Richard Burt

Ghlossed Protocol

We may now say what these glossings, glossing of “configurations” that are not as stable as those of any “reading” because they have no limits and for which there are no “protocols,” as there are even for a history of the archive that may never be possible to write.¹¹⁴ More radically, glossing canonot be limited to the reading of a single version of a text, a single edition, as Derrida does in “Love Lacan” with respect to the Ecrits, which he calls a “stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of the collection and binding of Écrits, in other words, in 1966.”¹¹⁵ Can deconstruction write off psychoanalysis, as Derrida apparently does in “Love Lacan” (1991)? Can deconstruction transform the logic of psychoanalysis, as Derrida says it can in Specters of Marx?¹¹⁶ Or does the gesture of writing pyschoanalysis off depend on pyschonalysis having to call itself something, on its having a name that modifies it? Is deconstruction nameless, that is not dependent on Derrida’s name? Or does it involve archiving of Derrida’s name from the original the title of the collouqium erased, even as Derrida erases all proper names that could modify pychoanlysis with the letter “X?” Or is there a Freudian deconstruction? A Lacanian deconstruction? I cannot answer these questions—can anyone?—nor canI say that the last two questions haven’t already put us on the wrong track in bringing back the proper name as an adjective in a way that assumes that we already know what a Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis is.

La carte posthume

I do not have answers to these questions. I can only make them more audible—leave you with them ringing in your ears –by extending the question of reading after death (Derrida’s, Lacan’s, X’s, yours, mine, ours, and so on) with which we began to the one time Derrida’s explicitly engages with posthumous publication but does so without reference to psychoanalysis even though it is under the heading of the phantasm. Glossing only renders, and hence rends any distinction between glossing and reading.

Earn Burial

Here I quote Derrida quoting Guerrier:

“A few days after the death of Monsieur Pascal . . . a servant of the house noticed by chance an area in the lining of the doublet of the illustrious deceased that appeared thicker than the rest, and having removed the stitching . . . found there a little folded parchment . . . and in the parchment of a paper written in the same hand: the one was a faithful copy of the other. . . . All agreed there was no doubt that this parchment, written with so much care and with such remarkable characters, was a type of memorial that he kept very carefully to preserve the memory of a thing that he wanted to have always present to his eyes and mind, since for eight years he had taken care to stitch and unstitch it from his clothes, as his wardrobe changed. The parchment is lost; but at the beginning of the manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, one can find the paper that reproduced it, written in the hand of Pascal, the authenticity of which was confirmed by a note signed by the Abbé [Étienne] Périer, Pascal’s nephew. At the top was a cross, surrounded by a ray of light.¹¹⁷

The material support of Pascal’s note has been lost; the copy has survived; it has been archived; it has been published; Derrida takes a father’s word for its authenticity.

Screen captures of Pascal’s Pensees, stored in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris from Alain Resnais’s documentary film Toute la memoire du monde (1956).

Feu la cindre, Derrida might have said, citing the title of a text in which Derrida’s many references to a holocaust in The Post Card become recast as references to the Holocaust, an event Derrida recalls in his coments on Pascal’s note by glossing it in relation to Paul Celan’s poem, Aschenglorie, one of many Celan’s poems Derrida also finds difficult to read.¹¹⁸

However the note might be read, it is not to be read, as Pascal’s elder sister, Gilberte Pascal Périer who published her dead brother’s “little paper” in her Life of Blaise Pascal, in her preface introducing the posthumous writing in which she narrates the circumstances of its discovery--Pascal had sewn the paper into his doublet, Derrida tells us, and a servant found it after Pascal died—the note is not to be read as Pascal’s “last word,” as a master text that would govern the meaning of all of Pascal’s other writings.¹¹⁹ She justifies its posthumous publication in her Life of Blaise Pascal by stating that she does not wish to solicit a desire for an a reading of the words on the paper as a last word, “for I am no ultimate end of any body.”¹²⁰ Even as what I call “sur-viv-ablity” or perhaps better, “survivance-ability” and “publish-ability” reach a limit point of the conditions of what can be read (and of what Derrida is sure he can read). Yet that limit is not an aporia or an impase; rather, it seem--surprisingly--to be underwritten by the (rigorous?) subcategory of strictly posthumous publication which is in turn underwritten by a very Heideggerian sounding of destiny and poetry.

Posthumography raises arguably psychoanalytic as well as deconstructive questions about how Derrida’s archive mis/management Derrida is “to be” read, about what has been left to be read and about how reading is a practice to be, unlimited, the definition of the unreadable always to be reopened.¹²¹ These questions about what remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s writings are also biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical questions concerning the archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own works, from which he sometimes quoted, sometimes including handwritten notebooks as well as published works.¹²²

[See also Derrida on his own reading—impatient, impertient; an don the good reader and the bad reader] These bibliographic protections are themselves self-corroding, I maintain, and the effects of their corrosion, corrosion produced by bibliographical logic that limits, forgets, neglects, consigns to oblivion data, effects that are structurally excluded from whatever is said, assumed, or taken to survive through publication. Editing and translating often produce the same kinds of corrision effects, often paraadoxically in an effort to repair a text. Derrida’s works into English sometimes supply as much information about each version of a text while others think that the most recent renders others obsolete, the last version being the supposedly definitive version.¹²³ This bibliographic, editorial, and translative logic glosses over—renders unreadable and even impossible to mourn, as in “you need not have read that so I don’t need to tell you about what you’re missing”--Derrida’s own self-corroding (re)publication practices and his idosyncratic bibliographic practices, his frequent omissions of bibliographic information both in the body of his text and in his footnotes, omissions which are sometimes filled in by his English translators, sometimes not, as well as his attention to the titles of published works (Parages) and the corruption of titles, or use of “faux-titres,” perhaps better called “feu-titres” or even “fou-titres.”¹²⁴

“The title has been proposed by the editors. For reasons that will become clear in the reading, this text did not present itself under any title. “The Double Session” in Dissemination Trans Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1983),173.

In Dissemination, Derrida retains the title the editors gave his two part article.

Moreover, this logic glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future publications, promises that Derrida sometimes fulfilled and sometimes did not.

What I am calling the reshelving or archival operations of posthumography delimit a given text as a single text, an unpublished, published, or republished text in order to render it readable as text signed off and sent off under a signature and a proper name, thereby permitting what Derrida often called an “internal reading” or the demarcation of a scene of reading of effects, whether noticed or not, to be deconstructed that stores the not yet read and appears to guarantee that what is “to be” read has always already been sent.¹²⁵ These biobibliopolitical questions are also psychoanalytic questions as they are irreducible in advance to a so-called ethics of reading, however, as if one could decide what reading carefully was and what carelessly was, as one could ever do justice by reading everything. Posthumographic reading, like all reading, is necessarily a politics of reading that is “err-responsible.” Since it is an archival or reshelving operation according to bibliographical norms publication, posthumographic reading, involves omissions of information, not limited to “editorial data,”¹²⁶ that do not default to the staus of a clue, evidence, symptom, detail and do not have the significance Derrida accords Freud’s omission, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of Socrates (Post Card, 344), Lacan’s omission of stories by Poe other or Lacan’s omission of Marie Bonaparte, Paul de Man’s omission of two words from a quotation from Rousseau that Derrida discusses in “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink (2),” and so on on.”¹²⁷

The kinds of omissions, or self-corroding effects of publication and what surives to be read, normally or otherwise, I attend to in Derrida’s works are idiosyncratic because they are errors, self-cremations that do not amount to self-incriminations, but are more like quasi-illegal driving that sometimes crosses the line.¹²⁸ These omissions involve the ways in which Derrida preps a published work for reading, and hence shelves what is not to be read, what can be skipped, what is insignificant, what is effectively invisible; these omissions of information related translations and publications may be likened to wounds, perhaps just scratches, that have been covered up, bandaged, hence repressed. But even if they have been repressed, the do not necessarily fall in line with repetition compulsion, the death drive, the uncanny fort-da, chance, destiny, and so on, not that any of those terms is unified or definable. Thus, I will not be writing a Psychopathology of Derrida’s Everyday Life.

As an archiving operation, posthumography is conerned not only with posthumous publication or thanatography but with what is “to be” read, what suruvives rests on how the boundaries of publication are drawn, what counts as published or unpublished. Publication is a question of surviv-ability, of what publication renders not to be read of whatever survives. A given text’s survival is subject to the conditions and structures of of publish-ability, a neologism that may be divided and recombined into a cluster of others, including unpublish-ability, republish-ablility, and pre-publishability, all of which, as we shall see, are related, to binding and unbinding.¹²⁹ Un/Publish-ability determines of the limits of readability and is a question about the justice of reading what remains to be read, of any reading “to come.” An orientation to a future rathh erhtan pastfrom a mess to a strucutre, from private to public, or from one kind of mess to another, publication not necessarily having a strucutre—how do you rad the structure? Not genetic criticism. ¹³⁰ In H.C., For Life, Derrida links just reading to reading everthing: “one must read everything, of course, letter by letter: I ill-treat everything by thus selecting and chopping with unforgivable violence. Unable to do justice to this book, as to the fifty others . . . H.C., For Life, 119.¹³¹ But the limits of what survive, the possibility of being in tact, left aside for a reading to come, are not reducible to the finitude of a given material support that makde publication possible and the infinity of reading whatever ahs been published. Publish-ability concerns the limits of “everything” that is to be read: is “everything” what has been published, republished? Whatever falls under the category of “internal” is not limited to what Derrida calls the “normal category of readability” Parages, 187 or “normal reading,” but neither does “unreadability” (Living On,” Parages, 188) amount to the text’s overruning of the protective legal aspects of publication—“protective measure [structures de garde] and institutions as the registering of copyright, the Library of Congress or the Bibliotheque Nationale, or something like a flyleaf,” Parages, 114-115.¹³²

Les Dernier Mots and Other “Lacanuae”

Jacques Derrida may be reasonably presumed dead, of course. I have tried to show that asking whether deconstruction will survives its death, a question Derrida addressed in 1994, in Derrida’s name, is the wrong question to ask. ¹³³ To address that question will produce defensive psychobiographies and thematic, pre-critical reshelvings of Derirda’s writings, key word by key word. The question of the survival of deconstruction is a question, properly or improperly, about the survial of a practice without a name, a practice that overlaps with psychoanalysis yet cannot be separated rom it. Let me “Speculate –On ‘Derrida’” for a moment. Derrida might have rethought the distinction he makes between posthumous writing in general and strictly posthumous generations of readings to come—had he remembered what he said earlier in the seminar, namely, that “Freud reminds us” of something crucial about the phantasm, perhaps even remembering what Derrida said about Freud in the Sixth Session of the Seminar?¹³⁴ Did Derrida forget psychoanalysis?¹³⁵ Did he ever forget it? Did ever forget Freud or Lacan?¹³⁶ Who can say? If we can say that all readings of what sur-vives or lives on of Derrida’s writings after his death will be about what he will not have said and would not have said, and I am not saying we can, we can also say Derrida’s account of Pascal’s paper as a note destined to be read depends on Derrida’s belief in its indestructibility, one might even says its indivisibility, and hence its undeconstructibility.¹³⁷ Does the word “fire” in Pascal’s note make the poem difficult to read because one cannot read while burning? Does the endlessness of burning here, the collapse of a fire lit before and its aftermath, mean that one can only gloss the poem while making the limits of any such glossing impossible to determine, extending glossing well past the determination of the meaning of a word, phrase, sentnece, or passage that glossing apparently delivers or is commonly thought to deliver to reading? Is Pascal’s note itself a gloss, his shirt a kind of urn burial or portable columbarium for it? Does glossing necessarily gloss over itself?

In isolating Pascal’s note as a strictly posthumous publication, Derrida forgets that all of Pascal’s Pensées were published posthumously in 1670, along with this note, in the same book.¹³⁸ The distinction Derrida draws between strictly and generally posthumous writing is not at all rigorous, and indeed depends in the case Derrida singles out on factoring out the facteur, on forgetting the mailman, in maybe untenable only in very different ways, and the forgetting of the servant’s name who sent off the note, the servant whose name was already forgotten by the Father. Let Derrida have the lost words, so to speak, or “ghlost” words: “And moreover I obey at every moment without seeming to: to burn everything, forget everything . . . and while driving I held it on the steering wheel.”¹³⁹
After-Peace

One still has to take note of this. And to finish that Second Letter: “. . . Consider these facts and take care lest you sometime come to repent of having now unwisely published. It is a very great safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing. . . . What are now called his . . . Sokratous estin kalou kai neou gegonots . . . are the work of a Socrates embellished and modernized. Farewell and believe. Read this letter now at once many times and burn it . . . .”

--I hope this one won’t get lost. Quick, a duplicate . . . graphite . . . carbon . . . reread this letter . . . burn it. Il y a là cendre. And now to distinguish between two repetitions.”

“I hope this one won’t get lost. Quick, a duplicate . . . graphite . . . carbon . . . reread this letter . . . burn it. . . . And now to distinguish between two repetitions.”

--Derrida, “Play: From Pharmakon to the Letter” in “Plato’s Parmacy” in Dissemination, 170-71

-- also cited in Derrida, Cinders III, 56, the whole part with the end up to “And now to distinguish between two repetitions” and Cinders n. IV, p. 58.

“Bye Bye that Song Bye Thank You Like You Love You See You Next Time Bye Miss You”

REnd Notes

“41. In the session, Derrida added nothing here.” Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 277. The last chapter of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle “adds nothing . . seems to add nothing” (Post Card, 386; 387).

“The unfortunate effect of all this is to give a large can of petrol and a flame-thrower to those prejudiced types who would like to terminate not Shakespeare but the “queer theory” which is currently the hottest thing on the American academic scene.”

, Review of Richard Burt, Unspeakable (1998); TLS 28 May 1999

Richar Burt

Read After Burning, I Pray You, or la carte posthume::

Derrida Destroyed . . . Derrida Archived . . . Derrida Published . . . Derrida Perished [Ableben] . . . Derrida Died [Sterben] . . . Derrida Survived [Uberleben] . . . “Jacques Says . . .”

"Its susceptibility of being produced?" said I.

"That is to say, of being destroyed," said Dupin.

Having alrady taken advantage of the time I have been given, having given myself as a rule not to return or refer to the book I have just published on the gift and currency, I will content myself with recounting in the from of an elliptical epilogue, a true story. Something that recently happened to me at a train station. It made me and continues to make me think. I will tell it without commentary, but we can return to it in the discussion.

It is not a story about a bank credit card. Nor is it a question of those coded cards with which we are able to draw bills from walls after having shown one’s credentials to cash distributing machines. It is about a telephone card, already partially used, but used to a degree that could neither measure nor calculate. I had just called, using this card, from the Gare du Nord around midnight, having returned from Lille. A young English couple next to me was in front of a telephone machine that took coins. The machine wasn’t working, and the English couple didn’t have a card. Having dialed the number for them with my card, I left it with them, and just as I was walking away, the young Englishman offered to pay e, without knowinghow or how much: I made a gesture with my hand to signifiy no, thatit was a gift and that, in any case, I didn’t want any money. The whole thing lasted several seconds and I asked myself, and I think the answer is not possible for a thousand reasons that I will not go into, whetherI had given something , and what, or how much, how much money, by helping them to do not just anything—but simply call someone far away by telephone. And for some reason, which I do not have time to develop, just asI did not have time to think at the Gare du Nord, there si no way to asnwer the question of knowing if there was something which one out to be congratulated, narcissistically, for having given, whether out of generosity or not, something, money or not. And to whom.

If we had time for a discussion, I would try to convince you that there cannot be and, what is more, that there should not be, an answer to satisfy these questions.

And thus one cannot, and should not, know—whether there was a gift. Into the bargain [par-dessu le marché].

Derrida, “On the ‘Priceless,’ or the ‘Going Rate’ of the Transaction” In Negotiations. 3267-28

The State of the Debit

Derrida has already mentioned running out of time 321 (middle of the essay, recalling the beginning) and 314 (first page). He is so caught up in the question of the gift, sacrfiice, and time htat he forgets to ask if the call went through, if the couple reached the person they called. Perhaps Derrida saw that they did reach that person. But he does not say so. Perhaps he walked off before the connection went through just assuming it would. Nor does he consider that the call could have lasted only a few seconds. The card installs a kind of gambling that Derrida overlooks since the amount on the acrd is finite and perhaps too small to permit the call—can the call go through on this card? Can the conversation the couple wishes to have happen? Did it happen? Or was there too little oney debited to the card or it to happen, or happen successufully. The story may not be about a bank credit card, but it is a story about a blank credit card. While the amount of money on the card is finite, the credit is seemingly infinite. Derrida does not check his blank check telephone line of credit. It’s a kind of Ronellian moment. The card ensures that the call will be received, that the person will pick up, and those who are far away will be closer.

Another S.P., agreed . . . , but I would put my hand into the fire, it’s really the only one. For the rest, they will understand nothing of my clinamen, even if they are sure of everything, especially in that case, the worst one. Especially there where I speak, they will see only fire. On this subject, you know that Freud’s Sophie was cremated. 255

Marie Bonaparte went through Freud's papers and correspondence and burned some items that would have been dangerous had they fallen into Nazi hands. Then the remaining files of papers and letters . . . were labeled and shipped along with the family’s other effects. . . . The files of papers were stored away in a house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which became the family’s permanent home in the autumn of 1938, and where Freud died on 23 September 1939. There the letters rested, surviving another kind of holocaust, the air raids of the Second World War, and afterwards, amidst the concerns of the Freud family with the immediacies of life and profession, the letters were seemingly forgotten. Jung’s letters from Freud lay undisturbed for nearly forty years. For a time he kept them in what he called his ‘cache,’ a narrow safe set in the wall of an alcove ad The ‘cache,’ which was locked with a key that Jung carried in his pocket, also contained, among other valuables, the four ments of a breadknife that had shattered when he was experimenting with occultism as a student. ix-xx.

Private communication from Miss Freud, who added, ‘Otherwise what we performed were really works of rescue. There was too much accumulated material to take with us to London, and my father was all for throwing away much of it, whereas Princess Bonaparte . . . [sic] was all for preservation. Therefore she rescued from waste-baskets which my father had thrown there.’ The account given by [Ernest] Jones (III, p. 238/233), of burning everything not worth preserving, is not quite exact. xix, n26

We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he may have burned. We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive fever, what have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or of his “life.” Burned without limit, without remains, and without knowledge. With no possible response, be it spectral or not, short of or beyond suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash.

Naples, 22-28 May 1994

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, “Postscript,” 101