Richard Burt

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I believe that it is better to erase all the pictures, all the other cards, the photos, the initials, the drawings, etc. The Oxford card is sufficient for everything. It has the iconographic power that one can expect in order to read or to have read the whole history, between us, the punctuated sequence of two years, from Oxford to Oxford, via two centuries or two millennia . . . 204

It’s a photograph by Erich Salomon. 205

Soetimes I wish that everything remain illegible for them—and also for you. To become absolutely unknowable for them. 205

Read this. It’s falling into place 206

Those that remain will not know how to read, they will go crazy. 249

When someone gives the order to fire, and to give the order is already to fire, everyone goes to it. 248

More or less, 248

I have just received the slide in color. 250

I remember only the celluloid baby doll that was aflame in two seconds 253

Nor it’s the project of “partial publication” that has become insupportable for me, not so much because of the publication—they will only be blinded by it--, as because the minute cross-section to which all of this should, for my part, give rise. I see him as a perverse copyist, seated for days in front of a correspondence, two years of voluble correspondence, busy transcribing a given passage, scratching out a given other one in order to prepare it for the fire, and he spends hours of knowledgeable philology sorting out what derives fro this or that, in order to deliver nothing to publicity, absolute nothing that might be proper (private, secret) in order to profane nothing, if that is possible. 182

Anything everything 183

Foreign language 183

I am reading the check that he is in the course of signing. 178

Of turning the back of the post card, 178

First faux metapassage:

The rest, if there is any that remains, is us, is for us, who do not belong to the card. We are the post card, if you will, and as such, accountable, but they will seek in vain, they will never find us in it. In several places, I will leave all kinds of references, names of persons and places, authentifiable dates, identifiable events, they will rush in with eyes closed, finally believing to be there and find us there when by means of a switch point I will send them elsewhere if we are there, with a stroke of the pen or the grattoir. I will make everything derail, not at every instant, that would be too convenient, but occasionally and according to a rule that I will not ever give, even were I to know it one day. I would not work too hard on composing the thing, it is a scrap copy of scrapped paths that I leave in their hands. Certain people will take it into their mouths, in order tor recognize the taste, occasionally in order to reject it immediately with a grimace, or in order to bite, or to swallow, in in order to conceive, even, I mean a child 177

This is literature without literature. 197

Of love letters. The ones I have reread running in the street and I scream with pain like a madman, they are the most beautiful that I have ever read, the first have ever been written but also, I must tell you, the last. You were not only predestined for me, you were predestined to write the last love letters. Afterward, they no longer will be able to, nor will I, and this conceive a bit of pain for you. Not only because your love takes on a somewhat eschatological and twilight tinge from this, but because, no longer knowing how to write “love-letters,” they will never read you. 197-98

The old man who remains the last to read himself. 199

I can’t go on. I’m going to run. Spent hours rereading. I’m trying to sort [trier], it’s impossible. I can’t even reread any more. 199

I also thought that upon reading this sorted mail [courier trie] they could think that I alone am sending these letters to myself: as soon as they are sent off they get to me 199

Second faux metapassage:

Derrida says in Resistance of Psychoanalysis that the word “oblique” chose him

Postal principle. 176, 191

Iconography 172

Too obvious 172

Strange that this is happening to me at the same time as the glasses—the problem with close reading has accelerated suddenly. 170

Sublime nothingness, you know it preserves everything. The “correspondence” will be destroyed better if we pretend to have several laughable fragments of it, several snapshots good enough to put into everyone’s hands. 171

Car crash 171

Whether it is a question of readers, which I do not like 168

One more citation for you, and I’ll stop reading, 166

Of us there will never be a narrative. 167

Double signature, 18

What I read in my date book for the next two days, I invent nothing 167

He decheminates them 165

I know that

We would have closed all the borders on our secret. 186

I am going to die soon 164

Perhaps even to find and read, 181

I adore her, but like the others she thinks she knows what the post, in the usual, literal or strict sense, “means”; she is sure that the exchange around the purloined letter does not concern the “efficiency of the postal service.” Mais si, mais si—it is not sure that the sense of the p.s. (postal service) is itself assured of arriving at its destination, nor is the word to post (poster). Are you sure, my love, of really understanding what this poster means? It doubles, passes all the time 162

You know every well I refuse myself nothing-through all the chicaneries I authorize myself everything. I send myself everything—on the condition that you let me do it 163

Chemin, 179

As if they knew about it for having read it. 197

Nothing is burned in The Post Card, yet is everything published? Decipherable and indecipherable, open and concealed.Is it naïve to ask “What is The Post Card about?” The back cover of the English translation strongly implies that it is about post cards. This is what paratexts do: they give you basic information that orients your reading, helps you decide whether or not you want to read. Why would anyone bother to ask what The Post Card is about, then? Isn’t the answer implied by the title? Isn’t the answer self-evident? Doesn’t Derrida refer in the book to the “ontology of the post card,” a “postal structure,” a “postal principle”? Before we consider that Derrida also asks and does not answer or get an answer to questions he poses about the difference between a letter and a post card, a dead letter and a dead parcel? let us pause for a moment and “read” the back cover, on which we are invited to turn to “the other side of the card” and “look.” Before the copywriter, who turns out to be Derrida, equates the post card and the book--“the thick support of the card, a book heavy and light”—, he asks, in Heideggerian fashion: “What does a postcard want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible?” On the back cover, the book’s title has already been cited and not cited, incorporated as words into a question presumably raised “in” the book. How far should our “reading” of the back cover go? Does it matter that the initially anonymous back cover description is “signed” J.D. at the bottom right, the same initials he signs in “Signature, event, Context.” Let us continue to read the back cover, read it as a text that may be skipped over, one of many paratexts such as the copyright page all readers tend to skip over. Before we fold the title of The Post Card into a thematic reading of the book, before we can say what the book is “really” about, perhaps something than the post card but just as homogenous, before we can say or what we, or “you” as the reader is addressed, “were reading” (first words of the back cover, [Derrida often comments on reading the back of the post card]), before we read “the book,” before we, again, “you,” “situate the subject of the book,” we may ask a more fundamental and perhaps seemingly even more bizarre question, an ontological question, namely, “what is The Post Card? Before any we offer any thematic or allegorical reading of The Post Card, then, Conditions of publication. Burn everything / publish everything. This means not only reading everything, including the paratext, but to ask when variations in edtions become part of the paratexutal apparatus, when book covers, footnotes, glossaries, table of contents, the organization of chapters, some previously published or perhaps delivered as lectures, and editions and translations become notable, as it were, or what I call “anecnotable.”^ It is to get at the conditions of reading, unreading, and non-reading. The heterogeneity of the corpus is also at issue, even within the original language, translations aside.

I offer a number of new questions, then, in the hope that they are what Heidegger would call the “right questions.” When is a letter not a dead letter? My questions arise from close formal attention to The post Card but also call into question the limits of what Derrida often calls an “internal reading” of a text.

Conditions of publication engage repetition and reproduction, the latter in its “iconomy,” the different economy a facsimile has from description. Republication of Lacan, note by Derrida. Note by Bass. Re-publication of part of The Post Card. Recursive ordering of the text through the envois, itself precursive-works cited later after first mentioned; and you are reading something written before and after the rest of the book was written. It never becomes the preface to legs.

Confessional metapassages—that give the reader no Archidemean interpretive leverage but do seem accurately descriptive.

“aims of publication”

In a posthumous fragment by our friends (one must also speak of Nietzsche’s chance), after insisted on the Socratic origins of the novel, he “turns himself back” again toward Socrates . . . “ 161

Before getting to the point of reading any given Fortune-telling book of the 13^th century, the bearer of S and p, never forget that there is something tor recount, to discern, something to tell, to be told, on the “fortune” of the book, of the chances it was able to get to us intact, for example to fall into my hands one day in 1977, the remainder remaining to follow . . .
It is always a question of setting (something) on its way / voice [voix], and alley oop, by pressing on a well-placed lever, to compel unplugging, derailing, hanging up, playing with the switch points and sending off elsewhere, setting it off route (go to see elsewhere, if I am there: and someone is always found there, to carry on, to take the thread of the story (you follow).
Reading Burns Repetition, Reproduction,

Do You Read Me?