his
title in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” op cit, 284-86.
101
96
via psychoanalysis. As Derrida writes in “Marx & Sons,” “the motifs of mourning,
inheritance, and promise are, in Specters of Marx, anything but ‘metaphors’ in the
ordinary sense of the word . . . They also allow me to introduce questions of a
psychoanalytic type (those of the specter or phantasma—which also means specter
in Greek) . . . All this presupposes a transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself . . . I
have elsewhere, tried to discuss how the transformation might be brought about,
and discuss this at length here” (235). In “Marx & Sons,” then, Derrida once again
raises the question he had raised in “Love Lacan,” citing Resistances of
Psychoanalysis and The Post Card as two of five texts he lists in endnote 32 (265) as
those in which he does the transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself.” In the
endnotes, in a relatively exterior paratextual space, Derrida makes the letter “X” a
mathematical variable of a title. An unreadable letter stands for a word composed
of readable letters in a title is central to the question of quasi-methodological status
of deconstruction and what Derrida calls the transformation of psychoanalytic logic
itself.
“Mort” to Say
In turning now to the crux, “X-ian,” with which we began, we are considering as
part of it the sentence that follows it, “What I will not have said today!” We will
gloss the “X” in relation to what Derrida did not say, to the way he collapses what he
will have said or would have said into the negative, the not said: “ What I will not
have said today!” (68). That’s what Derrida said. Yet what Derrida said, the way he
limits himself to the negative, becomes something “to be glossed” because he
97
introduces an asymmetry between what he says and what about what Lacan will
have said and won’t have said. Turning his text into an archive, Derrida “says” that
consists only of what he will “not have said,” not, as was the case with Lacan also
what he will or would have said. Of course, Derrida doesn’t say that. At least not
exactly. And that is precisely my point. The question I raising here concerns not
only what Derrida did not say, but what the limits of not saying are: where does the
opposition between saying and not saying deconstruct? Why does Derrida
“destruct” it rather than deconstruction?
Let us begin glossing the crux of the “X-ian.” What is it that Derrida has not
said in “Love Lacan” about the name and the title that bears on his erasure of any
proper name that might modify psychoanalysis, on “X-ian?” Derrida has not said
that he wrote one of the postscripts of Lacan avec les philosophes to which he
directs the reader in the headnote and the third endnote of “Love Lacan.” The postscript is entitled “Après Tout: Les Chance du College.”102 What does Derrida say in
this postscript? What he says bears directly on the “adjective” “X-ian”: in the
postscript Derrida talks about the erasure of his name, in the form of an adjective,
from the original colloquium title, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalaysis?,” and its
replacement with the colloquium and book’s title Lacan avec les philosophes.
By not citing his postscript to Lacan avec avec les philosophes in the paratexts—
headnote and endnote--of “Love Lacan,” Derrida effectively writes about the erasure
of his name from the original title in invisible ink, as it were. “X-ian” marks the spot .
. . less, the invisible ink, or, in Derrida’s words, “the history that in France and
102
Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris, Albin Michel, 1991), 421-52.
98
especially in Eastern France, has been written, so to speak, not in ink but in the
effacement of the name”103
Sayve My Name, Sayve My Name
And with the effacement of the name goes the effacement of the title. Derrida has
already given the reader everything he or she would need to find the dossier
regarding the changed title Lacan avec les pilosophes in his headnote and endotes to
“Love Lacan.” I leave some of the materials relevant to a glossing to come filed away
in the footnote below, materials to which refers in his post-script as a “dossier” and
as “archived.”104 I wll point only that Derrida mentions his shock at the change
“Love Lacan,” op cit, 47-48. In relation to Derrida’s use of “X-ian” in “Love
Lacan,”see the indecipherable (coded?) letters or words “EGEK HUM RSXVI STR, if I
am not mistaken” (150) and “P.R.” as “Poste Restante” (50) in The Post Card.
103
In “Après Tout: Les Chance du College,” op cit., Derrida repeats almost exactly
what he said at two different points in “Love Lacan: “Therefore to save time I will
not add anything more for the moment—because I find all this increasingly tedious
and because, let’s say, ‘I know only too well’” (op cit, 47) and “all the texts, which,
are, after all, available and in principle legible by whoever wants to look at them”
(ibid., 41).” Compare the following passages, from Après Tout, which I leave you to
translate, should you wish to do: “Par souci d’économie, je n’ajouterai donc pas
grand-chose. D’une part les documents d’un dossier (une bonne partie de cette
“archive” à laquelle je fais allusion dans mon exposé) sont disponibles, et je l’èspere
facilement lisibles. A chacun de les interpréter” (ibid, 443). Derrida then adds that
he could only repeat what he already said: “D’autre part, je ne pourais ici que
répéter ce j’ai dit lors de cette réunion, a savoir, pour schémetiser,” ibid, 443. On the
archive, Derrida says: “C’est aussi a ces principes et a ces règles que je me référais
dans mons intervention au colloque en évoquant l’objectivité têtue de certains faits
gestes maintenant archivés et que je préfère voir livrés a l’inteprétation de
chacun.,”ibid, 446. And on the publication of the title, Derrida comments: “A ce
silence, le fait est officelement consigné, René Major ne s’était jamais engage, et je
l’en approuve. ) et quand, après que René Major eut bien faits de rompre et silence
en publie et qu’il eut parlé, comme je l’ai fait aussie, de ce que tout le monde n’vait
d’ailleurs pas manqué de remarquer (le changement de titre entre de deux
announces publiques) et de ce don’t tous les participants avaient le droit de
104
99
made to the title of the colloquium and insists that the absence of his name makes
no difference to him at all. Yet he nowhere comments on the condition that he play
dead if he is to participate in the confernece. Alone among all of the contributors to
the appendices, Alain Badiou, who was the person who demanded that no proper
names other than Lacan’s appear in the colloquium title, only Badiou mentions the
condition of playing dead, and he brings it up only to say he is not guilty as charged:
“D’autres, ou les memes, ont jugé exorbitant, stalinien, et relevant du desire de mort,
que je demande qu’un nom proper, parce qu’il était le seul d’un contemporain à être
mis en balance avec celui de Lacan, soit ou éfface, ou équilibré par d’autres.”105 To
have allowed the colloquium title to include Derrida’s name or any name, Badiou
adds, would have been to betrayal [trahison] of Lacan.106
The question I am interested is less about what the contributors of the appendices
said about the change to the conference title than in the way Derrida reserves a
texutal and archival space in “Love Lacan” to say what he as to say. Derrida says he
will not insist on “silencing what he thinks of all of this, but only at the end, ‘off the
record,’ as one says in English.”107 Derrida then glosses this English phrase in
connaitre. Alain Badiou et quelques autres s’en sont plaints, encore une fois non pas
de séance publique mais, autre épreuve de force, en menaçent l’existence des Actes
du Colloque et tentant alors de mettre comme condition à la publication de leurs
exposés un deuxieme effet de censure, l’effacement ou le retrait de ce qui avait été
effectivement et publiquement pronouncé. De qui pouvait-on serieusement espérer
une telle soumission?” ibid, 446. Badiou returned to this “affair” after Derrida died
in a failed effort to turn Derrida into Gilles Deleuze. See Alain Badiou, Logics of
Worlds, (Being and Event 2) trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum; 2009),
545-546.
Ibid, 440.
Ibid, 440.
107 Op cit, 48.
105
106
100
relation to the archive: “Off the record” means not recorded, outside the archive.
We are thus brought back to the difficult question of the record, history, and the
archive. Is there an “outside-the-archive”? Impossible, but the impossible is
deconstruction’s affair.”108 (48). Whatever Derrida says he will say “only at the end”
(48) will be in a paratextual “off the record” space Derrida calls a “post-scriptum, in
parentheses” (48).109 Only “only at the end” (48) never arrives. There is no postscriptum in “Love Lacan,” as there is in Derrida’s “Force of Law,” among many other
texts, no postscript as there is in Archive Fever, among many other texts, and no
parentheses either.
When Derrida exlaims “what will I not have said today!” is he saying that he has
not said anything? Or that someone else---no one else?—will not have heard him
say what he said, that any hearing will have been a non-hearing? Whether Derrida
is saying anytng or not saying it or syaing it by not saying it, and so on, makes no
difference insofar as the question would be the same: where does Derrida say / not
say what he will not have said? At a number of moments in “For the Love of Lacan,”
Derrida goes out of his way to say that he has nothing to say or that he need not say
again what he said before: “It is certainly not because I think I have something more
or irreplaceable to say on these matters; the discussion of what I ventured almost
twenty years ago around those questions would demand a microscopic examination
for which neither you nor I have the time or the patience; as I have already said . . . “;
“I attempted to show this in “Le facteur de la vérité” and elsewhere; I would be
108
109
Ibid, 48.
Ibid, 48.
101
unable to reconstitute all this here in so little time.”110 Is Derrida ever speaking on
the record? It would appear that there is no record of what Derrida said against
which one could empirically show was later retated in an accurate or inaccurate
way.
Even “Mort” to say
What is the relation in “Love Lacan” between speaking of Lacan after his death
and Derrida’s X-ing out any name in relation to pyschoanlaysis at the end? Derrida
erases the proper name says “perhaps we step beyond psychoanalysis” by attending
to the “radical destruction of the archive, in ashes” (45). As I said earlier, Derrida’s
“last point” (69) in “Love Lacan” involves the priority of deconstruction over
psychoanalysis, “the degree” to which “the analytic situation, the analytic institution,
is deconstructed, as if by itself, without deconstruction or deconstructive project”
(69). Derrida here divorces deconstruction from psychonalysis by erasing without
erasing, at least not in this text, his name, or any name from deconstruction. If
deconstruction subsumes pyschoanalysis through the archive and recasts it, in effect
as “so-called psychoanalysis,” a psychoanalysis that is to some degree without
psychoanalysis, why does Derrida turn to psychoanalysis in order to make his
argument about the archive, its “radical destruction, as ashes” (44)? If the problem
of the archivization does If Lacan is just an example of the larger problem of the
archive, why does Derrida choose Lacan as his example?111 Similarly, when
Op cit, 45; 55.
In “Love Lacan,” why does Derrida proceed to locate the problem of the archive,
its paradoxes,” in psychoanalysis, say that “keen attention is required with what
110
111
102
Derrida writes a book on the archive entitled Archive Fever, why it also a book about
Freud? Why does Freud’s name turn up as an adjective in the book’s subtitle, “A
Freudian Impression?” Why is the last paragraph of Archive Fever about Freud
burning?
We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he [Freud] may have
burned. We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive
fever, what have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or of
his “life.” Burned without limit, without remains, and without knowledge.
With no possible response, be it spectral or not, short of or beyond
suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without
a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash.
Naples, 22-28 May 1994112
When writing on the archive, Derrida does not return to psychoanaysis in general
but to specific texts by Freud and Lacan.
In “Love Lacan,” Derrida returns to Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter”
and Derrida’s own reading of it in “Facteur.” In Archive Fever, Derrida goes back to
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the same text that Derrida says in “Love Lacan” he
attempted “a reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. . . (in ‘To Speculate--on
Freud”’),” rereading in Freud’s text in Archive Fever in relation to the archive and the
may be problematic in psychoanalytic discourse—for example, Lcan’s—as concerns
precisely, archivization, the economy of repression as guard, inscription, effacement,
the indestructibility of the letter or the name” (“Love Lacan,” op cit, 44)?
112 Archive Fever Postscript,” op cit, 101. We may add in passing that what Freud
burned of his archive is itself uncertain. See the the introduction to Sigmund Freud
and C. G. Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud
and C. G Jung, xix.
103
death drive, to the archive oriented toward the future, not the past, in which
anarchival repetition is, if not without without repetition, at least repetiton without
compulsion. 113 The importance of psychoanlaysis no longer lies only in the ways it
contributes to a deconstructive account of the problem of the archive through its
interests in “inscription, erasure, blanks, the non-said, memory storage, and new
techniques of archivization” (40) or what would might more commonly be called the
symptomatic reading.
Ghlossed Protocol
We may now say what these glossings, glossing of “configurations” that are not as
stable as those of any “reading” because they have no limits and for which there are
no “protocols,” as there are even for a history of the archive that may never be
possible to write.114 More radically, glossing canonot be limited to the reading of a
single version of a text, a single edition, as Derrida does in “Love Lacan” with respect
Post Card, op cit, 41. See also “The librarian seemed to know me . . . but this did
not get me out of the oath. She asked me to read it . . . Therefore I read it and handed
her back the cardboard covered with a transparent paper that had tendered me. At
this point, she starts to insist, I had not understood: no, you have to read it out loud.
I did so . . . What would an oath that you did not say out loud be worth, an oath that
you would only read, or not say be worth, an oath that you would only read, or that
while writing you would only read? Or that you would telephone? Or whose tape
you would send? I leave you to follow up.” 208 “Did I tell you, the oath that I had to
swear out loud (and without which I could never have been permitted to enter,
stipulated, among other things, that I introduce neither fire nor flame into the
premises: “I hereby undertake . . . not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any
fire or flame . . . and I promise to obey all the rules of the library.” 215-16. And see,
among others, the passages relating reading and fire on pp. 23; 40; 58; 171; 176;
180; 233; and 225.
114 The words in quotation marks are all take from Derida’s description of which
Lacan he read “Facteur” in “Love Lacan,” op cit, 48-49; 53.
113
104
to the Ecrits, which he calls a “stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of
the collection and binding of Écrits, in other words, in 1966.”115 Can deconstruction
write off psychoanalysis, as Derrida apparently does in “Love Lacan” (1991)? Can
deconstruction transform the logic of psychoanalysis, as Derrida says it can in
Specters of Marx?116 Or does the gesture of writing pyschoanalysis off depend on
pyschonalysis having to call itself something, on its having a name that modifies it?
Is deconstruction nameless, that is not dependent on Derrida’s name? Or does it
involve archiving of Derrida’s name from the original the title of the collouqium
erased, even as Derrida erases all proper names that could modify pychoanlysis
with the letter “X?” Or is there a Freudian deconstruction? A Lacanian
deconstruction? I cannot answer these questions—can anyone?—nor canI say that
the last two questions haven’t already put us on the wrong track in bringing back
the proper name as an adjective in a way that assumes that we already know what a
Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis is.
La carte posthume
I do not have answers to these questions. I can only make them more audible—
leave you with them ringing in your ears –by extending the question of reading after
death (Derrida’s, Lacan’s, X’s, yours, mine, ours, and so on) with which we began to
the one time Derrida’s explicitly engages with posthumous publication but does so
without reference to psychoanalysis even though it is under the heading of the
115
Ibid, 48-49.
116
105
phantasm. Glossing only renders, and hence rends any distinction between glossing
and reading.
Earn Burial
Here I quote Derrida quoting Guerrier:
“A few days after the death of Monsieur Pascal . . . a servant of the house
noticed by chance an area in the lining of the doublet of the illustrious
deceased that appeared thicker than the rest, and having removed the
stitching . . . found there a little folded parchment . . . and in the parchment of
a paper written in the same hand: the one was a faithful copy of the other. . . .
All agreed there was no doubt that this parchment, written with so much
care and with such remarkable characters, was a type of memorial that he
kept very carefully to preserve the memory of a thing that he wanted to have
always present to his eyes and mind, since for eight years he had taken care
to stitch and unstitch it from his clothes, as his wardrobe changed. The
parchment is lost; but at the beginning of the manuscript in the Bibliothèque
Nationale, one can find the paper that reproduced it, written in the hand of
Pascal, the authenticity of which was confirmed by a note signed by the Abbé
[Étienne] Périer, Pascal’s nephew. At the top was a cross, surrounded by a
ray of light.117
117
The Beast and Sovereign, Vol. 2, op cit, 212.
106
The material support of Pascal’s note has been lost; the copy has survived; it has
been archived; it has been published; Derrida takes a father’s word for its
authenticity.
Screen captures of Pascal’s Pensees, stored in the Bibliothèque nationale de
107
France in Paris from Alain Resnais’s documentary film Toute la memoire du
monde (1956).
Feu la cindre, Derrida might have said, citing the title of a text in which Derrida’s
many references to a holocaust in The Post Card become recast as references to the
Holocaust, an event Derrida recalls in his coments on Pascal’s note by glossing it in
relation to Paul Celan’s poem, Aschenglorie, one of many Celan’s poems Derrida also
finds difficult to read.118
However the note might be read, it is not to be read, as Pascal’s elder sister,
Gilberte Pascal Périer who published her dead brother’s “little paper” in her Life of
See, for example, these clauses from The Post Card: ““a great-holocaustic fire, a
burn everything into which we would throw, finally, along with our entire memory,
our names, the letters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc. And if nothing
remains . . .” (op cit, 40) and “a holocaust without fire or flame” (op cit, 71). See also
Derrida’s comment on Paul Celan’s poem “Einem, der vor der Tuer stand,” a poem
also has difficulty reading: “Let us read this poem . . . I cannot claim I can read or
decipher this poem,” Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas
Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Forham University Press, 2005), 56; 58. I
should add that Derrida never ceases to use “holocaust” even when referring to the
Holocaust: “Forgive me if I do not name, here, the holocaust, that is to say, literally,
as I chose to call it elsewhere, the all-burning. Except to say this . . . every hour
counts its holocaust” (ibid, 46). If one wished to read Derrida’s work on the archive
in relation to psychoanalysis as a question Derrida engages in Archive Fever, namely,
“Is psychonalysis a Jewish science?” and move from there to a reading of Badiou’s
erasure of Derrida’s name from the colloquium title as an anti-semitic act, as
Derrida obliquely suggests it was in referring to “the sinister political memory of the
history that, in France . . . , has been written” (“Love Lacan,” 47), in order to raise a
similar question about deconstruction and Judaism in relation to psychoanlaysis
would have to take into account Derrida’s “forgetting” of circumcission in The Post
Card, ibid, 222 and in Archive Fever, ibid, 12 and his replacing it, more overtly than
he merely recirculates the word phantasm, with a word he coined, namely,
“circumfession,” and that he first used as the title of a para-autobiographical book he
wrote. See “A Testimony Given” in Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elizabeth
Weber, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 39-58
and “Abraham, the Other, in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. and trans.
Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Forham University Press, 2007), 155.
118
108
Blaise Pascal, in her preface introducing the posthumous writing in which she
narrates the circumstances of its discovery--Pascal had sewn the paper into his
doublet, Derrida tells us, and a servant found it after Pascal died—the note is not to
be read as Pascal’s “last word,” as a master text that would govern the meaning of all
of Pascal’s other writings.119 She justifies its posthumous publication in her Life of
Blaise Pascal by stating that she does not wish to solicit a desire for an a reading of
the words on the paper as a last word, “for I am no ultimate end of any body.”120
Even as what I call “sur-viv-ablity” or perhaps better, “survivance-ability” and
“publish-ability” reach a limit point of the conditions of what can be read (and of
what Derrida is sure he can read). Yet that limit is not an aporia or an impase;
rather, it seem--surprisingly--to be underwritten by the (rigorous?) subcategory of
strictly posthumous publication which is in turn underwritten by a very
Heideggerian sounding of destiny and poetry.
As I noted above, Derrida never wants a last word: “As for me, all the while
apparently speaking of dissemination, I would have reconstituted this word to a last
word and therefore into a destination” (Post Card, op cit, 150). See also “Lacan’s
apparently equivocal ending says only its own dissemination, while ‘dissemination’
has erected inself into a kind of “’last word.’” La carte postale, 163 (In English in the
original). Derrida’s use of the verb “reconstitute” in in The Post Card (ibid, 226) and
in “For the Love of Lacan” “For the Love of Lacan” (see note 47) raises a question
about reading. How does the reconstitution of a reading or a dossier bear on the
question of restitution Derrida raises in “Restitutions of the truth in pointing
[sic][pointure]” in The Truth of Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 355-82. Can reconstitution only fail to
be done justly, something one has to excuse oneself from not having done or that
when done, will require one to defend onself from the accusation that it has been
done unjustly?
120 The Beast and the Soverign 2, op cit, 211.
119
109
Posthumography raises arguably psychoanalytic as well as deconstructive questions
about how Derrida’s archive mis/management Derrida is “to be” read, about what
has been left to be read and about how reading is a practice to be, unlimited, the
definition of the unreadable always to be reopened.121 These questions about what
remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s writings are also
biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical questions concerning the
archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all
of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a
question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida
performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own works, from which he
sometimes quoted, sometimes including handwritten notebooks as well as
published works.122
In additon to the importance Derrida accords Freud in Archive Fever, we might
adduce Freud use files as an extended simile for the topography of the psyche. See
Collected Works Volume 2.
122 Consider the idiosyncratic ways in which Derrida refers to The Post Card in
endnotes to three essays published after it, “My Chances” and “Telepathy,” both
republished in revised form in Psyche: Invention of the Other Volume 1. In the first
endnote to the lead essay, “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” Derrida writes,
If every invention, as invention of the trace, then becomes a movement of
différance or sending, envoi, as I have attempted to show elsewhere, the
postal framework is thereby privileged, as I should like simply to stress here
once again. And to illustrate according to Montaigne, from whose writings I
shall quote here, as a detached supplement to la carte postale, the following
fragment from Des postes (2.22), which names "invention: and situates it
between the animal socius and the human socius: [an anecdote about using
pigeons to send letters --]. (423 n1)
Although Derrida asserts in this endnote that “the postal framework is . . .
privileged,” it is worth noting that he does so in an endnote to an essay published
separately from The Post Card. See note 18 above. In “My Chances / Mes chances,”,
Derrida also refers back to The Post Card by way of his essay “Telepathy”: “Permit
me here to refer once again to the fragment detached from la carte postale that I
titled ‘Telepathy’ (191 above).” Psyche, 368. Derrida returns to the debate with
121
110
Lacan over the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” in “My Chances / Mes chances: A
Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies,” .
1. [Added to 2003 edition. This will be my only “footnote,” in order to say: ] This
essay proposes in a certain way an amost silent reading of the words “tombe”
[tomb] or “tomber” [to fall] in La carte postale. This is one of the most
frequently used words in “Envois.” For example, the entry for March 14,
1979: “An other, whom I know well, would unbind himself immediately in
order to run off in the other direction. I would bet that he would fall upon
you again. I fell in with you, so I remain.” On the following day . . . [added
2003 Derrida, The Post Card, 182-83]). I quote this book because it is
included in the program of this encounter; it has been inscribed there in a
certain way, in the meeting’s charter. Don’t accuse me therefore, of being, as
one says in English, “self-centered.” In truth, I have forever dreamt of writng
a self-centered text; I never manged it, never arrived at that point. I always
fall upon the others. This will end up by being known.
“My Chances / Mes chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean
Stereophonies” 429 Note 1.
If the previous publications cannot be linearized, they matter on two counts to
Derrida. “Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1 “2. He says These
texts have accompanied, in some fashion, the works I have published over the last
ten years.1 But they have also been disassociated from those works, separated,
distracted. . . . Each of the essays appears to be devoted, destined, or even singularly
dedicated to someone, very often to the friend, man of woman, close or distant,
living or not, known or unknown . . . Certain texts seem to bear witness better than
others to this quasi-epistolary situation. “Letter to a Japanese Friend, “Envoi,”
“Telepathy,” “Plato’s Letter,” or “Seven Missives.” “Seven Missives,” for example,
might have stood in the place of the title or preface, thanks to the play of metonymy.
I made another choice. By disrupting the chronological order only once, I thought
that “Psyche: Invention of the Other” might better perform this role.” “Author’s
Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, xii. And in the second endnote to
that essay, he states “When they are not simply unpublished, like the longest and the
most recent among them, or unpublished in French, like a large number of them,
these texts never conform exactly to their first versions, whose place of publication
is noted each time.” “Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, 413.
Whatever Derrida has added to The Post Card is significant to read yet marginal
(information worthy only of an endnote) and impossible to read unless one wants to
gather all of the publications and previous English translations and word by word.
collate them alongside their republication in the second, two volume edition of
Psyche (in one ones to say the a book published without Vol 1 in the title in 1998
and a volume published in 2003 with “2” in the title are two volumes of the shorter
book orginally published in 1987). Derrida does not this task ruled out—the earlier
versions are not jettisoned as inferior and obsolete. They are just different in ways
that may or may not be significant.
For that reason, I think it would be mistaken to box up these fragments and shelve
them, regarding them (and thereby not reading them) as instances of Derrida’s
111
distinerrant postings of his writings in a labyrinth, an imaginary Borgesian library
that short-circuits storage and retrieval, or entails Derrida’s incineration of them.
For the question is not merely how we to read these references and additions to The
Post Card but whether The Post Card, how self-fragmenting, self-ruining, and selfincinerating in its self-presentation, is self-identical as a publication to the words on
the 549 pages published under the title La carte postale in 1980 by Flammarion
press, whether its limits extend to self-identical, in legal or publishing terms, such as
“Telepathy,” “Mes Chances,” “Restitutions,” and “For the the Love of Lacan.” If one
wanted to gather these fragments together in a new edition of The Post Card, should
one include fragments like the passages from The Post Card Derrida cites in Cinders,
“an incomplete archive, still burning or already consumed, recalling certain textual
sites” (26), putting the passages in quotation marks and italicizing them but not
supplying footnotes to them, passages identifying them instead, along with all the
other passages Derrida self-cites, in a block of text at the end of Cinders, a block that
is not marked by as a partext by page layout or a word such as Notes or References?
Should one include notes by previous translators like this one from Cinders on
telepathy? 1. Although it is not cited, anther text is alluded to (p.75): Télépathie, a
kind of supplement to The Postcard, which, like Glas, is woven around the letters
LAC, CLA, ALC, CAL, ACL, etc. (Furor 2 [1981] and Confrontations 10 [1983]).
Schibboleth (1983) , also dedicated to cinders, was not yet published. Cinders p. 26.”
Or should one add David Woods inserted reference to The Post Card in Oassions:
ANOBlique Offerng? To ask these question is to recast the question of re/reading
Derrida or not reading him and forgetting him ask an archival question, a question
that neither stalls at by trying to gather exhaustively all the references or let them
go go go, treat them as exhaust, but invites readings of Derrida’s dis/orderings of his
own writings. For example, when Derrida says “Author’s Preface” in Psyche:
Invention of the Other Vol. 1 that he is disrupting the chronological order only once”
(xii) by putting an essay that cites the title of the book at the beginning of the book,
is Derrida recalling or repeating Lacan’s reorganization of the seminars published
as Ecrits in 1966, the one essay out of chronological order being the “Seminar on the
Purloined Letter” and also the essay at the head of the collection. See also the highly
eccentric loop between the book’s first and last essays’s created by headnote to
“Psyche: Invention of the Other,” (a footnote in the french edition) and endnote 3 of
“No Apocalypse, Not Now” in which Derrida writes “See “Psyche: Invention of the
Other” above. In fact the two lectures were delivered the same week at Conrell
University. The allusions are numerous from one to the other.” Psyche: Invention of
the Other, 1; 431n.3. The same question about Derrida may be asked of his
translators and editors. To take one example, the editors let stand a mistake Derrida
makes in “My Chances / Mes chances” when he writes “Now here is my chance, the
fourth, I believe” (367). The editors supply a note correcting Derrida but leaving
him alone. “Actually, is is the fifth that has bene so numbered. But given that
Derrida has just said he is less and less sure about the chances, we leave this
“mistake” as is. __Ed.,” Pysche, op cit, 430n8.” Co/Incidentally, Bruce Fink lets a
famous substitution of Poe’s “destin” for “dessin” error stand: “In quoting these
lines a second time, Lacan (inadvertently?) replaces dessein (scheme, plan) with
112
[See also Derrida on his own reading—impatient, impertient; an don the good
reader and the bad reader] These bibliographic protections are themselves selfcorroding, I maintain, and the effects of their corrosion, corrosion produced by
bibliographical logic that limits, forgets, neglects, consigns to oblivion data, effects
that are structurally excluded from whatever is said, assumed, or taken to survive
through publication. Editing and translating often produce the same kinds of
corrision effects, often paraadoxically in an effort to repair a text. Derrida’s works
into English sometimes supply as much information about each version of a text
while others think that the most recent renders others obsolete, the last version
being the supposedly definitive version.123 This bibliographic, editorial, and
destin (destiny, fate); I have let this stand in the text owing to the context.
“Translator’s Endnotes” (40,1)” in
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2007), 770. The err-responsbiltiy of editing Derrida is irreducible to an ethics not
just because one relies on tact when deciding to leave ell enough alone or not but
because editors may hinder by helping. I offer one example. In “The Retrait of
Metaphor,” Derrida writes “I will not claim to propose anything other than a brief
note, and so as to narrow my topic even further, a note on a note.” Psyche: Invention
of the Other Vol. 1, 53. Derrida is speaking of a note to “White Mythology: Metaphor
in Philosophy,” but he does not give the number of the note nor does he give the
page on which that note appears. See “I just said a moment ago why it seemed
necessary to me, outside of any plea pro domo, to begin by resituating my note on
Heidegger that today I would like to annotate and relaunch,” The Retrait of
Metaphor, 59. The translator helpfully supplies the note: “The note in question is
269n19; 226n22: the page numbers cited here and parenthetically in the text are
those of the original and the translation, respectively, in that order; translations
have frequently been modified. –Trans” Psyche 1, op cit, 419n3. Yet can we be sure
that “my note on Heidegger” is limited to the one the translator identifies? For
“White Mythology” appears in Margins of Philosophy along with “Ousia and Gramme:
Note on a Note from Being and Time,” 29-68. (By the way, the translator identified
the note incorrectly, lol (the note is number 29, not 22, on p. 226). What seems
notable to me is that Derrida does not cite the note the translator thinks—no doubt
very reasonably—Derrida is citing.
123 Should Bass’s translation of The Post Card be consulted with James Hulbert’s all
but forgotten fragmentary translation of a draft of what was later published as “To
113
translative logic glosses over—renders unreadable and even impossible to mourn,
as in “you need not have read that so I don’t need to tell you about what you’re
missing”--Derrida’s own self-corroding (re)publication practices and his
idosyncratic bibliographic practices, his frequent omissions of bibliographic
information both in the body of his text and in his footnotes, omissions which are
sometimes filled in by his English translators, sometimes not, as well as his attention
to the titles of published works (Parages) and the corruption of titles, or use of
“faux-titres,” perhaps better called “feu-titres” or even “fou-titres.”124
Speculate—On ‘Freud’” in The Post Card? See Jacques Derrida, “Coming into One’s
Own,” trans. James Hulbert, Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey
H. Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) 114-48. Hulbert’s headnote, reads
as follows: “Coming into One’s Own,” which treats a portion of the second chapter of
Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is three steps removed from being “a text by
Jacques Derrida.” It is part of a much longer work in progress (as yet untitled) that
studies Beyond the Pleasure Principle chapter by chapter, often line by line. Because
of limitations of space, this section has been abridged by more than one third: cuts
have been made in almost every paragraph, and many paragraphs have been
omitted entirely. . . . I have made the cuts, occasionally juggled sentences, dividing
the text into sections, and supplied all the titles, as part of this effort of
translation. All notes are translator’s notes, unless otherwise indicated. Hulbert’s
translation has gone m.i.a. perhaps because Derrida does provide a headnote to “To
Speculate—on “Freud” in The Post Card in which he would have cited it, as does
when citing prior publications in headnotes to “Le facteur de la vérité” and “Du
Tout.”
Derrida’s practice of using puncutation in the form of ellipses--“faux-tires,” of
“half titles” in The Post Card. Peggy Kamuf has a footnote on "faux-titres" in
Derrida’s Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 198) 94 n. 16: “In typography, a ‘faux-titre’ is a half title or bastard
title. (Trans.)” Transliterated into English, “faux-titre” means “false title.” In The Post
Card, Derrida repeatedly uses “faux-titres,” notably referring to Freud’s Beyond the
Pleasure Principle as “Beyond . . . .” Derrida also ccsionally shortens the title of the
third chapter of The Post Card to its first word, “facteur”: “They intersect with the
Facteur, its title and its theme” (222). Derrida similarly refers and to his own
chapter “Speculations on ‘Freud’” as “doubtless the book will be called Legs de
Freud,” 52. When left untranslated in the English translation, the French word Legs
124
114
“The title has been proposed by the editors. For reasons that will become clear in
the reading, this text did not present itself under any title. “The Double Session” in
Dissemination Trans Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1983),173.
[legacies] becomes a half-title within the title “Legacies of ‘Freud.’” “Freud’s Legacy,”
the subtitle of he second section of the second chapter, “To Speculate—On ‘Freud’,”
is mentioned several times in “Envois” as if it were the title of the second chapter,
and the second section “Freud’s Legacy,”of the second chapter, begins with a
comment about “The title of this chapter is a deliberately corrupt citation, which
doubtless will have been recognized. The expression “Freud’s legacy [legs de
Freud]” is often encountered in the writings of Jacques Lacan and Wladimir
Grandoo. Naturally I leave the reader as judge of what is going on in this
corruption” (292). For similar examples in which Derrida retitles sections of The
Post Card, see “I’m rereading my Legacy, what a tangle,” 248; “I am trying a new to
work on my legacy and on this accursed preface” (158), the referent of “this preface”
being the nearly three hundred page long “Envois”; and “this preface” later
characterized a “kind of false preface” (179). Like the “fake lectures” he describes
Freud as having written in “Telepathy.” See also “Title (to be specified)” in Parages,
op cit, and “And now there is the question of the title” in “The Double Session” in
Dissemination Trans. Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1983), 177; a
preliminary editorial note by the editors of Tel Quel nos. 41 and 42, in which the
chapter was first published, is “reproduced” by Derrida unsigned, as it were, (an
anonymous “we” speaks): “The title has been proposed by the editors. For reasons
that will become clear in the reading, this text did not present itself under any title.
“The Double Session” in Dissemination Trans. Barbara Johnson (University of
Chicago Press, 1983),173. Derrida retains the title the editors gave his two part
article. (Curiously, Derrida drops the accent aigu from the “E” in the title of Lacan’s
Écrits in La Post Carte postale, spelling it as Ecrits. See, for example, 484n9. Alan
Bass follows suit in his translation.) See also “The Double Session” in Dissemination
Trans Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1983)
And now there is the question of the title. “The Double Session” in Dissemination
Trans Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1983), 177
“For, as we have remarked, all this comes down to, comes back to the title, to the
question of the title as question of credit and the title as question of counterfeit
money. Given Time, 82
“We have only discussed the tutle, The Instant of My Death. The entire narrative is
but a gloss, a justification and expansion of a title that speaks of itself and for itself.”
Demeure, 53
In Dissemination, a preliminary editorial note by the editors of Tel Quel nos. 41 and
42, in which the chapter was first published, is “reproduced” by Derrida unsigned, as
it were, (an anonymous “we” speaks)
115
In Dissemination, Derrida retains the title the editors gave his two part article.
Moreover, this logic glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future publications,
promises that Derrida sometimes fulfilled and sometimes did not.
What I am calling the reshelving or archival operations of posthumography
delimit a given text as a single text, an unpublished, published, or republished text in
order to render it readable as text signed off and sent off under a signature and a
proper name, thereby permitting what Derrida often called an “internal reading” or
the demarcation of a scene of reading of effects, whether noticed or not, to be
deconstructed that stores the not yet read and appears to guarantee that what is “to
be” read has always already been sent.125 These biobibliopolitical questions are also
psychoanalytic questions as they are irreducible in advance to a so-called ethics of
reading, however, as if one could decide what reading carefully was and what
carelessly was, as one could ever do justice by reading everything.
Posthumographic reading, like all reading, is necessarily a politics of reading that is
For the phrase “internal reading,” see, for example, Jacques Derrida,
“Restitutions” in The Truth in Painting trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 255- 382; to 329-331, and 361; and see
also “a purely internal reading . . . internal and external reading . . . this very border
would have to be considered” “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink (2),” op cit, 285. In “To Do
Justice to Freud,” Derrida asks “Is an internal reading possible?” Like the word
return, the expression "dialogue with unreason" is a quotation. The two expressions
scan a final paragraph of this epilogue, in the middle of the book, that begins with
the phrase with which I entitled this talk: "We must do justice to Freud" (F, p. 411;
M, p. 198). Jacques Derrida "To Do Justice to Freud": The History of Madness in the
Age of Psychoanalysis Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994)(101). The title I have proposed for the few
reflections I will risk today, "The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,"
is actually the subtitle. Jacques Derrida "To Do Justice to Freud": The History of
Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas
125
116
“err-responsible.” Since it is an archival or reshelving operation according to
bibliographical norms publication, posthumographic reading, involves omissions of
information, not limited to “editorial data,”126 that do not default to the staus of a
clue, evidence, symptom, detail and do not have the significance Derrida accords
Freud’s omission, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of Socrates (Post Card, 344),
Lacan’s omission of stories by Poe other or Lacan’s omission of Marie Bonaparte,
Paul de Man’s omission of two words from a quotation from Rousseau that Derrida
discusses in “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink (2),” and so on on.”127
The kinds of omissions, or self-corroding effects of publication and what surives
to be read, normally or otherwise, I attend to in Derrida’s works are idiosyncratic
because they are errors, self-cremations that do not amount to self-incriminations,
but are more like quasi-illegal driving that sometimes crosses the line.128 These
Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the
Archive, trans Beverly Bie Brahic, (New York: Columbia University, 2008), 61.
127 See Derrida’s charge that Marie Bonaparte and her reference to “Das
‘Unheimlich’”) was “--omitted by the Seminar--” of Lacan, Post Card, 460. See also
Derrida’s comments on an omission in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “Freud
omits the scene of the text . . . In this great omission . . . To omit Socrates when one
writes is not to omit just anything or anyone . . . If Freud in his turn erases Socrates .
. . .” (PC, 374). And see “Why does he cut the sentence, mutilating or dismembering it
in this way, and in such an apparently arbitrary fashion”; “Why did de Man forget,
omit, or efface those two words . . ?; “de Man’s omission of the two little words,” in
“Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” op cit, 277–360; 318; 321; 339.
128 Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Invention of the Other” on illegality and see “The
Retrait of Metaphor” on skidding in Psyche: Invention of the Other, Vol 1., op cit., 1;
49-50. Among Derrida’s numerous references to driving, see “Who is driving?
Doesn’t it really look like a historical vehicle? A gondola? No, except Plato is playing
gondolier, perched in the back, looking away in front of him the way one guides the
blind. He is showing the direction” The Post Card, 46 and “By accident, and
sometimes on the brink of an accident, I find myself writing without seeing. Not
with my eyes closed, to be sure, but open an disoriented in the night; or else during
the day, my eyes fixed on something else, while looking elsewhere, in front of me, for
example, when at the wheel: I then scribble with my right hand a few squiggly lines
126
117
omissions involve the ways in which Derrida preps a published work for reading,
and hence shelves what is not to be read, what can be skipped, what is insignificant,
what is effectively invisible; these omissions of information related translations and
publications may be likened to wounds, perhaps just scratches, that have been
covered up, bandaged, hence repressed. But even if they have been repressed, the
do not necessarily fall in line with repetition compulsion, the death drive, the
uncanny fort-da, chance, destiny, and so on, not that any of those terms is unified or
definable. Thus, I will not be writing a Psychopathology of Derrida’s Everyday Life.
As an archiving operation, posthumography is conerned not only with posthumous
publication or thanatography but with what is “to be” read, what suruvives rests on
how the boundaries of publication are drawn, what counts as published or
unpublished. Publication is a question of surviv-ability, of what publication renders
not to be read of whatever survives. A given text’s survival is subject to the
conditions and structures of of publish-ability, a neologism that may be divided and
recombined into a cluster of others, including unpublish-ability, republish-ablility,
and pre-publishability, all of which, as we shall see, are related, to binding and
on a piece of paper attached to the dashboard or lying on the seat beside
me. Sometimes, still without seeing, on the steering wheel itself. These notations—
unreadable graffiti—are for memory; one would later think to be a ciphered
writing.” Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, Trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1993, 3. One by want to gather this and similar remarks about driving by Derrida
along with his analysis of the drive in Freud in “To Peculate on ‘Freud’.” I begin
gathering with this concluding sentence by Derrida "I decided to stop here because I
almost had an accident as I was jotting down this last sentence, when, on leaving the
airport, I was driving back from Tokyo," Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say
Yes in Joyce,” in Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts Ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and
Sam Slote (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 81.
118
unbinding.129 Un/Publish-ability determines of the limits of readability and is a
question about the justice of reading what remains to be read, of any reading “to
come.” An orientation to a future rathh erhtan pastfrom a mess to a strucutre, from
private to public, or from one kind of mess to another, publication not necessarily
having a strucutre—how do you rad the structure? Not genetic criticism.
130
In
On binding and Freud’s “Bindung,” see The Post Card, 260n4; 389. See the
discussion below of Lacan’s anxiety about the binding of the first, one volume
edition of the Écrits.
130 Derrida tends to take what he calls the “order” of publication as a given. See, for
example, “I could have begun with what resembles the absolute beginning, with the
juridico-historical order of this publication. What been lightly termed the first
version of La folie fu jour was not a book. Published in the journal Empedocle (No. 2,
May 1949), it bore another title—indeed, several other titles. On the journal’s cover,
here it is one reads:
Maurice Blanchot
Un recit [A recit?]
Later the question mark disappears twice. First, when the title is reproduced within
the journal in he table of contents:
Maurice Blanchot: Un recit
Then below the first tilne:
Un recit
Par Maurice Blanchot
Could you tell whether these titles, written earlier and filed away in the archives,
make up a single title titles of the same text, titles of the recit (which of course
figures as an impractible mode in the book), or the title of a genre?” “Living On,”
Parages (214-15)
Derrida adds:
One might be tempted to take recourse in the law or the rights that govern
published texts. One might be tempted to argue as follows; all these insoluble
problems of delimitation are raised ‘on the inside’ of a book classified as a work of
literature or literary fiction. Persuant to these judicial norms, this book has a
beginnign and an end that leave no opening for indecision. The book has a
determinable beginning and an end that leave no room for indecision. This book has
a determinable beginning and end, a title, an author, a publisher, its distinctive
denomination is La folie du jour” in “Living On,” Parages (238) And Derrida calls
into question this order: “The first words .. . that come after the word “recit“ and its
question mark. . . mark a collapse that is unthinkable, unrepresentable, unsituable
within a linear order of succession, within a spatial or temporal sequenciality,
within an objectifiable topology or chronology,” “Living On,” Parages, (234). What
Derrida calls “the insoluble problems of delimitation are raised ‘on the inside’ of a
129
119
H.C., For Life, Derrida links just reading to reading everthing: “one must read
everything, of course, letter by letter: I ill-treat everything by thus selecting and
chopping with unforgivable violence. Unable to do justice to this book, as to the fifty
others . . . H.C., For Life, 119.131 But the limits of what survive, the possibility of being
in tact, left aside for a reading to come, are not reducible to the finitude of a given
material support that makde publication possible and the infinity of reading
whatever ahs been published. Publish-ability concerns the limits of “everything”
that is to be read: is “everything” what has been published, republished? Whatever
falls under the category of “internal” is not limited to what Derrida calls the “normal
category of readability” Parages, 187 or “normal reading,” but neither does
“unreadability” (Living On,” Parages, 188) amount to the text’s overruning of the
protective legal aspects of publication—“protective measure [structures de garde]
book classified as a work of literature or literary fiction are not necessarily confined
to the “inside” because the norms of publication, editing, and translating involve all
kinds of silent deletions of precisely the kinds of variations between publication and
its republication that Derrida reads so well and so closely with a kind of radical
empircism noting textual effects as they “appear” in print.
See Derrida’s description of what he leaves unread: “I’ll begin again. Here is at
last my beginning . . . I will speak only of this first book, that will make a nice
beginning, leave the rest intact and virgin for a reading entirely to come . . .,” H.C.,
For Life . . . , 144. Derrida proceeds to tell a long, roundabout story involving a paper
he says he has “now” but which he does not publish: “Sometime after the
appointment at the Balzar, for we had to see each other again, the author left a
manuscript in my care. The author had not published anything yet, not signed H.C. . .
. Where was I? Yes, the manuscript of this Prenom de Dieu. So I go on holiday, to a
house in the country, and with this text that had neither a name nor a forename yet.
. . I do not remember what I told her, back then, no doubt the truth of what I
thought, as always, but probably more tactfully. I even wrote the “blurb” on the
back cover of the book, from which the publisher only kept a few lines but whose
original I have just found again among my papers. I have got it here. . . . H.C., For Life .
. . , 145; 147.
131
120
and institutions as the registering of copyright, the Library of Congress or the
Bibliotheque Nationale, or something like a flyleaf,” Parages, 114-115.132
Les Dernier Mots and Other “Lacanuae”
Jacques Derrida may be reasonably presumed dead, of course. I have tried to
show that asking whether deconstruction will survives its death, a question Derrida
Derrida writes “By normal reading I mean every reading that ensures knowledge
transmittable in its own language, in a language unchanging (identical to itself), in a
school or academy, knowledge constructed and ensured in institutional
constructions, in accordance with laws made so as to resist the ambiguous threats
with which the arret de mort troubles so many conceptual oppositions, boundaries,
orders.” Living On, Parages, 187 Compare these two passages from “Living On”
[Survivance] in Parages, a book, incidentally, that Derrida published twice (1986 and
augmented and revised in 2003):
From beginning to end. Let’s start now at the end, the very end, the end of
the end, the end of what I shall call for the sake of convenience and without
rigor the “second part” of the book. But this second part is “whole,” perfectly
autonomous. True, if we accept the entire conventional system of legalities
that organizes in literature, the framed unity of the corpus (binding, frame,
unity of the title, unity of the author’s name, unity of the contract,
registration of copyright, etc.). L’arrêt de mort (in each of its versions) is a
single book, signed by a single author, and made of two narratives, two récits,
in the first person, following a certain order and so forth . . . Parages, p. 162
Here is the second passage, a passage that in my view effectively pits textuality
against legal norms that produce single books with titles and names:
A text that is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content
enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces
referring endlessly to something other than itself, differential traces. Thus
the text overruns all limits assigned to it . . . all the limits , everything that
was to be set up in opposition to writing (speech, life, the world, the real
history, and what not, every field of reference). 110-111.
In The Post Card, a book that Derrida says he didn’t write (3), not that he says
anyone else wrote it either, he regularly and necessarily, he says, demarcates, limits
the flow of textuality, an organized scene of reading certain passages or the use of a
certainword and a cluster of rleated words (waltern n Beast andSov 2) from
published books. See note 15 below.
132
121
addressed in 1994, in Derrida’s name, is the wrong question to ask. 133 To address
that question will produce defensive psychobiographies and thematic, pre-critical
reshelvings of Derirda’s writings, key word by key word. The question of the
survival of deconstruction is a question, properly or improperly, about the survial of
a practice without a name, a practice that overlaps with psychoanalysis yet cannot
be separated rom it. Let me “Speculate –On ‘Derrida’” for a moment. Derrida might
have rethought the distinction he makes between posthumous writing in general
and strictly posthumous generations of readings to come—had he remembered
what he said earlier in the seminar, namely, that “Freud reminds us” of something
crucial about the phantasm, perhaps even remembering what Derrida said about
Freud in the Sixth Session of the Seminar?134 Did Derrida forget psychoanalysis?135
Did he ever forget it? Did ever forget Freud or Lacan?136 Who can say? If we can
say that all readings of what sur-vives or lives on of Derrida’s writings after his
death will be about what he will not have said and would not have said, and I am not
saying we can, we can also say Derrida’s account of Pascal’s paper as a note destined
to be read depends on Derrida’s belief in its indestructibility, one might even says its
Mitchell Stephens, “Jacques Derrida,” New York Times Magazine January 23,
1994, 22-25. Op cit.
134 Op cit, 147-58.
135 Memoirs of the Blind is a somewhat paradoxical case of Derrida’s never yet ever
goodbye to psychoanalysis. Derrida offers a para-Freudian reading of blindness,
mistakes, castation, and conversion that logs into Derrida’s own previous readings
of Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” while never mentioning Lacan even as Derrida uses
some of Lacan’s terms. I thank John Michael Archer for pointing this out to me in a
telephone conversation.
136 See Jacques Derrida, “Let Us Not Forget—Psychoanalysis,” Oxford Literary
Review Special Issue on “Psychoanalysis and Literature” Volume 12, July 1990, 3-8.
133
122
indivisibility, and hence its undeconstructibility.137 Does the word “fire” in Pascal’s
note make the poem difficult to read because one cannot read while burning? Does
the endlessness of burning here, the collapse of a fire lit before and its aftermath,
mean that one can only gloss the poem while making the limits of any such glossing
impossible to determine, extending glossing well past the determination of the
meaning of a word, phrase, sentnece, or passage that glossing apparently delivers or
is commonly thought to deliver to reading? Is Pascal’s note itself a gloss, his shirt a
kind of urn burial or portable columbarium for it? Does glossing necessarily gloss
over itself?
In isolating Pascal’s note as a strictly posthumous publication, Derrida forgets
that all of Pascal’s Pensées were published posthumously in 1670, along with this
As Maurice Blanchot remarks, that “the strange nature of posthumous
publications is to be inexhaustible.” See "The Last Word," in Friendship, trans.
Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford UP), 252-92. In relation to the lack of rigor in
Derrida’s distinction between strictly and general posthumous publiaction, one
could reread Derrida’s reading of Maurice Blancot’s The Instant of My Death in
Bl;anchot and Derrida’s The Instant of My Death / Demeures: Fiction and Testimony
Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2000), especially
Derida’s reading of Blanchot’s sentence “I am dead” and of Blanchot’s dating his
death from the time he was granted a reprieve just before he was to be executed in a
letter he wrote Derrida from which Derrida quotes the following: “I will therefore
quote the fragment of a letter I received from Blanchot last summer, just a year ago,
almost to the day, as if today were the anniversary of the day on which I received
this letter, after July 20. Here are its first two lines; they speak of the anniversary of
a death that took place without taking place. Blanchot wrote me thus, on July 20,
first making note of the anniversary date: ‘July 20. Fifty years ago I knew the
happiness of nearly being shot to death,’” 52. What would it mean to read
Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death as a posthumous publication? See also Derrida’s
citation of Blanchot’s “posthumous disaster” and Derrida’s comment that “the
posthumous is becoming the very element mixes in everywhere with the air we
breathe,” in The Beast and the Sovereign 2, op cit, 181 (258) and 179 (256).
137
123
note, in the same book.138 The distinction Derrida draws between strictly and
generally posthumous writing is not at all rigorous, and indeed depends in the case
Derrida singles out on factoring out the facteur, on forgetting the mailman, in maybe
untenable only in very different ways, and the forgetting of the servant’s name who
sent off the note, the servant whose name was already forgotten by the Father. Let
Derrida have the lost words, so to speak, or “ghlost” words: “And moreover I obey
at every moment without seeming to: to burn everything, forget everything . . . and
while driving I held it on the steering wheel.”139
After-Peace
One still has to take note of this. And to finish
that Second Letter: “. . . Consider these facts and
take care lest you sometime come to repent of
having now unwisely published. It is a very great
safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing. . . .
What are now called his . . . Sokratous estin kalou
kai neou gegonots . . . are the work of a Socrates
embellished and modernized. Farewell and
Jean-Michel Rabaté notes that “there is no general agreement as to which French
edition of the Pensées is the most reliable. For the sake of practicality, I have used
Michel Le Guern’s two-volume edition: Pascal, Pensées (Paris Gallimard, Folio,
1977)” Jean-Michel Rabaté, “The ‘Mujic of the Footure’: Future, Ancient, Fugitive,” in
Futures: Of Jacques Derrida, Ed. Richard Rand (Stanford University Press, 2002),
173-200; to 243n.4.
138
139
The Post Card, op. cit. 43.
124
believe. Read this letter now at once many times
and burn it . . . .”
--I hope this one won’t get lost. Quick, a duplicate
. . . graphite . . . carbon . . . reread this letter . . .
burn it. Il y a là cendre. And now to distinguish
between two repetitions.”
“I hope this one won’t get lost. Quick, a duplicate
. . . graphite . . . carbon . . . reread this letter . . .
burn it. . . . And now to distinguish between two
repetitions.”
--Derrida, “Play: From Pharmakon to the Letter”
in “Plato’s Parmacy” in Dissemination, 170-71
-- also cited in Derrida, Cinders III, 56, the whole
part with the end up to “And now to distinguish
between two repetitions” and Cinders n. IV, p. 58.
“Bye Bye that Song Bye Thank You Like You Love You See You Next Time Bye Miss
You”
125
REnd Notes
“41. In the session, Derrida added nothing here.” Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the
Sovereign 2, 277. The last chapter of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle “adds
nothing . . seems to add nothing” (Post Card, 386; 387).
“The unfortunate effect of all this is to give a large can of petrol and a flame-thrower
to those prejudiced types who would like to terminate not Shakespeare but the
126
“queer theory” which is currently the hottest thing on the American academic
scene.”
, Review of Richard Burt, Unspeakable (1998); TLS 28 May 1999
Richar Burt
Read After Burning, I Pray You, or la carte posthume::
Derrida Destroyed . . . Derrida Archived . . . Derrida Published . . .
Derrida Perished [Ableben] . . . Derrida Died [Sterben] . . . Derrida
Survived [Uberleben] . . . “Jacques Says . . .”
"Its susceptibility of being produced?" said I.
"That is to say, of being destroyed," said Dupin.
Having alrady taken advantage of the time I have been given, having given myself as a
rule not to return or refer to the book I have just published on the gift and currency, I
will content myself with recounting in the from of an elliptical epilogue, a true story.
Something that recently happened to me at a train station. It made me and continues
to make me think. I will tell it without commentary, but we can return to it in the
discussion.
127
It is not a story about a bank credit card. Nor is it a question of those coded cards with
which we are able to draw bills from walls after having shown one’s credentials to cash
distributing machines. It is about a telephone card, already partially used, but used to a
degree that could neither measure nor calculate. I had just called, using this card, from
the Gare du Nord around midnight, having returned from Lille. A young English couple
next to me was in front of a telephone machine that took coins. The machine wasn’t
working, and the English couple didn’t have a card. Having dialed the number for them
with my card, I left it with them, and just as I was walking away, the young Englishman
offered to pay e, without knowinghow or how much: I made a gesture with my hand to
signifiy no, thatit was a gift and that, in any case, I didn’t want any money. The whole
thing lasted several seconds and I asked myself, and I think the answer is not possible
for a thousand reasons that I will not go into, whetherI had given something , and what,
or how much, how much money, by helping them to do not just anything—but simply
call someone far away by telephone. And for some reason, which I do not have time to
develop, just asI did not have time to think at the Gare du Nord, there si no way to
asnwer the question of knowing if there was something which one out to be
congratulated, narcissistically, for having given, whether out of generosity or not,
something, money or not. And to whom.
If we had time for a discussion, I would try to convince you that there cannot be and,
what is more, that there should not be, an answer to satisfy these questions.
And thus one cannot, and should not, know—whether there was a gift. Into the bargain
[par-dessu le marché].
128
Derrida, “On the ‘Priceless,’ or the ‘Going Rate’ of the Transaction” In Negotiations.
3267-28
The State of the Debit
Derrida has already mentioned running out of time 321 (middle of the essay, recalling
the beginning) and 314 (first page). He is so caught up in the question of the gift,
sacrfiice, and time htat he forgets to ask if the call went through, if the couple reached
the person they called. Perhaps Derrida saw that they did reach that person. But he
does not say so. Perhaps he walked off before the connection went through just
assuming it would. Nor does he consider that the call could have lasted only a few
seconds. The card installs a kind of gambling that Derrida overlooks since the amount
on the acrd is finite and perhaps too small to permit the call—can the call go through on
this card? Can the conversation the couple wishes to have happen? Did it happen? Or
was there too little oney debited to the card or it to happen, or happen successufully.
The story may not be about a bank credit card, but it is a story about a blank credit card.
While the amount of money on the card is finite, the credit is seemingly infinite. Derrida
does not check his blank check telephone line of credit. It’s a kind of Ronellian moment.
The card ensures that the call will be received, that the person will pick up, and those
who are far away will be closer.
Another S.P., agreed . . . , but I would put my hand into the fire, it’s really the only
one. For the rest, they will understand nothing of my clinamen, even if they are sure
of everything, especially in that case, the worst one. Especially there where I speak,
129
they will see only fire. On this subject, you know that Freud’s Sophie was cremated.
255
Marie Bonaparte went through Freud's papers and correspondence and
burned some items that would have been dangerous had they fallen into
Nazi hands. Then the remaining files of papers and letters . . . were
labeled and shipped along with the family’s other effects. . . . The files of
papers were stored away in a house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which
became the family’s permanent home in the autumn of 1938, and where
Freud died on 23 September 1939. There the letters rested, surviving
another kind of holocaust, the air raids of the Second World War, and
afterwards, amidst the concerns of the Freud family with the immediacies
of life and profession, the letters were seemingly forgotten. Jung’s letters
from Freud lay undisturbed for nearly forty years. For a time he kept them
in what he called his ‘cache,’ a narrow safe set in the wall of an alcove ad
The ‘cache,’ which was locked with a key that Jung carried in his pocket,
also contained, among other valuables, the four ments of a breadknife that
had shattered when he was experimenting with occultism as a student. ixxx.
Private communication from Miss Freud, who added, ‘Otherwise what we
performed were really works of rescue. There was too much accumulated
material to take with us to London, and my father was all for throwing away
much of it, whereas Princess Bonaparte . . . [sic] was all for preservation.
130
Therefore she rescued from waste-baskets which my father had thrown
there.’ The account given by [Ernest] Jones (III, p. 238/233), of burning
everything not worth preserving, is not quite exact. xix, n26
We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he may have burned.
We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive fever, what
have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or of his “life.”
Burned without limit, without remains, and without knowledge. With no
possible response, be it spectral or not, short of or beyond suppression, on
the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without a name,
without the least symptom, and without even an ash.
Naples, 22-28 May 1994
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, “Postscript,” 101
The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund
Freud and C. G Jung
By Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, xix
Wha Derrida spells out asa reading—repeitions and subsituttions—of Purloined Letter.
Reading he spells out of eyond the Pleasure Principle
Our only chance for survival now, but in what sense, would be to burn everything, in
order to come back to our initial desire. Whatever “survival” it might be a question of,
this is our only chance, I mean common chance. I want to start over. Shall we burn
everything? That’s this morning’s idea, when you come back I’ll talk to you about it—as
technically as possible. (One of several entries / letters / post cards dated “January
1979”), 171
131
From the moment he published it and even if he had not published it, from the moment he
wrote it and constituted it by dedicating it to his “dear friend,” the presumed signatory
(Baudelaire or whoever signed this text beneath the patronymic and accredited signature
of Baudelaire—for let us not be so gullible as to believe that the dedicatee goes no further
than Arsene Housaye), from the moment he let it constitute itself in a system of traces, he
destined it, gave it, not only to another or in general to others than his “dear friend”
Arsene Housaye, but delivered it—and that was giving it—above and beyond any
addressee, done, or legatee (we are speaking here of an unconscious figure represented by
a determinable, bordered configuration of public and readers). The accredited signatory
delivered it up to dissemination without return. Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, 100
The premises of this unpublished seminar remain implied, in one way or another, in l
later works that were all devoted, if I may put it that way, to the question of the gift. . . .
Foreword, x
Posthumography raises arguably psychoanalytic as well as deconstructive questions
about how Derrida’s archive mis/management Derrida is “to be” read, about what
has been left to be read and about how reading is a practice to be, unlimited, the
definition of the unreadable always to be reopened.140 These questions about what
remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s writings are also
biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical questions concerning the
archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all
In addition to the importance Derrida accords Freud in Archive Fever, we might
adduce Freud use files as an extended simile for the topography of the psyche. See
Collected Works Volume 2.
140
132
of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a
question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida
performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own works, from which he
sometimes quoted, sometimes including handwritten notebooks as well as
published works.141
Consider the idiosyncratic ways in which Derrida refers to The Post Card in
endnotes to three essays published after it, “My Chances” and “Telepathy,” both
republished in revised form in Psyche: Invention of the Other Volume 1. In the first
endnote to the lead essay, “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” Derrida writes,
If every invention, as invention of the trace, then becomes a movement of
différance or sending, envoi, as I have attempted to show elsewhere, the
postal framework is thereby privileged, as I should like simply to stress here
once again. And to illustrate according to Montaigne, from whose writings I
shall quote here, as a detached supplement to la carte postale, the following
fragment from Des postes (2.22), which names "invention: and situates it
between the animal socius and the human socius: [an anecdote about using
pigeons to send letters --]. (423 n1)
Although Derrida asserts in this endnote that “the postal framework is . . .
privileged,” it is worth noting that he does so in an endnote to an essay published
separately from The Post Card. See note 18 above. In “My Chances / Mes chances,”,
Derrida also refers back to The Post Card by way of his essay “Telepathy”: “Permit
me here to refer once again to the fragment detached from la carte postale that I
titled ‘Telepathy’ (191 above).” Psyche, 368. Derrida returns to the debate with
Lacan over the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” in “My Chances / Mes chances: A
Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies,” .
2. [Added to 2003 edition. This will be my only “footnote,” in order to say: ] This
essay proposes in a certain way an amost silent reading of the words “tombe”
[tomb] or “tomber” [to fall] in La carte postale. This is one of the most
frequently used words in “Envois.” For example, the entry for March 14,
1979: “An other, whom I know well, would unbind himself immediately in
order to run off in the other direction. I would bet that he would fall upon
you again. I fell in with you, so I remain.” On the following day . . . [added
2003 Derrida, The Post Card, 182-83]). I quote this book because it is
included in the program of this encounter; it has been inscribed there in a
certain way, in the meeting’s charter. Don’t accuse me therefore, of being, as
one says in English, “self-centered.” In truth, I have forever dreamt of writing
a self-centered text; I never manged it, never arrived at that point. I always
fall upon the others. This will end up by being known.
“My Chances / Mes chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean
Stereophonies” 429 Note 1.
141
133
If the previous publications cannot be linearized, they matter on two counts to
Derrida. “Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1 “2. He says These
texts have accompanied, in some fashion, the works I have published over the last
ten years.1 But they have also been disassociated from those works, separated,
distracted. . . . Each of the essays appears to be devoted, destined, or even singularly
dedicated to someone, very often to the friend, man of woman, close or distant,
living or not, known or unknown . . . Certain texts seem to bear witness better than
others to this quasi-epistolary situation. “Letter to a Japanese Friend, “Envoi,”
“Telepathy,” “Plato’s Letter,” or “Seven Missives.” “Seven Missives,” for example,
might have stood in the place of the title or preface, thanks to the play of metonymy.
I made another choice. By disrupting the chronological order only once, I thought
that “Psyche: Invention of the Other” might better perform this role.” “Author’s
Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, xii. And in the second endnote to
that essay, he states “When they are not simply unpublished, like the longest and the
most recent among them, or unpublished in French, like a large number of them,
these texts never conform exactly to their first versions, whose place of publication
is noted each time.” “Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, 413.
Whatever Derrida has added to The Post Card is significant to read yet marginal
(information worthy only of an endnote) and impossible to read unless one wants to
gather all of the publications and previous English translations and word by word.
collate them alongside their republication in the second, two volume edition of
Psyche (in one ones to say the a book published without Vol 1 in the title in 1998
and a volume published in 2003 with “2” in the title are two volumes of the shorter
book orginally published in 1987). Derrida does not this task ruled out—the earlier
versions are not jettisoned as inferior and obsolete. They are just different in ways
that may or may not be significant.
For that reason, I think it would be mistaken to box up these fragments and shelve
them, regarding them (and thereby not reading them) as instances of Derrida’s
distinerrant postings of his writings in a labyrinth, an imaginary Borgesian library
that short-circuits storage and retrieval, or entails Derrida’s incineration of them.
For the question is not merely how we to read these references and additions to The
Post Card but whether The Post Card, how self-fragmenting, self-ruining, and selfincinerating in its self-presentation, is self-identical as a publication to the words on
the 549 pages published under the title La carte postale in 1980 by Flammarion
press, whether its limits extend to self-identical, in legal or publishing terms, such as
“Telepathy,” “Mes Chances,” “Restitutions,” and “For the the Love of Lacan.” If one
wanted to gather these fragments together in a new edition of The Post Card, should
one include fragments like the passages from The Post Card Derrida cites in Cinders,
“an incomplete archive, still burning or already consumed, recalling certain textual
sites” (26), putting the passages in quotation marks and italicizing them but not
supplying footnotes to them, passages identifying them instead, along with all the
other passages Derrida self-cites, in a block of text at the end of Cinders, a block that
is not marked by as a partext by page layout or a word such as Notes or References?
Should one include notes by previous translators like this one from Cinders on
telepathy? 1. Although it is not cited, anther text is alluded to (p.75): Télépathie, a
134
kind of supplement to The Postcard, which, like Glas, is woven around the letters
LAC, CLA, ALC, CAL, ACL, etc. (Furor 2 [1981] and Confrontations 10 [1983]).
Schibboleth (1983) , also dedicated to cinders, was not yet published. Cinders p. 26.”
Or should one add David Woods inserted reference to The Post Card in Passions: An
Oblique Offering?” in On the Name? To ask these question is to recast the question
of re/reading Derrida or not reading him and forgetting him ask an archival
question, a question that neither stalls at by trying to gather exhaustively all the
references or let them go go go, treat them as exhaust, but invites readings of
Derrida’s dis/orderings of his own writings. For example, when Derrida says
“Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1 that he is disrupting the
chronological order only once” (xii) by putting an essay that cites the title of the
book at the beginning of the book, is Derrida recalling or repeating Lacan’s
reorganization of the seminars published as Ecrits in 1966, the one essay out of
chronological order being the “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” and placed at the
head of the collection. See also the highly eccentric loop between the book’s first
and last essays’s created by headnote to “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” (a
footnote in the French edition) and endnote 3 of “No Apocalypse, Not Now” in which
Derrida writes “See “Psyche: Invention of the Other” above. In fact the two lectures
were delivered the same week at Conrell University. The allusions are numerous
from one to the other.” Psyche: Invention of the Other, 1; 431n.3. The same question
about Derrida may be asked of his translators and editors. To take one example, the
editors let stand a mistake Derrida makes in “My Chances / Mes chances” when he
writes “Now here is my chance, the fourth, I believe” (367). The editors supply a
note correcting Derrida but leaving him alone. “Actually, is is the fifth that has bene
so numbered. But given that Derrida has just said he is less and less sure about the
chances, we leave this “mistake” as is. __Ed.,” Pysche, op cit, 430n8.” Co/Incidentally,
Bruce Fink lets a famous substitution of Poe’s “destin” for “dessin” error stand: “In
quoting these lines a second time, Lacan (inadvertently?) replaces dessein (scheme,
plan) with destin (destiny, fate); I have let this stand in the text owing to the context.
“Translator’s Endnotes” (40,1)” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 770. The err-responsbiltiy of editing
Derrida is irreducible to an ethics not just because one relies on tact when deciding
to leave ell enough alone or not but because editors may hinder by helping. I offer
one example. In “The Retrait of Metaphor,” Derrida writes “I will not claim to
propose anything other than a brief note, and so as to narrow my topic even further,
a note on a note.” Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, 53. Derrida is speaking of a
note to “White Mythology: Metaphor in Philosophy,” but he does not give the
number of the note nor does he give the page on which that note appears. See “I
just said a moment ago why it seemed necessary to me, outside of any plea pro
domo, to begin by resituating my note on Heidegger that today I would like to
annotate and relaunch,” The Retrait of Metaphor, 59. The translator helpfully
supplies the note: “The note in question is 269n19; 226n22: the page numbers cited
here and parenthetically in the text are those of the original and the translation,
respectively, in that order; translations have frequently been modified. –Trans”
Psyche 1, op cit, 419n3. Yet can we be sure that “my note on Heidegger” is limited to
135
[See also Derrida on his own reading—impatient, impertient; and on the good
reader and the bad reader] These bibliographic protections are themselves selfcorroding, I maintain, and the effects of their corrosion, corrosion produced by
bibliographical logic that limits, forgets, neglects, consigns to oblivion data, effects
that are structurally excluded from whatever is said, assumed, or taken to survive
through publication. Editing and translating often produce the same kinds of
corrision effects, often paraadoxically in an effort to repair a text. Derrida’s works
into English sometimes supply as much information about each version of a text
while others think that the most recent renders others obsolete, the last version
being the supposedly definitive version.142 This bibliographic, editorial, and
the one the translator identifies? For “White Mythology” appears in Margins of
Philosophy along with “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time,”
29-68. (By the way, the translator identified the note incorrectly, lol (the note is
number 29, not 22, on p. 226). What seems notable to me is that Derrida does not
cite the note the translator thinks—no doubt very reasonably—Derrida is citing.
142 Should Bass’s translation of The Post Card be consulted with James Hulbert’s all
but forgotten fragmentary translation of a draft of what was later published as “To
Speculate—On ‘Freud’” in The Post Card? See Jacques Derrida, “Coming into One’s
Own,” trans. James Hulbert, Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey
H. Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) 114-48. Hulbert’s headnote, reads
as follows: “Coming into One’s Own,” which treats a portion of the second chapter of
Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is three steps removed from being “a text by
Jacques Derrida.” It is part of a much longer work in progress (as yet untitled) that
studies Beyond the Pleasure Principle chapter by chapter, often line by line. Because
of limitations of space, this section has been abridged by more than one third: cuts
have been made in almost every paragraph, and many paragraphs have been
omitted entirely. . . . I have made the cuts, occasionally juggled sentences, dividing
the text into sections, and supplied all the titles, as part of this effort of
translation. All notes are translator’s notes, unless otherwise indicated. Hulbert’s
translation has gone m.i.a. perhaps because Derrida does provide a headnote to “To
Speculate—on “Freud” in The Post Card in which he would have cited it, as does
when citing prior publications in headnotes to “Le facteur de la vérité” and “Du
Tout.”
136
translative logic glosses over—renders unreadable and even impossible to mourn,
as in “you need not have read that so I don’t need to tell you about what you’re
missing”--Derrida’s own self-corroding (re)publication practices and his
idosyncratic bibliographic practices, his frequent omissions of bibliographic
information both in the body of his text and in his footnotes, omissions which are
sometimes filled in by his English translators, sometimes not, as well as his attention
to the titles of published works (Parages) and the corruption of titles, or use of
“faux-titres,” perhaps better called “feu-titres” or even “fou-titres.”143
Derrida’s practice of using puncutation in the form of ellipses--“faux-tires,” of
“half titles” in The Post Card. Peggy Kamuf has a footnote on "faux-titres" in
Derrida’s Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 198) 94 n. 16: “In typography, a ‘faux-titre’ is a half title or bastard
title. (Trans.)” Transliterated into English, “faux-titre” means “false title.” In The Post
Card, Derrida repeatedly uses “faux-titres,” notably referring to Freud’s Beyond the
Pleasure Principle as “Beyond . . . .” Derrida also ccsionally shortens the title of the
third chapter of The Post Card to its first word, “facteur”: “They intersect with the
Facteur, its title and its theme” (222). Derrida similarly refers and to his own
chapter “Speculations on ‘Freud’” as “doubtless the book will be called Legs de
Freud,” 52. When left untranslated in the English translation, the French word Legs
[legacies] becomes a half-title within the title “Legacies of ‘Freud.’” “Freud’s Legacy,”
the subtitle of he second section of the second chapter, “To Speculate—On ‘Freud’,”
is mentioned several times in “Envois” as if it were the title of the second chapter,
and the second section “Freud’s Legacy,”of the second chapter, begins with a
comment about “The title of this chapter is a deliberately corrupt citation, which
doubtless will have been recognized. The expression “Freud’s legacy [legs de
Freud]” is often encountered in the writings of Jacques Lacan and Wladimir
Grandoo. Naturally I leave the reader as judge of what is going on in this
corruption” (292). For similar examples in which Derrida retitles sections of The
Post Card, see “I’m rereading my Legacy, what a tangle,” 248; “I am trying a new to
work on my legacy and on this accursed preface” (158), the referent of “this preface”
being the nearly three hundred page long “Envois”; and “this preface” later
characterized a “kind of false preface” (179). Like the “fake lectures” he describes
Freud as having written in “Telepathy.” See also “Title (to be specified)” in Parages,
op cit, and “And now there is the question of the title” in “The Double Session” in
Dissemination Trans. Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1983), 177; a
preliminary editorial note by the editors of Tel Quel nos. 41 and 42, in which the
chapter was first published, is “reproduced” by Derrida unsigned, as it were, (an
143
137
“The title has been proposed by the editors. For reasons that will become clear in
the reading, this text did not present itself under any title. “The Double Session” in
Dissemination Trans Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1983),173.
In Dissemination, Derrida retains the title the editors gave his two part article.
Moreover, this logic glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future publications,
promises that Derrida sometimes fulfilled (Given Time 1) and sometimes did not.
What I am calling the reshelving or archival operations of posthumography
delimit a given text as a single text, an unpublished, published, or republished text in
order to render it readable as text signed off and sent off under a signature and a
proper name, thereby permitting what Derrida often calls an “internal” reading,
even as he sometimes questions whether an internal reading is ever really possible,
or the demarcation of a scene of reading of effects, whether noticed or not, to be
anonymous “we” speaks): “The title has been proposed by the editors. For reasons
that will become clear in the reading, this text did not present itself under any title.
“The Double Session” in Dissemination Trans. Barbara Johnson (University of
Chicago Press, 1983),173. Derrida retains the title the editors gave his two part
article. (Curiously, Derrida drops the accent aigu from the “E” in the title of Lacan’s
Écrits in La Post Carte postale, spelling it as Ecrits. See, for example, 484n9. Alan
Bass follows suit in his translation.) See also “The Double Session” in Dissemination
Trans Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1983)
And now there is the question of the title. “The Double Session” in Dissemination
Trans Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1983), 177
“For, as we have remarked, all this comes down to, comes back to the title, to the
question of the title as question of credit and the title as question of counterfeit
money. Given Time, 82
“We have only discussed the tutle, The Instant of My Death. The entire narrative is
but a gloss, a justification and expansion of a title that speaks of itself and for itself.”
Demeure, 53
In Dissemination, a preliminary editorial note by the editors of Tel Quel nos. 41 and
42, in which the chapter was first published, is “reproduced” by Derrida unsigned, as
it were, (an anonymous “we” speaks)
138
deconstructed, scene that stores the not yet read and appears to guarantee that
what is “to be” read has always already been sent.144 These biobibliopolitical
questions are also psychoanalytic questions as they are irreducible in advance to a
so-called ethics of reading, however, as if one could decide what reading carefully
was and what carelessly was, as one could ever do justice by reading everything.
Posthumographic reading, like all reading, is necessarily a politics of reading that is
“err-responsible.” Since it is an archival or reshelving operation according to
bibliographical norms publication, posthumographic reading, involves omissions of
information, not limited to “editorial data,”145 that do not default to the staus of a
clue, evidence, symptom, detail and do not have the significance Derrida accords
Freud’s omission, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of Socrates (Post Card, 344),
Lacan’s omission of stories by Poe other or Lacan’s omission of Marie Bonaparte,
On Derrida’s the phrase “internal reading,” see, for example, Jacques Derrida,
“Restitutions” in The Truth in Painting trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 255- 382; to 329-331, and 361; and see
also “a purely internal reading . . . internal and external reading . . . this very border
would have to be considered” “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink (2),” op cit, 285. In “To Do
Justice to Freud,” Derrida asks “Is an internal reading possible?” Like the word
return, the expression "dialogue with unreason" is a quotation. The two expressions
scan a final paragraph of this epilogue, in the middle of the book, that begins with
the phrase with which I entitled this talk: "We must do justice to Freud" (F, p. 411;
M, p. 198). Jacques Derrida "To Do Justice to Freud": The History of Madness in the
Age of Psychoanalysis Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994)(101). The title I have proposed for the few
reflections I will risk today, "The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,"
is actually the subtitle. Jacques Derrida "To Do Justice to Freud": The History of
Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas
144
Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the
Archive, trans Beverly Bie Brahic, (New York: Columbia University, 2008), 61.
145
139
Paul de Man’s omission of two words from a quotation from Rousseau that Derrida
discusses in “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink (2),” and so on on.”146
The kinds of omissions, or self-corroding effects of publication and what surives
to be read, normally or otherwise, I attend to in Derrida’s works are idiosyncratic
because they are errors, self-cremations that do not amount to self-incriminations,
but are more like quasi-illegal driving that sometimes crosses the line.147 These
omissions involve the ways in which Derrida preps a published work for reading,
See Derrida’s charge that Marie Bonaparte and her reference to “Das
‘Unheimlich’”) was “--omitted by the Seminar--” of Lacan, Post Card, 460. See also
Derrida’s comments on an omission in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “Freud
omits the scene of the text . . . In this great omission . . . To omit Socrates when one
writes is not to omit just anything or anyone . . . If Freud in his turn erases Socrates .
. . .” (PC, 374). And see “Why does he cut the sentence, mutilating or dismembering it
in this way, and in such an apparently arbitrary fashion”; “Why did de Man forget,
omit, or efface those two words . . ?; “de Man’s omission of the two little words,” in
“Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” op cit, 277–360; 318; 321; 339.
147 Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Invention of the Other” on illegality and see “The
Retrait of Metaphor” on skidding in Psyche: Invention of the Other, Vol 1., op cit., 1;
49-50. Among Derrida’s numerous references to driving, see “Who is driving?
Doesn’t it really look like a historical vehicle? A gondola? No, except Plato is playing
gondolier, perched in the back, looking away in front of him the way one guides the
blind. He is showing the direction” The Post Card, 46 and “By accident, and
sometimes on the brink of an accident, I find myself writing without seeing. Not
with my eyes closed, to be sure, but open an disoriented in the night; or else during
the day, my eyes fixed on something else, while looking elsewhere, in front of me, for
example, when at the wheel: I then scribble with my right hand a few squiggly lines
on a piece of paper attached to the dashboard or lying on the seat beside
me. Sometimes, still without seeing, on the steering wheel itself. These notations—
unreadable graffiti—are for memory; one would later think to be a ciphered
146
writing.” Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, Trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1993, 3. One by want to gather this and similar remarks about driving by Derrida
along with his analysis of the drive in Freud in “To Peculate on ‘Freud’.” I begin
gathering with this concluding sentence by Derrida "I decided to stop here because I
almost had an accident as I was jotting down this last sentence, when, on leaving the
airport, I was driving back from Tokyo," Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say
Yes in Joyce,” in Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts Ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and
Sam Slote (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 81.
140
and hence shelves what is not to be read, what can be skipped, what is insignificant,
what is effectively invisible; these omissions of information related translations and
publications may be likened to wounds, perhaps just scratches, that have been
covered up, bandaged, hence repressed. But even if they have been repressed, the
do not necessarily fall in line with repetition compulsion, the death drive, the
uncanny fort-da, chance, destiny, and so on, not that any of those terms is unified or
definable. Thus, I will not be writing a Psychopathology of Derrida’s Everyday Life.
As an archiving operation, posthumography is conerned not only with posthumous
publication or thanatography but with what is “to be” read, what suruvives rests on
how the boundaries of publication are drawn, what counts as published or
unpublished. Publication is a question of surviv-ability, of what publication renders
not to be read of whatever survives. A given text’s survival is subject to the
conditions and structures of of publish-ability, a neologism that may be divided and
recombined into a cluster of others, including unpublish-ability, republish-ablility,
and pre-publishability, all of which, as we shall see, are related, to binding and
unbinding.148 Un/Publish-ability determines of the limits of readability and is a
question about the justice of reading what remains to be read, of any reading “to
come.” An orientation to a future rather than past from a mess to a structure, from
private to public, or from one kind of mess to another, publication not necessarily
having a structure—how do you read the structure? Not genetic criticism.
149
In
On binding and Freud’s use of the word “Bindung” [“Binding”], see The Post Card,
260n4; 389. See the discussion below of Lacan’s anxiety about the binding of the
first, one volume edition of the Écrits.
149 Derrida tends to take what he calls the “order” of publication as a given. See, for
example, “I could have begun with what resembles the absolute beginning, with the
148
141
H.C., For Life, Derrida links just reading to reading everthing: “one must read
everything, of course, letter by letter: I ill-treat everything by thus selecting and
chopping with unforgivable violence. Unable to do justice to this book, as to the fifty
juridico-historical order of this publication. What been lightly termed the first
version of La folie fu jour was not a book. Published in the journal Empedocle (No. 2,
May 1949), it bore another title—indeed, several other titles. On the journal’s cover,
here it is one reads:
Maurice Blanchot
Un recit [A recit?]
Later the question mark disappears twice. First, when the title is reproduced within
the journal in he table of contents:
Maurice Blanchot: Un recit
Then below the first tilne:
Un recit
Par Maurice Blanchot
Could you tell whether these titles, written earlier and filed away in the archives,
make up a single title titles of the same text, titles of the recit (which of course
figures as an impractible mode in the book), or the title of a genre?” “Living On,”
Parages (214-15)
Derrida adds:
One might be tempted to take recourse in the law or the rights that govern
published texts. One might be tempted to argue as follows; all these insoluble
problems of delimitation are raised ‘on the inside’ of a book classified as a work of
literature or literary fiction. Persuant to these judicial norms, this book has a
beginnign and an end that leave no opening for indecision. The book has a
determinable beginning and an end that leave no room for indecision. This book has
a determinable beginning and end, a title, an author, a publisher, its distinctive
denomination is La folie du jour” in “Living On,” Parages (238) And Derrida calls
into question this order: “The first words .. . that come after the word “recit“ and its
question mark. . . mark a collapse that is unthinkable, unrepresentable, unsituable
within a linear order of succession, within a spatial or temporal sequenciality,
within an objectifiable topology or chronology,” “Living On,” Parages, (234). What
Derrida calls “the insoluble problems of delimitation are raised ‘on the inside’ of a
book classified as a work of literature or literary fiction are not necessarily confined
to the “inside” because the norms of publication, editing, and translating involve all
kinds of silent deletions of precisely the kinds of variations between publication and
its republication that Derrida reads so well and so closely with a kind of radical
empircism noting textual effects as they “appear” in print.
142
others . . . H.C., For Life, 119.150 But the limits of what survive, the possibility of being
in tact, left aside for a reading to come, are not reducible to the finitude of a given
material support that makde publication possible and the infinity of reading
whatever ahs been published. Publish-ability concerns the limits of “everything”
that is to be read: is “everything” what has been published, republished? Whatever
falls under the category of “internal” is not limited to what Derrida calls the “normal
category of readability” Parages, 187 or “normal reading,” but neither does
“unreadability” (Living On,” Parages, 188) amount to the text’s overruning of the
protective legal aspects of publication—“protective measure [structures de garde]
and institutions as the registering of copyright, the Library of Congress or the
Bibliotheque Nationale, or something like a flyleaf,” Parages, 114-115.151
See Derrida’s description of what he leaves unread: “I’ll begin again. Here is at
last my beginning . . . I will speak only of this first book, that will make a nice
beginning, leave the rest intact and virgin for a reading entirely to come . . .,” H.C.,
For Life . . . , 144. Derrida proceeds to tell a long, roundabout story involving a paper
he says he has “now” but which he does not publish: “Sometime after the
appointment at the Balzar, for we had to see each other again, the author left a
manuscript in my care. The author had not published anything yet, not signed H.C. . .
. Where was I? Yes, the manuscript of this Prenom de Dieu. So I go on holiday, to a
house in the country, and with this text that had neither a name nor a forename yet.
. . I do not remember what I told her, back then, no doubt the truth of what I
thought, as always, but probably more tactfully. I even wrote the “blurb” on the
back cover of the book, from which the publisher only kept a few lines but whose
original I have just found again among my papers. I have got it here. . . . H.C., For Life .
. . , 145; 147.
150
Derrida writes “By normal reading I mean every reading that ensures knowledge
transmittable in its own language, in a language unchanging (identical to itself), in a
school or academy, knowledge constructed and ensured in institutional
constructions, in accordance with laws made so as to resist the ambiguous threats
with which the arret de mort troubles so many conceptual oppositions, boundaries,
orders.” Living On, Parages, 187 Compare these two passages from “Living On”
[Survivance] in Parages, a book, incidentally, that Derrida published twice (1986 and
augmented and revised in 2003):
151
143
“Is a Tweet a Publication? Is every publication a post?
Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, “In Praise of Psychoanalysis” in For What
Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue Trans. Jeff Fort(Stanford UP), 166-96; to 185-91.
Roger Chartier, “Introduction,” Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written
Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century Trans Arthur Goldhammer (
2008)
From beginning to end. Let’s start now at the end, the very end, the end of
the end, the end of what I shall call for the sake of convenience and without
rigor the “second part” of the book. But this second part is “whole,” perfectly
autonomous. True, if we accept the entire conventional system of legalities
that organizes in literature, the framed unity of the corpus (binding, frame,
unity of the title, unity of the author’s name, unity of the contract,
registration of copyright, etc.). L’arrêt de mort (in each of its versions) is a
single book, signed by a single author, and made of two narratives, two récits,
in the first person, following a certain order and so forth . . . Parages, p. 162
Here is the second passage, a passage that in my view effectively pits textuality
against legal norms that produce single books with titles and names:
A text that is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content
enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces
referring endlessly to something other than itself, differential traces. Thus
the text overruns all limits assigned to it . . . all the limits , everything that
was to be set up in opposition to writing (speech, life, the world, the real
history, and what not, every field of reference). 110-111.
In The Post Card, a book that Derrida says he didn’t write (3), not that he says
anyone else wrote it, Derrida says he regularly and necessarily, demarcates, limits
the flow of textuality, an organized scene of reading certain passages or the use of a
certainword and a cluster of related words (“Walten” in Beast and Sov 2) from
published books. See note 15 below.
144
The condition of archiving is publication when it comes to reading, to unreadability,
to living on (survivance). Two ediitons of Blanchot.
Fo fiction and testimony when it comes to Derrida’s last words, kjustfictions.
Not death of the other first, as Levinas argues, against Heideggers’s one’s own death,
but that the other is already spectral.
Banchot Last Words, Very Last words on posthumous publication.
“Final Words” Critical Inquiry “Jacques “says” puts the words in an oral register as if
the person reading the note were reading his won words, not Derrida’s, using the
informality—this is what he says, not what he said, even though Derrida is dead and
so could not be speaking in the present tense. No archival commentary giving the
details of the occasion given either in rue Descartes or critical inquiry. Pinned down
by paratext—proper name and title—but otherwise liberated.
Gisèle Berkman, La Dépensée
his twelve-year relationship with Sylviane Agacinski, which ended in 1984 with the
birth of a child, Daniel, and which Derrida tried to keep secret even from close
friends (though most seem to have known) until it uncomfortably entered the public
realm when Agacinski’s husband Lionel Jospin ran for president in 2002. It was to
Agacinski, Peeters suggests, that the ‘strange and superb correspondence’ making
up ‘Envois’ was originally addressed, and, given some later attacks on each other in
print, the relationship between the philosophical and the personal evidently
becomes rather fraught at this point.
145
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/grande-biog
Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third son, Daniel, in 1984.
Different engagement with Heidegger—not over animal versus human dying but the
after death of Dasein and its exclusion by Heidegger.
Heidegger on no after death versus Derrida’s posthumous note, a quotation,
unsigned, written in the third person, to be read? To be read aloud? To be
published?
Alan Bass does refer at times to the “jacket copy” in his Intro xvi,
Begin noting, in order to complicate, two seemingly obvious but actually
complicated features of The Post Card, the preface that is not a preface and the back
cover that bear on the boundaries of publication, prayer, survivance, and
unreadability. The complication in the non/preface is the analogy Derrida draws
between it and destroyed correspondence that has been burned and yet published
(followed by many mentions of the burning and publishing)? The other is the back
cover, signed J.D., which is like a letter in the “Envois.” It is singular. I am not
interested in reading the content of the letter but in its being a prière d'insère, or
“please insert.” What is the relation between destruction and divisibility, as pursued
in “Facteur de la verite,” and yet Poe’s notion in The Purloined Letter that to show
the letter is to destroy it, the simulacrum of the damaged—excessively folded letter
the giveaway and the simulacrum of it reproduced as a visiting card? The back
cover raises a different question related to publication. The post card is a letter, but
146
in this case, a simulacrum of a letter, placed at the outer limit of the book, signed off,
as it were, that is also related to prayer. It is not a citation, like the back cover of
papier machine. The back cover is not one letter, a singular letter, or even a letter
that has been posted. It has arrived at its resting place, the back cover, as Genette
maintains, being the last of four stages in the history of the prière d'insère in French
publication. Genette mentions one of Derrida’s prière d'insère. The material support
of the book is not exhausted by the bound book, by the exteriority of the back cover
with respect to the pages “inside” covered by the book. Nor does the jacket copy
occupy a privileged exteriority, a kind of synoptic “coverage” of the book as a whole
book (inside), but a simulacrum of the inside as well as an anachronism of what had
been inserted as a press notice then as loose pages inside a book. (Derrida wrote on
the bande around the book in Signsponge, but never on the prière d'insère.) The Post
Card is not the only one on the back cover of a Derrida book, but it is the only one
also signed, also dated, as much like a letter as the envoi are like a destroyed
correspondence. If the limits of the letter are no decided by Derrida, if a post card is
a publication, is the letter on the back, as prière d'insère, also a prayer? Although
prière d'insère is translated into English as “Please insert” (“I pray you” being the
transliteration, “je vous en prie”), Derrida activates the meaning of French meaning
of prayer I prière d'insère for a French reader in a late interview about survivance.
The section is a quotation –from the last chapter of Gift of Death, and the title is a
quotation from Rogues related to the renvoi. La carte postale a carte posthume, to
invent an expression that does not exist in French or have an equivalent in English,
147
unlike the idiomatic le carnet posthume (the posthumous notebook)?152 In order to
relate the deconstruction of the supposed indivisibility of the letter in The Post Card
to the phantasm of the indivisibility of sovereignty in Without Alibi. And in relation
to ash (of the archive), cinders, fires has Derrida’s favored tropes, and to the
disposal of the corpse as raised in Beast and Sovereign 2. Derrida left a note to be
read at his funeral. No addressee. No signatory. These are supplied by the editors
when the paper was published. No plans for a posthumous edition of his works.
But an order for the disposal of his works and for cremation in The Post Card. Not
only closer reading of page layout and graphics and paratexts without subsuming
them and dismissing them, boxing them up as instances of performativity. No
collecting all of JD’s post cards or of his prière d'insère along the lines Genette hopes
for. Derrida’s meaning publication notes as well as notes about not changing the
talk for publication.
I want to pursue these questions by engaging both aspects of The Post Card and
some of Derrida’s returns to it related to the archive, which brings with it
psychoanalysis, media and media supports, the proper name, the title; sovereignty;
and, to posthumous publication. Cinders, another simulacrum of destroyed
correspondence, this time as an archive. “For the Love of Lacan”; sovereignty and
cruelty in relation to the Post Card in “Psychoanalysis Searches”. In addition, I want
to link survivance to the post card, which may be too quickly under the headings of
various Derridemes. (Post Card is already posthumous as is all writing—see Plato’s
Derrida may have punned on the meaning of post as in mail and police but not on
carte because French has different words for the English “card.” Notecard is
“carnet” or “fiche,” for example. Robert Musil Posthumous Papers of a Living Author.
152
148
Pharmacy”; it’s not a distinction.) But strictly posthumous publication, also a paper,
a prayer, unpublished, or posthumously published, that cites, no more openly than
Derida cites himself in his interview, in Beast and the Sovereign 2 in relation to a
discussion of Heidegger and prayer. The purpose of pursuing them is open up the
possibility of a deconstruction Derrida never carried out, a deconstruction without a
name, of certain distinctions that underwrote Derrida’s deconstructive practice,
what he calls his custom. He stops and starts reading published editions. He
menitons letters and he may quote from Blanchot’s in Demeure, but then does not
reproduce the manuscript or give a full diplomatic transcription. Ditto with Hegel’s
report. Or with Pascal’s poem, paper, journal to self, and so on. A diplomatic
transcription is good enough. As opposed to “Final Words” (“Derniers Mots,” in
Critical Inquiry.” No critique genetique. No interest in textual criticism, not even in
Joyce studies Again, no difference whether published or unpublished (Geneses,
Archives). The archive in Cinders is a simulacrum, composed of quotations of The
Post Card. Derrida organizes a scene of reading sometimes by reshelving the works
of others (Lacan) in relation to their publication history, or through self-citations (as
in Gift of Death). He goes back to editions in Typewriter Ribbon Ink and in Living
On, but never to manuscripts. He does mention unpublished letters, and
reproductions of his own letters have appeared in publications he didn’t write
(Hantai; Cixous). He distinguishes his deconstruction from Destruktion (see Rogues
lengthy endnote.). (See Heidegger on Destruktion in, Fundamental Concepts) He is
very insistent, perhaps overly so. And he distinguishes his published work from his
own in relation to the archive. He thematized words. He formalized. But he did not
149
collect in his normative bibliographic way. No fantasy of a total collection. But the
simulacrum, the play with graphics, all dependent on the closure of publication. No
going back to Derrida’s mss. We may stay with his publications in order to examine
howhe deals with publication as a threshold of reading. But read his returns, his
renvoi (resendings) differently. The resending of a sending never sent.
Unreadable not the same thing as illegible—like crossed out words not
transcribed—whereas Nietzsche and other facing page manuscripts do show
crossing out. Heidegger published manuscript on facing page of type in Sojourns.
Derrida smoked—pipe and cigars.
Derrida drew had and last lines between his predecessors and rivals (Lacan and
Heidegger, especially).
We can purse these questions to open up posthumographic criticism, a
deconstructive practice that is without heading, without name, that is nether
Derridean nor non-Derridean, no post post, that may or may not be a psychoanalysis
without a name. It means giving up on sending as a priori, however. (telephonic in
Yes, Ulysses; telephone all over the Post Card) It means burning before reading. It
means burning by heart. One runs a fever not limited to the archive, a delirium of
reading
For Derrida, the edition was the limit of reading and of the unreadability.
Unreadability begun with the closure of publication. He stopped reading,
150
comparative reading at publications. He did not reproduce manuscripts, letters,
post cards. He may have become more comfortable with photographs and photos
of himself and even writing on photography. But he didn’t get around to writing on
publication. Hantai did Derrida’s in Correspondance.
And others , like rue Descartes—his letter said over his grave. Over Cixous, Flying
Manuscript. Reproductions of Artaud’s drawings and of other paintings in Memoirs
of the Blind. The a priori of sending (arriving without arriving) is played out in the
empirical threshold of publication—the empirical existence of a material support.
But when Derrida was reading, he stopped at editions of books; unreadabilty –all
borders except the border of publication versus pre-publication, manuscripts and
drafts. Textual critics often Derrida friendly, but Derrida did not reciprocate by
engaging in textual criticism. He did plan the publication of his works the way
Heidegger did (turned out to be a complete mess, in any case) or Kierkegaard did.
Be did not appoint caretakers, like Heidegger did his son. Publication is a threshold
he did not cross.
He may have mentioned handwritten dedications, but manuscripts, when they were
mentioned, were lost, as is in Blanchot’s Instant of My Death.
The Post Card is a publication and also a letter (derrida jokes); and prier d’insere is
also a publication, an insert that may also be attached.
151
Death and after death. Derrida speaks from beyond the grave. Who read the paper?
Or was it passed around, to be read silently by each person in attendance? Why did
he not permit orations given that he gave so many? Is Derrida already a ghost? A
spectre when writing the note in quotation marks? Is he writing a posthumous
publication? He knows it will be published but does not make arrangements for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigillography153
Mais l’anticipation rêvée semble se double d’un movement contraire, de ce qu’il
nommait “la perversion du play-back”, puisque la bande-son aura été choisie—“
élue”, comme il dit—pour être rejouée depuis là -bas, depuis ce lieu sans lieu où ça
posthume, comme un telephonogramme revenant de l’avenir. Bref, le flash-forward
contient, d’avance inscrit lui, une sorte de gramophonie qui accompagne, voire
153
Sigillography (sometimes referred to under its Greek name of Sphragistics) is one of the auxiliary
sciences of history. It refers to the study of seals attached to documents as a source of historical
information. It concentrates on the legal and social meaning of seals, as well as the evolution of their
design. It has links to diplomatics, heraldry, social history, and the history of art.
Antiquaries began to record historic seals in the 15th century, and in the 16th and 17th centuries their study
became a fairly widespread antiquarian activity.[1][2] The term sigillography is first found in the works of
Jean Mabillon in the late 17th century, and in those of Johann Michael Heineccius soon afterwards.[citation
needed]
Initially thought as a branch of diplomatics, the discipline gradually became an independent branch of
historical studies.
In the second half of the 19th century sigillography was further developed by German and French
historians, among them Hermann Grotefend, Otto Posse, Louis-Claude Douet d'Arcq and Germain
Demay.[citation needed]
Sigillography is also an important subdiscipline of Byzantine studies, involving the study of Byzantine lead
seal impressions and the text and images thereon. Its importance derives from both the scarcity of surviving
Byzantine documents themselves, and from the large number (over 40,000) of extant seals.[3] One of the
largest compendiums of Byzantine seals can be found in the large-volume by Gustave Schlumberger,
"Sigillographie de l'empire Byzantin," published in 1904.[4]
152
permet ou appelle l’anticipation, cette animation d’un “je” envoyé en délégation a
ses proper funérailles.
En différé, il y assiste a sa mort, il l’espionne.
“D’où que je sois . . . [Tels furent ses dernier mots, posthumes, lus au cimetiere de
Ris-Orange le 12 Octobre (ils sont reproduits dans Rue Descartes, no 48, 2005, 6-7] “
semble t-il songer alors, “je” veille et surveille son ci-gît. Tandis que son cercueil se
scelle d’avance un sigillographie posthume, son écoute présente se scinde et se
dédouble.
Peter Szendy, “Sortie: Le rêve de J.D.,” Sur Écoute – Esthétique de l'espionnage (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 2007), 145-53; to p. 151-52.
Szendy does not say who read the note.
Szendy cites, on p. 152 of Sur Écoute, Derrida’s circonfession “terminable survie
laquelle “je me vois vivre”: traduit “je me vois mourir” . . . “ , Circonfession, 40-41
Peter Szendy, “Sortie: Le rêve de J.D.,” Sur Écoute – Esthétique de l'espionnage (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 2007), 145-53; to p. 151-52.
Jacques Derrida, « Cette nuit dans la nuit de la nuit… », dans revue Rue Descartes, n°
42, novembre 2003, pp. 112-127) Ce texte est la retranscription d’une
communication faite au Collège International de Philosophie lors
du « Samedi du livre » consacré à La Musique en respect (Paris, Galilée, 2002), le 1er
février 2003).
153
“ . . . l’irresistiblé projection, la quasi-hallucination d’un théâtre, à la fois visible et
audible, d’une intrigue dans laquelle le visible est emporté, transporté pars le temps
sans temps de la musique, et la scène [ . . . ] où je suis —où le je se trouve—mort
mais encore là, et tous ceux et celles qui sont ou auront été aimées, toutes et toutes
ensemble, mais chacun et chacune pour soi écouteraient ensemble religieusement
cette musique-ci, qui peut être un chant, mais un chant non dominé par une voix
intelligible, une musique dont le mort ne serait pas l’auteur (puisqu’il en aura été
d’abord envahi et affecté), mais qu’il aurait élue comme s’il désirait avoir le génie de
l’inventer, de la composer pour leur offrir, si bien que cette parole (“voilà la
musique, se dirait-il, dans laquelle j’aurais voulu mourir, pour laquelle j’aurais voulu
mourir”), la tristesse de mort ou d’adieu serait alors d’un instant à l’autre
transfigurée en surabondance de vie . . . Le moi-même, mort mais soulevé par cette
musique par la venue unique de cette musique-ci, ici maintenant, dans un même
movement, le moi-même mourrait en disant oui à la mort et du coup réssusciterait,
se disant, je renais, mais non sans mourir, je renais posthumément, la même et
naissance, salut désespéré et l’adieu sans retour et sans salvation, sans rédemption
mais salut à la vie de l’autre vivant dans le signe secret et les silence exurbérant
d’une vie surabondante . . .’
154
155
156
Jacques Derrida, « Cette nuit dans la nuit de la nuit… », dans revue Rue Descartes, n°
42, novembre 2003, pp. 112-127; to pp. 124-25) URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40978797
Jacques Derrida, « Envois », La Carte postale, de Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris,
Aubier
Flammarion, 1980, p. 217.
No. 48, SALUT À JACQUES DERRIDA, Avril 2005, pp. 1-127; pp. 6-7 a transcription
of what was said at his grave when he was buried. Mentions that Blanchot was
cremated.
relation of divisibility and destruction—the one does map onto the other, only after
publication, when it is a simulacrum. Whereas in Poe’s story, to produce the letter
is to destroy it. But the letter is returned (or is it ever?), not destroyed (or was it?,
eventually?). The simulacrum is envelope that the Minister has made excessively
“used” destroyed.
Certain deconstruction guaranteed made possible by the condition of publication, by
not theorizing publishability or un/ publishability. Unreadability, survivance all
begin and stop at the post publication border. Pre-publication but publishing elides
and post. Posthumous publication part of carrying out already published and
unpublished works. Kierkegaard. JD mentions the mss Rousseau left in the church.
157
But also compares Blanchot to Pascal as oblivion, forget me, but no attention to
Posthumous publication as Blanchot paid. In essays on Kafka. Derrida also uses
“archived” to refer to already published materials. The politics of publication—legal
norms of publication—these are “external” to any “internal” reading or unreading,
parergonal border reading. The moment of publication serves as the a priori of
sending. A kind of transcendental limit.
Posthumographic is a kind of hauntogrammatology—extends ways of thinking
about the archive, archive management that are not reducible to a positive history,
on the one hand, but that are not reducible to a structure—restance—that
totalizes—either. But examines ecospecifc modes of destruction as played out in
published works..
« La musique... l’expérience même
de l’appropriation impossible ».
Quelques variations sur un thème
de Jacques Derrida
Marie-Louise MALLET
Escritura e imagen
Vol. ext. (2011): 41-56
My experience of Derrida’s death is of course heavily mediated by his numerous
writings on death and mourning. But it is also framed by an episode that took place
158
during one of his many visits to the University of Chicago, shortly after the
appearance of Specters of Marxin 1994. One of my colleagues asked him to compare
the widely rumored “death” of Marxism to the equally common rumors that
deconstruction was dying as well. Derrida’s eyes twinkled at the question:
Yes, it’s true. Deconstruction is clearly dying. But we have to ask precisely how it is
dying. For instance, last week we read in the newspaper that Nixon was dying, and
then that Nixon was dead. Next week there will be nothing in the papers about
Nixon dying. But it is not like that with deconstruction. Deconstruction has been
dying for quite awhile. The first reports of its dying came to us a long time ago, and
no doubt it will continue dying for some time to come. And it seems to be dying
more in some places than others. For instance, in France, deconstruction is not
dying. It was declared dead long ago. But in the United States, deconstruction still
seems to be dying quite a bit.4
Dead Again

W. J. T. Mitchell Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2007), pp. 219-228

Jacques Derrida
Final Words, “Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2007), 462 cited as “Dernier
Mots” in Rue Descartes. 20005. But online it says introduction.. They go first there
and at the end of Crit Inquriy (like tables of cotents in reverse)
Final Words
Jacques Derrida
Translated by Gila Walker
159
“Jacques wanted no rites and no orations. He knows from experience what an
ordeal it is for the friend who takes on this task. He asks me to thank you for coming
and to bless you. He beseeches you not to be sad, to think only of the many happy
moments you gave him the chance to share with him.
Smile for me, he says, as I will have smiled for you until the end.
Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival…
I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I am.”
Written in the present tense—dictated by Jacques—what he says—wherever he is
now. The “Survie” capitalized followed by an ellipsis “ . . . . ,” with “la,” as if inserted
after the fact in front of it to its upper left, and a downward angle. Space after fist
name “Jacque” meant to indicate the missing last name?
160
161
Restance is
162
something that cannot be thought philosophically as a modification of
substance, as a substance. Generally, philosophers say: “Well, something
that remains, the rest, is either the residual of an operation, of a calculation, or else
it’s a permanent substance, right? It remains, which means
that it’s a substance.” And, well, I try to think about the rest in a different
way, precisely not as a simple residue that falls and has no effects, that
falls at the end of an operation, a scrap, a residue that will not be taken
into account from now on. I think that the rest or the remains have to
be taken into account, but not in the form of a substance. Yes, the chain:
substance, presence, permanence, essence, and so on. The rest is not a
substance and, for this reason, the rest is not, in a way. We have to try to
think about the rest away from the authority of being, of the verb to be
163
and of everything that depends on it: essence, existence, substance, and
so on. That means to think the rest otherwise or to think the rest as another, if you
will.
Freddy Tellez and Bruno Mazzoldi, “The Pocket‐Size Interview with Jacques
Derrida,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2007), pp. 362-388
“I will not claim to propose anything other than a brief note, and so as to narrow my
topic even further, a note on a note.”
Jacques Derrida, “The Retrait of Metaphor,” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1,
53.
Kamuf’s foreword just gives up on the possibility of anything like a bibliography
with headnotes, the sort of work done by the editors of Work of Mourning, where
each essay gets a headnote with its publication history. Reference my essay about
the problems.
These texts have accompanied, in some fashion, the works I have published over the
last ten years.1 But they have also been disassociated from those works, separated,
distracted. . . . Each of the essays appears to be devoted, destined, or even singularly
dedicated to someone, very often to the friend, man of woman, close or distant,
living or not, known or unknown . . . Certain texts seem to bear witness better than
others to this quasi-epistolary situation. “Letter to a Japanese Friend, “Envoi,”
“Telepathy,” “Plato’s Letter,” or “Seven Missives.” “Seven Missives,” for example,
might have stood in the place of the title or preface, thanks to the play of metonymy.
I made another choice.
164
“Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, xii
“By disrupting the chronological order only once, I thought that “Psyche: Invention
of the Other” might better perform this role.”
Is this book Derrida’s version of the Ecrits, then? Derrida makes so much of Lacan’s
reorganization of the Ecrits, the one essay out of chronological order being the
Seminar on the Purloined Letter.
Derrida has a note in his preface
“2. When they are not simply unpublished, like the longest and the most recent
among them, or unpublished in French, like a large number of them, these texts
never conform exactly to their first versions, whose place of publication is noted
each time.”
“Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, 413.
“Permit me here to refer once again to the fragment detached from la carte postale
that I titled ‘Telepathy’ (191 above).”
“My Chances / Mes chances,” 368
Lacan follows Freud to the letter on this point, when he says that a letter always
arrives at its destination. There is no random chance in the unconscious.
“My Chances / Mes chances,” 369
165
“I leave you to pick up things from here.”
“My Chances / Mes chances,” 376
“Two dreams of death. I offered them as hors d’oeuvres”
in “Telepathy” 249
“Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time” in Margins of Philosophy,
29-68.
“pilot of the ship”
“This is why since I began I have been moving from aside to aside, from one vehicle
to another, unable to brake or stop the bus, its automaticity or automobility. Or at
least, I can brake only by letting skid, in other words, letting my control as driver
slip away at certain points. I can no longer stop the vehicle or anchor the ship,
master without remainder the drifting, skidding, or sideslipping [derapage] (I have
pointed out somewhere that the word derapage, before its greatest metaphorical
skid, has to do with a certain play of the anchor in nautical language . . .”
Retrait of Metaphor 49-50
Fast and Furor: Derrida Drift
166
Derrida doesn’t close the circle of hs works and his readings of other works and his
self-citations, and even refuses a self-indexing. But he closes it by recircling in more
or less the same way. Not closing is a kind of closing, or at least indissociable from
it. If it were more posiitve, it would be Hegelian (synthesis). It remains a negativity
that keeps it on the line with psychoanalysis and Heideggerian (the drive, detour,
border—the car metaphors and anecdotes--) Not a contradiction yet to be
decosntucted nor a more radcial orienttation, but acertianrecycling of survivance
and sovereignty inrleation to psychonalsysis and the archive opens up a reading of
recirlcings to The Post Card as well as to the Post card as an archive of circularity
that makes reading a question of posthumographic. Does the poshumogrpahic
mean the collapse of the postal a priori? Is prayer / addressing the same as
sending? What is the difference bewteen a post card and a prayer, when it comes to
prier d’insere—the back cover of The Post Card and the mention of it in interview ?
We must exlcude the inifite renewal of subscriptions (Niederschriften). The number
of inscriptions is finite—that’s finitude. For all acts of censorship operate on
inscriptions, and substitutes of inscriptions in a system (it is even this concept of
inscription which no doubt motivated the choice of the word or metaphor of
censorship), and the uantity of inscriptions is finite: so one must censor. It is like a
topological economy of the archive in which one has to exclude, censor, erase,
destroy or dispace, visualize, condenses the archive to gains pace in the same place,
in the same system, to be able to continue to store, to make space. Finitude is also
sort of a low for this economy.
167
Beast and Sovererign, 2, 156 (227) in the sisthe session, engagin with Freud
One can treat responsibility as a precisely academic theme. One would exhume this
archived topos, whose code would no longer be our own, along the lines of a
celebration, an anniversary.
Jacques Derirda, “Mochlos”, Eyes of the University, 89
“Sendoffs (for the College International de Philosophie) (1982) Eyes of the
University, 216-49.
“Everything begins in Belgium with a strange story of letters. Letters that are more
or less purloined or detoured in their destination. . . “’Le Parjure,’ Perhaps,” Without
Alibi, 175
Essays “Me—Psychonalysis” in Psyche, Invention of the Other VOl 1, 129-142 and
also “Geopsychoanlaysis ‘and the rest of the world’,” Pysche, Invention of the Other
VOl 1, 318-343
“The other reason concerns the place that one must recognize for Heidegger in
Lacanian theory. This point was also imporant to me in my interterreation of
Lacan’s Seeminar of Poe’s “Purloined Letter.”
The Rest of the World
““What I Would Have Said . . . ,” in Negotiatons: Interventons and Interviews 19712001 Trans. ElizabethRottenberg Standord 2002, 55-68.
Jacques Derrida Chapter four title “A Marginal Note or Remark—The Two Loose
Pages” in The Archaelogy of the Friviolous: Reading Condillac, John P. Leavey Jr. ,
university of Nebraska, 1987, 113
Read the Post Card “intratexutally” in several ways.
168
Derrida assuems the finitude of the support vesus the infinity of reading (HC for Life
“read her infinitely” 79 and textual criticism and literature (edition) on the other.
He sidleines publishing and genetic criticism under the heading of the archive
(Geneses Arhive)and all ediitons and adaptions under narrative and survivance of
Robinson Crusoe in Beast and Sovereign 2
Unreadable takes for granted publication—another version of finitude—the egal
constraints—around which Derrida reads parergonally. He reds back to ediitons,
but not to manuscripts.
Historicist critique based on actor network theory or systems theory or someother
cosicl cirucaltion model all close down rading. So does French genetique criticism.
Derrida also pays clsoe attention to publication and original occasion. Various kinds
of embalming / archiving practices, self-citations and other reshelving operations of
publishing histoyr. This is not find Derida is a simple logical contradiciotn but to
question the way he makes sending a priori. In order to get around Heidegger
(destiny) and Lacan (arrival), Derrida , in favor of chance, the aleatory,
destinerrance , has to postulate that the post is sent just as the call isplaced, the
phonerings. Or the phone meschnine records. So archive / ash follows—a kind
offigure of what cannot be archived replaces the various things that do not get
archived, like the prier d’inserer. Post card versus posthue.
No linearizaiton or biogrpahical reduciton, no narrative of Derrida’s progress
thatwould situate the Post Card in one place.
Hegel’s irony is double: He knows htat elsewhere , objected to mnemotechnic
formalism and learning “byheart.” Age of Hegel, 133
169
Let us come back to Matthew (Chap. 6). On three occasions there returns this truth,
ike some obsessive reminder to belearned by heart. . . . It is a truth ‘to be learned by
heart’ in the first place because one has the impression of having to learn it without
understanding it, like a repeated and repeatable forumla (like our tout autre est tout
autre just now . . . like a sealed message that can be passed to hand to hand or
whispered mouth to ear). It is a matter of learning ‘by heart’ beyond any semantic
comprehension.
“Tout autre est tout autre,” Gift of Death, 97
"Sortie: Le reve de J.D." in your fascinating and very timely (NSA scandal) book, Sur
l'ecoute: esthetique de l'espionage I am also interested in whether posthumous
publication might offer a wrinkle in your account of the "panacousticon" (great
neologism, by the way) in that the spy is also a ghost, a revenant ecrit that makes
itself hear with the voice of the Other (autre). I think of Derrida's chapter in The Gift
of Death, "tout autre est tout autre." Or has Derrida put us on hold, unable to hear
"him" speak but forced to ask, as in Hamlet, "who's there?" Do we have to hold our
breath? Or posthume as we breathe (Circonfession, le bete et le souverain 2)? Is
l'autre a spectre? a living dead? “53 “Supposing that—Glas or The POscard havea
so’seclector,; a princieple or choice or discrimination (thematic or formal) for
example the two columns . . Circonfessions, 276
“36 . .and I am trying to disinterest myselffrom myselfto withdraw from death by
making the “I,” to whom death is supoed to happen, gradually go away,no,to be
destroyedbefore death cometo meet it, so that at the end already there should
benooneleft tobe scared oflosig the worldin losing hinselg in it, andhte last of the
170
Jews that I stillam is doing nothing here other than destroying the worldon the
pretext of making truth, but just as well the instense relation to survival that wiritng
is =, not driven by the desire that somethingremain after me, sine I shall not be there
to enjoy it iina word, there where the point is, rather, in producing these remains
and therefre te witnesses of my radical absence, t live today, here and now, this
death of me, for example, the very counterexample which finally reveals the truth of
the world such as it is, itself, i.e. without me, and all the more intensely to enjoy this
light I am producing through the present experimentation of my possible survival,
i.e. of absolute death, I tell myself this every time I am walkingin the streets of tha
city I love, in which I love, on whose walls I weep myself and was weeping myself
again yesterday in the sight of the rue de l’Abbe de l’Epee not long after leaving you,
G., at Gatwick. Circonfession. 190-92.
Cite the The Post Card on p. 89 in the caption to a cover of a notebook of 1976
concerning Elijah and circumcision.
There is a photo of JD’s Macintosh with a citation below, and the words in a boc
across the screen “Cette command va creer un paragraphe trop long [This command
will create an paragraph tha tis too long.” Not translated. No transcription of the
words blocked out by the command either.
Photo of Derrida working at Ris Orangi Circonfessions, 11
you write in footnote 12, p. 152 that Derrida's "dernier mots" were read at his
funeral. Do you know who read them? Did that person attribute the words to J.D. or
say "quote" and "unquote" to indicate the quotation marks? Did the person offer any
kind of critical commentary to explain what she or he was reading? Second, do you
171
know anything about the "arrangements," so to speak, Derrida made to have his
note, reproduced in rue descartes on p. 7 (and also in an issue of Critical Inquiry and
entitled "Final Words"), do you know if Derrida arranged for it to be read? Did he
plan to have it published? Or did someone else decide to publish it? Third, so you
know if a title was given in rue descartes? Critical Inquiry cites the title "Derniers
mots," but on p. 6 of Rue descartes, only "Jacque Derrida" is printed (at least in the
online version). And table des matieres gives only "Introduction." (Btw, Critical
Inquiry oddly--to my mind--translates "dernier" as "final" rather than "last," as in
"Final Words.") I am struck by the quotation marks Derrida placed around the note
and his use of the third person. and the lack of an addressee (preceding the
remarks) or a signatory (J.D.). Derrida appears to have wanted to be spoken for
from beyond the grave (d'outre tombe) like Chateaubriand's mémoires d'outre
tombe with the voice of an Other, a voice citing not J.D. but a citation J.D. did not sign
and hence speaking for Derrida but not in his name (since he refused to sign) or
even "his" words. "Tout outre," as it were, "est tout outre."
The Age of Hegel, learning by heart and mnenotechnics
“philosophemes” 37
Section subtitled “The Signature: Art of Invenitng, Art of Sending”36-41
We could evoke the politics of publishing, the orders of booksellers or art
merchants, studies of themarket, cultural policies, whether state-promoted or not,
and the politics of research and, as we say these days, the ‘orientations’ that this
poltiics imposes throughout our institutions of higher education . . . 27
Psyche: Invention of the Other Volume 1,
172
I have just quoted my chances wiith regard to Poe’s pas de chance because what we
have here is a preface or postface to “The Purveyor of truth,” to the thought of
sending [la pensee de l’envoi] that gets relaunched there, to the randomness of
missives ando the sendings of chance. My Chances,
Psyche: Invention of the Other Volume 1, 358
“Of a Materiality Without Matter” susbtitle of typewriter ribbon Ink, Without Alibi,
128, like X without X”
Derrida postals, recalls, not a single channel, as with digital in Kittler. One medium
morphs into another, as it does through langauge—telephone, post office, phone
card, post card, etc. Configuration of skeuomorphs as metaphors, analogues.
Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire Trans. Charlotte Mandell Stanford University
Press, 1995
Michel Butor, Dans les flammes: Chanson du mone a Madame Nu (Paris, 1988)
“The good hour of the Purloined Letter,” Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, 105-06
Dying a living death being buried or swallowed up alive, is indeed, for Robinson, to
be delivered over, in his body, defenseless, to the other (138)
Dying alive, swallowed alive, buried alive apply both to RC and to the book (133)
and to the narrative (132).
Is swallowed” (eaten) already a psychoanlaytic register here? Burial cllpases into
eating? A kind of auto-canaiblaizaiton of het xorpse, or zombie effect on the living
(who become cannibals) ?
173
Dying a living death being buried or swallowed up alive, is indeed, for Robinson, to
be delivered over, in his body, defenseless, to the other (138)
In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who
speaks and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of themmight have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might
outlive Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe. . Now this survival, thanks
to which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be
read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive
by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. (130)
The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of
finitude, this alliance of the living and the dead. I shall say that this finitude is
survivance. Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure
and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life
and death. (130)
At the end of after.life—corpse and paper—how will corpse be disposed of? No
habeas corpus, no corpse for Derrida—detachment from the corpse and form paper.
The dead do not read the death certificate.
Then Derrida wants to wake from this reading as reanimation psycho-anthropology
of cultures . . present modernity of Greco-Abrahamic Europe, like ours,. . wonder
what is happening to us that is very specific . . . in the procedural organization of
death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or the State, of the so-called
174
dead boy, what we call a corpse.,. . . not just in the universal structure of survivance .
. . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the juridical apparatus and
the set of technical procedures whereby we . .deliver the corpse over to its future,
prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. .
. . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)
And he says that there is no such thing as habeas corpus or a corpse.
A dead person is one who cannot him or himself put into operation any decision
concerning the future of his or her corpse. The dead person no longer has the corpse
at his or her disposal, there is no longer any habeas corpus. Habeas corpus, at least,
is not a habeas corpse, supposing there ever were such a thing. Habeas corpus
concerns the living body and not the corpse. Supposing, I repeat, that there ever
were such a habeas corpus for the living body. Because you can guess that I believe
that this habeas corpus never existed and is a legal emergence, however important
it may be, designates merely a way of taking into account or managing the effects of
heteronomy and an irreducible non habeas corpus, And the non habeas corpus at
the moment of death, shows up the truth of this non habeas corpus during the
lifetime of said corpus. 144
if one extends a little the idiom and the juridical law that binds this concept and this
law to England, habeas corpus [see Agamben Homo Sacer on Habeas corpus as an
extension of biopolitics; Derrida also uses the “zone” metaphor in B and S vol 2]
accords a sort of proprietorial sovereignty over one’s own living body. I have the
property of my own body proper, that’s the habeas corpus poss as to birth,
175
conception, birth control, medicine, experimentation, organ transplants, etc [in
other words, what Foucault calls biopolitics], to limit myself to the treatment of
death. I shall not even speak of the specific problems of autosopy, DNA research ,
etc. I shall limit myself to the decision, the choice, the alternative between bury and
cremate, and its relation to the fantasy of the living dead. [Derrida doesn’tntote that
the canniblas both bury and cremate the uneaten remains of their dead prisoners.
The cannibals are both raw and cooked, to recall Levi-Strauss.]
In the jewish community of Algeria, where people are buried, of
course, with no coffin, straight intthe ground in the shroud , , to
make ssure ice is not burying someone living, one plugs all the
orifices and lays out the corpse on cold titles long enough fir
stiffening, rigor mortis, to confirm beyond all doubt the legal or
medical certification of death that in the end one does not absolutely
trust. 145
Instead of starting with a fantasmatics “the fantasy of dying a living death” [a
psycho-anthropological point of view] 144 leading to apoertics of inhumation ad
cremation, we can start with a living corpse. Habeas corpse is the literary remains.
Robinson C’s anxiety / fantasy is shared by Rousseau only in relation to the fate of
his works. Rousseau stopping writing for publication. So Derrida too quickly
invokes inheritance as a metaphor for textual transmission, or he boxes up what he
could have unfoled but simly did not.
176
Agamben’s Homo Sacer as he situates his account of biopolitics directly in
relation to Foucault and maintains that he has radicalized Foucault. Agamben ‘s
critique of liberal democracy turns in part on habeas corpus:
The first recording of bare life as the new political subject is already implicit in the
document that is generally placed at the foundation of modern democracy: the 1679
writ of habeas corpus . . . Nothing allows one to measure the difference between
ancient and medieval freedom and the freedom at the basis of modern democracy
better than this formula. It is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives,
nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the subject of politics. And
democracy is born precisely as the assertion and presentation of this “body”: habeas
corpus ad subjiciendum, “you will have to have the body to show” (124-125).
Bring in de Certeau here as away of rethinking his notion of reading as sovereignty
in order to make our book intelligible to history of the book people.
+ Chartier + Agamben equals Biopolitics of reading
We should try to rediscover the movements of this reading within the body itself,
which seems to stay docile and silent but mines the reading in its own way: from the
nooks of all sorts of “reading rooms” (including lavatories) emerge subconscious
gestures, grumblings, tics, stretchings, rustlings, unexpected noises, in short wild
orchestrations of the body. But elsewhere, at its most elementary level, reading has
become, over the last three centuries, a visual poem. It is no longer accompanied, as
it used to be, by the murmur of a vocal articulation nor by the movement of a
muscular manducation. To read without uttering the words aloud or at least
177
mumbling them is a “modern” experience, unknown for millennia. In earlier times,
the reader interiorized the text; he made his voice the body of the other; he was an
actor. Today, the text no longer imposes its own rhythm on the subject, it no longer
manifests itself through the reader’s voice. This withdrawal of the body, which is
the condition of its autonomy, is a distancing of the text. It is the reader’s habeas
corpus (175-176).
Several friends recently brought to my attention a recent publication (“a pathetic
Parisian tabloid in the style of Gala,” as one of them put it), whose author
pontificates, without verifying anything, on what I’ve written and taught for a
number of years now under the name unconditional hospitality. Obviously
understanding nothing, the author even gives me, as if still back in high school, a bad
grade and exclaims peremptorily in the margins of my paper: “Absurd!” Well, what
can I say? . . . . note 12, 172 (Rogues)
Gives several self-citations on p 173 (still n.12) and then concludes
“as for the notion of sacrifice, which the same newspaper confusedly throws into the
mix, I’ve written so much on the subject that a whole page of references would not
suffice. One last bit of advice—uttered out of desperation: read everything! And
ten, if need be, reread it!”
178
See also “”I repeat my advice, always, always, “venture beyond the beginning,” in
Post-Script to, “Post-Script: Reading ‘beyond the beginning’; or, On the Venom in
Letter: Postscript and ‘Literary Supplement’” Demeure (104-08)154
Derrida, “Privilege,” in Who’s Afraid of Philosophy
The possiblization of this power can also be read in the “internal” organization of
Kantian discourse. 52 As for the “internal” difficulties of this machinery . . . 53
Derrida on Hegel’s letter written, when Hegel was 52, to the Royal Ministry of
Spiritual Academic, and Medical Affairs,” appendix to “The Age of Hegel” in Who’s
Afraid of Philosophy, 117—49; “Appendix,” 150-57, after Hegel last major work,
Elements of the Philosophy of Right had been published.
See Derrida’s note 2, p. 203
Reference to the texts of the Philosophy of Right of Berlin as well as to the political
scene of the epoch is a precondition for the minimal intelligibility of this letter. We
should therefore specify immediately that it is becoming increasingly clear we must
154
See Richard Burt, Putting Your Papers in Order: The Matter of Kierkegaard’s
Writing Desk, note 43.
Goethe’s Files, and Derrida’s Paper Machine, Or, the Philology and Philosophy of
Publishing After Death
179
speak of the “Philosophies of Right” of Berlin. This multiplicity is not simply a
matter of revisions, versions, editions, or additions.
Learning ‘by heart.’” (132)
In other words, Derrida comes up agains the publication history only to dimssis it.
Derrida citing Hegel’s letter: “if I do not die a professor of the Royal University, my
contributions to the University Widows’ Fund will be entirely lost.” 127
What he learned by heart and still remembers 119
memory, the recollection of certain lifeless contrents, 132
Hegel played the lottery . . . scrap of paper 130
All that, moreover, for a widow and children about whom he already thinks
posthumously and thus with the paradoxical disinterestedness of the dead?” (128)
And a situation in which cannot really be determined without the simultaneous and
structural cognizance of an entire textuality, consisting at least of . . . Interpreting
the age of Hegel involves keeping in min this boundless textualuty . . . 137
If this ‘special report’ has more or less disappeared from the great circulation of
“canonized” texts, can this be explained entirely by reasons relating to its ‘form’? It
is, first of all, a letter. Of course, there is a venerable tradition of philosophical
letters. But what does this tradition consist and what does it preserve? Either
‘fictive’ letters on topics . . .They are usually read as they were novels or memoirs.. . .
This tradition, as we have described it. Cannot find a place of Hegel’s ‘letter.’ It is not
180
really a ‘letter,’ although it bears the marks of one. It is less addressed to a person
than to a function. 136; 137
A few years ago, in Strasbourg, I saw, or think I saw, a photo of Martin wearing short
pants. Martin Heidegger. You don’t necessarily have to have trembled before
Thinking or Philosophy, or to have had masters or pastors who delighted in
provoking fear and promoting the delight engendered by fear, to explode in laughter
on seeing the short pants of this great man who was defrocked (he too a product, if
we can say that, like Hegel, of an unforgettable “Theological Seminary”). There, it
wasn’t Martin himself who displayed the photograph. Rather, his brother, “the sole
brother.” Also one of Heidegger’s dedications reads. The brother played this trick
on him with the naive, affectionate mischievousness of some someone swelling with
pride at having written a little book of family memories—“Heidegger” family
memories—but who also has (perhaps) something of a (deadly) grudge against his
brother in short pants. In short pants, at an age when one has not yet learned
philosophy, much less thinking, there is no difference yet between two sole
brothers. 126
“at least in the form of a political metaphor, the theme of a Bemachtigungstrieb, a
drive for ascendancy, for power, or for possession. I tried to show elsewhere, in a
long Post Card, how the word and concept of Bemachtigung,” however discreet they
are and however underanalyzed by Freud’s readers, are present beginning in he
Three Essays and play in Beyond a decisive role, beyond or on this side of the
principles, as principal drive, if I can say that, notably in love / hate ambivalence and
181
the unleashing of cruelty that calls up the hypothesis of originary sadism. . . there
would thus be a concept of a drive that for power . . that organizes . . the whole order
of what Lacan called the symbolic.” 258
Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a
Sovereign Cruelty,” Without Alibi, 238-80; to 258.
The problem of the death penalty and of sovereignty in general, of the sovereign
power of the state over the life and death of citizens, this will make manifest a
double resistance, both that of the world to psychoanalysis and that of
psychoanalysis to itself as to the world, of psychoanalysis to psychoanalysis as
being-in-the-world.
Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a
Sovereign Cruelty,” Without Alibi, 238-80; to 262.
Derrida trashes Agamben, Homo Sacer, in note 26, 165 of Rogues. In one sentence.
“In this text [Aristotle’s Politics], as in so many others both by Plato and Aristotle,
the distinction between bios and zoe--or zen—is more than tricky or precarious; in
no way does it correspond to the strict opposition on which Agamben bases the
quasi-totality of his argument about sovereignty and the biopolitical in Homo Sacer
(but let’s leave that for another time).” P. 24
Rogier Laporte Le carnet posthume
182
Pun on “card” in English (not “carnet and “carte” but like “post” as mail and police in
French)
Phone card and postcard intersect in the anecdote Derrida tells about giving his card
to the couple as he arrived back in France but not knowing if they had enough
time—if there was enough money on it for them to place the call.
Calling card—means telephone card now or phone card; a signature token or
characteristic of a crime used by a serial criminal
Telephonic and postal analogous in Ulysses Gramophone, which recalls the Post Card,
or redials it.
Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden Ed. Genetic Criticism: Texts and
Avant-textes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree trans. Channa Newman
University of Nebraska Press (1997)
Sovereignty is analogous to the letter in being indivisible:
It would be necessary to dissociate a certain unconditional independence of
thought, of deconstruction, of justice, of the Humanities, of the university, and so
forth from any phantasm of indivisible sovereignty and of sovereign mastery.”
183
“The University Without Condition,” in Without Alibi, 235
“Sending” chapter 10, 108-14 in Rogues, and
“To Arrive—At at the Ends of the State (and of War, and of World War),” Rogues
141-59; “revois” , p. 38
Examples of self-citation note 8, 162
Inn both cases it seemed to me more approriate to publish these texts as such in
order to respectnot only the constrints and limits imposed on htem but also in their
original aduiences. None of the distinguishing features provided by the original
lcontexts have thus been edited out or modidfied: on such a day, in such a place,
before such an audience. Only a few notes were added after the fact. N3.162 selfcitations, n. 12, 173
Heideggerian deconstruction (Destruktion) never relaly opposed logicentrism or
even logos. Indeed, it often, on the contrary, in the name of a more “orginary” deeper
interpretation that it carried out thedeconstruction of lasical ontology or
ontotheology.
2
The “deconstrction” that I attempt or that tempts me is not only distinct (in ways too
numerous and too widely discussed welwwhere for me to recall here) from the one
practised by Heidegger. Note 14, 173 in Rogues
The next note returns to Of Grammaotlogy is in a discussion of Luther’s use of
Destruktion and Heidegger as a great reader of Luther. Note 3. 174
Hence I never associated the theme of decnstruciton with the the themes s that were
constantly being brought up during the discussion, themes of ‘diagonosis,” of “after”
184
or “post,” of “death” (death of philosophy, death of metaphysics, and so on)
of”completion” or “surpassing” (Uberwindung or Scritt zuruck), of the “end.” One
will find no trace of such a vocabulary in nay of my texts. Note 2, 174 Rogues,
“cruelty” and “sovereignty” in “Psychoanalysis Searches” Without Alibi
“Psychoanalysis would be the same of that which which, without theological or
other alibi, would be turned toward what is most proper to cruelty. Psychoanalysis .
. . would be another name for the “without alibii.” “Psychoanalysis Searches”,
Without Alibi 240 “cruelty, sovereignty, resistance” 242; “Freudian psychoanalysis”
257
Freudian psychoanalytic discurse” 258
Derrida on Die Welst ist fort, ich Paul Celan’s dich tragen” (see also Rogues, 155)
“I carry you then in the void, the time it takes to fly or swim not from one island to
another in the world, but from one non-shore to a non-shore, between two nonarrivals.”
Beast and Sov 2, 268 (369)
“the finite time of such an impossible voyage between two non-shores where
nothing happens”
268 (370)
Can Derrida Die?" (It would be a reframing of
185
JD's reading of Heidegger on the animal perishing but not dying
(Sterben) as only Dasein can in relation to a paragraph in Being and
Time on "after death," as a paragraph that follows Heidegger's
distinction between demise / perish and death on which Derrida does
not comment; the reframing would open up the notion of posthumographic
criticism, oriented to the future, to publication--as opposed to
genetic criticism, oriented to the past, to manuscripts, to unpublished
materials--so that one would not pass from the disorder of an archive
of papers and mss to the order of a published work but from one kind
of mess to another. In other words, one would not pass.) Did I tell
you I found a will--just published in English translation--that
Heidegger made in the 1930s about how his works should be published
posthumously? THE WISH AND THE WELL “On Preserving What is Attempted” in
Mindfulness (Besinnung). trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, Continuum,
2006, 270-78.
186
“Nothing need be said about the ship’s voyage and goal, because it has become
wholly the vehicle of surviving [Überleben] and rising above life [Über-leben].”
“tranquility of Dionysus’s sea voyage as depicted on Exekias’s ancient vase.” Hans
Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996 ), 65. Blumenberg mentions Robinson Crusoe
twice, near the end of the book 75, 78.
Derrid speaks of two “non-shores” in tenth session , but never enages Hdeigger’s
Sojourns (even though Derida went to greece—book on Athens and photography. .
This same image is on the cover of English trans. of Heidegger’s Sojourns.
This piece of paper initially takes the form of a journal, of a note to self, dated in
Pascal’s hand 209
It was found written on a piece of paper found in Pascal's clothing after his death. . .
209
And Pascal was only thirty-one years old when he wrote and put into his clothing
the posthumous paper 210
To whom did he write this? To whom did he write in general? For there is in Pascal .
. . a “do not remember me,” a ‘keep me in oblivion,’ . . . a ‘forget me’ about which one
187
can always wonder if it is not also praying that one remember to forget and even
attach oneself to the one thus praying that one not attach oneself to him. 210
“[there is no doubt, then, that the general form of the posthumous fragment by
Pascal us both, indissociably, that of the prayer and of a journal for self or for other
humans, other neighbors and brothers in sin], and also, [primarily, a prayer
addressed to God and to Jesus his son], even though often this prayer quotes words
from the the Bible . . . ,” 213
The paradox of the “forget me,” “do not love me,” is to be found in Pascal, and there
is again consigned to another paper as his elder sister Gilberte Pascal says 210
This is indeed what has been called a memorial, to use the word of a witness, Father
Guerrier” 212
“Memorial” is inserted at the head of the note in the Oxford World Classics
translation
1. Ps. XXVIII, 16. --- Ces trois denieres lignes ne figurent pas sur la autographe de la
Bibliotecque nationale: il est possbible cependant eq’elles aient appartenus au
parchemin original.” 143.
188
This note comes right before ?”Amen” and after the last line, “Non obliviscare
sermones tuos. (143)
In Honor Levi’s Oxford World’s Classics note to the “paper” entitled “The Memorial”
in his edition of the Pensees and Other Writings, Levi writes “The Memorial: there
exist two texts of this document, one in the hand of Pascal on paper sewn into the
lining of his jacket after his death, and a second, swor, exact copy of text on
parchment, itself lost, which the paper and was sewn into the jacket with it. The
parchment text adds the last three lines and the scripture references. The Memorial
follows as closely as possible the layout of the parchment version, which is slightly
longer than the paper copy it protected when sewn into Pascal’s jacket.
A special receipt was issue for the Memorial when it was deposited on 25
September 1711, to the library of the of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, demonstrating that
it was considered a document apart from the fragments now known as the Pensees.
The document, presumably written within hours of the experience it records,
captures the moments of a movement of profound spiritual exaltation. pp. 24—45,
note 178
“Opuscules—Deuxieme partie,” in Pensées et opuscules / Blaise Pascal ; publiés avec
une introduction, des notices, des notes et deux fac-similés du manuscrit des Pensées
ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris : Hachette, 1946), 142.
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its moment on, is a livingdead machine, sur-viving the body of a thing buried in a library, a bookstore, in
189
cellars, urns, drowned in the world-wide waves of a Web, etc., but a dead thing that
resucitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or
the other breath, each time an intentionality ontends it and makes it live again by
animating it, like as the Husserl of The Origin of Geometry woould say, a “geistige
Leiblichkeit,” a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Lieb and not Körper), a
body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional
spirituality. 131
The survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to
engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is
at work But once again, this is the case not only for books, or for writing or for the
archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living
experience is woven, through and through. A weave of survival, like death in life or
life in death, a weave that does not come along to clothe a more originary existence,
a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist under this clothing. The
Beast and Sovereign 2, pp. 131-32 (194-95)
Compare the weaving / clothing metaphor to Pascal’s shirt.
Derrida’s analysis of Heidegger in The Animal That Therefore I Am as well as in The
Beast and Sovereign 2 focuses on Heidgger’s distinction between demise (Ableben)
and dying [Sterben]: “Dasein . . . qua Dasein . . does not simply perish. We call this
intermediate phenomenon its demise (Ableben). Let the term dying [Sterben] stand
for the way of being in which Dasein is toward its death. Thus we can say Dasein
never peishes. Dasein can suffer demise only as long as it dies.”
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But Derrida does not comment on a paragraph on “after death” on the same page
The ontological analysis of being toward the end . . . does not anticipate any
existentiell stance toward death. If death is defined as the “end” of Dasein, that is, of
being-in-the-world, no ontic decision has been made as to whether “after death”
another being [Sein] is still possible, either higher or lower, whether Dasein “lives
on” or even, “outliving itself,” is “immortal.” Nor is anything decided ontically about
the otherwordly and its ossibility, any more than about “this worldly,” as of norms
and rules for behavior toward death should be proposed for edification.” But our
analysis of death remains purely “this-worldly”in that it interprets the phenomenon
solely with respect to the question of how it enters into each and every Dasein as its
possibility-of-being. We cannot even ask with any methodological assurance about
what is after death until death is understood in its full ontological essence. Whether
such a question presents a possible theoretical question at all is not to be decided
here. The this-world ontological interpretation of death comes before any ontic,
other-worldly speculation . . . The existential analsyis is methodologically prior to
questions of a biology, psychology, theodicy,and theology of death. P 238; 239
(248); see the end of the last sentence of the note on “’problems of life’”at the
bottom of page 239, after the last sentence of the body of the text.
Kittler, Post Card, 180
191
Nobus, Danny. 2001. Littorical Reading: Lacan, Derrida, and the
Analytic Production of Chaff. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture &
Society 6(2): 279 -288.
I said as few words as possible about my post cards, asking him to keep it as secret as
possible. This morning, in Freibourg [sic], to which he accompanied me by car, I
understood that he had immediately spoken of it to Kittler, my host here, and perhaps to
his wife (psychoanalyst). The secret of the post card burns. 180
Derrida is also post-hermeneutic in facteur de la veritie, but for entirely different reasons
from Kittler. P. 441 center hermeneutic deciphering 441
What counts here is the indestructibility of the letter has to do with its elevation toward
the ideality of a meaning. . . it is the effect of living and present speech that in the last
analysis guarantees the indestructible and unforgettable singularity of the letter, the
taking-place of a signifier which is never lost, goes astray, or is divided The subject is
very divided, but the phallus is not to be cut. Fragmentation is an accident which does not
concern it. 466
Mentions Lacan’s notes, 446-47; 468
1. That fiction for Lacan is permeated by truth as something spoken, and therefore as
something non-real. 2. That this leads to no longer reckoning, in the text, with everything
that remains irreducible to the spoken word, to speech and meaning: that is, irreducible
dis-regard, theft without return, destructibility, divisibility, the failure to reach a
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destination (which definitely rebels against the destination of the lack: an unverifiable
non-truth. Post Card, 469
Materiality of the letter is about its divisibility and its destructibility, not just about wear
and tear of physical material, as is the case with Kittler. Technological is recording
media and storage media and hence purely instrumental (weapon of war in which arts are
side effects of military advances). His criticism is post-hermeneutic, post Goethe’s Faust,
only because he is pre-Heideggerian, that is, he does not consider the essence of
technology and the work of art. But divisibility is curiously troped as destruction, as
tearing. Burn as metaphor for archive for Derrida. Derrida auto-immun-reshelves his
works. Derrida on a typo versus a Freudian slip. A record breaks only once a century,
circle becomes circa, time a succession of periods.
Parergon subsumed what Genette calls the paratext—prefaces of Hegel, or preface or
Envois, or exergues and so on in Archive Fever, on the title in Maurice Blanchot and
Kafka, on the proper name, among others, are thresholds of reading, not pragmatic but
disseminative, distnierrance literary in the way to which Genette objects—dysfunctional
as paratexts that become invisible and deliver meaning. Parergon is also related to frame
in Kant and in The Truth of Painting as well as to graphic design, page layout, columns,
and footnotes (living On, Jacques Derrida and Circumfession). And it related to the
material support. Parergon is abount borders, borderlines, rather than thresholds, even
drawing the line between writing and drawing, between the book and the end of the book.
Reads Freud’s footnotes in Speculations on ‘Freud’”, does not read Lacan’s endnotes,
and does not include any footnotes to Envois. A psychoanalysis of the paratext—
parapraxes of everyday life—not included in Derrida’s notion of the autobiography of
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writing, only paragon. How does a Derridean reading differ from a psychoanalytic one, a
symptomatic one, how is the postal principle not post, but posted, sent off? Derrida’s
paraspychoanalytic, paraDerridean reading as “parerpraxes.” Reading of Freud’s
footnotes, but Derrida’s own useless footnote; also Freud’s omission (like Nietzsche not
mentioned, but no matter). What counts as a symptom? What are the limits of the
graphic unconscious, the graphesis and grammtology of the missing? Hegel on decay and
preservation (dialectics), but nothing n corpse and decay in Derrida. Corpse on 5, 358;
corporeality 438 underworld, 410. This paper, 66. Action of these dead men when they
bury their dead, 45. Kittler on corpse Question of the destruction of material supports
and recording and storage media, especially repetition as the copy and the facsimile, that
cannot be thematized or reduced to a key word, even difference, dissemination,
disinterrance, parergon, or “survivance”). Why the engagement of Freud and media in
Post Card and Archive Fever? Would a parerpraxis be a distinerror rather than a
Freudian sli, a seeming accident that isn’t an accident but overdetermined? The finitude
of the support (mystic writing pad is theoretically infinite, though the body too is finite,
will wear out, get used up.
Freud can only justify the apparently useless expenditure of paper, ink, and typographic
printing, in other words, the laborious investment in the archive, by putting forward the
novelty of his discovery, the very one which provokes so much resistance, and first of all
to himself, and precisely because its silent vocation is to burn the archive and to incite
amnesia, thus refuting the economic principle of the archive, aiming to ruin the archive
as accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior
place. What in general, can this substrate consist of? Exterior to what? What does
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“exterior” mean” mean? Is a circumcision, for example, an exterior mark? Is it an
archive? 12.
Remains anonymous for me, 171
Car, 101
Alan Bass’s entry on “auto”, xvi.
Reading Room / Reading Raum
Engagement with Kittler in The Post Card—only time Derrida did?
Phonography means the death of the author; it stores a mortal voice rather than
eternal thoughts and turns of phrase. The past that the photograph forces to speak
is only Wildenbruch’s helpless euphemism for his singular body, which was
posthumous even while he lived. Discourse Networks, 237
Kittler on Freud in Discourse Networks and on Lacan in Literature anthology. He
explains away psychoanalysis with reference to technical developments.
Technodeterminism aside, the basis of German discourse analysis is Foucault. There is
no room for psychoanalysis. See The Index Card book by German guy. Work on files—
also excludes Freud-historicizes, and Files Vismann book is Derrida friendly but does not
engage psychoanalysis. Neither Derrida nor Kittler doing a positive history like Stiegert
Postal Relays book. What are the limits of a Derridean as opposed to a psychoanalytic
symptomatic reading? Graphic unconscious versus psychoanalytic—mystic writing pad.
Would reproducing the reading room matter? A photo of the librarian? Derrida’s pencils
(the way A U.S President’s pens matter when he signs a bill into law). Why only reprods
from the fortne telling book. Why are there three reproductions of the post card, one in
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color? Does their placement in the text matter? Consider delay between literary story
and why he told it.
The library room in The Post Card. Reading aloud. Cite German book about reading
and the body.
Derrida says he is on the side of survival and preservation.
In Paper Machine?
Different kinds of anarchivity: Scrupulous self-referencing in Given Time versus careless
self-referencing in Negotiations. No footnotes for “Envois” in The Post Card. The
faux-tires of The Post Card. Is not a book, it is four books in one. Scrambling codes of
lecture and revised for publication. Apart from Jacques Derrida, Circumfessions, stops
short of material archives, of the physical “supports.” Graphic play in a variety of texts
from Tympan, Living On: Borderline’s and most notably Glas, but also writings on
images. Again a scrambling of codes in Memoirs of the Blind. Literariness—destruction
of manuscripts and papers in literature by burning. Ash, cinders, and so on, literary
tropes for the archive, the ash of the archive. More than a preferred metaphor a
“characteristic” “habit” of performing writing, of injecting the performative into
publiaction. Gennte’s threshold begins after a book has been published.
Did not write about his own archives in U.C. Irvine and in France. Logs on to a
“Derridabase” sometimes, sometimes not.
Local resistances to reading not of a sort one would catalogue or classify. Would it make
sense to do so or attempt to do so? Derrida leaves open the relation between the medium
and material support. Letters and cards; letters and dead letters. But Freud and fax in
Archive Fever. Hw does publication bear on this relation? Publication leaving behind an
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archive of supports. Is there a temporality to publication, a chronology of a sort that
would need to be read, that would make any difference to Derrida’s reading,
unreadability, what he means when he says others have not read it or that he has only
begun to read a text or that he will never have finished reading a text? Relation between
finitude of the support, its publication in a given medium, and its sur-vivance beyond the
opposition between living speech and a (dead) writing” Derrida usually deconstructs?
Relation between support, or biblios, and bios, or autobiography of writing. Take up
these questions with respect to Derrida’s engagement with Freud and Lacan in the post
Card (will ignore the telepathy essay) and “For the Love of Lacan,” a text wrote after
Lacan was dead in the ordinary sense of the word. Postal principle and postal structure
versus telephony as most fundamental of tropes. Tropics of reading as the parergon, the
borderless borders of the text in relation to its title, its central paratext for Derrida?
Would it make sense if someone wanted to publish a book consisting of reproductions
and diplomatic transcriptions post cards Derrida had sent to friends, along the lines of,
say, the book entitled The Walter Benjamin Archive? Would that be cool? Or silly?
Consider the book on Derrida that largely reproduces his book covers and so on, that
turns his texts into facsimiles.
Part of fascination in Artaud le moma is with Artaud’s burning some of the illustrations.
The pages are remains. But their ash was not collected and stored in an urn.
Anarchvitiy Freud, Post Card and Freud, Post Card again in Resistances of
Psychoanalysis.
197
Having already taken advantage of the time I have been given, having given myself as a
rule not to return or refer to the book I have just published on the gift and currency, I will
content myself with recounting in the from of an elliptical epilogue, a true story.
Something that recently happened to me at a train station. It made me and continues to
make me think. I will tell it without commentary, but we can return to it in the
discussion.
It is not a story about a bank credit card. Nor is it a question of those coded cards with
which we are able to draw bills from walls after having shown one’s credentials to cash
distributing machines. It is about a telephone card, already partially used, but used to a
degree that I could neither measure nor calculate. I had just called, using this card, from
the Gare du Nord around midnight, having returned from Lille. A young English couple
next to me was in front of a telephone machine that took coins. The machine wasn’t
working, and the English couple didn’t have a card. Having dialed the number for them
with my card, I left it with them, and just as I was walking away, the young English man
offered to pay me, without knowing how or how much: I made a gesture with my hand
to signify no, that it was a gift and that, in any case, I didn’t want any money. The whole
thing lasted several seconds and I asked myself, and I think the answer is not possible for
a thousand reasons that I will not go into, whether I had given something, and what, or
how much, how much money, by helping them to do not just anything—but simply call
someone far away by telephone. And for some reason, which I do not have time to
develop, just as I did not have time to think at the Gare du Nord, there is no way to
answer the question of knowing if there was something which one out to be
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congratulated, narcissistically, for having given, whether out of generosity or not,
something, money or not. And to whom.
If we had time for a discussion, I would try to convince you that there cannot be and,
what is more, that there should not be, an answer to satisfy these questions.
And thus one cannot, and should not, know—whether there was a gift. Into the bargain
[par-dessu le marché].
Derrida, “On the ‘Priceless,’ or the ‘Going Rate’ of the Transaction.” In Negotiations.
326-28
Derrida has already mentioned running out of time, p. 321 (middle of the essay, recalling
the beginning) and 314 (first page). He is so caught up in the question of the gift,
sacrifice, and time that he forgets to ask if the call went through, if the couple reached the
person they called. Perhaps Derrida saw that they did reach that person. But he does not
say so. Perhaps he walked off before the connection went through just assuming it
would. Nor does he consider that the call could have lasted only a few seconds. The
card installs a kind of gambling, take your chances on my gift, that Derrida overlooks
since the amount on the card is finite and perhaps too small to permit the call—can the
call go through on this card? Can the conversation the couple wishes to have happen?
Did it happen? Or was there too little only debited to the card or it to happen, or happen
successfully. The story may not be about a bank credit card, but it is a story about a blank
credit card. While the amount of money on the card is finite, the credit is seemingly
infinite. Derrida does not check his blank out but not blank check telephone line of
credit. It’s a kind of Avital Ronellian moment. The card ensures that the call will be
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received, that the person will pick up, and those who are far away will be closer. To
regift as in get rid of.
Dead and Deader
Letter as evidence, unprecedented, in The Instant of My Death. Inscribed dedication to
Jacques Derrida by de Man in “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink 2: (within such limits).” Eulogies
of dead friends in Beast and the Sovereign, at the beginning and inside sessions.
Everything Must Go: Fire Sale / Firewall
Something other than the traditional opposition between (living) speech and a (dead)
writing. 101, n. 18
Death of the king, pp. 1-5, “The Time of the King”; —cf. Ranciere on Philip II
“Conditions: fault, debt, duty.” 150 What about defaulting? Bankruptcy?
We are at once his debtor and his creditor. 151
This unlivable distinction between economy and chresmatics7 . . . 161
“Let us begin by the impossible” 6, top of page after space left of more than half a page
on p. 5. Chapter One, “The Time of the King.” Is that an accident of the translation? Or
is a graphic layout carried out, translated “literally” on to the Chicago edition?
Some opposite numbers of scrupulous log on of Given Time 1 (never followed by two),
and Memoirs of Blind, are Instant of My Death and The Animal that Therefore I am.
Derrida, D'ailleurs and Au-dela la principe postale
The logic of the phantasm, as we are concerned with it here (be it about living death, the
ghost or the revenant, about cremation or the posthumous), [this logic of the phantasm] is
not strictly speaking a logic, it resists the logos, the legein of the logos, somewhat in the
200
same way as the eschato-logical is both the thing of the logos and which exceeds and
comes after the logos, the logic of the logos, the extremity of the last, of the last word of
the last man, the extremity of the last extremity situated both in speech, in logos as the
last word, still and already out of speech, falling out of it into the posthumous that is
already breathing, precisely, the logic of the phantasm resists, defies and dislocates logos
and logic in all its figures, be it a question of logos as reason and as the logic of noncontradiction and the excluded middle. Of yes or no, of the yes and the no, of the
undecidable either/or, be it a question of logos as speech or be it a question of logos as
gathering and the power of putting together. There is therefore no logic of the phantasm,
strictly speaking, since as Freud reminds us, the phantasm, just as much as the drive, is to
be found on both sides of the limit between two opposing concepts, like what Blanchot
nicknames, especially in The Step Not Beyond (we shall come to this in a moment), the
neuter. There is therefore no logic or logos of the phantasm of the ghost or the spectral.
Unless the logos itself be precisely the phantasm, the very element, the origin and the
resource of the phantasm itself, the form and the formation of the phantasm, or even of
the revenant.
This is why all the things we’re dealing with here, sovereignty the animal, the living
dead, the buried alive, etc., the spectral and the posthumous—well, the dream, the
oneiric, fiction, so-called literary fiction, so-called fantastic literature will always be less
inappropriate, more relevant, if you prefer, than the authority of wakefulness, and the
vigilance of the ego, and the consciousness of so-called philosophical discourse.
Amor (love) tization
mortmain — n
201
law the state or condition of lands, buildings, etc, held inalienably, as by an
ecclesiastical or other corporation
[C15: from Old French mortemain, from Medieval Latin mortua manus dead hand,
inalienable ownership]
amortize
late 14c., from O.Fr. amortiss-, prp. stem of amortir "deaden," from V.L. *admortire
"to extinguish," from L. ad- "to" + mors (gen. mortis) "death" (see mortal). Originally
a legal term for an act of alienating lands. Meaning "extinguish a debt" (in form
amortization) is attested from 1864.
mort·main An Idiot who says duh.   (happy Faces and a sad face).
noun Law .
1. the condition of lands or tenements held without right of alienation, as by an
ecclesiastical corporation; inalienable ownership.
2. the perpetual holding of land, especially by a corporation or charitable trust.
Origin: 1250–1300; Middle English mort ( e ) mayn ( e ) < Anglo-French
mortemain, translation of Medieval Latin mortua manus dead hand
am·or·tize verb (used with object), am·or·tized, am·or·tiz·ing.
1. Finance . a. to liquidate or extinguish (a mortgage, debt, or other obligation),
especially by periodic payments to the creditor or to a sinking fund.
b. to write off a cost of (an asset) gradually.
2. Old English Law . to convey to a corporation or church group; alienate in
mortmain.
202
Origin: 1375–1425; Middle English amortisen < Anglo-French, Old French
amortiss-, long stem of amortir literally, to kill, die < Vulgar Latin *a ( d )
mortīre (derivative of Latin mors, stem mort- death, with ad- ad-); -ize later
replacing -is ( s )-, probably by association with Anglo-Latin a ( d ) mortizāre
Amortization of survivance. Mortgage economy of debt, depreciation, and death
Mort—death; “atem” Celan, German for “breath”; given time. Gift of death.
Amortization in Specters of Marx? Postcard structure, The Post Card, 89.
This is one of the reasons we always set out from texts for the elaboration of this
problematic, texts in the ordinary sense of differential traces according to the concept we
have elaborated elsewhere. [No reference is supplied.] We could not do otherwise even
if we wished to do so or thought to do so. We are no longer credulous enough to believe
that we are setting out form things themselves by avoiding “texts” simply by avowing
quotation or the appearance of “commentary.” The most apparently direct writing, the
most directly concrete, personal writing which is supposedly in direct contact with the
“thing itself,” this writing is “on credit”: subjected to the authority of a commentary or
re-editing that it is not even capable of reading. 100 Trans. Peggy Kamuf Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1992
Cites “Le facteur de la verite,” p. 104, n. 21: “If we take the liberty of accumulating
references of this sort, it is because reflection begun in the seminar titled “Donner—
le temps” was contemporary with and indissociable from these works, notably The
Post Card, which, was already mentioned, refers to it in a note above (see above
Foreword, n. 2).
203
Cites “Le facteur de la verite,” p. 105-06, n. 224; 151-52, n. 24; 15 n. 6.
Citation to Margins of Philosophy, Ousia and Gramme, is in the text, p. 27, but not
cited. No note.
Cinders, trans. Ned Luckacher p. 17, n. 7
They must restitute and enter again into the symbolic circle. 144
Cites survivance in Living On: Borderlines,
No, only a “life” can give, but a life in which this economy of death presents itself and
lets itself be exceeded. Neither death nor immortal life can ever give anything, only
a singular surviving can give. This is the element of the problematic.
The text credited to Baudelaire, which we have barely begun to read, belongs to a
scene of writing and therefore to therefore to the scene of a gift unthinkable for any
subject. It is within this exceeded and excessive scene, within its destiny and its
destination without identifiable addressee and without certain addressor, that our
corpus is carved out, But insofar as it tells the story of a gift, this corpus is going to
say :in:” itself, “of” itself the exceeding that frames it and that exceeds tis frame. It is
going to re-mark in a supplementary abyme that absolute dissemination that
destines the text to depart in ashes or go up in smoke. For example, tobacco ashes
and tobacco smoke.
Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, 102
In truth, posthumous, posthumus, with an h,
appears to be a faulty spelling, the grammarian
tells us, and the spelling error in it is apparently
204
induced by the proximity with humus, earth. . . .
It’s like for differance, with an a, which is yet
another way to posthume by differing or
deferring life or, what comes down to the same
thing, deferring death. In truth, postume, without
an h, apparently corresponds to the superlative
of posterus. Posterus qualifies the one who comes
after, the one who follows. Posterus is the follower
of the descendent, the one who is going to come, or
even the future itself, posthumous, the superlative
here meaning the last follower of all, and above all
the one who, being born after the death of the
father, child or grandchild, posterity, bears the
testamentary future and the fidelity of inheritance.
Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 174
I attempted to show his in “Le facteur de la verite” and elsewhere; I would be
unable to reconstitute all this here in so little time. “For the Love of Lacan,” 55
Burning by Heart
What does it mean to reconstitute a reading? Is there a cryonics metaphor there?
Wetwares of publication. Freeze-dried food for astronauts? Reading with the other text
in hand?
I am reflecting upon a rather rigorous principle of destruction. What will we burn, what
will we keep (in order to broil it better still)? The selection (tri), if it is possible, with in
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truth be postal: I would cut out, in order to deliver it, everything that derives form the
Postal Principle . . . . And we burn the rest. Everything that from near or far touches on
the post card (this one, in which one sees Socrates reading us, or writing all the others
and every post card in general), all of this we would keep, or finally doom to loss by
publishing it . . . 176
“The librarian seemed to know me . . . but this did not get me out of the oath. She asked
me to read it . . . Therefore I read it and handed her back the cardboard covered with a
transparent paper that had tendered me. At this point, she starts to insist, I had not
understood : no, you have to read it out loud. I did so . . . What would an oath that you
did not say out loud be worth, an oath that you would only read, or not say be worth, an
oath that you would only read, or that while writing you would only read? Or that you
would telephone? Or whose tape you would send? I leave you to follow up. 208
Did I tell you, the oath that I had to swear out loud (and without which I could never have
been permitted to enter, stipulated, among other things, that I introduce neither fire nor
flame into the premises: “I hereby undertake . . . not to bring into the Library or kindle
therein any fire or flame . . . and I promise to obey all the rules of the library.” 215-16
Scene of reading and fire. “Read this letter now at once many times and burn it.” 588
It now resembles a rebroadcast, a sinister play-back (but give ear closely, come near to
my lips) and while writing you I henceforth know what I am sending to the fire, what I
am letting appear and what you give me back even before receiving it. Back could have
been orchestrated all of this starting from the title: the back of Socrates and of the card:
all the dossiers that I have bound, the feed-back, the play-back, the returns to sender, etc.,
our tape-recorders, our phantom cassettes. 225 I am reflecting upon a rather rigorous
206
principle of destruction. What will we burn, what will we keep (in order to broil it better
still)? The selection (tri), if it is possible, with in truth be postal: I would cut out, in order
to deliver it, everything that derives form the Postal Principle . . . . And we burn the rest.
Everything that from near or far touches on the post card (this one, in which one sees
Socrates reading us, or writing all the others and every post card in general), all of this we
would keep, or finally doom to loss by publishing it . . . 176
You might read these envois as the preface to a book I have not written . . . As for the
“Envois” themselves, I do not know if their reading is bearable. You might consider
them, if you really wish to, as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence.
Destroyed by fire or by that which figuratively takes its place, more certain of leaving
what I like to call the tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are (s’il ya a la
cendre).
--Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 3
Derrida and inhumation versus cremation but not liquidation—dumping—as waste
management of capital and paperless money, versus burning of letters and books (or
Kindle books).
For other uses of fire by Derrida, see Cinders, ash of the archive for what cannot be
archived in Archive Fever, ash of cigarette in Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money,
“Shall we burn everything?”
--Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 171
Actual legality has no jurisprudence here, and even if you don’t want to give them back I
could reinvent them. I will retain only whatever may be combined as a preface to the
three other texts (Legs de, Le facteur de la verite, Du tout). The ensemble will be seen as
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a combine, an emitting-receiving device: nothing will be seen in it, only calls, or wires, in
every sense will be heard, that which reads the post card and which first will have been
read by it. Socrates reading Socrates. 180
Destroyed 181
Dead letter 181
Lots of tropes will be necessary. There will be several books in this book. I count four,
we will read it as our Tropics. 178
Publication becomes destruction.
A great-holocaustic fire, a burn everything into which we would throw, finally, along
with our entire memory, our names, the letters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc.
And if nothing remains . . 40
A holocaust without fire or flame 71
Hauntology. Hauntogrammatology. Hauntotextology. What is the relation of
the ontology of the post card, and a hauntology? Is there a hauntology of the post
card? it’s deconstruction of dead letters and dead parcels, of letters and postcards,
to the ontology of The Post Card?
Possibility of reading after burning, the figure of burning, of cremation and inhumation,
To four topics.
Fire-Wall Paper
Derrida’s return to Lacan versus his engagement with Lacan in The Post Card with
reference to Dissemination.
varying degrees of pressure Derrida puts in The Post Card and beyond on what is
generally taken to be self-evident oppositions between published and unpublished
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writing, between publication and posthumous publication. Rather than deconstruct these
oppositions and arrive ahead of schedule at pre-programmed aporias, I want to focus on
the structure of the “postal principle” in The Post Card not only with respect to repetition,
reproduction, and the repetition compulsion but with respect to the way Derrida’s
parapsychoanalytic account of the postal principle appears to admit the possibility that a
writer could die more than once and that one read after burning one’s writing materials, a
burning that has already occurred and yet is still to come. I am doing an interrogative
reading not limited to a symptomatic reading or even a Derridean parasymptomaitc
reading.9 And I am not suggesting that Derrida’s death or deaths, as Derrida put in the
title of his commemorative essay “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” in 2004 has somehow
changed how we read The Post Card.10
Relate the topics governing bios and biblios.
First, the life of writing:
they concern the bios of writing, what Derrida in The Post Card calls the autobiography
of writing separate from testamentary writing (writing intended to be read
posthumously):
the description of Ernst’s game . . . can no longer be read solely as a theoretical
argument, as a strictly theoretical speculation that tends to conclude with the
repetition compulsion or the death drive or simply with the internal limit of the PP
[Pleasure Principle] . . . but also can be read, according to the supplementary
necessity of a parergon, as an autobiography of Freud. Not simply an
autobiography confiding his life to his own more or less testamentary writing, but
a more or less living description of his own writing, of the way of writing what he
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writes, most notably Beyond . . . In question is not only a folding back or a
tautological reversal, as if the grandson, by offering him a mirror of his writing,
were in advance dictating to him what (and where) he had to set it down on paper;
as if Freud were writing what his descendence prescribed that he write, in sum
holding the pen prescribed that he write, in sum holding the first pen the one that
always passes from one hand to another; as if Freud were making a return to
Freud through the connivance of a grandson who dictates from his spool and
regularly brings it back, with all the seriousness of a grandson of a certain
privileged contract with the grandfather. It is not only a question of a
tautological mirror. The autobiography of the writing posits and deposits
simultaneously, in the same movement, the psychoanalytic movement. 303
Living versus dead writing, They could never give me a truly satisfactory answer on this
question, how they distinguish between a letter and a parcel, a dead letter and a dead
parcel, and why they did not sell the so-called dead letter at auction. 125
Second, The problem of the support, of the limits of what is and is not a post card.
For it to work, you will say, there have to be supports (ah yes, but the “substance” of
the support is my entire problem. It is enormous and concerns all posts and
telecommunications, their strict, literal and figurative meanings, and the tropic post turns
them into one another, etc,) there has to be some support and, for a time, copyists, seated
copyists. 160-61
210
“I do not believe that one can properly call “post card” a unique and original image, if
some such thing ever occurs, a painting or a drawing destined to someone in the guise of
a post card and abandoned to an anonymous third party, a neutral machinery that
supposedly leads the message to its destination, or at least would have the support make
its way . . . . 35
Why prefer to write on cards? First of all because of the support, doubtless, which is
more rigid, the cardboard firmer, it preserves, it resists manipulation; and then it limits
and justifies from the outside; by means of the borders, the indigence of the discourse, the
insignificance of the anecdote [sic]
Otherwise what would we have done with all the others, the films, the cassettes, the piece
of skin with the drawing? So the insupportable supports remain, post cards, I am burning
all the supports and keeping only purely verbal sequences. 186-87
Third, reproduction of images.
and then I went into a bookstore, I bought several cards and reproductions, as you know. .
. I fell upon two books of photographs that cost me a great deal, one on Freud, very rich,
the other on Heidegger, at home, with Madame and the journalists from the Spiegel in
1978), 238
The narrators of the letters talk about the book project, what the title will be, what the
preface will be: this is a correspondence, but utterly unlike the Hantai Correspondences,
which sorts out painting, letters in facsimile and in diplomatic transcription. Multiple
reproductions of the same postcard in The Post Card. Bears on the postal principle in
relation to repetition, compulsion, and reproduction, in particular reproduction of the post
card, the post card he discovers in the Bodeleian, and some pages of the fortune teller
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book, but not reproducing the photos of Heidegger and of Freud. Although the criterion
for distinguishing between books and letters remains open. I do not believe in the rigor of
such a criterion. 61
Illustrations courtesy of the Bodelian Library, Oxford. Cover illustration: Plato and
Socrates, the frontispiece of Prognostica Socratis basilei, a fortune telling book. English,
thirteenth century, the work of Matthew Paris. MS. Ashmole 304. Fol. 3IV (detail). <<on
the copyright page.
What How bears the publication of facsimiles bear on reproduction, the publication as a
repetition? Graphic design, page lay out, topography, and so on, but also reproductions
of Adami and of Van Gogh in Truth of Painting. And even more strikingly, Memoirs of
the Blind. Memoirs of the Blind is more than simply a catalogue of an exhibition. First,
the text presented along with the drawings and paintings at the exhibition was not the
same as that found here. Second, a number of works that could not be exhibited have
been included here: while the exhibition displayed some forty-four drawings and
paintings, the book has seventy-one. Finally, the works are not presented in the same
order in the book as in the exhibition. (To compare the two orderings, one may consult
the list of illustrations where all the works exhibited are briefly described and their
number.)
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass, “Translators’ Preface,” Jacques Derrida Memoirs
of the Blind viii.
“This fine study concerns numerous works that we have had to leave in the shadows so as
to observe the law of the exhibition: to keep to the body of drawings housed at the
Louvre.”
212
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass,
106, n81.
Fourth, publishability, readability and the pancarte.
This final total card (my absolute pancarte), that you be able to read it, hold it in your
hands, our knees, under your eyes, in you, that you inherit and guard it. 68
In the “Envois,” Derrida, or one of many, infinitely divisible “Derridas” who write the
epistolary exchanges without addressing them or signing them, records a dream about the
pressure of publication: “Dream from just now: obsequious: around the word
obsequious. I was being pressed, I no longer know by whom, obsequiously, to publish, to
let be read, to divulge.”11 The pressure to publish comes from a forgotten source and
exerts itself in Derrida’s record of it through repetition of the word “obsequies” and the
equivalence of “to publish” with two infinitives that follow it, namely, “to be read,” and
“to divulge.” Derrida declines to say whether he gave into the pressure or not, whether
he or the obsequies source equates publication with permission to read and with giving up
a secret. “Obsequies” here apparently means to keep the pressure on by using different
words to say the same thing. Is there a dream of publication embedded here, a dream
about publication and reading as transparent openness? Is that a dream about repetition,
reproduction, and seriality? Is the dream of publication, if there is one, about effacing
publication as something to be read, about taking publication taken “as read”?
The dream may permit us to ask more generally, “what is the relation between
publication and the “postal principle?” Is publication about avoiding reading, about
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determining the limits of avoidance? Near the end of The Post Card, Derrida writes
about ways in which one does not read all sorts of publications.
all the police forces of avoidance is, I can put it thus, avoidance itself. There are,
for example, what are called “publications”: one can fail to know them, this is
always possible in a given context, but one can arrange things, in a certain milieu,
in order to avoid knowing that they exist; one can also, knowing of their existence
avoid reading them; one can read while avoiding “understanding”; one can,
understanding avoid being affected by them or using them; one can also, using
them, avoid them, contain them, exclude them, and therefore, avoid them better
than ever, etc. But what is to be thought of the fact that one cannot avoid
avoiding, of inevitable avoidance in all its form—rejection, foreclusion,
denegation, incorporation, and even the introjective and idealizing assimilation of
the other at the limit of incorporation---?
“Du Tout,” 506-07
When I photograph myself alone in stations or airports, I throw it away or tear the thing
into little pieces that I let fly out the window if it is a train, leave them in an ashtray or a
magazine if it is it’s an airplane. 79
What is The Post Card? Prior to signatures and codes, ciphers, laws of genre, divisibility
of the Envois, reversibility of its chronology, written before the rest of the book and after
it has been written, and so on and other kinds of play one could locate in what Derrida
calls an “internal reading,” what is the text and an edition: under what conditions do
editions become relevant to the reading of the copy one has in hand?
Or how it is status as non-book and its readability or unreadability?
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Is it a dream of Sigmund Freud’s “dreamwork” as dreamreworking, “the old dream of the
complete electro-cardo-encaphlo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-gram—I mean first of all
without the slightest literature, the slightest superimposed fiction, without pause, without
selection either of the code or of the tone, without the slightest secret, nothing at all, only
everything,” Paper Machine, 68 Or is it an apocalyptic fantasy, the opposite of the
holocaust?
In the name of what, in the name of whom publish, divulge—and first of all write, since it
amounts to the same? I have published a lot, but there is someone in me, I still can’t
identify him, who still hopes never to have done it. And he believes that in everything
that I have let pass, depart, a very effective mechanism that comes to annihilate the
exception, I write while concealing every possible divulging of the very thing that
appears to be published. 80
Five: Reading After Death. Derrida returns to Lacan and to his own “Facteur de la
verite” in “For the Love of Lacan,” the second of three essays that make up Resistances
of Psychonalysis.
The future of Lacanian thought as it moves beyond the Écrits is all the more
difficult in that Lacan was an incomparable listener and his discursive machine
was one of such sensitivity that everything could be inscribed there with finesse
or discretion. (This is quite right; who doesn’t try to do the same?) But, what is
more, it is inscribed there in the spoken words of a seminar that, by giving rise to
numerous stenotyped or tape-recording archivings, will have fallen prey not only
to the problem of rights . . . but also to all the problems posed by delays in
publishing and of an editing—in the American sense—that was of the most active
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sort. [same thing happens to Derrida’s seminars] Since all of these things hang by
a hair, since the stakes get decided in a word, an ellipsis, a verbal modality,
conditional or future anterior, especially when one knows Lacan’s rhetoric, I say
good luck to shy narrator who would try to know what was said and written by
whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not have said!
What about publication and speaking of the recently dead? In “Du Tout,” Derrida,
prompted by a request from Rene Major, finally supplies the name of a friend he had
hitherto kept secret because the friend was by then dead.12 And in “For the Love Lacan,”
Derrida comments humorously on the way speaking only of the dead was made a
condition of his giving a lecture at a colloquium on “Lacan avec les philosophes” [Lacan
with the Philosophers] held in 1991: “they put forward the pretext of a rule according to
which only the dead could be spoken about here and therefore, if one insisted on speaking
of me, one could so only under the pretext that I play dead, even before the fact, and that
I be given a helping hand when the occasion arose.”13 ?”
Know When to Hold ‘Em
Philippe Labarthe calls “autobiothanatography” or to what Derrida calls “auto-biothanato-hetero-graphic scene of writing” (336).14 Not just ruin either. It is like a ruin that
does not come after the work but remains produced, already from the origin, by the
advent and structure of the work. In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the
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origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the
origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration.
Memoirs of the Blind 65
Just as a memory does not restore a past (once) present, so the ruin the ruin of the face—
and of the face looked in the face in the drawing—does not indicate decaying, wearing
away, anticipated decomposition, or this being eaten away by time—something about
which the portray often betrays an apprehension. The ruin does not supervene like an
accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin.
Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the
self-portrait . . .
From corpus of book to corpse of author, reader on the side of live. Turn to account of
survivance and posthumous publication.
What is commonly called the “afterlife” of a book is given a more technical meaning
whereby survival as a metaphor for preservation becomes a notional term, “sur-vivance.”
The translators of Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 leave the French
neologism untranslated and without annotation apart from informing the reader the
“words ‘living on,’ ‘to survive,’ and ‘survival’ are in English in the text.” (131,n30).
Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense
that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130). The
book is not exactly a corpse that continues to live, as it were, as it decomposes or is put to
various medical uses before being buried or cremated.
In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks
and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have
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desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and
the character called Robinson Crusoe . . . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book
bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught,
saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this
survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed with any trace, in the sense I give
this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this
machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each
wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left
behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or
other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the
opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The
book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude,
this alliance of the dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance.
Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense
that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that
is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or
fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something
sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor
indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself
to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle
voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the
substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-” is without superiority,
without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does
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not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it
cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one
could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you
will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a
groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we
can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly socalled as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is
where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless.
That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The
other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and
that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my
survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead
machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in
the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a
breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time
an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a
spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Lieb and not Koerper), a body proper animated,
activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)
This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to
engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at
work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the
archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living experience
219
is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living experience,” but
“tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors and derails “tissue”
skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like death in life or life in
death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more originary existence, a life or a
body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked under this this clothing. For, on he
contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance, comprehended, they live and die, they live
to death as the very inextricability of this weave. It is against the groundless ground of
this quasi-transcendentality of living to death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one
hand, one can say that “Robinson Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the
book, were, according to a first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and
desire attested to by this book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or
metonymy, [were all] buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can
and one must, one must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and
like the experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psychoanthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson
Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like ours, I
mean in the present modernity of a Greco-Abrahamic Europe, wonder what is happening
. . . in the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the family and/or State,
of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132
Course called “Living to Death”
in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or
the State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in the universal
structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the
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juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . . . deliver the corpse
over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says
prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)
Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies created
by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-vivance.
Sur-vivance is not exactly new. Derrida in “Living On: Borderlines” (reduced to “Living
On” in the second edition of the book in which it was originally published) and Derrida
on death would be difficult to catalogue. Also livance.
It’s a kind of self-archiving—the document that remains, literally, unsewn and resewn
into different shirts; reread but not to revise; to revisit but not reanimate? Just asking.
Derrida asserts, in the future, or a specific find of future, that is also a memorial:
Derrida cites his “I posthume as I breathe” line from Circumfessions in Beast and Sov
Vol. 2, Seventh Session, 173, and then goes on to comment on posthumous before
turning to Blanchot’s recent cremation, 174.
And in a somewhat economic way, by reason of a sort of finitude, because we must
exclude the infinite renewal of inscriptions (Niederschriften). The number of inscriptions
to be inscribed is finite – that’s finitude. For all acts of censorship act on inscriptions,
and substitutes of inscriptions in a system (it is even this concept of inscription which no
doubt motivated the choice of the word or metaphor of censorship), and the quantity of
inscriptions is finite; so one must censor. It is like a topological economy of the archive
in which one has to exclude, censor, erase, destroy or displace, virtualize, condense the
archive to gain space in the same place, in the same system, to be able to continue to
store, to make space. Finitude is also a sort of law for this economy. (B&S vol. 2, 156)
221
What Derrida calls “the postal principle” () also involves what he calls the
afterlifeanddeath of a text, the uncertain boundary of publication in general, a boundary
that not only complicates seemingly self-evident and unquestionable binary oppositions
between a published text and unpublished material, biography and bibliography,
production and waste, but brings to bear Derrida’s notion of a text’s “sur-vivance” on
what Derrida calls “unreadability”: sur-vivance involves various media transfers, various
material supports, or subjectiles, as well as various tropes for not/non/un/reading.15
The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of
finitude, this alliance of the living and the dead. I shall say that this finitude is
survivance. Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and
simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death.
(130)
In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks
and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have
desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and
the character called Robinson Crusoe. . Now this survival, thanks to which the book
bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught,
saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this
survival is indeed that of the living dead. (130)
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead
machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in
the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a
breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time
222
an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a
spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated,
activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)
in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or
the State, of the so-called dead boy, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in the universal
structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the
juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . . . deliver the corpse
over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says
prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)
La carte posthume
Let me begin destinerrantly by drifting into a passage regarding posthumous publication
to be found in the ninth session In the Seventh Session of Derrida’s The Beast and the
Sovereign Volume 2, from which the epigraph to the present essay is taken, Derrida
returns to the sentence “I posthume as I breathe” (see Beast and Sov, 2, 193; see 193n2
for the reference) he had written in “Circumfessions,” and after elaborately on, discusses
several works by Maurice Blanchot Derrida wrote just after Blanchot had been cremated,
pages he says he believes he has “not yet begun to read” (185). (As the editors note
[181], these pages appeared modified in the second edition of Parages as an additional
chapter entitled Maurice Blanchot est mort” [Maurice Blanchot is Dead”); that chapter
was not, however, included in the English translation of Parages, Stanford UP, 2011). In
the Ninth Session, Derrida observes that “all writings are posthumous” before proceeding
to narrow the definition of posthumous writing in which he which he includes a piece of
writing found upon Blaise Pascal’s accidentally found by Pascal’s servant.16 Pascal had
223
sewn the paper, the first word of which is “fire,” into his shirt. Pascal’s elder sister,
Gilberte Pascal Périer, published the writing in her Life of Blaise Pascal, introducing the
posthumous writing with a preface in which she narrates the circumstances of its
discovery and in which she wishes to direct how the note should note be read: it is not
Pascal’s “last word,” a master text that would govern the meaning of all of Pascal’s other
writings.17
Derrida’s interest in Pascal’s paper lies partly in the way it is “strictly posthumous,”
that is “posthumous” in the ordinary sense of the word:
As you well know, it is a posthumous piece of writing (now, of course, all
writings are posthumous, within the trace as structurally and essentially and by
destinal vocation posthumous or testamentary, there is a stricter enclave of the
posthumous, namely, what is only discovered and published after the death of the
author or signatory). Pascal’s writing on the god of Abraham was strictly
posthumous in the latter sense, even though we are not sure Pascal wanted it to be
published. This piece of paper initially takes the form of a journal, a note to self,
dated in Pascal’s hand—Pascal, who like Robinson Crusoe, here dates the
signature. He inscribes the year, the month, the day, and the hour . . . (209)
Even before it was posthumously published, apparently even if it had never been
published, Pascal’s writing remains readable.
Let us now come back to <this> “Writing Found in Pascal’s Clothing After His
Death.” There can be little doubt that this little piece of paper was destined, if not
for someone, then at least to remain, to survive the moment of its inscription, to
remain legible in an exteriority of a trace, of a document, even if it were readable
224
only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come. This is
indeed what has been called a memorial, to use the word of a witness, Father
Guerrier:
“A few days after the death of monsieur Pascal,” said Father Guerrier, “a
servant of the house noticed by chance an area in the lining of the doublet
of the illustrious deceased that appeared thicker than the rest, and having
removed the stitching at this place to see what was it was, he found there a
little folded parchment written in the hand of Monsieur Pascal, and in the
parchment of a paper written in the same hand: the one was a faithful copy
of the other. These two pieces were immediately put into the hands of
Madame Périer who showed them to several of her particular friends. All
agreed there was no doubt that this parchment, written with so much care
and with such remarkable characters, was a type of memorial that he kept
very carefully to preserve the memory of a thing that he wanted to have
always present to his eyes and mind, since for eight years he had taken
care to stitch and unstitch it from his clothes, as his wardrobe changed.
The parchment is lost; but at the beginning of the manuscript in the
Bibliothèque Nationale, one can find the paper that reproduced it, written
in the hand of Pascal, the authenticity of which was confirmed by a note
signed by the Abbé [Étienne] Périer, Pascal’s nephew. At the top was a
cross, surrounded by a ray of light.18
Derrida then cites the first word of Pascal’s note, “Fire [feu]” (212) placing it in the
middle of the page, as if it here a title. Derrida comments “This word ‘fire,’ is, then,
225
isolated, insularized in a single line, I’m not sure I can interpret it; I’m even sure that I
cannot interpret it in a decidable way, between the fire of the glory that reduces to ashes
and the fire that still smolders under the ashes of some cremation (Ashengloire).”
Derrida alludes here to his earlier discussion of Blanchot’s quotation from Paul Celan’s
poem Strette, the first of which, Derrida, notes at the end of a sentence that first links
cremation to Nazi concentration camps to Blanchot to Celan, is “ASCHENGLORIE
[ASHGLORY]” (capital letters in the original): “as for cremation, and the ashes that m
from now on, in modern and uneffaceable history of humanity, the crematoria of the
camps, let us forget nothing” (Beast and Sov 2, 179). Two kinds of reading, or
readability emerge in Derrida’s account of document entitled “Fire” (assuming the
document has a title) that happens to have kept from publication. On the one hand, the
paper always remains readable: it can be transcribed, it can be lost, its authenticity can be
vouched for on a note, and what cannot be transcribed can be described (the cross
surrounded by a ray of light). On the other hand, Derrida is not sure he can read what is
readable. Derrida could have easily distinguished the first kind of reading from the
second by using words like legible and, in opposition to it, interpretable; but he didn’t.
Instead, he calls the paper both legible and readable, using the words as synonyms, and
uses reader using and interpretable (one cannot decide what the legible writing means).
Nor did he put the two kinds of reading into paradoxical or aporetic relation with each
other, as I have done above. Neither the “strictly” posthumous publication of the paper
nor with the unpublished paper that Pascal folded up and covered by a piece of
parchment and then sewed into his shirts aligns with readability or unreadability, not
reading.
226
Derrida’s phrase “generation of repetitions to come” certainly invites, some reader might
even say demands, that repetition would not be the same, the generation is not a
mechanical program that Pascal installed and that his servant carried out after Pascal
died.
Survivance—as a structuring strucutre that genrates a series of differeneces that matter or don’t
accrding to at various historical moments, what copy you have, what lanuguage it is in, what
edition, hardcover or apperback, paper used,etc. and revivified by the reader. Wetwares
storage notion of the archive. Diffference betweenarhcival materials and their
publication—recursive since new editions can be published.
Assumption is that paper only is paper once it is written on—only papers with writing in
the ordinary sense can be archived. But move from archive to publication introduces
media that remediate the archival materials.
Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies created
by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-vivance.
Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense
that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130).
Relation of selection and sur-vivance. Is the “Envois” a disturbed or unfilled fantasy of
genetic criticism, the author telling the story about what was or was not destroyed, what
was allowed to live? In Beast and S 2, Derrida mentions RC and later versions, but starts
with the first edition.
First word before the first word—first publication before the first publication; a last
publication after the last word, as in last word after the last word?
Bears on the problem of the material support, the problem of reading (or not reading),
and the problem of narrative.19
227
I have already sufficiently formalized readability under erasure and the logic of the event
as graphematic event—notably as event of the proper name, in which the little devil
arrives only to erase itself / by erasing itself—to be spared having to add anything here
for the moment. Resistances, 48. Derrida does not provide a citation.
“Off the record” means not recorded, outside the archive. We are thus brought back to the
difficult question of the record, history, and the archive. Is there an “outside-thearchive”? Impossible, but the impossible is deconstruction’s affair. At bottom, beneath
the question that I will call once again the remaining [restance] of the archive—which
does anything but remain in the sense of the permanent subsistence of a presence—
beneath this question of the differance or the distinerrance of there archive.
Thus, not with Lacan in general —who for me does not exist, and I never speak of a
philosopher or a corpus in general as it were a matter of a homogenous body: I did not
do so for Lacan any more than for any other. The discussion was begun rather with a
forceful, relatively coherent, and stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of the
collection and binding of Écrits, in other words, in 1966.
Resistances, 48-49
Now if there is one text that stands more than any other in this position and at this post of
binder [sic], it is the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” As you know, the “Seminar on
‘The Purloined Letter’” is given a “privilege,” which is Lacan’s word; I quote Lacan:
“the privilege of opening the sequence [the sequence of the Écrits] despite its
diacnhrony.”4 In other words, Écrits collects and binds together all the texts out of which
it is composed in chronological order (according to the “diachrony” of prior publication
with the exception of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” which, by coming at
228
beginning is thereby given the privilege of figuring the synchronic configuration of the
set and thus the binding the whole together. It therefore seemed legitimate to take a
privileged interest in this privilege. If I use the word binding here, the binding that holds
together the moment of reading and rereading, it is because of one of the two sole
occasions in my life on which I met Lacan and spoke briefly with him, he himself spoke
to me of binding and the binding of the Écrits. I am not telling these stories for the same
of amusement or the distraction of anecdotes, but because we are supposed to be talking
here about the encounter, tukhe, contingency—or not—and what binds, if you will the
signature of the event to the theorem.
Resistances, 49
Here Derrida stops reading the publishing history, the gap between 1975 and 1966, and
moves to an extra-discursive but somehow more immediate and therefore better
justification for what he did because Lacan personally, as it were, gave him permission.
He proceeds to tell the anecdotes about meeting Lacan over the next two and a half pages
before returning to “the republication of the paperback edition in 1970” (52). But
Derrida forgets that the Écrits publishes the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” in two
versions; the essay begins over. Seminar is not an isolated heading, a caption that binds;
it already subverts that function. Furthermore, Lacan cites Beyond the Pleasure
Principle and. Although Derrida reads some of Freud’s notes very closely, he does not
read the paratexts of the Écrits.
Instead, he reconfigures the configuration:
229
I link this and bind it once again to the binding of the great book. I go back then to the
period (the end of the 1960s, 1965, 1966-67) when Écrits was being bound under the sign
of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’”
Resistance of Psych, 53
Ps. So as not to forget: the little key to the drawer is hidden in the other book. (I leave it
to you to divine the page.), 144
The post without post, 159
He has read all of us 148
Phone anxiety, 159
Says Socrates, our friend, whom I rereading in translation of our friends, 158
I am trying anew to work on my legacy and on this accursed preface. 158
Now “Legs” and Legacies” are no longer a title of a book but Derrida’s own legacy.
Reread the whole thing (p.100), it’s wonderful. 158
Note p. 150 on Lacan
The secret without measure: it does exclude publication, it measures publication against
itself. . . at how many thousands of readers do the family circles end? 144
“Dechimenation,” 142
Therefore you must not read me. 142
Who reads me 147
Reread what follows 142
Reading the Post Card after Écrits (2005)
Cite Blaise Pacal fire—poem / note to self posthumously published, Derrida’s discussion.
230
Compare to Foucault in response to Derrida, this paper this fire
Derrida on signature, 136
Derrida abbreviates titles, truncates them to their first word. Beyond . . . p. 139, 147; legs
;
Specter, 132
Idiomatic, 138
“See also” 139
proof 136
but read closely, turning slowly, the for corners, around the 4 times 4 rectangles, perhaps
it does not form a single sentence but this is my life and I dedicate it to you. 139
Passage on posthumous publication deserves attention in itself But dead letter and letters.
Derrida does not deconstruction that distinction. Always already dead. Yet on the way
to being published. Bibliographical information about editions get pushed over into the
notes, generally, both by Derrida and by Alan Bass (who operates as both in Living On,
and to copyright pages. But all kinds of differences between editions and translations do
not get archived. Idiosyncratic narratives may be told, end up as a narrative. . If we
want to dismiss these microdifferences as fetishes, in the name of what non-problematic
level of generality would we do so? Generality is more a problem for Derrida that
fetishism is.
There is no parergon of this history, of its traits, retraits, and so on in book history,
textual practice, and so on, no frame of reference, confined by the relay “See also”.
Commentary without comment, not like Marxism without Marx. When does comment,
annotation, become discursive? Anecdote an anecnote?
231
Difficult to tell not because one reaches an aporia but instead confronts not reading and
nonreading? Paratext supposed by go to be unread, invisible. JD conceals ciphers
illegible. An economy of no returns. Speculation. But kind of investment? Graphic
economy as opposed to an “Icon”omy. Value of reproduction(s) of the postcard, the hit of
the image, as opposed to describing it. No comment as a comment, a non-denial denial,
All the President’s Men.
Burn everything as opposed to publish everything. No way to know that it is a postcard,
however, as the reverse side is not reproduced, the side with information, caption, etc.
This part is not published, not transcribed.
Is the first line a quotation of first line of Dissemination, also about prefaces?
Burn After Rereading
Reread Before Burning
Insupportable Reading
IS the notion of a beginning merely naïve? The end as the beginning, with the move to
“tu” in the footnote. The paratext as a graphic “place” ; Glossary stops shot of an index.
Gives the note number, but not the page number.
Reading randomly; backwards; by chance, as in “Meschances.”
Decipher, 42
Facsimiles in The Post Card. Already reproductions, iconography, versus ekphrasis
Cutting and pasting, 41
And moreover I obey at every moment without seeming to: to burn everything, forget
everything . . .
Facteur de la verite, 40
232
For the moment I am cutting and pasting. 41
And while driving I held it on the steering wheel 43
Decipher, 43
The stamp is not a metaphor. 46
Who is driving? Doesn’t it really look like a historical vehicle? A gondola? No, except
plato is playing gondolier, perched in the back, looking away in front of him the way one
guides the blind. He is showing the direction. 46
For us, for our future, nobody can tell. 47
She will put the letter back into circulation once she has read it. 49
And the case will be proven, 51
To enclose myself in a book project. 51
False preface to Freud, 51
And it would also inscribe Le facteur de la verite as an appendix, with the great reference
to the Beyond . . . 53
French cover and Chicago book cover both reproduce the image.
“Bass Notes” (La-Bas)
My post card dissertation 54
But I would really like to call the book philately 65
No, I will never rewrite it, that letter. 57
I’m not making it up! 63
You see him reading me at this very instant 67
No rigorous theory of “reception,” however necessary it might be, will get to the end of
that literature. 71
233
Finally, he would consent, see The Purloined Letter, and the queen too, and Dupin too,
and the psychoanalyst too” 71
Purim Pur lot 72; 74-75
Difficult to tell 74
Believe without proof 76
Amnesia 77
Okay, let’s drop it. I am rereading myself, thus at the end of the word “lottery” 81
When you are reading, 79
It has to be read in Greek, 87
Okay, let’s drop it, I will continue to scratch, read while writing my knowing letter, rather
than taking note’s on those little white pieces of cardboard that you always don’t give a
damn about. 87
And he adds, following my finger (I am citing but always rearranging a little. Guess the
number of false citations in my publications . . . ):” 89
Literature epistolary genres, 88
To read among others, the Socratic letters in which he grouped the anecdotes concerning
the life, method, and even the death of the Athenian philosopher [Socrates]” 91
Prophylactic guarding of the letter incorporated in the “by heart.” 93
The Oxford card is looking at me. I am rereading Plato’s letters. 93
Always reports, feigns reporting, as if he were reading 93
But contrary to what goes on in The Purloined Letter 95
Reading it will be impossible to understand94
The other does not answer, is not published 96
234
The one who scratches and pretends to write in the pace of the other who writes and
pretends to scratch. 98
Dream of the original imprint . . Visa or Mastercharge. . . tympan 101
Ciphered letters, 93
I have said it elsewhere 124
Phomomaton of myself 125
Derrida anticipates the cell phone on vibrator mode:
When will we be able to call without ringing? There would be a warning light or one
could even carry it one oneself, near the heart or in the pocket, for certain coded calls,
some signal. 87
Rite versus lean by heart 82
Tomorrow, if I want to write this preface, I will set myself to running down all the paleoand neo-testamentary courriers. And why not, while I’m at all the death dentneces [arrets
de mort] and all the police regulations [arrestes de police] on the pretext that they are sent
or signify! And htat everything that is is sent willy-nilly is law . . . Alo turns the law,plays
on it, but that’s the law.
Postcard, 75
This owld be like a purificiation by fire. Not a single trace, an absolute camoflaging by
means of too much evidence: cards on the table, they won’t be able to see anything.
They will throw themselves onto unitelligible remainders. Come from who knows where
in order to preface a book about the Platonic inheritance, the era of the posts, the structure
of the letter and other common goods and places. Postcard, 175
Undated (probably the same period)
235
That you have put an end to the “remission” by once again remembering the “dead
letter,” the “past” and all the rest does not astonish me.
Postcard, 137
For example in le Factuer de la verite a note amoutns to agreeing, a note they have not
even been able to read it was so unberable)” postcard, 40
On the dead letter office, 124
14 october 1977“’Divison of dead letters’ is a stroke of genius. Myself, I say, “division of
living letters,” and this is what more or less aounts to the same. Everything isplayed out,
remains, wins-and-loses, on the basiss of my ‘divisibility’”
124
I’m taking ntoes for the preface . . [Socrates and Plato] stand guard and satellize every
one of our phrases (one day, I will be dead, if you reread the post cards I sent you, by
thousan,ds not so, even before I fell upon S. and p., . . 121
Perversion of the playback, 120
One can say he is writng, a mirror, or on a rearview mirror 119
Like music paper, 118
Once again I am affixing myself to put an endto my letter: another photoaumaton of
myself,pitiless, no? 125
13 August 1979
You are right in part, it would have to have been made into, precisely, a post-face, this is
indeed the word, in particular because it’s uninteilligible fif you do nto beginw ith what
follows—if notby the end, and as they never reread . . . Too bad. Postcard, 240
I scratch and I erase everything with the other hand. Therefore you must not read me.
236
Postcard,143
Reread what follows . . . Postcard, 142
Burn by Heart
Strange story. Again you suspect me of have sent it. I do no dare open it to reread it . . .
But I will not send it to you a second time—in any case, I will never reread it. 76
No more than this card that you are reading now, that you are holding in your hands or on
your knees. 73
Signature 73
Reading the last one (for it is he who reads me, you see him here . . . 63
Another way of saying that you had reread it, no? which is what one begins doing when
on rereads, even for the first time. Repetition, memory, etc. . . . P. asks D. to reread
before burning, so be it, in order to incorporate the letter (like a member of the resistance
under torture). 59-60
Rearview mirror of an automobile that pauses 60
One day, please, read me no more, and even forget that you have read me. 36
And soon we will be able to afford that answering machine. 36
I’ll see you before you read this. 36
I always come back to the same card. 34
Repetition compulsion is understood even less, 35
All this because you didn’t want to burn the first letters, 14
With stupefying dexterity they move three cards after having you choose one. 36
237
The coded “words” to which Alan Bass refers in his glossary are “EGEK HUM XSR
STR” p. 148 (Bass does not give the page reference, and is no longer glossing, though the
last entry does refer the reader a footnote.)
I await everything from an event that I am incapable of anticipating. 47
Speaking of which, M., who has read the seminar on Life Death along with several
friends, tell me I should publish the notes without changing anything. This is impossible,
of course, unless I detach the sessions on Freud, or only the one on Freud’s legacy, the
story of the fort/da with little Ernest. 41
Without seeming to burn everything, 40
I think I made this film for myself even before I knew how to drive. If I were not afraid
of waking everyone I would come, in any case I would telephone. When will we be able
to call without ringing [anticipates the vibe setting on cell phones]. There would be a
warning light or one could even carry it on oneself, near the heart or in the pocket, for
certain coded calls, some signal. 87
“and not only in the way a negative is developed” PC, 43
“These letters of “Plato,” that Socrates, of course, would have neither read nor written., I
now find them greater than the works. I could like to call you to read out loud several
extracts from the “stands” they have mandated, commanded, programmed for centuries
as I would like to use them for my legs. I am typing them, or rather one day you will
return this letter to me). . . . And if I read out loud, the most irreplaceable ones, don’t you
think . . . you always imitate better than I). Listen . . .[reread it as if I had written it
myself, starting from the “philosopher’s notes, especially the end which more or less
[note Derrida’s comments on “more or les” a phrase his father used, in “For the Love of
238
Lacan”] says this—but the whole thing would have to be retranslated: This letter, all
three must be read together as much as possible, if not at the same time and as often as
you are able. Look at it as a way to take an oath and as a convention having the force of
law, on which it is legitimate to swear with a seriousness mixed with grace and with the
badinage of the serious . . . Take as a witness the god chief among all things present and
future, and the all-powerful father of the chief and its cause, whom we all know, if we
philosophize truly and with all the clarity possible for men enjoying beatitude.” It has to
be read in Greek, my very sweet one, as if I were writing it to you. Myself.) So then I
pick up my citation again,
8586; 86-87
Derrida will make more mistakes, 27 (“reprosuction” instead of “reproduction”), 27
Typo versus slip, 513
Typo? 216, “head” instead of the more obvious “had”
Typos, 152, 228
Reproduction of reproduction, 35; 37
It is Socrates’ writing surface” 17
Thereby to give the slightest hope of reading it one day 127
I want to reread the entire corpus platonicum 129
Brotherl 129
You can feel he has a hard-on in his back 128
And they publish everything 132
I remember the ashes. What a chance, to burn, yes yes [no punctuation] 23
239
This entire post card ontology 22
Two hands, the mystic writing pad, 25
That we will be able to send sperm by post card, 24
For example, I write on post cards, oh well I write on post cards. “I” begins again with a
reprosuction (say, I just wrote reproSuction: have you noticed that I make more and more
strange mistakes, is it fatigue or age, occasionally the spelling goes, phonetic writing
come back in force, as in elementary school, only to others whom I confusedly looked
down on—the lapsus or “slips” obviously). And by means of a reproduction that is itself
reproduced serially, always the same picture on another support, but an identical support,
differing only in numero. 27
The postal principle 27
7 hours in the car with the old film of the accident to resolve everything, 87
I still do not know how to see what there is to see. 16
As if he were running to catch a moving train, 17
On the back of the same card, I write you all the time, 16
Out of this atrocious exclusion that we make of all of them—and every possible reader.
The whole reader. 16
I had read in his glance that he was begging for the impossible. 14
Write it in cipher, 1
Silent move, 13
But that which checks
As if what is invisible here could take a reading into account.
502
240
archive, 506
the decrypting, in these conditions, can no longer come from the simple and alleged
interior of what is still called, provisionally, psychoanalysis.
540
Rene Major: I first of all would like you to convey to you the profound malaise I
experience reading Glas,
Du Tout, 499
I ask you to forget, to preserve in amnesia. 12
The secret of reproduction, 12
Look closely at this card, it’s a reproduction.
I confide to you this solemn and sententious aphorism: di not everything between us
begin with a reproduction? Yes, and at the same time . .. the tragedy is there. 9
I will have sent you only cards. Even if they are letters and if I always put more than one
in the same envelope. 8
What a couple. Socrates turns his back to plato [sic], who has made him write whatever
he wanted while pretending to receive it from him. This reproduction is sold here as a
post card, you have noticed, with greetings and address. Socrates writing, do you notice,
on a post card. 12
The Post Card as the title of a romance novel or a film (The Notebook; Postcards from
the Edge); the history of the post card, or the particular post card “the” post card of
Socrates writing and Plato dictates from behind, or post card of post cards Derrida finds
in Oxford, that is for sale [the post card, italicized but with “a” not “the” before it 12],
and copies of which he/whomever writes on, puts in an envelope, and mails instead of
241
mailing the post cards. Uses the cards instead of a letter (Kafka and Freud used letters,
they were the last to do so].
“and not only in the way a negative is developed” PC, 43
“Tell you a brief story,”
Op cit 518
[This story is like Lacan thinking that Derrida is “inanalysis” [a neologism]—this time
the person, a woman, thinks Derrida is the analyst, and never names the person he is
supposedly analyzing].
“Du Tout,” PC, 514-15
This text is not cited in the headnote of “For the Love of Lacan” in Resistances of
Psychoanalysis.
I am afraid that the readers will exclude them too quickly, will conclude precipitously
that: these are third parties, they cannot be the secret addressee of these letters. 223
Versus the bad reader who does not rad slowly. But you cannot avoid avoiding, so “the
readers” can’t fall out into two groups, sorted into slow at the correct speed and get a
ticket for reading too fast, going over the reading speed limit.
Burning everything in The Post Card with the burning of Archive Fever, the ash.
On the last page of the volume of Letters to Milena, which I wouldn’t have read without
you, Blanchot cites Kafka” [Derrida then cites the Kafka citation Blanchot cites]PC, 222
[reference to Kafka letter, Kafka now named, whereas p. 35 referred to without a name
“You had me read that letter to me where he [no referent of the pronoun] more or less
says that, speculating with spirit, denuding oneself before them; he wrote only (on) letters
that one, one of the last along with Freud finally. 35
242
circumcise 222
I am here signing my proper name, Jacques Derrida.1
1
regret that you [tu] [so, using the tutoyer, Derrida has already moved into
epistolary mode in his note before the Envois begins.] do not very much trust my
signature, on the pretext that it might be several.” P. 6
Introduction / Glossary
Voler, see “Le facteur,” note 9. PC, xxix
At the end of the letters 15 June and 20 June 1978, you will find some “words” in capital
letters. These have been transposed from the original, but they are particularly
problematic in the translation. If the original text is crypted, as it claims to be, is the
translation equally crypted? Is there a possible key to the translation of a crypted text?
Does the translation hold out the same promise of decrypting (of translation) as the
original? Such are the question of EGEK . . .”
laser effect which would come to cut out onto the surface of the letters, and in truth our
body. 221
I’m going to read L’enfant du chien-assis by Jos, alias L’ete rouge.
Or quite simply because he is---reading and that is always on some reading, you know
something about this, that I transfer. 218
He is taking notes having in mind a prospect of publication in modern times. He is
pretending to write but he has a small pocket tape recorder under his mantle, or rather
above his head, under his pointed hat: the arm of the mike is stretched above the head of
plato. 218-19
243
Dream, 216-17
Vacation reading, 252I’ve just received the slide in color. Be very careful with it. I’ll
need it in the reproduction. I have never found them so resigned to their beauty. What a
couple. 250
Right in the moment of slipping this into the envelope: don’t forget that all of this tookthe
wish to make this picture into the cover of a book, all of it pushed back into the margins,
the title, may name, the name of the publisher, and miniaturized (I mean in red) on
Socrates’ phallus. 251
The most anonymous support, 175
That Plato is calling Socrates, gives him an order (jussic performative one says at Oxford,
of the “send a card to Freud” type there, right away, it’s done.) . . . you all transfer
everything, and everyone, onto Socrates. You don’t know if this is an order or an
affirmation. Nor if the amorous transference takes place because Socrates is writing or
precisely because he is not writing, since armed with a pen and the grattoir [scapel,
knife], presently he is doing both while doing neither the one nor the other. And if he is
not writing, you do not know why he is not writing presently, because he has suspended
his pen for a second or because he is erasing by scratching out or because he cannot write
or because he can not write, because he does not know how or knows how not, etc., or
quite simply 218
In the first publication of this text. . . The deletion of this phrase (which is
inconsequential) is the only modification of this essay since its first publication. Footnote
68, 495 to Le facteur
Derrida reshelves the entire book:
244
On the contrary, the necessity of everything [du tout] announces itself terribly, the fatality
of saving everything from destruction: what is there, rigorously in our letters does not
derive from the fort: da, from the vocabulary of going-coming, of the step, of the way or
the away, of the near and the far, of all the frameworks in tele-, of the adestination, of the
address and maladdress, of everything that is passed and comes to pass between Socrates
and Plato, Freud and Heidegger, the “truth,” of the facteur, “du tout,” of the transference,
of the inheritance and the genealogy, of the paradoxes of nomination, of the king an, of
the queen and of their ministers, of the magister and of the ministries, of the public and
private detectives? Is there a word, a letter, an atom of a message that rigorously speaking
should not be withdrawn from the burning with the aim of publication? . . . If I
circumcise, and I will, it will have to bleed around the edges, and we all put in their
hands, under their eyes, shards of our body, of what is most secret in our soul.
Very intrigued, at Oxford, by the arrival of the kings and the answers by 4. They
intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme. 222
Rereading the Legacy 225
March-April 1979.
I’ve started to reread, to sort, to dig around in the box (my first gift, suddenly, it no longer
sufficed.) 186
Derrida satirizes a reading of his work that fold it back into Lacan, one that say that
Derrida s only saying what Lacan already said. 150-51
S/p is for Socrates and Plato but p/S is “for Poe, for Dupin, and the narrator. 148
When one reads everything that is still written today, and so seriously, in such a
businesslike way (spoudaios!) on the subject of this great telephonic farce . . . 146
245
Not a word that would not be dictated upside down, programmed on the back [au dos], in
the back of the post card. Everything will consist in describing Socrates with Plato as a
child in his back, and I will retain only the lexicon required from every line [trait] in the
drawing. In a word, there will only be back (du dos), even the word “dos,” if you are
willing to pay faithful attention to it and keep the memory.
187
“If you’re not there, leave an message on the answering machine.” 189
I am haunted by Heidegger’s ghost in the city, 189
“the crushing repetition compulsion” 458, PC, then Derrida cites marie Bonaparte using
the same phrase , 458
Here, the insistent monotony has at least led to the construction of a textual network, the
demonstration of the recurrence of certain motifs . . . outside The Purloined Letter. Thus
the letter hanging under the mantelpiece has its equivalent in The Murders in the Rue
Morgue. For us, the interest of this recurrence, and of pointing it out, is not that of an
empirical enrichment, an experimental verification, the illustration of a repetitive
insistence. It is structural. It inscribes The Purloined Letter in a texture, to which it
belongs, and within which the Seminar had effected a cursory framing or cross-section.
We know that The Purloined Letter belongs to what Baudelaire called “A kind of trilogy,
along with The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget. The
Seminar does not breathe a word about this trilogy; not only odes it lift out the narrated
triangles (the “real drama”) in order to center the narration in them hear the burden of the
interpretation (the destruction of the letter), but that it omits like a naturalized frame.
458-59
246
But it happens that her [Marie Bonaparte’s] laborious analysis opens up textual structures
that remain closed to Lacan. 459
Headnotes about publication of various chapters in Écrits along with notes in the
Biographical Appendix as well as the Index Jacques Lain Miller provides, but is not
keyed to words but to concepts.
He returns to Archive Fever in “Typewriter Ribbon” 302-03. “Typewriter Ribbon:
Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits,’)” in Tom Cohen et al (eds), Material Events:
Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001), p.286,
289; 331 originally published as the first chapter of the French edition of Papier
Machine. “Fichus” is not in the French edition of Paper Machine while “Typewriter
Ribbon, Inc” is not included in the English translation (three other short essays
along with “Typewriter Ribbon, Inc” which is the subtitle and centerpiece of the
French edition drop out in the English translation; Bowlby does have a note about
the excluded and included essays, pp.ix-x).
Jacques Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” in Paper Machine, trans.
Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). I am dreaming. I am
sleepwalking” (169) “First, when I dream of an absolute memory—well, when I sigh
after the keeping of everything, really (it’s my very respiration)—my imagination
continues to protect this archive of paper. Not on a screen, even though it might
occur to me, but on a strip of paper. . . I wouldn’t write, but everything would get
written down, by itself, right on the strip. With no work. . . . But what I thereby
leave to write itself would not be a book, a codex, but rather a strip of paper. I
would roll itself up, on itself, an electrogram of everything that happened (to me)
bodies, ideas, images, words, songs, thoughts, tears. Others. The world forever, in
the faithful and polyrhythmic recording of itself and all its speeds. Everything all the
same without delay, and on paper—that is why I am telling you. On paperless
paper. Paper is in the world that is not a book.” “Paper or Me, You Know . . .” 65
Fichus is a separate publication in French. A stand alone book. It is not included in
Papier Machine. Translation of Derrida into English (among 39 other languages) is a
kind of dissemination that in philological terms recollects the writings and rebinds
247
them into new “cuts.” Essays not in the French book are cut form the English,
translated in two different collections (Typewriter Ribbon); essays not in it are
added Editors and translators reshelve Derrida.
Next to last words, next to last story; 124, 150, 152, 154, 156 cf. Typewriter Ribbon, Ink
Where was I? 147
not just in the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the
organized manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures
whereby we . . . deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse
and prepare ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying
alive or dying dead (132)
In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks
and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have
desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and
the character called Robinson Crusoe. . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book
bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught,
saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this
survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed with any trace, in the sense I give
this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this
machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each
wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left
behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or
other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the
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opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The
book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude,
this alliance of the dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance.
Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense
that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that
is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or
fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something
sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor
indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself
to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle
voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the
substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-“ is without superiority,
without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does
not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it
cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one
could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you
will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a
groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we
can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly socalled as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is
where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless.
That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The
other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and
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that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my
survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead
machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in
the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a
breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time
an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a
spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated,
activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)
This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to
engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at
work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the
archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living experience
is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living experience,” but
“tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors and derails “tissue”
skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like death in life or life in
death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more originary existence, a life or a
body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked under this this clothing. For, on he
contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance, comprehended, they live and die, they live
to death as the very inextricability of this weave. It is against the groundless ground of
this quasi-transcendentality of living to death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one
hand, one can say that “Robinson Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the
book, were, according to a first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and
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desire attested to by this book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or
metonymy, [were all] buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can
and one must, one must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and
like the experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psychoanthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson
Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like ours, I
mean . . the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the family and/or
State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132
Derrida then proceeds to outline what he takes to be the two options for the
disposal of corpses now available: inhumation and cremation. (132-33). He then
returns to Robinson Crusoe to discuss Crusoe’s fear of being buried alive. At p. 143
Derrida then returns to inhumation and cremation and finishes the Fifth Session
with that topic (146). Derrida returns to the topic in pp. 162-71 of the Sixth Session.
Effective exorcism pretends to declare the death only in order to put to death. As a
coroner might do, it certifies the death but here it is in order to inflict it. This is a
familiar tactic. The constative form tends to reassure. The certification is effective. . .
. But here effectivity phantomalizes itself. It is in face [en effet] a matter of a
performative that seeks to reassure to but first of all to reassure itself, for nothing is
less sure, that what one would like to see dead is indeed dead. It speaks in the name
of life. It claims to know what that is. Who knows better than someone who is alive .
. . . now, it says (to itself), what used to be living is no longer alive, it does not remain
effective in death itself, don’t worry. (What is going on here is a way of not wanting
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to know . . . what everyone alive knows . . . , namely, that that the dead can often be
more powerful than the living. . . In short, it is often a matter of pretending to certify
death there where the death certificate is still the performative of an act of war or
the important of gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution. Jacques Derrida,
Specters of Marx: (48).
“the lifeline of live words [mots de vie]” Derrida, H.C. for Life, 95
“the live-ance of life [vivement de vie],” Derrida, H.C. for Life, 84
When it is not associated—like life, moreover, or a silk paper with a veil or
canvas, writing’s blank white, spacing, gaps, the “blanks which become what is
important,” always opens up onto a base of paper. Basically, paper often
remains for us on the basis of the basis. The base figure on the basis of which
figures and letters are separated out. The indeterminate “base” of paper, the
basis of the basis en abyme, when it is also surface, support, and substance,
material substratum, formless matter and for force in force, virtual or dynamic
power of virtuality—see how it appeals to an interminable genealogy of these
great philosophemes. “Paper or Me, You Know . . . (New Speculations on a
Luxury of the Poor)” Paper Machine, 53.
Type Writer Ribbing of Derrida
I will contemplate about, and look [in mock Derridean
252
fashion] for, his typewriter ribbons." And also for his computers and discs, and
even the hard drive. Now where are those ribbons, anyway? And what traces did
JD leave on them? Did he re-ink them? Or did he buy new ones each time?
As Derrida writes of Rousseau’s purloined ribbon, stolen and passed from hand
to hand turned typewriter ribbon,
a formidable writing machine, a ribbon of ink along which so many
signs transited so irresistibly, a skin on which or under which so
many words will have been printed, a phantasmatic body through
which waves of ink will have been made to flow. An affluence or
confluence of limited ink, to be sure, because a typewriter ribbon,
like a computer printer, has only a finite reserve of coloring
substance. The material potentiality of this ink remains modest,
that is true, but it capitalizes, virtually, for the sooner or later, an
impressive quantity of text: not only a great flux of liquid, good for
writing, but a growing flux at the rhythm of a capital—on a day
when speculation goes crazy in the capitals of the stock markets.
And when one makes ink flow, figuratively or not, one can also
figure that one causes to flow or lets flow all that which, by spilling
itself this way, can invade or fertilize some cloth or tissue and the
surface and ink of an immense bibliography . . . . The ribbon will
always shave been more or less a subject. It was always already
at the origin a material support, at once a subjectile on which one
writes and the piece of a machine thanks to which one will never
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have done with inscribing: discourse upon discourse, exegesis on
top of exegesis, beginning with those of Rousseau. . . [Marion]
with or without annunciation . . . will have been fertilized with ink
through the ribbon of a terrible and tireless writing machine that is
now relayed, this floating sea of characters, by the apparently liquid
element of computer screens and from time to time by ink
cartridges for an Apple printer. (2001, 322-23)20
How comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the
only real Tissue, should have been overlooked by science—the vestural Tissue, namely,
of woole or other Cloth; which Man’s Soul wears as to its outermost wrappage and
overall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole faculties
at work, his whole Self lives, moves, has its being? 4
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford Classics) ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor.
Caryle makes the same move form tissue to cloth Derrida does.
Derrida says that de Man was going to call “Excuses (Confessions)" “The
"Purloined Ribbon," but Derrida does not state that that was the original title of de
Man’s essay when it was first published in Glyph.
Derrida resists glossing. Sur-vivance; no key words, no synonyms, no chain even,
necessarily. “Driving” by car is one instance of many. Survivance.
This essay may not have been published. If it has been published, what is it that you are
reading now? Is there a future anterior of the after the fact of publication, a future of
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infinite reading? Has one crossed the threshold of publication before one publishes,
especially if one has been invited to contribute and the chances of rejection have been
minimized? On you writing on the way to publication? Is it the criterion of selection?
What one decides to delete but does not destroy, does not want to publish under one’s
name, material one withholds in a manner that is the opposite of plagiarism? Is there
an auto-recovery involved in published unpublished not reducible to genetic criticism?
Is publication always a kind of privation or deprivation? Is publication a destination of
writing, to be distinguished from the destinations of unpublished materials one might
call priva--cations? Under what conditions can publication no longer be sidelined as
merely a juridical, institutional, and bibliographical matter and must be addressed as a
philosophical question?
Is there a “die-stination” for all publication given that , for Derrida, writing is inseparable
from death?
The Post Card and Beyond. What are the limits of the book, what is the status of “and
beyond”? Beyond Finitude?
I will lay down cards and play a few hands. I have no trumps, no wild cards. I may not
be playing with a full deck. I just shuffle and reshuffle, like iTunes. I’ll take “mes”
chances.
The Post Card is not about publication—what is it about? Not a thematic reading.
Publcation is sufficiently internal and external to pose come questions, leave the reader
some callng cards, or “interjections d’apel”
Media addressed separately, as it were, in the “Envois.” Also separated by a lack of
translators notes and footnotes. There are none. And that distinction is complicated by
Derrida’s readings of Freud’s footnotes and of their completely useless—and himself
writes a completely useless one. And set adrift is already an operative metaphor in The
Post Card.
For you may consider them as calling cards, or “interjections d’apel.” Placing a call,
asking a question
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Paper—not material versus virtual—Paper Machine; Echographies—reduction of media
to technology as machines versus as techne, as repletion.
Where does ash go in survivance? How does one read the ash in other than figurative
terms, in not in empirical terms either (Derrida’s typewriter ribbons). Cinders. Strictly
posthumous just happens to be about fire, yet it is not destroyed—destructibility and
divisibility of the letter, but also the name of the dead person. Death of letter writer/s in
“Envois.” Useless footnotes. Economy of the footnote and of reading the footnote.
Inattention and attention to the paratext. Letter as destructible versus the support.
The issue of publication comes up in problem of typographical error versus Freudian slip,
though Derrida just says slip, in “Du Tout.” So how to decide the limits of the
undecidable? What is the relation between error in general and destinerrance in general,
drifting and idling. The typographical error and destinerrance.
Both specific to The Post Card and beyond. What are the limits of reading the
heterogeneity of Derrida’s corpus? How does he deal with Lacan—not a model for
dealing with Derrida—he dedicated Artaud le MOMA to Paul Thevelin, who wrote part
of the Artaud book.
Memoirs of the Blind, 68
Derrida in “restitutions” is replying as if to Hegel’s preface to he phenomenology and the
complaint people make about reading philosophy. You have to read too much before you
can read. Preparation and reparation.
The beyond of this its actual existence hovers over the corpse of the vanished
independence of a real being, or the being of faith, merely as the exaltation of a stale gas,
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or the vacuous Etre supreme. “Of Spirit,” Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A. V.
Miller, 358.
The aim by itself is a lifeless universal, just as the guiding tendency is a mere drive that
as yet lacks an actual existence; and the bare result is the corpse which has left the
guiding tendency behind it.
Preface, 2-3
This abnormal inhibition of thought is in large measure the course of complaints
regarding the unintelligibility of philosophical writings from individuals who otherwise
possess the educational requirements for understanding them. Here we see the reason
behind one particular complaint made so often against: that so much has to be read over
and over again before it can be understood—a complaint whose burden is presumed to be
quite outrageous and, if justified, to admit of no defense. . . . We learn by experience that
we mean something else something other than what we meant to mean, and this
correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and
understand it some other way.
Preface, 39
paraFreudian reading of networks and media, without rerouting them via Lacan’s return
to Freud and language and the unconscious. A more radical return, a return to what is
refound, etc. in relation to media, metaphor, and the parergon.
Point of Pascal is to set up a problem of involved in The Post Card—media, reading,
burning. The sidelining of history, of law, thee juridical and history both discourses in
need of deconstruction; ruin as always already, always “before”; the apprehension. Also
the book not as corpse. The “tissue” and “weave” mixed metaphors.
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Screaming Driver, Screaming Driver's Wife: You're going the wrong
Planes, Trains &
way! You're going to kill somebody!
Automobiles
(1987)
Topics a problem of media and the subjectile. Cite passage in Derrida about the problem
of the subjective. Not empirical materiality as opposed to idealization of the
transcendental signifier, deconstructed in facteur. But does have a model of writing that
skips over publication, over relation between Memoirs of Blind and the event of the
exhibition that occasioned it. Ditto for Artaud le Moma. Not an error, not a mistake for
which Derrida should be punished. (See Memoirs of Blind). But his lecture versus
publication format could have been placed between slide show lecture and powerpoint.
Instead, he distributed handouts or Xerox copies. Impact does not include publication,
virtual or otherwise.
Finitude of archive and finitude of ink and typewriter ribbon.
Finitude of the archive.
Is the paper an absolute conservation and preservation, an archive without anarchivity?
Or is it pure expenditure, a sealing that keeps what it destroys, a kind unburned ash of he
archive? Where do the generations of repetitions fit in relation out the finitude of the
archive? The finitude of survivance? Why did Pascal have two pieces of parchment?
Did Pascal copy it? Are both pieces of parchment written on? Or is one blank? Is one
the back up of the other? What happens to the referent before publication? Does
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For Crusoe, reading is reanimating, implicitly on the side of life. Pascal—is reading on
the side of life, can one read for life, is it reanimation? Generation of the repetitions to
come—how would this securing of non-reading as the same thing as rereading work in
relation to the archive and repetition and the death drive? Biological death sometimes
matters to Derrida, as in “Du Tout,” dead name, dedications of sessions of east and the
Sovreign to recently deceased friends, For the Love of Lacan after Lacan is dead, same
for To DO Justice to Freud. Difference between revisiting (revenant) and reviving
(seeing—would one read blind, as in Memoirs Derrida talks about driving as if blind? No
clothing versus naked, but clothing of Pascal like the wallet Derrida discusses in Paper
Machine.
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” he answered, laughing.” The
Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Oxford 19
The glance of reading (Lacan)—look at instead of look up—retinal reading. Derrida, “I
didn’t know where to start reading, looking , opening.” 209 Instead of WB’s essay made
up entirely of quotations, one would write an essay with a list of words not keyed to
anything, prior to any indexing. Glancing as somewhere between glossing and reading.
Having recalled this, and having taken this precaution as a matter of principle, I am not
doing what one ought to do and cannot do it with you in a seminar. I cannot do all that
again with you here for at least two reasons, as I was saying. The one has to do with the
obvious lack of time: it would take us years. The other, less obvious, is that I also believe
in the necessity, sometimes, in a seminar the work of which is not simply reading, in the
necessity, and even the fecundity, when I’m optimistic and confident, of a certain number
of leaps, certain new perspectives from a turn in the text, from a stretch of path that gives
you another view of the whole, like, for example, when you’re driving a car on a
mountain road, a hairpin or a turn, an abrupt and precipitous elevation suddenly gives you
in an instant a new perspective on the whole, or a large part of the itinerary or of what
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orients, designs, or destines it. And here there intervene not only each person’s readingidioms, with their history, their way of driving (it goes without saying that each of my
choices and my perspectives depends broadly here, as I will never try to hide, on my
history, my previous work, my way of driving, driving on this read, on my drives, desires
and phantasms, even if I always try to make them both intelligible, shareable, convincing
and open to discussion) [here there intervene, not only each person’s reading-idioms,
with their history, their way of driving] in the mountains or on the flat, on dirt roads or on
highways, following this or that map, this or that route, but also the crossing, the decision
already taken and imposed by you by fiat as soon as it was proposed to you, to read a
given seminar by Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe, i.e., two discourses also on the way
and on the path which can multiply perspectives from which two vehicles can light up,
their headlights crossing, the overall cartography and the landscape in which we are
traveling and driving together, driving on all these paths interlaced, intercut, overloaded
with bridges, fords, no entries or one-way streets, etc.
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2, (2012) 206
Reading in Color: Kindle with and without color images.
Facsimiles in The Post Card as well. Description of it
“I didn’t know where to start reading, looking, opening.” PC, 209 when he gets the book
without the frontispiece and things he got the wrong book, then holds it again with both
hands and finds the right page with the image of Plato and Socrates and describes the
image, the blue and the red lettering—non-signifying patterns
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"Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. 'No doubt you think that you are complimenting
me in comparing me to Dupin,' he observed. 'Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very
inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos
remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had
some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe
appeared to imagine.'" Study in Scarlet
Repetition—structure is not only about a sequence, first Queen, then Minister; first
Minister, then Dupin—but also about reversibility, from inside to outside, from outside in
(Invagination) or top to bottom or upside down.
Dupin’s signature in Facteur is not “Dupin,” it’s the citation from Astree, a note left
behind by which the Minister will know Dupin found it and found him out. But will the
minister ever read it? Will the facsimile arrive at its destination? Is Poe (and Derrida)
making an exception-due to different kinds of marking (support of the facsimile) and
re/marking (citation as signature), both of which are easily misrecognized or not
recognized at all? Will the Minister repeat Dupin’s recognition, or has Dupin duped
himself?
“Purloined Letter” cited in an endnote to Oxford Worlds Classics “Scandal in Bohemia.”
In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Ed Owen Dudley Edwards, 299, n4 It’s one of
A.C. Doyle’s sources.
Derrida forgets to mention Lacan’s “Overture to this Collection,” 3-5, which explains the
order of the Écrits as well as the first sentence of ‘The Seminar on ‘Purloined Letter’”
begins with the repetition compulsion, which Lacan idiosyncratically translates as
“repetition automatism.”21 “My research has led me to the realization that the repetition
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automatism (Wiederholungszwang) has its basis in what I have called the insistence of
the signifying chain.” 6 The opening section of the essay ends at a page spacing by
returns to repetition compulsion. “This is what will confirm for us that it is repetition
automatism. P. 10
“This is what happens in repetition automatism.” 21
“The idea here is that one will already find in Lacan’s 1956 “Seminar on the ‘Purloined
Letter’” ideas that were not fully developed until the 1960s. Bruce Fink, 766, n (10, 5).
In other words, Lacan is not relineazing his collection , putting a master text at the “head”
of the book, but staging a reading as a rereading, a circular process “Exmplified” by this
text. This text doubles back on itself. Unlike most revisions, it includes the alternate
drafts. The first version brings over, placed and dated: Guitrancourt and Sans Cascinao,
mid-May to mid-August 1956 and then a new italicized subtitle represents the second
version tat followed “Presentation of the Suite” 30) followed by an identically italicized
subtitle “Introduction” on p. 33 which begins “The class of my seminar that I have
written up to the present here was given on April 26, 1955. It represents a moment in the
commentary that I devoted to Beyond the Pleasure Principle for the whole of that year.”
33 This section is undated in the text presumably because the edition in which it was
publishes establishes the date on the copyright page. . A final section is subtitled in
italics “Parenthesis of Parentheses (Added in 1966).” The last paragraphs constitute an
intellectual autobiography of the essay’s non-linear composition. 45-46. The endnotes
have been updated so that the default reference is to the 1966 edition. But Fink’s
translation records the dates of footnote added later “[Added in 1968:] and even “[Added
in 1966].” Some endnotes offer more bibliographical information. The second to last
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endnote reads: “[Added in 1966] The text written in 1955 resumes here. The introduction
of a structural approach through such exercises was, in fact, followed by important
developments in my teaching. Concepts related to subjectivization progressed hand-inhand with a reference to the analysis situs in which I claim the subjective progress.” 48,
n. 29. The break is not graphically consistent. The endnote occurs roughly four pages
before the essay ends. When Lacan talks why he “is publishing a version of it here,” both
the referent of “version” and “here” keep the published text in an unfinished state. When
Lacan writes about why he reworked the essay in accordance with the requirements of
writing” and “increasingly promoted the notion of the symbol here,” To obscure its
historical traits through a sort of historical feint would have seemed, I believe, artificial to
my students.” Lacan may make the “historical traits” apparent, but he does not make tem
clear, he does not follow the biobibliograhical conventions which would provide a clear,
progress narrative. Instead, the apparence of the essay’s historical traits” is inseparable
from the graphic appearance and variations in its paratexts, which apparently demands
recursive reading.
Compare “version” when used by Derrida.
The epigraph from Goethe’s Faust is kept in German, translated in the endnotes, 767
(11,2)
“Was Hiesst Lesen?”
“Was Hiesst Lesen?” Das Tragende (support for carrying, like a strecher) und Leitende
(Leader, Head) im Lesen ist die Sammlung. Worauf [What drives] sammelt sie? Auf die
Gescrhiebene, auf das in der Schrift Gesagte. Das eingenliche Lesen ist die Sammlung
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auf das, was ohne unser Wissen einst shchon unser Wesen in den Anspruch genommenon
hast, moegen wir dabei ihm entsprechen oder versagen.
Ohne das eigenliche Lesen vermoegen wir auch nicht das uns Anblinkended zu sehe und
das Erscheinende und Scheinedne zu schauen.
“Was Hiesst Lesen?” in Denkerfahrungen, 1910-1974. Ed. Hermann Heidegger. Vittorio
Klostermann: Krankfurst am Main, 1983, 61.
Bruce Fink’s endnotes—a kind of glossary sensitive to the repetitions of Lacan’s terms
precedes the endnotes, which gloss a particular word.
Do these various bibliographic recursions constitute a structural repetition akin to the
structures of repetition that Lacan and Derrida debate and that differnitate them (the letter
is indivisblle, the triangle intersubjective, the letter is pre-graamatoligcal, and the letter
always arrives at its destination, versus the letter is always divisible (because material),
the letter is always already grammmatological, and the triangle is not intersubjective, and
the letter is subject to disinterrance such it does not always arrive at its destination? Does
Lacan particular staging of his argument have any relation to the way Derrida restages le
facteur de la verite by placing it at the end of The Post Card (inverting the place of the
Seminar?), including of an already published article to which Derrida appends to a “prenote” about his setting it adrift? Is this republication a new version of the essay? And
would be reading it mean making it a symptom, reading symptomatic? Is this a structure
yet to be read? Does it bear on the repetition compulsion? Is it a variation on compulsive
reading? Where does the deconstruction of a text’s parergon, its title and its borders
begin and end? What does Derrida do to reconfigure a text have to be re/configured for
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Derrida to read it? Look at For the Love of Lacan. Says he is not standing outside the
text, but still in a scene of reading.
Yet derrida does not deconstruct his own reading and Lacan’s. He does not show how his
own reading repeats the kinds of msrecognitions he finds in Lacan, even if he does nto
calim to have “corrected,” as it were, Lacan’s reading.
Does orienting ourselves through page design nad paratextss, philogical and
bibliographical issues pt us on a path to such a deconstruction?
Must these questions beheld in suspense? Are they yet another aporia?
I propose to address these readings in a preliminary way by turn to For the Love of
Lacan, a passage in Le facteur in which Derrida unlocks his reading, and a passage in
Poe’s Purloined Letter regarding the facsimile. The facsimile in Poe is a particular kind
of copy, a particular kind of supplement. In Poe’s letter, it is a supplement. But Derrida
uses an actual facsimile of his signature, “J.D” several times in “Signature, Event,
Context.” Memoirs of the Blind, Artaud le Moma, The Sense of the Subjectile, Hantai,
Correspondence, Truth of Painting all make use of facsimiles. Bok on Derrida turning
his publications into facsmiles. Neither Lacan nor Derrida read the facsimile in Poe’s
story. Is it one kind of iteration among others, or does its particularity, a matter of verbal
description in Poe’s story, of course, make a difference to difference, the trace, archewriting, the impression, and so on?
Hand Delivered Reading
Derrida uses “internal reading” in Memoirs of the Blind
265
Read by juxtaposition of selections: My choice is information passage (about media) in
relation to sentence about the reading he has unlocked. To get at question of the support
and the facsimile.
“This question cannot but resound when we know we are caught in a scene of reading”
On the Name, 98.
Cite first sentence of Envois
First sentence of Envois
Cite unbearable
First page of envois
Have we begun at the beginning? Are we already reading too quickly?
Philology versus philosophy
Derrida on the bad reader, next page
Because I still like him, I can foresee the impatience of the bad reader: this is the way I
name or accuse the fearful reader, the reader in a hurry to be determined, decided upon
deciding (in order to annul in other words, to bring back to oneself, one has to wish to
know in advance what to expect, one wishes to expect what has happened, one wishes to
expect (oneself)). Now, it is bad, and know no other definition of the bad, it is bad to
predestine one’s reading, it is always bad to foretell. It is bad, reader, no longer to like
retracing’s one’s steps.
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, 4
Yet he says he is not using bad in a moral sense but in a literary sense in Resistances.
Is glossing a form of extreme close reading, a line by line commentary? Is glossing not
reading insofar as it takes the text as a given, as complete.
266
The text entitled "The Purloined Letter" imprints / is imprinted in these effects of
indirection. I have only indicated the most conspicuous of these-effects in order to begin
to unlock their reading: the game of doubles, the endless divisibility, the textual
references from facsimile to facsimile, the framing of frames, the interminable
supplementarity of quotation marks, the insertion of "The Purloined Letter" in a
purloined letter that begins with it, throughout the narratives of narrative of "The Murders
in the Rue Morgue," the newspaper clippings of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" ("A
Sequel to 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' "). Above all else, the mise en abime of the
title: "The Purloined Letter" is the text, the text in a text (the purloined letter as a trilogy).
The title is the title of the text, it names the text, it names itself and thus includes itself
while pretending to name an object described in the text. "The Purloined Letter"
functions as a text that escapes all assignable destination and produces, or rather induces
by deducing itself, this inassignability at the exact moment in which it narrates the arrival
of a letter. It pretends to mean [vouloir-dire]and to make one think that "a letter always
arrives at its destination," authentic, intact, and undivided, at the moment and the place
where the simulation, as writing avant la lettre, leaves its path. In order to make another
leap to the side. At this very place, of course.
YFS, 110
Derrida’s unlocked reading—a series of equivalences, nested or translated, repeated, a
series? Is it serial repetition? What kind of structural reading is being unlocked here?
What difference, if any, does the substrate make to this structural reading? What kind of
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formal materiality or radical empiricism, differs from history of the book and material
culture?
Obviously I am thinking of the omission of the frame, of the play of signatures, and
notably the parergonal effect; I cannot produce the demonstration I gave in 1975 of this
misrecognition. Resistances of Psych, 59
of a continuum composed each time of words or sentences, of signs missing from the
interior, if it can be put thus, of a card, a of a letter, or of a card-letter. For the totally
incinerated envois, could not be indicated any mark. I had thought first of preserving the
figures and the dates, in other words the places of the signature, but I gave it up. What
would this book have been like? Before all else I wanted, such was one of the
destinations of my labor, to make a book—in part for reasons that remain obscure and
always will, I believe, and in part for other reasons that I must silence. A book instead of
what? Or of whom?
PC, 4-5
The misrecognition of the failure to account of the literary structure of narration,
Cite Derrida, For the Love of Lacan, I do not think of Lacan as a homogenous body.
Same could be said for Derrida’s own works.
Derrida does not read line by line and provides his own directions for reading.
Nevertheless , we may ask where glossing ends and reading begins, whether glossary is a
kind of non-reading, a supplement that is continuous or discontinuous with the text (more
268
corridors in a labyrinth or the thread that takes one in and out of the labyrinth of the text
it is graphically marked off from?
Let’s start over. Let’s begin with the paratexts of the Post Card, the translation’s
introduction and glossary, entitled “L before K.” Is the glossary a kind of reading of the
Post Card, a reading that is also a non-linear reading but instead gives the reader a
network before rather than after the text? And where is that reading? Is the glossary
separate from the introduction, as it is in the table of contents where the glossary is
printed in the same font size as the introduction, or is it part of the introduction, in which
Glossary appears as a subheading, not the title at the head of a new page in the same size
as the font used for the Introduction, but in a smaller font on the same page of the
introduction? Consider Derrida’s reading of the small , barely noticeable but
nevertheless significant differences between title of Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour
(The Madness of the Day), reproduced in facsimile images of the table of contents and in
Parages. (Is John P. Leavey’s Glassary a reading of Derrida’s Glas? How does one gloss
these paratextual differences in a paratext not in Derrida’s French edition? How should
one gloss, how does one read the paratexts in Derrida’s text? Should we read the notes
that precede Speculations and “Le facteur “on facing pages the same way we read
Derrida’s preface? Are these unsigned notes written by Derrida? Consider Derrida’s
note to the translator in his extended footnote running across the bottom of each page of
“Living On: Borderlines?” And does glossing exclude the reprinting in a smaller font
and repagination as Living On,” dropping the subtitle?
Is glossing restricted to alphabetic lettering without regard to the support or substrate?
How should one account for the variation in the placement of notes in translations
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Derrida’s works? Stanford University Press Notes precede each of the endnotes to the
three reprinted essays in Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Chicago UP favors putting them
before each essay (See The Truth in Painting). Are these to regarded as meaningless
vagaries of publication? Is Stanford’s more awkward in having to include references in
the text to the notes (See Headnote one)? Or should the so-called materiality of any
edition be read? Should the medium be read, the different stocks of paper for the printed
text and for the facsimiles in The Post card?
The pronoun “I” is used in the first, “we” and “I” are used in the second? And what are
we to make of “first version” or the “first version was initially published?” Should we
track down these different versions and catalogue their variations? In the second
endnote, the author, apparently Derrida, recommends we read two essays given at a
conference to which his paper responds? Should we read these notes differently from the
way we read Derrida’s autobiographical anecdotes about how he arrived at the title of his
work (Archive Fever, Typewriter Ribbon, Memoirs of the Blind, and so on? Derrida’s
own rereading of Envois and The Purloined Letter in For the Love of Lacan. Derrida
writes in “Restitutions,” And Shapiro [Meyer] quotes these two paragraphs which you all
find so ridiculous or so imprudent. Lets reread them first, in German, in French, and in
English.
........................................................................
.........
........................................................................
.........
270
........................................................................
.........
--It’s done. (294)
Or two pages later,
In other words, would it not be on the basis of thing as work or product that is general
interpretation (or one that is claimed as general) of the thing as informed matter was
secretly constituted? Now reread the chapter. 296
Should one read such moments? Or are they to be gathered and shelved under the rubric
of Derrida’s rhetoric?
Does anything go missing between glossing and reading? In addition to what Derrida
calls “unreadability” in Living On: Borderlines?” is there also non reading, nto be
confused with not reading? And where would this nonreading be situated in relation to
reading and unreading?
--Do you think you need to start over again? What happened to passages from The Post
Card you cited at the beginning of your essay? Can you do what Derrida calls in various
places an “internal reading” of that book, even if the limits of that reading are artificially
and arbitrarily imposed, for the sake of clarity?
--Of course. One always “does” such readings. My purpose thus far is slow the speed of
such reading or what Derrida calls the rush in Memoirs of the Blind. My reading has thus
far been radically empiricist in ask a basic bibliographical question about The Post Card:
What is it? We have already put deconstructive pressure on reading, on its difference
271
form glossing and from nonreading. Let’s take a leap, then, and examine the title of my
essay, “What is Called Reading?” My question alludes to Martin Heidegger’s “What is
Called Thinking?” Derrida pairs Freud and Heidegger in The Post Card in order to
establish the end of an epoch. Derrida also mentions “the hermeneutical circle,” which
orients Heidegger’s orientation of thinking as questioning, without mentioning
Heidegger. (Derrida returns to it at length in Beast and the Sovereign Part Two). Derrida
obviously does not omit Heidegger, but he arguably does delivers a nonreading of him.
Focusing on repetition in Freud, on the repetition compulsion , on psychoanalysis as the
finding of the refound, Derrida forgets reception in Heidegger. The question of Being in
Being and Time is the repetition. Division Two is at points overtly a repetition of
Division One, and passages about Descartes and Kant appear in almost the same place in
both divisions. Moreover, the passage on the hermeneutical circle in division one is
repeated in division two. To the earlier questions about reading we may now ask what is
rereading? Following Heidegger’s move in Introduction to Metaphysics, in which he
sows that metaphysics is the question “What is metaphyics?,” not any particular answer
to that question, I want to suggest that re/reading Derrida and the texts he reads and does
not read, always happens at the threshold of the question waiting to be asked, namely
“what is called reading?” Derrida is not exemplary nor is he just an example. But he
does reward reading.
---OK. I’m beginning to get it. You want to stay with the text in a radically empirical
way, maybe a hyperglossative way, and, at the same time, you want to push close reading
to its limits—how close is close? How slow is slow? What is the proper speed of good
272
reading? Does good reading does not mean merely linear reading, word by word, page
by page, but a recursive return from later to earlier passages, scanning the book like a flip
book, indexing it, and random accessing it. And you want to push the, as Derrida
frequently does, the limits of writing and drawing (Memoirs of the blind) to the consider
the reprodocution of images in his works, including The Post Card but the way the
printing of some his texts begins to turn them into images (Living On, Glas, etc)?.
Mes Chances—reading by chance—I remembered a line when reading Foucault, then In
Love of Lcan by chance?
Reading not something that can be folded into a mise-en-abyme, or a parergon—reading
derrida reading. Or my autobiographical narrative. Quesiron about narrative. Can you
tell a story that is already about retelling?
Reading is the question awaiting and usually goes unasked—what is reading? Close?
How close? Slow? How so? What about random access reading scanning reading? Flip
book reading? Far reading? When is it no longer reading? What is the place of nonreading? Reading is not about a theme, a frame, a master word.
First sentence
First page
First word same as the first page?
273
No Weg without Umweg: the detour does not overtake the road, but constitutes it, breaks
open the path. Pc, 284
Here I am asking question in the dark. PC, 278
Not to frame Derrida, not parergonalize him , not to shrink-wrap him, is to read sideways,
glancing from passage to another, a kind of comparative philology that freely associative
reading in that it has not predetermined limits about what constitutes writing in the
ordinary sense(as opposed to arche-writing, the mark, the trace). Not be spaced as in
Glas under two columns and two texts as in Borderlines, two running texts or in Jacques
Derrida (Bennington and Derrida), which licenses a kind of key words Derridabase
repackaging, reshelving, hack job, complete with photos from the family album.
As for the 52 signs, the 52 mute spaces, in question is a cipher that I had wanted to be
symbolic and secret—in a word a clever cryptogram, that is, a very naïve one, tat had
cost me long calculations. If I state now, and this is the truth, I swear, that have totally
forgotten the rule as well as the elements of such a calculation, as if I had thorn it into the
fire, I know in advance all the types of reaction that this will not fail to induce. 5
“Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? to what address?
Without any desire to surprise, and thereby to grab attention by means of obscurity, I owe
it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally that I do not know.” 5
274
(In the syntax of “X: A Critical Reader,” it will, moreover, always be difficult to
determine who is the reader of whom, who the subject, who the text, who the object, and
who offers what—or whom—to whom. What one would have to criticize in the oblique,
today, without doubt, is without doubt the geometrical figure, the compromise still made
with the primitiveness of the place, the line, the angle, the diagonal, and thus of the right
angle between the vertical and the horizontal. The oblique remains the choice of a
strategy that is till crude, obliged to ward off what is most urgent, a geometric calculus
for diverting as quickly as possible both the frontal approach and the straight line:
presumed to be the shortest path form one point to another.
Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” in On the Name, 13-14 [Kant is the
critical reader, see p. 8)
Jacque Derrida’s On the Name compromises three essays . . . the three essays appeared
in France as a Collection of three separately bound but matching books published by
Editions Galilee. On the Name, the title this book published by Stanford University Press,
thus is not a translation of any French book title by Jacques Derrida; it is a name given to
what is a hypothetical book in France. The title On the Name would in French be Sur le
nom.
Thomas dutoit, “Translating the Name?” in On the Name, (1995) ix
Not possible to bring these threads together into a htematic unity, under a signature,
attached to a single proper name.
“Biodegradables”—have not read me-vitriol at Spivack in Ghostlier Demarcations
275
Can deconstruction deliver? Oronly pomise?
[For the Lacan
Saying Lacan is right or doing right by Lacan . . . makes my text still more unreadable
for readers in a rush to decide between the “pro and the con,” in short, for those minds
who believed I was opposed to Lacan or showing him to be wrong. The question lies
elsewhere: it is the question of reason and the principle of reason. Thus, not only was I
not criticizing Lacan, but I was not even writing a sort of overseeing or objectifying
metadiscourse on Lacan or on a text by Lacan. My writing involved me in a scene, which
scene I was showing at the same time (no doubt inn small phrases (no doubt in small
phrases that no one reads) could not be closed or framed. All of this has since been
constantly put back into play other scenes of en abyme that have been deployed here and
there, more often there than here, which is to say, once again, abroad. Moreover, for all
these reasons, the argument of “Le facteur de la verite” does not lend itself to being
framed [the TN note on the French title awaits the reader of the PC, 413] in the text
bearing this title; it is played, set adrift in The Post Card, the book with that title, which
inscribes “Le facteur de la verite” like a piece in a borderless fiction, neither public nor
private, with and without a general narrator. It is inscribed first of all in the “Envois” 63
And above all the (duplicitous and identificatory) opening set off to the side, in the
direction of the (narrating-narrated) narrator, brings back one letter only to set another
adrift. The Post Card, Facteur, 492
This is why we have insisted on this key or theoretical safety lock of the Seminar 469
276
Therefore nothing begins. Only a drifting or disorientation from which it one does not
emerge 484
Derrida talks about the opening that Lacan does not read, 484
Hermeneut interested in the center of the picture 484
“invisible framing” 483
One cannot define the ‘hermeneutical circle’” Post Card, 474
It hears itself say what it cannot hear or understand.
MEETING PLACE:
THE DOULE SQUARE OF KINGS
But it cannot read the story it tells itself. 483
The double, repetition, recording, and the mimeme in general are excluded from the
system, along with the entire graphematic structure they imply” 472
“Unpublished Journal” 468
empirical versus unconscious letter, 467
empirical versus or transcendental, material or ideal signifier, 464; 466; 477-79.
Dessein—“design,” as in deliberate, intent-but also graphic design, even drawing.
Typographical marks as part of design. (Joyce, Restored Finnegans Wake—Derrida on
Joyce)
“What is a signature between quotation marks?” 495
It’s the graphology that Dupin depends on—“he knows my hand”—not the quotation
itself.
Hermeneutic deciphering 441
277
Derrida’s apparently useless footnote versus Freud’s “completely useless footnote,” p.
495 on a change made to the first edition that concludes: “The deletion of this phrase
(which is inconsequential) is the only modification of this essay since its first
publication.” Is the note completely useless? Or is there, on the next to last page of the
essay in order to contrast his account of Lacan to Lacan’s revisions and re-editing of the
Seminar? See Heidegger’s preface to the second edition of his book on Kant. Is the note
a symptom? Another open secret there to be deciphered? Doesn’t Derrida decipher
Dupin’s “signature” in the fac-simile? The “signature” is not a proper name; it is a
quotation, between quotations and placed in the middle of the blank (like the center at
which the hermenut looks)
Going from Derrida on Pascal—posthumous to cremation versus inhumation—to
cremation in PC to “For the Love of Lacan”—to Derrida’s own mocking selfdeconstruction of his account of Poe and Lacan’s, to publication and editions, paratexts—
to repetition and reading—to destruction—to dessein / design, to drawing, to icon, image
and writing support, to facsimile. Unrevealed contents of purloined letter; unnamed book
Dupin and narrator are both looking and that Poe, as Derrida, never makes clear whether
they find it.
“And they publish everything.” 132
signature, proof, 136
The post is a banking agency. 139
“’I just copied into the middle of the blank sheets these words’” Citation from Poe, 494
Is the middle like the hermenut’s center? Is the Minister a hermenut, like Lacan?
278
The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of
commentary upon the propositions just advanced. Citation from Poe, 487
And the voice retains [garde] all the more in that one believes one can retrain [garder] it
without external accessory, without paper, and without envelope. 465
. . . without quoting myself, 63
“dessein”—design, plan; subtracting a letter, “dessin” –drawing, cartoon, sketch and
also design (a pattern), grid, layout; “dessiner,” “to draw” ; to sketch; to trace;
there is no audible difference in the pronunciation of “dessein” and “dessin,” like “je
nous” and “genoux.” Closeness in spelling, allows for a pun, rather than two meanings
present in “design.” Poe uses “design” to mean “plan.” “Un dessin si funeste”
translated as “plot”
Relation between sight (pun) and sound--what you hear—noise versus silence (Prefect
says nothing after writing out the check in PL), in Purloined Letter.
Can one ever finish with obliqueness? The secret, if there is one, is not hidden at the
corner of an angle, it does not lay itself open to a double view or a squinting gaze. It
cannot be seen, quite simply. No more than a word. As soon as there are words--and this
is true of the trace in general, and of the chance that it is—direction intuition no longer
has any chance. One can reject, as we have done, the word “oblique”; one cannot deny
the disinterrant indirection [indirection distinerrante: see Derrida’s The Post Card . . .
Tr.] as soon as there is a trace. Or if you prefer, one can only deny it.
“Passions,” On the Name, Trans David Wood, Ed. Thomas Dutoit, 30
Green spectacles like the cover of he mystic writing pad, the protective sheet, in Poe, a
“cover.”
279
“When is a pun not a pun?” Finnegans Wake, cited by J.D. Poe writes the address in
French at the end of the first sentence of the Purloined Letter:
“au troisieme, No. 33. Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain.” 680
citation at the end:
“Un dessein si funeste, s'il nést digne d'Atrée est digne de Thyeste"
[Derrida says he doesn’t want to translate the German passage he cites at length from
Nietzsche at the end of “Speculations on ‘Freud’” p. 408-09:
but in sudden falls, if observed closely, the countermotion comes
visibly earlier than the sensation of pain. It would be bad for me if I had to wait
when making a misstep until the fact rings the bell of consciousness and a hint of
what to do is telegraphed back. Rather I discern as clearly as possible that first
comes the countermotion of the foot that prevents the fall, and then ...
“ . . . aber in plotzlichichen Faellen kommt, wenn man genau beobachtet, die
Gegenbewegung ersichtlic frueher als Schmerzzempfindung. Es stuende schlimm um
mich, wenn ich bei einem Fehltritt zu warten haette, bis das Faktum an die Gloeke des
Bewussteins schluege und ein Wink, was zu tun ist, zururcktelegraphiert wuerde.
Vielmehr unterschiede ich so deutlich als moeglich, das erst die Gegenbewugung des
Fusses, um den Fall zu verhueten, folget und dann . . .” This is to be continued.
Bass Notes
Alan Bass leaves many French words untranslated into English. There are no
translator’s notes to “Envois.”22
All this to be read in the Nachlass of the 80s, surrounding this sentence which I no longer
wish to translate” At the end he returns to the phrase “To is to be continued” (cites his
280
own “La séance continue” subtitle which is taken from Freud, who said when his
daughter died.
I did not wish to cite in passing 388
To be continued 337; 409; la séance continue, 320; 376
The word transference reminds one of the unity of the metaphoric network, which is
precisely metaphor and transference (Uebertragung), a network of correspondences,
connections, switch points, traffic and a semantic postal, railway sorting without which
no transferential destination would be possible, in he strictly technical sense that Freud’s
psychoanalysis has sought to assign this word . . . . 383
Obeying a law of selective economy . . . as much as the rightful pleasure that I can give
myself tonight, I will limit myself to the following traits. 372
Zuruck, 362, 409
Autoteleguiding 356, 337
How has such a hypothesis, under its rubric as hypothesis, I am insisting on this, been
granted in this third chapter? I am supposing it reread. 339
Empirico-biographical, 328
(This entire syntax is made possible by the graphics of the margin or hyphen, or the
border and the step, such as remarked elsewhere. I will exploit it here.] 317
The last sentence of the note is “Other fragments of the same seminar will appear soon in
book form.” 293
281
This fact will be contested by those whose truth is hidden by these themes, who are all
too happy to find in them corroboration for their truth on the basis of what they call
“hermeneutics.”
(A healthy reform of spelling would allow us to give their exploitation of this term the
import of a famillionaire practice: that of the faux-filosopher, for example, or the
fuzzyosphy, without adding any more does or I’s.)
Their radical vice can be seen in [their approach to] the transmission of knowledge.
--Jacques Lacan, “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question,” Écrits, 193
I will do nothing for the reader henceforth—apart from pointing out, a little further on,
the aim of my Seminar—but trust in his tete-a-tete with texts that are certainly no easier,
but that are intrinsically suitable.
--Jacques Lacan, “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question,” Écrits, 189
(Here, I interrupt this development, If one is willing to read its consequences, including
its appendix in Facteur de la verite, one will perceive . . . 335
To which he forcibly adapts his designs, 689
Completely useless 367
Deciphers it far afar like a teleguided reading device
Besides, in our case, we were obliged to proceed without noise” 685 [like D—going
blind, only on audio for Dupin.
Holding up his closed hand, 689
Vacant stares 688
Its susceptibility to being produced?” I said.
282
That is to say, of being destroyed, said Dupin. [When do Derirda’s “Tropics” become
designs, drawings, writing bordering on drawing?
The Prefect . . . finally filled up and signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed
across the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and deposited in his pocketbook; then, unlocking an escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect.
No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in
search. . . . But the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive 696
You will remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested,
upon our first interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on
account of its being so very self-evident.” 696
681
Ful of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pari of green spectacles. . To be even with
him [why even? Odd? ], I complained of my weak eyes [versus D’s “lynx-eyed”] and
emanated the necessity of the spectacles, under cover [under cover as in detective, but
also like a piece of paper—his glances, his eye movements, his reading al have be
concealed by the “shades” Dupin wears] I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the
apartment, while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host. [Dupin goes on
audio only-he is blind, but somehow he is still readable as a listener. He is actually
deaf—or has the mute button on.
Upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it
to good purpose; I paid especial attention to a large writing-table near which he sat . . .
By being too shallow or to deep, for the matter in hand; [on hand and in hand] 689
283
It was nearly in two, across the middle—as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it out
as worthless had been altered, or stayed, in the second. [first, second] It had a very large
seal, bearing the D-cipher very conspicuously . . . 695
He hard foreseen all of this 693
When you have signed it, will hand you the letter. 688
Opened it with a trembling hand 688
Producing a memorandum-book, proceeded to read aloud a minute account of the
internal, and especially of the external appearance of the missing document. 686-87
I made the re-examination” 687
Poe engages forensics as a kind of bibliometrics:
You looked among D----‘s papers, of course, and into the books of the library? We
opened every package and every parcel; we nervously opened every book, but we turned
over every lead in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to
the fashion of some police officers. We also measured the thickness of Every book-cover
, 686
Also storage metrics:
We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained
police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. 684
After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in the drawer, she was forced to place it,
open as it was, upon a table. 682
From giving him reason to suspect our design. 683
I have keys which can open any chamber of any cabinet in Paris. 683
Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain, said Dupin. 681
284
Especial form, 692
Microscopes, 693
Eyes, 693
Escaped observation by dint of being excessively obvious 694
“re-directed and re-sealed”
I just copied” 698
“opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close juxtaposition to the other. 682
This cannot be done openly. 683
Policial eyes, 691
Suggestive of a design to delude the beholder 696 (Henry James—“design in the carpet”)
“And what, after all, is the matter on hand?” I asked. 681
from employing it as he must design in the end to employ it. 681
“Be a little more explicit,” I said. 681
When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations. 688
The story is essentially over less than half way through the Purloined Letter. The letter is
already recovered—ended, the entire first half is already “protracted’ because Dupin
could simply have said to the Prefect. I have what you’re looking for. That’ll be 50k.
Here is my checkbook. Story over. SO it comes as a chock tht he already has the letter
when he has seemed not to even know what the case was about.
The rest of the story is explanation, but most of it does not explain. The story really picks
up and finishes only in the last three pages.
So in addition to excessiveness making the copy recognizable, Dupin’s detection involves
a doubly protracted narrative.
285
The question is all about whether the Minister will read Dupin’s card and recognize the
handwriting. But there is also a question about whether the Prefect ever gets the letter
back to the Queen. Might D--- have not intercepted the Prefect? We never have evidence
that the Queen gets it back.
Rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out. 697
He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investigation of his premises. . .
I regarded only as ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police 693
First, by default of this identification, and secondly, by ill-admeasurement [first . .
second] 690
from whom especially it was her wish to conceal it. 682
“A little too self-evident. 681
An imaginary individual 687
“in the dark,” 680 (repeated on p. 680; “under cover” of the green spectacles?)
Thorough identification 689
“now they have to be destroyed,” 233
The bad reader in Derrida pc, 4
Typo and name 364
Facteur, 360
Paragon and autobiography, 303
In this great omission, Freud forgets Socrates 374
Economy of reading Freud’s footnotes in BPP
286
This is the object of a note which is not only the longest in the book, but also much
longer than the passage it annotates. . . . The note then follows, more than twice as long
as the citation from the Symposium. 374; 374
I am going right to the end of this chapter, toward the site of this first pause where . .
Freud finally concludes278, 320,
Freud drops it . . like the note at the bottom of the page which punctuates the end of this
act 368
And with this word a call for something. A call for a footnote that I will read presently.
313
Derrida announces and delays reading of Freud’s two footnotes (This is how we fall on
the first of two footnotes 318) delays getting to the second on p. 320, “Let us pause after
this first footnote, 320, mentions the second note on 325 This is the sentence that calls for
a note on Sophie’s Death. Before translating this paragraph on the two negative
functions of the PP, note included, I am extracting a notation from the preceding
paragraph, I have extracted it only because it did appear dissociable to me, like a parasite
from its immediate context. Perhaps it is best read as an epigraph of for what is to
follow. In the preceding paragraph it resonates . . . 325-26 calls up the second note only
to defer analysis of it “Call for a note on Sophie’s death. Before coming to it, I
emphasize the certainty . . . , last two sentences at the bottom of 326, and then on the
middle 327 “Here, finally, is the second note” 327
But a certain reading of his text, the one I am attempting here, cannot fail to come across
its work. PC 277
287
Freud torso, 265
I have cited it elsewhere 263
262, n6, by translator “An allusion to Freud and the Scene of Writing
Comparative philology—return to philology for de Man, who considered himself a
philologist?
Old dream of cinema, 68; repeated in Paper Machine
I am teaching you pleasure , I am telling you the limit and the paradoxes of the apeiron,
and everything begins like the post card, with reproduction. Sophie and her followers,
Ernest, Heinele, myself and company dictate to Freud who dictates to Plato, who dictates
to Socrates who himself, reading the last one (for it is you who reads me, you see him
here on his card I the place where he is scratching, it is for him that is written the very
thing that he is going to sign) again will have forwarded. Postmark on the stamp,
obliteration, no one any longer heard distinctly, all rights reserved, law is the rule, but
you can always run after the addressee as well as the sender. Run in circles, but I
promise you that you will have to run faster and faster. At a speed out of proportion to
these old networks, or in nay any event to their images. Finished the post, or finally this
one, this epoch of the destinal and of the envoi . . . 63
And to “recount” it has always seemed impossible to me , pc, 167
They intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme. 232
Holocaust 232
288
Autobiographical story about a telephone call, 230, like the story he tells at the end of
Given Time: Counterfeit Money.
Van Gogh’s shoelaces as signature (drawing, painting as writing).
Reread the little one’s letters. 255
There would only be “facteurs,” and therefore no verite. Only “media,” take this into
account in every war against the media. The immediate will never be substituted for
them, only other frameworks and other forces. 194
A datem for example, when sending a message [a l’evoi d’un pli] is never perceivable,
one never sees it, it never comes to me, in any event to consciousness, there wehere it
strictly takes place, whence one dates, signs, “expedites.” 195
All posts and telelcomunications 161
Story about posting anxiety 102
Story about telephone anxiety 159
Dead letters 124
Suppose I write a book abou, let us say Palto and telecom,” 103
The whole thing would be retranslated 95
Thus I am rereading the Letters of Plato and all those admirable discussions around their
authenticirt, of their belonging, the one says, to the corpus platonicum sucha s it has been
constituted from the time of Thrasyllus. 83
289
French book about Derrida turning his books into images.
I am rereading one of the letters received yesterday. Pc, 116
For the day that there will be a reading of theOxford card, the one and true reading, will
be the end of history. 115
Dupont and Dupond 112
“entire teleorgamization” 108
Voltaire and ciphers, 70
The Purveyor of Truth
Truth (out) of the Letter from Freud's Hand, 78.- o f a Kind, Kings - Double, 100.
Pretexts
Meeting Place: Four
11s le remercient pour les grandes veritds qu'il vient de proclamer,-- car ils ont d6couvert ( verificateurs de ce qui ne peut &tre vkrifie!) que tout ce qu'il a enonce est absolument vrai;-- bien que d'abord, avouent ces braves gens, ils aient eu le soupcon que ce
pouvait bien 6tre une simple fiction. Poe repond que pour son compte, il n'en a jamais
dout6.
BAUDELAIRE
Mehlman does not translate; bass does
290
Mehlman spkips the first six sentneces
Were does psychoanalysis, always, alrady, find itself to be refound? 413
The author of thE book of which I am speaking, himself, not his name (therefore pardon
me for no† naming him) is himself pc, 99
Au Revoir
A very trivial remark , the relations between post, police and media are called upon to
transform themselves profoundly , as in the amorous message (which is more and more
watched over, even if it has always been), by virtue of informitization. So be it. And
therefore all the networks of the p.p. (psych and pol). [play on PP as pleasure principle]
But will the relation between the police, the psychoanalytic insitutioand letters be
affected? Inveitably, and it is beginning. Could Poe adapt The Purloined Letter to this?
Is it capable of adaptation? Here I would bet yes but it would be very difficult. The end of
a postal epoch is doubtless the end of literature. 104
PL, facteur, Poe appear in Envois: 28, 71, 94, 95, 104, 148-49, 200, 218, 222, 233
Lacan on on 150-51; Play on Purloined with “Purim” and “Pur . . . lot” 72 and possible
play on Dupin with “Dupont” and “Dupond”
From page 307 of Finnegan’s Wake: “visit to Guiness’s Brewery, Clubs, Advantages of
the enny Post. When is aPun not a Pun?” 142
Derrida’s use of the parergon rather than Genette’s paratext, does not analyze the borders
between notes and editorial annotations in translations, the extent to which one may read
publication history. (B Johnson’s fabricated title page in Dissemination. On the Name,
291
translation of a book that does not exist in French.)
No master word or first word or last word. Pc,151
Last word after the last word and first word before the first word In typewriter Ribbon,
Ink II: (Within such limits)
I am spending my time rereading you. 50
Since I am a true network of resistance, with internal cells, those little groups of three
who communicate only on one side (what is it called?), so that nothing can be extorted so
that no one gives way under torture, and finally so that no one able to betray. What one
hand does the other does not know (definition of Islamic alms?) 42
No history of the posts6-67
Dossier dos, 201
At the moment, I am thinking that thinking that every “production” as they say, f a
concept or system which is never without a name and effigy, is also the meission of a
postage stamp which itself is a post card (picture, text, reproduction, and most often ina
rectangular shape. Pc, 200
Heidegger and Freud, 191 masters of the post.
End of an epoch 190
I have lost my life writing 143
I had put it in my pocket, without reading it right away, the note you left me. 141
292
Question of geometry of the card and the frame. Oblique and geometry in On the Name.
These reminders, of which countless other examples could be given, make us aware of
the effects of the frame, and of the paradoxes in the parergonal logic. Our purpose is not
to prove that "The Purloined Letter" functions within a frame (omitted by the Seminar,
which can thus be assured of its triangular interior by an active, surreptitious limitation
starting with a metalinguistic overhang), but to prove that the structure of the framing
effects is such that no totalization of the border is even possible. The frames are always
framed: thus by some of their content. Pieces with- out a whole, "divisions" without a
totality-this is what thwarts the dream of a letter without division, allergic to division.
From this point on, the seme "phallus" is errant, begins by disseminating, not even by
being disseminated.
The naturalizing neutralization of the frame permits the Seminar, by imposing or
importing an Oedipal outline, by finding it (self there) in truth -and it is there, in fact, but
as a piece, even if a precisely central one, within the letter-to constitute a metalanguage
and to exclude all of the general text in all of the dimensions we began here by recalling
(return to the "first page").
pp. n 36
Supplement to the Investigation
a little too self-evident . 39
293
“A note in Positions augured this reading of "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'"
which was originally the object of a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, Nov., 1971.”
39, n5
Those "literary critics" in France who have been influenced by psychoanalysis have not
yet posed the question of the text.
2. Although it is not the earliest of Lacan's Bcrits chronologically, the Seminar comes at the head of this collection after its determinant strategic
place has been prepared by an overture.
6
Delivered in 1955, committed to paper in 1956 and published in 1957, only in 1966 does
the Seminar receive its place at the head of Bcrits, thus following an order which, not
being chronological, does not arise in any simple way from his theoretico-didactic
system. It might stage Bm'ts in a particular way. The necessity of this priority, in any
event, happens to be confirmed, recalled and emphasized by the introduction to Bcrits in
the "Points" edition (1970): ". .. the text, which here keeps the entry post it possesses
elsewhere. . ." Anyone wishing to narrow the scope of the questions raised here can by all
means keep those questions in the "place" given to the Seminar by its "author": entry
post. "This post [le poste] differs from another post [la poste] only in gender," according
294
to Littre. 40, n6
Finally, the Seminar is part of a larger investigation of the repetition automatism
[Wiederholungszwang] which, in the group of texts dating from 1919-1920 (Jenseits,
Das Unheimliche) trans- forms, at least in principle (cf. La Double Sbance, notes 44 and
56), the relationship between psychoanalysis and literary fiction.7 41
7 See Jacques Derrida, La Dissemination (Paris: Le Seuil, 1972), pp. 279-280 and pp.
300-301. Within a rather long text ,questioning the literary process through Plato and
Mallarme, Derrida tackles Freud's dealing with a work of art and notably the
displacement in Freud's approach before and after Das Unheimliche. Derrida also points
out there how Freud in Das Unheimliche is sensitive to the undecidable ambivalence,
"the game of the double, the endless interplay between the fantastic and the real." -Ed.
"Our inquiry has led us to the point of recognizing that the repetition automatism
[wiederholungszwang] finds its basis in what we have called the insistence of the
signifying chain. We have elaborated that notion itself as a correlate of the ex-istence (or:
excentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the subject of the unconscious if we
are to take Freud's discovery seriously."8 These are the opening lines of the Seminar.
41
Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'," trans. J. Mehlman, French Freud,
pp. 38-72. Hereafter cited in the text as SPL fol- lowed by the page number. The
problematic set forth in The Purveyor of Truth can best be grasped through a rereading of
Poe's Purloined Letter and of the Seminar as well as the editorial notes of Jeffrey
295
Meh1man.-Ed. 41, n8
This passage has been closely preceded by a reference to Heidegger, and that is not
surprising; it carries the Dasein back to the subject, and that is more surprising.
42
As for the Envois themselves, I do not know if their reading is bearable. 3 (firt page of
pc)
In every support,is something les than ideal, and therefore can be destroyed without
remaining. . 79
But you know that with you I never reread. 229
You are right in part, it would have to have been made into, precisely, a post-face, this is
indeed the word, in particular because it’s unintelligible, you do not begin with what
follows—if not by the end, and as they never reread . . . Too bad. 240
To stop becomes impossible, 242
Finnegans Wake 240
I am rereading your note from yesterday: what counts in post cards, and moreover, in
everything, is the tempo. Say you. 247
What I told you is that Socates is now the name of a logiciel. You don’t know what this
is? One calls logiciel the corpus of programs, procedures, or rules that assure the smooth
functioning of a system in the treatment of information. The storage banks depend upon
296
a logiciel. 242
I am rereading (and indeed for the first time since I have been writing to you) because
you overtook me while writing at the moment when you called form the café. No, I repeat
what I have just told you; there was nothing “decisive” in my PR letter—moreover, I
have not reopened it--, only details which perhaps, perhaps would have made you
understand and approve, if you wanted, if you could. Okay, let’s drop out. I am rereading
myself, that, . . . 81
This is how it is to be read, and written, the carte of the adestination. Abject literature is n
its way. 29
The charter is the contract for, which quite stupidly one has to believe; Socrates comes
before Plato, there is between them—and in general—an order of generations, an
irreversible sequence of inheritance. Socrates is before, not in front of, but before Plato,
therefore behind him, and the charter binds us to this order: this is how to orient one’s
thought, this is the left and right [alluding to Kant’s “What is Orientation in Thinking”],
march. 20
Post card anxiety, 21
When I first wrote “burn everything,” it was neither out of prudence and a taste for the
clandestine, nor out a concern for inernal guarding but out of what ws necessary (he
condition, he given) for the affirmation to be reborn at very instant, without memory. 23
Read Reading Station, 208
297
I rpeat to you, it was dangerous to keep the letters, and yet I cravenly dreamed that they
would be stolen from us; now they have to be destroyed, the countdown has started, less
than a month, you will be here. 233
Yellow pages of the telephone Book act as a way round resistance—you can dial up
pages, placed them through the index. You can trace a call, as it were.
Once again, I am holding the book open to its middle and I am trying to understand, it’s
not easy. 216
I am opening the Traumdeutung approximately in its middle. 414
First published in Poetique 21 (1975), a special issue put together by Phillipe LacoueLabarthe under the title Litterature et philosophie melees. 412
The table of contents divides the introduction from the glossary, makes them sequential.
But the text sutures them, making Glossary a subheading in the text rather than title at the
top of he page, a new page, in the same size font.
Also implicit pun on letters—we get alphabetic letters L before K—seems nonsensical—
and also wrong L obviously comes after K)
We have forgotten to talk about the color of paper, the color of ink, and their comparative
chromatics: a vast subject. That will be for another time. Paper Machine (53)
Survive one’s children 241 to understand postal letters, post cards.
298
Reverse sde of the facsimile.
Signautre is a quotation, not Dupin’s name.
(Derrida reads titles and tables of contents of Blanchot in Parages.
You know that J.D. is in analysis.” 203; Derrida returns to Lacan’s misreading in
Resistances of Psychoanalysis.
Historicism 139
If a book has been republished or published in parts, is it a book? Is the postcard a book?
Can on eread it in iolation from other texts written by Derrida (other than the ones he
specifies in his notes? Note also the way his references to his own works becomes
bibiorhicaly incomplete over time.
He refuses to turn his own works into a network, to provide the reader with a complete
narrative thread to follow thorugh and properly xit without a faux pas.
For the Love of Lacan—in REsistances of Pyshoanalysis
Freud and the Scene of Writing 55
62-63—he narrates an account of its inscription in the post card.
problem of the archive 68
299
2. The Hinge
To begin, let us indicate a few telling signs. If most of the explicit references to Freud
are grouped in the conclusion of the book (at the end of “The Birth of the Asylum and in
the beginning of “The Anthropological Circle”,) 6 what I would call a charniere, a hinge,
comes earlier on, right in he middle of the volume, to divide at once he book and the
book’s relation to Freud. To Do Justice to Freud, 78
The first sign comes right in the middle of the book. To Do Justice to Freud, 79
This, therefore, will not have been a book.” Dissemination.
Simulacrum of illustrations of fortune telling book, of color illustration used on the cover
as inside flap, like Baudelaire story in Counter Money.
Economy of note and annotation in Freud, 374
Apocalypse 169 The countdown is accelerating, don’t’ you think?” 163
Reread the little one’s letters. 255
If you had listened to me, you would have burned everything 23
In the beginning, n principle, was the post, and I will never get over it. But in the end I
know it, I become aware of it as of our death sentence . . . 29
Undated (probably the same period)
300
Date-abiity—Heidegger and Derrida
What Freud states about secondary revision (Freud's explaining text) is already staged
and represented in advance in the text explained (Andersen's fairy tale).
This text, too, described the scene of analysis, the position of the analyst, the forms of his
language, the metaphorico-conceptual structures of what he seeks and what he finds. The
locus of one text is in the other.
Freud pays no attention to a fold in the text, a structural com- plication that envelops his
discourse and within which his discourse must inevitably be situated.
Would there then be no difference between the two texts?
Writing is dated, but not reading (or it can be now—annotations can be linearized—but
that is pointless exercise in genetic criticism, or it is more like Holmes than Poe
The ideal reasoned, 114—cause and effect, first and last, a line back and forward.
Burt Glossator
Tempting to see the Glossary as a reading of the Post Card. Tile is L before K and the
glossary comes first rather than last, at the end of the book. But also because the terms
forma network of back and forth references. See this before reading this.
Translotr’s Introudction LBefore K” vii
301
Glossary, xiii
Repetition and reversal, or reversibility.
Postal reading not reducible to a labrythine and infinite deferral of the referent, of the
seme, of definition (limits). This would be to stop reading by diagramming reading.
Vresus John Leavey’s Glasary
These retreats faux pas, false exits, Bass, 377
Sequencing becomes running in circles for Derrida. Linear is already a circle. See
Derrida on the circle in Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2.
What relation is the unbreable reading of the envois and the reading of the PL that
follows? One could aska similar quesotn about the mentions of Beyond the PP
Edgar Allan Poe, Double Assassinat dans la rue Morgue
In le facteur, he mentions the hermeneutical circle and names Heidegger in the next page.
He puts the uncanny against Lacan’s imaginary, doubling and divisibility; but he
nowhere mentions or cites or reads Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny.”
Also, two, successive long notes on Poe’s Purloined Letter in On the Name.
302
Derrida discusses the publication history of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter.”
He also mentions the facsimile, but only in relation to Dupin’s signature, not in relation
to the materiality of the signifier and the divisibility of the letter. He folds the facsimile,
like the simulacrum or replica, even the double, into the same structure of reading he says
he unlocks.
Importance of the facsimile—word and image, boundary of word and image, of line and
drawing (see YFS issue)
Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires / par Edgar Poe ; traduction de Charles Baudelaire
Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849
1884 Translator: Charles Baudelaire
Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires / par Edgar Poe ; traduction de Charles Baudelaire
Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849
Double assassinat dans la rue Morgue (The Murders in the Rue Morgue dans l'édition
originale) est une nouvelle d'Edgar Allan Poe, parue en avril 1841 dans le Graham's
Magazine, traduite en français d'abord par Isabelle Meunier puis, en 1856, par Charles
Baudelaire dans le recueil Histoires extraordinaires. C'est la première apparition du
303
détective inventé par Poe, le Chevalier Dupin qui doit faire face à une histoire de meurtre
incompréhensible pour la police.
Derrida writes of Murders in the rue Morgue as if it had been written after The Purloined
Letter.
Whereupon he has but to withdraw, after "forgetting" his snuff-box on the table, in order
to return the following day to reclaim it-armed with a facsimile of the letter in its present
state. As an incident in the street, prepared for the proper moment, draws the Minister to
the window, Dupin in turn seizes the opportunity to seize the letter while substituting the
imitation, and has only to maintain the appearances of a normal exit.
YFS 55-56
But at the Minister who " 'is well acquainted with my MS.,' " Dupin strikes a blow signed
brother or confrere, twin or younger or older brother (Atreus / T'hyestes). This rival and
duplicitous identification of the brothers, far from fitting into the symbolic space of the
family triangle (the first, the second, or the one after), carries it off infinitely far away in a
labyrinth of doubles without originals, of facsimile without an authentic, an indivisible
letter, of casual counterfeits [contrefacons sans facon], imprinting the purloined letter
with an incorrigible indirection.
YFS 109-110
Thus Dupin wants to sign, indeed, doubtless, the last word of the last message of the
304
purloined letter. First by being unable to resist leaving his own mark-the seal, at least,
with which he must be identified-on the facsimile that he leaves for the Minister. He fears
the facsimile and, insisting on his utterly confraternal vengeance, he demands that the
Minister know where it came from. Thus he limits the facsimile, the counterfeit exterior
of the letter. The interior is authentic and properly identifiable. Indeed: at the moment
when the madman (" 'the pretended lunatic' " who is " 'a man in my own pay' ") distracts
everyone with his "frantic behavior," what does Dupin do? He adds a note. He leaves the
false letter, that is, the one that interests him, the real one, which is not a facsimile except
for the exterior. If there were a man of truth, a lover of the authentic, in all this, Dupin
would indeed be the model: "'In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter,
put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals [quantd
I'exte'rieur],)which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D--cipher, very
readily, by means of a seal formed of
bread.' "
Thus D-will have to decipher, on the inside, what the decipherer meant and whence and
why he deciphered, with what end in mind, in the name of whom and what. The initialthe same, D, for the Minister and for Dupin-is a facsimile on the outside but on the inside
it is the thing itself.
YFS, 100-11
The Question of Reading: Again (rather than Otherwise)
305
Paraphrase Heidegger, reading is always the question what is reading?, a repetition of the
question. Heidegger repeats the hermeneutic circle passage in division tone in division
two and titles his first chapter on the repetition.
Is reading different from rereading? Is reading different from not reading? Can you read
without not reading? What s the economy of reading literature and pyschoanlysis? How
much literature do you need? Where do you get to stop? When has reading arrived? If it
is not a program, what saves it from being an iteration of the same moves made on
different texts, and from a development, progress narrative, ora genetic or teleological
model? What saves it from being saved? Saving a question of the economy of reading as
expenditure.
How to read sequentially—can one sequence reading? Poe, Lacan, Derrida, Johnson.
Vulgar historical time of biographical and bibliographical history. Who published first.
This kind of linearization is inescapable. It is not just a matter of institutional norms and
paratextual dating, bibliographic codes. Question of reference not reducible to such
historicism, vulgar time for Heidegger, irreversible, empty homogenous time, for
Benjamin. Question of dates, dateability for Heidegger and Derrida. Occurrence and
event for Heidegger, Derrida (and Badiou). Ecstatic time. Heidegger in Being and Time
on the repletion of the question. Not a question of a trope, or a master trope like the
frame either, that merely reinscribes the sequence and formalizes it as a blind spot of
re/reading.
306
Johnson’s essay appeared in two versions. Poe read in Baudelaire’s translation. Lacan
rewrites his essay, starts it again less than half way through. Derrida’s essay
decontextualized from The Post Card. Published in translation separately, twice.
Derrida rereading the same texts—“Freud and the Scene of Writing.” “Madness and
Civilization” in an essay title of which is about Freud.
Apart from complications publication presents to linearization, we may ask what comes
first other than Poe. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Cited in the notes by Lacan.
The focus of Speculations on Freud, precedes “Le facteur de la verite” in The Post Card.
Question of speculation in psychoanalysis and philosophy like the question of literature
and philosophy: what are the limits of philosophical discourse? What does it mean to
read “beyond,” a word Derrida uses in his title that conspicuously repeats the title of
Freud’s work? Is reading always as step not beyond, a faux pas, in Maurice Blanchot’s
terms, an error and an aporia, a distinerrance? Or does copying, the facsimile come into
play? The facsimile of Derrida’s signature in Signature Event Context.
Empiricism of the facsimile, or fauxsimile. It is repated in Singature, Event Context.
Derrida brings up repetition compulsion in le facteur in relation to Marie Bonaparte but
also in relation to Po—Murders in the Rue Morgue similar to Purloined Letter.
307
But Derrida does not read that story or read that repetition. His attention s to the structure
of repetition, not to empirical examples of it.
Derrida returns to Rousseau and de Man via the title of an an earlier essay, “Limited Ink
II”
Derrida’s essay on titles in PArages and on the title in Kafka “Before the Law.”
Illustration of writing and reversibility in The Post Card. Reading for Lacan and for
Derrida is not about Master and disciple.
In Poe, its the idea of the copy that matters, not the material referent. See William
WIlson
In "Unsensing the Subjectile," he discusses Artaud's posthumously published drawings.
To file: (1) “I could . . . file,” break into the figure in yet another way. Still by rubbing,
to be sure, and scraping, but this time according to the obliqueness of the metal teeth,
molars against millstones. But (2) the aggression which thus reduces the surface is
destined to polish, make delicate, adjust, inform, beautify, still save the truth of the body
in straining it, purifying it, from it any uncleaness and useless excrescences. The taking
away of the unclean has the virtue of laying bare and catharsis.
--Jacques Derrida, "Unsensing the Subjectile," in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud,
Trans. and Ed. Mary Ann Caws (MIT 1998), 140.
308
We won’t tell the story of the subjectile, rather some record of its coming-to-be.
--Jacques Derrida, "Unsensing the Subjectile," in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud,
Trans. and Ed. Mary Ann Caws (MIT 1998), 61
There is a good chance he never finished either one or the other and that he destroyed
these sketches.
Paul Thevenin, “In Search for a Lost World,” in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, Trans.
and Ed. Mary Ann Caws, 8
Thevenin’s anecdote about Artaud drawing him in 1946, and the drawing, one of three,
getting lost during the framing of it for an exhibition. The lost one is the one. Thevenin
remembers Artaud drawing this portrait and wants to see again. (3-31). Enndote 76
explains how it got lost.
It can’t analzye it’s “no longer was”, it’s “has not yet been,” or “not yet having been.”
He can’t look back from the future at something that never was.
Mary Ann Caws writes:
It is deeply regrettable that the Artaud estate did not allow us to use in this volume
the reproduction of the very paintings and drawings that were at the origin of
these texts. (Many of them can be found in two other publications: Mary Ann
Caws, Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper [Museum of Modern art] and The
309
Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter [MIT Press, 1997]) it is also deeply
ironic, given Jacques Derrida’s work on the absence of origin.
Mary Ann Caws, preface, xiv The Secret Writing of of Antonin Artaud.
But another kind of irony that may be merely uncaught typographical error or related
Freudian slips. Two errors of attribution go uncorrected. Caws mistakenly gives her own
name as the author of Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper. It is actually by Paule Thévenin
and translated by Margit Rowell. Caws also omits the author of the second book, a book
she herself wrote.
Post/Card/Match/Book/"Envois"/Derrida
David Wills
310
SubStance
Vol. 13, No. 2, Issue 43 (1984), pp. 19-38
The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida
Barbara Johnson
Yale French Studies, No. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading:
Otherwise. (1977), pp. 457-505.
The Purveyor of Truth
Jacques Derrida; Willis Domingo; James Hulbert; Moshe Ron; M.-R. L.
Yale French Studies, No. 52, Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy.
(1975), pp. 31-113.
The title is not trsnslated, but left in French, “Le faceteur de la vertie”
Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud au-delà was first published in 1980.
Jacques Derrida. The Postcard. Chicago: CUP, 1989.
---. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 1985.
---. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stamford: Stamford University Press, 1999.
311
THE PURLOINED LETTER
by Edgar Allan Poe
(1845)
Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio. - Seneca.
At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18--, I was enjoying the
twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste
Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisieme, No. 33, Rue Dunot,
Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while
each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with
the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself,
however, I was mentally discussing certain topics which had formed matter for
conversation between us at an earlier period of the evening; I mean the affair of the Rue
Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of Marie Roget. I looked upon it,
therefore, as something of a coincidence, when the door of our apartment was thrown
open and admitted our old acquaintance, Monsieur G--, the Prefect of the Parisian police.
We gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as
of the contemptible about the man, and we had not seen him for several years. We had
been sitting in the dark, and Dupin now arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but sat
down again, without doing so, upon G.'s saying that he had called to consult us, or rather
to ask the opinion of my friend, about some official business which had occasioned a
great deal of trouble.
312
"If it is any point requiring reflection," observed Dupin, as he forbore to enkindle the
wick, "we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark."
"That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every
thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion
of "oddities."
"Very true," said Dupin, as he supplied his visitor with a pipe, and rolled towards him a
comfortable chair.
"And what is the difficulty now?" I asked. "Nothing more in the assassination way, I
hope?"
"Oh no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is very simple indeed, and I make
no doubt that we can manage it sufficiently well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin
would like to hear the details of it, because it is so excessively odd."
"Simple and odd," said Dupin.
"Why, yes; and not exactly that, either. The fact is, we have all been a good deal puzzled
because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether."
"Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault," said my friend.
"What nonsense you do talk!" replied the Prefect, laughing heartily.
"Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain," said Dupin.
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"Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?"
"A little too self-evident."
"Ha! ha! ha! --ha! ha! ha! --ho! ho! ho!" --roared our visitor, profoundly amused, "oh,
Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!"
"And what, after all, is the matter on hand?" I asked.
"Why, I will tell you," replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, steady, and contemplative
puff, and settled himself in his chair. "I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin,
let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should
most probably lose the position I now hold, were it known that I confided it to any one.
"Proceed," said I.
"Or not," said Dupin.
"Well, then; I have received personal information, from a very high quarter, that a certain
document of the last importance, has been purloined from the royal apartments. The
individual who purloined it is known; this beyond a doubt; he was seen to take it. It is
known, also, that it still remains in his possession."
"How is this known?" asked Dupin.
"It is clearly inferred," replied the Prefect, "from the nature of the document, and from the
nonappearance of certain results which would at once arise from its passing out of the
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robber's possession; --that is to say, from his employing it as he must design in the end to
employ it."
"Be a little more explicit," I said.
"Well, I may venture so far as to say that the paper gives its holder a certain power in a
certain quarter where such power is immensely valuable." The Prefect was fond of the
cant of diplomacy.
"Still I do not quite understand," said Dupin.
"No? Well; the disclosure of the document to a third person, who shall be nameless,
would bring in question the honor of a personage of most exalted station; and this fact
gives the holder of the document an ascendancy over the illustrious personage whose
honor and peace are so jeopardized."
"But this ascendancy," I interposed, "would depend upon the robber's knowledge of the
loser's knowledge of the robber. Who would dare--"
"The thief," said G., is the Minister D--, who dares all things, those unbecoming as well
as those becoming a man. The method of the theft was not less ingenious than bold. The
document in question --a letter, to be frank --had been received by the personage robbed
while alone in the royal boudoir. During its perusal she was suddenly interrupted by the
entrance of the other exalted personage from whom especially it was her wish to conceal
it. After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in a drawer, she was forced to place it,
open as it was, upon a table. The address, however, was uppermost, and, the contents thus
315
unexposed, the letter escaped notice. At this juncture enters the Minister D--. His lynx
eye immediately perceives the paper, recognises the handwriting of the address, observes
the confusion of the personage addressed, and fathoms her secret. After some business
transactions, hurried through in his ordinary manner, he produces a letter somewhat
similar to the one in question, opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close
juxtaposition to the other. Again he converses, for some fifteen minutes, upon the public
affairs. At length, in taking leave, he takes also from the table the letter to which he had
no claim. Its rightful owner saw, but, of course, dared not call attention to the act, in the
presence of the third personage who stood at her elbow. The minister decamped; leaving
his own letter --one of no importance --upon the table."
"Here, then," said Dupin to me, "you have precisely what you demand to make the
ascendancy complete --the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber."
"Yes," replied the Prefect; "and the power thus attained has, for some months past, been
wielded, for political purposes, to a very dangerous extent. The personage robbed is more
thoroughly convinced, every day, of the necessity of reclaiming her letter. But this, of
course, cannot be done openly. In fine, driven to despair, she has committed the matter to
me."
"Than whom," said Dupin, amid a perfect whirlwind of smoke, "no more sagacious agent
could, I suppose, be desired, or even imagined."
"You flatter me," replied the Prefect; "but it is possible that some such opinion may have
been entertained."
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"It is clear," said I, "as you observe, that the letter is still in possession of the minister;
since it is this possession, and not any employment of the letter, which bestows the
power. With the employment the power departs."
"True," said G. "and upon this conviction I proceeded. My first care was to make
thorough search of the minister's hotel; and here my chief embarrassment lay in the
necessity of searching without his knowledge. Beyond all things, I have been warned of
the danger which would result from giving him reason to suspect our design."
"But," said I, "you are quite au fait in these investigations. The Parisian police have done
this thing often before."
"Oh yes; and for this reason I did not despair. The habits of the minister gave me, too, a
great advantage. He is frequently absent from home all night. His servants are by no
means numerous. They sleep at a distance from their master's apartment, and, being
chiefly Neapolitans, are readily made drunk. I have keys, as you know, with which I can
open any chamber or cabinet in Paris. For three months a night has not passed, during the
greater part of which I have not been engaged, personally, in ransacking the D-- Hotel.
My honor is interested, and, to mention a great secret, the reward is enormous. So I did
not abandon the search until I had become fully satisfied that the thief is a more astute
man than myself. I fancy that I have investigated every nook and corner of the premises
in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed."
"But is it not possible," I suggested, "that although the letter may be in possession of the
minister, as it unquestionably is, he may have concealed it elsewhere than upon his own
317
premises?"
"This is barely possible," said Dupin. "The present peculiar condition of affairs at court,
and especially of those intrigues in which D-- is known to be involved, would render the
instant availability of the document --its susceptibility of being produced at a moment's
notice --a point of nearly equal importance with its possession."
"Its susceptibility of being produced?" said I.
"That is to say, of being destroyed," said Dupin.
"True," I observed; "the paper is clearly then upon the premises. As for its being upon the
person of the minister, we may consider that as out of the question."
"Entirely," said the Prefect. "He has been twice waylaid, as if by footpads, and his person
rigorously searched under my own inspection.
"You might have spared yourself this trouble," said Dupin. "D--, I presume, is not
altogether a fool, and, if not, must have anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of
course."
"Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove
from a fool."
"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, "although I
have been guilty of certain doggerel myself."
318
"Suppose you detail," said I, "the particulars of your search."
"Why the fact is, we took our time, and we searched every where. I have had long
experience in these affairs. I took the entire building, room by room; devoting the nights
of a whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened
every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained police agent,
such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. Any man is a dolt who permits a 'secret'
drawer to escape him in a search of this kind. The thing is so plain. There is a certain
amount of bulk --of space --to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have accurate
rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. After the cabinets we took the chairs.
The cushions we probed with the fine long needles you have seen me employ. From the
tables we removed the tops."
"Why so?"
"Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece of furniture, is removed
by the person wishing to conceal an article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited
within the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of bedposts are employed in
the same way."
"But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?" I asked.
"By no means, if, when the article is deposited, a sufficient wadding of cotton be placed
around it. Besides, in our case, we were obliged to proceed without noise."
"But you could not have removed --you could not have taken to pieces all articles of
319
furniture in which it would have been possible to make a deposit in the manner you
mention. A letter may be compressed into a thin spiral roll, not differing much in shape or
bulk from a large knitting-needle, and in this form it might be inserted into the rung of a
chair, for example. You did not take to pieces all the chairs?"
"Certainly not; but we did better --we examined the rungs of every chair in the hotel, and,
indeed, the jointings of every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful
microscope. Had there been any traces of recent disturbance we should not have failed to
detect it instantly. A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as
obvious as an apple. Any disorder in the glueing --any unusual gaping in the joints -would have sufficed to insure detection."
"I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and the plates, and you probed
the beds and the bed-clothes, as well as the curtains and carpets."
"That of course; and when we had absolutely completed every particle of the furniture in
this way, then we examined the house itself. We divided its entire surface into
compartments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed; then we scrutinized
each individual square inch throughout the premises, including the two houses
immediately adjoining, with the microscope, as before."
"The two houses adjoining!" I exclaimed; "you must have had a great deal of trouble."
"We had; but the reward offered is prodigious.
"You include the grounds about the houses?"
320
"All the grounds are paved with brick. They gave us comparatively little trouble. We
examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed."
"You looked among D--'s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?"
"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we
turned over every leaf in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake,
according to the fashion of some of our police officers. We also measured the thickness
of every book-cover, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to each the
most jealous scrutiny of the microscope. Had any of the bindings been recently meddled
with, it would have been utterly impossible that the fact should have escaped observation.
Some five or six volumes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed,
longitudinally, with the needles."
"You explored the floors beneath the carpets?"
"Beyond doubt. We removed every carpet, and examined the boards with the
microscope."
"And the paper on the walls?"
"Yes.
"You looked into the cellars?"
"We did."
321
"Then," I said, "you have been making a miscalculation, and the letter is not upon the
premises, as you suppose.
"I fear you are right there," said the Prefect. "And now, Dupin, what would you advise
me to do?"
"To make a thorough re-search of the premises."
"That is absolutely needless," replied G--. "I am not more sure that I breathe than I am
that the letter is not at the Hotel."
"I have no better advice to give you," said Dupin. "You have, of course, an accurate
description of the letter?"
"Oh yes!" --And here the Prefect, producing a memorandum-book, proceeded to read
aloud a minute account of the internal, and especially of the external appearance of the
missing document. Soon after finishing the perusal of this description, he took his
departure, more entirely depressed in spirits than I had ever known the good gentleman
before.
In about a month afterwards he paid us another visit, and found us occupied very nearly
as before. He took a pipe and a chair and entered into some ordinary conversation. At
length I said,--
"Well, but G--, what of the purloined letter? I presume you have at last made up your
mind that there is no such thing as overreaching the Minister?"
322
"Confound him, say I --yes; I made the reexamination, however, as Dupin suggested -but it was all labor lost, as I knew it would be."
"How much was the reward offered, did you say?" asked Dupin.
"Why, a very great deal --a very liberal reward --I don't like to say how much, precisely;
but one thing I will say, that I wouldn't mind giving my individual check for fifty
thousand francs to any one who could obtain me that letter. The fact is, it is becoming of
more and more importance every day; and the reward has been lately doubled. If it were
trebled, however, I could do no more than I have done."
"Why, yes," said Dupin, drawlingly, between the whiffs of his meerschaum, "I really -think, G--, you have not exerted yourself--to the utmost in this matter. You might --do a
little more, I think, eh?"
"How? --In what way?"
"Why --puff, puff --you might --puff, puff --employ counsel in the matter, eh? --puff,
puff, puff. Do you remember the story they tell of Abernethy?"
"No; hang Abernethy!"
"To be sure! hang him and welcome. But, once upon a time, a certain rich miser
conceived the design of spunging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up,
for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to
the physician, as that of an imaginary individual.
323
"'We will suppose,' said the miser, 'that his symptoms are such and such; now, doctor,
what would you have directed him to take?'
"'Take!' said Abernethy, 'why, take advice, to be sure.'"
"But," said the Prefect, a little discomposed, "I am perfectly willing to take advice, and to
pay for it. I would really give fifty thousand francs to any one who would aid me in the
matter."
"In that case," replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and producing a check-book, "you may
as well fill me up a check for the amount mentioned. When you have signed it, I will
hand you the letter."
I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunderstricken. For some minutes he
remained speechless and motionless, less, looking incredulously at my friend with open
mouth, and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; then, apparently in some
measure, he seized a pen, and after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and
signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across the table to Dupin. The
latter examined it carefully and deposited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an
escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This functionary grasped it in a
perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents,
and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from
the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested
him to fill up the check.
When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.
324
"The Parisian police," he said, "are exceedingly able in their way. They are persevering,
ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem
chiefly to demand. Thus, when G-- detailed to us his mode of searching the premises at
the Hotel D--, I felt entire confidence in his having made a satisfactory investigation --so
far as his labors extended."
"So far as his labors extended?" said I.
"Yes," said Dupin. "The measures adopted were not only the best of their kind, but
carried out to absolute perfection. Had the letter been deposited within the range of their
search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it."
I merely laughed --but he seemed quite serious in all that he said.
"The measures, then," he continued, "were good in their kind, and well executed; their
defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly
ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly
adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the
matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight
years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal
admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his
hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd.
If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I
allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing;
and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents.
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For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks,
'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial
he wins, for he then says to himself, the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and
his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I
will therefore guess odd'; --he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree
above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I
guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself upon the first impulse, a
simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought
will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it
even as before. I will therefore guess even' guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of
reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed "lucky," --what, in its last analysis,
is it?"
"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his
opponent."
"It is," said Dupin;" and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the
thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows:
'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any
one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as
accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what
thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the
expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious
profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli,
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and to Campanella."
"And the identification," I said, "of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent,
depends, if I understand you aright upon the accuracy with which the opponent's intellect
is admeasured."
"For its practical value it depends upon this," replied Dupin; and the Prefect and his
cohort fall so frequently, first, by default of this identification, and, secondly, by illadmeasurement, or rather through non-admeasurement, of the intellect with which they
are engaged. They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for
anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it. They are
right in this much --that their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the
mass; but when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their own,
the felon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is above their own, and very
usually when it is below. They have no variation of principle in their investigations; at
best, when urged by some unusual emergency --by some extraordinary reward --they
extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles. What,
for example, in this case of D--, has been done to vary the principle of action? What is all
this boring, and probing, and sounding, and scrutinizing with the microscope, and
dividing the surface of the building into registered square inches --what is it all but an
exaggeration of the application of the one principle or set of principles of search, which
are based upon the one set of notions regarding human ingenuity, to which the Prefect, in
the long routine of his duty, has been accustomed? Do you not see he has taken it for
granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter, --not exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a
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chair-leg --but, at least, in some hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of thought
which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg? And do
you not see also, that such recherches nooks for concealment are adapted only for
ordinary occasions, and would be adopted only by ordinary intellects; for, in all cases of
concealment, a disposal of the article concealed --a disposal of it in this recherche
manner, --is, in the very first instance, presumable and presumed; and thus its discovery
depends, not at all upon the acumen, but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and
determination of the seekers; and where the case is of importance --or, what amounts to
the same thing in the policial eyes, when the reward is of magnitude, --the qualities in
question have never been known to fall. You will now understand what I meant in
suggesting that, had the purloined letter been hidden anywhere within the limits of the
Prefect's examination --in other words, had the principle of its concealment been
comprehended within the principles of the Prefect --its discovery would have been a
matter altogether beyond question. This functionary, however, has been thoroughly
mystified; and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a
fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels;
and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are
fools."
"But is this really the poet?" I asked. "There are two brothers, I know; and both have
attained reputation in letters. The Minister I believe has written learnedly on the
Differential Calculus. He is a mathematician, and no poet."
"You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would
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reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would
have been at the mercy of the Prefect."
"You surprise me," I said, "by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice
of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The
mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.
"'Il y a a parier,'" replied Dupin, quoting from Chamfort, "'que toute idee publique, toute
convention recue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre.' The
mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to
which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as truth. With
an art worthy a better cause, for example, they have insinuated the term 'analysis' into
application to algebra. The French are the originators of this particular deception; but if a
term is of any importance --if words derive any value from applicability --then 'analysis'
conveys 'algebra' about as much as, in Latin, 'ambitus' implies 'ambition,' 'religio' religion
or 'homines honesti,' a set of honorable men."
"You have a quarrel on hand, I see," said I, "with some of the algebraists of Paris; but
proceed."
"I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any
especial form other than the abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed
by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity;
mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity.
The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are
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abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the
universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of
general truth. What is true of relation --of form and quantity --is often grossly false in
regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the
aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom falls. In the
consideration of motive it falls; for two motives, each of a given value, have not,
necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are
numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation.
But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an
absolutely general applicability --as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his
very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that
'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and
make inferences from them as existing realities.' With the algebraists, however, who are
Pagans themselves, the 'Pagan fables' are believed, and the inferences are made, not so
much through lapse of memory, as through an unaccountable addling of the brains. In
short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of equal
roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x squared + px
was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of
experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur where x squared + px is
not altogether equal to q, and, having made him understand what you mean, get out of his
reach as speedily as convenient, for, beyond doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down.
I mean to say," continued Dupin, while I merely laughed at his last observations, "that if
the Minister had been no more than a mathematician, the Prefect would have been under
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no necessity of giving me this check. I knew him, however, as both mathematician and
poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with reference to the circumstances
by which he was surrounded. I knew him as a courtier, too, and as a bold intriguant. Such
a man, I considered, could not fall to be aware of the ordinary policial modes of action.
He could not have failed to anticipate --and events have proved that he did not fail to
anticipate --the waylayings to which he was subjected. He must have foreseen, I
reflected, the secret investigations of his premises. His frequent absences from home at
night, which were hailed by the Prefect as certain aids to his success, I regarded only as
ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police, and thus the sooner to
impress them with the conviction to which G--, in fact, did finally arrive --the conviction
that the letter was not upon the premises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought,
which I was at some pains in detailing to you just now, concerning the invariable
principle of policial action in searches for articles concealed --I felt that this whole train
of thought would necessarily pass through the mind of the Minister. It would
imperatively lead him to despise all the ordinary nooks of concealment. He could not, I
reflected, be so weak as not to see that the most intricate and remote recess of his hotel
would be as open as his commonest closets to the eyes, to the probes, to the gimlets, and
to the microscopes of the Prefect. I saw, in fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of
course, to simplicity, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter of choice. You will
remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested, upon our first
interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account of its
being so very self-evident."
"Yes," said I, "I remember his merriment well. I really thought he would have fallen into
331
convulsions."
"The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the
immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that
metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a
description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics
and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more
difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is
commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster
capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than
those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of
hesitation in the first few steps of their progress. Again: have you ever noticed which of
the street signs, over the shop doors, are the most attractive of attention?"
"I have never given the matter a thought," I said.
"There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map. One party
playing requires another to find a given word --the name of town, river, state or empire -any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the
game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely
lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one
end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the
street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical
oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect
suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably
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self-evident. But this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or beneath the understanding
of the Prefect. He never once thought it probable, or possible, that the Minister had
deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of best
preventing any portion of that world from perceiving it.
"But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing, and discriminating ingenuity of D--;
upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it to
good purpose; and upon the decisive evidence, obtained by the Prefect, that it was not
hidden within the limits of that dignitary's ordinary search --the more satisfied I became
that, to conceal this letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious
expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all.
"Full of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine
morning, quite by accident, at the Ministerial hotel. I found D-- at home, yawning,
lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He
is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive --but that is only when
nobody sees him.
"To be even with him, I complained of my weak eyes, and lamented the necessity of the
spectacles, under cover of which I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the apartment,
while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host.
"I paid special attention to a large writing-table near which he sat, and upon which lay
confusedly, some miscellaneous letters and other papers, with one or two musical
instruments and a few books. Here, however, after a long and very deliberate scrutiny, I
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saw nothing to excite particular suspicion.
"At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree cardrack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just
beneath the middle of the mantelpiece. In this rack, which had three or four
compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much
soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle --as if a design, in the
first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second.
It had a large black seal, bearing the D-- cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed,
in a diminutive female hand, to D--, the minister, himself. It was thrust carelessly, and
even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the upper divisions of the rack.
"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in
search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the
Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the
D-- cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S-- family. Here, the
address, to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a
certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of
correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the
dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical
habits of D--, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the
worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of
this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the
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conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly
corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect.
"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a most animated
discussion with the Minister, on a topic which I knew well had never failed to interest
and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I
committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell,
at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have
entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed
than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when
a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed
direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery
was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, redirected, and re-sealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and took my departure at once,
leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table.
"The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite eagerly, the
conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a
pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a
series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. D-- rushed to a casement, threw it
open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in
my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals,) which I had
carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D-- cipher, very readily, by means of a
seal formed of bread.
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"But what purpose had you," I asked, in replacing the letter by a fac-simile? Would it not
have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly, and departed?"
"D--," replied Dupin, "is a desperate man, and a man of nerve. His hotel, too, is not
without attendants devoted to his interests. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest, I
might never have left the Ministerial presence alive. The good people of Paris might have
heard of me no more. But I had an object apart from these considerations. You know my
political prepossessions. In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For
eighteen months the Minister has had her in his power. She has now him in hers; since,
being unaware that the letter is not in his possession; he will proceed with his exactions
as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction.
His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk
about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of
singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no
sympathy --at least no pity --for him who descends. He is the monstrum horrendum, an
unprincipled man of genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the
precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms 'a
certain personage,' he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the cardrack."
"How? did you put any thing particular in it?"
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"Why --it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior blank --that would have been
insulting. D--, at Vienna once, did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite goodhumoredly, that I should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard
to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not to give him a
clue. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just copied into the middle of the blank
sheet the words--
--Un dessein si funeste,
S'il n'est digne d'Atree, est digne de Thyeste.
They are to be found in Crebillon's 'Atree.'"
“For those who, lacking the ability to read, would be simple and hasty enough to
content themselves with such an objection.” “The Double Session,”
Dissemination,181n.8
337
1
Walter Benjamin Kafka
Kafka did not always evade the temptations of a modish mysticism. . . . His ways
with his own writings certainly does not exclude this possibility. Kafka had a rare
capacity for creating parables of himself. Yet his parables are never exhausted by
what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the
interpretation of his writings. One has to find one’s way in them circumspectly,
cautiously, and warily. One must keep in mind Kafka’s way of reading, as
exemplified in in his interpretation of the above mentioned parable [“Beim Bau der
Chinesischen Mauer”; “The Great Wall of China”]. The text of his will is another case
in point. Given its background, the directive in which Kafka ordered the destruction
of his literary remains is just as unfathomable, to be weighed just as carefully as the
answers to the doorkeeper in “Vor dem Gestz” [“Before the Law”]. Perhaps Kafka,
whose every day on earth brought him up against insoluble modes of behavior and
imprecise communications, in death wished to his contemporaries a taste of their
own medicine.
“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Selected Writings Vol 2
1931-1934, Harvard, 794-818; to 804.
It is easier to draw speculative conclusions from Kafka’s posthumous collection of
notes than to explore even one of the motifs that appear in histories and novels.
“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Selected Writings Vol 2 19311934, Harvard, 794-818; to 807.
Brod’s inability to do justice to the subject itself becomes particularly distasteful
when he deals with Kafka’s famous testamentary instructions prescribing the
destruction of his posthumous papers. This, if anywhere, would have been the place
to review the fundamental aspects of Kafka’s life. (Kafka was clearly unwilling to
take responsibility before posterity for a body of work whose greatness he
nevertheless recognized.) This question s has been exhaustively discussed since
Kafka’s death; it offered a fitting point to pause for thought. That, however, would
have entailed some self-reflection on the biographer’s part. Kafka presumably had
to entrust his literary remains to someone who would not comply with his last
request. And neither the testator nor the biographer would be damaged by such a
view of the matter. But this view presupposes an ability to grasp the tensions which
riddled Kafka’s life.
Walter Benjamin, “Letter to Gershom Scholem,” in Selected Writings Vol 3 19351938, Harvard, 323-29; to p. 323.
Who Owns Kafka?
338
Judith Butler
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-kafka
Vol. 33 No. 5 · 3 March 2011
pages 3-8
ELIF BATUMAN
• Published: September 22, 2010 Kafka’s Last Trial
• http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/magazine/26kafka-t.html
Martin Heidegger, “On Preserving What is Attempted,” in Mindfulness (Besinnung).
trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, Continuum, 2006, 270-78, to 277. The editor
notes: “However, in the course of planning the publication of his literary
Gesamtausgabe Heidegger made a different decision. The general contract drawn up
between him and the publisher Vittorio Klostermann in 1974 assigns “Briefe” [“The
Letters”] to the fourth division of the Gesamtausgabe. Hence Ausgewählte Briefe will
appear in volumes 92 and 93.” “Editor’s Epilogue,” “On Preserving What is
Attempted,” in Mindfulness (Besinnung). trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary,
Continuum, 2006, 385. S Volome of Hediegger’s letters have been published and
translated into English., including Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters:
1925-1975 trans. Ursula Ludz and Andrew Shields (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2003); Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols - Conversations - Letters trans.
Franz Mayr (Northwestern University Press, 2001); Martin Heidegger, Letters to His
Wife (Polity Press, 2008). For an open letter Martin Heidegger, “Letter on
‘Humanism’ (1946),” in Pathmarks (Wegmarken), trans. William McNeill(Cambridge
UP, 1998), 239-76.
3 For this lectern, no less than the ego, is dependent on the signifier, namely on the
word, which—generalizing its function compared to the pulpit of quarrelsome
memory and to the Tronchin table of a noble pedigree—is responsible for that fact
that it is not merely a tree that has been felled, cut down to size and glued back
together by a cabinet maker, for reasons of commerce tied to need-creating fashions
that maintains its exchange value, assuming it is not led too quickly to satisfy the
least superfluous of those needs by the final use to which wear and tear will
eventually reduce it: namely, fuel for the fire.
--Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing,” Écrits, 351
2
Blanchot’s essay is devoted to the publication of Kafka’s Complete Works. See also
Blanchot’s related essays “The Very Last Word,” in the same volume Friendship
Trans. Elizabeth Rotteberg (Stanford UP), 252-92, and “Kafka and the Work’s
Demand” in The Space of Literature Trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NB: Nebraska UP,
1982), 49-50.
5 Non cesse de nous tourner la tete a donner a entendre la phrase “Maurice Blanchot
est mort”? D’ailleurs, pour ma part, je pourrais raconteur, sans voulour en dire
davantage ici, que ce fut en deux temps, dont le premier fut celui d’une fausse
nouvelle ou d’une nouvelle seulement anticipe de quinze jours, que j’ai appris que
“Maurice Blanchot etait mort”. Je dis “etait” et non “est”, ce qui nous donnerait a
4
339
penser cette autre tentation, au fond, de Maurice Blanchot: nous avons tous, a
commencer sans doute par lui, endure la terrible tentation (c’est de tentation que je
voudrais le aujourd’hui) de penser que la vraie position, ce que, depuis toujours,
“Maurice Blanchot etait mort.” --Jacques Derrida, “Maurice Blanchot est morte” in
Parages, revised and augmented edition, 2003, 270. This chapter, which Derrida
added to the second edition of Parages, is oddly (and inexplicably) not included in
the translation of Parages edited by John Leavey. A shorter version of it has
appeared in The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2. See editors’ note.
6 For Derrida’s comments on Martin Heidegger and the posterous in relation to
reversibility (“umgekehrt,” turned things around, past participale of the infinitive
umkerhren) and a distinction between fact and principle, see Beast and S, 2 194. “it
incidicates an order of presuppositions, the order of what comes before and what
comes after in statements, an order of what follows, posterous, and of what is
posterior in the logical series of valid statements.
7 Chresmatics
related: buzzwordbingo, economy
Quotes
Aristotle made a distinction between Chresmatics and Economics. The latter comes
from oikonomia, which, in turn, comes from oikonomos, a compound word from
oikos (house) and nomos (managing). If A buys a piece of land and sells it at a profit
later without doing any thing to improve it, that is part of Chresmatics. If A plants
new trees in the land and sells it for a profit, that is part of Economics. The financial
sector, to a great extent belongs to Chresmatics. The debate on regulation will be
made more meaningful if we can separate Chresmatics from Economics. Sad to say
the standard text books, or even dictionaries, do not mention Chresmatics. It is time
we took a critical look at the fundamentals of economics. Ethics, politics, and
economics are irrevocably connected After all, Adam Smith was professor of moral
philosophy when he wrote his Wealth of Nations.
http://www.ambassador-fabian.com/index.php/2009/10/04/aristotle-vsgreenspan
8 ‘I was in the act of writing to you,’ said she, ‘but now my scrawl may go in the
basket;’ and she raised the sheet of gilded note paper from her desk as though to
tear it.
‘Indeed it shall not,’ said he, laying the embargo of half a stone weight of human
flesh and blood upon the devoted paper. ‘Nothing that you write for my eyes,
signora, shall be so decorated,’ and he took up the letter, put that also among the
carrots and fed on it, and then proceeded to read it.
‘Gracious me! Mr. Slope,’ said she, ‘I hope you don’t mean to say that you keep all the
trash I write to you. Half my time I don’t know what I write, and when I do, I know it
is only fit for the back of the fire. I hope you have not that ugly trick of keeping
letters.
‘At any rate, I don’t throw them into a waste-paper basket. If destruction is their
doomed lot, they perish worthily and are burnt in a pyre, as Dido was of old.
340
Oxford World Classics, Intro and Notes, John Sutherland, 1996; Ed. Michael Sadleir
and Frederick Page, 1953), Part one, chapter 27, “A Love Scene,” p. 272. Examples
of posthumously burned letters in literature may be easily multiplied. The most
famous is Henry James’s The Aspern Papers.
9 Derrida frequently attended (frequently enough to become recognizable as a
strategy or gambit) to what he regards as “omissions.” Here is how Derrida
describes it Freud’s omission of Socrates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the
second chapter of The Post Card, “Speculations on ‘Freud’”:
Freud omits the scene of the text . . . It is the great omission. . . To omit
Socrates, when one writes, is not to omit just anything or anyone. . . The
omission is not a murder, of course, let us not overdramatize. . . If Freud in
turn erases Socrates . . 374
Two pages earlier, Derrida writes about the manner of reading for fragments:
Now, in the time of this performance, Aristophanes’ discourse represents
only one episode. Freud is barely interested in this fact, and he retains only
those shards of a fragment which appear pertinent to his own hypothesis, to
what he says he means. One again, he sets himself to relating a piece of a
piece of a narrative related in the Symposium.
Derrida carefully then excuses Freud on the grounds that everyone does it, omit,
erase, that is:
This is a habitual operation. Who does not do it? And the question is no one
of approving or disapproving in the name of the law. Of what law? Beyond
any criteria or legitimation, we can nevertheless attempt to understand what
is going on in a putting to perspective, in a reading, in a writing, in citations,
liftings, omission, suspensions, etc. To do this, one must also make the
relation to the object vary. Post Card, 372
the omission in Memoirs of the Blind. spirit in Heidegger in Of Spirit
10 On Derrida’s essay “The Two Deaths of Roland Barthes,” see Pysche: Invention of
the Other, Vol 1. Trans Peggy Kamuf. Stanford UP, 2007. A number of essays
Derrida wrote upon the deaths of friends were athered together in an English book
The Work of Mourning. This thematic or generic grouping is exceeded, however, by
Derrida’s differing ways in which he discussed, sometime more htna once, an
author’s works after death. First and last essay of Roland Barthes strategy is used
elsewhere for a living author. In the middle for Foucault is used for Freud. Maurice
Blanchot is dead appears in Beast and Sovereign and second edition of Parages, a
book almost entirely about Blanchot but which does not name Blanchot in the title
or chapter titles. Neither translation refers ot the other. Death or deaths did not
organize even if they sometimes occasioned, Derrida’s works with respect to the
subject being posthumous or not. On the many paratextual oddities of The Work of
Mourning, see Burt, “Putting Your Papers in order. Derida’s dedication of Artaud le
moma to paul Thevelin (in memory). Dedication as epitaph.
11 Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 199
12 Now here is the most ingenious finding: what remains a typographical error two
out of three times in given Écrits [Derrida does not specify the editions or given the
relevant page numbers] becomes [François] Roustang’s “slip,” Roustang having
341
contented himself, somewhat quickly it is true, with reproducing the ur-typo,
everyone including its author, turning all around that which must not be read.
Whose name I can say because he is dead”
Du Tout,” C, 519
“For the Love of Lacan,” 47 and 121n3. The headnote accompanying reprinting of
this essay, originally published as part of the proceedigs of the colloquium, in the
book Resistances of Psychoanlysis provides, as do some of the headnotes to The Post
Card, some idiosyncracies. Headnotes are often anonymous. In Resistances of
Psychoanlaysis, Derrida plays with indications of who wrote them. All three
headnotes are unifromly preceded with the word “NOTE” in all capitals followed,
but the first person pronouns used in each vary. In the first note, someone uses the
plural “Our thanks” 119, and in the second note someone similarly writes “we
thank” but then Derrida identifies himself as the writer by using the singular first
person pronoun “I.” This variation would ordinarily be considered unworthy of
notice, even if Derrida writes a title “I writes us” in The Post Card. In Resistnaces, it
becomes noticeable though not necessarily readable only because Derrida devotes
nearly two pages of the republished lecture to the use of “we” after citing a sentence
he might say hypothetically “You see, I think that we loved each other very much,
you see.” Derrida focuses on what it means to say “’We’ when speaking all alone of
the death of the other” (42): “It is always an ‘I’ who utters ‘we’ supposing thereby, in
effect, the asymmetrical strucutre of the utterance, the other to be absent, dead, in
any case, incompetent, or even arriving too late to object. . . . If there is some ‘we’ in
being-with, it is because there is always one who speaks all alonein the name of the
other, from the other; there is always one of htem who lives longe. I will not hasten
to call this one the ‘subject.’ When we are with someone, we know without delay that
one ofus will survive the other” (43). The asynchronic relation between these
remarks about first person pronouns and death in the text and the use of “we” and
then “I” in the headnote allows for, perhaps even invites a reading of the “note” that
and its placement at the head of the endnotes.
14 For variations on the compound word, “auto / bio / thanato / graphy,” see The
Post Card, 273, 293, 298, 302, 303, 322, 323, 328, 333, 356.
13
15
By “all writings are posthumous,” Derrida presumably means that all writing is
like the signature as defined in “Signature, Event, Context.” (your signature will
operates even after you are dead; to sign is to be dead). Like “I posthume I breathe.”
Like the ruin in Memoirs of the Blind. Again a para-Freudian reading of blndness,
mistakes, castation, and convresion that logs into Derrida’s own previous readings
of Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” while never mentioning Lacan.
17 Derrida continues: “Pascal was only thirty-one years old when he wrote and put
into his clothing the posthumous paper we are deciphering and he must have kept
for around eight years, as he dies in 1662, at “39 years and two months,” says his
[elder] sister. . . This is how she presents and quotes this “little paper”: (Quote and
comment on Pascal)
16
342
Thus he made it appear, that he had no attachment to those he loved, for had
he been capable of having one, it would indisputably have been to my sister;
since she was undeniably the person in the world he loved most. But he
carried it still further, for not only he had no attachment to any body, but he
was absolutely against any body’s having one to him. . . . We afterwards
perceived that this principle had entered very deep into his heart, for to the
end he might always have presented it to his thoughts. He had it set down in
his own handwriting, on a little piece of paper by itself, where these words. . .
. (210; 211)
Gilberte Pascal Périer then justifies publication in her Life of Blaise Pascal by stating
that she does not wish to solicit a desire for an a reading of the words on the paper
as a last word, “for I am no ultimate end of any body” (211).
18 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and Sovereign, Vol. 2, 212. By chance, a letter from
Timothy Bahti Derrida quotes at the beginning of the Seventh Session also went
missing: The editors say “we found this letter neither in the typescript of the session
nor in the Jacques Derrida archives at IMEC. The following extract in reproduced
from a copy of the letter, which is dated February 23, 2003 [and written in French],
as provided by its author” (Beast and Sovereign 2, 172n1).
19
The passages Derrida writes on Pascal I cited above are one of many
“examples,” if one wanted to call them that and momentarily suspend the question
of exemplarity, in which essays Derrida wrote under the heading of
“autobiothanatographical” texts.
The parchment within the parchment, the confusion of paper and parchment—
which is lost and which is a copy—only one of two lost?
Resewing—is sewing a figure? Did the servant never see Pascal sewing the paper?
Did he never help Pascal with the unsewing and sewing?
“Drawing” the Line: The Graphic Design of Writing
In relation to publication lies another problem, and its relation to the support. The
parergon has the same problem of the support as does publishing.
Cite Derrida on the material support as problem in The Post Card
Derrida and reproductions in The Post Card-which photographs are described,
placement of reproductions, and so on. Eccentric as compared to The Truth in
Painting or Memoirs of the Blind or “Unsensing the Subjectile” in Artaud or
“Maddening the Subjectile” in “Boundaries: Writing and Drawing” YFS (1994) or
Artaud le MOMA, to name a few. Derrida’s radical empiricism doesn’t get into drafts
(though he does get into editions a bit, but not generally philology). Relation
between reception, iteration, reproduction, and the material supports of both words
and images and the boundary between them. No reproduction of the title pages of
the two editions of Rouseau’s Confessions in Typewriter Ribbon, Ink 2: (within such
limits). But reproduction of J.D. in signature, Event. Book on Derrida, posthumous,
turning editions into images. What are the limits of reading materials for Derrida?
The boundary of writing and drawing, the parergon: it is both figurative and literal,
a narrative frame, an “invisible” narrative frame, but also a frame of a painting, and
related to paratext or signature or wall text. So what is excessive in relation to the
343
line in Poe? When does the explicit become seeable? Memoirs of the Blind? When
does the line becoming a drawing? What about the parergon as a facsimile, as a
frontispiece, as a painting (Van Gogh) or a drawing (Adami), Restitutions and
“Parergon” in The Truth of Painting. Does the parergon include the paratext?
Graphic design and drawing. Pun as sound activated by visual. Dessein and dessin
Drawing Between the Eye and the Hand: (On Rousseau) Bernard Vouilloux,
Christine Cano and Peter Hallward Yale French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing
& Drawing (1994), pp. 175-197.
Martine Reid and Nigel P. Turner “Editor's Preface: Legible/Visible
” Yale French
Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994), pp. 1-12
The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books
by Renée Riese Hubert, Judd D. Hubert
Louis Aragon The adventures of Telemachus. Lincoln : University of translated and
with an introduction by Renée Riese Hubert & Judd D. Hubert. Nebraska Press,
c1988.
Renée Riese Hubert. Derrida, Dupin, Adami: "Il faut être plusieurs pour écrire" Yale
French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994), pp. 242-264.
All Writing is Drawing: The Spatial Development of the Manuscript Serge Tisseron
Yale French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994), pp. 29-42.
Jean-Gérard Lapacherie and Anna Lehmann Typographic Characters: Tension
Between Text and Drawing Yale French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing &
Drawing (1994), pp. 63-77.
Jacques Derrida and Mary Ann Caws Maddening the Subjectile
Yale French Studies,
No. 84, Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994), pp. 154-171.
For more on Derrida on the subjectile, see Paper Machine (2005)
SEE BRUCE FINKS’S ENDNOTE P. 767, (11, 3)
22 Poe Translations for "The Purloined Letter"
This story features a lot of French and Latin. Here are some translations and
explanations, listed by page number.
155 Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine
nimio
Nothing is more odious to wisdom than guilefulness
au
troisième....Germain
This is a street address
the affair of the Rue Morgue...murder
of Marie Rogêt
Poe's earlier dectective stories
156 boudoir
a woman's bedroom,
dressing room, or private sitting room
157 au fait
according to precedent
(literally, to the fact)
158 gimlet-dust
waste wood left by a hand drill
161
Rochefoucauld, La Bougive, Machiavelli, Campanella
These are writers claiming
human beings are motivated by self-interest
162 non distributio medii
The Latin
name for a logical fallacy--in English, "the undistributed middle."
The error is this:
All fools are poets. The Minister is a poet. Therefore, the Minister is a fool.
Il y à
20
21
344
parièr...grand nombre
It appears that all popular ideas, all accepted conventions,
are blunders because they have been shaped to suit the greatest number [of
people].
ambitus...religio...homines homesti
Dupin's point is that the original Latin
meanings of these words do not correspond with their English derivatives.
Ambitus meant soliciting votes,
religio referred to fasting or connecting, and
homines honesti signified
decent and respectable people.
166 facilis descensus
Averni
from Virgil's Aeneid: It is easy to do down into hell [Avernus]
monstrum
horrendum
a horrible monster
Un dessein si funeste...Thyeste
From Crébillon's
play Atreus and Thyestes: If so lethal a plot is not worthy of
Atreus, it is worthy of
Thyestes. [This refers to Greek mythology--see Course Content for a summary of the
story.]
Fold 236
If there is no such thing as a total or proper meaning, it is because the blank foldsover. The fold is not an accident that happens to the blank. . . . The fold does not
come upon it from outside it; it is the blank’s outside as well as its inside, the
complication according to which the supplementary mark of the blank (the asemic
spacing) applies itself to the set of white things (the full semantic entities) plus to
itself, the fold of the veil, or text upon itself.
Dissemination, 258
I am rereading Beyond . . . with one hand (everything in it is marvelously hermetic,
which is to say postal and trailing [trainant]—a subterrean railway, but also lame,
trailing the leg behind: he tells us NOTHING, does not make a step that he does not
take back at the next step. 140-41
Nothing works [Rien ne marche], but everything goes very fast, absolutely fast, in
which this paralysis, which I know something about. 141
The post card or telethisthat, 113
And it will remain like that in a wallet 79
Run in circles, 63
When I have nothing to do in a public place, I photograph myself and with few
exceptions burn myself. 37
“repetition compulsion” is understood even less, 35
“you are dead” 33
Want to write a grand history, a large encyclopedia of the post and of the cipher, but
to write it ciphered still in order to dispatch it to you, taking all the precautions so
that forever you are the only on to be able to decrypt it (to write, then, and to sign),
to recognize your name, the unique name I have given you . . . 13
He was sure that his death would arrive in 1907. 241
Obviously when beneath my public signature they read these words they will have
won out (over just what?) but . . . .238
The computers, the powers, the dupins and their bi-spoolarity (fort/da), the States,
this is what I am assessing, or computing, what I am sorting out in order to defy all
sorting out [tris]. 194
345
Teckne does not happen to language or to the poem, 192
I am losing the track, I no longer know to whom I am speaking, nor about what. The
difficulty I would have about in sorting out this courier with the aim of publication is
due, among other perils, to this one: you know that I do not believe in propriety,
property, but above all in the form it takes according to the opposition public /
private (p/p, so be it). 185
And I say ardently that I, let me, die. Or ardently, that this book is, let this book be,
behind me. 198
I am rereading, sometimes sinking into tour immense memory, sometimes with the
meticulous attention of he philologist. 200
I have more and more difficulty writing you. 200
The dos, 201
You were already dead ten times, 201
With Socrates, with my posthumous analyst of with you, for example, okay this is
even what I say all the time. 201-02
Account of the professor and student lecture photograph, 202—we get no photo,
just as didn’t get the photos of Freud and of Heidegger, each posing with his wife.
The fortune teller book reproductions are matched to account 211
Color reproduction socartes, in black and white on he cover and in the end paper, is
on p. 251.
Everything would be destroyed 253
But the support itself, which I wanted to deliver naked, we will also burn. 252
I notice that in speaking of readers with you, I always call them people 253
That I burned the baby doll instead of taking it out on her. 252
Holocaust, 254
Another S.P., agreed . . . , but I would put my hand into the fire, it’s really the only
one. For the rest, they will understand nothing of my clinamen, even if they are sure
of everything, especially in that case, the worst one. Especially there where I speak,
they will see only fire. On this subject, you know that Freud’s Sophie was cremated.
255
Each of them to the other; you were in league to have me destroyed, you conspired,
you have covered al the trails, get out of it yourself. 244
Ophelia 254
Aporia 255
Proof, 255
Tomorrow I will write you again, in our foreign language. I won’t retain a word of it
and n September, without my even having seen you again, you will burn
You will burn it, you, it has to be
you. 256
But when the syngram has been published, he will no longer have anything to do
with it, or with anyone—completely elsewhere-- the literary post will forward it by
itself q.e.d. This has given me the wish, envie (that is indeed the word) to publish
under my name things that are inconceivable, and above all unlivable, for me, thus
abusing the “editorial” credit that I have been laboriously accumulating for years the
346
to publish under my name things that are inconceivable with this sole aim in mind.
235
Prove it 235
Cable burial 236
Not to know how to burn 236
I read, 236
They can no longer read anything except the peforation (B A, B A, O A, OA, Ri, R I
).
Burned to a white heat, 239
When beneath my public signature they read these words 238
I now have the book on my table. I am rereading it.
So much for the fire 244
The end of the world by fire 245
After the fire 245
You’re right, I love you is not to be published. I should not shout it from the rooftops.
246
But I tell you again. Am keeping only a very brief sequence of our film, and only of
the film, a copy, a copy of a copy, the thin black roll, hardly a veil. 246
But even though they cannot bear is what you know: that jogging is infinitely
preferable to writing for publication: it never goes very far, it comes back in a close
circuit, it plays like a child in its playpen: that jogging and writing for publication for
me only a training with you in mind. 247
And knowing that I have understood nothing, that I will die without have [sic]
understood anything. 247
Chemin, Weg, 247
A rebours, 247
You would not have liked it if I had collected your letters. 249
Not that I’m thinking about the fire 250
If I this, people are going to believe that I am inventing it for my compositional
needs. 253
Between the preface and the three others, the phone calls will buzz like wasps in full
transference. 239
If not by the end, and as they never read . . . Too bad. 240
We will no longer be able to 239 write each other, we will be too late.
As if it had an incipit, I am, then, opening this book. It was our agreement that I
began it at the moment of the third ring.n1 p259
Let one refer to any of the aforementioned judgments—the impossibility of a resting
point pulls the textual performance along into a singular thing.
I have abused this word, it hardly satisfies me. Drifting designates too continuous a
movement, or rather too undifferentiated, too homogenous a movement that
appears to travel away without saccade from a supposed origin, from a shore, a
border, a coast with an invisible outlne.261
Those who remain will not know how to read, 249
Read this. It’s falling into place, 206
347
They cannot write to each right on the thing, right on the support, they cannot
accumulate by writing to each on the subject of accumulation. 207 Derrida is
speaking of stamp collectors.
The variety of the pub. In general. 233
In order to reassure themselves they say: deconstruction does not destroy
I’m not inventing anything 233
By virtue of you, I intrigue. Sending nothing to anyone, not anyone, I am fomenting a
resurrection. Had you finally encountered him, Elijah? You were right nearby, you
were burning. I had put you on the track and if because I love them too much I am
not publishing your letter (which by all rights belongs to me). I will be accused of
erasing you, or stifling you, or of keeping you silent. If I do publish them, they will
accuse me of appropriating you for myself, of stealing of keeping the initiative, of
exploiting the body of a woman, always the pimp, right? Ah Bettina, my love
And it
Will be even worse if I publish your letters under my name, signing in your place.
Listen, Bettina, I will restore everything to you. 230-31
We were dead, 231
I no longer know what I am doing, and how I am “scratching,” if I am easing or
writing and what I am “saving.” 229
Melina, K. 226
Who will prove, 234
Socrates “is taking notes for having in mind a project of publication in modern times.
He is pretending to write but he has a small pocket tape recorder under his mantle.
218-19
Believe I am making it up, 217
Refound here the American student with whom we had coffee last Saturday, the one
who was looking for a thesis subject (comparative literature), I suggested to her
something on the telephone in literature of the 20th century (and beyond), starting
with, for example, the telephone lady in Proust or the figure of the American
operator, and then asking the question of the effects of the most advanced
telematics on whatever would still remain of literature. I spoke to her about
microprocessors and computer terminals, she seemed somewhat disgusted. She told
me that she loved still literature (me too, I answered her, mais si, mais si). Curious to
know what she understood by this. 204
(in the same way, the “log” that runs at the bottom of the pages of Derrida’s Parages
is not, despite its position, a local note but is clearly an appendage to the text as a
whole).
Genette, Paratexts, 336
Structure itself, the formal structure yields itself to reading, Post Card, 321
Dupes (duplicates, dummies)
Reengage materiality and so called book history in relation to the support, formal
materiality, figures.
By the aid of a most powerful microscope. Had there been any traces of recent
disturbance we should not have failed to detect it instantly.
348
Is the facsimile one kind of duplicate among others? Is it an exact copy of the
inexact copy Dpupin discovers D—has hidden? Or its fold up? Unfolded—unlike
Pascal, whose text is deleiver, but equallyunredable.
"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was
in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of
which the Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and
black, with the D-- cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S-family. Here, the address, to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the
superscription, to a certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the
size alone formed a point of correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these
differences, which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper,
so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D--, and so suggestive of a design
to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document; these
things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of this document, full in the view
of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which I had
previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion, in
one who came with the intention to suspect.
"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a most animated
discussion with the Minister, on a topic which I knew well had never failed to
interest and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this
examination, I committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in
the rack; and also fell, at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial
doubt I might have entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed
them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the broken
appearance which is manifested when a stiff paper, having been once folded and
pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed direction, in the same creases or
edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It was clear
to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-directed, and resealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and took my departure at once, leaving a
gold snuff-box upon the table.
"The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite eagerly, the
conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if
of a pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was
succeeded by a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. D-- rushed to a
casement, threw it open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the cardrack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as
regards externals,) which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D-cipher, very readily, by means of a seal formed of bread.
"But what purpose had you," I asked, in replacing the letter by a fac-simile? Would it
not have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly, and departed?"
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (1845). In Edgar Allen Poe: Poetry and Tales.
Ed. Patrick F. Quinn, Library of America, 1984, 696-97.
349
Everything I have to say about The Post Card—and beyond--will necessarily be
either prolegomonal or paralipomenal--dupe
I have cited it elsewhere, but once more I reread the declaration of avoidance which
performs the inevitable, 263
Footnote 268
Detour 269
Small footnote in the Letter to d’Alembert invokes the devil “in person, so to speak,
and his apparition under the guise of the phantom of his double . . . 270
Here is the footnote I take as the exergue to my discourse 270
Then we must begin, at least, by pointing out in the hastily named “internal” reading
the places that are
Here I break off these preliminary remarks 272 (started on p.259)
open to intersecting with other networks 273
Here, it seems to me, we must pay the greatest attention to Freud’s rhetoric. 279
Freud specifies between dashes 29
See elsewhere
I believe that it is better to erase all the pictures, all the other cards, the photos, the
initials, the drawings, etc. The Oxford card is sufficient for everything. It has the
iconographic power that one can expect in order to read or to have read the whole
history, between us, the punctuated sequence of two years, from Oxford to Oxford,
via two centuries or two millennia . . . 204
It’s a photograph by Erich Salomon. 205
Soetimes I wish that everything remain illegible for them—and also for you. To
become absolutely unknowable for them. 205
Read this. It’s falling into place 206
Those that remain will not know how to read, they will go crazy. 249
When someone gives the order to fire, and to give the order is already to fire,
everyone goes to it. 248
More or less, 248
I have just received the slide in color. 250
I remember only the celluloid baby doll that was aflame in two seconds 253
Nor it’s the project of “partial publication” that has become insupportable for me,
not so much because of the publication—they will only be blinded by it--, as because
the minute cross-section to which all of this should, for my part, give rise. I see him
as a perverse copyist, seated for days in front of a correspondence, two years of
voluble correspondence, busy transcribing a given passage, scratching out a given
other one in order to prepare it for the fire, and he spends hours of knowledgeable
philology sorting out what derives fro this or that, in order to deliver nothing to
publicity, absolute nothing that might be proper (private, secret) in order to profane
nothing, if that is possible. 182
Anything everything 183
Foreign language 183
I am reading the check that he is in the course of signing. 178
Of turning the back of the post card, 178
350
First faux metapassage:
The rest, if there is any that remains, is us, is for us, who do not belong to the card.
We are the post card, if you will, and as such, accountable, but they will seek in vain,
they will never find us in it. In several places, I will leave all kinds of references,
names of persons and places, authentifiable dates, identifiable events, they will rush
in with eyes closed, finally believing to be there and find us there when by means of
a switch point I will send them elsewhere if we are there, with a stroke of the pen or
the grattoir. I will make everything derail, not at every instant, that would be too
convenient, but occasionally and according to a rule that I will not ever give, even
were I to know it one day. I would not work too hard on composing the thing, it is a
scrap copy of scrapped paths that I leave in their hands. Certain people will take it
into their mouths, in order tor recognize the taste, occasionally in order to reject it
immediately with a grimace, or in order to bite, or to swallow, in in order to
conceive, even, I mean a child 177
This is literature without literature. 197
Of love letters. The ones I have reread running in the street and I scream with pain
like a madman, they are the most beautiful that I have ever read, the first have ever
been written but also, I must tell you, the last. You were not only predestined for
me, you were predestined to write the last love letters. Afterward, they no longer
will be able to, nor will I, and this conceive a bit of pain for you. Not only because
your love takes on a somewhat eschatological and twilight tinge from this, but
because, no longer knowing how to write “love-letters,” they will never read you.
197-98
The old man who remains the last to read himself. 199
I can’t go on. I’m going to run. Spent hours rereading. I’m trying to sort [trier], it’s
impossible. I can’t even reread any more. 199
I also thought that upon reading this sorted mail [courier trie] they could think that I
alone am sending these letters to myself: as soon as they are sent off they get to me
199
Second faux metapassage:
Derrida says in Resistance of Psychoanalysis that the word “oblique” chose him
Postal principle. 176, 191
Iconography 172
Too obvious 172
Strange that this is happening to me at the same time as the glasses—the problem
with close reading has accelerated suddenly. 170
Sublime nothingness, you know it preserves everything. The “correspondence” will
be destroyed better if we pretend to have several laughable fragments of it, several
snapshots good enough to put into everyone’s hands. 171
Car crash 171
Whether it is a question of readers, which I do not like 168
One more citation for you, and I’ll stop reading, 166
Of us there will never be a narrative. 167
Double signature, 18
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What I read in my date book for the next two days, I invent nothing 167
He decheminates them 165
I know that
We would have closed all the borders on our secret. 186
I am going to die soon 164
Perhaps even to find and read, 181
I adore her, but like the others she thinks she knows what the post, in the usual,
literal or strict sense, “means”; she is sure that the exchange around the purloined
letter does not concern the “efficiency of the postal service.” Mais si, mais si—it is not
sure that the sense of the p.s. (postal service) is itself assured of arriving at its
destination, nor is the word to post (poster). Are you sure, my love, of really
understanding what this poster means? It doubles, passes all the time 162
You know every well I refuse myself nothing-through all the chicaneries I authorize
myself everything. I send myself everything—on the condition that you let me do it
163
Chemin, 179
As if they knew about it for having read it. 197
Nothing is burned in The Post Card, yet is everything published? Decipherable
and indecipherable, open and concealed.Is it naïve to ask “What is The Post Card
about?” The back cover of the English translation strongly implies that it is about
post cards. This is what paratexts do: they give you basic information that orients
your reading, helps you decide whether or not you want to read. Why would
anyone bother to ask what The Post Card is about, then? Isn’t the answer implied by
the title? Isn’t the answer self-evident? Doesn’t Derrida refer in the book to the
“ontology of the post card,” a “postal structure,” a “postal principle”? Before we
consider that Derrida also asks and does not answer or get an answer to questions
he poses about the difference between a letter and a post card, a dead letter and a
dead parcel? let us pause for a moment and “read” the back cover, on which we are
invited to turn to “the other side of the card” and “look.” Before the copywriter,
who turns out to be Derrida, equates the post card and the book--“the thick support
of the card, a book heavy and light”—, he asks, in Heideggerian fashion: “What does
a postcard want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible?” On the back cover,
the book’s title has already been cited and not cited, incorporated as words into a
question presumably raised “in” the book. How far should our “reading” of the back
cover go? Does it matter that the initially anonymous back cover description is
“signed” J.D. at the bottom right, the same initials he signs in “Signature, event,
Context.” Let us continue to read the back cover, read it as a text that may be
skipped over, one of many paratexts such as the copyright page all readers tend to
skip over. Before we fold the title of The Post Card into a thematic reading of the
book, before we can say what the book is “really” about, perhaps something than the
post card but just as homogenous, before we can say or what we, or “you” as the
reader is addressed, “were reading” (first words of the back cover, [Derrida often
comments on reading the back of the post card]), before we read “the book,” before
we, again, “you,” “situate the subject of the book,” we may ask a more fundamental
and perhaps seemingly even more bizarre question, an ontological question, namely,
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“what is The Post Card? Before any we offer any thematic or allegorical reading of
The Post Card, then, Conditions of publication. Burn everything / publish
everything. This means not only reading everything, including the paratext, but to
ask when variations in edtions become part of the paratexutal apparatus, when
book covers, footnotes, glossaries, table of contents, the organization of chapters,
some previously published or perhaps delivered as lectures, and editions and
translations become notable, as it were, or what I call “anecnotable.”22 It is to get at
the conditions of reading, unreading, and non-reading. The heterogeneity of the
corpus is also at issue, even within the original language, translations aside.
I offer a number of new questions, then, in the hope that they are what
Heidegger would call the “right questions.” When is a letter not a dead letter? My
questions arise from close formal attention to The post Card but also call into
question the limits of what Derrida often calls an “internal reading” of a text.
Conditions of publication engage repetition and reproduction, the latter in its
“iconomy,” the different economy a facsimile has from description. Republication of
Lacan, note by Derrida. Note by Bass. Re-publication of part of The Post Card.
Recursive ordering of the text through the envois, itself precursive-works cited later
after first mentioned; and you are reading something written before and after the
rest of the book was written. It never becomes the preface to legs.
Confessional metapassages—that give the reader no Archidemean
interpretive leverage but do seem accurately descriptive.
“aims of publication”
In a posthumous fragment by our friends (one must also speak of Nietzsche’s
chance), after insisted on the Socratic origins of the novel, he “turns himself back”
again toward Socrates . . . “ 161
Before getting to the point of reading any given Fortune-telling book of the
13th century, the bearer of S and p, never forget that there is something tor recount,
to discern, something to tell, to be told, on the “fortune” of the book, of the chances it
was able to get to us intact, for example to fall into my hands one day in 1977, the
remainder remaining to follow . . .
It is always a question of setting (something) on its way / voice [voix], and alley oop,
by pressing on a well-placed lever, to compel unplugging, derailing, hanging up,
playing with the switch points and sending off elsewhere, setting it off route (go to
see elsewhere, if I am there: and someone is always found there, to carry on, to take
the thread of the story (you follow).
Reading Burns Repetition, Reproduction,
Do You Read Me?
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