Richard Burt

The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G Jung

 By Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, xix

Wha Derrida spells out asa reading—repeitions and subsituttions—of Purloined Letter. Reading he spells out of eyond the Pleasure Principle

Our only chance for survival now, but in what sense, would be to burn everything, in order to come back to our initial desire. Whatever “survival” it might be a question of, this is our only chance, I mean common chance. I want to start over. Shall we burn everything? That’s this morning’s idea, when you come back I’ll talk to you about it—as technically as possible. (One of several entries / letters / post cards dated “January 1979”), 171

From the moment he published it and even if he had not published it, from the moment he wrote it and constituted it by dedicating it to his “dear friend,” the presumed signatory (Baudelaire or whoever signed this text beneath the patronymic and accredited signature of Baudelaire—for let us not be so gullible as to believe that the dedicatee goes no further than Arsene Housaye), from the moment he let it constitute itself in a system of traces, he destined it, gave it, not only to another or in general to others than his “dear friend” Arsene Housaye, but delivered it—and that was giving it—above and beyond any addressee, done, or legatee (we are speaking here of an unconscious figure represented by a determinable, bordered configuration of public and readers). The accredited signatory delivered it up to dissemination without return. Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, 100

The premises of this unpublished seminar remain implied, in one way or another, in l later works that were all devoted, if I may put it that way, to the question of the gift. . . . Foreword, x

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.¹⁴⁰ 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the archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida performed on the writings he wrote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.¹⁴¹

[See also Derrida on his own reading—impatient, impertient; and on 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.¹⁴² 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.”¹⁴³

“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 (Given Time 1) 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 calls an “internal” reading, even as he sometimes questions whether an internal reading is ever really possible, or the demarcation of a scene of reading of effects, whether noticed or not, to be deconstructed, scene that stores the not yet read and appears to guarantee that what is “to be” read has always already been sent.¹⁴⁴ 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,”¹⁴⁵ 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.”¹⁴⁶

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.¹⁴⁷ 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.¹⁴⁸ 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 rather than past from a mess to a structure, from private to public, or from one kind of mess to another, publication not necessarily having a structure—how do you read the structure? Not genetic criticism. ¹⁴⁹ 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, 119.¹⁵⁰ 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, 114-115.¹⁵¹

“Is a Tweet a Publication? Is every publication a post?
Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, “In Praise of Psychoanalysis” in For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue Trans. Jeff Fort(Stanford UP), 166-96; to 185-91.
Roger Chartier, “Introduction,” Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century Trans Arthur Goldhammer ( 2008)

The condition of archiving is publication when it comes to reading, to unreadability, to living on (survivance). Two ediitons of Blanchot.

Fo fiction and testimony when it comes to Derrida’s last words, kjustfictions.
Not death of the other first, as Levinas argues, against Heideggers’s one’s own death, but that the other is already spectral.

Banchot Last Words, Very Last words on posthumous publication.

“Final Words” Critical Inquiry “Jacques “says” puts the words in an oral register as if the person reading the note were reading his won words, not Derrida’s, using the informality—this is what he says, not what he said, even though Derrida is dead and so could not be speaking in the present tense. No archival commentary giving the details of the occasion given either in rue Descartes or critical inquiry. Pinned down by paratext—proper name and title—but otherwise liberated.
Gisèle Berkman, La Dépensée

his twelve-year relationship with Sylviane Agacinski, which ended in 1984 with the birth of a child, Daniel, and which Derrida tried to keep secret even from close friends (though most seem to have known) until it uncomfortably entered the public realm when Agacinski’s husband Lionel Jospin ran for president in 2002. It was to Agacinski, Peeters suggests, that the ‘strange and superb correspondence’ making up ‘Envois’ was originally addressed, and, given some later attacks on each other in print, the relationship between the philosophical and the personal evidently becomes rather fraught at this point. 

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/grande-biog

Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third son, Daniel, in 1984.
Different engagement with Heidegger—not over animal versus human dying but the after death of Dasein and its exclusion by Heidegger.

Heidegger on no after death versus Derrida’s posthumous note, a quotation, unsigned, written in the third person, to be read? To be read aloud? To be published?

Alan Bass does refer at times to the “jacket copy” in his Intro xvi,

Begin noting, in order to complicate, two seemingly obvious but actually complicated features of The Post Card, the preface that is not a preface and the back cover that bear on the boundaries of publication, prayer, survivance, and unreadability. The complication in the non/preface is the analogy Derrida draws between it and destroyed correspondence that has been burned and yet published (followed by many mentions of the burning and publishing)? The other is the back cover, signed J.D., which is like a letter in the “Envois.” It is singular. I am not interested in reading the content of the letter but in its being a prière d'insère, or “please insert.” What is the relation between destruction and divisibility, as pursued in “Facteur de la verite,” and yet Poe’s notion in The Purloined Letter that to show the letter is to destroy it, the simulacrum of the damaged—excessively folded letter the giveaway and the simulacrum of it reproduced as a visiting card? The back cover raises a different question related to publication. The post card is a letter, but in this case, a simulacrum of a letter, placed at the outer limit of the book, signed off, as it were, that is also related to prayer. It is not a citation, like the back cover of papier machine. The back cover is not one letter, a singular letter, or even a letter that has been posted. It has arrived at its resting place, the back cover, as Genette maintains, being the last of four stages in the history of the prière d'insère in French publication. Genette mentions one of Derrida’s prière d'insère. The material support of the book is not exhausted by the bound book, by the exteriority of the back cover with respect to the pages “inside” covered by the book. Nor does the jacket copy occupy a privileged exteriority, a kind of synoptic “coverage” of the book as a whole book (inside), but a simulacrum of the inside as well as an anachronism of what had been inserted as a press notice then as loose pages inside a book. (Derrida wrote on the bande around the book in Signsponge, but never on the prière d'insère.) The Post Card is not the only one on the back cover of a Derrida book, but it is the only one also signed, also dated, as much like a letter as the envoi are like a destroyed correspondence. If the limits of the letter are no decided by Derrida, if a post card is a publication, is the letter on the back, as prière d'insère, also a prayer? Although prière d'insère is translated into English as “Please insert” (“I pray you” being the transliteration, “je vous en prie”), Derrida activates the meaning of French meaning of prayer I prière d'insère for a French reader in a late interview about survivance. The section is a quotation –from the last chapter of Gift of Death, and the title is a quotation from Rogues related to the renvoi. La carte postale a carte posthume, to invent an expression that does not exist in French or have an equivalent in English, unlike the idiomatic le carnet posthume (the posthumous notebook)?¹⁵² In order to relate the deconstruction of the supposed indivisibility of the letter in The Post Card to the phantasm of the indivisibility of sovereignty in Without Alibi. And in relation to ash (of the archive), cinders, fires has Derrida’s favored tropes, and to the disposal of the corpse as raised in Beast and Sovereign 2. Derrida left a note to be read at his funeral. No addressee. No signatory. These are supplied by the editors when the paper was published. No plans for a posthumous edition of his works. But an order for the disposal of his works and for cremation in The Post Card. Not only closer reading of page layout and graphics and paratexts without subsuming them and dismissing them, boxing them up as instances of performativity. No collecting all of JD’s post cards or of his prière d'insère along the lines Genette hopes for. Derrida’s meaning publication notes as well as notes about not changing the talk for publication.

I want to pursue these questions by engaging both aspects of The Post Card and some of Derrida’s returns to it related to the archive, which brings with it psychoanalysis, media and media supports, the proper name, the title; sovereignty; and, to posthumous publication. Cinders, another simulacrum of destroyed correspondence, this time as an archive. “For the Love of Lacan”; sovereignty and cruelty in relation to the Post Card in “Psychoanalysis Searches”. In addition, I want to link survivance to the post card, which may be too quickly under the headings of various Derridemes. (Post Card is already posthumous as is all writing—see Plato’s Pharmacy”; it’s not a distinction.) But strictly posthumous publication, also a paper, a prayer, unpublished, or posthumously published, that cites, no more openly than Derida cites himself in his interview, in Beast and the Sovereign 2 in relation to a discussion of Heidegger and prayer. The purpose of pursuing them is open up the possibility of a deconstruction Derrida never carried out, a deconstruction without a name, of certain distinctions that underwrote Derrida’s deconstructive practice, what he calls his custom. He stops and starts reading published editions. He menitons letters and he may quote from Blanchot’s in Demeure, but then does not reproduce the manuscript or give a full diplomatic transcription. Ditto with Hegel’s report. Or with Pascal’s poem, paper, journal to self, and so on. A diplomatic transcription is good enough. As opposed to “Final Words” (“Derniers Mots,” in Critical Inquiry.” No critique genetique. No interest in textual criticism, not even in Joyce studies Again, no difference whether published or unpublished (Geneses, Archives). The archive in Cinders is a simulacrum, composed of quotations of The Post Card. Derrida organizes a scene of reading sometimes by reshelving the works of others (Lacan) in relation to their publication history, or through self-citations (as in Gift of Death). He goes back to editions in Typewriter Ribbon Ink and in Living On, but never to manuscripts. He does mention unpublished letters, and reproductions of his own letters have appeared in publications he didn’t write (Hantai; Cixous). He distinguishes his deconstruction from Destruktion (see Rogues lengthy endnote.). (See Heidegger on Destruktion in, Fundamental Concepts) He is very insistent, perhaps overly so. And he distinguishes his published work from his own in relation to the archive. He thematized words. He formalized. But he did not collect in his normative bibliographic way. No fantasy of a total collection. But the simulacrum, the play with graphics, all dependent on the closure of publication. No going back to Derrida’s mss. We may stay with his publications in order to examine howhe deals with publication as a threshold of reading. But read his returns, his renvoi (resendings) differently. The resending of a sending never sent.

Unreadable not the same thing as illegible—like crossed out words not transcribed—whereas Nietzsche and other facing page manuscripts do show crossing out. Heidegger published manuscript on facing page of type in Sojourns.

Derrida smoked—pipe and cigars.
Derrida drew had and last lines between his predecessors and rivals (Lacan and Heidegger, especially).
We can purse these questions to open up posthumographic criticism, a deconstructive practice that is without heading, without name, that is nether Derridean nor non-Derridean, no post post, that may or may not be a psychoanalysis without a name. It means giving up on sending as a priori, however. (telephonic in Yes, Ulysses; telephone all over the Post Card) It means burning before reading. It means burning by heart. One runs a fever not limited to the archive, a delirium of reading
For Derrida, the edition was the limit of reading and of the unreadability. Unreadability begun with the closure of publication. He stopped reading, comparative reading at publications. He did not reproduce manuscripts, letters, post cards. He may have become more comfortable with photographs and photos of himself and even writing on photography. But he didn’t get around to writing on publication. Hantai did Derrida’s in Correspondance.

And others , like rue Descartes—his letter said over his grave. Over Cixous, Flying Manuscript. Reproductions of Artaud’s drawings and of other paintings in Memoirs of the Blind. The a priori of sending (arriving without arriving) is played out in the empirical threshold of publication—the empirical existence of a material support.

But when Derrida was reading, he stopped at editions of books; unreadabilty –all borders except the border of publication versus pre-publication, manuscripts and drafts. Textual critics often Derrida friendly, but Derrida did not reciprocate by engaging in textual criticism. He did plan the publication of his works the way Heidegger did (turned out to be a complete mess, in any case) or Kierkegaard did. Be did not appoint caretakers, like Heidegger did his son. Publication is a threshold he did not cross.

He may have mentioned handwritten dedications, but manuscripts, when they were mentioned, were lost, as is in Blanchot’s Instant of My Death.

The Post Card is a publication and also a letter (derrida jokes); and prier d’insere is also a publication, an insert that may also be attached.
Death and after death. Derrida speaks from beyond the grave. Who read the paper? Or was it passed around, to be read silently by each person in attendance? Why did he not permit orations given that he gave so many? Is Derrida already a ghost? A spectre when writing the note in quotation marks? Is he writing a posthumous publication? He knows it will be published but does not make arrangements for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigillography¹⁵³

Mais l’anticipation rêvée semble se double d’un movement contraire, de ce qu’il nommait “la perversion du play-back”, puisque la bande-son aura été choisie—“ élue”, comme il dit—pour être rejouée depuis là -bas, depuis ce lieu sans lieu où ça posthume, comme un telephonogramme revenant de l’avenir. Bref, le flash-forward contient, d’avance inscrit lui, une sorte de gramophonie qui accompagne, voire permet ou appelle l’anticipation, cette animation d’un “je” envoyé en délégation a ses proper funérailles.

En différé, il y assiste a sa mort, il l’espionne.

“D’où que je sois . . . [Tels furent ses dernier mots, posthumes, lus au cimetiere de Ris-Orange le 12 Octobre (ils sont reproduits dans Rue Descartes, no 48, 2005, 6-7] “ semble t-il songer alors, “je” veille et surveille son ci-gît. Tandis que son cercueil se scelle d’avance un sigillographie posthume, son écoute présente se scinde et se dédouble.

Peter Szendy, “Sortie: Le rêve de J.D.,” Sur Écoute – Esthétique de l'espionnage (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2007), 145-53; to p. 151-52.

Szendy does not say who read the note.

Szendy cites, on p. 152 of Sur Écoute, Derrida’s circonfession “terminable survie laquelle “je me vois vivre”: traduit “je me vois mourir” . . . “ , Circonfession, 40-41

Peter Szendy, “Sortie: Le rêve de J.D.,” Sur Écoute – Esthétique de l'espionnage (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2007), 145-53; to p. 151-52.
Jacques Derrida, « Cette nuit dans la nuit de la nuit… », dans revue Rue Descartes, n° 42, novembre 2003, pp. 112-127)  Ce texte est la retranscription d’une communication faite au Collège International de Philosophie lors

du « Samedi du livre » consacré à La Musique en respect (Paris, Galilée, 2002), le 1er février 2003).

“ . . . l’irresistiblé projection, la quasi-hallucination d’un théâtre, à la fois visible et audible, d’une intrigue dans laquelle le visible est emporté, transporté pars le temps sans temps de la musique, et la scène [ . . . ] où je suis —où le je se trouve—mort mais encore là, et tous ceux et celles qui sont ou auront été aimées, toutes et toutes ensemble, mais chacun et chacune pour soi écouteraient ensemble religieusement cette musique-ci, qui peut être un chant, mais un chant non dominé par une voix intelligible, une musique dont le mort ne serait pas l’auteur (puisqu’il en aura été d’abord envahi et affecté), mais qu’il aurait élue comme s’il désirait avoir le génie de l’inventer, de la composer pour leur offrir, si bien que cette parole (“voilà la musique, se dirait-il, dans laquelle j’aurais voulu mourir, pour laquelle j’aurais voulu mourir”), la tristesse de mort ou d’adieu serait alors d’un instant à l’autre transfigurée en surabondance de vie . . . Le moi-même, mort mais soulevé par cette musique par la venue unique de cette musique-ci, ici maintenant, dans un même movement, le moi-même mourrait en disant oui à la mort et du coup réssusciterait, se disant, je renais, mais non sans mourir, je renais posthumément, la même et naissance, salut désespéré et l’adieu sans retour et sans salvation, sans rédemption mais salut à la vie de l’autre vivant dans le signe secret et les silence exurbérant d’une vie surabondante . . .’

Jacques Derrida, « Cette nuit dans la nuit de la nuit… », dans revue Rue Descartes, n° 42, novembre 2003, pp. 112-127; to pp. 124-25)  URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40978797

Jacques Derrida, « Envois », La Carte postale, de Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris, Aubier

Flammarion, 1980, p. 217.
No. 48, SALUT À JACQUES DERRIDA, Avril 2005, pp. 1-127; pp. 6-7 a transcription of what was said at his grave when he was buried. Mentions that Blanchot was cremated.
relation of divisibility and destruction—the one does map onto the other, only after publication, when it is a simulacrum. Whereas in Poe’s story, to produce the letter is to destroy it. But the letter is returned (or is it ever?), not destroyed (or was it?, eventually?). The simulacrum is envelope that the Minister has made excessively “used” destroyed.

Certain deconstruction guaranteed made possible by the condition of publication, by not theorizing publishability or un/ publishability. Unreadability, survivance all begin and stop at the post publication border. Pre-publication but publishing elides and post. Posthumous publication part of carrying out already published and unpublished works. Kierkegaard. JD mentions the mss Rousseau left in the church. But also compares Blanchot to Pascal as oblivion, forget me, but no attention to Posthumous publication as Blanchot paid. In essays on Kafka. Derrida also uses “archived” to refer to already published materials. The politics of publication—legal norms of publication—these are “external” to any “internal” reading or unreading, parergonal border reading. The moment of publication serves as the a priori of sending. A kind of transcendental limit.

Posthumographic is a kind of hauntogrammatology—extends ways of thinking about the archive, archive management that are not reducible to a positive history, on the one hand, but that are not reducible to a structure—restance—that totalizes—either. But examines ecospecifc modes of destruction as played out in published works..
« La musique... l’expérience même

de l’appropriation impossible ».

Quelques variations sur un thème

de Jacques Derrida

Marie-Louise MALLET

Escritura e imagen

Vol. ext. (2011): 41-56
My experience of Derrida’s death is of course heavily mediated by his numerous writings on death and mourning. But it is also framed by an episode that took place during one of his many visits to the University of Chicago, shortly after the appearance of Specters of Marxin 1994. One of my colleagues asked him to compare the widely rumored “death” of Marxism to the equally common rumors that deconstruction was dying as well. Derrida’s eyes twinkled at the question:

Yes, it’s true. Deconstruction is clearly dying. But we have to ask precisely how it is dying. For instance, last week we read in the newspaper that Nixon was dying, and then that Nixon was dead. Next week there will be nothing in the papers about Nixon dying. But it is not like that with deconstruction. Deconstruction has been dying for quite awhile. The first reports of its dying came to us a long time ago, and no doubt it will continue dying for some time to come. And it seems to be dying more in some places than others. For instance, in France, deconstruction is not dying. It was declared dead long ago. But in the United States, deconstruction still seems to be dying quite a bit.⁴