Richard Burt

Bass Notes

Alan Bass leaves many French words untranslated into English. There are no translator’s notes to “Envois.”²²

All this to be read in the Nachlass of the 80s, surrounding this sentence which I no longer wish to translate” At the end he returns to the phrase “To is to be continued” (cites his own “La séance continue” subtitle which is taken from Freud, who said when his daughter died.

I did not wish to cite in passing 388

To be continued 337; 409; la séance continue, 320; 376

The word transference reminds one of the unity of the metaphoric network, which is precisely metaphor and transference (Uebertragung), a network of correspondences, connections, switch points, traffic and a semantic postal, railway sorting without which no transferential destination would be possible, in he strictly technical sense that Freud’s psychoanalysis has sought to assign this word . . . . 383

Obeying a law of selective economy . . . as much as the rightful pleasure that I can give myself tonight, I will limit myself to the following traits. 372

Zuruck, 362, 409

Autoteleguiding 356, 337

How has such a hypothesis, under its rubric as hypothesis, I am insisting on this, been granted in this third chapter? I am supposing it reread. 339

Empirico-biographical, 328

(This entire syntax is made possible by the graphics of the margin or hyphen, or the border and the step, such as remarked elsewhere. I will exploit it here.] 317

The last sentence of the note is “Other fragments of the same seminar will appear soon in book form.” 293

This fact will be contested by those whose truth is hidden by these themes, who are all too happy to find in them corroboration for their truth on the basis of what they call “hermeneutics.”

(A healthy reform of spelling would allow us to give their exploitation of this term the import of a famillionaire practice: that of the faux-filosopher, for example, or the fuzzyosphy, without adding any more does or I’s.)

Their radical vice can be seen in [their approach to] the transmission of knowledge.

--Jacques Lacan, “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question,” Écrits, 193

I will do nothing for the reader henceforth—apart from pointing out, a little further on, the aim of my Seminar—but trust in his tete-a-tete with texts that are certainly no easier, but that are intrinsically suitable.

--Jacques Lacan, “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question,” Écrits, 189
(Here, I interrupt this development, If one is willing to read its consequences, including its appendix in Facteur de la verite, one will perceive . . . 335

To which he forcibly adapts his designs, 689

Completely useless 367

Deciphers it far afar like a teleguided reading device

Besides, in our case, we were obliged to proceed without noise” 685 [like D—going blind, only on audio for Dupin.

Holding up his closed hand, 689

Vacant stares 688

Its susceptibility to being produced?” I said.

That is to say, of being destroyed, said Dupin. [When do Derirda’s “Tropics” become designs, drawings, writing bordering on drawing?

The Prefect . . . finally filled up and signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed across the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and deposited in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect.

No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in search. . . . But the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive 696

You will remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested, upon our first interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account of its being so very self-evident.” 696

681

Ful of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pari of green spectacles. . To be even with him [why even? Odd? ], I complained of my weak eyes [versus D’s “lynx-eyed”] and emanated the necessity of the spectacles, under cover [under cover as in detective, but also like a piece of paper—his glances, his eye movements, his reading al have be concealed by the “shades” Dupin wears] I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the apartment, while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host. [Dupin goes on audio only-he is blind, but somehow he is still readable as a listener. He is actually deaf—or has the mute button on.

Upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it to good purpose; I paid especial attention to a large writing-table near which he sat . . .

By being too shallow or to deep, for the matter in hand; [on hand and in hand] 689

It was nearly in two, across the middle—as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it out as worthless had been altered, or stayed, in the second. [first, second] It had a very large seal, bearing the D-cipher very conspicuously . . . 695

He hard foreseen all of this 693

When you have signed it, will hand you the letter. 688

Opened it with a trembling hand 688

Producing a memorandum-book, proceeded to read aloud a minute account of the internal, and especially of the external appearance of the missing document. 686-87

I made the re-examination” 687

Poe engages forensics as a kind of bibliometrics:

You looked among D----‘s papers, of course, and into the books of the library? We opened every package and every parcel; we nervously opened every book, but we turned over every lead in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to the fashion of some police officers. We also measured the thickness of Every book-cover , 686

Also storage metrics:

We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. 684

After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in the drawer, she was forced to place it, open as it was, upon a table. 682

From giving him reason to suspect our design. 683

I have keys which can open any chamber of any cabinet in Paris. 683

Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain, said Dupin. 681

Especial form, 692

Microscopes, 693

Eyes, 693

Escaped observation by dint of being excessively obvious 694

“re-directed and re-sealed”

I just copied” 698

“opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close juxtaposition to the other. 682

This cannot be done openly. 683

Policial eyes, 691

Suggestive of a design to delude the beholder 696 (Henry James—“design in the carpet”)

“And what, after all, is the matter on hand?” I asked. 681

from employing it as he must design in the end to employ it. 681

“Be a little more explicit,” I said. 681

When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations. 688

The story is essentially over less than half way through the Purloined Letter. The letter is already recovered—ended, the entire first half is already “protracted’ because Dupin could simply have said to the Prefect. I have what you’re looking for. That’ll be 50k. Here is my checkbook. Story over. SO it comes as a chock tht he already has the letter when he has seemed not to even know what the case was about.

The rest of the story is explanation, but most of it does not explain. The story really picks up and finishes only in the last three pages.

So in addition to excessiveness making the copy recognizable, Dupin’s detection involves a doubly protracted narrative.

The question is all about whether the Minister will read Dupin’s card and recognize the handwriting. But there is also a question about whether the Prefect ever gets the letter back to the Queen. Might D--- have not intercepted the Prefect? We never have evidence that the Queen gets it back.

Rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out. 697

He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investigation of his premises. . .

I regarded only as ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police 693

First, by default of this identification, and secondly, by ill-admeasurement [first . . second] 690

from whom especially it was her wish to conceal it. 682

“A little too self-evident. 681

An imaginary individual 687

“in the dark,” 680 (repeated on p. 680; “under cover” of the green spectacles?)

Thorough identification 689

“now they have to be destroyed,” 233

The bad reader in Derrida pc, 4

Typo and name 364

Facteur, 360

Paragon and autobiography, 303

In this great omission, Freud forgets Socrates 374

Economy of reading Freud’s footnotes in BPP

This is the object of a note which is not only the longest in the book, but also much longer than the passage it annotates. . . . The note then follows, more than twice as long as the citation from the Symposium. 374; 374

I am going right to the end of this chapter, toward the site of this first pause where . . Freud finally concludes278, 320,

Freud drops it . . like the note at the bottom of the page which punctuates the end of this act 368

And with this word a call for something. A call for a footnote that I will read presently. 313

Derrida announces and delays reading of Freud’s two footnotes (This is how we fall on the first of two footnotes 318) delays getting to the second on p. 320, “Let us pause after this first footnote, 320, mentions the second note on 325 This is the sentence that calls for a note on Sophie’s Death. Before translating this paragraph on the two negative functions of the PP, note included, I am extracting a notation from the preceding paragraph, I have extracted it only because it did appear dissociable to me, like a parasite from its immediate context. Perhaps it is best read as an epigraph of for what is to follow. In the preceding paragraph it resonates . . . 325-26 calls up the second note only to defer analysis of it “Call for a note on Sophie’s death. Before coming to it, I emphasize the certainty . . . , last two sentences at the bottom of 326, and then on the middle 327 “Here, finally, is the second note” 327
But a certain reading of his text, the one I am attempting here, cannot fail to come across its work. PC 277

Freud torso, 265

I have cited it elsewhere 263

262, n6, by translator “An allusion to Freud and the Scene of Writing

Comparative philology—return to philology for de Man, who considered himself a philologist?
Old dream of cinema, 68; repeated in Paper Machine
I am teaching you pleasure , I am telling you the limit and the paradoxes of the apeiron, and everything begins like the post card, with reproduction. Sophie and her followers, Ernest, Heinele, myself and company dictate to Freud who dictates to Plato, who dictates to Socrates who himself, reading the last one (for it is you who reads me, you see him here on his card I the place where he is scratching, it is for him that is written the very thing that he is going to sign) again will have forwarded. Postmark on the stamp, obliteration, no one any longer heard distinctly, all rights reserved, law is the rule, but you can always run after the addressee as well as the sender. Run in circles, but I promise you that you will have to run faster and faster. At a speed out of proportion to these old networks, or in nay any event to their images. Finished the post, or finally this one, this epoch of the destinal and of the envoi . . . 63

And to “recount” it has always seemed impossible to me , pc, 167

They intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme. 232

Holocaust 232

Autobiographical story about a telephone call, 230, like the story he tells at the end of Given Time: Counterfeit Money.
Van Gogh’s shoelaces as signature (drawing, painting as writing).

Reread the little one’s letters. 255

There would only be “facteurs,” and therefore no verite. Only “media,” take this into account in every war against the media. The immediate will never be substituted for them, only other frameworks and other forces. 194
A datem for example, when sending a message [a l’evoi d’un pli] is never perceivable, one never sees it, it never comes to me, in any event to consciousness, there wehere it strictly takes place, whence one dates, signs, “expedites.” 195

All posts and telelcomunications 161

Story about posting anxiety 102

Story about telephone anxiety 159

Dead letters 124

Suppose I write a book abou, let us say Palto and telecom,” 103

The whole thing would be retranslated 95

Thus I am rereading the Letters of Plato and all those admirable discussions around their authenticirt, of their belonging, the one says, to the corpus platonicum sucha s it has been constituted from the time of Thrasyllus. 83

French book about Derrida turning his books into images.
I am rereading one of the letters received yesterday. Pc, 116

For the day that there will be a reading of theOxford card, the one and true reading, will be the end of history. 115

Dupont and Dupond 112

“entire teleorgamization” 108

Voltaire and ciphers, 70
The Purveyor of Truth

Truth (out) of the Letter from Freud's Hand, 78.- o f a Kind, Kings - Double, 100.

Pretexts

Meeting Place: Four

11s le remercient pour les grandes veritds qu'il vient de proclamer,-- car ils ont d6cou- vert ( verificateurs de ce qui ne peut &tre vkrifie!) que tout ce qu'il a enonce est absolu- ment vrai;-- bien que d'abord, avouent ces braves gens, ils aient eu le soupcon que ce pouvait bien 6tre une simple fiction. Poe repond que pour son compte, il n'en a jamais dout6.

BAUDELAIRE

Mehlman does not translate; bass does

Mehlman spkips the first six sentneces

Were does psychoanalysis, always, alrady, find itself to be refound? 413

The author of thE book of which I am speaking, himself, not his name (therefore pardon me for no† naming him) is himself pc, 99

Au Revoir

A very trivial remark , the relations between post, police and media are called upon to transform themselves profoundly , as in the amorous message (which is more and more watched over, even if it has always been), by virtue of informitization. So be it. And therefore all the networks of the p.p. (psych and pol). [play on PP as pleasure principle] But will the relation between the police, the psychoanalytic insitutioand letters be affected? Inveitably, and it is beginning. Could Poe adapt The Purloined Letter to this? Is it capable of adaptation? Here I would bet yes but it would be very difficult. The end of a postal epoch is doubtless the end of literature. 104

PL, facteur, Poe appear in Envois: 28, 71, 94, 95, 104, 148-49, 200, 218, 222, 233

Lacan on on 150-51; Play on Purloined with “Purim” and “Pur . . . lot” 72 and possible play on Dupin with “Dupont” and “Dupond”

From page 307 of Finnegan’s Wake: “visit to Guiness’s Brewery, Clubs, Advantages of the enny Post. When is aPun not a Pun?” 142

Derrida’s use of the parergon rather than Genette’s paratext, does not analyze the borders between notes and editorial annotations in translations, the extent to which one may read publication history. (B Johnson’s fabricated title page in Dissemination. On the Name, translation of a book that does not exist in French.)

No master word or first word or last word. Pc,151

Last word after the last word and first word before the first word In typewriter Ribbon, Ink II: (Within such limits)

I am spending my time rereading you. 50

Since I am a true network of resistance, with internal cells, those little groups of three who communicate only on one side (what is it called?), so that nothing can be extorted so that no one gives way under torture, and finally so that no one able to betray. What one hand does the other does not know (definition of Islamic alms?) 42

No history of the posts6-67

Dossier dos, 201

At the moment, I am thinking that thinking that every “production” as they say, f a concept or system which is never without a name and effigy, is also the meission of a postage stamp which itself is a post card (picture, text, reproduction, and most often ina rectangular shape. Pc, 200

Heidegger and Freud, 191 masters of the post.

End of an epoch 190

I have lost my life writing 143

I had put it in my pocket, without reading it right away, the note you left me. 141

Question of geometry of the card and the frame. Oblique and geometry in On the Name.

These reminders, of which countless other examples could be given, make us aware of the effects of the frame, and of the paradoxes in the parergonal logic. Our purpose is not to prove that "The Purloined Letter" functions within a frame (omitted by the Seminar, which can thus be assured of its triangular interior by an active, surreptitious limitation starting with a metalinguistic overhang), but to prove that the structure of the framing effects is such that no totalization of the border is even possible. The frames are always framed: thus by some of their content. Pieces with- out a whole, "divisions" without a totality-this is what thwarts the dream of a letter without division, allergic to division. From this point on, the seme "phallus" is errant, begins by disseminating, not even by being disseminated.

The naturalizing neutralization of the frame permits the Seminar, by imposing or importing an Oedipal outline, by finding it (self there) in truth -and it is there, in fact, but as a piece, even if a precisely central one, within the letter-to constitute a metalanguage and to exclude all of the general text in all of the dimensions we began here by recalling (return to the "first page").

pp. n 36
Supplement to the Investigation

a little too self-evident . 39

“A note in Positions augured this reading of "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" which was originally the object of a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, Nov., 1971.”

39, n5

Those "literary critics" in France who have been influenced by psychoanalysis have not yet posed the question of the text.

2. Although it is not the earliest of Lacan's Bcrits chrono-

logically, the Seminar comes at the head of this collection after its determinant strategic place has been prepared by an overture.

6

Delivered in 1955, committed to paper in 1956 and published in 1957, only in 1966 does the Seminar receive its place at the head of Bcrits, thus following an order which, not being chronological, does not arise in any simple way from his theoretico-didactic system. It might stage Bm'ts in a particular way. The necessity of this priority, in any event, happens to be confirmed, recalled and emphasized by the introduction to Bcrits in the "Points" edition (1970): ". .. the text, which here keeps the entry post it possesses elsewhere. . ." Anyone wishing to narrow the scope of the questions raised here can by all means keep those questions in the "place" given to the Seminar by its "author": entry post. "This post [le poste] differs from another post [la poste] only in gender," according to Littre. 40, n6

Finally, the Seminar is part of a larger investigation of the repetition automatism [Wiederholungszwang] which, in the group of texts dating from 1919-1920 (Jenseits, Das Unheimliche) trans- forms, at least in principle (cf. La Double Sbance, notes 44 and 56), the relationship between psychoanalysis and literary fiction.7 41

7 See Jacques Derrida, La Dissemination (Paris: Le Seuil, 1972), pp. 279-280 and pp. 300-301. Within a rather long text ,questioning the literary process through Plato and Mallarme, Derrida tackles Freud's dealing with a work of art and notably the displacement in Freud's approach before and after Das Unheimliche. Derrida also points out there how Freud in Das Unheimliche is sensitive to the undecidable ambivalence, "the game of the double, the endless interplay between the fantastic and the real." -Ed.

"Our inquiry has led us to the point of recognizing that the repetition automatism [wiederholungszwang] finds its basis in what we have called the insistence of the signifying chain. We have elaborated that notion itself as a correlate of the ex-istence (or: excentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the subject of the unconscious if we are to take Freud's discovery seriously."8 These are the opening lines of the Seminar.

41

Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'," trans. J. Mehlman, French Freud, pp. 38-72. Hereafter cited in the text as SPL fol- lowed by the page number. The problematic set forth in The Purveyor of Truth can best be grasped through a rereading of Poe's Purloined Letter and of the Seminar as well as the editorial notes of Jeffrey Meh1man.-Ed. 41, n8

This passage has been closely preceded by a reference to Heidegger, and that is not surprising; it carries the Dasein back to the subject, and that is more surprising.

42

As for the Envois themselves, I do not know if their reading is bearable. 3 (firt page of pc)

In every support,is something les than ideal, and therefore can be destroyed without remaining. . 79

But you know that with you I never reread. 229

You are right in part, it would have to have been made into, precisely, a post-face, this is indeed the word, in particular because it’s unintelligible, you do not begin with what follows—if not by the end, and as they never reread . . . Too bad. 240

To stop becomes impossible, 242

Finnegans Wake 240

I am rereading your note from yesterday: what counts in post cards, and moreover, in everything, is the tempo. Say you. 247

What I told you is that Socates is now the name of a logiciel. You don’t know what this is? One calls logiciel the corpus of programs, procedures, or rules that assure the smooth functioning of a system in the treatment of information. The storage banks depend upon a logiciel. 242

I am rereading (and indeed for the first time since I have been writing to you) because you overtook me while writing at the moment when you called form the café. No, I repeat what I have just told you; there was nothing “decisive” in my PR letter—moreover, I have not reopened it--, only details which perhaps, perhaps would have made you understand and approve, if you wanted, if you could. Okay, let’s drop out. I am rereading myself, that, . . . 81

This is how it is to be read, and written, the carte of the adestination. Abject literature is n its way. 29

The charter is the contract for, which quite stupidly one has to believe; Socrates comes before Plato, there is between them—and in general—an order of generations, an irreversible sequence of inheritance. Socrates is before, not in front of, but before Plato, therefore behind him, and the charter binds us to this order: this is how to orient one’s thought, this is the left and right [alluding to Kant’s “What is Orientation in Thinking”], march. 20

Post card anxiety, 21

When I first wrote “burn everything,” it was neither out of prudence and a taste for the clandestine, nor out a concern for inernal guarding but out of what ws necessary (he condition, he given) for the affirmation to be reborn at very instant, without memory. 23

Read Reading Station, 208

I rpeat to you, it was dangerous to keep the letters, and yet I cravenly dreamed that they would be stolen from us; now they have to be destroyed, the countdown has started, less than a month, you will be here. 233

Yellow pages of the telephone Book act as a way round resistance—you can dial up pages, placed them through the index. You can trace a call, as it were.

Once again, I am holding the book open to its middle and I am trying to understand, it’s not easy. 216

I am opening the Traumdeutung approximately in its middle. 414

First published in Poetique 21 (1975), a special issue put together by Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe under the title Litterature et philosophie melees. 412

The table of contents divides the introduction from the glossary, makes them sequential. But the text sutures them, making Glossary a subheading in the text rather than title at the top of he page, a new page, in the same size font.

Also implicit pun on letters—we get alphabetic letters L before K—seems nonsensical—and also wrong L obviously comes after K)

We have forgotten to talk about the color of paper, the color of ink, and their comparative chromatics: a vast subject. That will be for another time. Paper Machine (53)

Survive one’s children 241 to understand postal letters, post cards.

Reverse sde of the facsimile.

Signautre is a quotation, not Dupin’s name.

(Derrida reads titles and tables of contents of Blanchot in Parages.

You know that J.D. is in analysis.” 203; Derrida returns to Lacan’s misreading in Resistances of Psychoanalysis.

Historicism 139

If a book has been republished or published in parts, is it a book? Is the postcard a book? Can on eread it in iolation from other texts written by Derrida (other than the ones he specifies in his notes? Note also the way his references to his own works becomes bibiorhicaly incomplete over time.

He refuses to turn his own works into a network, to provide the reader with a complete narrative thread to follow thorugh and properly xit without a faux pas.

For the Love of Lacan—in REsistances of Pyshoanalysis

Freud and the Scene of Writing 55

62-63—he narrates an account of its inscription in the post card.

problem of the archive 68

2. The Hinge

To begin, let us indicate a few telling signs. If most of the explicit references to Freud are grouped in the conclusion of the book (at the end of “The Birth of the Asylum and in the beginning of “The Anthropological Circle”,) 6 what I would call a charniere, a hinge, comes earlier on, right in he middle of the volume, to divide at once he book and the book’s relation to Freud. To Do Justice to Freud, 78

The first sign comes right in the middle of the book. To Do Justice to Freud, 79

This, therefore, will not have been a book.” Dissemination.

Simulacrum of illustrations of fortune telling book, of color illustration used on the cover as inside flap, like Baudelaire story in Counter Money.

Economy of note and annotation in Freud, 374

Apocalypse 169 The countdown is accelerating, don’t’ you think?” 163

Reread the little one’s letters. 255

If you had listened to me, you would have burned everything 23

In the beginning, n principle, was the post, and I will never get over it. But in the end I know it, I become aware of it as of our death sentence . . . 29