Richard Burt Read After Burning: Posthumous Publication and the Sur-vivance of Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card 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 1
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Transcript
Richard Burt
Read After Burning:
Posthumous Publication and the Sur-vivance of Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card
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.
Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 174
1
“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.” 58 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
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
2
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 Cinders, ash of he archive, ash of cigarette in
Given Time
“Shall we burn everything?”
--Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 171
Burn before Reading
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.
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
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,
3
reproduction, and the repetition compulsion but with respect to the way Derrida’ss
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.1 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.2
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
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;
4
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
“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
5
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
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
6
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.”
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass,
106, n81.
7
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.”3 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
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.
8
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?
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
9
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 Lcan,” 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
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,
10
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 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.4 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.”5 ?”
Know When to Hold ‘Em
Philippe Labarthe calls “autobiothanatography” or to what Derrida calls “auto-bio-
thanato-hetero-graphic scene of writing” (336).6 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
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
11
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
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,
12
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
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
13
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 so-
called 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
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
14
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 psycho-
anthropology 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
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)
15
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)
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
16
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.7
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
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)
17
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.8 Pascal had
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
18
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.9
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
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:
19
“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.10
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,
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).”
20
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.
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
21
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.11
Ps. So as not to forget: the little key to the drawer is hidden in the other book. (I leave it
22
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
No rigorous theory of “reception,” however necessary it might be, will get to the end of
that literature. 71
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
28
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
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
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 read 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
29
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
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 would have reconstituted
this word to a last 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 “dessmination” is reversed into 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. 151
With stupefying dexterity they move three cards after having you choose one. 36
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
30
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
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
31
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
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
32
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
archive, 506
the decrypting, in these conditions, can no longer come from the simple and alleged
interior of what is still called, provisionally, psychoanalysis.
33
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
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
34
“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
circumcise 222
I am here signing my proper name, Jacques Derrida.1
35
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
Dream, 216-17
36
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:
37
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 here 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
38
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
39
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
40
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. “No dead person has ever said their last word.” Cixous, Or, les lettres de mom pere, 25;
cited by Derrida, H.C. for Life, 125, n. 113, p. 170
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
41
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
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 so-
called as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is
42
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 (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
43
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
1 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
44
like the experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-
anthropology 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
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
2 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 htematic or genreic grouping is exceeded, however, by Derrida’s
differing ways in which he discussed, sometime more htna once, an autor’s works afeter
death. First and last essay of Roland Barthes strategy is used elsewhere for a living
author. Inhte 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
45
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.
as epitaph.
3 Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 199
4 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 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
5 “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
46
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
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.
6 For variations on auto / bio / thanato / graphy, see The Post Card, 273, 293, 298, 302,
303, 322, 323, 328, 333, 356.
7
47
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 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
8 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.
9 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)
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)
48
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
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).
10 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).
11 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
49
“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
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 line in Poe?
When does the explicit become seeable? Memoirs of the Blind? When does the line
50
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
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
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
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.
12 The Dictionnaire de la langue française by Émile Littré
52
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
53
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)13
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.
13 For more on Derrida on the subjectile, see Paper Machine (2005)
54
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 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.
55
For you may consider them as calling cards, or “interjections d’apel.” Placing a call,
asking a question
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.
56
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,
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
57
need of deconstruction; ruin as always already, always “before”; the apprehension. Also
the book not as corpse. The “tissue” and “weave” mixed metaphors.
Screaming Driver, Screaming Driver's Wife: You're going the wrong
way! You're going to kill somebody! Planes, Trains &
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
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
59
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
orients, designs, or destines it. And here there intervene not only each person’s reading-
idioms, 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
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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
"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’”
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begins with the repetition compulsion, which Lacan idiosyncratically translates as
“repetition automatism.”14 “My research has led me to the realization that the repetition
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
14 SEE BRUCE FINKS’S ENDNOTE P. 767, (11, 3)
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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
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-in-
hand 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
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Gescrhiebene, auf das in der Schrift Gesagte. Das eingenliche Lesen ist die Sammlung
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 “pre-
note” 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
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begin and end? What does Derrida do to reconfigure a text have to be re/configured for
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, arche-
writing, the impression, and so on?
Hand Delivered Reading
Derrida uses “internal reading” in Memoirs of the Blind
65
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.
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-the-
archive”? 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
66
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
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
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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:
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
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.
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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.
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
69
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
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.
70
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
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
71
“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
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