Richar Burt

Read After Burning:

Notes on a Possibly Psychoanalytic Posthumography of Jacques Derrida’s Post Card

and the Biobibliothanatopolitics of its Remains . . . to Be Archived . . . to Be Published

. . . to Be Inhumed . . . to Live on [Sur-vivre] . . . to Be Cremated . . . to Be Wetwared . . .

to Be Continued . . . to Be Read (X-uent Omnes?)

One day, please, read me no more, and forget

that you have read me.

--Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, 36

We cannot develop this analysis here; it is to be

read elsewhere.

--Jacques Derrida, Post Card, 466

A hundred similar instances go to show that the

MS. so inconsiderately published, was merely a

rough note-book, meant only for the writer's

own eye, but an inspection of the pamphlet will

convince almost any thinking person of the truth

of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy

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was about the last man in the world to commit

himself on scientific topics. . . . I verily believe

that his last moments would have been rendered

wretched, could he have suspected that his

wishes in regard to burning this 'Diary' (full of

crude speculations) would have been

unattended to; as, it seems, they were. I say 'his

wishes,' for that he meant to include this note-

book among the miscellaneous papers directed

'to be burnt,' I think there can be no manner of

doubt. Whether it escaped the flames by good

fortune or by bad, yet remains to be seen.

--Edgar Allan Poe, “Von Kempelen and His

Discovery” (1850)

Before my death I would give orders. If you aren’t

there, my body is to be pulled out of the lake [lac]

and burned, my ashes are to be sent to you, the

urn well protected (‘fragile’) but not registered, in

order to tempt fate. This would be an envois of /

from me [an envoi de moi] which no longer would

come from me (or an envoi sent [come] by me,

who would have ordered it, but no longer an envoi

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of [/from] me as you like). And then you would

enjoy mixing my cinders [ashes] with what you eat

(morning coffee, bricohe, tea at 5 o’clock, etc.)

After a certain dose you would start to go numb. . .

Cinders, 74; quoted from The Post Card, 196,

from a letter dated 31 May, 1979, without the

date

What must we do to allow a text to live?

“Living On [Survivance],” Parages, 178

Courage! Courage, now! You need heart and

courage to think . . . the living dead.

The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 147 (215).

Intestates of Exeption

In the horror film After.Life (dir. Agnieszka Wójtowicz-Vosloo, 2009), Anna

Taylor (Christina Ricci) wakes up--just after we saw her apparently die in a car

accident--on the table of a mortician and spiritual medium named Eliot Deacon

(Liam Neeson) who can talk to the dead. Unable to move her body, she

nevertheless exclaims “I’m not dead.” 1 But Deacon says tells her otherwise. He

1 http://www.afterlifethefilm.com/site.html#/home

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knews she’s dead and he’s got her death certificate to prove it. She was D.OA. In

horror movies, it would appear, corpses always arrive at their destination whether

they know it or not, sometimes even ahead of schedule.2

2 On the death certificate, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International trans Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994): “In short, it is often a matter of pretending to certify death there where the death certificate is still the performative of an act of war or the impotent gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution” (48). See also Derrida’s comment: “The response echoes, always, like a response that can be identified neither as a living present nor as the pure and simply absence of someone dead,” in “Marx and Sons,” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 213.

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Death, as Derrida knew, is always a matter of paperwork, the death certificate, a

paper that does not necessarily reassure.

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Post Marks: Reading Around Derrida with(out) Derrida (Still) Around

Let me begin again by departing from this scene in After.Life to say a few things

about posthumography so that it will not be confused with a pre-deconstructive,

pre-psychoanalytic psychobiography or psychobiohagiography of Derrida that takes

his biological death as the basis for linearizing his publications and highlighting

certain themes he wrote on toward the end of his death thought to be key due to

their proximity to his death, nor do I divide his posthumously published

publications from his “humous” publications.3 In order to “out-work-line” (hors

d’ouevre ligne) a kind of reading Derrida sometimes performs, a kind of reading I

call posthumographic, I will read The Post Card with “For the Love of Lacan,” and

with The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2 (and some related writings along onr on the

3 See Craig Saper’s introduction “Posthumography: The Boundaries of Literature and the Digital Trace” and my essay "Putting Your Papers in Order: The Matter of Kierkegaard's Writing Desk, Goethe's Files, and Derrida's Paper Machine, or the Philology and Philosophy of Publishing After Death" in Rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010). http://www.rhizomes.net/issue20/For an example of a posthumographic reading of Derrida, see Hélène Cixous, "The Flying Manuscript," trans. Peggy Kamuf. New Literary History Volume 37, Number 1, Winter 2006), 15-46, to pp. 24-24. Cixous tells of her discovery of a handwritten manuscript Derrida had left with her in an envelop ehe told her not to open and that she had misplaced, forgotten, and then found and then found again (by chance?). The manuscript was a draft of Derrida’s “A Silkworm of one’s Own,” first published in in 1997 and translated in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,, 2002. See reproduces two pages of the manuscript Derida has cancelled, as if he were a kind of post man stamping letters and invalidating the stamps, taking them out of circulation (except among stamp collectors, Cixous operating here as a collector rather than an editor). See pp. 38, 39. But she does not reproduce a facsimile of the entire manuscript, that is to say an edition. Cixous’s strory reads as if it were a response to Derrida’s story about her leaving him with the manuscript of her first book. See note 8 below.

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way the way). As I go, indeed already have begun to go, you may notice that the

footnotes take on a life or death of their own, to think, without fully registering or

performing, what it means to read in relation to the eco-specificity of a book’s

destruction, fire being Derrida’s element of choice: “As for the “Envois” . . . .you

might consider them . . . as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence.

Destroyed by fire or by that which figuratively takes its place, more certain of

leaving what I like to call the tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are

(s’il y a là cendre)” (3).4 I consider The Post Card, not just the “Envois,” a hostage to

4 The book printed on paper can also, of course, be destroyed by drowning, wind, and burial. See Prospero declaring “I’ll drown my book” in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and scenes of pages of books being blown away in Peter Greenaway’s film adaptation, Prospero’s Books. On this example, see Richard Burt and Julian Yates, What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). In Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books, a book may be “buried alive” (109) in an obsccure corner of alibrary, and Swift notes in A Tale of a Tub, presented as a found manuscript (13), the numerous ways books may be destroyed: “But your governor perhaps may still insist, and put the question, What is then become of those immense bales of paper which must needs have been employed in such numbers of books?  Can these also be wholly annihilate, and so of a sudden as I pretend?  What shall I say in return of so invidious an objection? It ill befits the distance between Your Highness and me to send you for ocular conviction to a jakes, or an oven, to the windows of a bawdy-house, or to a sordid lantern.  Books, like me their authors, have no more than one way of coming into the word,

but there are ten thousand to go out of it and return no more” 16-17. See Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford, 2008). There are numerous English novels in which characters take unpublished letters and various papers to their graves. For one example, consult Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, ed. John Sutherland, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2008). See in particular the letter housemaid Rosanna Spearman leaves in a box on a chain the sand by before she drowns herself, a letter later recovered by the detective Sergeant Cuff: “Not even my grave will be my marker” (310); see the “Fourth Narrative” made up of extracts from the unfinished journal making up written by the opium addicted and disgraced doctor, Ezra Jennings, and comments about Jennings’s death bed request in the “Seventh Narrative”: “At his request I next collected the other papers, that is to day, the bundle of letters, the unfinished book, and the volumes of the Diary—and enclosed them all in one wrapper, sealed with my own seal. ‘Promise,’ he said, that you will put this in to my coffin with your own hand.” And that you will see that no other hand touches it afterwards . . . He said ‘Let

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the burnt book, to the raised or razed ground of posthumographic writing, a ground

that never quite settles into something as stable as a grave, memorial, haunt or a

crime scene to be reconstructed or an archive that could be completed or deferred

to a time to come or a time that remains. It’s only by playing (back) with fire, by

cremating my thoughts about The Post Card as I go in the cinders ashes and other

cre-mains of these notes that I may proceed to leave the “che-mains” rendering what

I leave you difficult to read, perhaps even unreadable, by making it next to

impossible to move easily between the text and my footnotes.5 By exceeding the

academic norms of footnote length without creating a separate running border

separating them on each page as a seemingly coherent paratext from a seemingly

coherent text, norms meant to guide the reader through the text, I want you to

know that I have rendered any decision to read either the text first and then the

footnotes, or vice versa, inconsequential.6 I can offer encouragement to the reader,

but I can offer no reassurance. I have burned before reading. I have not saved the

(la folie de) the day, or daybreak.

my grave be forgotten. Give me your word of honour that you will allow no monument of any sort—even the commonest tombstone—to mark the place of my burial. Let me sleep nameless. Let me rest, unknown’” (456). 5 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 179 (256).6 Some of Derrida’s works that engage unreadability look difficult to read until you make a decision to read one text or paratext first. Then reading—even reading about the unreadable--becomes easy. In “Living On: Borderlines,” for example, Derrida divides his text from his one footnote, that runs under the entire text and marked by a line running continuously across each page. See “Living On,” Parages. Similarly, Derrida uses a borderline to divide his “Circumfession” from Geoff Bennington’s dictonary entries on deconstruction in Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Even the

task of reading Derrida’s Glas trans. John P. Leavey. (Lincoln , NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) is simplified by the borders separting the clolumns about Jean Genet from the columns about Hegel.

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By introducing the term posthumography I am trying to capture something

in Derrida’s writings, something related to biopolitics and the paper machine, or

biobibliopolitics, something difficult to articulate because it will either have been

captured in advance, that is to say routinized, familiarized by editors and translators

and even Derrida, then routed under already established headings, or “Derridemes,”

such as distinerrance, performativity, phantasm, aborder (approach), revenant,

parage, the secert, d’abord (above all, border), de-bordement (overrun), survivance,

parergon, frame, performativity, a-thesis, pas [step; not], faux-pas, pas au-delà (no /

step beyond) the “to-come,” paralysis, the secret, autobiothanatoheterography,

cinders, aporia, iterability, and so on, or it will have been rejected and repulsed as an

allergen for which Derrida has no auto-immunity. (The same kind of capture of

posthumography could be performed with Freudiamemes—the repetition

compulsion, death drive, Herrschaft (mastery), Unheimlich [uncanny], etc. or with

Lacaniamemes—objet petit a, lack, point de caption, the Other, the letter, between

two deaths, etc.)

Let me say at once, to avoid an unncessary misunderstanding or perhaps to

ensure it, I am not sure which, posthumographic reading is not a philospheme, an

internal supplement to the postal principle by which Derrida could be shown to

reinscribe binary opositions between life and death, nor is it outside, au-delà or

even au-dessous the “Postal Principle.”7 Although Derrida many times took

7 (PC, 176) I will not, to be clear, Even though gather up the numerous publications on death Derrida (see note 5 below), sometimes in dedications in seminars, sometimes in essays gave on the occasion of someone’s death. Derrida frequently asked questions, often engaging Hediegger when asking them to show that Derrida resinscribed a binary opposition between life and death that he elswewhere repeatedly deconstructed when discussing living death, spectrality, biopower, living

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someone’s death the occasion as the occasion to write about that personwrote

numerous times on, sometimes in dedications in seminars, sometimes in essays,

Derrida’s writings on the dead, the could use the same interpretive stragedy when

write on a living author and a dead one.8 Similarly, Derrida does not distinguish

dead languages and living languges.9 Morever, Derrida often accords importance to

the last chapter, the last sentence of a writing (Post Card, )to the “very end of the

end” (Parages, 162) but he does not accord the last words of a person importance.10

on or 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’ Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2, op cit., pp130-31. 8 For Derrida’s writings on the dead, too many to catalogue, see the eulogies for Jean-Youssaint Desanti and Pierre Bourdieu in The Beast and Sovereign 1, 97 (140); 136-37 (190-91); the discssion of Maurice Blanchot’s death in The Beast and Sovereign 2, 162-98 to 166n4; Derrida’s dedication of his book, Artaud le moma to Paul Thevelin (in memory); the note in Pysche: Invention of the Other, Vol 1. Trans Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), (413-14n7) on the publication and republications of Signsponge trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), a copy of which Derrida dedicated to de Man that arrived at the Yale memorial service for de Man), n4 for the re / publication history) on the publication and republications of Signsponge, a copy of which Derrida dedicated to de Man that arrived at the Yale memorial service for de Man, and the essays collected in Jacques Derrida, The Work

of Mourning ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) On the many paratextual oddities of The Work of Mourning, see Burt, “Putting Your Papers in Order. See also Jacques Derrida, “The Two Deaths of Roland Barthes,” in which Derrida reads, after Barthes died and for the first time, “the first and last” books Barthes published; see Pysche: Invention of the Other, Vol 1. Trans Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 264-98; to 266. Similarly, Derrida says he “will probably speak directly . . . only of the first and last books published to date by Helene Cixous,” H.C., For Life, That Is to Say . . . (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 77.9 Jacques Derrida, “Envoi,” in Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford , CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 94-128; to 94-99.10 See Derrida on “the last word after the last,” the “first word before the first,” and “the end of the before the last-first-word . . .” in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits’),” op cit, 233-24; 291; 359. See also “Up to the very last word”; “seminar says in its last words;” “In question are the last pages of the Seminar;” “such, once again, are the last words of the seminar;” “his last command, his will”;

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There is no set of texts by Derrida that may be decisively classified or declassified as

posthumographic.11 There is no rigorous distinction between posthumographic and

humographic writings., and posthumography subsumes rather than opposes genetic

criticism even though genetic critics are indifferent to the difference between

publication and posthumous publication.12

“You were reading a somewhat retro love letter, the last in history”; “Finally, the last words of the chapter, the chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a “postscript” to the “next to the last chapter. . . . These are the last words of the chapter . . This is the final point, the last words of the chapter . . . Only a note finds itself called upon by these last words . . . The last words of the chpater could have been the last of the book” (PC, 385-86); “The last free-will in person (the signer of the will) no longer has anything to do with it or with anyone.” PC, 344-45; the last chapter, the shortest, thre little pages (387).

11 Derrida did ocasionally take note that a puliaction was posthumous, however. See, for example, “. . . between a corpus or proper name, Paul de Man, more precisely a very particular place of the posthumous corpus, Aesthetic Ideology. . . . here, then, is an inheritance that is also a posthumous work of Paul de Man . . .,” in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) ,” op cit, 289.12 When discussing Hélène Cixous’s donation of her unpublished dream notebooks to the BNF, Derrida says that the vastness of the number would effectively defeat any attempt to organize them by following the protocols genetic criticism: “Forewarnings . . . anticipate the text and give an inkling of the impossible and unending task that awaits the library reader. First of all, that a choice has been made. The author announces that she won’t be giving us all her dreams. So as to respect their secrets. Even is he leaves a first draft, the premier the (remember the word “jet”) untouched, this shaping nonetheless constitutes a first, literary and public declaration. It would be could idea to reconstitute its articulations: with the remaining, immense corpus of the other dreams, of course, but also with the bulk of the published work. Cixous herself has apparently classified these dreams according to their more or less readably understandable connection with a number of her works. But what sort of connection? Did these dreams induce some motif or figure in the published work? But in this case, though enthusiasts of the genetic study of the manuscripts may be tempted to consider them enticing raw material, they do not have the same status as a first draft. Nor do they constitute rough work with crossings-out in view of a final version. Nor are they proof in the process of correction, etc. “Genetic” or “generic” study comes to a dead end here. . . . We must grant these drams another fate and different histories depending on whether they have been published or not, as decided, deliberately and duly by the author. Are

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Nevertheless, I will read The Post Card in relation to “For the Love of Lacan” in

part because Derrida wrote it after Lacan’s death, and I focus on The Beast and the

Sovereign, Vol 2 in part because it is a posthumous publication that engages

posthumous publication and takes up a posthumously published note Pascal wrote

that his servant found when he discovered Pascal dead. (The note by Pascal is

coincidentally entitled “Fire,” and happens to, like Derrida’s and burned papers in

The Post Card, parts of which Derrida quotes in Cinders, and Derrida’s ash of the

archive in Archive Fever.) I attend at great length and in great detail to their

publication history and at even greater length and detail to what Derrida does with

the publishing history of the writings he reanders as a “scene” in The Post Card, with

two tenses—the future anterior and the future anterior conditional—he uses in “For

the Love of Lacan,” thereby making questions about reading and archiving the dead

they even contemporaneous with the literary writing? Are they marginal material, deletions, oneric texts induced and later interpreted by the author. . . Jacques Derrida Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secret of the Archive (27-28)But Derrida often paid attention to the kinds of materials that fall under the heading of genetic criticism. See Jacques Derrida, Artaud le MOMA (Paris: Galilée 2002); Jacques Derrida, “To Unsense the Subjectile,” The Secret of Antonin Artaud, Jacques Derrida and Paule Thevènin (Trans) Mary Ann Caws MIT, 1998, 59-148.See also Simon Hantai; Jacques Derrida; Jean-Luc Nancy, La Connaissance Des Textes: Lecture D'un Manuscrit Illisible (Correspondances) (Paris: Galilee 2001). Simon Hantai takes footnotes by Derrida and Nancy on Heidegger as the basis of two of his paintings, photographic reproductions of which are included in La connaissance des texts, sometimes extreme close up photos of the folds in Hantai’s canvas. Photographic facsimile of the pages from Hantai’s, Derrida’s, and Nancy’s letters to each other are set on facing pages across from their diplomatic transcriptions. See also the essays deconstructing genetic criticism in the issue on Drafts in Yale French Studies, ed. Michel Contat, Number 89: 1996) and Le Manuscrit inachevé: Écriture, création, communication, ed. Louis Hay, Jack Neefs, et al. (Paris, Éditions du CNRS 1986) on unfinsihed manuscripts written by Stendhal, Fluabert, Proust, Kafka and Valery; and for a posthumodocumenting of Derrida’s biobibliography, see Michel Lisse, Jacques Derrida (Ministère des affaires étrangères Paris, 2005).

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questions both about what was published and about what was said, hence questions

of rumor and testimony, and The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2.

However, unlike psychobiographers and unlike genetic critics, I do not give any

priority, chronological, biological, or otherwise, to one of these texts over the

other.13 Posthumography raises arguably psychoanalytic as well as deconstructive

questions about how Derrida’s archive mis/management Derrida is “to be” read,

about what has been left to be read and about how reading is a practice to be,

unlimited, the definition of the unreadable always to be reopened.14 “Those who

remain will not know how to read,” Derrida writes in The Post Card,15 “those who

remain” meaning, I take it, “those who have survived.” These questions about what

remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s writings are also

biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical questions concerning the

archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all

of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a

question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida

performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own works, from which he

sometimes quoted, sometimes including handwritten notebooks as well as

published works.16 One could organize a reading of The Post Card according to a

13 Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans Beverly Bie Brahic, (Columbia University, 2008), 61.14 In additon to the importance Derrida accords Freud in Archive Fever, we might adduce Freud use files as an extended simile for the topography of the psyche.15 The Post Card, 249. 16 Consider the idiosyncratic ways in which Derrida refers to The Post Card in endnotes to three essays, “My Chances” and “Telepathy,” both republished in revised form in Psyche: Invention of the Other Volume 1. In the first endnote to the lead essay, “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” Derrida writes,

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bibliographical and editorial logic in relation to its self-ruination and self-

fragmentation (Envois are liked to burned letters; “To Speculate—‘On Freud’” is a

fragment) and texts Derrida published after The Post Card in which he referred to it,

discussed it, or added to it, as he did in “Telepathy.”17 This logic, however, is pre-

If every invention, as invention of the trace, then becomes a movement of différance or sending, envoi, as I have attempted to show elsewhere, the postal framework is thereby privileged, as I should like simply to stress here once again.  And to illustrate according to Montaigne, from whose writings I shall quote here, as a detached supplement to la carte postale, the following fragment from Des postes (2.22), which names "invention: and situates it between the animal socius and the human socius: [an anecdote about using pigeons to send letters --]. (423 n1)

Although Derrida asserts in this endnote that “the postal framework is . . . privileged,” it is worth noting that he does so in an endnote to an essay published separately from The Post Card. See note 18 above. In “My Chances / Mes chances,”, Derrida also refers back to The Post Card by way of his essay “Telepathy”: “Permit me here to refer once again to the fragment detached from la carte postale that I titled ‘Telepathy’ (191 above).” Psyche, 368. Derrida returns to the debate with Lacan over the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” in “My Chances / Mes chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies”

1. [Added to 2003 edition. This will be my only “footnote,” in order to say: ] This essay proposes in a certain way an amost silent reading of the words “tombe” [tomb] or “tomber” [to fall] in La carte postale. This is one of the most frequently used words in “Envois.” For example, the entry for March 14, 1979: “An other, whom I know well, would unbind himself immediately in order to run off in the other direction. I would bet that he would fall upon you again. I fell in with you, so I remain.” On the following day . . . [added 2003 Derrida, The Post Card, 182-83]). I quote this book because it is included in the program of this encounter; it has been inscribed there in a certain way, in the meeting’s charter. Don’t accuse me therefore, of being, as one says in English, “self-centered.” In truth, I have forever dreamt of writng a self-centered text; I never manged it, never arrived at that point. I always fall upon the others. This will end up by being known.“My Chances / Mes chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies” 429 Note 1.

If the previous publications cannot be linearized, they matter on two counts to Derrida. “Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1 “2. He says These texts have accompanied, in some fashion, the works I have published over the last ten years.1 But they have also been disassociated from those works, separated,

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critical. It always arrives at its destination, as it were, a dead end. Moreover, it

glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future publications.18

These questions about what remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s

writings are also biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical

questions concerning the archival operations by which performed all the time by

distracted. . . . Each of the essays appears to be devoted, destined, or even singularly dedicated to someone, very often to the friend, man of woman, close or distant, living or not, known or unknown . . . Certain texts seem to bear witness better than others to this quasi-epistolary situation. “Letter to a Japanese Friend, “Envoi,” “Telepathy,” “Plato’s Letter,” or “Seven Missives.” “Seven Missives,” for example, might have stood in the place of the title or preface, thanks to the play of metonymy. I made another choice. By disrupting the chronological order only once, I thought that “Psyche: Invention of the Other” might better perform this role.” “Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, xii. And in the second endnote to that essay, he states “When they are not simply unpublished, like the longest and the most recent among them, or unpublished in French, like a large number of them, these texts never conform exactly to their first versions, whose place of publication is noted each time.” “Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, 413. Whatever Derrida has added to The Post Card is significant to read yet marginal (information worthy only of an endnote) and impossible to read unless one wants to gather all of the publications and previous English translations and word by word. collate them alongside their republication in the second, two volume edition of Psyche (in one ones to say the a book published without Vol 1 in the title in 1998 and a volume published in 2003 with “2” in the title are two volumes of the shorter book orginally published in 1987). Derrida does not this task ruled out—the earlier versions are not jettisoned as inferior and obsolete. They are just different in ways that may or may not be significant. For that reason, I think it would be mistaken to box up these fragments and shelve them, regarding them (and thereby not reading them) as instances of Derrida’s distinerrant postings of his writings in a labyrinth, an imaginary Borgesian library that short-circuits storage and retrieval, or entails Derrida’s incineration of them. For the question is not merely how we to read these references and additions to The Post Card but whether The Post Card, how self-fragmenting, self-ruining, and self-incinerating in its self-presentation, is self-identical as a publication to the words on the 549 pages published under the title La carte postale in 1980 by Flammarion press, whether its limits extend to self-identical, in legal or publishing terms, such as “Telepathy,” “Mes Chances,” “Restitutions,” and “For the the Love of Lacan.” If one wanted to gather these fragmets together in a new edition of The Post Card, should one include fragments like the passages from The Post Card Derrida cites in Cinders, “an incomplete archive, still burning or already consumed, recalling certain textual

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editors and translators on all of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and

posthumous publications, a question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving

operations Derrida performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own

works, from which he sometimes quoted. As an archiving operation,

posthumography is conerned not only with posthumous publication or

thanatography but with what is “to be” read, what suruvives rests on how the

sites” (26), putting the passages in quotation marks and italicizing them but not supplying footnotes to them, passages identifying them instead, along with all the other passages Derrida self-cites, in a block of text at the end of Cinders, a block that is not marked by as a partext by page layout or a word such as Notes or References? Should one include notes by previous translators like this one from Cinders on Telepathy? 1. Although it is not cited, anther text is alluded to (p.75): Télépathie, a kind of supplement to The Postcard, which, like Glas, is woven around the letters LAC, CLA, ALC, CAL, ACL, etc. (Furor 2 [1981] and Confrontations 10 [1983]). Schibboleth (1983) , also dedicated to cinders, was not yet published. Cinders p. 26.” To ask these question is to recast the question of re/reading Derrida or not reading him and forgetting him ask an archival question, a question that neither stalls at by trying to gather exhaustively all the references or let them go go go, treat them as exhaust, but invites readings of Derrida’s dis/orderings of his own writings. For example, when Derrida says “Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1 that he is disrupting the chronological order only once” (xii) by putting an essay that cites the title of the book at the beginning of the book, is Derrida recalling or repeating Lacan’s reorganization of the seminars published as Ecrits in 1966, the one essay out of chronological order being the “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” and also the essay at the head of the collection. See also the highly eccentric loop between the book’s first and last essays’s created by headnote to “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” (a footnote in the french edition) and endnote 3 of “No Apocalypse, Not Now” in which Derrida writes “See “Psyche: Invention of the Other” above. In fact the two lectures were delivered the same week at Conrell University. The allusions are numerous from one to the other.” Psyche: Invention of the Other, 1; 431n.3. The same question about Derrida may be asked of his translators and editors. To take one example, the editors let stand a mistake Derrida makes in “My Chances / Mes chances” when he writes “Now here is my chance, the fourth, I believe” (367). The editors supply a note correcting Derrida but leaving him alone. “Actually, is is the fifth that has bene so numbered. But given that Derrida has just said he is less and less sure about the chances, we leave this “mistake” as is. __Ed.,” Pysche, op cit, 430n8.” Co/Incidentally, Bruce Fink lets a famous substitution of Poe’s “destin” for “dessin” error stand: “In quoting these lines a second time, Lacan (inadvertently?) replaces dessein (scheme, plan) with destin (destiny, fate); I have let this stand in the text owing to the context. “Translator’s Endnotes” (40,1)” in

16

boundaries of publication are drawn, what counts as published or unpublished.

Publication is a question of surviv-ability, of what publication renders not to be read

of whatever survives. A given text’s survival is subject to the conditions and

structures of of publish-ability, a neologism that may be divided and recombined

into a cluster of others, including unpublish-ability, republish-ablility, and pre-

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 770. The err-responsbiltiy of editing Derrida is irreducible to an ethics not just because one relies on tact when deciding to leave ell enough alone or not but because editors may hinder by helping. I offer one example. In “The Retrait of Metaphor,” Derrida writes “I will not claim to propose anything other than a brief note, and so as to narrow my topic even further, a note on a note.” Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, 53. Derrida is speaking of a note to “White Mythology: Metaphor in Philosophy,” but he does not give the number of the note nor does he give the page on which that note appears. See “I just said a moment ago why it seemed necessary to me, outside of any plea pro domo, to begin by resituating my note on Heidegger that today I would like to annotate and relaunch,” The Retrait of Metaphor, 59. The translator helpfully supplies the note: “The note in question is 269n19; 226n22: the page numbers cited here and parenthetically in the text are those of the original and the translation, respectively, in that order; translations have frequently been modified. –Trans” Psyche 1, op cit, 419n3. Yet can we be sure that “my note on Heidegger” is limited to the one the translator identifies? For “White Mythology” appears in Margins of Philosophy along with “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” 29-68. (By the way, the translator identified the note incorrectly, lol (the note is number 29, not 22, on p. 226). What seems notable to me is that Derrida does not cite the note the translator thinks—no doubt very reasonably—Derrida is citing. 17 In the headnote to “Telepathy,” Derrida wrote for its republication, Derrida says that he meant to publish it as part of The Post Card and explains, how seriously is open to question, why he had to publish it separately:

Such a remainder [restant], I am no doubt publishing it in order to come closer to what remains inexplicable even to this day. These cards and letters had become inaccessible to me, materially speaking at least, by a semblance of accident, at some precise moment. They should have appeared as fragments and in accordance with the plan [dispositif] adopted at that time in "Envois" [Section One of la carte postale [Paris: Aubie-Flammarion, 1980].  In a manner that was apparently just as fortuitous, I rediscovered them very close at hand, but too late, when the proofs for the book had already been sent back for the second time. There will perhaps be talk of omission through "resistance" and such other things. Certainly, but resistance to what? to whom? Dictated by whom, to whom, how, according to what routes [voies]?

17

publishability, all of which, as we shall see, are related, to binding and unbinding.19

Publish-ability determines of the limits of readability and is a question about the

justice of reading what remains to be read, of any reading “to come.”20 In H.C., For

Life, Derrida links just reading to reading everthing: “one must read everything, of

course, letter by letter: I ill-treat everything by thus selecting and chopping with

From this bundle of daily dispatches that all date from the same week, I have exacted only a portion for the moment, for lack of space.  Lack of time too, and for the treatment to which I had to submit this mail [courrier], triage, fragmentation, destruction, etc., the interested reader may refer to "Envois," 7ff.

18 Consider the conspicuous attention to promises of future publications in footnotes in The Post Card: “the last sentence of the long quotation of a preface that is a note: “Other fragments of the same seminar will appear soon in book form.” 293 Note 6. Donner—le temps (To Give—time, in preparation, to appear later. Other essays (to appear) analyze this figure under the heading of “double chiasmatic invagination of the borders.” 391 8. An allusion, in the seminar Life death, to other seminars organized, or three years running, under the title of La Chose (The Thing) (Heidegger / Ponge, Heidegger / Blanchot, Heidegger / Freud), at Yale and in Paris. Perhaps they will give rise to other publications later. 401. Footnote 10, p. 40319 On binding and Freud’s “Bindung,” see The Post Card, 260n4; 389. See the discussion below of Lacan’s anxiety about the binding of the first, one volume edition of the Écrits.20 Derrida tends to take what he calls the “order” of publication as a given. See, for example, “I could have begun with what resembles the absolute beginning, with the juridico-historical order of this publication. What been lightly termed the first version of La folie fu jour was not a book. Published in the journal Empedocle (No. 2, May 1949), it bore another title—indeed, several other titles. On the journal’s cover, here it is one reads:

Maurice BlanchotUn recit [A recit?]

Later the question mark disappears twice. First, when the title is reproduced within the journal in he table of contents:

Maurice Blanchot: Un recitThen below the first tilne:

Un recitPar Maurice Blanchot

Could you tell whether these titles, written earlier and filed away in the archives, make up a single title titles of the same text, titles of the recit (which of course figures as an impractible mode in the book), or the title of a genre?” Living On,

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unforgivable violence, Unable to do justice to this book, as to the fifty others . . . H.C.,

For Life, 119.21 But the limits of what survive, the possibility of being in tact, left

aside for a reading to come, are not reducible to the finitude of a given material

support that makde publication possible and the infinity of reading whatever ahs

been published. Publish-ability concerns the limits of “everything” that is to be

Parages (214-15)Derrida adds:One might be tempted to take recourse in the law or the rights that govern published texts. One might be tempted to argue as follows; all these insoluble problems of delimitation are raised ‘on the inside’ of a book classified as a work of literature or literary fiction. Persuant to these judicial norms, this book has a beginnign and an end that leave no opening for indecision. The book has a determinable beginning and an end that leave no room for indecision. This book has a determinable beginning nad end, a title, an author, a publisher, its distinctive denomination is La folie du jour. “Living On,” Parages (238) And this is the order Derrida has caleld into question: “The first words .. . that come after the word “recit“ and its question mark. . . mark a collapse that is unthinkable, unrepresentable, unsituable within a linear order of succession, within a spatial or temporal sequenciality, within an objectifiable topology or chronology,” “Living On,” Parages, (234). What Derrida calls “the insoluble problems of delimitation are raised ‘on the inside’ of a book classified as a work of literature or literary fiction are not necessarily confined to the “inside” because the norms of publication, editing, and translating involve all kinds of silent deletions of precisely the kinds of variations between publication and its republication that Derrida reads so well and so closely with a kind of radical empircism noting textual effects as they “appear” in print.

21 See Derrida’s description of what he leaves unread: “I’ll begin again. Here is at last my beginning . . . I will speak only of this first book, that will make a nice beginning, leave the rest intact and virgin for a reading entirely to come . . .,” H.C., For Life . . . , 144. Derrida proceeds to tell a long, roundabout story involving a paper he says he has “now” but which he does not publish: “Sometime after the appointment at the Balzar, for we had to see each other again, the author left a manuscript in my care. The author had not published anything yet, not signed H.C. . . . Where was I? Yes, the manuscript of this Prenom de Dieu. So I go on holiday, to a house in the country, and with this text that had neither a name nor a forename yet. . . I do not remember what I told her, back then, no doubt the truth of what I thought, as always, but probably more tactfully. I even wrote the “blurb” on the back cover of the book, from which the publisher only kept a few lines but whose original I have just found again among my papers. I have got it here. . . . H.C., For Life . . . , 145; 147.

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read: is “everything” what has been published, republished? Whatever falls under

the category of “internal” is not limited to what Derrida calls the “normal category of

readability” Parages, 187 or “normal reading,” but neither does “unreadability”

(Living On,” Parages, 188) amount to the text’s overruning of the protective legal

aspects of publication—“ protective measure [structures de garde] and institutions

as the registering of copyright, the Library of Congress or the Bibliotheque

Nationale, or something like a flyleaf” Parages, 114-115.22 These bibliographic

protections are themselves self-corroding, I maintain, and the effects of their

22 Derrida writes “By normal reading I mean every reading that ensures knowledge transmittable in its own language, in a language unchanging (identical to itself), in a school or academy, knowledge constructed and ensured in institutional constructions, in accordance with laws made so as to resist the ambiguous threats with which the arret de mort troubles so many conceptual oppositions, boundaries, orders.” Living On, Parages, 187 Compare these two passages from “Living On” [Survivance] in Parages, a book, incidentally, that Derrida published twice (1986 and augmented and revised in 2003):

From beginning to end. Let’s start now at the end, the very end, the end of the end, the end of what I shall call for the sake of convenience and without rigor the “second part” of the book. But this second part is “whole,” perfectly autonomous. True, if we accept the entire conventional system of legalities that organizes in literature, the framed unity of the corpus (binding, frame, unity of the title, unity of the author’s name, unity of the contract, registration of copyright, etc.). L’arrêt de mort (in each of its versions) is a single book, signed by a single author, and made of two narratives, two récits, in the first person, following a certain order and so forth . . . Parages, p. 162

Here is the second passage, a passage that in my view effectively pits textuality against legal norms that produce single books with titles and names:

A text that is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, differential traces. Thus the text overruns all limits assigned to it . . . all the limits , everything that was to be set up in opposition to writing (speech, life, the world, the real history, and what not, every field of reference). 110-111.

In The Post Card, a book that Derrida says he didn’t write (3), not that anyone else wrote it either, he regularly and necessarily, he says, demarcates, limits the flow of textuality, an organized scene of reading certain passages from published books. See note 15 below.

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corrosion, corrosion produced by bibliographical logic that limits, forgets, neglects,

consigns to oblivion data, effects that are structurally excluded from whatever is

said, assumed, or taken to survive through publication. Editing and translating often

produce the same kinds of corrision effects, often paraadoxically in an effort to

repair a text. Derrida’s works into English sometimes supply as much information

about each version of a text while others think that the most recent renders others

obsolete, the last version being the supposedly definitive version.23 This

bibliographic, editorial, and translative logic glosses over—renders unreadable and

even impossible to mourn, as in “you need not have read that so I don’t need to tell

you about what you’re missing”--Derrida’s own self-corroding (re)publication

practices and his idosyncratic bibliographic practices, his frequent omissions of

bibliographic information both in the body of his text and in his footnotes, omissions

which are sometimes filled in by his English translators, sometimes not, as well as

his attention to the titles of published works (Parages) and the corruption of titles,

23 Should Bass’s translation of The Post Card be consulted with James Hulbert’s all but forgotten fragmentary translation of a draft of what was later published as “To Speculate—On ‘Freud’” in The Post Card? See Jacques Derrida, “Coming into One’s Own,” trans. James Hulbert, Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) 114-48. Hulbert’s headnote, reads as follows: “Coming into One’s Own,” which treats a portion of the second chapter of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is three steps removed form being “a text by Jacques Derrida.”  It is part of a much longer work in progress (as yet untitled) that studies Beyond the Pleasure Principle chapter by chapter, often line by line.  Because of limitations of space, this section has been abridged by more than one third: cuts have ben made in almost every paragraph, and many paragraphs have been omitted entirely.  . . . I have made the cuts, occasionally juggled sentences, dividing the text into sections, and supplied all the titles, as part of this effort of translation.  All notes are translator’s notes, unless otherwise indicated. Hulbert’s translation has gone m.i.a. perhaps because Derrida does provide a headnote to “To Speculate—on “Freud” in The Post Card in which he would have cited it, as does when citing prior publications in headnotes to “Le facteur de la vérité” and “Du Tout.”

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or use of “faux-titres,” perhaps better called “feu-titres” or even “fou-titres.”24

(Curiously, Derrida drops the accent aigu from the “E” in the title of Lacan’s Écrits in

La Post Carte postale, spelling it as Ecrits. See, for example, 484n9. Alan Bass

follows suit in his translation.) Moreover, this logic glosses over Derrida’s notes

which promise future publications, promises that Derrida sometimes fulfilled and

sometimes did not.

What I am calling the reshelving or archival operations of posthumography

delimit a given text as a single text, an unpublished, published, or republished text in

order to render it readable, permitting what Derrida often called an “internal

reading” or the demarcation of a scene of reading that stores the not yet read and

24 Derrida’s practice of using puncutation in the form of ellipses--“faux-tires,” of “half titles” in The Post Card. Peggy Kamuf has a footnote on "faux-titres" in Derrida’s Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 198) 94 n. 16: “In typography, a ‘faux-titre’ is a half title or bastard title. (Trans.)” Transliterated into English, “faux-titre” means “false title.” In The Post Card, Derrida repeatedly uses “faux-titres,” notably referring to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as “Beyond . . . .” Derrida also ccsionally shortens the title of the third chapter of The Post Card to its first word, “facteur”: “They intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme” (222). Derrida similarly refers and to his own chapter “Speculations on ‘Freud’” as “doubtless the book will be called Legs de Freud,” 52. When left untranslated in the English translation, the French word Legs [legacies] becomes a half-title within the title “Legacies of ‘Freud.’” “Freud’s Legacy,” the subtitle of he second section of the second chapter, “To Speculate—On ‘Freud’,” is mentioned several times in “Envois” as if it were the title of the second chapter, and the second section “Freud’s Legacy,”of the second chapter, begins with a comment about “The title of this chapter is a deliberately corrupt citation, which doubtless will have been recognized. The expression “Freud’s legacy [legs de Freud]” is often encountered in the writings of Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Grandoo. Naturally I leave the reader as judge of what is going on in this corruption” (292). For similar examples in which Derrida retitles sections of The Post Card, see “I’m rereading my Legacy, what a tangle,” 248; “I am trying a new to work on my legacy and on this accursed preface” (158), the referent of “this preface” being the nearly three hundred page long “Envois”; and “this preface” later characterized a “kind of false preface” (179). Like the “fake lectures” he describes Freud as having written in “Telepathy.” See also “Title (to be specified)” in Parages, op cit.

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appears to guarantee that what is “to be” read has always already been sent.25

These biobibliopolitical questions are also psychoanalytic questions as they are

irreducible in advance to a so-called ethics of reading, however, as if one could

decide what reading carefully was and what carelessly was, as one could ever do

justice by reading everything. Posthumographic reading, like all reading, is

necessarily “err-responsible.” Since it is an archival or reshelving operation

according to bibliographical norms publication, it involves omissions of information,

not limited to “editorial data,”26 that do not default to the staus of a clue, evidence,

symptom, detail and do not have the significance Derrida accords Freud’s omission,

in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of Socrates (Post Card, 344), Lacan’s omission of

stories by Poe other or Lacan’s omission of Marie Bonaparte, Paul de Man’s

omission of two words from a quotation from Rousseau that Derrida discusses in

“Typewriter Ribbon, Ink (2),” and so on on.”27

25 For the phrase “internal reading,” see, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions” in The Truth in Painting trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 255- 382; to 329-331, and 361; and see also “a purely internal reading . . . internal and external reading . . . this very border would have to be considered” “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink (2),” op cit, 285. In “To Do Justice to Freud,” Derrida asks “Is an internal reading possible?” (101).26 Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans Beverly Bie Brahic, (New York: Columbia University, 2008), 61.27 See Derrida’s charge that Marie Bonaparte and her reference to “Das ‘Unheimlich’”) was “--omitted by the Seminar--” of Lacan, Post Card, 460. See also Derrida’s comments on an omission in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “Freud omits the scene of the text . . . In this great omission . . . To omit Socrates when one writes is not to omit just anything or anyone . . . If Freud in his turn erases Socrates . . . .” (PC, 374). And see “Why does he cut the sentence, mutilating or dismembering it in this way, and in such an apparently arbitrary fashion”; “Why did de Man forget, omit, or efface those two words . . ?; “de Man’s omission of the two little words,” in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” op cit, 277–360; 318; 321; 339.

23

The kinds of omissions, or self-corroding effects of publication and what surives

to be read, normally or otherwise, I attend to in Derrida’s works are idiosyncratic

because they are errors, self-cremations that do not amount to self-incriminations,

but are more like quasi-illegal driving that sometimes crosses the line.28 These

omissions involve the ways in which Derrida preps a published work for reading,

and hence shelves what is not to be read, what can be skipped, what is insignificant,

what is effectively invisible; these omissions of information related translations and

publications may be likened to wounds, perhaps just scratches, that have been

covered up, bandaged, hence repressed. But even if they have been repressed, the

do not necessarily fall in line with repetition compulsion, the death drive, the

uncanny fort-da, chance, destiny, and so on, not that any of those terms is unified or

definable. Thus, I will not be writing a Psychopathology of Derrida’s Everyday Life.

Posthumography has a kind of priority mail status, a kind of a-priority mail status

“within” what Derrida calls the postal network, a status that permits us to take a

detour, follow a pathway off the beaten track, and rephrase Derrida’s Heideggerian

28 Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Invention of the Other” on illegality and see “The Retrait of Metaphor” on skidding in Psyche: Invention of the Other, Vol 1., op cit., 1; 49-50. Among Derrida’s numerous references to driving, see “Who is driving? Doesn’t it really look like a historical vehicle? A gondola? No, except Plato is playing gondolier, perched in the back, looking away in front of him the way one guides the blind. He is showing the direction” The Post Card, 46 and “By accident, and sometimes on the brink of an accident, I find myself writing without seeing.  Not with my eyes closed, to be sure, but open an disoriented in the night; or else during the day, my eyes fixed on something else, while looking elsewhere, in front of me, for example, when at the wheel:  I then scribble with my right hand a few squiggly lines on a piece of paper attached to the dashboard or lying on the seat beside me.  Sometimes, still without seeing, on the steering wheel itself. These notations—unreadable graffiti—are for

memory; one would later think to be a ciphered writing.” Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.  Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 3.

24

question “is there death as such?” as a question of whether, for Derrida, the letter is

always sent, even if it does not always arrive at its destination, whether it is always

given even if never received, left unclaimed, whether it is always in the mail on the

way whether or not there is a sender to return to whom one could return it, whether

it is sent quasi-automatically rather than by an organic being, whether sending

always has priority over whatever is sent, even if the sent is a residue that amounts

to nothing, that “adds nothing,” whether the letter rests “en souffrance”

(undelivered), whether the letter is divisibile or not, whether the letter is a post card

or not, whether the letter is a dead or living letter, whether the letter is always sent

“c/o,” in care [Sorge] of, or sometimes “in care-less-ness.”29

Burning by Heart: What Remains to be Read(?) and for Whom?

This question I have just raised about whether sending [schicken] has priority

over the letter’s address under the heading of the word posthumography, is not only

a question about repetition. It is a question of whether, on the one hand, reading or

rereading is guaranteed by repetition, insured as it were, even before it is dipatched,

29 See “A priori,” Post Card, 457 and “dead too soon” Post Card, , 456. See Derrida’s note on Heidegger and “Shuldigsein [being guilty]” which ends “As concerns referring Being and Time to The Genealogy of Morals in the question of Schuldigsein—I will attempt it elsewhere (264n10).” On the Postal network and the a priori, see Derrida’s rephrasing of Heidegger’s question about death as such in The Beast and the Sovereign Vol 2, “Is death merely the end of life? Death as such? Is there ever, moreover, death as such? If I said “I am going to die living [mourir vivant],” what would you have to understand? That I want to die living? Or that I want above all not to die living, not to die in my lifetime? Derrida, “Fourth Session, January 23, 2003,” The Beast and the Sovereign Vol 2, 93 (145). See also Derrida, Aporias: Dying--awaiting (one Another At) the "limits of Truth" (mourir--s'attendre Aux "limites de la Vâeritâe") Trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). On “adds nothing,” see the “REnd note” at the end of this article.

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always given back, the “envoi” always already backed up, copied, deposited in vault

when sent, such that publishing can become of a form of destruction rather than

preservation, or, on the other hand, such that what Derrida calls the “origin of the

post card” (59-60) means one may only burn after reading.30 In the “Envois” in The

Post Card, Derrida asserts that reading is always already rereading and reroutes

rereading through a Freudian post office to burning, memory, and repetition:

But in fact, yes, had understood my order or my prayer, the demand of the

first letter: “burn everything,” understood it so well that you told me you

copied over (“I am burning, stupid impression of being faithful, neverthelss

kept several simulacra, etc.,” isn’t that it?), in your writing, and in pencil, the

words of that first letter (not the others). Another way of saying that you

reread it, no? which is what one begins by doing when one reads, even for the

first time, repetition, memory, etc. I love you by heart, there between the

parentheses or quotation marks, such is the origin of the post card.31

30 See “It now resembles a rebroadcast, a sinister play-back (but give ear closely, come near to my lips) and while writing you I henceforth know what I am sending to the fire, what I am letting appear and what you give me back even before receiving it. Back could have been orchestrated all of this starting from the title: the back of Socrates and of the card: all the dossiers that I have bound, the feed-back, the play-back, the returns to sender, etc., our tape-recorders, our phantom cassettes” (225)31 Post Card 59-60. See also Derrida’s comments on memory, the proper name, and “the mechanics of the ‘by heart’” in “The Night Watch (“over the book of himself’)” in Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts Ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,,2013), 97. Derrida writes something similar about learning by heart in “Play: From Pharmakon to the Letter,” the last section of “Plato’s Parmacy” in Dissemination. Ventriloquizing someone who stammers or whose reception comes with interference (puncutation marks indicating pauses or ellipses), Derrida writes:

One still has to take note of this. And to finish that Second Letter: “. . . Consider these facts and take care lest you sometime come to repent of having now unwisely published. It is a very great safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing. . . . What are now called his . . . Sokratous estin kalou kai

26

The origin of the post card consists of words placed in a space by quotation marks

and parentheses (they are identical puncutation marks in French), words already

cited, iterable, and so on. But are they also words that have been redeemed or

words that can always be redeemed, that are to be redeemed because they have by

heart, the origin being a love letter? Even if the letter cannot be amortized, as

Derrida insists it cannot, can the letter be “morgue-aged,” a word I coin at the risk of

sounding facetious; that is, can the letter credited by virtue of having been stored

before any sorting, an partition, even if what is stored cannot be retireved, restored,

revived, or reanimated? Is the heart that learns a bleeding heart? a heart that never

stops bleedingm, that just keeps hemmorgueing?

These questions about the priority of sending in Derrida’s postal network can be

productively addressed, I think, if we close reading a shelving operation Derrida

performs on the contents of The Post Card the first page. Echoing the first sentence

of Dissemination (“This will therefore not have been a book”), Derrida begins the

“Envois” writing: “You might read these envois as the preface to a book I have not

written” (3). 32 Derrida goes on to draw distinction between the last three parts of

the book, preserve, and the the first part, “Envois,” destroyed. Derrida binds the

neou gegonots . . . are the work of a Socrates embellished and modernized. Farewell and believe. Read this letter now at once many times and burn it . . . . I hope this one won’t get lost. Quick, a duplicate . . . graphite . . . carbon . . .

reread this letter . . . burn it. Il y a là cendre. And now to distinguish between two repetitions.” --, 170-71

Derrida repeats the same passage from Dissemination in Cinders (48).

32 Derrida repeats the passage in the “Envois” (3) from The Post Card cited above in Cinders twice, on two successive pages. “Surviving it, being destined to this sur-vival, to this excess over present life, this œuvre as trace implies from the outset the structure of this sur-vival.”

27

heterography of The Post Card, the second chapter of which Derrida calls a

“fragment” (292) he “extracted from a seminar” (PC, 259n1): and the last two

chapters previously published, by dividing the book into two parts, in other words:

“The three last parts of the present work, “To Speculate—on ‘Freud,’” “Le facteur de

la vérité,” “Du tout” are all different by virtue of their length, their circumstance or

pretext, their manner and their dates. But they preserve the memory of this project,

occasionally even exhibit it (3).” Derrida continues: “As for the “Envois”

themselves, I do not know if their reading is bearable. You might consider them, if

you really wish to, as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence.

Destroyed by fire or by that which figuratively takes its place, more certain of

leaving what I like to call the tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are

(s’il y a là cendre)” (PC, 3). Derrida can thereby go on to say in the “Envois” both

“burn everything, forget everything” and “publish everything” while occasionally

deconstructing the opposition between burning and publishing.33 Derrida reshelves

the book’s table of contents (given on p. 551 in la carte postale but m.i.a. in the

English translation) as a kind of preface to a book “not written” but that Derrida

nevertheless dispatches the book by prepping it, by publishing only a selection of

envois that were “spared or if you prefer ‘saved’ (I already hear murmured

‘registered,’ as is said for a kind of receipt)” (3). Does Derrida’s division of The Post

Card’s four parts into two mean that sending is a p/repetition, as it were? Is

sending a priori? Has sending been sent, as it were, before any preface, even if that

preface is inside the text rather than a paratext, before the repetition that makes

33 The Post Card, 23; 43; 171; 176; 180.

28

reading always rereading? Does sending what has been sent guarantee, as I

suggested above, that what is “to be” read precedes any burning of what is to be

reread, even if what is “to be” read is not destined, not fated, not archivable, but

always “to come,” even if there is no one (even no machine or quasi-human, quasi-

machine) to read it or who will know how to read it when it arrives? Is the sending

of the letter a given, always a gift that may be gone from the start and thus never

given? Is there a difference between sending a letter and publishing a book?

Derrida says he does not think the distinction between letters and post cards to be a

rigorous one, and he compares post cards to identity cards, as if anticipating

machine-readable passports.34 If The Post Card will not have been a book (3)

despite its having been published, does Derrida effectively shelves what is “to be”

read by rendering publications as marked playing cards or Tarot cards which he

reshuffles and then deals from a stacked deck in order to delimit what is to be read

or to be considered read, what bets are to be placed, whose fortune told?

Fort : Da, Can’t You See I’m Burning?35

Before proceeding to discuss “For the Love of Lacan” and The Beast and the

Sovereign, Vol. 2, I want to make two general points about the kind of

posthumographic reading Derrida does of Lacan. Both points concern what is to be

read in relation to what remains, whose remains, “remains” understood both in the

34 See “Imagine a city, a State in which identity cards were post cards. No more possible resistance. There are already checks photographs. All of this is not so far off. With the progress of the post the State police has always gained ground,” The Post Card, 37.35 I follow Derrida’s silent change from “Fort / Da” to Fort : Da” on page of The Post Card, 321.

29

biological of a coorpse or cremains and in the bibiliographic sense of papers left to

be read either unpublished or published. First, the remains in both sense involve

the survival a reading practice like psychoanlaysis or deconstruction in relation to

the proper name. As Derrida writes of Freud, “that he hoped for this survival of

psychoanalysis is probable, but in his name, survival on the condition of his name:

by virtue of which he says that he survives it as the proper place of the name.”36

Deconstruction was often pronounced dead during Derrida’s lifetime, but the

survival of deconstruction under Derrida’s name is not my concern here.37 Rather I

am concerned with the erasure and rephrasing of aa question about Derrida and

psychoanalysis that did not survive, a question that was also to be a title of a

colloquium organized by René Major and the title of the published conference

proceedings, namely, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?”38 The proposed title

the colloquium, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?,” was replaced by the title

Lacan avec les philosophes, and the conference proceedings were published as a

book bearing that same Lacan avec les philosophes. Derrida tells this story in the

Annexes [appendices] to Lacan avec les philosophes, a post-script entitled “Après

Tout: Les Chance du College.” In the “For the Love of Lacan” in the republished

version in Resistances to Psychoanalysis, Derrida does not tell this story but twice

refers his reader headnote and again in the third endnote to the “Annexes” [my

36 The Post Card, 334. 37 See, for example, Mitchell Stephens, “Jacques Derrida,” New York Times Magazine January 23, 1994, 22-25.38 “For the Love of Lacan,” in Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 39-69; to 50-51 was written and published three years before Archive Fever (1994) but published again in Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996) of two years after Archive Fever? (These are the French publication dates.)

30

emphasis ] of Lacan avec les philosophes, the publication in which “Love Lacan” first

appeared. Derrida both archives and “X-s” out, as it were , the story he to

concerning the erasure of his name in the two notes to “Love Lacan”, the story he

does not retell but leaves to waiting be told to the reader who takes up Derrida’s

invitation to consult the postscript. More crucially, Derrida revises the suppressed

question of the collouquim title “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?” in “Love

Lacan” by taking out the proper name alotogther. Derrida’s “last point” (69) is that

the “question of knowing whether or not there is some psychoanalysis—X-ian, his,

yours, mine that the degree—that can hold up or that is coming, this incalcaluable,

unimaginable, unaccountable, unattribuable question is displaced to the degree that

the analytic siutation, and thus the analytic institution, is deconstructed, as if by

itself, without deconstruction or deconstructive project” (69). Ordinarily, one would

not read the the letter “X” in the sentence above. One one would simply pass over it

as a variable for which any proper name could be substituted and move on. I will

take the letter in the “word” “X-ian” (and Derrida’s use of the phrase “X without X”)

to be the something like a crux, survival of psychoanalysis under someone’s name,

turning on a letter, a letter that is neither a proper name nor the lack of one. The

letter “X” in “X-ian,” the substitution of a letter for a proper name, any proper name,

turned into an adjective becomes something to be glossed by virtue of the relatively

“ex”terior paratextual space in the endnotes of “Love Lacan.”39

39 I will unfold and these quasi- cruxes by glossing them, which is perhaps not the same thing as reading them. I do not consider the distinction between glossing and reading to be rigorous because “to gloss” is a kind of anthiteical word in Freud’s sense; on the one hand, it secondary to reading, a varitation of annotation, a paratext that sometimes appears on the margins of a page that unveils and makes a given text’s opacities at least relatively transparent; on the other hand, one may

31

My second point regarding reading Derrida’s Post Card under the heading of

posthumography concerns the way does Derrida tends to separate the two

meanings of “remains” I noted above into bios and biblios, thereby keepinge seprate

from bibliopolitics. In a sentence I cited above from The Post Card, Derrida writes,

“Those who remain will not know how to read.” I take it that “those who remain”

means “those who survive.” 40 In The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 2, however,

Derrida asks a question about the remains of those who will have been survived by

others:

What is the other—What is the other—or what are others—going to make of

me when, after the distancing step [pas] of the passing [trépas], after this

passage, when I am past, when I have passed, when I am departed, deceased,

passed away, gone, absolutely without defense, disarmed, in their hands, i.e.,

as they say, so to speak, dead.” The other appears to me as the other as such,

qua he, she, or they who might survive me, survive my decease and then

proceed as they wish, sovereignly, and sovereignly have at my disposal the

future of my remains, if there are any. . . .”

The human remains are very much a political question for Derrida. In the ninth

session of the Beast and the Sovreign Vol 2, Derrida discusses the disposition of the

“gloss over,” that is miss something crucial in the text and let it remain out of sight, or erhaps hiding in plain sight. Moreover, glossing may serve reading, but any services rendered by glosses will be difificult to settle because since the borders between reading and ronreading as well as between reading and unreading are not givens.

40 The Post Card, 249.

32

corpse as a biopolitical question he relates to the democracy to come. I quote at

length:

Would not the democracy to come gain by opening still wider the spectrum

of possible choices? For one can not indeed imagine and see coming another

epoch of humanity in which, tomorrow, one would no longer deal with

corpses either by cremation or by inhumation, either by earth or by fire?

Would not the democracy to come gain by opening still wider the spectrum

of possible choices? Will one not invent unheard-of techniques, fitted like

their predecessors to the dictatorial power of a phantasm as well as to

technical possibilities and which would then deliver them over corpses, if

there still are any, neither to the subsoil of humus, nor to fire of heaven or

hell? In this future, with these other ways of treating the corpse, if there still

are any, today’s institutions, today’s orders, would appear as vestiges,

anachronistic orders or sects of a new modern Middle Ages. People would

speak of cremators and the inhumers . . . as oddities that were both

unheimlich and dated, as archaic curiosities for historians or anthropologists

of death. . . .You have to be to dream. 233 (326).

Derrida limits the political question about the disposal of human remains to two (he

forgets burial at sea and cryogenics, but no matter). Although Derrida also

discusses the survivance, living on of a published work, recalling the title of an essay

published in Parages, and as living death, also under the heading of the phantasm,

he does not examine either the ways the written remains, or cremains, are stored or

33

question the politics of their storage.41 Is there no such thing as a living will when it

comes to the survivance of one’s papers? Does the specificty of eco-destruction of a

given support or subjectile not matter?

Just Saying

What wouldn’t Derrida have said!

41 Following Derrida’s practice of citing numerous passages Lacan in footnotes to “Le facteur de la vérité” without comment, I offer these passages on survivance of the book and the corpse from The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2: In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe. . . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated, filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. (130)The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the living and the dead. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130)Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Körper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or the State, of the so-called dead boy, what we call a corpse.,. . . not just in the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . .deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)

34

What will he not have said!

This is an exclamation, not a question . . .

In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida tells two anecdotes about the two times he

met Jacques Lacan in person: “I remark that the only two times we met and spoke

briefly one with the other, it was a question of death between us, and first of all from

Lacan’s mouth. In Baltimore, for example, he spoke to me of way in which he

thought he would be read, in particular by me, after his death.”42 Furthermore,

Derrida devotes a paragraph summarizing his relation to Lacan as one of death:

So there was a question between us of death; it was especially a question of

death. I will say even only of the death of one of us, as it is with or chez all

those who love each other. Or rather he spoke about it, he aloe, since for my

part I never breathed a word about it. He spoke, alone, about our death,

about his death that would not fail to arrive, and about the death or rather

the dead one that, according to him, I was playing.43

Will how we read The Post Card, a text to which Derrida returns in “Love Lacan,”

have changed now that its author is dead, in the ordinary sense of the word?44 Can

42 “For the Love of Lacan,” in Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 39-69; to 50-51. I will hereafter frequently shorten the title to “Love Lacan.”

43 Ibid, 52.44 On the two editions of Parages, 1986 and 2003, see footnote 2 above. A number of essays Derrida wrote on the occasion of the death of a friend were gathered together in an book, first published in English as The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). On the many paratextual oddities of The Work of Mourning, see Richard Burt, "Putting Your Papers in Order: The Matter of Kierkegaard’s Writing Desk, Goethe’s Files, and Derrida’s Paper Machine, or the Philology and Philosophy of Publishing After Death," Rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010).

35

we read it? Or can we gloss what remains of its burning, its ashes, its considers,

“gloss” being a synonym for luster and derived from Old English, Scandiavanian, and

Icelandic words for flame and glow? Does reading mean glossing over the question

of glossing?45

So You Say

In response to this question, let me cite two passages in The Post Card, both of

which concern and a Lacanian reading of Derrida Lacan’s reading of Derrida that

will help us begin glossing what I have called quasi-cruxes. The passage from the

Post . . . I will cite first will recall Derrida’s exclamations, not questions, in “Love

Lacan” about what Lacan will or would have said or not have said. This passage

concerns Lacan and Derrida did (not) saying about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined

Letter in the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” and in “Le facteur de la vérité.” The

passage is remarkable not only for the absence of bibliographical references but for

about who said what but for having an anonymous third party tell this story about

who meant to say what according to someone who goes mentioned and is therefore

not exactly saying anything in the future anterior in the conditional:

45 Although gloss is a shimmer or shine in Germanic languages, a more likely source historically for the word in the sense of "elaborate, define." “Glossa” means "tongue" in Greek, and then passes to Latin and Romance languages to mean, initially, a hard word and then the explanation one puts in the margin to elucidate it.  It enters English first as "gloze" then changes to gloss mid 16th century (see the OED, s.v. gloss).  This sense is no doubt primary--although phrases like "gloss over" probably fudge the difference.  Fortuitously, I think this brings us to the distances between glossing and reading. I thank Jacob Riley and William West for drawing my attention to the etymology of gloss.

36

Lacan, in truth, meant to say what I said, under the heading of dissemination.

What next! As for me, all the while apparently speaking of dissemination, I

reconstituted this word and therefore into a destination. In other words, if it

can be put thus, Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I am

only doing what he says he is doing. And there you are, the trick has been

played, destination is back in my hand and “dissemination” is reversed into

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.46

Who is speaking here in this envoi? Derrida? Maybe. Why is “dessimination” put in

scare quotes? The speaker’s analogy between three card monte and what was said

about Derrida merely repeating Lacan clearly serves to imply that a shell game has

been unjustly played on Derrida’s texts / lectures about Lacan: “Lacan already

meant what I will have said, and myself I am only doing what he says he is doing.”

Derrida has been falsely said (but said by whom?) to have said what Lacan meant to

have said then shrink-wrapped into one of three cards and entered into play in a

game which Derrida will always lose. But Derrida does not say that. Is Derrida

rigging the reading of what is still to be read, not just defensively and preemptively

having someone voice a complaint about an injustice done—by who knows whom--

to Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter?”

In “For the Love of Lacan,” a text that Derrida wrote, as I have said, after Lacan

was dead, Derrida returns to the other passage in The Post Card I mentioned above,

46 Op cit, 151.

37

a passage which Derrida retells a story about Lacan misreading Derrida: “Lacan

made a compulsive blunder; he said that he thought I was in analysis . . . The thing

has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card (202-04).”47 Derrida

spares the reader the task of rereading it but also allows any reader to stop reading

“Love Lacan” and go to the Post . . . and reread it. Yet if the reader were to go to

pages 202-04 of the Post . . . he or she would find that Derrida does not quote

Lacan’s words when discussing what Lacan mistakenly said about Derrida was in

analysis. See for yourselves. Only very near the end of “Love Lacan” does Derrida

deliver the story along with the quotation from Lacan he left out of The Post Card:

“In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever withdrawn

from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the syntax and the

reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about whom I did not know that

–to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not know that he was in analysis—

about whom I did not know that he was in analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis

—his name is Jacques Derrida, who has written a preface to this Verbier.”48 We will

return to this passage later and attend several times in a necessarily paratactic

fashion to Derrida’s retellings of this story. For now, I wish only to say that in “Love

Lacan,” Derrida retells the anecdote he had already told before in the Post . . . in a

way that makes it fully readable. Only in this later text, “For the Love of Lacan,” does

47 Op cit, 68. 48 Ibid, 68. “Verbier” is translated in English as “magic word.” Aubier-Flammirion is the name of the press that published Abraham and Torok’s Cryptonymie. Lacan refers here to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s Cryptonymie: Le verbier de L’Homme aux translated as The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans Nicholas Rand, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

38

Derrida retrieve Lacan’s words from the archive and cite them. Having retrieved

them, however, Derrida does not read them. Nor does he quote Lacan’s next

sentence in which Lacan reads Derrida’s preface “Fors” as evidence for Lacan’s

supposition, not declaration, that Derrida is in analysis. Does it matter that to a

reading of “For the Love of Lacan” that Derrida returned to what Lacan said about

him and to what Derrida said about Lacan in nearly twenty years earlier, by

Derrida’s count, in The Post Card, after Lacan died? Does the media Derrida

references with respect to the archive in “Love Lacan,” the tape recorders in front of

him recording what he says as he speaks, matter in relation to Lacan’s death the way

the fax matters to Derrida when discussing Freud’s reliance on letters in Archive

Fever?49

Say again?

As I have said, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” for a colloquium on Lacan organized

and held after Lacan was dead, and “Love Lacan” was published first as an article in

Lacan avec les philosophes (1991) and subsequently as the second chapter of

Derrida’s book, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996). The three sentences with

which I began the present essay paraphrase the first three sentences of “Love

Lacan.” These sentences of “Love Lacan” are set off typographically on the page as

three different lines:

What wouldn’t Lacan have said!

What will he not have said!

49 See Derrida’s aside: “(look at the tape recorders that are in this room),” op cit, 40.

39

This is an exclamation, not a question . . . .50

Derrida repeats the phrase three times, the second inverting exactly the first, and on

the same page just after the first paragraph: “What will Lacan not have said! What

wouldn’t he have said!” This second, inverted repetition of the first two sentences,

printed continuously on the page rather than broken into two separate lines as the

first two sentences are. Derrida exclaims the nearly the same words a third time

near the end of the section Derrida calls the “third protocol”: “what would Lacan

have said or not have said!”51

As I have already said more than once, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” after Lacan

died, and Derrida sends off “Love Lacan” as if by he, Derrida, were already dead,

already taking Lacan place, as if looking to how he, Derrida, will be read after his

death. In this case, however, Derrida significantly leaving out the first of Derrida’s

first two sentences about Lacan and the second of the second two: “What will I not

have said today!”52 Derrida retains only the negative formulation for himself, allows

only what he will not have said, not what he will have said. He thereby leaves, as if

shut, access to the exclamation of what he will or would have said today by erasing

the published half of his archive in the form of an article.

JustUs

I must you to wait patiently for just a bit longer before we return to the passages

in the Post . . . I cited and attend further to these stylistic repetitions concerning

50 Ibid., 39.51 Ibid., 62. 52 Ibid., 39; 69.

40

what will or wouldn’t have been said or not said, Derrida’s insistence that they are

exclamations, not questions, and Derrida’s subtle but deliberate different

rephrasings of the opening two lines, his division of Lacan and his division of

himself from Lacan. For the moment, let me note a similar stylistic repetition to

which we will need to attend alongside, or “with” the those I have just cited above:

Derrida uses the words “I say good luck” twice, although he punctuates them

differently:

to those who are waiting for me to take a position [“saying Lacan is right or

doing right by Lacan”] so they can reach a decision [arreter leur judgment], I

say, “Good luck.”53

And:

I say good luck to any narrator who would try to know what was said and

written by whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not have

said! 54

Derrida’s repetition of the words “I say good luck” invert the order of Derrida’s

repetition of what Lacan and Derrida would or would not have said. Two inverted

repetitions bind, a word I use advisedly since Derrida uses it when discussing the

publication of Lacan’s Écrits in “Love Lacan,” these repetitions bind Derrida to Lacan

in relation to their reading and publications: in the first set of repetitions, Derrida

takes Lacan’s place (at the end of the essay, after Lacan takes his place a second time

53 Ibid, 58.54 Ibid, 62.

41

in reverse) as someone who will or would not have said in one case and Lacan takes

the place Derrida had earlier assigned himself in the second instance.55

In binding these two repetitions together within the same sentence, Derrida

makes the question of what Lacan or Derrida has or hasn’t said under the heading of

the archive (and under the subheading of “death”).56 If we cite the lines preceding

Derrida repeats the lines “what will Lacan not have said today!” at the end of a

discussion of the archive:

The future of Lacanian thought as it moves beyond the Écrits is all the more

difficult in that Lacan was an incomparable listener and his discursive

machine was one of such sensitivity that everything could be inscribed there

55 Other stylistic repetitions are equally deliberate. In The Post Card, one finds similar stylistic repetitions such as “To be continued (la séance continue)”; 36; 190, 320, 337, 362, 376, 409, 451. [add other examples to speculate on Freud] Derrida also uses nearly the same word to describe his reading practice in The Post Card and “Love Lacan.” For one example, see “extremely careful and slow, bringing micrological refinement “For the Love of Lacan” (op cit, 44); and “microscopic examination” (ibid., 45). Derrida uses frequently uses “I have said” and variations on the phrase customarilty to be found in academic prose, none of which are necessarily mean anything but all of which nevertheless carry a charge, however small, given the repetitions of phrases about what Lacan and Derrida “said.” These repetitions are beyond the limits of my capacity to gloss. Derrida sometimes reduces the problem of distinguishing between glossing and reading or between reading and not reading to effects that he has noticed and those that haven’t yet been noticed but are waiting to be noticed. See, for example, “I will say the same the same things I have deliberately left out of this defense, works such as Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche or la carte postale, which each it its own what, nevertheless extend a reading (of Freud, Nietzsche, and some others) begun at an earlier stage, the deconstruction of a certain hermeneutics as well as the theorization of a the signifier and the letter with its authority and institutional power . . . to locate their effects where I could spot them—but these effects are everywhere, even where they remain unnoticed.” “Punctuations,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plu & Others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 124. Derrida’s distinction effectively shelves his readings under the heading of his autobiography, or, in this essay, under the heading of an apologia pro sua vita.

56 62, 66.

42

with finesse or discretion. (This is quite right; who doesn’t try to do the

same?) But, what is more, it is inscribed there in the spoken words of a

seminar that, by giving rise to numerous stenotyped or tape-recording

archivings, will have fallen prey not only to the problem of rights . . . but also

to all the problems posed by delays in publishing and of an editing—in the

American sense—that was of the most active sort. Since all of these things

hang by a hair, since the stakes get decided in a word, an ellipsis, a verbal

modality, conditional or future anterior, especially when one knows Lacan’s

rhetoric, I say good luck to any narrator who would try to know what was

said and written by whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not

have said!57

As we shall see, Derrida similar situates his comment about what he will not have

said in relation to the “problem of the archive.”58

In “Love Lacan,” Derrida places the “just us” of saying or not saying or saying you

are not sure you will say about the dead (who include the living, who always dead,

Derrida says, when you speak for them) is placed under the title “love,” a title that is

of course reversible, about loving Lacan and what Lacan loved. Derrida does not

comment in the essay on “love” and whether he will say that he and Lacan loved

each other more marks the limit of what can or can not have been said by Derrida in

“Love Lacan,” and by extension about what each of the said about the other when

57 The same sorts of things happens to Derrida’s published seminars. See Richard Burt, “Putting Your Papers in Order,” op cit.

58 Ibid., 43.

43

they were both alive and what Derrida still says about Lacan now that Lacan is dead.

Lacan’s archivization the future reading of Lacan, or anyone else, as the archive is a

question of the future, not the past, in Archive Fever.59

Après tout: ‘Pas’ “Du tout”

In order to address these broader questions, let us attempt to grasp more exactly

what motivates them, especially Derrida’s turn to the archive, by proceeding in an X-

centric manner now to gloss another set of cruxes, with respect the way Derrida

makes reading Lacan a question of the archive, in the last chapter of The Post Card,

“Du tout,” and parentheses in a passage in “Love Lacan” the end of the sometimes

forgotten last chapter “Du tout,” left untranslated as is “Le facteur de la vérité.”60

First, let me pause to gloss the title “Du tout.” In The Post Card, Derrida several

places talks about the Paratext as a book and its paratexts in different ways, as not a

book, as a book with a false preface, as a book with four chapters, of “Facteur” as an

appendix.61 At one point, Derrida goes so far as enter a chapter of “To Speculate--on

59 In “Love Lacan,” Derrida never actually directly “says” anything about his relationship with Lacan—first he says he “is not sure if” he “will say” that he and Lacan loved each other very much, then he asks if he has not said that they did: “Now, wasn't this a way of saying that I loved and admired him greatly?” Is Derrida saying that he and Lacan did love each other very much without saying so or saying and not saying they did? If so, is Derrida’s manner of not saying just given that Lacan is dead? What is the relation between justice and saying or not saying in Derrida’s lines? (See Derrida’s note on“the undeconstructible injunction of justice” in Specters of Marx, op cit 267, n73.) 60 On the first page of “Love Lacan,” Derrida immediately places his introductory exclamations about Lacan’s saying under the heading of the archive: “To deal with this enigma of the future anterior and the conditional . . . is to deal with the problem of archivization” op. cit, 39-40. 61 You might read these envois as the preface of a book that I have not written” (ibid., 3); “Beyond all else I wanted, . . to make a book” (ibid., 5).

44

‘Freud’” as a paratext even though the chapter is not finished: Of “Seven:

Postscript,” Derrida says that “it resembles another postscript, another codicil, the

postscript or codicil to the entire book this time. . . . This is the end: an appendix that

is as reduced as possible, free, detachable too, a play appendix.”62 The most

anarchivic of Derrida’s remixes of his book is “Du tout,” a chapter that is arguably a

long paratext to Derrida’s discussion of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,”

the “Facteur,” an epitext when published as an article but then turned peritext when

published in The Post Card. Yet Derrida never reads “Du tout” as a paratext. He just

refers to it as one of the “three last parts of the present work.”63 “Du tout” is most

“anarchivically” archival insofar as its inclusion is not motivated, not read as such,

and therefore resembles the “seventh chapter” of The Post Card that “in certain

respects adds nothing.”64

Les mots juste

Rather than catalogue the ways in which Derrida routes Lacan to the archive, I

want to make two points that bear on the quasi-crux, “X-ian.” First, Derrida makes

the titel the condition of the archive. In “Title to Be Specified,” he writes: “the noun

62 Ibid., 387. 63 Ibid, 3. 64 “Title to Be Specified,” in Parages, ed. John Leavey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011) 193-215; to; 386. For an even more curious case, see translator Thomas Dutoit’s note to Derrida’s On the Name : “On the Name compromises three essays . . . the three essays appeared in France as a Collection of three separately bound but matching books published by Editions Galilee. On the Name, the title this book published by Stanford University Press, thus is not a translation of any French book title by Jacques Derrida; it is a name given to what is a hypothetical book in France. The title On the Name would in French be Sur le nom.” “Translating the Name?” in On the Name, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), ix.

45

titleer would signify two things. In Old French, a titleer (titrier]—was a monk

responsible for the archives of a monastery. He was an archivist, the archivist par

excellence, for if every archivist must prevail over the order of titles—how can there

be an archive without a title [pas d’archive sans titre]—what is to be said of the

guardian of titles?”65 I have spoken earlier of Derrida’s use of “faux-tires,” and offer

in a footnote below an example of variations Derrida or a publisher made the title

from a different chapter of Parages.66 Second, translation complicates ableit in

microscopic ways, the philological task of determining what is to be glossed and

how it is to be glossed. I offer an example of the different ways the letter “X”

appears typographically in a passage from Parages on “X without X,” a phrase to

which we will return, in French and in the English translation in the footnote

below.67 I want to pursue the anarchivity of Derrida’s archive as the limit of what

65 Ibid; 198-99; Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986, 219-47; to 227. A ssecond edtion includes Blanchot’s name in the title of the last chapter, “Maurice Blanchot est mort,” Parages, revised and augmented edition, Paris: Galilée, 2003, 267-300. This chapter is nto incuded in Leavey’s translation, ibid.66 In a note, 103, Derrida gives the original title and subtitle of this chapter, first published in English, as “LIVING ON. Border Lines” but does not explain why he dropped the subtitle. See Parages, 1986, 118. In Parages, 2001, the typography appears as “Living On / Border Lines,” 102. In Deconstruction and Criticism, the typography is as follows; “Living On . Borderlines.” (the dot is the middle of the space between “On” and “Border”; it is not a period). The subtitle is dropped from the first page of the essay but then appears as LIVING ON: Border Lines” on 75; 76. In the second edition, the subtitle has been removed from the table of contents and the first page of the essay, 9; 62; 63. If anyone thinks that this kind of micro-philological attention is de facto a waste of time, let him or her consult Derrida’s reading of the differences between the titles in the reverse order of Blanchot’s name and the title “un reçit” in two versions of Blanchot’s Folie due jour [Madness of the Day] in Parages, ibid, 113-123. To be sure, Derrida never paid that kind of attnetion to differences in translations and editions.67 Here are the passages, first in French, and then, the relevant part, in English:Atopie, hypertopie, lieu sans lieu, cette voix narrative en appellee dans le texte du sans qui vient si fréquemment, dans le texte de Blanchot, neutraliser (sans poser, sans nier) un mot, un concept, un terme (X sans X). Sans sans privation ni negativité

46

can ne archived not only to translation and media but to the storage and publication

of Derrida’s texts, including their publishing history, errata, editions, editions,

bindings, copies, and so on.68 Derrida uses the word “anarchivic” in Archive Fever to

mean “the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence”.69 Reading

Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida finds that Freud’s concept of the

“death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say archiviolithic. It will always have

been archive –destroying . . . . Archiviolthic force leaves nothing of its own behind . . .

The death drive is . . . what we will later call mal d’archive, “archive fever.”70

Anarchivity is the radical destruction of the archive and the remains of what can

never be archived, the ash of the archive.

By unfolding, carefully and patiently some specific quasi-cruxes in Derrida’s

various archiving of his publications related to The Post Card, we may grasp how the

question of reading Derrida now, after his death, is also a question of the anarchivity

ni manqué (sans sans “sans”) don’t j’ai tenté d’analyser a nécessité dans Le “sans” de la coupure pure et dans Pas. . . . “Lieu sans lieu”, nous l’avons lu, et voici maintenant “à distance sans distance” . . . .“Survivre,” Parages, ibid, 151 A word, a concept, a term (x-less x): without (or “-less”), without privation or negativity or lack (“without” without without, less-less “-less”)l the necessity of which I have tried to analyze in “The Sans of the Pure Cut” and “Pace Not(s).” “Living On,” Parages, ibid, 103-215; to 132-33. Derrida references Parages in relation to the phrase In this graphics desire is without “without,” is a without without without” in “To Speculate on Freud”: “9. A Cf. Pas and Le Paeregon in La Veritie en peinture. [The phrase here is “un sans snas sans.]” See note 9, p. .

68 On Derrida’s interest in the archive and the shift from print to electronic media, see Richard Burt, "Life Supports: 'Paperless' People, the New Media Archive, and the Hold of Reading," in New Formations special issue on "Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net," eds. Nicholas Toburn and Says May. Forthcoming, 2013.69 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans, Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998), 7.70 Ibid., 10; 11.

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of his archived texts, anarchivity being a force which may not properly brought

under the heading of a pre-fabricated, ready-made term like “performavity” since

this anarchivity puts into question any binary opposition between publication and

ash, between the legible or readable and the illegible or unreadable, between

between memory and the present and past tenses—it is archived or it has been

archived—and forgetting and the future anterior--it will have been archive

destroying.71 As Derrida says of Lacan, “since the legal archive covers less and less

of the whole archive, this archive remains unmasterable and continues on its way, in

continuity with the anarchive.”72 The same thing, more or less, could be said of

Derrida’s archive.

The delirious anarchivity of Derrida’s publications puts the limits of their

reading, or their future anterior (in the conditionl) reading after (the fact of)

Derrida’s death, into question, such that as we turn now to what I am calling quasi-

cruxes, or cruxes for the sake of economy, we are no longer talking about the

symptom or even a “parerpraxis.”73 I want to compare a crux in “Du tout” to a crux

in “Love Lacan.” Here is the crux in “Du tout”: there is a remote relation between

Derrida’s discussion of how to read an error in the first two editions of Lacan’s

Écrits and a story Derrida tells involving a dead friend, a story that inverts a story

one of the letter writers of the “Envois” tells about a mistake Lacan made about

Derrida.

71 For the catalogue, I refer the reader to note 13.72 “Love Lacan,” op cit, 68.73 My neologism is designed to give the Freudian lapsus, or parapraxis, a Derridean inflection by punning on Derrida’s interest in the parergon, the frame, and the border. I mean to suggest as well that the limits of a “Derridean” reading, Derrida’s name turned into an adjective are also broached.

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The mention of someone’s death occurs a few pages (513-15) after a lengthy

discussion of whether Lacan’s misquotation of “dessein” (“plot,” “scheme,” or

“design”) from the last lines of Poe’s The Purloined Letter as “destin” (“destiny” or

“fate”) in the last sentence of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” “an altering

citation,” Derrida says, but one about which “’Le facteur de la vérité’ did not say all

that I [Derrida] think, but that in any event carefully refrained from qualifying as a

“typographical error” or a “slip,” even supposing, you are going to see why I am

saying this, that a somewhat lighthearted analytic reading could content itself with

such a distinction, I mean between a “typo” and a “slip.”74 Derrida then permits

himself to cite what he said before launching into a full-scale assault on François

Roustang’s reading of the mistake as a slip, not a typo:

Now here is the most ingenious finding: what remains a typographical error

two out of three times in given Écrits [Derrida does not specify the editions

or give the relevant page numbers] becomes Roustang’s “slip,” Roustang

having contented himself, somewhat quickly it is true, with reproducing the

ur-typo, everyone including its author, turning all around that which must

not be read.75

Prompted by a request from René Major, one of the conference organizers, Derrida,

supplies the name of a friend he had hitherto kept secret: “She probably had in

mind someone whose name I can say because I believe that he is dead.”76

74 Ibid, 513. In Lacan’s Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, ed and trans, Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007) Fink leaves the error Lacan made at the end of “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” in mistaking “dessein” for “destin” when citing Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter. 75 Ibid, 513.76 Ibid, 519.

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As I Was Saying

The question of what is an error is an typo or a slip is what textual critics

would ordinarily regard as a crux. The mention of the dead friend would have no

bearing on the story about the error in the Écrits involving a crux the meaning of

which Derrida aparently wants to leave undecided. In order to understand what I

take to be a remote relation between mention and the story, I now move to what

will be perhaps the most X-centric or perhaps the most XOXXOOOX-centric of the

cruxes Derrida uses in “Love Lacan” and The Post Card, among all of those I will

gloss. I say they are perhaps most X-centric because they are perhaps the hardest to

notice; Derrida is not deliberately drawing his reader’s attention to them as he does

the repetitions and inversions we saw in “Love Lacan.”

The crux I gloss bears directly on the questions we will have been asking

about Derrida’s effacement of both the proper name and the title. In the first

repetition and inversion, Derrida says Lacan told about him to a similar story

someone else told Derrida at a conference, both of which Derrida tells with

reference to a dead friend. In a passage in “Du tout” that repeats, or precedes,

“p/repeats,” as if in reverse order, the passage in “Love Lacan” in which Derrida

parenthetically mentions a dead friend while discussing Lacan’s blunder, Derrida

tells a story soon after castigating Roustang about saying that what may have been a

typo was actually a slip, Derrida says that he would “prefer to tell [us] a brief story,”

a story that bears a remarkable, Derrida might (not) have said uncanny,

resemblance to “Derrida’s story about Lacan saying that Derrida was “inanalysis”

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(sic).77 The story Derrida reverses Derrida’s relationship to the analyst. This time

Derrida himself is said to be the analyst. At a conference, someone came up to tell

Derrida she knew he was psychoanalyzing someone but didn’t give Derrida a name:

‘I know that so and so has been in analysis with you for more than ten

years.” My interlocutor, a woman, knew that I was not an analyst, and for my

own part I knew, to refer to the same shared criteria, that what she was

saying with so much assurance was false, quite simply false.78

In addition to the way the two stories invert Derrida’s position as analyst and

analysand, both stories mention, as I have said, a dead friend of Derrida’s. This is

the second repetition and inversion. Immediately after this story, in the telling of

which Derrida leaves the woman unnamed, René Major invites Derrida to state the

name of the person who was not in analysis: “Given the point we have reached,

what prevents you from saying who is in question? To state his name now seems

inevitable.”79 Major does not ask Derrida to give the name of the woman who said

she knew who Derrida was (not) analyzing. Derrida responds as follows:

René Major asks me the name of the analyst in question. Is this really

necessary? Moreover, my interlocutor did not name him. She contented

herself with characteristics . . . No name was pronounced. It was only after

the fact, reflecting on the composite that she had sketched, that I attempted

an induction.80

77 Ibid., 518; 202. 78 Ibid., 518.79 Ibid., 518. 80 Ibid., 518-19.

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Here is the first narrative repetition. In the last pages of “Love Lacan,” repeats and

inverts the woman’s story he tells in “Du tout”: this time Derrida tells the story of

Lacan having said that Derrida having been an analysand, a story also about an

error, the dead friend is mentioned in a parenthetical sentence within Derrida’s

story about what Lacan said rather than before it or after it: “Lacan made a

compulsive blunder,” Derrida writes; “he said that he thought I was in analysis.”

Derrida proceeds to quote Lacan’s unofficial version. I now quote it again:

In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever

withdrawn from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the

syntax and the reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about

whom I did not know that –to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did

not know that he was in analysis—about whom I did not know that he was in

analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who

has written a preface to this Verbier.”81

Derrida then introduces in parentheses an anecdote in “Love Lacan” about the death

of the a friend: “(Lacan . . . was then obviously unaware of the fact that one of the

two [Derrida and his supposed analyst], was dead by the time I wrote the preface in

question, which was this written to his memory, as homage, and in his absence.”82

Only after inserting this parenthentical remark about a dead friend does Derrida

return to Lacan’s blunder and ask “How could Lacan have made his listeners laugh . .

. on the basis of a blunder, his own . . . ? How could he insist on two occasions on”

Derrida’s “real status as noninstitutional analyst and on what he wrongly supposed

81 Op cit, 68.82 Ibid., 68.

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to be my status as institutional analysand, whereas he ought to have been the first to

. . .”83

So You (Would or Will Have) Said

Having glossed these narrative repetitions and inversions, we may also gloss

stylistic repetitions and inversions in the passage we have just not “read.” Just as

the story in “Du Tout” repeats the story about Lacan in the “Envois,” so in “Love

Lacan” Derrida refers the reader back to the same story in the “Envois”: “The thing

has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card.”84 These repetitions

come with omissions and additions that may be glossed, if one can still call what I

am doing “glossing,” as having inverted each other. For example, Derrida does not

give the quotation from Lacan in “Envois,” but he does give it in “Love Lacan”;

inversely, Derrida names the dead friend in “Du tout” but does not in “Love Lacan.”

One could go even further and point out the parentheses uses in “Love Lacan” to

mention his dead friend and to say Lacan was mistaken recall the figurative

parentheses in which Derrida places the anecdote about Roustang in “Du Tout”: “A

few words in parenthesis”; “I will not close this short parenthesis”; “Here I close this

parenthesis.”85

These cruxes are at the outer limits of the borders of glossing, or of any glossing

to come. As with the title “Du tout,” we come at these limits to the anarchivity of

Derrida’s own texts the question of reading after death becomes a question of the

83 Ibid., 68-69.84 Op cit., 202-04.85 Ibid., 512; 513; nd 515.

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title, anecdotes, and publication. In the last crux, I will gloss, Derrida again tells a

story about an error, in this case, an error Lacan made, one of many, when speaking

about Derrida. Derrida puts this story in a long parenthetical paragraph and to the

way that paragraph follows the second anecdote Derrida tells about meeting Lacan

in person, an anecdote Derrida that involves dates and a posterous order of

publication and that Derrida defers for so long that he finally begins telling it by

saying “I am not forgetting.”86 Here are the first and last sentences of the paragraph

that follows the first anecdote: “Prior to any grammatology: “Of Grammatology” was

the first title of an article published some five years before Lacan’s new title of an

article published some five years before Lacan’s new introduction and—and this

was one of the numerous mistakes or misrecognitions made by Lacan--it never

proposed a grammatology. . . The book that treated of grammatology was anything

but a grammatology”) (52).87 Derrida does not put write of grammatology with

initial capital letters, as it should be written, Of Grammatology. Why not? And why

does Derrida enclose this very general accusation about Lacan’s mistakes with

parentheses?

We can best respond to these questions, I think, by turning the the anecdote that

immediately precedes this paragraph in parentheses, an anecdote Derrida tells a

story about what Lacan told concerning the publication of, a passage that I cited as

an epigraph and cite yet once more :

86 Op cit, 52. 87 The title of the text to which Derrida refers is not properly capitalized here. The text is Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivack (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974; second, corrected edition, 1997.

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I am not forgetting the binding which all of this is bound up. The other worry

Lacan confided me in Baltimore concerned the binding of the Écrits, which

had not yet appeared, although its publication was imminent. Lacan was

worried and slightly annoyed, it seemed to me, with those at Le Seuil, his

publishers, who had advised him not to assemble everything in a single large

volume of more than nine hundred pages. There was thus a risk that the

binding would not be strong enough and would give way “You’ll see,” he told

me with a gesture of his hands, “it’s not going to hold up.” The republication

in the two-volume paperback edition in 1970 will thus have reassured him,

in passing, not only to confirm, the necessity of placing the “Seminar on the

Purloined Letter” at the “entry post” of the Écrits, but also to fire off one of

those future anteriors (antedates or antidotes) that will have been the

privileged mode of all the declarations of love that he so often made to me, by

mentioning (I dare not say by antedating), and I quote, “what I will literally

call the instance prior to any grammatology’.”88

This is what the first of what Derrida says are two first anecdotes about meeting.

Lacan. Before returning to the question of Derrida’s use of all lower case letters for

his book Of Grammatology and his use of parentheses, let me gloss this potentially

unlimited crux even further. the anecdote he defers telling, just after talking about

his reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” followed from the way

Lacan published the Écrits and before returning to “the republication of the

paperback edition in 1970”:

88 Ibid, 52.

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Now if there is one text that stands more than any other in this position and

at this post of binder [sic], it is the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” As

you know, the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” is given a “privilege,”

which is Lacan’s word; I quote Lacan: “the privilege of opening the sequence

[the sequence of the Écrits] despite its diachrony. In other words, Écrits

collects and binds together all the texts out of which it is composed, with the

exception of the seem which, by coming at the beginning, is thereby given the

‘privilege’ of figuring the synchronic configuration of the set and thus binding

the whole together. It therefore seemed legitimate to me to take a privileged

interest in this privilege. If I use the word binding here, the binding that

holds the moment of reading and rereading, it is because on one of the two

sole occasions in my life on which I met Lacan and spoke briefly with him, he

himself spoke to me of binding and of the binding of the Écrits.89

With the borders of this gloss thus expanded to include a question of textual

criticism and publication as a question of reading and rereading in ancdote told in

reverse order and conspicuously deferred, we may now return to Derrida’s

parenthetical paragraph in which he writes “of grammatology.” Through the use of

parentheses, Derrida allows himself to say some things about Lacan with greater

force and even more decisiveness descisvely outs does two partly. Derrida corrects

Lacan by appealing to dates (“five years before”), but does not bother to archive all

of Lacan’s many other mistakes or misrecognitions. At the same time, Derrida

allows himself to depart from the bibliographical norm for titles. By citing the title

89 (52);

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of grammatology in lower case letters and introducing a pointless yet conscipuous

error, Derrida turns the relation of his own work and its title inside out, then stating

only what his book was not about. Whatever “of grammatology” is about, or why it

bears that title, or why Derrida waits to make such a bold and general accusation

right after telling the anecdote, all remain completely unclear, at rest and arrested.

The crux implodes and explodes: One wonders what kind of mistake Lacan is

supposed to have made by antedating his texts. Derrida’s reading, in the past tense,

of Lacan’s use of the future anterior, becomes Derrida’s non-reading of his own

works. “Was anything but” is perhaps echoed in the equally negatively stated

sentence near the end of “Love Lacan”: What I will not have said today!”90

The least—or the most—we can say is that it is not clear in “Love Lacan” that one

can one use the future anterior to speak of the what the dead will have said that

differs significantly from speaking of the dead using the past tense; that is, it is by no

means clear whether or not the future anterior just reappropriating, hence unjustly,

what has been said not only about by the dead by the living but of what the living

said or will have said about the living. When Derrida says Lacan fired “off one of

those future anteriors (antedates or antidotes)” (49) he uses the future anterior to

describe Lacan’s use of the future anterior as an act of love: “that will have been the

privileged mode of all the declarations of love that he so often made to me” (49). Yet

Derrida puts this point about Lacan’s mode of declaring his love in the past tense:

“he so often made to me.” When Derrida comes to the end of “Love Lacan” and

accuses Lacan of having made a “compulsive blunder,” Derrida equates Lacan’s use

90 (69).

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of the future anterior quite negatively with reapproriation: “Here is a better known

episode that occurred some ten years later after Lacan used the future anterior

several times to reappropriate by way of antedating when he said, for example . . . )

In a session of the seminar [XXIV] in 1977 (still “l’Insu-que-sait”), Lacan made a

compulsive blunder.”91 By collapsing the future anterior into the past tense, Derrida

leaves us to wonder whether any declaration of love is not also a declaration of war,

as if psychoanalysis and deconstruction could only make love and war, not “make

love, not war.”

Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead

Having unfolded the cruxes above, we are now in a position to route the

question of what it means to read Derrida after Derrida’s death, a question that has

informed our glossing of Derrida’s attention to the future of a reading Lacanian

discourse in “Love Lacan,” to a question of the effacement of the title and of the

proper name. Before turning to the next crux let me point out that Derrida several

times excuses himself in “Love Lacan ”from rereading passages or summarizing

what he said in the Post . . . in one case on the grounds that he has already

“formalized readability” in general: “I have already sufficiently formalized

readability under erasure and the logic of the event as graphematic event—notably

as event of the proper name, in which the little devil arrives only to erase itself / by

erasing itself—to be spared having to add anything here for the moment” (48).92 I

91 (67),92 Derrida also states “It goes wihtout saying that my reading [in Facteur] concerned explicitly . . the question of Lacan’s name, the problems of legacy, of science and institution, and the aporias of archivization in whichthat name is involved. (LL, 41)

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turn now now to very last crux, there always being a last gloss after the last, to the

very, very last crux I will gloss before returning to the one with which I began,

namely the letter “X” in “X-ian.”93 In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida comments on a

condition made on his giving a lecture at a colloquium on “Lacan avec les

philosophes”: “they put forward the pretext of a rule according to which only the

dead could be spoken about here and therefore, if one insisted on speaking of me,

one could so only under the pretext that I play dead, even before the fact, and that I

be given a helping hand when the occasion arose”(47).94 In an anecdote Derrida

relays or relates about meeting Lacan, Derrida says Lacan said something very

similar to Derrida: “At our second and last encounter, during dinner offered by his

in-laws, he insisted on publicly archiving in his own way, with regard to something I

had told him, the disregard of the Other that I had supposedly attempted ‘by playing

dead’”(61). Although Lacan made his comment about playing dead to Derrida

93 For another crux I won’t gloss, see Derrida’s comments in Love Lcan on “we” and “I” in relation to “who will ever have has the right to say: “’we love each other’?” (43); to the death of the one of whom one speaks; and to “what is getting archived!” (43). This instance concerns Derrida’s uses of “I” and “we” in the body of the text and in the third endnote of the book, Resistances of Psychoanalysis. All three headnotes are uniformly preceded with the word “NOTE” in all capitals followed, but the first person pronouns used in each vary. In the first note, someone uses the plural “Our thanks” 119, and in the second note someone similarly writes “we thank” but then Derrida identifies himself as the writer by using the singular first person pronoun “I.” 94 “Love Lacan,” 47 and 121n3. The repetition of the word “play” is not as exact in the French versions as it is the English translation, and it is possible that Derrida deliberately chose not repeat the same words exactly. In “Pour l’amour de Lacan,” Derrida uses two different verbs rather than one, “je fasse le mort” (Lacan avec les philosophes, 403; Resistances, 65) and “en jouant du mort” (Lacan avec les philosophes 406; Resistances, 69). I by no means fault the translator of the English edition for translating these two different French verbs as “play” rather than, for example, as “act” dead and “play” dead. The crux is as much about Derrida’s variation in word choice as it is the translator’s repetition of the same word.

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before the conference at which Derrida is speaking happened, but Derrida tells that

anecdote about what Lacan said only after Derrida states the condition unnamed

colloquium conference organizers put on his speaking only if he played dead: “That

is (was enough just to think of it) to make me disappear nominally as a live person

—because I am alive—to me disappear for life” (“Love Lacan,” 47). Derrida adds

that he would not allow himself to be offended or discouraged by the “lamentable

and indecent incident of the barring of my proper name from the program and that

he was “shocked” by the “symptomatic and compulsive violence” of forcing to act as

if he were dead in order to speak at the conference, but refers the reader in an

endnote to the appendices of Lacan avec les philosophes and does not make anything

of the way Lacan’s words “playing dead” repeat those Derrida used when speaking

of the colloquium.95

Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead

Having glossed these cruxes, we are ready to return to “Love Lacan” and gloss

Derrida’s use of “X-ian” to stand for any proper name that would modify the noun

“psychoanalysis.” Let me begin this gloss with a gloss from another text by Derria

related to the letter “X.” It is getting late, I know, to introduce another text. Please

follow along. You’re almost not there. The degree to which Derrida’s sentence

about “X-ian” psychoanalysis and deconstruction, let us consider the investment

Derrida has in psychoanalysis with relation to “X” in the title by turning to an

endnote to “Marx & Sons,” that is, in Derrida’s response to a group of academic

95 47.

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readers commenting on Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Derrida glosses the phrase “X

without X,” a phrase in which X may stand either for a noun or a name in a title.

Derrida writes—rather scathingly—of Terry Eagleton’s adoption of the phrase “X

without X” in the title of contribution to the volume:

Eagleton is undoubtedly convinced that, with the finesse, grace and elegance

he is universally acknowledged to possess, he has hit upon a title (‘Marxism

without Marxism’) which is a flash of wit, an ironic dart, a witheringly

sarcastic critique, aimed at me or, for example, Blanchot, who often says –I

have discussed this at length elsewhere—‘X without X.’ Every ‘good Marxist’

knows , however, that noting is closer to Marx, more faithful to Marx, than

this Marxism without Marxism was, to begin with, the Marxism of Marx

himself, if that name still means anything.96

In citing from a text related to Specters of Marx, I mean to move us closer, nor

further, to the question of reading Derrida reading Lacan after Lacan’s death amd

our reading The Post Card and “Love Lacan” after Derrida’s death by using “X

wihtout X” to link even more strongly these questions to the way deconstruction

96 Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 213–69; to 265.n. 29. On the “x without x” formulation itself, see also Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. The Instant of My Death and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 88–9) and “Living On,” op cit, 132-33. See “Marx & Sons,” for “messianicity without messianism” see Derrida (ibid: 265, n.29 and 267, n.69. For Derrida’s variations on the “x without x” formulation, see “Marx & Sons,” op cit, wherein Derrida explains the meaning of his formulation “messianicity without messianism” see Derrida (op cit, 265, n.29 and 267, n.69), where the translator supplies a helpful commentary on Derrida’s phrases “death without death” and “relation without relations(s)”). On “community without community” see Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997, 37, 42, 46–7, n.15; 1999: 250–2); see also Derrida’s discussion of his title in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” op cit, 284-86.

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turn on the displacement of the question of psychoanlaysis having a proper name,

any proper name, in front of it. Derrida introduces the phantasm in Specters of Marx

via psychoanalysis. As Derrida writes in “Marx & Sons,” “the motifs of mourning,

inheritance, and promise are, in Specters of Marx, anything but ‘metaphors’ in the

ordinary sense of the word . . . They also allow me to introduce questions of a

psychoanalytic type (those of the specter or phantasma—which also means specter

in Greek) . . . All this presupposes a transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself . . . I

have elsewhere, tried to discuss how the transformation might be brought about,

and discuss this at length here” (235). In “Marx & Sons,” then, Derrida once again

raises the question he had raised in “Love Lacan,” citing Resistances of

Psychoanalysis and The Post Card as two of five texts he lists in endnote 32 (265) as

those in which he does the transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself.” In the

endnotes, in a relatively exterior paratextual space, Derrida makes the letter “X” a

mathematical variable of a title. An unreadable letter stands for a word composed

of readable letters in a title is central to the question of quasi-methodological status

of deconstruction and what Derrida calls the transformation of psychoanalytic logic

itself.

“Mort” to Say

In turning now to the crux, “X-ian,” with which we began, we are considering as

part of it the sentence that follows it, “What I will not have said today!” We will

gloss the “X” in relation to what Derrida did not say, to the way he collapses what he

will have said or would have said into the negative, the not said: “ What I will not

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have said today!” (68). That’s what Derrida said. Yet what Derrida said, the way he

limits himself to the negative, becomes something “to be glossed” because he

introduces an asymmetry between what he says and what about what Lacan will

have said and won’t have said. Turning his text into an archive, Derrida “says” that

consists only of what he will “not have said,” not, as was the case with Lacan also

what he will or would have said. Of course, Derrida doesn’t say that. At least not

exactly. And that is precisely my point. The question I raising here concerns not

only what Derrida did not say, but what the limits of not saying are: where does the

opposition between saying and not saying deconstruct? Why does Derrida

“destruct” it rather than deconstruction?

Let us begin glossing the crux of the “X-ian.” What is it that Derrida has not

said in “Love Lacan” about the name and the title that bears on his erasure of any

proper name that might modify psychoanalysis, on “X-ian?” Derrida has not said

that he wrote one of the postscripts of Lacan avec les philosophes to which he

directs the reader in the headnote and the third endnote of “Love Lacan.” The post-

script is entitled “Après Tout: Les Chance du College.”97 What does Derrida say in

this postscript? What he says bears directly on the “adjective” “X-ian”: in the

postscript Derrida talks about the erasure of his name, in the form of an adjective,

from the original colloquium title, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalaysis?,” and its

replacement with the colloquium and book’s title Lacan avec les philosophes.

By not citing his postscript to Lacan avec avec les philosophes in the paratexts—

headnote and endnote--of “Love Lacan,” Derrida effectively writes about the erasure

97 Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris, Albin Michel, 1991), 421-52.

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of his name from the original title in invisible ink, as it were. “X-ian” marks the spot .

. . less, the invisible ink, or, in Derrida’s words, “the history that in France and

especially in Eastern France, has been written, so to speak, not in ink but in the

effacement of the name”98

Sayve My Name, Sayve My Name

And with the effacement of the name goes the effacement of the title. Derrida has

already given the reader everything he or she would need to find the dossier

regarding the changed title Lacan avec les pilosophes in his headnote and endotes to

“Love Lacan.” I leave some of the materials relevant to a glossing to come filed away

in the footnote below, materials to which refers in his post-script as a “dossier” and

as “archived.”99 I wll point only that Derrida mentions his shock at the change made

98 “Love Lacan,” op cit, 47-48. In relation to Derrida’s use of “X-ian” in “Love Lacan,”see the indecipherable (coded?) letters or words “EGEK HUM RSXVI STR, if I am not mistaken” (150) and “P.R.” as “Poste Restante” (50) in The Post Card.

99 In “Après Tout: Les Chance du College,” op cit., Derrida repeats almost exactly what he said at two different points in “Love Lacan: “Therefore to save time I will not add anything more for the moment—because I find all this increasingly tedious and because, let’s say, ‘I know only too well’” (op cit, 47) and “all the texts, which, are, after all, available and in principle legible by whoever wants to look at them” (ibid., 41).” Compare the following passages, from Après Tout, which I leave you to translate, should you wish to do: “Par souci d’économie, je n’ajouterai donc pas grand-chose. D’une part les documents d’un dossier (une bonne partie de cette “archive” à laquelle je fais allusion dans mon exposé) sont disponibles, et je l’èspere facilement lisibles. A chacun de les interpréter” (ibid, 443). Derrida then adds that he could only repeat what he already said: “D’autre part, je ne pourais ici que répéter ce j’ai dit lors de cette réunion, a savoir, pour schémetiser,” ibid, 443. On the archive, Derrida says: “C’est aussi a ces principes et a ces règles que je me référais dans mons intervention au colloque en évoquant l’objectivité têtue de certains faits gestes maintenant archivés et que je préfère voir livrés a l’inteprétation de chacun.,”ibid, 446. And on the publication of the title, Derrida comments: “A ce silence, le fait est officelement consigné, René Major ne s’était jamais engage, et je l’en approuve. ) et quand, après que René Major eut bien faits de rompre et silence

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to the title of the colloquium and insists that the absence of his name makes no

difference to him at all. Yet he nowhere comments on the condition that he play

dead if he is to participate in the confernece. Alone among all of the contributors to

the appendices, Alain Badiou, who was the person who demanded that no proper

names other than Lacan’s appear in the colloquium title, only Badiou mentions the

condition of playing dead, and he brings it up only to say he is not guilty as charged:

“D’autres, ou les memes, ont jugé exorbitant, stalinien, et relevant du desire de mort,

que je demande qu’un nom proper, parce qu’il était le seul d’un contemporain à être

mis en balance avec celui de Lacan, soit ou éfface, ou équilibré par d’autres.”100 To

have allowed the colloquium title to include Derrida’s name or any name, Badiou

adds, would have been to betrayal [trahison] of Lacan.101

The question I am interested is less about what the contributors of the appendices

said about the change to the conference title than in the way Derrida reserves a

texutal and archival space in “Love Lacan” to say what he as to say. Derrida says he

will not insist on “silencing what he thinks of all of this, but only at the end, ‘off the

en publie et qu’il eut parlé, comme je l’ai fait aussie, de ce que tout le monde n’vait d’ailleurs pas manqué de remarquer (le changement de titre entre de deux announces publiques) et de ce don’t tous les participants avaient le droit de connaitre. Alain Badiou et quelques autres s’en sont plaints, encore une fois non pas de séance publique mais, autre épreuve de force, en menaçent l’existence des Actes du Colloque et tentant alors de mettre comme condition à la publication de leurs exposés un deuxieme effet de censure, l’effacement ou le retrait de ce qui avait été effectivement et publiquement pronouncé. De qui pouvait-on serieusement espérer une telle soumission?” ibid, 446. Badiou returned to this “affair” after Derrida died in a failed effort to turn Derrida into Gilles Deleuze. See Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, (Being and Event 2) trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum; 2009), 545-546.

100 Ibid, 440. 101 Ibid, 440.

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record,’ as one says in English.”102 Derrida then glosses this English phrase in

relation to the archive: “Off the record” means not recorded, outside the archive.

We are thus brought back to the difficult question of the record, history, and the

archive. Is there an “outside-the-archive”? Impossible, but the impossible is

deconstruction’s affair.”103 (48). Whatever Derrida says he will say “only at the end”

(48) will be in a paratextual “off the record” space Derrida calls a “post-scriptum, in

parentheses” (48).104 Only “only at the end” (48) never arrives. There is no post-

scriptum in “Love Lacan,” as there is in Derrida’s “Force of Law,” among many other

texts, no postscript as there is in Archive Fever, among many other texts, and no

parentheses either.

When Derrida exlaims “what will I not have said today!” is he saying that he has

not said anything? Or that someone else---no one else?—will not have heard him

say what he said, that any hearing will have been a non-hearing? Whether Derrida

is saying anytng or not saying it or syaing it by not saying it, and so on, makes no

difference insofar as the question would be the same: where does Derrida say / not

say what he will not have said? At a number of moments in “For the Love of Lacan,”

Derrida goes out of his way to say that he has nothing to say or that he need not say

again what he said before: “It is certainly not because I think I have something more

or irreplaceable to say on these matters; the discussion of what I ventured almost

twenty years ago around those questions would demand a microscopic examination

for which neither you nor I have the time or the patience; as I have already said . . . “;

102 Op cit, 48. 103 Ibid, 48.104 Ibid, 48.

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“I attempted to show this in “Le facteur de la vérité” and elsewhere; I would be

unable to reconstitute all this here in so little time.”105 Is Derrida ever speaking on

the record? It would appear that there is no record of what Derrida said against

which one could empirically show was later retated in an accurate or inaccurate

way.

Even “Mort” to say

What is the relation in “Love Lacan” between speaking of Lacan after his death

and Derrida’s X-ing out any name in relation to pyschoanlaysis at the end? Derrida

erases the proper name says “perhaps we step beyond psychoanalysis” by attending

to the “radical destruction of the archive, in ashes” (45). As I said earlier, Derrida’s

“last point” (69) in “Love Lacan” involves the priority of deconstruction over

psychoanalysis, “the degree” to which “the analytic situation, the analytic institution,

is deconstructed, as if by itself, without deconstruction or deconstructive project”

(69). Derrida here divorces deconstruction from psychonalysis by erasing without

erasing, at least not in this text, his name, or any name from deconstruction. If

deconstruction subsumes pyschoanalysis through the archive and recasts it, in

effect as “so-called psychoanalysis,” a psychoanalysis that is to some degree without

psychoanalysis, why does Derrida turn to psychoanalysis in order to make his

argument about the archive, its “radical destruction, as ashes” (44)? If the problem

of the archivization does If Lacan is just an example of the larger problem of the

105 Op cit, 45; 55.

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archive, why does Derrida choose Lacan as his example?106 Similarly, when Derrida

writes a book on the archive entitled Archive Fever, why it also a book about Freud?

Why does Freud’s name turn up as an adjective in the book’s subtitle, “A Freudian

Impression?” Why is the last paragraph of Archive Fever about Freud burning?

We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he [Freud] may have

burned. We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive

fever, what have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or of

his “life.” Burned without limit, without remains, and without knowledge.

With no possible response, be it spectral or not, short of or beyond

suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without

a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash.

Naples, 22-28 May 1994107

When writing on the archive, Derrida does not return to psychoanaysis in general

but to specific texts by Freud and Lacan.

In “Love Lacan,” Derrida returns to Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter”

and Derrida’s own reading of it in “Facteur.” In Archive Fever, Derrida goes back to

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the same text that Derrida says in “Love Lacan” he

attempted “a reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. . . (in ‘To Speculate--on

106 In “Love Lacan,” why does Derrida proceed to locate the problem of the archive, its paradoxes,” in psychoanalysis, say that “keen attention is required with what may be problematic in psychoanalytic discourse—for example, Lcan’s—as concerns precisely, archivization, the economy of repression as guard, inscription, effacement, the indestructibility of the letter or the name” (“Love Lacan,” op cit, 44)? 107 Archive Fever Postscript,” op cit, 101. We may add in passing that what Freud burned of his archive is itself uncertain. See the the introduction to Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G Jung, xix.

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Freud”’),” rereading in Freud’s text in Archive Fever in relation to the archive and the

death drive, to the archive oriented toward the future, not the past, in which

anarchival repetition is, if not without without repetition, at least repetiton without

compulsion. 108 The importance of psychoanlaysis no longer lies only in the ways it

contributes to a deconstructive account of the problem of the archive through its

interests in “inscription, erasure, blanks, the non-said, memory storage, and new

techniques of archivization” (40) or what would might more commonly be called the

symptomatic reading.

Ghlossed Protocol

We may now say what these glossings, glossing of “configurations” that are not as

stable as those of any “reading” because they have no limits and for which there are

no “protocols,” as there are even for a history of the archive that may never be

possible to write.109 More radically, glossing canonot be limited to the reading of a

108 Post Card, op cit, 41. See also “The librarian seemed to know me . . . but this did not get me out of the oath. She asked me to read it . . . Therefore I read it and handed her back the cardboard covered with a transparent paper that had tendered me. At this point, she starts to insist, I had not understood: no, you have to read it out loud. I did so . . . What would an oath that you did not say out loud be worth, an oath that you would only read, or not say be worth, an oath that you would only read, or that while writing you would only read? Or that you would telephone? Or whose tape you would send? I leave you to follow up.” 208 “Did I tell you, the oath that I had to swear out loud (and without which I could never have been permitted to enter, stipulated, among other things, that I introduce neither fire nor flame into the premises: “I hereby undertake . . . not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame . . . and I promise to obey all the rules of the library.” 215-16. And see, among others, the passages relating reading and fire on pp. 23; 40; 58; 171; 176; 180; 233; and 225.109 The words in quotation marks are all take from Derida’s description of which Lacan he read “Facteur” in “Love Lacan,” op cit, 48-49; 53.

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single version of a text, a single edition, as Derrida does in “Love Lacan” with respect

to the Ecrits, which he calls a “stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of

the collection and binding of Écrits, in other words, in 1966.”110 Can deconstruction

write off psychoanalysis, as Derrida apparently does in “Love Lacan” (1991)? Can

deconstruction transform the logic of psychoanalysis, as Derrida says it can in

Specters of Marx?111 Or does the gesture of writing pyschoanalysis off depend on

pyschonalysis having to call itself something, on its having a name that modifies it?

Is deconstruction nameless, that is not dependent on Derrida’s name? Or does it

involve archiving of Derrida’s name from the original the title of the collouqium

erased, even as Derrida erases all proper names that could modify pychoanlysis

with the letter “X?” Or is there a Freudian deconstruction? A Lacanian

deconstruction? I cannot answer these questions—can anyone?—nor canI say that

the last two questions haven’t already put us on the wrong track in bringing back

the proper name as an adjective in a way that assumes that we already know what a

Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis is.

La carte posthume

I do not have answers to these questions. I can only make them more audible—

leave you with them ringing in your ears –by extending the question of reading after

death (Derrida’s, Lacan’s, X’s, yours, mine, ours, and so on) with which we began to

the one time Derrida’s explicitly engages with posthumous publication but does so

without reference to psychoanalysis even though it is under the heading of the

110 Ibid, 48-49.111

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phantasm. Glossing only renders, and hence rends any distinction between glossing

and reading.

Here we also ask whether there is a posthumous principle or posthumous

structure that differs from the postal principle or postal structure, whether the

posthumous be subsumed by the posterous, the phantasm, and the postal. Derrida

engages the “phantasm” in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, and the posthumous

publication is a note Pascal wrote. The note just happens to begin with the word

“fire.” Derrida’s discussion of Pascal’s note occurs in relation to the phantasm, the

survivance of a text, which is not the same thing as the survival or a corpse decaying.

His interest in Pascal’s paper lies partly in the way it is “strictly posthumous,” that is

published after Pascal’s death:

As you well know, it is a posthumous piece of writing (now, of course, all

writings are posthumous, within the trace as structurally and essentially and

by destinal vocation posthumous or testamentary, there is a stricter enclave

of the posthumous, namely, what is only discovered and published after the

death of the author or signatory). Pascal’s writing on the god of Abraham

was strictly posthumous in the latter sense, even though we are not sure

Pascal wanted it to be published. This piece of paper initially takes the form

of a journal, a note to self, dated in Pascal’s hand—Pascal, who like Robinson

Crusoe, here dates the signature. He inscribes the year, the month, the day,

and the hour . . . 112

112 Ibid, 209.

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Even before it was posthumously published, apparently even if it had never been

published, Pascal’s writing would have remained readable even it was never read.

Earn Burial

Derrida almost says that the note would arrive at its destination. It does, any

case, have a destiny, not a destinerrance. I quote at length:

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.

Here I quote Derrida quoting Guerrier:

“A few days after the death of Monsieur Pascal . . . a servant of the house

noticed by chance an area in the lining of the doublet of the illustrious

deceased that appeared thicker than the rest, and having removed the

stitching . . . found there a little folded parchment . . . and in the parchment of

a paper written in the same hand: the one was a faithful copy of the other. . . .

All agreed there was no doubt that this parchment, written with so much

care and with such remarkable characters, was a type of memorial that he

kept very carefully to preserve the memory of a thing that he wanted to have

always present to his eyes and mind, since for eight years he had taken care

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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.113

The material support has been lost; the copy has survived; it has been archived; it

has been published; Derrida takes a father’s word for its authenticity. The note has

been “destined” to remain, and to remain legible, “even if it were readable only for

Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come.” That generation is

apparently infinite.114

113 The Beast and Sovereign, Vol. 2, op cit, 212. 114 On Derrida’s account of a material archival support related to Pascal’s doublet, namely, the wallet, see Richard Burt, "Life Supports,” op cit.

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Screen captures of Pascal’s Pensees, stored in the Bibliothèque nationale de

France in Paris from Alain Resnais’s documentary film Toute la memoire du

monde (1956).

What Derrida calls Pascal’s “strictly” posthumously published note has arrived

at a future even if that future arrives. It remains readable. For generations to come.

But can it be read? Derrida is not so sure. He places the first word of Pascal’s note,

“Fire [feu]” (212) in the middle of the page, as if it were the title of the note that

follows. And then Derrida says he is uncertain whether he can read it: “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).”115 Feu la cindre, Derrida might have said, citing the title of

115 Derrida alludes here to his earlier discussion of Blanchot’s quotation from Paul Celan’s poem Strette, the first word of which, Derrida notes at the end of a sentence linking cremation to Nazi concentration camps and to Blanchot, is “ASCHENGLORIE [ASHGLORY]” (capital letters in the original): “as for cremation, and the ashes that

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a text in which Derrida’s many references to a holocaust in The Post Card become

recast as references to the Holocaust, an event Derrida recalls in his coments on

Pascal’s note by glossing it in relation to Paul Celan’s poem, Aschenglorie, one of

many Celan’s poems Derrida also finds difficult to read.116

However the note might be read, it is not to be read, as Pascal’s elder sister,

Gilberte Pascal Périer who published her dead brother’s “little paper” in her Life of

Blaise Pascal, in her preface introducing the posthumous writing in which she

narrates the circumstances of its discovery--Pascal had sewn the paper into his

from now on, in modern and uneffaceable history of humanity, the crematoria of the camps, let us forget nothing,” Beast and Sovereign 2, op cit, 179.116 See, for example, these clauses from The Post Card: ““a great-holocaustic fire, a burn everything into which we would throw, finally, along with our entire memory, our names, the letters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc. And if nothing remains . . .” (op cit, 40) and “a holocaust without fire or flame” (op cit, 71). See also Derrida’s comment on Paul Celan’s poem “Einem, der vor der Tuer stand,” a poem also has difficulty reading: “Let us read this poem . . . I cannot claim I can read or decipher this poem,” Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Forham University Press, 2005), 56; 58. I should add that Derrida never ceases to use “holocaust” even when referring to the Holocaust: “Forgive me if I do not name, here, the holocaust, that is to say, literally, as I chose to call it elsewhere, the all-burning. Except to say this . . . every hour counts its holocaust” (ibid, 46). If one wished to read Derrida’s work on the archive in relation to psychoanalysis as a question Derrida engages in Archive Fever, namely, “Is psychonalysis a Jewish science?” and move from there to a reading of Badiou’s erasure of Derrida’s name from the colloquium title as an anti-semitic act, as Derrida obliquely suggests it was in referring to “the sinister political memory of the history that, in France . . . , has been written” (“Love Lacan,” 47), in order to raise a similar question about deconstruction and Judaism in relation to psychoanlaysis would have to take into account Derrida’s “forgetting” of circumcission in The Post Card, ibid, 222 and in Archive Fever, ibid, 12 and his replacing it, more overtly than he merely recirculates the word phantasm, with a word he coined, namely, “circumfession,” and that he first used as the title of a para-autobiographical book he wrote. See “A Testimony Given” in Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elizabeth Weber, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 39-58 and “Abraham, the Other, in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. and trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Forham University Press, 2007), 1-55.

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doublet, Derrida tells us, and a servant found it after Pascal died—the note is not to

be read as Pascal’s “last word,” as a master text that would govern the meaning of all

of Pascal’s other writings.117 She justifies its posthumous publication in her Life of

Blaise Pascal by stating that she does not wish to solicit a desire for an a reading of

the words on the paper as a last word, “for I am no ultimate end of any body.”118

Les Dernier Mots and Other “Lacanuae”

Jacques Derrida may be presumed dead, of course. I have tried to show that

asking whether deconstruction will survives its death, a question Derrida addressed

in 1994, in Derrida’s name, is the wrong question to ask. 119 To address that question

will produce defensive psychobiographies and thematic, pre-critical reshelvings of

Derirda’s writings, key word by key word. The question of the survival of

deconstruction is a question, properly or improperly, about the survial of a practice

without a name, a practice that overlaps with psychoanalysis yet cannot be

separated rom it. Let me “Speculate –On ‘Derrida’” for a moment. Derrida might

117 Derrida never wants a last word: “As for me, all the while apparently speaking of dissemination, I would have reconstituted this word to a last word and therefore into a destination” (Post Card, op cit, 150). See also “Lacan’s apparently equivocal ending says only its own dissemination, while ‘dissemination’ has erected inself into a kind of “’last word.’” La carte postale, 163 (In English in the original). Derrida’s use of the verb “reconstitute” in in The Post Card (ibid, 226) and in “For the Love of Lacan” “For the Love of Lacan” (see note 47) raises a question about reading. How does the reconstitution of a reading or a dossier bear on the question of restitution Derrida raises in “Restitutions of the truth in pointing [pointure]” in The Truth of Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 355-82. Can reconstitution only fail to be done justly, something one has to excuse oneself from not having done or that when done, will require one to defend onself from the accusation that it has been done unjustly? 118 The Beast and the Soverign 2, op cit, 211. 119 Mitchell Stephens, “Jacques Derrida,” New York Times Magazine January 23, 1994, 22-25. Op cit.

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have rethought the distinction he makes between posthumous writing in general

and strictly posthumous generations of readings to come—had he remembered

what he said earlier in the seminar, namely, that “Freud reminds us” of something

crucial about the phantasm, perhaps even remembering what Derrida said about

Freud in the Sixth Session of the Seminar?120 Did Derrida forget psychoanalysis?121

Did he ever forget it? Did ever forget Freud or Lacan?122 Who can say? If we can say

that all readings of what sur-vives or lives on of Derrida’s writings after his death

will be about what he will not have said and would not have said, and I am not

saying we can, we can also say Derrida’s account of Pascal’s paper as a note destined

to be read depends on Derrida’s belief in its indestructibility, one might even says its

indivisibility, and hence its undeconstructibility.123 Does the word “fire” in Pascal’s

120 Op cit, 147-58.121 Memoirs of the Blind is a somewhat paradoxical case of Derrida’s never yet ever goodbye to psychoanalysis. Derrida offers a para-Freudian reading of blindness, mistakes, castation, and conversion that logs into Derrida’s own previous readings of Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” while never mentioning Lacan even as Derrida uses some of Lacan’s terms. I thank John Michael Archer for pointing this out to me in converation.122 See Jacques Derrida, “Let us not Forget—Psychoanalysis,” Oxford Literary Review Special Issue on “Psychoanalysis and Literature” Volume 12, July 1990, 3-8.

123 As Maurice Blanchot remarks, that “the strange nature of posthumous publications is to be inexhaustible.” See "The Last Word," in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford UP), 252-92. In relation to the lack of rigor in Derrida’s distinction between strictly and general posthumous publiaction, one could reread Derrida’s reading of Maurice Blancot’s The Instant of My Death in Bl;anchot and Derrida’s The Instant of My Death / Demeures: Fiction and Testimony Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2000), especially Derida’s reading of Blanchot’s sentence “I am dead” and of Blanchot’s dating his death from the time he was granted a reprieve just before he was to be executed in a letter he wrote Derrida from which Derrida quotes the following: “I will therefore quote the fragment of a letter I received from Blanchot last summer, just a year ago, almost to the day, as if today were the anniversary of the day on which I received this letter, after July 20. Here are its first two lines; they speak of the anniversary of a death that took place without taking place. Blanchot wrote me thus, on July 20, first making note of the anniversary date: ‘July 20. Fifty years ago I knew the

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note make the poem difficult to read because one cannot read while burning? Does

the endlessness of burning here, the collapse of a fire lit before and its aftermath,

mean that one can only gloss the poem while making the limits of any such glossing

impossible to determine, extending glossing well past the determination of the

meaning of a word, phrase, sentnece, or passage that glossing apparently delivers or

is commonly thought to deliver to reading? Is Pascal’s note itself a gloss, his shirt a

kind of urn burial or portable columbarium for it? Does glossing necessarily gloss

over itself?

In isolating Pascal’s note as a strictly posthumous publication, Derrida forgets

that all of Pascal’s Pensées were published posthumously in 1670, along with this

note, in the same book. The distinction Derrida draws between strictly and

generally posthumous writing is not at all rigorous, and indeed depends in the case

Derrida singles out on factoring out the facteur, on forgetting the mailman, in may

untenable only in very different ways, and the forgetting of the servant’s name who

sent off the note, the servant whose name was already forgotten by the Father. Let

Derrida have the lost words, so to speak, or “ghlost” words: “And moreover I obey

at every moment without seeming to: to burn everything, forget everything . . . and

while driving I held it on the steering wheel.”124

happiness of nearly being shot to death,’” 52. What would it mean to read Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death as a posthumous publication? See also Derrida’s citation of Blanchot’s posthumous disaster” and Derrida’s comment that “the posthumous is becoming the very element mixes in everywhere with the air we breathe” The Beast and the Sovereign 2, op cit, 181 (258) and 179 (256).

124 The Post Card, op. cit. 43.

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After-Peace

One still has to take note of this. And to finish

that Second Letter: “. . . Consider these facts and

take care lest you sometime come to repent of

having now unwisely published. It is a very great

safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing. . . .

What are now called his . . . Sokratous estin kalou

kai neou gegonots . . . are the work of a Socrates

embellished and modernized. Farewell and

believe. Read this letter now at once many times

and burn it . . . .”

--I hope this one won’t get lost. Quick, a duplicate

. . . graphite . . . carbon . . . reread this letter . . .

burn it. Il y a là cendre. And now to distinguish

between two repeitions.”

“I hope this one won’t get lost. Quick, a duplicate

. . . graphite . . . carbon . . . reread this letter . . .

burn it. . . . And now to distinguish between two

repeitions.”

--Derrida, “Play: From Pharmakon to the Letter”

in “Plato’s Parmacy” in Dissemination, 170-71

-- also cited uin Derrida, Cinders III, 56, the

whole part with the end up to “And now to

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distinguish between two repetitions” and Cinders

n. IV, p. 58.

“Bye Bye that Song Bye Thank You Like You Love You See You Next Time Bye Miss

You”

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REnd Notes

“41. In the session, Derrida added nothing here.” Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the

Sovereign 2, 277. The last chapter of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle “adds

nothing . . seems to add nothing” (Post Card, 386; 387).

“The unfortunate effect of all this is to give a large can of petrol and a flame-thrower

to those prejudiced types who would like to terminate not Shakespeare but the

“queer theory” which is currently the hottest thing on the American academic

scene.”

, Review of Richard Burt, Unspeakable (1998); TLS 28 May 1999

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