Richard Burt

Reading Burns:

Repetition, Reproduction, Publication,

and the Parergon in The Post Card and Beyond

Commentary without comment, not like Marxism without Marx. When does comment, annotation, become discursive? Anecdote an anecnote?Difficult to tell not because one reaches an aporia but instead confronts not reading

and nonreading?  Paratext supposed by go to be unread, invisible. JD conceals

ciphers illegible. An economy of no returns. Speculation. But kind of investment?

Graphic economy as opposed to an “Icon”omy. Value of reproduction(s) of the

postcard, the hit of the image, as opposed to describing it. No comment as a

comment, a non-denial denial, All the President’s Men.

Burn everything as opposed to publish everything. The narrators of the letters talk

about the book project, what the title will be, what the preface will be: this is a

correspondence, but utterly unlike the Hantai Correspondences, which sorts out

painting, letters in facsimile and in diplomatic transcription. Mutliple reproductions

of the same postcard in The Post Card. No way to know that it is a postcard,

however, as the reverse side is not reproduced, the side with information, caption,

etc. This part is not published, not transcribed.

Is the first line a quotation of first line of Dissemination, also about prefaces?

Burn After Rereading

Reread Before Burning

Insupportable Reading

1

IS the notion of a beginning merely naïve? The end as the beginning, with the move

to “tu” in the footnote. The paratext as a graphic “place” ; Glossary stops shot of an

index. Gives the note number, but not the page number.

Reading randomly; backwards; by chance, as in “Meschances.”

Decipher, 42

Facsimiles in The Post Card. Already reproductions, iconography, versus ekphrasis

Cutting and pasting, 41

And moreover I obey at every moment without seeming to: to burn everything,

forget everything . . .

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

Facteur de la verite, 40

For the moment I am cutting and pasting. 41

And while driving I held it on the steering wheel 43

Decipher, 43

N,the stamp is not a metaphor. 46

Who is driving? Doesn’t it really look like a historical vehicle? A gondola? No, except

plato is playing gondolier, perched in the back, looking away in front of him the way

one guides the blind. He is showing the direction. 46

For us, for our future, nobody can tell. 47

She will put the letter back into circulation once she has read it. 49

And the case will be proven, 51

2

To enclose myself in a book project. 51

False preface to Freud, 51

Doubtless the book will be called Legs de Freud 52

And it would also inscribe Le facteur de la verite as an appendix, with the great

reference to the Beyond . . . 53

This is the law of the genre/gender as was said in the note of the Facteur that they

evidently have not read at all, the note that installs the entire program, note 6

precisely: “le poste differs from la poste only by gender” (Littré)1 54

That note is on p. 411, though the page number is not given, and Bass translates it

differently: “gateway post:. Le poste [in the sense of osition] dffers from la poste {in

the sense of mail] only gender says Littré.

Bass adds a note in brackets that is nlonger htan Derrida’s, explainging “the various

editions nad translations of Lacan,” and observes that the English translation of the

Ecrits by “Alan Sheridan states that the slection of the essays for the English Ecrits

[Bass omits the subtitle, A Selection] is “Lacan’s own” (p.vii). Thus, fr reasons to be

determined, something has changed: the “Semnar” no longer has he ateway post

that Lacan previously had emphasized, and, as just staed, does not appear in the

volume at all.]” 421, n. 6.

Now that Bruce Fink’s Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English [Hardcover]Jacques Lacan (Author), Bruce Fink (Translator) W. W. Norton &

Company (December 16, 2005) is out, should that be read as

sreotred version the way new translation of Kakfa or new editions of

3

Faulkner are? What is the relation between selection and complete?

Doesn’t first complete render the Ecrits editions unreadable, as if there

were a complete, closed, single definitive edition? Did Lacan give the

English edition a different heading? Or did he approve, as he did

Jacque Lain mIllers French editions, what Sheridan had decided to

select?

Bass note p. 420 Throughout I will refer to the English version of the

Smnar, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, in French Freud, Yale French

Studies, no 48, 1972 All references in the text will be given by the

letter S and a page number.

Derrida’s note 4, p. 420:

A note in Positions (1971-72, p. 107, n. 44) announced this reading of

the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” which was the object of a

lecture at the Johns Hopkins University in November 1971.

French cover and Chicago book cover both reproduce the image.

“Bass Notes” (La-Bas)

Illustrations courtesy of the Bodelian Lbrary, Oxford. Cover illustration: Plato and

Socrates, the frontispiece of Prognostica Socratis basilei, a fortune telling book.

English, thirteenth century, the work of Matthew Paris. MS. Ashmole 304. Fol. 3IV

(detail). <<on the copyright page.

My post card dissertation 54

But I would really like to call the book philately 65

No, I will never rewrite it, that letter. 57

4

Read this letter now at once many times and burn it. 58

Although the criterion for distinguishing between books and letters remains open. I

do not believe in the rigor of such a criterion. 61

I’m not making it up! 63

You see him reading me at this very instant 67

The old dream of the complete electro-cardo-encaphlo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-

gram—I mean first of all without the slightest literature, the slightest superimposed

fiction, without pause, without selection either of the code or of the tone, without

the slightest secret, nothing at all, only everything, 68

This final total card (my absolute pancarte), that you be able to read it, hold it in

your hands, our knees, under your eyes, in you, that you inherit and guard it. 68

Reads aloud, 69

No rigorous theory of “reception,” however necessary it might be, will get to the end

of that literature. 71

A holocaust without fire or flame 71

Finally, he would consent, see The Purlined Letter, and the queen too, and Dupin

too, and the psychoanalyst too” 71

Purim Pur lot 72; 74-75

Difficult to tell 74

Believe without proof 76

When I photograph myself alone in stations or airports, I throw it away or tear the

thing into little pieces that I let fly out the window if it is a train, leave them in an

ashtray or a magazine if it is it’s an airplane. 79

5

Amnesia 77

In the name f what, in the name of whom publish, divulge—and first of all write, sine

it amounts to the same? I have published a lot, but there is someone in me, I still

can’t identify him, who still hopes never to have done it. And he believes that in

everything that I have let pass, depart, a very effective mechanism comes to

annihilate the exception, I write while concealing every possible divulging of the

very thing that papers to be published. 80

Okay, let’s drop it. I am rereading myself, thus at the end of the word “lottery” 81

When you are reading, 79

It has to be read in Greek, 87

Okay, let’s drop it, I will continue to scratch, read while writing my knowing letter,

rather than taking note’s on those little white pieces of cardboard that you always

don’t give a damn about. 87

And he adds, following my finger (I am citing but always rearranging a little. Guess

the number of false citations in my publications . . . ):” 89

Postcard structure 89

Literature epistolary genres, 88

To read among others, the Socratic letters in which he grouped the anecdotes

concerning the life, method, and even the death of the Athenian philosopher

[Socrates]” 91

Prophylactic guarding of the letter incorporated in the “by heart.” 93

The Oxford card is looking at me.. I am rereading Plato’s letters. 93

6

Together we should bring to light a history (genesis and structure) of the libraries of

the great thinkers and great writers: how they kept, arranged, classified, annotated,

“indexed,” archived what they really read, what they have pretended to have read,

or, more interesting, not to have read, etc. 92

Always reports, feigns reporting, as if he were reading 93

But contrary to what goes on in ThePurloined Letter 95

Reading it will be impossible to understand94

The other does not answer, is not published 96

The one wh scrtches nad preteds to write in the pace of the other who writes and

pretends to scratch. 98

Dream of the original imporint . . Visa o Masercharge. . . tympan 101

Ciphered letters, 93

I have said it elsewhere 124

Phomomaton of myself 125

they could never give me a truly satisfactory answer on this question, how they

distinguish between a letter and a parcel, a dead letter and a dead parcel, and why

they did not sell the so-called dead letter at auction. 125

Derrida anticipates the cell phone on vibrator mode:

When will we be able to call without ringing? There would be a warning light or one

could even carry it one oneself, near the heart or in the pocket, for certin coded calls,

some signal. 87

Rite versus lean by heart 82

Burn by Heart

7

Strange story. Again you suspect me of have sent it. I do no dare open it to reread

it . . . But I will not send it to you a second time—in any case, I will never read it. 76

No more than this card that you are reading now, that you are holdin gi your ahdns

or on your knees. 73

Signature 73

Reading the last one (for it is he who reads me, you see him here . . . 63

Another way of saying that you had reread it, no? which is what one begins doing

when on rereads, even for the first time. Repetition, memory, etc. . . . P. asks D. to

reread before burning, so be it, in order to incorporate the letter (like a member of

the reistance under torture). 59-60

Rearviwew mirror of an automobile that pauses 60

One day, please, read me no more, and even forget that you have read me. 36

And son we will be able to afford that answering machine. 36

I’ll see you before you read this. 36

For this for life I must lose you, for life, and make myself illegible for you. . . I have

not destroyed anything of yours, your scarps of paper, I mean, you perhaps, but

nothing of yours. But it would be fatal. (I am still en train, this is getting harder and

harder to read no doubt.). 34

I always come back to the same card. 34

Repetition compulsion is understood even less, 35

All this because you didn’t want to burn the first letters, 14

Lacan, in truth, meant to say what I said, under the heading of disemmination, What

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

8

reconstituted this word to a last word and therefore into a destination. In other

words, if it can be put thus, Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I

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

destination is back in my hand and “dessmination” is reversd into Lacan’s account.

This is what I had describe to you one day, three-card monte, the agility of the

expert hands to which one would yield oneself bound hand and foot. 151

With stupefying dexterity they move three cards after having you choose one. 36

The coded “words” to which Alan Bas refers in his glossary are “EGEK HUM XSR

STR” p. 148 (Bass does not give the page reference, and is no longer glossing, though

the last entry does refer the reader a footnote.)

I await everything from an event that I am incapable of anticipating. 47

Speaking of which, M., who has read the seminar on Life Death along with several

friends, tell me I should publish the notes without changing anything. This is

impossible, of course, unless I detach the sessions on Freud, or only the one on

Freud’s legacy, the story of hteh fort/da with little Ernest. 41

Without seeming to burn everything, 40

I think I made this film for myself even before I knew how to drive. If I were not

afraid of waking everyone I would come, in any case I would telephone. When will

we be able to call without ringing/ [aniticpates the vibe setting on cell phones]There

would be a warning light or one could even carry it on oneself, near the heart or in

the pocket, for certain coded calls, some signal. 87

“and not only in the way a negative is developed” PC, 43

9

“Thiese letters f “Plato,” that Socrates, of course, would have neither reda nor

written., I now find them greater than the works. I could like to call you to read oout

loud several extracts from the “stands” they have mandated, commanded,

programmed for centuries as I would like to use them for my legs. I am typing them,

or rather one day you will return this letter to me). . . . And if I read out loud, the

most irreplaceable ones, don’t ‘ you think . . . you always imitate better than I).

Listen . .[reread it as if I had written it myself, starting from the “philosopher’s notes,

especially the end which more or less [note Derrida’s comments on “more or les” a

phrase his father used, in For the Love of Lacan] says this—but the whole thing

would have to be retranslated: This letter, all three must be read together as much

as possible, if not at the same time and as often as you are able. Look at it as a way to

take an oath and as a convention having the force of law, on which it is legitimate to

swear with a seriousness mixed with grace and with the badinage of the serious . . .

Take as a witness the god chief among all things present and future, and the all-

powerful father of the chief and its cause, whom we all know, if we philosophize

truly and with all the clarity possible for men enjoying beatitude.” It has to be read

in Greek, my very sweet one, as if I were writing it to you. Myself.) So then I pick up

my citation again,

8586; 86-87

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

out of three times in given Ecrits [Derrida does not bother to specify the editions or

given the relevant page numbers] becomes [François] Roustang’s “slip,” Roustang

10

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

everyone including its author, turning all around that which must not be read.

Whose name I can say because he is dead”

Du Tout,” C, 519

Derrida will make more mistakes, 27 (“reprosuction” instead of “reproduction”), 27

Typo versus slip, 513

Typo? 216, “head” instead of the more obvious “had”

Typos, 152, 228

Reproduction of reproduction, 35; 37

It is Socrates’ writing surface” 17

Why prefer to write on cards? First of all because of the suppor, doubtless, which is

more rigid, the cardboard firmer, it preserves, it resists manipulation; and hten it

limits and justifies form ht eoutside; by means of the borders, the indigence of the

discourse, the insgnifiacance of the anecdoque [sic]

I have so much to tell you and I will have to hold on snapshot postcards—and

immediately be divided among them. Letters in small pieces torn out in advance;

cut out recut. 22

I swear without reading or deciphering anything in it, I have torn out this page, at

the date you can see, only in order to write to you, and to do so with a the pencil that

you had left between the pages. 126

Thereby to give the slightest hope of reading it one day 127

I want to reread the entire corpus platonicum 129

Brotherl 129

11

You can feel he has a hard-on in his back 128

And they publish everything 132

I remember the ashes. What a chance, to burn, yes yes [no punctuation] 23

This entire post card ontology 22

Two hands, the mystic writing pad, 25

That we will be able to send sperm by post card, 24

For example, I write on post cards, oh well I write on post cards. “I” begins again

with a reprosuction (say, I just wrote reproSuction: have you noticed that I make

more and more strange mistakes, is it fatigue or age, occasionally the spelling goes,

phonetic writing come back in force, as in elementary school, only to others whom I

confusedly looked down on—the lapsus or “slips” obviously). And by means of a

reproduction that is itself reproduced serially, always the same picture on another

support, but an identical support, differing only in numero. 27

The postal principle 27

7 hours in the car with the old film of the accident to resolve everything, 87

I still do not know how to see what there is to see. 16

As if he were running to catch a moving train, 17

On the back of the same card, Iw write you all the time, 16

Out of this atrocious exclusion that we make of all of htem—and every possible

reader. The whole reader. 16

I had read in his glance that he was begging for the impossible. 14

Write it in cipher, 1

Silent move, 13

12

But that which checks

As if what is invivble here could take a reading into account.

502

archive, 506

the decryting, in these conditions, can no longer come from the simple and alleged

interior of what is still called, provisionally, psychoanalysis.

540

all the police forces of avoidance is, I can put it thus, avoidance itself. There are, for

example, what are called “publications”: one can fail to know them, this is always

possible in a given context, but one can arrange things, ina certain milieu, in order to

avoid knowing that they exist; one can also, knowing of their existence avoid

reading them; one can read while avoiding “understanding”; one can, understanding

avoid being affected by them or using them; one can also, using them, avoid them,

contain the,, exclude them, and therefore, avoid them better than ever, etc. But what

is to be thought of the fact that one cannot avoid avoiding, of inevitable avoidance in

all its form—rejection, foreclusion, deegation, incorporation, and even the

introjective and idealizing assimilation of the other at the the limit of

incorporation---? 506-07

Rene Major: I first of all ould like you to convey to you the profound malaise I

experience reading Glas,

Du Tout, 499

I ask you to forget, to preserve in amnesia. 12

The secret of reproduction, 12

13

Look closely at this card, it’s a reproduction.

I confide to you this solemn and sententious aphorism: di not everything between

us begin with a rpeorduction? Yes, and at the same time . .. the tragedy is there. 9

I wil have sent you only cards. Even if they are letters and if I always put more htan

one in the same envelope. 8

What a couple. Socrates turns his back to plato [sic], who has made him write

whatever he wanted while pretending to receive it from him. This reproduction is

sold here as a post card, you have noticed, with greetings and address. Socrates

writing, do you notice, on a post card. 12

The Post Card as the title of a romance novel or a film (The Notebook; Postcards from

the Edge); the history of the post card, or the particular post card “the” post card of

Socrates writing and Plato dictates from behind, or post card of post cards Derrida

finds in Oxford, that is for sale [the post card, italicized but wit “a” not “the” before it

12], and copies of which he/whomever writes on, puts in an envelope, and mails

instead of mailing the post cards. Uses the cards instead of a letter (Kafka and Freud

used letters, they were the last to do so].

“and not only in the way a negative is developed” PC, 43

“Tell you a brief story,”

Op cit 518

[This story is like Lacan thinking that Derrida is “inanalysis” [a neologism]—this

time the person, a woman, thinks Derrida is the analyst, and never names the

person he is supposedly analyzing].

“Du Tout,” PC, 514-15

14

This text is not cited in the headnote of “For the Love of Lacan” in Resistances of

Psychoanalysis.

I am afraid that the readers will exclude them too quickly , will conclude

precipitously that: these are third parties, they cannot be the secret addressee of

these letters. 223

Versus the bad reader who does not rad slowly. But you cannot avoid avoiding, so

“the readers” can’t fall out into two groups, sorted into slow at the correct speed and

get a ticket for reading too fast., going over the reading speedlimit.

Burning everything in The Post Card with the burning of Archive Fever, the ahs.

“I do not believe that one can properly call “post card” a unique and original image,

if some such thing ever occurs, a painting or a drawing destined t someone in the

guise of a part card and abandoned to an anonymous third party, a neutral

machinery that supposedly leads the message to its desintination, or at least would

have the support make its way . . . . 35

On the last page of the volume of Letters to Milena, which I wouldn’t have read

without you, Blanchot cites Kafka” [Derrida then gites the Kafka citation Blanchot

cites]PC, 222 [reference to Kafka letter, Kafka now named, whereas p. 35 referred to

without a name “You had me read that letter to e where he [no referent of the

pronoun] more or less says that, speculating with spirit, denuding oneself before

them; he wrote only (on) letters that one, one of the last along with Freud finally. 35

circumcise 222

I am here signing my proper name, Jacques Derrida.1

15

1 regret that you [tu] [so, using the tutoyer, Derrida has already moved into

epistolary mode in his note before the Envois begins.] do not very much trust

my signature, on the pretext that it might be several.” P. 6

Introduction / Glossary

Voler, see “Le facteur,” note 9. PC, xxix

At the end of the letters 15 June and 20 June 1978, you will find some “words” in

capital letters. These have been transposed from the original, but they are

particularly problematic in the translation. If the original text is crypted, as it claims

to be, is the translation equally crypted? Is there a possible key to the translation of

a crypted text? Does the translation hold out the same promise of decrypting (of

translation) as the original? Such are the question of EGEK . . .”

laser effect which would come to cut out onto the surface of the letters, and in truth

our body. 221

I’m going to read L’enfant du chien-assis by Jos, alias L’ete rouge.

Or quite simply because he is---reading and that is always on some reading, you

know something about this, that I transfer. 218

He is taking notes having in mind a prospect of publication in modern times. He is

pretending to write but he has a small pocket tape recorder under his mantle, or

rather above his head, under his pointed hat: the arm of the mike is stretched above

the head of plato. 218-19

Dream, 216-17

16

Vacation reading, 252I’ve just received the slide in color. Be very careful with it. I’ll

need it in the reproduction. I have never found them so resigned to their beauty.

What a couple. 250

Right in the moment of slipping this into the envelope: don’t forget that all of this

tookthe wish to make this picture into the cover of a book, all of it pushed back into

the margins, the title, may name, the name of the publisher, and miniaturized (I

mean in red) on Socrates’ phallus. 251

The most anonymous support, 175

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

That plato is calling Socrates, gives him an order (jussic performative one says at

Oxford, of the “send a card to Freud” type there, right away, it’s done.) . . . yo all

transfer everything, and everyone, onto Socrates. You don;’t know if this is an order

or an oaffirmation. Nor if the amorous transference takes plcebecause Socrates is

writing or precisely because he is not writing, since armed with a pen and the

grattoir [scapel, knife], presently he is doing bothwhile doing neither the one nor

the other. And if he is not writing, you do not know why he is not writing presently,

because he has suspended his pen for a second or because he is erasing by

17

scratching out or because he cannot write or because he ca not write, because he

does not know how or knows how not, etc., r quite simply 218

In the first publication of this text. . . The deletion of this phrase (which is

inconsequential) is the only modification of this essay since its first publication.

Footnote 68, 495 to Le facteur

Derida reshelves the entire book:

On the contrary, the necessity of everything [du tout] announces itself terribly, the

fatality of saving everything from destruction: what is there, rigorously in our letters

does not derive from the fort: da, from the vocabulary of going-coming, of the step,

of the way or the away, of the near and the far, of all the frameworks in tele-, of the

adestination, of the address and maladdress, of everything that is passed and comes

to pass between Socrates and Plato, Freud and Heidegger, the “truth,” of the facteur,

“du tout,” of the transference, of the inheritance and the genealogy, of the paradoxes

of nomination, of the king an, of the queen and of their ministers, of the magister

and of the ministries, of the public and private detectives? Is here a word, a letter, an

atom of a message that rigorously speaking should not be withdrawn from the

burning with the aim of publication? . . . If I circumcise, and I will, it will have to

bleed around the edges, and we al put in their hands, under their eyes, shards of our

body, of what is most secret in our sou.

Very intrigued, at Oxford, by the arrival of the kings and tof the answers by 4. They

intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme. 222

Rereading the Legacy 225

March-April 1979.

18

I’ve started to reread, to sort, to dig around in the box (my first gift, suddenly, it no

longer sufficed.) 186

Derrida satirizes a reading of his work that fold it back into Lacan, one that say that

Derrida s only saying what Lacan already said. 150-51

You will, like me, be the last one able to read. . . Nor read in lowered voice. 238

S/p is for Socrates and Plato but p/S is “for Poe, for Dupin, and the narrator. 148

When one reads everything that is still written today, and so seriously, in such a

businesslike way (spoudaios!) on the subject of this great telephonic farce . . . 146

I’ve decided to reproduce only the words, no iconography, save the Oxford card.

Otherwise what would we have done with all the others, the films, the cassettes, the

piece of skin with the drawing? So the insupportable supports remain, post cards, I

ma burning all the supports and keeping only purely verbal sequences. 186-87

Not a word that would not be dictated upside down, programmed on the back [au

dos], in the back of the post card. Everything will consist in describing Socrates with

Plato as a child in his back, and I will retain only the lexicon required fro every line

[trait] in he drawing. In a word, there will only be back (du dos), even the word

“dos,” if you are willing to pay faithful attention to it and keep the memory.

187

“If you’re not there, leave an message on the answering machine.” 189

and then I went into a bookstore, I bought several cards and reproductions, as you

know. . . I fell upon two books of photographs that cost me a great deal, one on

Freud, very rich, the other on Heidegger, at home, with Madame and the journalists

from the Spiegel in 1978)

19

Moreover I this letter that I am reading at the moment in the train (I have the album,

it is heavy and thick, on my knees, this paper posed on Freud’s head which covers

the entire page) he tells him that one must not “complain,” one cannot, nor dig too

deep.

Here Freud and Heidegger, I conjoin them within me like the two great ghosts of the

“great epoch.” The two surviving grandfathers. 191

I am haunted by Heidegger’s ghost in the city, 189

“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

“the crushing repetition compulsion” 458, PC, then Derrida cites marie Bonaparte

using the same phrase , 458

20

Here, the insistent monotony has at least led to the construction of a textual

network, the demonstration of the recurrence of certain motifs . . . outside The

Purloined Letter. Thus the letter hanging under the mantelpiece has its equivalent in

The Murders in the Rue Morgue. For us, the interest of this recurrence, and of

pointing it out, is not that of an empirical enrichment, an experimental verification,

the illustration of a repetitive insistence. It is structural. It inscribes The Purloined

Letter in a texture, to which it belongs, and within which the Seminar had effected a

cursory framing or cross-section. We know that The Purloined Letter belongs to

what Baudelaire called “A kind of trilogy, along with The Murders in the Rue Morgue

and The Mystery of Marie Roget. The Seminar does not breathe a word about this

trilogy; not only odes it lift out the narrated triangles (the “real drama”) in order to

center the narration in them hear the burden of the interpretation (the destruction

of the letter), but that it omits like a naturalized frame. 458-59

Bu it happens that her [Marie Bonaparte’s] laborious analysis opens up textual

structures that remain closed to Lacan. 459

Headnotes about publication of various chapters in Ecrits along with notes in the

Biographical Appendix as well as the Index Jacques Lain Miller provides, but s not

keyed to words but to concepts.

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” he answered, laughing.” The

Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Oxford 19

The glance of reading (Lacan)—look at instead of look up—retinal reading. Derrida,

“I didn’t know where to start reading, looking , opening.” 209 Instead of WB’s essay

made up entirely of quotations, one would write an essay with a list of words not

21

keyed to anything, prior to any indexing. Glancing as somewhere between glossing

and reading.

Having recalled this, and having taken this precaution as a matter of principle, I am not doing what one ought to do and cannot do it with you in a seminar. I cannot do all that again with you here for at least two reasons, as I was saying. The one has to do with the obvious lack of time: it would take us years. The other, less obvious, is that I also believe in the necessity, sometimes, in a seminar the work of which is not simply reading, in the necessity, and even the fecundity, when I’m optimistic and confident, of a certain number of leaps, certain new perspectives from a turn in the text, from a stretch of path that gives you another view of the whole, like, for example, when you’re driving a car on a mountain road, a hairpin or a turn, an abrupt and precipitous elevation suddenly gives you in an instant a new perspective on the whole, or a large part of the itinerary or of what orients, designs, or destines it. And here there intervene not only each person’s reading-idioms, with their history, their way of driving (it goes without saying that each of my choices and my perspectives depends broadly here, as I will never try to hide, on my history, my previous work, my way of driving, driving on this read, on my drives, desires and phantasms, even if I always try to make them both intelligible, shareable, convincing and open to discussion) [here there intervene, not only each person’s reading-idioms, with their history, their way of driving] in the mountains or on the flat, on dirt roads or on highways, following this or that map, this or that route, but also the crossing, the decision already taken and imposed by you by fiat as soon as it was proposed to you, to read a given seminar by Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe, i.e., two discourses also on the way and on the path which can multiply perspectives from which two vehicles can light up, their headlights crossing, the overall cartography and the landscape in which we are traveling and driving together, driving on all these paths interlaced, intercut, overloaded with bridges, fords, no entries or one-way streets, etc.

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2, (2012) 206

Reading in Color: Kindle with and without color images.

Facsimiles in The Post Card as well. Description of it

“I didn’t know where to start treading, looking, opening.” PC, 209 when he gets the

book without the frontispiece ad things he got the wrong book, then holds it again

22

with both hands and finds the right page wit te image of Plato and Socrates and

describes the image, the blue and the red lettering—non-signifying patterns

"Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. 'No doubt you think that you are

complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,' he observed. 'Now, in my opinion,

Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends'

thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very

showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no

means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.'" Study in Scarlet

Repetition—structure is not only about a sequence, first Queen, then Minister; first

Minister, then Dupin—but also about reversibility, from inside to outside, from

outside in (Invagination) or top to bottom or upside down.

Dupin’s signature in Facteur is not “Dupin,” it’s the citation from Astree, a note left

behind by which the Minister will know Dupin found it and found him out. Bt will

the minister ever read it? Will the facsimile arrive at its desination? Is Poe (and

Derrida) making an exception-due to different kinds of marking (support of the

facsimile) and re/marking (citation as signature), both of which are easily

misrecognized or not recognized at all? Will the Minister preat Dupin’s recognition,

ofr has Dupin duped himself?

“Purloined Letter” cited in an endnote to Oxford Worlds Classics “Scandal in

Bohemia.” In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Ed Owen Dudley Edwards, 299, n4

It’s one of A.C. Doyle’s sources.

23

Derrida forgets to mention Lacan’s “Overture to this Collection,” 3-5, which explains

the order of the Ecrits as well as the first sentence of ‘The Seminar on ‘Purloined

Letter’” begins with the repetition compulsion, which Lacan idiosyncratically

translates as “repetition automatism.”2 “My research has led me to the realization

that the repetition automatism (Wiederholungszwang) has its basis in what I have

called the insistence of the signifying chain.” 6 The opening section of the essay ends

at a page spacing by returns to repetition compulsion. “This is what will confirm for

us that it is repetition automatism. P. 10

“This is what happens in repetition automatism.” 21

“The idea here is that one will already find in Lacan’s 1956 “Seminar on the

‘Purloined Letter’” ideas that were not fully developed until the 1960s. Bruce Fink,

766, n (10, 5).

In other words, Lacan is not relineazing his collection , putting a master text at the

“head” of the book, but staging a reading as a rereading, a circular process

“Exmplified” by this text. This text doubles back on itself. Unlike most revisions, it

includes the alternate drafts. The first version beings over, placed nad dated:

Guitrancourt and Sans Cascinao, mid-May to mid-August 1956 and then a new

italicized subtile repsents the second version tat followed “Presentation of the Suite”

30) followed by an identically italicized subtitle “Introduction” on p. 33 which

begins “The class of my seminar that I have written up to the present here was given

on April 26, 1955. It represents a moment in the commentary that I devoted to

Beyond the Pleasure Principle for the whole of that year.” 33 This section is undated

in the text presumably because the edition in which it was publishes establishes the

24

date on the copyright page. . A final section is subtitled in italics “Parenthesis of

Parentheses (Added in 1966).” The last paragraphs constitute an intellectual

autobiography of the essay’s non-linear composition. 45-46. The endnotes have

been updated so that the default reference is to the 1966 edition. But Fink’s

translation records the dates of footnote added later “[Added in 1968:] and even

“[Added in 1966].” Some endnotes offer more bibliographical information. The

second to last endnote reads: “[Added in 1966] The text written in 1955 resumes

here. The introduction of a structural approach through such exercises was, in fact,

followed by important developments in my teaching. Concepts related to

subjectivization progressed hand-in-hand with a reference to the analysis situs in

which I claim the subjective progress.” 48, n. 29. The break is not graphically

consistent. The endnote occurs roughly four pages before the essay ends. When

Lacan talks why he “is publishing a version of it here,” both the referent of “version”

and “here” keep the published text in an unfinished state. When Lacan writes about

why he reworked the essay in accordance with the requirements of writing” and

“increasingly promoted the notion of the symbol here,” To obscure its historical

traits through a sort of historical feint would have seemed, I believe, artificial to my

students.” Lacan may make the “historical traits” apparent, but he does not make

tem clear, he does not follow the biobilbiograhical conventions which would provide

a clear, progress narrative. Instead, the apparence of the essay’s historical traits” is

inseparable from the graphic appearance and variations in its paratexts, which

apparently demands recursive reading.

Compare “version” when used by Derrida.

25

The epigraph from Goethe’s Faust is kept in German, translated in the endnotes, 767

(11,2)

“Was Hiesst Lesen?”

“Was Hiesst Lesen?” Das Tragende (support for carrying, like a strecher) und

Leitende (Leader, Head) im Lesen ist die Sammlung. Worauf [What drives] sammelt

sie? Auf die Gescrhiebene, auf das in der Schrift Gesagte. Das eingenliche Lesen ist

die Sammlung auf das, was ohne unser Wissen einst shchon unser Wesen in den

Anspruch genommenon hast, moegen wir dabei ihm entsprechen oder versagen.

Ohne das eigenliche Lesen vermoegen wir auch nicht das uns Anblinkended zu sehe

und das Erscheinende und Scheinedne zu schauen.

“Was Hiesst Lesen?” in Denkerfahrungen, 1910-1974. Ed. Hermann Heidegger.

Vittorio Klostermann: Krankfurst am Main, 1983, 61.

Bruce Fink’s endnotes—a kind of glossary sensitive to the repetitions of Lacan’s

terms precedes the endnotes, which gloss a particular word.

Do these various bibliographic recursions constitute a structural repetition akin to

the structures of repetition that Lacan and Derrida debate and that differnitate them

(the letter is indivisblle, the triangle intersubjective, the letter is pre-graamatoligcal,

and the letter always arrives at its destination, versus the letter is always divisible

(because material), the letter is always already grammmatological, and the triangle

is not intrsubjective, and the letter is subject to disinterrance such it does not

always arrive at its destination? Does Lacan particular staging of his argument have

any relation to the way Derrida restages le facteur de la verite by placing it at the

26

end of the Post Card (inverting the place of the Seminar?), including of an already

published article to which Derrida appends to a “pre-note” about his setting it

adrift? Is this republication a new version of the essay? And would be reading it

mean making it a symptom, reading symptomatic? Is this a structure yet to be read?

Does it bear on the repetition compulsion? Is it a variation on compulsive reading?

Where does the deconstruction of a text’s parergon, its title and its borders begin

and end? What does Derrida do to reconfigure a text have to be re/configured for

Derrida to read it? Look at For the Love of Lacan. Says he is not standing outside

the text, but still in a scene of reading.

Yet derrida does not deconstruct his own reading and Lacan’s. He does not show

how his own reading repeats the kinds of msrecognitions he finds in Lacan, even if

he does nto calim to have “corrected,” as it were, Lacan’s reading.

Does orienting ourselves through page design nad paratextss, philogical and

bibliographical issues pt us on a path to such a deconstruction?

Must these questions beheld in suspense? Are they yet another aporia?

I propose to address these readings in a preliminary way by turn to For the Love

of Lacan, a passage in Le facteur in which Derrida unlocks his reading, and a passage

in Poe’s Purloined Letter regarding the facsimile. The facsimile in Poe is a particular

kind of copy, a particular kind of supplement. In Poe’s letter, it is a supplement. But

Derrida uses an actual facsimile of his signature, “J.D” several times in “Signature,

Event, Context.” Memoirs of the Blind, Artaud le Moma, The Sense of the Subjectile,

Hantai, Correspondence, Truth of Painting all make use of facsimiles. Bok on

Derrida turning his publications into facsmiles. Neither Lacan nor Derrida read the

27

facsimile in Poe’s story. Is it one kind of iteration among others, or does its

particularity, a matter of verbal description in Poe’s story, of course, make a

diference to difference, te trace, arce-wriitng, the impression, and so on?

Hand Delivered Reading

Derrida uses “internal reading” in Memoirs of the Blind

Read by juxtaposition of selections: My choice is information passage (about media)

in relation to sentence about the reading he ahs unlocked. To get at question of the

support and he facsimile.

“This question cannot but resound when we know we are caught in a scene of

reading” On the Name, 98.

I have already sufficiently formalized readabiltiy under erasure and the logic of the

event as grahphematic 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 ere for the moment. Resistances, 48. Derrida does not provide a citation.

“Off the record” means not recorded, outside the archive. We are thus brought back

to the difficult question of the record, history, and the archive Is there an “outside-

the-archive”? Impossible, but the impossible is deconstruction’s affair. At bottom,

beneath the question that I will call once again the remaining [restance] of the

archive—which does anything but remain in the sense of the permanent subsistence

of a presence—beneath this question of the differance or the distinerrance of there

archive . .

28

Thus, not with Lacan in general —who for me does not exist, and I never speak fo a

philosopher or a corpus in general as it were a matter of a homogenous body: I did

not do so for Lacan any more than for any other. The discussion was begun rather

with a forceful, relatively coherent, and stabilized configuration of a discourse at the

time of the collection and binding of Ecrits, in other words, in 1966.

Resistances, 48-49

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

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

“Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” is given a “privilege,” which is Lacan’s word; I

quote Lacan: “the privilege of opening the sequence [the sequence of the Ecrits]

despite its diacnhrony.”4 In other words, Ecrits collects and binds together all the

texts out of which it is composed in chronological order (according to the

“diachrony” of prior publication with the exception of the “Seminar on ‘The

Purloined Letter,’” which, by coming at beginning is thereby given the privilege of

figuring the synchronic configuration of the set and thus the binding the whole

together. It therefore seemed legitimate to take a privileged interest in this

privilege. If I use the word binding here, the binding that holds together the moment

of reading and rereading, it is because of one of the two sole occasions in my life on

which I met Lacan and spoke briefly with him, he himself spoke to me of binding and

the binding of the Ecrits. I am not telling these stories for the same of amusement or

the distraction of anecdotes, but because we are supposed to be talking here about

the encounter, tukhe, contingency—or not—and what binds, if you will the

signature of the event to the theorem.

29

Resistances, 49

Here Derrida stops reading the publishing history, the gap between 1975 and 1966,

and moves to an extra-discursive but somehow more immediate and therefore

better jsutification for what he did because Lacan personally, as it were, gave him

permission. He proceeds to tell the anecdotes about meeting Lacan over the next

two and a half pages before returning to “the republication of the paperback edition

in 1970” (52). But Derrida forgets that the Ecrit publishes the “Seminar on ‘The

Purloined Letter’” in two versions; the essay begins over. S it is not an isolated

heading, a caption that binds; it already subverts that function. Furthermore, he

cites Beyond the Pleasure Principle and. Although Derrida reads some of Freud’s

notes very closely, he does not read the paratexts of the Ecrits.

Instead, he reconfigures the configuration:

I link this and bind it once again to the binding of the great book. I go back then to

the period (the end of the 1960s, 1965, 1966-67) when Ecrits was being bound

under the sign of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’”

Resistance of PSyh, 53

Cite first sentence of Envois

First sentence of Envois

Cite unbearable

First page of envois

Have we begun at the beginning? Are we already reading too quickly?

Philology versus philosophy

1 The Dictionnaire de la langue française by Émile Littré2 SEE BRUCE FINKS’S ENDNOTE P. 767, (11, 3)

30

Derrida on the bad reader, next page

Because I still like him, I can foresee the impatience of the bad reader: this is the

way I name or accuse the fearful reader, the reader in a hurry to be determined,

decided upon deciding (in order to annul in other words, to bring back to oneself,

one has to wish to know in advance what to expect, one wishes to expect what has

happened, one wishes to expect (oneself)). Now, it is bad, and know no other

definition of the bad, it is bad to predestine one’s reading, it is always bad to foretell.

It is bad, reader, no longer to like retracing’s one’s steps.

Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, 4

Yet he says he is not using bad in a moral sense but in a literary sense in Resistances.

Is glossing a form of extreme close reading, a line by line commentary? Is glossing

not reading insofar as it takes the text as a given, as complete.

The text entitled "The Purloined Letter" imprints / is imprinted in these effects of

indirection. I have only indicated the most conspicuous of these-effects in order to

begin to unlock their reading: the game of doubles, the endless divisibility, the

textual references from facsimile to facsimile, the framing of frames, the

interminable supplementarity of quotation marks, the insertion of "The Purloined

Letter" in a purloined letter that begins with it, throughout the narratives of

narrative of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the newspaper clippings of "The

Mystery of Marie Roget" ("A Sequel to 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' ").

Above all else, the mise en abime of the title: "The Purloined Letter" is the text,

the text in a text (the purloined letter as a trilogy). The title is the title of the text, it

31

names the text, it names itself and thus includes itself while pretending to name an

object described in the text. "The Purloined Letter" functions as a text that escapes

all assignable destination and produces, or rather induces by deducing itself, this

inassignability at the exact moment in which it narrates the arrival of a letter. It

pretends to mean [vouloir-dire]and to make one think that "a letter always

arrives at its destination," authentic, intact, and undivided, at the moment and the

place where the simulation, as writing avant la lettre, leaves its path. In order to

make another leap to the side. At this very place, of course.

YFS, 110

Derrida’s unlocked reading—a series of equivalences, nested or

translated, repeated, a series? Is it serial repetition? What kind of

structural reading is being unlocked here? What difference, if any,

does the substrate make to this structural reading? What kind of

formal materiality or radical empiricism, differs from history of the

book and material culture?

Obviously I am thinking of the omission of the frame, of the play of signatures, and

notably the parergonal effect; I cannot produce the demonstration I gave in 1975 of

this misrecognition. Resistances of Psych, 59

32

of a continuum composed each time of words or sentences, of signs missing from

the interior, if it can be put thus, of a card, a of a letter, or of a card-letter. For the

totally incinerated envois, could not be indicated any mark. I had thought first of

preserving the figures and the dates, in other words the places of the signature, but I

gave it up. What would this book have been like? Before all else I wanted, such was

one of the destinations of my labor, to make a book—in part for reasons that remain

obscure and always will, I believe, and in part for other reasons that I must silence. A

book instead of what? Or of whom?

PC, 4-5

The misrecognition of the failure to account of the literary structure of narration,

Cite Derrida, For the Love of Lacan, I do not think of Lacan as a homogenous body.

Same could be said for Deririda’s own works.

Derrida does not read line by line and provides his own directions for reading.

Nevertheless , we may ask where glossing ends and reading begins, whether

glossary is a kind of non-reading, a supplement that is continuous or discontinuous

with the text (more corridors in a labyrinth or the thread that takes one in and out

of the labyrinth of the text it is graphically marked off from?

Let’s start over. Let’s begin with the paratexts of the Post Card, the translation’s

introduction and glossary, entitled “L before K.” Is the glossary a kind of reading of

the Post Card, a reading that is also a non-linear reading but instead gives the reader

a network before rather than after the text? And where is that reading? Is the

glossary separate from the introduction, as it is in the table of contents where the

33

glossary is printed in the same font size as the introduction, or is it part of the

introduction, in which Glossary appears as a subheading, not the title at the head of

a new page in the same size as the font used for the Introduction, but in a smaller

font on the same page of the introduction? Consider Derrida’s reading of the small ,

barely noticeable but nevertheless significant differences between title of Maurice

BLanchot’s La folie du jour (The Madness of the Day), reproduced in facsimile

images of the table of contents and in Parages. (Is John P. Leavey’s Glassary a

reading of Derrida’s Glas? How does one gloss these paratextual differences in a

paratext not in Derrida’s French edition? How should one gloss, how does one read

the paratexts in Derrida’s text? Should we read the notes that precede Speculations

and “Le facteur “on facing pages the same way we read Derrida’s preface? Are these

unsigned notes written by Derrida? Consider Derrida’s note to the translator in his

extended footnote running across the bottom of each page of “Living On:

Borderlines?” And does glossing exclude the reprinting in a smaller font and

repagination as Living On,” dropping the subtitle?

Is glossing restricted to alphabetic lettering without regard to the support or

substrate? How should one account for the variation in the placement of notes in

translations Derrida’s works? Stanford University Press Notes precede each of the

endnotes to the three reprinted essays in Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Chicago UP

favors putting them before each essay (See The Truth in Painting). Are these to

regarded as meaningless vagaries of publication? Is Stanford’s more awkward in

having to include references in the text to the notes (See Headnote one)? Or should

34

the so-called materiality of any edition be read? Should the medium be read, the

different stocks of paper for the printed text and for the facsimiles in The Post card?

The pronoun “I” is used in the first, “we” and “I” are used in the second? And what

are we to make of “first version” or the “first version was initially published?”

Should we track down these different versions and catalogue their variations? In

the second endnote, the author, apparently Derrida, recommends we read two

essays given at a conference to which his paper responds? Should we read these

notes differently from the way we read Derrida’s autobiographical anecdotes about

how he arrived at the title of his work (Archive Fever, Typewriter Ribbon, Memoirs

of the Blind, and so on? Derrida’s own rereading of Envois and The Purloined Letter

in For the Love of Lacan. Derrida writes in “Restitutions,” And Shapiro [Meyer]

quotes these two paragraphs which you all find so ridiculous or so imprudent. Lets

reread them first, in German, in French, and in English.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

--It’s done. (294)

Or two pages later,

In other words, would it not be on the basis of thing as work or product that is

general interpretation (or one that is claimed as general) of the thing as informed

matter was secretly constituted? Now reread the chapter. 296

Should one read such moments? Or are they to be gathered and shelved under the

rubric of Derrida’s rhetoric?

35

Does anything go missing between glossing and reading? In addition to what

Derrida calls “unreadability” in Living On: Borderlines?” is there also non reading,

nto be confused with not reading? And where would this nonreading be situated in

relation to reading and unreading?

--Do you think you need to start over again? What happened to passages from The

Post Card you cited at the beginning of your essay? Can you do what Derrida calls in

various places an “internal reading” of that book, even if the limits of that reading

are artificially and arbitrarily imposed, for the sake of clarity?

--Of course. One always “does” such readings. My purpose thus far is slow the

speed of such reading or what Derrida calls the rush in Memoirs of the Blind. My

reading has thus far been radically empiricist in ask a basic bibliographical question

about The Post Card: What is it? We have already put deconstructive pressure on

reading, on its difference form glossing and from nonreading. Let’s take a leap, then,

and examine the title of my essay, “What is Called Reading?” My question alludes to

Martin Heidegger’s “What is Called Thinking?” Derrida pairs Freud and Heidegger

in The Post Card in order to establish the end of an epoch. Derrida also mentions

“the hermeneutical circle,” which orients Heidegger’s orientation of thinking as

questioning, without mentioning Heidegger. (Derrida returns to it at length in Beast

and the Sovereign Part Two). Derrida frequently reads what he regards as

omissions—spirit in Heidegger; the great omission in Lacan; the omission in

Memoirs of the Blind. Derrida obviously does not omit Heidegger, but he arguably

36

does delivers a nonreading of him. Focusing on repetition in Freud, on the

repetition compulsion , on psychoanalysis as the finding of the refound, Derrida

forgets reception in Heidegger. The question of Being in Being and Time is the

repetition. Division Two is at points overtly a repetition of Division One, and

passages about Descartes and Kant appear in almost the same place in both

divisions. Moreover, the passage on the hermeneutical circle in division one is

repeated in division two. To the earlier questions about reading we may now ask

what is rereading? Following Heidegger’s move in Introduction to Metaphysics, in

which he sows that metaphysics is the question “What is metaphyics?,” not any

particular answer to that question, I want to suggest that re/reading Derrida and

the texts he reads and does not read, always happens at the threshold of the

question waiting to be asked, namely “what is called reading?” Derrida is not

exemplary nor is he just an example. But he does reward reading.

---OK. I’m beginning to get it. You want to stay with the text in a radically empirical

way, maybe a hyperglossative way, and, at the same time, you want to push close

reading to its limits—how close is close? How slow is slow? What is the proper

speed of good reading? Does good reading does not mean merely linear reading,

word by word, page by page, but a recursive return from later to earlier passages,

scanning the book like a flip book, indexing it, and random accessing it. And you

want to push the, as Derrida frequently does, the limits of writing and drawing

(Memoirs of the blind) to the consider the reprodocution of images in his works,

37

including The Post Card but the way the printing of some his texts begins to turn

them into images (Living On, Glas, etc)?.

Mes Chances—reading by chance—I remembered a line when reading Foucault,

then In Love of Lcan by chance?

Reading not something that can be folded into a mise-en-abyme, or a parergon—

reading derrida reading. Or my autobiographical narrative. Quesiron about

narrative. Can you tell a story that is already about retelling?

Reading is the question awaiting and usually goes unasked—what is reading? Close?

How close? Slow? How so? What about random access reading scanning reading?

Flip book reading? Far reading? When is it no longer reading? What is the place of

non-reading? Reading is not about a theme, a frame, a master word.

First sentence

First page

First word same as the first page?

No Weg without Umweg: the detour does not overtake the road, but constitutes it,

breaks open the path. Pc, 284

Here I am asking question in the dark. PC, 278

38

Not to frame Derrida, not parergonalize him , not to shrink-wrap him, is to read

sideways, glancing from passage to another, a kind of comparative philology that

freely associative reading in that it has not predetermined limits about what

constitutes writing in the ordinary sense(as opposed to arche-writing, the mark, the

trace). Not be spaced as in Glas under two columns and two texts as in Borderlines,

two running texts or in Jacques Derrida (Bennington and Derrida), which licenses a

kind of key words Derridabase repackaging, reshelving, hack job, complete with

photos from the family album.

As for the 52 signs, the 52 mute spaces, in question is a cipher that I had wanted to

be symbolic and secret—in a word a clever cryptogram, that is, a very naïve one, tat

had cost me long calculations. If I state now, and this is the truth, I swear, that have

totally forgotten the rule as well as the elements of such a calculation, as if I had

thorn it into the fire, I know in advance all the types of reaction that this will not fail

to induce. 5

“Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? to what

address? Without any desire to surprise, and thereby to grab attention by means of

obscurity, I owe it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally that I do not

know.” 5

(In the syntax of “X: A Critical Reader,” it will, moreover, always be difficult to

determine who is the reader of whom, who the subject, who the text, who the object,

39

and who offers what—or whom—to whom. What one would have to criticize in the

oblique, today, without doubt, is without doubt the geometrical figure, the

compromise still made with the primitiveness of the place, the line, the angle, the

diagonal, and thus of the right angle between the vertical and the horizontal. The

oblique remains the choice of a strategy that is till crude, obliged to ward off what is

most urgent, a geometric calculus for diverting as quickly as possible both the

frontal approach and the straight line: presumed to be the shortest path form one

point to another.

Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” in On the Name, 13-14 [Kant is the

critical reader, see p. 8)

Jacque Derrida’s On the Name compromises three essays . . . the three essays

appeared in France as a Collection of three separately bound but matching books

published by Editions Galilee. On the Name, the title this book published by Stanford

University Press, thus is not a translation of any French book title by Jacques

Derrida; it is a name given to what is a hypothetical book in France. The title On the

Name would in French be Sur le nom.

Thomas dutoit, “Translating the Name?” in On the Name, (1995) ix

Not possible to bring these threads together into a htematic unity, under a signature,

attached to a single proper name.

“Biodegradables”—have not read me-vitriol at Spivack in Ghostlier Demarcations

40

Can deconstruction deliver? Oronly pomise?

[For the Love of Lacan

Saying Lacan is right or doing right by Lacan . .. makes my text still more unreadable

for readers in a rush to decide between the “pro and the con,” in short, for htose

minds who believed I was opposed to Lacan or showing him to be wrong. The

question lies elsewhere: it is the question of reason and the principle of reason.

Thus, not only was I not criticizing Lacan, but I was not even writing a sort of

overseeing or objectifying metadiscourse on Lacan or on a text by Lacan. My writing

involved me I a scene, which scene I was showing at the same time (no doubt inn

small phrases (no doubt in small phrases that no one reads) could not be closed or

framed. All of this has since been constantly put back into play other scenes of en

abyme that have been deployed here and there, more often there than here, which is

to say, once again, abroad. Moreover, for all these reasons, the argument of “Le

facteur de la verite” does not lend itself to being framed [the TN note on the French

title awaits the reader of the PC, 413] in the text bearing this title; it is played, set

adrift in The Post Card, the book with that title, which inscribes “Le facteur de la

verite” like a piece in a borderless fiction, neither public nor private, with and

without a general narrator. It is inscribed first of all in the “Envois” 63

. . . without quoting myself, 63

41

Lacan made a compulsive blunder: he has said that he thought I was in analysis

(laughter from the audience, the sentence replaced by an ellipsis in Ornicar, but too

late because the transcription had circulated; once again the problem of the archive,

the archive that no one can master; here no more than ever because of the recording

technique. 67-68]

The bad reader in Derrida pc, 4

Typo and name 364

Facteur, 360

Paragon and autobiography, 303

In this great omission, Freud forgets Socrates 374

Economy of reading Freud’s footnotes in BPP

This is the object of a note which is not only the longest in the book, but also much

longer than the passage it annotates. .. . The note then follows, more than twice as

long as the citation from the Symposium. 374; 374

I am going right to the end of this chapter, toward the site of this first pause where . .

Freud finally concludes278, 320,

Freud dops it . . like the ntoe at the bottom of the pagewhich punctuates te end of

this act 368

And with this word a call for something. A call for a footnote that I will read

presently. 313

42

Derrida announces and delays reading of Freud’s two footnotes (This is how we fall

on the first of two footnotes 318) delays getting to the second on p. 320, “Let us

pause after this first footnote, 320, mentions the second note on 325 This is the

sentence that calls for a note on Sophie’s Death. Before translating this paragraph

on the two negative functions of the PP, note included, I am extracting a notation

from the preceding apragph, I have extracted it only because it did appear dissciable

to me, like a parasite from its immediate context. Perhaps it is best read as an

epigraph of for what is to follow. In the preceding parapgh it resonates . . . 325-26

calls up the second note only to defer analysisof it “Call for a note on ophie’s death.

Before coming to it, I emphasize the certainty . . . , last two sentences at the bottom

of 326, and hten on the middle 327 “Here, finally, is the second note” 327

But a certain reading of his text, theone I am attempting here, cannt fail to ocme

across its work. PC 277

Freud torso, 265

I have cited it elsewhere 263

262, n6, by translator “An allusion to freud and the Scene of Writing

Comparative philology—return to philology for de Man, who considered himself a

philologist?

Old dream of cinema , 68; repeated in Paper Machine

43

I am teaching ou pleasure , I ma telling you the limit and the paradoxes of the

apeiron, and everything begins like the post card, with reproduction. Sophie and her

followers, Ernest, Heinele, myself and company dictate to Freud who dictates to

Plato, who dictates to Socrates who himself, reading the last one (for it is you who

reads me, you see him here on his card I the place where he is scratching, it is for

him that is written the very thing that he is going to sign) again will have forwarded.

Postmark on the stamp, obliteration, no one any longer heard distinctly, all rights

reserved, law is the rule, but you can always run after the addressee as well as the

sender. Run in circles, but I promise you that you will have to run faster and faster.

At a speed out of proportion to these old networks, or in nay any event to their

images. Finished the post, or finally this one, this epoch of the destinal and of the

envoi . . . 63

And to “recount” it has always seemed impossible to me , pc, 167

The survival of a book is in the hands of a scribe 161

They intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme. 232

Holocaust 232

Autobiographical story about a telephone call, 230, like the story he tells at the end

of Given Time: Counterfeit Money.

Van Gogh’s shoelaces as signature (drawing, painting as writing).

44

Reread the little one’s letters. 255

There would only be “facteurs,” and therefore no veritei. Only “media,” take this

into account in every war agains the media. The immediate will never be

substituted for htem, only other frmaeworks and other forces. 194

A datem fr example, when sending a message [a l’evoi d’un pli] is never

perceiveable, one never sees it, it never comes to me, in any event to consciousness,

there wehere it strictly takes place, whence one dates, signs, “expedites.” 195

All posts and telelcomunications 161

Story about posting anxiety 102

Story about telephone anxiety 159

Dead letters 124

Suppose I write a book abou, let us say Palto and telecom,” 103

The whole thing would be retranslated 95

Thus I am rereading the Letters of Plato and all those admirable discussions around

their authenticirt, of their belonging, the one says, to the corpus platonicum sucha s

it has been constituted from the time of Thrasyllus. 83

French book about Derrida turning his books into images.

I am rereading one of the letters received yesterday. Pc, 116

45

For the day that there will be a reading of theOxford card, the one and true reading,

will be the end of history. 115

Dupont and Dupond 112

“entire teleorgamization” 108

Voltaire and ciphers, 70

The Purveyor of Truth

Truth (out) of the Letter from Freud's Hand, 78.- o f a Kind, Kings - Double, 100.

Pretexts

Meeting Place: Four

11s le remercient pour les grandes veritds qu'il vient de proclamer,-- car ils ont d6cou-

vert ( verificateurs de ce qui ne peut &tre vkrifie!) que tout ce qu'il a enonce est absolu-

ment vrai;-- bien que d'abord, avouent ces braves gens, ils aient eu le soupcon que ce

pouvait bien 6tre une simple fiction. Poe repond que pour son compte, il n'en a jamais

dout6.

BAUDELAIRE

Mehlman does not translate; bass does

Mehlman spkips the first six sentneces

46

Were does psychoanalysis, always, alrady, find itself to be refound? 413

The author of thE book of which I am speaking, himself, not his name (therefore

pardon me for no† naming him) is himself pc, 99

Au Revoir

A very trivial remark , the relations between post, police and media are called upon

to transform themselves profoundly , as in the amorous message (which is more and

more watched over, even if it has always been), by virtue of informitization. So be it.

And therefore all the networks of the p.p. (psych and pol). [play on PP as pleasure

principle] But will the relation between the police, the psychoanalytic insitutioand

letters be affected? Inveitably, and it is beginning. Could Poe adapt The Purloined

Letter to this? Is it capable of adaptation? Here I would bet yes but it would be very

difficult. The end of a postal epoch is doubtless the end of literature. 104

PL, facteur, Poe appear in Envois: 28, 71, 94, 95, 104, 148-49, 200, 218, 222, 233

Lacan on on 150-51; Play on Purloined with “Purim” and “Pur . . . lot” 72 and

possible play on Dupin with “Dupont” and “Dupond”

From page 307 of Finnegan’s Wake: “visit to Guiness’s Brewery, Clubs, Advantages

of the enny Post. When is aPun not a Pun?” 142

Derrida’s use of the parergon rather than Genette’s paratext, does not analyze the borders

between notes and editorial annotations in translations, the extent to which one may read

publication history. (B Johnson’s fabricated title page in Dissemination. On the Name,

translation of a book that does not exist in French.)

47

No master word or first word or last word. Pc,151

Last word after the last word and first word before the first word In typewriter Ribbon,

Ink II: (Within such limits)

I am spending my time rereading you. 50

Since I am a true network of resistance, with internal cells, those little groups of three

who communicate only on one side (what is it called?), so that nothing can be extorted so

that no one gives way under torture, and finally so that no one able to betray. What one

hand does the other does not know (definition of Islamic alms?) 42

No history of the posts6-67

Dossier dos, 201

At the moment, I am thinking that thinking that every “production” as they say, f a

concept or system which is never without a name and effigy, is also the meission of a

postage stamp which itself is a post card (picture, text, reproduction, and most often ina

rectangular shape. Pc, 200

Heidegger and Freud, 191 masters of the post.

End of an epoch 190

I have lost my life writing 143

I had put it in my pocket, without reading it right away, the note you left me. 141

48

Question of geometry of the card and the frame. Oblique and geometry in On the Name.

These reminders, of which countless other examples could be given, make us aware of

the effects of the frame, and of the paradoxes in the parergonal logic. Our purpose is not

to prove that "The Purloined Letter" functions within a frame (omitted by the Seminar,

which can thus be assured of its triangular interior by an active, surreptitious limitation

starting with a metalinguistic overhang), but to prove that the structure of the framing

effects is such that no totalization of the border is even possible. The frames are always

framed: thus by some of their content. Pieces with- out a whole, "divisions" without a

totality-this is what thwarts the dream of a letter without division, allergic to division.

From this point on, the seme "phallus" is errant, begins by disseminating, not even by

being disseminated.

The naturalizing neutralization of the frame permits the Seminar, by imposing or

importing an Oedipal outline, by finding it (self there) in truth -and it is there, in fact, but

as a piece, even if a precisely central one, within the letter-to constitute a metalanguage

and to exclude all of the general text in all of the dimensions we began here by recalling

(return to the "first page").

pp. n 36

Supplement to the Investigation

a little too self-evident . 39

“A note in Positions augured this reading of "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'"

49

which was originally the object of a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, Nov., 1971.”

39, n5

Those "literary critics" in France who have been influenced by psychoanalysis have

not yet posed the question of the text.

2. Although it is not the earliest of Lacan's Bcrits chrono-

logically, the Seminar comes at the head of this collection after its determinant

strategic place has been prepared by an overture.

6

Delivered in 1955, committed to paper in 1956 and published in 1957, only in

1966 does the Seminar receive its place at the head of Bcrits, thus following an

order which, not being chronological, does not arise in any simple way from his

theoretico-didactic system. It might stage Bm'ts in a particular way. The necessity of

this priority, in any event, happens to be confirmed, recalled and emphasized by the

introduction to Bcrits in the "Points" edition (1970): ". .. the text, which here keeps

the entry post it possesses elsewhere. . ." Anyone wishing to narrow the scope of the

questions raised here can by all means keep those questions in the "place" given to

the Seminar by its "author": entry post. "This post [le poste] differs from another

post [la poste] only in gender," according to Littre. 40, n6

50

Finally, the Seminar is part of a larger investigation of the repetition automatism

[Wiederholungszwang] which, in the group of texts dating from 1919-1920 (Jenseits,

Das Unheimliche) trans- forms, at least in principle (cf. La Double Sbance, notes 44

and 56), the relationship between psychoanalysis and literary fiction.7 41

7 See Jacques Derrida, La Dissemination (Paris: Le Seuil, 1972), pp. 279-280 and pp.

300-301. Within a rather long text ,questioning the literary process through Plato

and Mallarme, Derrida tackles Freud's dealing with a work of art and notably the

displacement in Freud's approach before and after Das Unheimliche. Derrida also

points out there how Freud in Das Unheimliche is sensitive to the undecidable

ambivalence, "the game of the double, the endless interplay between the fantastic

and the real." -Ed.

"Our inquiry has led us to the point of recognizing that the repetition automatism

[wiederholungszwang] finds its basis in what we have called the insistence of the

signifying chain. We have elaborated that notion itself as a correlate of the ex-istence

(or: excentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the subject of the

unconscious if we are to take Freud's discovery seriously."8 These are the opening

lines of the Seminar.

41

Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'," trans. J. Mehlman, French Freud,

pp. 38-72. Hereafter cited in the text as SPL fol- lowed by the page number. The

problematic set forth in The Purveyor of Truth can best be grasped through a

51

rereading of Poe's Purloined Letter and of the Seminar as well as the editorial notes

of Jeffrey Meh1man.-Ed. 41, n8

This passage has been closely preceded by a reference to Heidegger, and that is not

surprising; it carries the Dasein back to the subject, and that is more surprising.

42

As for the Envois themselves, I do not know if their reading is bearable. 3 (firt page

of pc)

In every support,is something les than ideal, and therefore can be destroyed without

remaining. . 79

But you know that with you I never reread. 229

To stop becomes impossible, 242

I am rereading your note from yesterday: what counts in post cards, and moreover,

in everything, is the tempo. Say you. 247

I am rereading (and indeed for the first time since I have been writing to you)

because you overtook me while writing at the moment when you called form the

café. No, I repeat what I have just told you; there was nothing “decisive” in my PR

letter—moreover, I have not reopened it--, only details which perhaps, perhaps

would have made you understand and approve, if you wanted, if you could. Okay,

let’s drop out. I am rereading myself, that, . . . 81

52

This is how it is to be read, and written, the carte of the adestination. Abject

literature is n its way. 29

The charter is the contract for, which quite stupidly one has to believe; Socrates

comes before Plato, there is between them—and in general—an order of

generations, an irreversible sequence of inheritance. Socrates is before, not in front

of, but before Plato, therefore behind him, and the charter binds us to this order:

this is how to orient one’s thought, this is the left and right [alluding to Kant’s “What

is Orientationin Thinking”], march. 20

Post card anxiety, 21

When I first wrote “burn everything,” it was neither out of prudence and a taste for

the clandestine, nor out a concern for inernal guarding but out of what ws necessary

(he condition, he given) for the affirmation to be reborn at very instant, without

memory. 23

Read Reading Station, 208

I rpeat to you, it was dangerous to keep the letters, and yet I cravenly dreamed that

they would be stolen from us; now they have to be destroyed, the countdown has

started, less than a month, you will be here. 233

Yellow pages of the telephone Book act as a way round resistance—you can dial up

pages, placed them through the index. You can trace a call, as it were.

Once again, I am holding the book open to its middle and I am trying to understand,

53

it’s not easy. 216

I am opening the Traumdeutung approximately in its middle. 414

First published in Poetique 21 (1975), a special issue put together by Phillipe

Lacoue-Labarthe under the title Litterature et philosophie melees. 412

The table of contents divides the introduction from the glossary, makes them

sequential. But the text sutures them, making Glossary a subheading in the text

rather than title at the top of he page, a new page, in the same size font.

Also implicit pun on letters—we get alphabetic letters L before K—seems

nonsensical—and also wrong L obviously comes after K)

We have forgotten to talk about the color of paper, the color of ink, and their

comparative chromatics: a vast subject. That will be for another time. Paper

Machine (53)

Survive one’s children 241 to understand postal letters, post cards.

Reverse sde of the facsimile.

Signautre is a quotation, not Dupin’s name.

(Derrida reads titles and tables of contents of Blanchot in Parages.

54

You know that J.D. is in analysis.” 203; Derrida returns to Lacan’s misreading in

Resistances of Psychoanalysis.

Historicism 139

If a book has been republished or published in parts, is it a book? Is the postcard a

book? Can on eread it in iolation from other texts written by Derrida (other than the

ones he specifies in his notes? Note also the way his references to his own works

becomes bibiorhicaly incomplete over time.

He refuses to turn his own works into a network, to provide the reader with a

complete narrative thread to follow thorugh and properly xit without a faux pas.

For the Love of Lacan—in REsistances of Pyshoanalysis

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

in that Lacan was an incomparable listener and his discursive machine was one of

such sensitivity that everything could be inscribed there with finesse or discretion.

(This is quite right; who doesn’t try to do the same?) But, what is more, it is

inscribed there in the spoken words of a seminar that, by giving rise to numerous

stenotyped or tape-recording archivings, will have fallen prey not only to the

problem of rights . . . but also to all the problems posed by delays in publishing and

of an editing—in the American sense—that was of the most active sort. [same thing

55

happens to Derrida’s seminars] Since all of these things hang by a hair, since the

stakes get decided in a word, an ellipsis, a verbal modality, s conditional or future

anterior, especially when one knows Lacan’s rhetoric, I say good luck to shy

narrator who would try to know what was said and written by whom on which date:

what would Lacan have said or not said! Purloined Letter 49, factuer, 55-62

Freud and the Scene of Writing 55

62-63—he narrates an account of its inscription in the post card.

problem of the archive 68

2. The Hinge

To begin, let us indicate a few telling signs. If most of the explicit references to

Freud are grouped in the conclusion of the book (at the end of “The Birth of the

Asylum and in the beginning of “The Anthropological Circle”,)6 what I would call a

charniere, a hinge, comes earlier on, right in he middle of the volume, to divide at

once he book and the book’s relation to Freud. To Do Justice to Freud, 78

The first sign comes right in the middle of the book. To Do Justice to Freud, 79

This, therefore, wil not have been a book.” Dessimination.

Simlarum of illsutraions of fortune telling book, of color illustration used on the

cover as inside flap, like Baudelaire story in Counter Money.

Economy of note and annotation in Freud, 374

56

Apocalypse 169 The countdown is accelerating, don’t’ you think?” 163

Reread the little one’s letters. 255

If you had listened to me, you would have burned everything 23

In the beginning, n principle, was the post, and I will never get over it. But in the end

I know it, I become aware of it as of our death sentence . . . 29

Undated (probably the same period)

Date-abiity—Heidegger and Derrida

What Freud states about secondary revision (Freud's explaining text) is

already staged and represented in advance in the text explained

(Andersen's fairy tale).

This text, too, described the scene of analysis, the position of the

analyst, the forms of his language, the metaphorico-conceptual

structures of what he seeks and what he finds. The locus of one text is

in the other.

Freud pays no attention to a fold in the text, a structural com- plication that

envelops his discourse and within which his discourse must inevitably be situated.

57

Would there then be no difference between the two texts?

Writing is dated, but not reading (or it can be now—annotations can be linearized—

but that is pointless exercise in genetic criticism, or it is more like Holmes than Poe

The ideal reasoned, 114—cause and effect, first and last, a line back and forward.

Burt Glossator

Tempting to see the Glossary as a reading of the Post Card. Tile is L before K and the

glossary comes first rather than last, at the end of the book. But also because the

terms forma network of back and forth references. See this before reading this.

Translotr’s Introudction LBefore K” vii

Glossary, xiii

Repetition and reversal, or reversibility.

Postal reading not reducible to a labrythine and infinite deferral of the referent, of

the seme, of definition (limits). This would be to stop reading by diagramming

reading.

Vresus John Leavey’s Glasary

58

These retreats faux pas, false exits, Bass, 377

Sequencing becomes running in circles for Derrida. Linear is already a circle. See

Derrida on the circle in Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2.

What relation is the unbreable reading of the envois and the reading of the PL that

follows? One could aska similar quesotn about the mentions of Beyond the PP

Edgar Allan Poe, Double Assassinat dans la rue Morgue

In le facteur, he mentions the hermeneutical circle and names

Heidegger in the next page.

He puts the uncanny against Lacan’s imaginary, doubling and

divisibility; but he nowhere mentions or cites or reads Freud’s essay,

“The Uncanny.”

Also, two, successive long notes on Poe’s Purloined Letter in On the

Name.

Derrida discusses the publication history of Lacan’s “Seminar on The

Purloined Letter.”

59

He also mentions the facsimile, but only in relation to Dupin’s

signature, not in relation to the materiality of the signifier and the

divisibility of the letter. He folds the facsimile, like the simulacrum or

replica, even the double, into the same structure of reading he says he

unlocks.

Importance of the facsimile—word and image, boundary of word and

image, of line and drawing (see YFS issue)

Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires / par Edgar Poe ; traduction de

Charles Baudelaire Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849

1884 Translator: Charles Baudelaire

Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires / par Edgar Poe ; traduction de

Charles Baudelaire Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849

Double assassinat dans la rue Morgue (The Murders in the Rue

Morgue dans l'édition originale) est une nouvelle d'Edgar Allan

Poe, parue en avril 1841 dans le Graham's Magazine, traduite en

français d'abord par Isabelle Meunier puis, en 1856, par Charles

Baudelaire dans le recueil Histoires extraordinaires. C'est la

première apparition du détective inventé par Poe, le Chevalier

60

Dupin qui doit faire face à une histoire de meurtre

incompréhensible pour la police.

Derrida writes of Murders in the rue Morgue as if it had been written after The

Purloined Letter.

Whereupon he has but to withdraw, after "forgetting" his snuff-box on the table, in order

to return the following day to reclaim it-armed with a facsimile of the letter in its present

state. As an incident in the street, prepared for the proper moment, draws the Minister to

the window, Dupin in turn seizes the opportunity to seize the letter while substituting the

imitation, and has only to maintain the appearances of a normal exit.

YFS 55-56

But at the Minister who " 'is well acquainted with my MS.,' " Dupin strikes a blow

signed brother or confrere, twin or younger or older brother (Atreus / T'hyestes).

This rival and duplicitous identification of the brothers, far from fitting into the

symbolic space of the family triangle (the first, the second, or the one after),

carries it off infinitely far away in a labyrinth of doubles without originals, of

facsimile without an authentic, an indivisible letter, of casual counterfeits

[contrefacons sans facon], imprinting the purloined letter with an incorrigible

indirection.

YFS 109-110

61

Thus Dupin wants to sign, indeed, doubtless, the last word of the last message of

the purloined letter. First by being unable to resist leaving his own mark-the seal,

at least, with which he must be identified-on the facsimile that he leaves for the

Minister. He fears the facsimile and, insisting on his utterly confraternal

vengeance, he demands that the Minister know where it came from. Thus he limits

the facsimile, the counterfeit exterior of the letter. The interior is authentic and

properly identifiable. Indeed: at the moment when the madman (" 'the pretended

lunatic' " who is " 'a man in my own pay' ") distracts everyone with his "frantic

behavior," what does Dupin do? He adds a note. He leaves the false letter, that is,

the one that interests him, the real one, which is not a facsimile except for the

exterior. If there were a man of truth, a lover of the authentic, in all this, Dupin

would indeed be the model: "'In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took

the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards

externals [quantd I'exte'rieur],)which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings;

imitating the D--cipher, very readily, by means of a seal formed of

bread.' "

Thus D-will have to decipher, on the inside, what the decipherer meant and

whence and why he deciphered, with what end in mind, in the name of whom and

62

what. The initial-the same, D, for the Minister and for Dupin-is a facsimile on the

outside but on the inside it is the thing itself.

YFS, 100-11

The Question of Reading: Again (rather than Otherwise)

Paraphrase Heidegger, reading is always the question what is

reading?, a repetition of the question. Heidegger repeats the

hermeneutic circle passage in division tone in division two and

titles his first chapter on the repetition.

Is reading different from rereading? Is reading different from not reading? Can you

read without not reading? What s the economy of reading literature and

pyschoanlysis? How much literature do you need? Where do you get to stop? When

has reading arrived? If it is not a program, what saves it from being an iteration of

the same moves made on different texts, and from a development, progress

narrative, ora genetic or teleological model? What saves it from being saved? Saving

a question of the economy of reading as expenditure.

63

How to read sequentially—can one sequence reading? Poe, Lacan, Derrida, Johnson.

Vulgar historical time of biographical and bibliographical history. Who published

first.

This kind of linearization is inescapable. It is not just a matter of institutional norms

and paratextual dating, bibliographic codes. Question of reference not reducible to

such historicism, vulgar time for Heidegger, irreversible, empty homogenous time,

for Benjamin. Question of dates, dateability for Heidegger and Derrida. Occurrence

and event for Heidegger, Derrida (and Badiou). Ecstatic time. Heidegger in Being

and Time on the repletion of the question. Not a question of a trope, or a master

trope like the frame either, that merely reinscribes the sequence and formalizes it as

a blind spot of re/reading.

Johnson’s essay appeared in two versions. Poe read in Baudelaire’s translation.

Lacan rewrites his essay, starts it again less than half way through. Derrida’s essay

decontextualized from The Post Card. Published in translation separately, twice.

Derrida rereading the same texts—“Freud and the Scene of Writing.” “Madness and

Civilization” in an essay title of which is about Freud.

Apart from complications publication presents to linearization, we may ask what

comes first other than Poe. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Cited in the

notes by Lacan. The focus of Speculations on Freud, precedes “Le facteur de la

verite” in The Post Card. Question of speculation in psychoanalysis and philosophy

64

like the question of literature and philosophy: what are the limits of philosophical

discourse? What does it mean to read “beyond,” a word Derrida uses in his title that

conspicuously repeats the title of Freud’s work? Is reading always as step not

beyond, a faux pas, in Maurice Blanchot’s terms, an error and an aporia, a

distinerrance? Or does copying, the facsimile come into play? The facsimile of

Derrida’s signature in Signature Event Context.

Empiricism of the facsimile, or fauxsimile. It is repated in Singature, Event Context.

Derrida brings up repetition compulsion in le facteur in relation to Marie Bonaparte

but also in relation to Po—Murders in the Rue Morgue similar to Purloined Letter.

But Derrida does not read that story or read that repetition. His attention s to the

structure of repetition, not to empirical examples of it.

Derrida returns to Rousseau and de Man via the title of an an earlier essay, “Limited

Ink II”

Derrida’s essay on titles in PArages and on the title in Kafka “Before the Law.”

Illustration of writing and reversibility in The Post Card. Reading for Lacan and for

Derrida is not about Master and disciple.

65

In Poe, its the idea of the copy that matters, not the material referent. See William

WIlson

In "Unsensing the Subjectile," he discusses Artaud's posthumously published

drawings.

To file: (1) “I could . . . file,” break into the figure in yet another way. Still by

rubbing, to be sure, and scraping, but this time according to the obliqueness of

the metal teeth, molars against millstones. But (2) the aggression which thus

reduces the surface is destined to polish, make delicate, adjust, inform, beautify,

still save the truth of the body in straining it, purifying it, from it any uncleaness

and useless excrescences. The taking away of the unclean has the virtue of

laying bare and catharsis.

--Jacques Derrida, "Unsensing the Subjectile," in The Secret Art of Antonin

Artaud, Trans. and Ed. Mary Ann Caws (MIT 1998), 140.

We won’t tell the story of the subjectile, rather some record of its coming-to-be.

--Jacques Derrida, "Unsensing the Subjectile," in The Secret Art of Antonin

Artaud, Trans. and Ed. Mary Ann Caws (MIT 1998), 61

There is a good chance he never finished either one or the other and that he

destroyed these sketches.

Paul Thevenin, “In Search for a Lost World,” in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud,

Trans. and Ed. Mary Ann Caws, 8

66

Thevenin’s anecdote about Artaud drawing him in 1946, and the drawing, one of

three, getting lost during the framing of it for an exhibition. The lost one is the

one. Thevenin remembers Artaud drawing this portrait and wants to see again.

(3-31). Enndote 76 explains how it got lost.

It can’t analzye it’s “no longer was”, it’s “has not yet been,” or “not yet having

been.” He can’t look back from the future at something that never was.

Mary Ann Caws writes:

It is deeply regrettable that the Artaud estate did not allow us to use in this

volume the reproduction of the very paintings and drawings that were at

the origin of these texts. (Many of them can be found in two other

publications: Mary Ann Caws, Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper [Museum

of Modern art] and The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter [MIT

Press, 1997]) it is also deeply ironic, given Jacques Derrida’s work on the

absence of origin.

Mary Ann Caws, preface, xiv The Secret Writing of of Antonin Artaud.

But another kind of irony that may be merely uncaught typographical error or

related Freudian slips. Two errors of attribution go uncorrected. Caws

mistakenly gives her own name as the author of Antonin Artaud: Works on

Paper. It is actually by Paule Thévenin and translated by Margit Rowell. Caws

also omits the author of the second book, a book she herself wrote.

67

Post/Card/Match/Book/"Envois"/Derrida

David Wills

SubStance

Vol. 13, No. 2, Issue 43 (1984), pp. 19-38

The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida

Barbara Johnson

Yale French Studies, No. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis.

68

The Question of Reading: Otherwise. (1977), pp. 457-505.

The Purveyor of Truth

Jacques Derrida; Willis Domingo; James Hulbert; Moshe Ron; M.-

R. L.

Yale French Studies, No. 52, Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature

and Philosophy. (1975), pp. 31-113.

The title is not trsnslated, but left in French, “Le faceteur de la

vertie”

Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and

Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1987)

 

La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud au-delà was first published in

1980. 

Jacques Derrida. The Postcard.  Chicago: CUP, 1989.

69

---.  “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Writing and Difference.

London: Routledge, 1985.

---. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stamford: Stamford University

Press, 1999.

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