Richard Burt

The Last Instance of My Death

“It is a word and above all a writing gesture, a singular pragmatic use, signed by Heidegger who, presenting himself as . . . Beast and Sov (2982)

Extends Freud’s resistance to death ( Compare “I’m not dead” in After.life. Versus “We’re all going to die” in disaster movies) but because it deals with Derrida’s concenrs with regard to the disposal of corpses and democracy , the posthumous, and a strictly posthumous publication.

Derrida makes some rather astonsihing claims for this note. A prayer.

What Derrida calls Pascal’s “strictly” posthumously published note has arrived at a future even if that future never arrives. Derrida almost says that the note would arrive at its destination. It does, any case, have a destiny, not a destinerrance:

Let us now come back to “Writing Found in Pascal’s Clothing After His Death.” There can be little doubt that this little piece of paper was destined, if not for someone, then at least to remain, to survive the moment of its inscription, to remain legible in an exteriority of a trace, of a document, even if it were readable only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come. The note remains readable, even if only to Pascal. For generations to come. But can it be read? Derrida places the first word of Pascal’s note, “Fire [feu]” (212) in the middle of the page, as if it were the title of the note that follows. And then Derrida says he is not sure he can read it: “This word ‘fire,’ is, then, isolated, insularized in a single line, I’m not sure I can interpret it; I’m even sure that I cannot interpret it in a decidable way, between the fire of the glory that reduces to ashes and the fire that still smolders under the ashes of some cremation (Ashengloire).”¹⁹ The note has been “destined” to remain, and to remain legible, “even if it were readable only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come.” That generation is apparently infinite.²⁰ Derrida writes:

This is indeed what has been called a memorial, to use the word of a witness, Father Guerrier.

Does the destiny of the posthumously published depend on the burning, as it were, of the support, on Pascal’s burning by heart his note already on fire and yet extinguished?²¹

Derrida situates Pascal in a session on prayer focused on Heidegger, and in the following session, continuing the question of prayer, recalls Freud on the uncanny in relation to Hediegger’s Being and Time and Lacan’s reading of Robinson Crusoe in Le seminar V: Les formations de l’inconscient (1957-58), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: le Seuil, 1998), pp. 342-43. P. 23637 ((330-31; 246-51 ending with “there is, it seems to meme, a profound congruence between Lacan and Heidegger.” 251. (ninth session)

Faut pouvoir (power, to be able to) Derrida says he shall not give examples after “faced with an exploit that one admires or condemns, one exclaims in stupefaction: “Ah! They dared to write that, faut pouvoir, eh . . . Ah! That idiot dared write and publish that shameful thing at a given moment, this or hta weekly dared to go in for that abjection, faut pouvoir, faut pouvoir, implying faut pouvoir le faire, it takes ome doing to be abject, it’s quite something [faut le faire].

Freud and Heidegger on uncanny, pp 242-43

It is not the difference between different Xs” 252

“traces remain, hen, that he would have wished to be both effaceable and ineffaceable. Could he [MH] that in the posterity of the probable improbable archive, the day would come when a French animal [i.e. Derrida], in turn conducting a seminar on the seminar and every Wednesday sniffing out the footprints or the track of an impossible Friday, would come to worry away at these “pas d’avue (non avowals, steps of avowals],” on these traceless traces . . . yesterday, now, and tomorrow? 240-41 (335-36)

Heidegger is speaking of prayer and of God, but he is neither praying to nor addressing a God who would not be the God of the philosophers and onto-theology. Robinson Crusoe . . . is writing a book which . . . is a sort of prayer . . . The book itself does not pray, but Robinson nevertheless quotes, and several times, which Heidegger never does, insistently quotes prayers, and prayers that are essentially linked to the Christian revelation: (208-09; 293-950)

I shall start out again from prayer as a crossing point between Heidegger’s seminar or problematic and Robinson Crusoe. I shall not go back over wheat we said about the new apprenticeship of prayer by Robinson . . . the training in view of a prayer the vocation of which—if I can put it this way—is Christian. There is, in the course of Heidegger’s seminar, a moment where an allusion to prayer—to this odd type of statement that prayer is, but then evoked in Greek in a context marked rather by Aristotle and from which Christianity appears to be absent . . .”206-07 (290-91)

Begins the Eight session, dated March 5, 2003

What is it to pray, How to pray? How not to pray? More precisely, if prayer consists in doing something, in a gesture of the body or a movement of the soul, what is one doing when one prays? Is one doing something? . . . I am not choosing to begin with this question because we have spoken so much these last weeks of death, of consigning to earth or fire, of cremators and inhumers, and because it is difficult even when a church does not take charge of the thing, is that so-called atheistic milieu, it is a difficlt and rare thing not to give voice, during ritual ceremonies, during ones thoughts or one’s experience, to a movement that resembles prayer. And so to some hymn or oration. No, without for the moment linking prayer to death, to the the theme of death and the posthumus, to death and dying, to such and such a death, to the eve and the day after such and such a death (and in the French the day after a death is its veille, its wake), no, I shall give this question, “what is it to pray?” a more general and apparently neutral scope [portee]. Pp. 202-03 (285-286)

[Tranlators note:] je vous en prie, which can mean “I pray you (for it),” is more often the standand polite response to thanks, as in “you’re welcome” or “don’t mention it.” Note 4, 203 (286)

But can one say sincerely to someone: “forget me?” can one say “forget me” other htan to mean: do not forget to forget me, remember me, at least enough to forget me. Or to get off my back! . . . So, remember this question about prayer that I abandon here, that I am abandoning to you here—to keep it in your memory. 205 (289)

What is one doing whenone says to someone “Ipray you,”Je vous enprie, “I pray you to”? Can one pray wihtout praying to soeone, i.e. without “addressing” one’s prayer ot the singularity of a “who”? Cane one [ray without praying to . . . ? Can one pray without asing or expecting something in retreturn? Is there a link between the quotiddian and trivial “je vous en prie” and the orison or chant of religious and sacred prayer that rises and lifts itself above the quotidian, even if it lifts itself every day, at fixed times, or some solmenly once a year [is there a link and analogy] between the anemic and mechanical “je vous en prie” and, on the other hand, prayer in the strong sense, with or wihtout active faith, which grips one, and brings with it a sort of ecstasy beyond automatic triviality? 203 (287)

The back cover copy of the Post Card is a signed prier d’inserer. ²²

prière d'insérer. A reading inserted, a prayer an address and a date, whether to God Pascal) or Heidegger(atheist).

The prière d'insérer on the back cover of of The Post Card is a prayer, not just a prgamatic address to the reader, as Genette thinks.

Derrida “Le suriviant, le sursis, le sursaut”
Derrida ends with a final section not named in the title. (each word in the title gets its own section). In it Derrida activiates pun please insert and prayer.

“Prier’ d’inserer. Ja’I deja un mal a me reconnaitre , pour y souscrire, dans chachune ds images que he viens d’exposer. Je me suis putot expose et lasisse prendre, une foisde plus: par un autre pour un autre. Je me suis laisse prendre en photographie (instantane ou photomaton) ou surprendre par un radar qui juge et snctioone la viteese sans vous laiser le temps ni la place de prendre la parole pour faire valoir vos driots, come il le faudrait. Je signe toute fois sincerement ce que vous venez peu-etre de lire. Non comme le symptome d’une “verite”, la mienne, plutot come une priere, , celle dont Aristote dissit si justement qu’elle n’est “ni vrai ni fausse.” Le mai 2004 , 16

“Prier’ d’inserer”—a prayer. Is there a shift from Post card to strictly posthumous and Pascal from post card to prayer?

What counts as a prier d’inserer? Is it inhte article a kind of postface, the way the back coer isalso a postface as well as a “blurb” (or will be misrecogized as a blurb, a s written by someone other than the author, or leftunsigned if written as an allographic blurb?

“Prier’ d’inserer”—
Publication as a kind of prayer to be inserted. A text that is already detached, probably lost. See Genette on “Prier’ d’inserer”

Is The Post Card an archive? Hat does it include of the the unpublished? What does it leave behind?

What does not get dessiminated?
To pray is to address, to recall, to remember. So it is a kind of guaranteeing of the archive. The prayer sends, like the card, even if it is never heard, even if there is no one to hear it. ²³

http://www.prayerrequest.com http://www.bennyhinn.org/prayer/prayer-request

“reprinted in the posthumous book by Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis, ed Marie-Louis Mallet (Paris: Galilee, 2006), pp. 163-91,” Beast and Sov 2, 237 (331), note 8.

The question is whether prayer as neither false nor true, is excluded form Heidegger’s account of truth as empirically truth and untruth (revealing and concealing), and his reinscription of a different kind of atheistic nonpolitical theological sovereignty, one closer to the God of onto-theology than those who pray, kneel and offer sacrifices to are . . .

Is there a posthumous principle or posthumous structure that differs from the postal principle or postal structure, whether the postal be subsumed by the posterous, the phantasm, and the posthumous.

Even before it was posthumously published, apparently even if it had never been published, Pascal’s writing would have remained readable even it was never read.

Derrida engages the “phantasm” in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, and the posthumous publication is a note Pascal wrote. The note just happens to begin with the word “fire.” Derrida’s discussion of Pascal’s note occurs in relation to the phantasm, the survivance of a text, which is not the same thing as the survival or a corpse decaying. His interest in Pascal’s paper lies partly in the way it is “strictly posthumous,” that is published after Pascal’s death:

As you well know, it is a posthumous piece of writing (now, of course, all writings are posthumous, within the trace as structurally and essentially and by destinal vocation posthumous or testamentary, there is a stricter enclave of the posthumous, namely, what is only discovered and published after the death of the author or signatory). Pascal’s writing on the god of Abraham was strictly posthumous in the latter sense, even though we are not sure Pascal wanted it to be published. This piece of paper initially takes the form of a journal, a note to self, dated in Pascal’s hand—Pascal, who like Robinson Crusoe, here dates the signature. He inscribes the year, the month, the day, and the hour . . . ²⁴

Derrida survivance and a prier d’inserer. Note reocvered on the body, worn. (cf Derrida on the wallet)
The reader may recall that Derrida, who kept the least little scrap of paper, in his last public conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe related how, one day, he had destroyed a correspondence ‘with grim determination’: ‘I destroyed a correspondence that I should not have destroyed and I will regret it all my life long (rue Descartes no. 52, 2006, p. 96). Like other people, no doubt, I first though that these destroyed letters were those from Sylviane Agacinski. But this auto-da-fe is also referred to in The Post Card as having occurred several years before Jacques and Sylvane met: [think of Jontahn [[Culler]]and Cynthia [[Chase]]and other proper names of will known critics] “. . . I burned everything , slowly, at the side of the road. I told myself that I would never start again’ (The Post Card, p. 33). I do not know where the letters sent by Agacinsku to Derrida are now; but it is known htat he did not destroy the, And, according to acquaintances, nearly a thousand letters from Derrida have been preserved by Agacinski. In the pages of the present work, the reader will have had a chance to appreciate how talented a letter-writer Derrida was; so one may indulge in dreaming of these letters [Derrida in Fichus on dream of Walter Benjamin in a letter] and hoping they will be published one day, even if far in the future.

Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, 244, asterisked footnote.

Il y a divers etats de la disquette, que je ne garde pas, en general. Il m’est arrive une fois ou dexus, pour Circonfession, de garder quelque etapes. Mai pour la plupart des textes, je me garde rien, ca se trasforme et ca ne laisse pas des traces. 68
“Derrida entre entre le corp ecrivant et l’ecriture”

Genesis 17, 2001, 59-72.

Jacques Derrida, « Le survivant, le sursis, le sursaut », dans La quinzaine littéraire, n° 882, 11-31 août 2004, pp. 15-16.

Derrida says
some things about his work that are the exact opposite of what he says
in the other interview published in Genesis.
J. DERRIDA : Peut-être. Quand je serai mort, il y aura un oiseau, une
fourmi qui dira « moi » pour moi et quand quelqu’un dit « moi » pour
moi, c’est moi. Mais alors pour enchaîner sur ce que vous avez dit
tous les deux sur vos papiers, moi, j’ai détruit une fois une
correspondance. Avec un acharnement terrible : j’avais broyé – ça ne
marchait pas ; brûlé – ça ne marchait pas… J’ai détruit une
correspondance que je n’aurais pas dû détruire et je le regretterai
toute ma vie. Pour le reste – et là on va parler du problème de
l’archive – je n’ai jamais rien perdu ou détruit. Jusqu’aux petits
papiers, quand j’étais étudiant et que Bourdieu ou Balibar venait
mettre sur ma porte un petit mot disant « je repasse tout à l’heure »…
Ou de Bourdieu : « Je vais t’appeler », et je l’ai toujours – et j’ai
tout. Les choses les plus importantes et les choses apparemment les
plus insignifiantes. Toujours en espérant, bien sûr, qu’un jour – non
pas grâce à l’immortalité, mais grâce à la longévité – je pourrais
relire, me rappeler, revenir, et en quelque sorte, me réapproprier
tout ça. Et puis, j’ai fait l’expérience cruelle et amère – maintenant
que toute cette correspondance est archivée et classée pour la majeure
partie hors de chez moi – que malheureusement je ne relirai jamais ces
choses…

http://www.cairn.info/revue-rue-descartes-2006-2-page-86.htm

-- Derrida entre entre le corp ecrivant et l’ecriture
Genesis 17, 2001, 59-72.
Niave: Benoit Peters—fantasy of preservation somewhere.
Footnote: Benoit Peters Jacques Derrida: A Biography on Derrida saying he destroyed correspondence. p. 244

Cite the Post Card as if it were evidence. I found a note in Benoit Peeters biography of Derrida (attached the

capture).  he says that Derrida did not destroy the correspondence

with Sylviane (though he says he does not know where the letters are).

 I've requested Penser avec Derrida, the source he cites in which

Derrida says he did destroy a correspondence but does not say which it

was. .  Apart from Peeters says Derrida never destroyed  a scrap of

paper on which he had written, which is the opposite of what Derrida

says in the Genesis interview.  However, Derrida's assertion that he

destroyed all drafts except for 1 or 2 floppy discs he used for

Circonfession is belied by the existence of the Derrida archive in UC

Irvine and the facsimiles of pages of notes and of a notebook of

Derrida's printed in the very same interview (lol?). Peeters use of

the Post Card as autobiographical evidence of Derrida's NOT burning of

Sylviane's letters is exceedingly stupid since the letters in the PC

are unsigned, just sent off.  He reads the letter writer quite

literally--"I burned everything" even though on the first page of the

"Envois" Derrida suggests that one read the correspondence that

follows as if it had been destroyed, burned.  Peeters also clams that

Sylviane has preserved 1k letters of Derrida but not published them.

Footnote: Benoit Peters Jacques Derrida: A Biography on Derrida saying he destroyed correspondence. p. 244

Cite the Post Card as if it were evidence. I found a note in Benoit Peeters biography of Derrida (attached the

capture).  he says that Derrida did not destroy the correspondence

with Sylviane (though he says he does not know where the letters are).

 I've requested Penser avec Derrida, the source he cites in which

Derrida says he did destroy a correspondence but does not say which it

was. .  Apart from Peeters says Derrida never destroyed  a scrap of

paper on which he had written, which is the opposite of what Derrida

says in the Genesis interview.  However, Derrida's assertion that he

destroyed all drafts except for 1 or 2 floppy discs he used for

Circonfession is belied by the existence of the Derrida archive in UC

Irvine and the facsimiles of pages of notes and of a notebook of

Derrida's printed in the very same interview (lol?). Peeters use of

the Post Card as autobiographical evidence of Derrida's NOT burning of

Sylviane's letters is exceedingly stupid since the letters in the PC

are unsigned, just sent off.  He reads the letter writer quite

literally--"I burned everything" even though on the first page of the

"Envois" Derrida suggests that one read the correspondence that

follows as if it had been destroyed, burned.  Peeters also clams that

Sylviane has preserved 1k letters of Derrida but not published them.

Derrida “Le suriviant, le sursis, le sursaut”

“Prier’ d’inserer. Ja’I deja un mal a me reconnaitre , pour y souscrire, dans chachune ds images que he viens d’exposer. Je me suis putot expose et lasisse prendre, une foisde plus: par un autre pour un autre. Je me suis laisse prendre en photographie (instantane ou photomaton) ou surprendre par un radar qui juge et snctioone la viteese sans vous laiser le temps ni la place de prendre la parole pour faire valoir vos driots, come il le faudrait. Je signe touteffois sincerement ce que vous venez peu-etre de lire. Non comme le symptome d’une “verite”, la mienne, plutot come une priere, , celle don’t Aristote dissit si justement qu’elle n’est “ni vrai ni fausse.” Le mai 2004 , 16

If it is true that for a certain Freud, “our unconscious cannot conceive of our mortality” (is unable to represent mortality to itself), then it would seem to follow that dying is unrepresentable, not only because it has no present, but also because it has no place, not even in time, the temporality of time. . . Nothing can be done with death that has always taken place already: it is the task of idleness, a nonrelation with a past (or future) utterly bereft of present. Thus the disaster would be beyond what we understand by death or abyss, or in any case by my death, since there is no more place for “me”: in the disaster I disappear without dying (or die without disappearing).

--Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 118-19.⁵

When I wrote one day, in “Circumfession,” if I remember correctly, “I posthume as I breathe,” that’s pretty much what I wanted to have felt, that’s pretty much what I wanted t have felt, rather than thought, or even speculated, or it’s pretty much what I wanted to have myself pre-sense. . . . In truth, posthumous, posthumus, with an h, appears to be a faulty spelling, the grammarian tells us, and the spelling error in it is apparently induced by the proximity with humus, earth. . . . It’s like for differance, with an a, which is yet another way to posthume by differing or deferring life or, what comes down to the same thing, deferring death. In truth, postume, without an h, apparently corresponds to the superlative of posterus. Posterus qualifies the one who comes after, the one who follows. Posterus is the follower of the descendent, the one who is going to come, or even the future itself, posthumous, the superlative here meaning the last follower of all, and above all the one who, being born after the death of the father, child or grandchild, posterity, bears the testamentary future and the fidelity of inheritance.

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 173-174⁶

and I focus on The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2 in part because it is a posthumous publication that engages posthumous publication and takes up a posthumously published note Pascal wrote that his servant found when he discovered Pascal dead. (The note by Pascal is coincidentally entitled “Fire,” and happens to, like Derrida’s and burned papers in The Post Card, parts of which Derrida quotes in Cinders, and Derrida’s ash of the archive in Archive Fever.) This note, however, emrges not just as a letter, like the letter form Blanchot in Demeure, but in a discussion of the prayer.

Letter cited by Derrida in seesion 7 of Beast and Sov 2 has gone missing, according to a note.

Because of publication and archive, effects are always tied to material support of an edition; anarchivity limited to page layout in “Tympan,” in Margins of philosophy, the columns in Glas, --with banks, a kind ofMallarmean aesthiec, eccentric ways of using bibliographic codes; so the coherence of a tropological reading—aporia, and the questioning of an internal reading, its limits, all depend on publication, just as for Genette the threshold or “seuil” of reading is always something published. The post Card is a publication. The post card is sent a priori.

Anarchivity from the way the published works are like a general text overflowing a given text to render it readable. Or unreadable.

Simulacra of destruction. Corpse.
What remains—passage by freud. So the general text is not ashen the way the arhive is

Quasi-machine of survivance, de Man and Rousseau on Typewriter Ribbon Ink

Archive means a psychoanalytic reading—Freud burns
No book history could sort out the references and so on, create a file, since Derrida refers to the Post Card as a post card., cites passages in his own anacrhivic archive, Cinders..

Question of animal and human

Of prayer and Post card

An posthumous publication

Writng on the support for –so a radical empiricism.
Fire in Bodeleian anecdote.
Yet Pascal—posthumous—a certain breakdown aroundHiedegger and prayer.

Heidegger—no death—in Why Poets? No destiny either.

Derrrida’s sending is the limit of his reading.
Because no one knows whether the publisher has intervened. Case of ON the Name. Nt up to the translator.
Publication constitutes its own kind of anarchvity.

Derrida often respects the distinction between published and unpublished,, private and public.

Quesiton of the animal is a question of the archive—a question about death of the writer. Or about the way death enters in a biological sense in derrida’s writing even as he pursues tsurivance and publication and unreadability (went back tohe text to add “Maurice Blanchot is Dead,” also the Beast and the Sovereign 2 (identified in an editor’s note). Editor as caretaker.