Richard Burt

So You (Would or Will Have) Said

Having glossed these narrative repetitions and inversions, we may also gloss stylistic repetitions and inversions in the passage we have just not “read.” Just as the story in “Du Tout” repeats the story about Lacan in the “Envois,” so in “Love Lacan” Derrida refers the reader back to the same story in the “Envois”: “The thing has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card.”⁸⁹ These repetitions come with omissions and additions that may be glossed, if one can still call what I am doing “glossing,” as having inverted each other. For example, Derrida does not give the quotation from Lacan in “Envois,” but he does give it in “Love Lacan”; inversely, Derrida names the dead friend in “Du tout” but does not in “Love Lacan.” One could go even further and point out the parentheses uses in “Love Lacan” to mention his dead friend and to say Lacan was mistaken recall the figurative parentheses in which Derrida places the anecdote about Roustang in “Du Tout”: “A few words in parenthesis”; “I will not close this short parenthesis”; “Here I close this parenthesis.”⁹⁰

These cruxes are at the outer limits of the borders of glossing, or of any glossing to come. As with the title “Du tout,” we come at these limits to the anarchivity of Derrida’s own texts the question of reading after death becomes a question of the title, anecdotes, and publication. In the last crux, I will gloss, Derrida again tells a story about an error, in this case, an error Lacan made, one of many, when speaking about Derrida. Derrida puts this story in a long parenthetical paragraph and to the way that paragraph follows the second anecdote Derrida tells about meeting Lacan in person, an anecdote Derrida that involves dates and a posterous order of publication and that Derrida defers for so long that he finally begins telling it by saying “I am not forgetting.”⁹¹ Here are the first and last sentences of the paragraph that follows the first anecdote: “Prior to any grammatology: “Of Grammatology” was the first title of an article published some five years before Lacan’s new title of an article published some five years before Lacan’s new introduction and—and this was one of the numerous mistakes or misrecognitions made by Lacan--it never proposed a grammatology. . . The book that treated of grammatology was anything but a grammatology”) (52).⁹² Derrida does not put write of grammatology with initial capital letters, as it should be written, Of Grammatology. Why not? And why does Derrida enclose this very general accusation about Lacan’s mistakes with parentheses?

We can best respond to these questions, I think, by turning the the anecdote that immediately precedes this paragraph in parentheses, an anecdote Derrida tells a story about what Lacan told concerning the publication of, a passage that I cited as an epigraph and cite yet once more :

I am not forgetting the binding which all of this is bound up. The other worry Lacan confided me in Baltimore concerned the binding of the Écrits, which had not yet appeared, although its publication was imminent. Lacan was worried and slightly annoyed, it seemed to me, with those at Le Seuil, his publishers, who had advised him not to assemble everything in a single large volume of more than nine hundred pages. There was thus a risk that the binding would not be strong enough and would give way “You’ll see,” he told me with a gesture of his hands, “it’s not going to hold up.” The republication in the two-volume paperback edition in 1970 will thus have reassured him, in passing, not only to confirm, the necessity of placing the “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” at the “entry post” of the Écrits, but also to fire off one of those future anteriors (antedates or antidotes) that will have been the privileged mode of all the declarations of love that he so often made to me, by mentioning (I dare not say by antedating), and I quote, “what I will literally call the instance prior to any grammatology’.”⁹³

This is what the first of what Derrida says are two first anecdotes about meeting. Lacan. Before returning to the question of Derrida’s use of all lower case letters for his book Of Grammatology and his use of parentheses, let me gloss this potentially unlimited crux even further. the anecdote he defers telling, just after talking about his reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” followed from the way Lacan published the Écrits and before returning to “the republication of the paperback edition in 1970”:

Now if there is one text that stands more than any other in this position and at this post of binder [sic], it is the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” As you know, the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” is given a “privilege,” which is Lacan’s word; I quote Lacan: “the privilege of opening the sequence [the sequence of the Écrits] despite its diachrony. In other words, Écrits collects and binds together all the texts out of which it is composed, with the exception of the seem which, by coming at the beginning, is thereby given the ‘privilege’ of figuring the synchronic configuration of the set and thus binding the whole together. It therefore seemed legitimate to me to take a privileged interest in this privilege. If I use the word binding here, the binding that holds the moment of reading and rereading, it is because on one of the two sole occasions in my life on which I met Lacan and spoke briefly with him, he himself spoke to me of binding and of the binding of the Écrits.⁹⁴

With the borders of this gloss thus expanded to include a question of textual criticism and publication as a question of reading and rereading in ancdote told in reverse order and conspicuously deferred, we may now return to Derrida’s parenthetical paragraph in which he writes “of grammatology.” Through the use of parentheses, Derrida allows himself to say some things about Lacan with greater force and even more decisiveness descisvely outs does two partly. Derrida corrects Lacan by appealing to dates (“five years before”), but does not bother to archive all of Lacan’s many other mistakes or misrecognitions. At the same time, Derrida allows himself to depart from the bibliographical norm for titles. By citing the title of grammatology in lower case letters and introducing a pointless yet conscipuous error, Derrida turns the relation of his own work and its title inside out, then stating only what his book was not about. Whatever “of grammatology” is about, or why it bears that title, or why Derrida waits to make such a bold and general accusation right after telling the anecdote, all remain completely unclear, at rest and arrested. The crux implodes and explodes: One wonders what kind of mistake Lacan is supposed to have made by antedating his texts. Derrida’s reading, in the past tense, of Lacan’s use of the future anterior, becomes Derrida’s non-reading of his own works. “Was anything but” is perhaps echoed in the equally negatively stated sentence near the end of “Love Lacan”: What I will not have said today!”⁹⁵

The least—or the most—we can say is that it is not clear in “Love Lacan” that one can one use the future anterior to speak of the what the dead will have said that differs significantly from speaking of the dead using the past tense; that is, it is by no means clear whether or not the future anterior just reappropriating, hence unjustly, what has been said not only about by the dead by the living but of what the living said or will have said about the living. When Derrida says Lacan fired “off one of those future anteriors (antedates or antidotes)” (49) he uses the future anterior to describe Lacan’s use of the future anterior as an act of love: “that will have been the privileged mode of all the declarations of love that he so often made to me” (49). Yet Derrida puts this point about Lacan’s mode of declaring his love in the past tense: “he so often made to me.” When Derrida comes to the end of “Love Lacan” and accuses Lacan of having made a “compulsive blunder,” Derrida equates Lacan’s use of the future anterior quite negatively with reapproriation: “Here is a better known episode that occurred some ten years later after Lacan used the future anterior several times to reappropriate by way of antedating when he said, for example . . . ) In a session of the seminar [XXIV] in 1977 (still “l’Insu-que-sait”), Lacan made a compulsive blunder.”⁹⁶ By collapsing the future anterior into the past tense, Derrida leaves us to wonder whether any declaration of love is not also a declaration of war, as if psychoanalysis and deconstruction could only make love and war, not “make love, not war.”
Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead

Having unfolded the cruxes above, we are now in a position to route the question of what it means to read Derrida after Derrida’s death, a question that has informed our glossing of Derrida’s attention to the future of a reading Lacanian discourse in “Love Lacan,” to a question of the effacement of the title and of the proper name. Before turning to the next crux let me point out that Derrida several times excuses himself in “Love Lacan ”from rereading passages or summarizing what he said in the Post . . . in one case on the grounds that he has already “formalized readability” in general: “I have already sufficiently formalized readability under erasure and the logic of the event as graphematic event—notably as event of the proper name, in which the little devil arrives only to erase itself / by erasing itself—to be spared having to add anything here for the moment” (48).⁹⁷ I turn now now to very last crux, there always being a last gloss after the last, to the very, very last crux I will gloss before returning to the one with which I began, namely the letter “X” in “X-ian.”⁹⁸ In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida comments on a condition made on his giving a lecture at a colloquium on “Lacan avec les philosophes”: “they put forward the pretext of a rule according to which only the dead could be spoken about here and therefore, if one insisted on speaking of me, one could so only under the pretext that I play dead, even before the fact, and that I be given a helping hand when the occasion arose”(47).⁹⁹ In an anecdote Derrida relays or relates about meeting Lacan, Derrida says Lacan said something very similar to Derrida: “At our second and last encounter, during dinner offered by his in-laws, he insisted on publicly archiving in his own way, with regard to something I had told him, the disregard of the Other that I had supposedly attempted ‘by playing dead’”(61). Although Lacan made his comment about playing dead to Derrida before the conference at which Derrida is speaking happened, but Derrida tells that anecdote about what Lacan said only after Derrida states the condition unnamed colloquium conference organizers put on his speaking only if he played dead: “That is (was enough just to think of it) to make me disappear nominally as a live person—because I am alive—to me disappear for life” (“Love Lacan,” 47). Derrida adds that he would not allow himself to be offended or discouraged by the “lamentable and indecent incident of the barring of my proper name from the program and that he was “shocked” by the “symptomatic and compulsive violence” of forcing to act as if he were dead in order to speak at the conference, but refers the reader in an endnote to the appendices of Lacan avec les philosophes and does not make anything of the way Lacan’s words “playing dead” repeat those Derrida used when speaking of the colloquium.¹⁰⁰

Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead

Having glossed these cruxes, we are ready to return to “Love Lacan” and gloss Derrida’s use of “X-ian” to stand for any proper name that would modify the noun “psychoanalysis.” Let me begin this gloss with a gloss from another text by Derria related to the letter “X.” It is getting late, I know, to introduce another text. Please follow along. You’re almost not there. The degree to which Derrida’s sentence about “X-ian” psychoanalysis and deconstruction, let us consider the investment Derrida has in psychoanalysis with relation to “X” in the title by turning to an endnote to “Marx & Sons,” that is, in Derrida’s response to a group of academic readers commenting on Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Derrida glosses the phrase “X without X,” a phrase in which X may stand either for a noun or a name in a title. Derrida writes—rather scathingly—of Terry Eagleton’s adoption of the phrase “X without X” in the title of contribution to the volume:

Eagleton is undoubtedly convinced that, with the finesse, grace and elegance he is universally acknowledged to possess, he has hit upon a title (‘Marxism without Marxism’) which is a flash of wit, an ironic dart, a witheringly sarcastic critique, aimed at me or, for example, Blanchot, who often says –I have discussed this at length elsewhere—‘X without X.’ Every ‘good Marxist’ knows , however, that noting is closer to Marx, more faithful to Marx, than this Marxism without Marxism was, to begin with, the Marxism of Marx himself, if that name still means anything.¹⁰¹

In citing from a text related to Specters of Marx, I mean to move us closer, nor further, to the question of reading Derrida reading Lacan after Lacan’s death amd our reading The Post Card and “Love Lacan” after Derrida’s death by using “X wihtout X” to link even more strongly these questions to the way deconstruction turn on the displacement of the question of psychoanlaysis having a proper name, any proper name, in front of it. Derrida introduces the phantasm in Specters of Marx via psychoanalysis. As Derrida writes in “Marx & Sons,” “the motifs of mourning, inheritance, and promise are, in Specters of Marx, anything but ‘metaphors’ in the ordinary sense of the word . . . They also allow me to introduce questions of a psychoanalytic type (those of the specter or phantasma—which also means specter in Greek) . . . All this presupposes a transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself . . . I have elsewhere, tried to discuss how the transformation might be brought about, and discuss this at length here” (235). In “Marx & Sons,” then, Derrida once again raises the question he had raised in “Love Lacan,” citing Resistances of Psychoanalysis and The Post Card as two of five texts he lists in endnote 32 (265) as those in which he does the transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself.” In the endnotes, in a relatively exterior paratextual space, Derrida makes the letter “X” a mathematical variable of a title. An unreadable letter stands for a word composed of readable letters in a title is central to the question of quasi-methodological status of deconstruction and what Derrida calls the transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself.

“Mort” to Say

In turning now to the crux, “X-ian,” with which we began, we are considering as part of it the sentence that follows it, “What I will not have said today!” We will gloss the “X” in relation to what Derrida did not say, to the way he collapses what he will have said or would have said into the negative, the not said: “ What I will not have said today!” (68). That’s what Derrida said. Yet what Derrida said, the way he limits himself to the negative, becomes something “to be glossed” because he introduces an asymmetry between what he says and what about what Lacan will have said and won’t have said. Turning his text into an archive, Derrida “says” that consists only of what he will “not have said,” not, as was the case with Lacan also what he will or would have said. Of course, Derrida doesn’t say that. At least not exactly. And that is precisely my point. The question I raising here concerns not only what Derrida did not say, but what the limits of not saying are: where does the opposition between saying and not saying deconstruct? Why does Derrida “destruct” it rather than deconstruction?

Let us begin glossing the crux of the “X-ian.” What is it that Derrida has not said in “Love Lacan” about the name and the title that bears on his erasure of any proper name that might modify psychoanalysis, on “X-ian?” Derrida has not said that he wrote one of the postscripts of Lacan avec les philosophes to which he directs the reader in the headnote and the third endnote of “Love Lacan.” The post-script is entitled “Après Tout: Les Chance du College.”¹⁰² What does Derrida say in this postscript? What he says bears directly on the “adjective” “X-ian”: in the postscript Derrida talks about the erasure of his name, in the form of an adjective, from the original colloquium title, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalaysis?,” and its replacement with the colloquium and book’s title Lacan avec les philosophes.

By not citing his postscript to Lacan avec avec les philosophes in the paratexts—headnote and endnote--of “Love Lacan,” Derrida effectively writes about the erasure of his name from the original title in invisible ink, as it were. “X-ian” marks the spot . . . less, the invisible ink, or, in Derrida’s words, “the history that in France and especially in Eastern France, has been written, so to speak, not in ink but in the effacement of the name”¹⁰³

Sayve My Name, Sayve My Name

And with the effacement of the name goes the effacement of the title. Derrida has already given the reader everything he or she would need to find the dossier regarding the changed title Lacan avec les pilosophes in his headnote and endotes to “Love Lacan.” I leave some of the materials relevant to a glossing to come filed away in the footnote below, materials to which refers in his post-script as a “dossier” and as “archived.”¹⁰⁴ I wll point only that Derrida mentions his shock at the change made to the title of the colloquium and insists that the absence of his name makes no difference to him at all. Yet he nowhere comments on the condition that he play dead if he is to participate in the confernece. Alone among all of the contributors to the appendices, Alain Badiou, who was the person who demanded that no proper names other than Lacan’s appear in the colloquium title, only Badiou mentions the condition of playing dead, and he brings it up only to say he is not guilty as charged: “D’autres, ou les memes, ont jugé exorbitant, stalinien, et relevant du desire de mort, que je demande qu’un nom proper, parce qu’il était le seul d’un contemporain à être mis en balance avec celui de Lacan, soit ou éfface, ou équilibré par d’autres.”¹⁰⁵ To have allowed the colloquium title to include Derrida’s name or any name, Badiou adds, would have been to betrayal [trahison] of Lacan.¹⁰⁶

The question I am interested is less about what the contributors of the appendices said about the change to the conference title than in the way Derrida reserves a texutal and archival space in “Love Lacan” to say what he as to say. Derrida says he will not insist on “silencing what he thinks of all of this, but only at the end, ‘off the record,’ as one says in English.”¹⁰⁷ Derrida then glosses this English phrase in relation to the archive: “Off the record” means not recorded, outside the archive. We are thus brought back to the difficult question of the record, history, and the archive. Is there an “outside-the-archive”? Impossible, but the impossible is deconstruction’s affair.”¹⁰⁸ (48). Whatever Derrida says he will say “only at the end” (48) will be in a paratextual “off the record” space Derrida calls a “post-scriptum, in parentheses” (48).¹⁰⁹ Only “only at the end” (48) never arrives. There is no post-scriptum in “Love Lacan,” as there is in Derrida’s “Force of Law,” among many other texts, no postscript as there is in Archive Fever, among many other texts, and no parentheses either.

When Derrida exlaims “what will I not have said today!” is he saying that he has not said anything? Or that someone else---no one else?—will not have heard him say what he said, that any hearing will have been a non-hearing? Whether Derrida is saying anytng or not saying it or syaing it by not saying it, and so on, makes no difference insofar as the question would be the same: where does Derrida say / not say what he will not have said? At a number of moments in “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida goes out of his way to say that he has nothing to say or that he need not say again what he said before: “It is certainly not because I think I have something more or irreplaceable to say on these matters; the discussion of what I ventured almost twenty years ago around those questions would demand a microscopic examination for which neither you nor I have the time or the patience; as I have already said . . . “; “I attempted to show this in “Le facteur de la vérité” and elsewhere; I would be unable to reconstitute all this here in so little time.”¹¹⁰ Is Derrida ever speaking on the record? It would appear that there is no record of what Derrida said against which one could empirically show was later retated in an accurate or inaccurate way.

Even “Mort” to say

What is the relation in “Love Lacan” between speaking of Lacan after his death and Derrida’s X-ing out any name in relation to pyschoanlaysis at the end? Derrida erases the proper name says “perhaps we step beyond psychoanalysis” by attending to the “radical destruction of the archive, in ashes” (45). As I said earlier, Derrida’s “last point” (69) in “Love Lacan” involves the priority of deconstruction over psychoanalysis, “the degree” to which “the analytic situation, the analytic institution, is deconstructed, as if by itself, without deconstruction or deconstructive project” (69). Derrida here divorces deconstruction from psychonalysis by erasing without erasing, at least not in this text, his name, or any name from deconstruction. If deconstruction subsumes pyschoanalysis through the archive and recasts it, in effect as “so-called psychoanalysis,” a psychoanalysis that is to some degree without psychoanalysis, why does Derrida turn to psychoanalysis in order to make his argument about the archive, its “radical destruction, as ashes” (44)? If the problem of the archivization does If Lacan is just an example of the larger problem of the archive, why does Derrida choose Lacan as his example?¹¹¹ Similarly, when Derrida writes a book on the archive entitled Archive Fever, why it also a book about Freud? Why does Freud’s name turn up as an adjective in the book’s subtitle, “A Freudian Impression?” Why is the last paragraph of Archive Fever about Freud burning?

We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he [Freud] 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 1994¹¹²

When writing on the archive, Derrida does not return to psychoanaysis in general but to specific texts by Freud and Lacan.

In “Love Lacan,” Derrida returns to Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” and Derrida’s own reading of it in “Facteur.” In Archive Fever, Derrida goes back to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the same text that Derrida says in “Love Lacan” he attempted “a reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. . . (in ‘To Speculate--on Freud”’),” rereading in Freud’s text in Archive Fever in relation to the archive and the death drive, to the archive oriented toward the future, not the past, in which anarchival repetition is, if not without without repetition, at least repetiton without compulsion. ¹¹³ The importance of psychoanlaysis no longer lies only in the ways it contributes to a deconstructive account of the problem of the archive through its interests in “inscription, erasure, blanks, the non-said, memory storage, and new techniques of archivization” (40) or what would might more commonly be called the symptomatic reading.