Richard Burt

Post Marks / Like a Prayer: Reading Around Derrida with(out) Derrida (Still) Around

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 Jonthan [[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 that he did not destroy them. 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.

“Those who remain will not know how to read,” Derrida writes in The Post Card,²⁵ “those who remain” meaning, I take it, “those who have survived.”

I will read The Post Card in relation to “For the Love of Lacan” in part because Derrida wrote it after Lacan’s death and returned to the engagement with Lacan in The Post Card if only to skip it, in relation to the archive. I attend at great length and in great detail to their publication history and at even greater length and detail to what Derrida does with the publishing history of the writings he reanders as a “scene” in The Post Card, with two tenses—the future anterior and the future anterior conditional—he uses in “For the Love of Lacan,” thereby making questions about recording, archiving, and reading the speech of the dead questions both about what was published and about what was said, hence questions of rumor and testimony, and prayer as neither true nor false.

However, unlike psychobiographers and unlike genetic critics, I do not give any priority, chronological, biological, or otherwise, to one of these texts over the other.²⁶ It is precisely the boundary of publication htat Derrida sometimes draws that I calll npblishability, like and not like unarchiviability. One could organize a reading of The Post Card according to a bibliographical and editorial logic in relation to its self-ruination and self-fragmentation (Envois are liked to burned letters; “To Speculate—‘On Freud’” is a fragment) and texts Derrida published after The Post Card in which he referred to it, discussed it, or added to it, as he did in “Telepathy.”²⁷ This logic, however, is pre-critical. It always arrives at its destination, as it were, a dead end. Moreover, it glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future publications.²⁸

Derrida self-thematized his own works and words:

As this problematiic has become invasive, I will not give any determined reference here. In the course of the chapters that follow, I will take the liberty of specifying certain of these references, sometimes in order to spare myself a development already proposed elsewhere. Oriented or disoriented by the themes of speculation, destination, or the promise, The Post Card referred to the seminar “Given Time” and signaled its forthcoming publication (p.430/403).

Second note to the “Foreword” of Given Time: Counterfeit Money 1, x

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.

Posthumography has a kind of priority mail status, a kind of a-priority mail status “within” what Derrida calls the postal network, a status that permits us to take a detour, follow a pathway off the beaten track, and rephrase Derrida’s Heideggerian question “is there death as such?” as a question of whether, for Derrida, the letter is always sent, even if it does not always arrive at its destination, whether it is always given even if never received, left unclaimed in a poste restante, whether it is always in the mail on the way whether or not there is a sender to return to whom one could return it, whether it is sent quasi-automatically rather than by an organic being, whether sending always has priority over whatever is sent, even if whatever has been sent is a residue that amounts to nothing, that “adds nothing,” even if the letter rests “en souffrance” (undelivered, never claimed, never returned to sender), even the letter is divisible because it is material, even if what us said cannot be sorted out conceptually into letters and post cards, dead and living letters, even if the letter is always sent “c/o,” in care [Sorge] of, or sometimes “in care-less-ness,” even if sending always involves distinerrancy that amounts to something like an OCCD, or Obsessive Compulsive in Care of Disorder. To put the question more paradoxically and concisely, framed as a question, is burning the post card the same thing as sending it, and hence the condition of its reading, of what is or remains to be read of it?²⁹ Derrida continues: “As for the “Envois” themselves, I do not know if their reading is bearable. You might consider them, if you really wish to, as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence. Destroyed by fire or by that which figuratively takes its place, more certain of leaving what I like to call the tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are (s’il y a là cendre)” (PC, 3). Derrida can thereby go on to say in the “Envois” both “burn everything, forget everything” and “publish everything” while occasionally deconstructing the opposition between burning and publishing.³⁰
Burning by Heart: What Remains to be Read(?) and for Whom?

This question I have just raised about whether sending [schicken] as burning has priority over the letter’s address under the heading of the word posthumography, is not only a question about repetition. It is a question of whether, on the one hand, reading or rereading is guaranteed by repetition, insured as it were, even before it is dispatched, always given back, the “envoi” always already backed up, copied, deposited in vault when sent, such that publishing can become of a form of destruction rather than preservation, or, on the other hand.³¹ In the “Envois” in The Post Card, Derrida asserts that reading is always already rereading and reroutes rereading and the “origin of the post card” (59-60) through a Freudian post office to memory, and repetition burning after reading:

But in fact, yes, had understood my order or my prayer, the demand of the first letter: “burn everything,” understood it so well that you told me you copied over (“I am burning, stupid impression of being faithful, neverthelss kept several simulacra, etc.,” isn’t that it?), in your writing, and in pencil, the words of that first letter (not the others). Another way of saying that you reread it, no? which is what one begins by doing when one reads, even for the first time, repetition, memory, etc. I love you by heart, there between the parentheses or quotation marks, such is the origin of the post card.³²

The origin of the post card consists of words placed in a space by quotation marks and parentheses (they are identical puncutation marks in French), words already cited, iterable, and so on. But are they also words that have been redeemed or words that can always be redeemed, that are to be redeemed because they have by heart, the origin being a love letter? Even if the letter cannot be amortized, as Derrida insists it cannot, can the letter be “morgue-aged,” a word I coin at the risk of sounding merely facetious; that is, is the letter credited as such by virtue of having been stored before any sorting, an partition, even if what is stored cannot be retrieved, restored, revived, or reanimated? Is the heart that learns a bleeding heart? a heart that never stops pumping yet never stops bleeding, that just keeps hemmorgueing, that survives by refusing to know it is dead?

These questions about survival and the priority of sending in Derrida’s postal network can be productively addressed, I think, if we closely read, even microread, a shelving operation Derrida performs on the contents of The Post Card in the first page of the book. Derrida reshelves the book’s table of contents (given on p. 551 in la carte postale but m.i.a. in the English translation) as a kind of preface to a book “not written” but that Derrida nevertheless dispatches the book by prepping it, by publishing only a selection of envois that were “spared or if you prefer ‘saved’ (I already hear murmured ‘registered,’ as is said for a kind of receipt)” (3). Echoing the first sentence of Dissemination (“This will therefore not have been a book”), Derrida begins the “Envois” writing: “You might read these envois as the preface to a book I have not written” (3). ³³ Derrida goes on to draw distinction between the last three parts of the book, preserve, and the the first part, “Envois,” destroyed. Derrida binds the heterography of The Post Card, the second chapter of which Derrida calls a “fragment” (292) he “extracted from a seminar” (PC, 259n1): and the last two chapters previously published, by dividing the book into two parts, in other words: “The three last parts of the present work, “To Speculate—on ‘Freud,’” “Le facteur de la vérité,” “Du tout” are all different by virtue of their length, their circumstance or pretext, their manner and their dates. But they preserve the memory of this project, occasionally even exhibit it (3).”

Let me rephrase the question I raised above about burning being the condition of what is to be read, of what may be rendered as readable, a condition that is similar, perhaps transposible, to the condition of the archive as articulated by Derrida in Archive Fever and Cinders , that condition being the incompleteness of the archive, the archive’s inability to archive the ashes it necessarily leaves “outside” it. Does Derrida’s reshelving of The Post Card’s four parts into two parts on the first page of the book mean that sending is a p/repetition, as it were? Is sending a priori even “before” one sends off or gets off [s’envoyer]?³⁴ Has sending been sent, as it were, before any preface, even if that preface is inside the text rather than a paratext, sent before the repetition that makes reading always rereading? Does burning what has been sent, as I suggested above, guarantee that what is “to be” read survives what is to be reread, even if what is “to be” read is not destined, not fated, not fatal, not archivable, but always “to come,” even if there is no one (even no machine or quasi-human, quasi-machine) to read it or who will know how to read it when it arrives? Is the sending of the letter—writing is always posted-- a given, always a gift that may be gone from the start and thus never given? Are the cinders of what survives as a publication to be read a gift, a legacy, an inheritance? Is there a difference between sending a letter and publishing a book, between a post card and a publication?³⁵ Is sending the post card (or a publication) like answering the telephone call? Yes “must be taken for an answer. It always has the form of an answer.”³⁶ Did Derrida take that collect call from Martini Heidegger after all?³⁷ If The Post Card will not have been a book (3) despite its having been published, does Derrida effectively shelve what is “to be” read by rendering publications as marked cards (or Tarot cards?), cards that he reshuffles, perhaps using Heidegger’s deck, and then, taking his chances as the dealer, telling his readers, if I may mix my gambling metaphors, “faites vos jeux . . . rien ne va plus . . . les jeux sont faites,” as he deals the cards from a stacked deck in order to play a hand he can read or to tell someone’s fortune by turning defaced cards face up, perhaps at random? The force of these questions, I suggest, is that for Derrida the surival of a critical practice—psychoanalysis or deconstruction—necessarily depend on its sending through publications and therefore on titles and proper names.

Derrida’s use of the death certificate to question life and death and his questioning of the destruction of documents and destroyed. “As for the “Envois,” Derrida writes on the first page of The Post Card, “you might consider them . . . as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence. Destroyed by fire or by that which figuratively takes its place, more certain of leaving what I like to call the tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are (s’il y a là cendre)” (3).³⁸ Unsigned letters—other letters open up death. Both lines of questioning, of deconstructing life and death, or biothanatopolitics, and of published and destroyed materials, biobiblothantopolitics do not depend on a coterminus of author and writing. All writing is death, all signatures, all publications posted. rest on Derrida. We can go closer to the Post Card—questioning of letter and dead letter, or letter and post card, and , following J.L. an equivalence between a post card and a publication. In Paper Machine, finitude of the support versus intifnitude of the text to be read. Posthumographic oriented, like the archive, to the future, rather than exclusively to empirical contents of the archive that make up the infinity of texts for Genette and genetic criticism in French (infinitely editable, readable text). Finitude of the body, corpse disposal also the ocus of Beast and Sovereign 2. Blind spot to ways in which texts can be destroyed—the eco-specificity—as well as to the ways in which corpses can be disposed—burial at sea—but Sometimes archive, unarchivabiltiy is unpublished, and Derrida as he returned to survivance, the quesiton of legacy posed in To SPecualte on ‘Freud’” and interviews, his own writing practices, dsitinguished his own pre-publication aterials from his publications. Alos the question of the body. And he also in Beast and the Sovereign, for the only time, engaged posthumous publication. and also a quesiton of what was said to what will have or would have been said.

to say a few things about posthumography so that it will not be confused with a pre-deconstructive, pre-psychoanalytic psychobiography or psychobiohagiography of Derrida that takes his biological death as the basis for linearizing his publications and highlighting certain themes he wrote on toward the end of his death thought to be key due to their proximity to his death, nor do I divide his posthumously published publications from his “humous” publications.³⁹ The question I pursue in relation to publication in Derrida is a questio of destruction and sending of an rchive, a slef-divison and raqdical destrucitbbiity that is false or true or neither false nor ture like a prayer and of the analogy between a post card and a publication. Derrida’s own autobiographical recountings of his rleation to different media nd his return to surivance as a “key” word, as it word. Derrida’s own reshelving operation. And his eccentric bibliogrpahical practices with respect to publications, not to say his frequest retention of remakrs made on the oral delivery of the printed essay, of what was said (Foucault Cogito and Madness) or of what will have been said but also of what would have been said. .

Argument: is that Derrida draws a line between pre-publication (what is lost or not) and publication (not lost; an archive that anyone can retrieve. So there is an intenral split in his own filing system or reshelving practices between what is like a destroyed crorrespondence and what is destroyed. Also, the epistlolary form of Envois and the first person, anecdotal autobiobiliogrpahies he gave in interviews in Paper Machine and afterwards. He says he destroyed a correspondence. (Note reducible to a biographical reading). Only because the letter is always send can the letter equal a post card equal a publication. What is the force of the “like” of a comparison between the publication and an unpublished coorespondence that hs been destroyed? What does it mean to archive the ashes, the ashes that cannot be archived, in Archive Fever. What does it mean for “unreadabiltiy” as used in Living On (surivivance)? What does it mean to do that under a proper name? Name as adjective? psychaonalsysis Derrida lays out, in the first pages of Archive Fever, certain conditions on which he says any archive depends: there can be no archive ‘without substrate nor without residence’, no archive without archons as guardians and interpreters of the law, ‘no archive without outside’, no archive without psychoanalysis (AF, pp3-4; p11).

Whatis sending is not a priori? What is some letters are never sent, never destined to remain? POsthumographic criticism, as opposed to genetic criticism, would engage that quesiton. Posthumography a way of considierng publication that does nto reduce it to genetic criticism, in hich case published or not does not matter (book on Cixous). Answer: a return to Hedeigger, a turn to the strictly posthumous under the heading of a note on fire that has disappeared (orginal is gone), and from post card to prayer. In Derrida’s analysis, a certain “repression” of Pascal’s writing style in general and publication history. A kind of limit of archiving, a limit that is not the same as ashes and publication., no mattre meerely a matter of likeness, but of false testimony (what Derrida did or did not destroy, Derrida citing Banchot’s letter in Demeure as evidence,) to a prayer that is neither flase nor true. A Post-Post Card or Pre-Post Card.

Spell out that I am anchoring my reading arund a certain bibliogrpahy related to The Post Card, a series of returns to Lacan and to psychoanalyssis involving the archive, media, and surivance and the destruction of the archiv e, the “like” a destroyed coreposndnece. Or corners. . They turn on equation of the post card and publication. Posting as publicationgg, sending, versus a prayer. So a return to surivance (from Parages) in last works, that are not the last Blacnhot) and Heidegger (Lacan as Heideggerian) on the prayer. Pascal and the prayer. Balzac discusses Pascal in le peau de chagrin.

Fort : Da, Can’t You See I’m Burning?⁴⁰

Before proceeding to discuss “For the Love of Lacan” and The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2, I need to make two general points about the kind of posthumographic reading Derrida does of Lacan. Both points concern what is to be read in relation to what remains, whose remains, “remains” understood both in the biological of a corpse or cremains and in the bibiliographic sense of papers left to be read either unpublished or published. First, the remains in both sense involve the survival a reading practice like psychoanlaysis or deconstruction in relation to the proper name. As Derrida writes of Freud, “that he hoped for this survival of psychoanalysis is probable, but in his name, survival on the condition of his name: by virtue of which he says that he survives it as the proper place of the name.”⁴¹ Deconstruction was often pronounced dead during Derrida’s lifetime, but the survival of deconstruction under Derrida’s name is not my concern here.⁴² Rather I am concerned with the erasure and rephrasing of a question about Derrida and psychoanalysis that did not survive, a question that was also to be a title of a colloquium organized by René Major and the title of the published conference proceedings, namely, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?”⁴³ The proposed title the colloquium, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?,” was replaced by the title Lacan avec les philosophes, and the conference proceedings were published as a book bearing that same Lacan avec les philosophes. Derrida tells this story in the Annexes [appendices] to Lacan avec les philosophes, a post-script entitled “Après Tout: Les Chance du College.” In the “For the Love of Lacan” in the republished version in Resistances to Psychoanalysis, Derrida does not tell this story but twice refers his reader headnote and again in the third endnote to the “Annexes” [my emphasis ] of Lacan avec les philosophes, the publication in which “Love Lacan” first appeared. Derrida both archives and “X-s” out, as it were , the story he to concerning the erasure of his name in the two notes to “Love Lacan”, the story he does not retell but leaves to waiting be told to the reader who takes up Derrida’s invitation to consult the postscript. More crucially, Derrida revises the suppressed question of the collouquim title “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?” in “Love Lacan” by taking out the proper name alotogther. Derrida’s “last point” (69) is that the “question of knowing whether or not there is some psychoanalysis—X-ian, his, yours, mine that the degree—that can hold up or that is coming, this incalcaluable, unimaginable, unaccountable, unattribuable question is displaced to the degree that the analytic siutation, and thus the analytic institution, is deconstructed, as if by itself, without deconstruction or deconstructive project” (69). Ordinarily, one would not read the the letter “X” in the sentence above. One one would simply pass over it as a variable for which any proper name could be substituted and move on. I will take the letter in the “word” “X-ian” (and Derrida’s use of the phrase “X without X”) to be the something like a crux, survival of psychoanalysis under someone’s name, turning on a letter, a letter that is neither a proper name nor the lack of one. The letter “X” in “X-ian,” the substitution of a letter for a proper name, any proper name, turned into an adjective becomes something to be glossed by virtue of the relatively “ex”terior paratextual space in the endnotes of “Love Lacan.”⁴⁴

My second point regarding reading Derrida’s Post Card under the heading of posthumography concerns the way does Derrida tends to separate the two meanings of “remains” I noted above into bios and biblios, thereby keepinge seprate from bibliopolitics. In a sentence I cited above from The Post Card, Derrida writes, “Those who remain will not know how to read.” I take it that “those who remain” means “those who survive.” ⁴⁵ In The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 2, however, Derrida asks a question about the remains of those who will have been survived by others:

What is the other—What is the other—or what are others—going to make of me when, after the distancing step [pas] of the passing [trépas], after this passage, when I am past, when I have passed, when I am departed, deceased, passed away, gone, absolutely without defense, disarmed, in their hands, i.e., as they say, so to speak, dead.” The other appears to me as the other as such, qua he, she, or they who might survive me, survive my decease and then proceed as they wish, sovereignly, and sovereignly have at my disposal the future of my remains, if there are any. . . .”

The human remains are very much a political question for Derrida. In the ninth session of the Beast and the Sovreign Vol 2, Derrida discusses the disposition of the corpse as a biopolitical question he relates to the democracy to come. I quote at length:

Would not the democracy to come gain by opening still wider the spectrum of possible choices? For one can not indeed imagine and see coming another epoch of humanity in which, tomorrow, one would no longer deal with corpses either by cremation or by inhumation, either by earth or by fire? Would not the democracy to come gain by opening still wider the spectrum of possible choices? Will one not invent unheard-of techniques, fitted like their predecessors to the dictatorial power of a phantasm as well as to technical possibilities and which would then deliver them over corpses, if there still are any, neither to the subsoil of humus, nor to fire of heaven or hell? In this future, with these other ways of treating the corpse, if there still are any, today’s institutions, today’s orders, would appear as vestiges, anachronistic orders or sects of a new modern Middle Ages. People would speak of cremators and the inhumers . . . as oddities that were both unheimlich and dated, as archaic curiosities for historians or anthropologists of death. . . .You have to be to dream. 233 (326).

Derrida limits the political question about the disposal of human remains to two (he forgets burial at sea and cryogenics, but no matter). Although Derrida also discusses the survivance, living on of a published work, recalling the title of an essay published in Parages, and as living death, also under the heading of the phantasm, he does not examine either the ways the written remains, or cremains, are stored or question the politics of their storage.⁴⁶ Is there no such thing as a living will when it comes to the survivance of one’s papers? Does the specificty of eco-destruction of a given support or subjectile matter? Or not?