Richard Burt

Just Saying

What wouldn’t Derrida have said!

What will he not have said!

This is an exclamation, not a question . . .

In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida tells two anecdotes about the two times he met Jacques Lacan in person: “I remark that the only two times we met and spoke briefly one with the other, it was a question of death between us, and first of all from Lacan’s mouth. In Baltimore, for example, he spoke to me of way in which he thought he would be read, in particular by me, after his death.”⁴⁷ Furthermore, Derrida devotes a paragraph summarizing his relation to Lacan as one of death:

So there was a question between us of death; it was especially a question of death. I will say even only of the death of one of us, as it is with or chez all those who love each other. Or rather he spoke about it, he aloe, since for my part I never breathed a word about it. He spoke, alone, about our death, about his death that would not fail to arrive, and about the death or rather the dead one that, according to him, I was playing.⁴⁸

Will how we read The Post Card, a text to which Derrida returns in “Love Lacan,” have changed now that its author is dead, in the ordinary sense of the word?⁴⁹ Can we read it? Or can we gloss what remains of its burning, its ashes, its considers, “gloss” being a synonym for luster and derived from Old English, Scandiavanian, and Icelandic words for flame and glow? Does reading mean glossing over the question of glossing?⁵⁰
So You Say

In response to this question, let me cite two passages in The Post Card, both of which concern and a Lacanian reading of Derrida Lacan’s reading of Derrida that will help us begin glossing what I have called quasi-cruxes. The passage from the Post . . . I will cite first will recall Derrida’s exclamations, not questions, in “Love Lacan” about what Lacan will or would have said or not have said. This passage concerns Lacan and Derrida did (not) saying about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter in the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” and in “Le facteur de la vérité.” The passage is remarkable not only for the absence of bibliographical references but for about who said what but for having an anonymous third party tell this story about who meant to say what according to someone who goes mentioned and is therefore not exactly saying anything in the future anterior in the conditional:

Lacan, in truth, meant to say what I said, under the heading of dissemination. What next! As for me, all the while apparently speaking of dissemination, I reconstituted this word and therefore into a destination. In other words, if it can be put thus, Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I am only doing what he says he is doing. And there you are, the trick has been played, destination is back in my hand and “dissemination” is reversed into Lacan’s account. This is what I had describe to you one day, three-card monte, the agility of the expert hands to which one would yield oneself bound hand and foot.⁵¹

Who is speaking here in this envoi? Derrida? Maybe. Why is “dessimination” put in scare quotes? The speaker’s analogy between three card monte and what was said about Derrida merely repeating Lacan clearly serves to imply that a shell game has been unjustly played on Derrida’s texts / lectures about Lacan: “Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I am only doing what he says he is doing.” Derrida has been falsely said (but said by whom?) to have said what Lacan meant to have said then shrink-wrapped into one of three cards and entered into play in a game which Derrida will always lose. But Derrida does not say that. Is Derrida rigging the reading of what is still to be read, not just defensively and preemptively having someone voice a complaint about an injustice done—by who knows whom--to Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter?”

In “For the Love of Lacan,” a text that Derrida wrote, as I have said, after Lacan was dead, Derrida returns to the other passage in The Post Card I mentioned above, a passage which Derrida retells a story about Lacan misreading Derrida: “Lacan made a compulsive blunder; he said that he thought I was in analysis . . . The thing has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card (202-04).”⁵² Derrida spares the reader the task of rereading it but also allows any reader to stop reading “Love Lacan” and go to the Post . . . and reread it. Yet if the reader were to go to pages 202-04 of the Post . . . he or she would find that Derrida does not quote Lacan’s words when discussing what Lacan mistakenly said about Derrida was in analysis. See for yourselves. Only very near the end of “Love Lacan” does Derrida deliver the story along with the quotation from Lacan he left out of The Post Card: “In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever withdrawn from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the syntax and the reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about whom I did not know that –to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not know that he was in analysis—about whom I did not know that he was in analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who has written a preface to this Verbier.”⁵³ We will return to this passage later and attend several times in a necessarily paratactic fashion to Derrida’s retellings of this story. For now, I wish only to say that in “Love Lacan,” Derrida retells the anecdote he had already told before in the Post . . . in a way that makes it fully readable. Only in this later text, “For the Love of Lacan,” does Derrida retrieve Lacan’s words from the archive and cite them. Having retrieved them, however, Derrida does not read them. Nor does he quote Lacan’s next sentence in which Lacan reads Derrida’s preface “Fors” as evidence for Lacan’s supposition, not declaration, that Derrida is in analysis. Does it matter that to a reading of “For the Love of Lacan” that Derrida returned to what Lacan said about him and to what Derrida said about Lacan in nearly twenty years earlier, by Derrida’s count, in The Post Card, after Lacan died? Does the media Derrida references with respect to the archive in “Love Lacan,” the tape recorders in front of him recording what he says as he speaks, matter in relation to Lacan’s death the way the fax matters to Derrida when discussing Freud’s reliance on letters in Archive Fever?⁵⁴
Say again?

As I have said, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” for a colloquium on Lacan organized and held after Lacan was dead, and “Love Lacan” was published first as an article in Lacan avec les philosophes (1991) and subsequently as the second chapter of Derrida’s book, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996). The three sentences with which I began the present essay paraphrase the first three sentences of “Love Lacan.” These sentences of “Love Lacan” are set off typographically on the page as three different lines:

What wouldn’t Lacan have said!

What will he not have said!

This is an exclamation, not a question . . . .⁵⁵

Derrida repeats the phrase three times, the second inverting exactly the first, and on the same page just after the first paragraph: “What will Lacan not have said! What wouldn’t he have said!” This second, inverted repetition of the first two sentences, printed continuously on the page rather than broken into two separate lines as the first two sentences are. Derrida exclaims the nearly the same words a third time near the end of the section Derrida calls the “third protocol”: “what would Lacan have said or not have said!”⁵⁶

As I have already said more than once, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” after Lacan died, and Derrida sends off “Love Lacan” as if by he, Derrida, were already dead, already taking Lacan place, as if looking to how he, Derrida, will be read after his death. In this case, however, Derrida significantly leaving out the first of Derrida’s first two sentences about Lacan and the second of the second two: “What will I not have said today!”⁵⁷ Derrida retains only the negative formulation for himself, allows only what he will not have said, not what he will have said. He thereby leaves, as if shut, access to the exclamation of what he will or would have said today by erasing the published half of his archive in the form of an article.
JustUs

I must you to wait patiently for just a bit longer before we return to the passages in the Post . . . I cited and attend further to these stylistic repetitions concerning what will or wouldn’t have been said or not said, Derrida’s insistence that they are exclamations, not questions, and Derrida’s subtle but deliberate different rephrasings of the opening two lines, his division of Lacan and his division of himself from Lacan. For the moment, let me note a similar stylistic repetition to which we will need to attend alongside, or “with” the those I have just cited above: Derrida uses the words “I say good luck” twice, although he punctuates them differently:

to those who are waiting for me to take a position [“saying Lacan is right or doing right by Lacan”] so they can reach a decision [arreter leur judgment], I say, “Good luck.”⁵⁸

And:

I say good luck to any narrator who would try to know what was said and written by whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not have said! ⁵⁹

Derrida’s repetition of the words “I say good luck” invert the order of Derrida’s repetition of what Lacan and Derrida would or would not have said. Two inverted repetitions bind, a word I use advisedly since Derrida uses it when discussing the publication of Lacan’s Écrits in “Love Lacan,” these repetitions bind Derrida to Lacan in relation to their reading and publications: in the first set of repetitions, Derrida takes Lacan’s place (at the end of the essay, after Lacan takes his place a second time in reverse) as someone who will or would not have said in one case and Lacan takes the place Derrida had earlier assigned himself in the second instance.⁶⁰

In binding these two repetitions together within the same sentence, Derrida makes the question of what Lacan or Derrida has or hasn’t said under the heading of the archive (and under the subheading of “death”).⁶¹ If we cite the lines preceding Derrida repeats the lines “what will Lacan not have said today!” at the end of a discussion of the archive:

The future of Lacanian thought as it moves beyond the Écrits is all the more difficult in that Lacan was an incomparable listener and his discursive machine was one of such sensitivity that everything could be inscribed there with finesse or discretion. (This is quite right; who doesn’t try to do the same?) But, what is more, it is inscribed there in the spoken words of a seminar that, by giving rise to numerous stenotyped or tape-recording archivings, will have fallen prey not only to the problem of rights . . . but also to all the problems posed by delays in publishing and of an editing—in the American sense—that was of the most active sort. Since all of these things hang by a hair, since the stakes get decided in a word, an ellipsis, a verbal modality, conditional or future anterior, especially when one knows Lacan’s rhetoric, I say good luck to any narrator who would try to know what was said and written by whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not have said!⁶²

As we shall see, Derrida similar situates his comment about what he will not have said in relation to the “problem of the archive.”⁶³

In “Love Lacan,” Derrida places the “just us” of saying or not saying or saying you are not sure you will say about the dead (who include the living, who always dead, Derrida says, when you speak for them) is placed under the title “love,” a title that is of course reversible, about loving Lacan and what Lacan loved. Derrida does not comment in the essay on “love” and whether he will say that he and Lacan loved each other more marks the limit of what can or can not have been said by Derrida in “Love Lacan,” and by extension about what each of the said about the other when they were both alive and what Derrida still says about Lacan now that Lacan is dead. Lacan’s archivization the future reading of Lacan, or anyone else, as the archive is a question of the future, not the past, in Archive Fever.⁶⁴

Après tout: ‘Pas’ “Du tout”

In order to address these broader questions, let us attempt to grasp more exactly what motivates them, especially Derrida’s turn to the archive, by proceeding in an X-centric manner now to gloss another set of cruxes, with respect the way Derrida makes reading Lacan a question of the archive, in the last chapter of The Post Card, “Du tout,” and parentheses in a passage in “Love Lacan” the end of the sometimes forgotten last chapter “Du tout,” left untranslated as is “Le facteur de la vérité.”⁶⁵ First, let me pause to gloss the title “Du tout.” In The Post Card, Derrida several places talks about the Paratext as a book and its paratexts in different ways, as not a book, as a book with a false preface, as a book with four chapters, of “Facteur” as an appendix.⁶⁶ At one point, Derrida goes so far as enter a chapter of “To Speculate--on ‘Freud’” as a paratext even though the chapter is not finished: Of “Seven: Postscript,” Derrida says that “it resembles another postscript, another codicil, the postscript or codicil to the entire book this time. . . . This is the end: an appendix that is as reduced as possible, free, detachable too, a play appendix.”⁶⁷ The most anarchivic of Derrida’s remixes of his book is “Du tout,” a chapter that is arguably a long paratext to Derrida’s discussion of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” the “Facteur,” an epitext when published as an article but then turned peritext when published in The Post Card. Yet Derrida never reads “Du tout” as a paratext. He just refers to it as one of the “three last parts of the present work.”⁶⁸ “Du tout” is most “anarchivically” archival insofar as its inclusion is not motivated, not read as such, and therefore resembles the “seventh chapter” of The Post Card that “in certain respects adds nothing.”⁶⁹

Les mots juste

Rather than catalogue the ways in which Derrida routes Lacan to the archive, I want to make two points that bear on the quasi-crux, “X-ian.” First, Derrida makes the titel the condition of the archive. In “Title to Be Specified,” he writes: “the noun titleer would signify two things. In Old French, a titleer (titrier]—was a monk responsible for the archives of a monastery. He was an archivist, the archivist par excellence, for if every archivist must prevail over the order of titles—how can there be an archive without a title [pas d’archive sans titre]—what is to be said of the guardian of titles?”⁷⁰ I have spoken earlier of Derrida’s use of “faux-tires,” and offer in a footnote below an example of variations Derrida or a publisher made the title from a different chapter of Parages.⁷¹ Second, translation complicates ableit in microscopic ways, the philological task of determining what is to be glossed and how it is to be glossed. I offer an example of the different ways the letter “X” appears typographically in a passage from Parages on “X without X,” a phrase to which we will return, in French and in the English translation in the footnote below.⁷² I want to pursue the anarchivity of Derrida’s archive as the limit of what can ne archived not only to translation and media but to the storage and publication of Derrida’s texts, including their publishing history, errata, editions, editions, bindings, copies, and so on.⁷³ Derrida uses the word “anarchivic” in Archive Fever to mean “the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence”.⁷⁴ Reading Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida finds that Freud’s concept of the “death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say archiviolithic. It will always have been archive –destroying . . . . Archiviolthic force leaves nothing of its own behind . . . The death drive is . . . what we will later call mal d’archive, “archive fever.”⁷⁵ Anarchivity is the radical destruction of the archive and the remains of what can never be archived, the ash of the archive.

By unfolding, carefully and patiently some specific quasi-cruxes in Derrida’s various archiving of his publications related to The Post Card, we may grasp how the question of reading Derrida now, after his death, is also a question of the anarchivity of his archived texts, anarchivity being a force which may not properly brought under the heading of a pre-fabricated, ready-made term like “performavity” since this anarchivity puts into question any binary opposition between publication and ash, between the legible or readable and the illegible or unreadable, between between memory and the present and past tenses—it is archived or it has been archived—and forgetting and the future anterior--it will have been archive destroying.⁷⁶ As Derrida says of Lacan, “since the legal archive covers less and less of the whole archive, this archive remains unmasterable and continues on its way, in continuity with the anarchive.”⁷⁷ The same thing, more or less, could be said of Derrida’s archive.

The delirious anarchivity of Derrida’s publications puts the limits of their reading, or their future anterior (in the conditionl) reading after (the fact of) Derrida’s death, into question, such that as we turn now to what I am calling quasi-cruxes, or cruxes for the sake of economy, we are no longer talking about the symptom or even a “parerpraxis.”⁷⁸ I want to compare a crux in “Du tout” to a crux in “Love Lacan.” Here is the crux in “Du tout”: there is a remote relation between Derrida’s discussion of how to read an error in the first two editions of Lacan’s Écrits and a story Derrida tells involving a dead friend, a story that inverts a story one of the letter writers of the “Envois” tells about a mistake Lacan made about Derrida.

The mention of someone’s death occurs a few pages (513-15) after a lengthy discussion of whether Lacan’s misquotation of “dessein” (“plot,” “scheme,” or “design”) from the last lines of Poe’s The Purloined Letter as “destin” (“destiny” or “fate”) in the last sentence of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” “an altering citation,” Derrida says, but one about which “’Le facteur de la vérité’ did not say all that I [Derrida] think, but that in any event carefully refrained from qualifying as a “typographical error” or a “slip,” even supposing, you are going to see why I am saying this, that a somewhat lighthearted analytic reading could content itself with such a distinction, I mean between a “typo” and a “slip.”⁷⁹ Derrida then permits himself to cite what he said before launching into a full-scale assault on François Roustang’s reading of the mistake as a slip, not a typo:

Now here is the most ingenious finding: what remains a typographical error two out of three times in given Écrits [Derrida does not specify the editions or give the relevant page numbers] becomes Roustang’s “slip,” Roustang having contented himself, somewhat quickly it is true, with reproducing the ur-typo, everyone including its author, turning all around that which must not be read.⁸⁰

Prompted by a request from René Major, one of the conference organizers, Derrida, supplies the name of a friend he had hitherto kept secret: “She probably had in mind someone whose name I can say because I believe that he is dead.”⁸¹
As I Was Saying I Would Have Said

The question of what is an error is an typo or a slip is what textual critics would ordinarily regard as a crux. The mention of the dead friend would have no bearing on the story about the error in the Écrits involving a crux the meaning of which Derrida aparently wants to leave undecided. In order to understand what I take to be a remote relation between mention and the story, I now move to what will be perhaps the most X-centric or perhaps the most XOXXOOOX-centric of the cruxes Derrida uses in “Love Lacan” and The Post Card, among all of those I will gloss. I say they are perhaps most X-centric because they are perhaps the hardest to notice; Derrida is not deliberately drawing his reader’s attention to them as he does the repetitions and inversions we saw in “Love Lacan.”

The crux I gloss bears directly on the questions we will have been asking about Derrida’s effacement of both the proper name and the title. In the first repetition and inversion, Derrida says Lacan told about him to a similar story someone else told Derrida at a conference, both of which Derrida tells with reference to a dead friend. In a passage in “Du tout” that repeats, or precedes, “p/repeats,” as if in reverse order, the passage in “Love Lacan” in which Derrida parenthetically mentions a dead friend while discussing Lacan’s blunder, Derrida tells a story soon after castigating Roustang about saying that what may have been a typo was actually a slip, Derrida says that he would “prefer to tell [us] a brief story,” a story that bears a remarkable, Derrida might (not) have said uncanny, resemblance to “Derrida’s story about Lacan saying that Derrida was “inanalysis” (sic).⁸² The story Derrida reverses Derrida’s relationship to the analyst. This time Derrida himself is said to be the analyst. At a conference, someone came up to tell Derrida she knew he was psychoanalyzing someone but didn’t give Derrida a name:

‘I know that so and so has been in analysis with you for more than ten years.” My interlocutor, a woman, knew that I was not an analyst, and for my own part I knew, to refer to the same shared criteria, that what she was saying with so much assurance was false, quite simply false.⁸³

In addition to the way the two stories invert Derrida’s position as analyst and analysand, both stories mention, as I have said, a dead friend of Derrida’s. This is the second repetition and inversion. Immediately after this story, in the telling of which Derrida leaves the woman unnamed, René Major invites Derrida to state the name of the person who was not in analysis: “Given the point we have reached, what prevents you from saying who is in question? To state his name now seems inevitable.”⁸⁴ Major does not ask Derrida to give the name of the woman who said she knew who Derrida was (not) analyzing. Derrida responds as follows:

René Major asks me the name of the analyst in question. Is this really necessary? Moreover, my interlocutor did not name him. She contented herself with characteristics . . . No name was pronounced. It was only after the fact, reflecting on the composite that she had sketched, that I attempted an induction.⁸⁵

Here is the first narrative repetition. In the last pages of “Love Lacan,” repeats and inverts the woman’s story he tells in “Du tout”: this time Derrida tells the story of Lacan having said that Derrida having been an analysand, a story also about an error, the dead friend is mentioned in a parenthetical sentence within Derrida’s story about what Lacan said rather than before it or after it: “Lacan made a compulsive blunder,” Derrida writes; “he said that he thought I was in analysis.” Derrida proceeds to quote Lacan’s unofficial version. I now quote it again:

In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever withdrawn from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the syntax and the reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about whom I did not know that –to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not know that he was in analysis—about whom I did not know that he was in analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who has written a preface to this Verbier.”⁸⁶

Derrida then introduces in parentheses an anecdote in “Love Lacan” about the death of the a friend: “(Lacan . . . was then obviously unaware of the fact that one of the two [Derrida and his supposed analyst], was dead by the time I wrote the preface in question, which was this written to his memory, as homage, and in his absence.”⁸⁷ Only after inserting this parenthentical remark about a dead friend does Derrida return to Lacan’s blunder and ask “How could Lacan have made his listeners laugh . . . on the basis of a blunder, his own . . . ? How could he insist on two occasions on” Derrida’s “real status as noninstitutional analyst and on what he wrongly supposed to be my status as institutional analysand, whereas he ought to have been the first to . . .”⁸⁸