Richard Burt

Nobus, Danny. 2001. Littorical Reading: Lacan, Derrida, and the Analytic Production of Chaff. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society 6(2): 279 -288.
I said as few words as possible about my post cards, asking him to keep it as secret as possible. This morning, in Freibourg [sic], to which he accompanied me by car, I understood that he had immediately spoken of it to Kittler, my host here, and perhaps to his wife (psychoanalyst). The secret of the post card burns. 180
Derrida is also post-hermeneutic in facteur de la veritie, but for entirely different reasons from Kittler. P. 441 center hermeneutic deciphering 441

What counts here is the indestructibility of the letter has to do with its elevation toward the ideality of a meaning. . . it is the effect of living and present speech that in the last analysis guarantees the indestructible and unforgettable singularity of the letter, the taking-place of a signifier which is never lost, goes astray, or is divided The subject is very divided, but the phallus is not to be cut. Fragmentation is an accident which does not concern it. 466

Mentions Lacan’s notes, 446-47; 468

1. That fiction for Lacan is permeated by truth as something spoken, and therefore as something non-real. 2. That this leads to no longer reckoning, in the text, with everything that remains irreducible to the spoken word, to speech and meaning: that is, irreducible dis-regard, theft without return, destructibility, divisibility, the failure to reach a destination (which definitely rebels against the destination of the lack: an unverifiable non-truth. Post Card, 469

Materiality of the letter is about its divisibility and its destructibility, not just about wear and tear of physical material, as is the case with Kittler. Technological is recording media and storage media and hence purely instrumental (weapon of war in which arts are side effects of military advances). His criticism is post-hermeneutic, post Goethe’s Faust, only because he is pre-Heideggerian, that is, he does not consider the essence of technology and the work of art. But divisibility is curiously troped as destruction, as tearing. Burn as metaphor for archive for Derrida. Derrida auto-immun-reshelves his works. Derrida on a typo versus a Freudian slip. A record breaks only once a century, circle becomes circa, time a succession of periods.

Parergon subsumed what Genette calls the paratext—prefaces of Hegel, or preface or Envois, or exergues and so on in Archive Fever, on the title in Maurice Blanchot and Kafka, on the proper name, among others, are thresholds of reading, not pragmatic but disseminative, distnierrance literary in the way to which Genette objects—dysfunctional as paratexts that become invisible and deliver meaning. Parergon is also related to frame in Kant and in The Truth of Painting as well as to graphic design, page layout, columns, and footnotes (living On, Jacques Derrida and Circumfession). And it related to the material support. Parergon is abount borders, borderlines, rather than thresholds, even drawing the line between writing and drawing, between the book and the end of the book.

Reads Freud’s footnotes in Speculations on ‘Freud’”, does not read Lacan’s endnotes, and does not include any footnotes to Envois. A psychoanalysis of the paratext—parapraxes of everyday life—not included in Derrida’s notion of the autobiography of writing, only paragon. How does a Derridean reading differ from a psychoanalytic one, a symptomatic one, how is the postal principle not post, but posted, sent off? Derrida’s paraspychoanalytic, paraDerridean reading as “parerpraxes.” Reading of Freud’s footnotes, but Derrida’s own useless footnote; also Freud’s omission (like Nietzsche not mentioned, but no matter). What counts as a symptom? What are the limits of the graphic unconscious, the graphesis and grammtology of the missing? Hegel on decay and preservation (dialectics), but nothing n corpse and decay in Derrida. Corpse on 5, 358; corporeality 438 underworld, 410. This paper, 66. Action of these dead men when they bury their dead, 45. Kittler on corpse Question of the destruction of material supports and recording and storage media, especially repetition as the copy and the facsimile, that cannot be thematized or reduced to a key word, even difference, dissemination, disinterrance, parergon, or “survivance”). Why the engagement of Freud and media in Post Card and Archive Fever? Would a parerpraxis be a distinerror rather than a Freudian sli, a seeming accident that isn’t an accident but overdetermined? The finitude of the support (mystic writing pad is theoretically infinite, though the body too is finite, will wear out, get used up.

Freud can only justify the apparently useless expenditure of paper, ink, and typographic printing, in other words, the laborious investment in the archive, by putting forward the novelty of his discovery, the very one which provokes so much resistance, and first of all to himself, and precisely because its silent vocation is to burn the archive and to incite amnesia, thus refuting the economic principle of the archive, aiming to ruin the archive as accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place. What in general, can this substrate consist of? Exterior to what? What does “exterior” mean” mean? Is a circumcision, for example, an exterior mark? Is it an archive? 12.

Remains anonymous for me, 171

Car, 101

Alan Bass’s entry on “auto”, xvi.

Reading Room / Reading Raum

Engagement with Kittler in The Post Card—only time Derrida did?

Phonography means the death of the author; it stores a mortal voice rather than eternal thoughts and turns of phrase. The past that the photograph forces to speak is only Wildenbruch’s helpless euphemism for his singular body, which was posthumous even while he lived. Discourse Networks, 237

Kittler on Freud in Discourse Networks and on Lacan in Literature anthology. He explains away psychoanalysis with reference to technical developments. Technodeterminism aside, the basis of German discourse analysis is Foucault. There is no room for psychoanalysis. See The Index Card book by German guy. Work on files—also excludes Freud-historicizes, and Files Vismann book is Derrida friendly but does not engage psychoanalysis. Neither Derrida nor Kittler doing a positive history like Stiegert Postal Relays book. What are the limits of a Derridean as opposed to a psychoanalytic symptomatic reading? Graphic unconscious versus psychoanalytic—mystic writing pad.

Would reproducing the reading room matter? A photo of the librarian? Derrida’s pencils (the way A U.S President’s pens matter when he signs a bill into law). Why only reprods from the fortne telling book. Why are there three reproductions of the post card, one in color? Does their placement in the text matter? Consider delay between literary story and why he told it.

The library room in The Post Card. Reading aloud. Cite German book about reading and the body.

Derrida says he is on the side of survival and preservation.

In Paper Machine?

Different kinds of anarchivity: Scrupulous self-referencing in Given Time versus careless self-referencing in Negotiations. No footnotes for “Envois” in The Post Card. The faux-tires of The Post Card. Is not a book, it is four books in one. Scrambling codes of lecture and revised for publication. Apart from Jacques Derrida, Circumfessions, stops short of material archives, of the physical “supports.” Graphic play in a variety of texts from Tympan, Living On: Borderline’s and most notably Glas, but also writings on images. Again a scrambling of codes in Memoirs of the Blind. Literariness—destruction of manuscripts and papers in literature by burning. Ash, cinders, and so on, literary tropes for the archive, the ash of the archive. More than a preferred metaphor a “characteristic” “habit” of performing writing, of injecting the performative into publiaction. Gennte’s threshold begins after a book has been published.

Did not write about his own archives in U.C. Irvine and in France. Logs on to a “Derridabase” sometimes, sometimes not.

Local resistances to reading not of a sort one would catalogue or classify. Would it make sense to do so or attempt to do so? Derrida leaves open the relation between the medium and material support. Letters and cards; letters and dead letters. But Freud and fax in Archive Fever. Hw does publication bear on this relation? Publication leaving behind an archive of supports. Is there a temporality to publication, a chronology of a sort that would need to be read, that would make any difference to Derrida’s reading, unreadability, what he means when he says others have not read it or that he has only begun to read a text or that he will never have finished reading a text? Relation between finitude of the support, its publication in a given medium, and its sur-vivance beyond the opposition between living speech and a (dead) writing” Derrida usually deconstructs? Relation between support, or biblios, and bios, or autobiography of writing. Take up these questions with respect to Derrida’s engagement with Freud and Lacan in the post Card (will ignore the telepathy essay) and “For the Love of Lacan,” a text wrote after Lacan was dead in the ordinary sense of the word. Postal principle and postal structure versus telephony as most fundamental of tropes. Tropics of reading as the parergon, the borderless borders of the text in relation to its title, its central paratext for Derrida? Would it make sense if someone wanted to publish a book consisting of reproductions and diplomatic transcriptions post cards Derrida had sent to friends, along the lines of, say, the book entitled The Walter Benjamin Archive? Would that be cool? Or silly? Consider the book on Derrida that largely reproduces his book covers and so on, that turns his texts into facsimiles.

Part of fascination in Artaud le moma is with Artaud’s burning some of the illustrations. The pages are remains. But their ash was not collected and stored in an urn.

Anarchvitiy Freud, Post Card and Freud, Post Card again in Resistances of Psychoanalysis.

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

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

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

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

Derrida, “On the ‘Priceless,’ or the ‘Going Rate’ of the Transaction.” In Negotiations. 326-28

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

Letter as evidence, unprecedented, in The Instant of My Death. Inscribed dedication to Jacques Derrida by de Man in “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink 2: (within such limits).” Eulogies of dead friends in Beast and the Sovereign, at the beginning and inside sessions.

Everything Must Go: Fire Sale / Firewall

Something other than the traditional opposition between (living) speech and a (dead) writing. 101, n. 18

Death of the king, pp. 1-5, “The Time of the King”; —cf. Ranciere on Philip II

“Conditions: fault, debt, duty.” 150 What about defaulting? Bankruptcy?

We are at once his debtor and his creditor. 151

This unlivable distinction between economy and chresmatics⁷ . . . 161

“Let us begin by the impossible” 6, top of page after space left of more than half a page on p. 5. Chapter One, “The Time of the King.” Is that an accident of the translation? Or is a graphic layout carried out, translated “literally” on to the Chicago edition?

Some opposite numbers of scrupulous log on of Given Time 1 (never followed by two), and Memoirs of Blind, are Instant of My Death and The Animal that Therefore I am.

Derrida, D'ailleurs and Au-dela la principe postale

The logic of the phantasm, as we are concerned with it here (be it about living death, the ghost or the revenant, about cremation or the posthumous), [this logic of the phantasm] is not strictly speaking a logic, it resists the logos, the legein of the logos, somewhat in the same way as the eschato-logical is both the thing of the logos and which exceeds and comes after the logos, the logic of the logos, the extremity of the last, of the last word of the last man, the extremity of the last extremity situated both in speech, in logos as the last word, still and already out of speech, falling out of it into the posthumous that is already breathing, precisely, the logic of the phantasm resists, defies and dislocates logos and logic in all its figures, be it a question of logos as reason and as the logic of non-contradiction and the excluded middle. Of yes or no, of the yes and the no, of the undecidable either/or, be it a question of logos as speech or be it a question of logos as gathering and the power of putting together. There is therefore no logic of the phantasm, strictly speaking, since as Freud reminds us, the phantasm, just as much as the drive, is to be found on both sides of the limit between two opposing concepts, like what Blanchot nicknames, especially in The Step Not Beyond (we shall come to this in a moment), the neuter. There is therefore no logic or logos of the phantasm of the ghost or the spectral. Unless the logos itself be precisely the phantasm, the very element, the origin and the resource of the phantasm itself, the form and the formation of the phantasm, or even of the revenant.

This is why all the things we’re dealing with here, sovereignty the animal, the living dead, the buried alive, etc., the spectral and the posthumous—well, the dream, the oneiric, fiction, so-called literary fiction, so-called fantastic literature will always be less inappropriate, more relevant, if you prefer, than the authority of wakefulness, and the vigilance of the ego, and the consciousness of so-called philosophical discourse.

Amor (love) tization

mortmain  — n

law  the state or condition of lands, buildings, etc, held inalienably, as by an ecclesiastical or other corporation

[C15: from Old French mortemain,  from Medieval Latin mortua manus  dead hand, inalienable ownership]

amortize

late 14c., from O.Fr. amortiss-, prp. stem of amortir "deaden," from V.L. *admortire "to extinguish," from L. ad- "to" + mors (gen. mortis) "death" (see mortal). Originally a legal term for an act of alienating lands. Meaning "extinguish a debt" (in form amortization) is attested from 1864.

mort·main An Idiot who says duh.   (happy Faces and a sad face).
noun Law .

1. the condition of lands or tenements held without right of alienation, as by an ecclesiastical corporation; inalienable ownership.

2. the perpetual holding of land, especially by a corporation or charitable trust.

Origin: 1250–1300; Middle English mort ( e ) mayn ( e ) < Anglo-French mortemain,  translation of Medieval Latin mortua manus  dead hand

am·or·tize  verb (used with object), am·or·tized, am·or·tiz·ing.

1. Finance . a. to liquidate or extinguish (a mortgage, debt, or other obligation), especially by periodic payments to the creditor or to a sinking fund.

b. to write off a cost of (an asset) gradually.

2. Old English Law . to convey to a corporation or church group; alienate in mortmain.

Origin: 1375–1425; Middle English amortisen  < Anglo-French, Old French amortiss-,  long stem of amortir  literally, to kill, die < Vulgar Latin *a ( d ) mortīre  (derivative of Latin mors,  stem mort-  death, with ad- ad-); -ize  later replacing -is ( s )-, probably by association with Anglo-Latin a ( d ) mortizāre

Amortization of survivance. Mortgage economy of debt, depreciation, and death Mort—death; “atem” Celan, German for “breath”; given time. Gift of death.

Amortization in Specters of Marx? Postcard structure, The Post Card, 89.

This is one of the reasons we always set out from texts for the elaboration of this problematic, texts in the ordinary sense of differential traces according to the concept we have elaborated elsewhere. [No reference is supplied.] We could not do otherwise even if we wished to do so or thought to do so. We are no longer credulous enough to believe that we are setting out form things themselves by avoiding “texts” simply by avowing quotation or the appearance of “commentary.” The most apparently direct writing, the most directly concrete, personal writing which is supposedly in direct contact with the “thing itself,” this writing is “on credit”: subjected to the authority of a commentary or re-editing that it is not even capable of reading. 100 Trans. Peggy Kamuf Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992

Cites “Le facteur de la verite,” p. 104, n. 21: “If we take the liberty of accumulating references of this sort, it is because reflection begun in the seminar titled “Donner—le temps” was contemporary with and indissociable from these works, notably The Post Card, which, was already mentioned, refers to it in a note above (see above Foreword, n. 2).

Cites “Le facteur de la verite,” p. 105-06, n. 224; 151-52, n. 24; 15 n. 6.

Citation to Margins of Philosophy, Ousia and Gramme, is in the text, p. 27, but not cited. No note.

Cinders, trans. Ned Luckacher p. 17, n. 7

They must restitute and enter again into the symbolic circle. 144

Cites survivance in Living On: Borderlines,

No, only a “life” can give, but a life in which this economy of death presents itself and lets itself be exceeded. Neither death nor immortal life can ever give anything, only a singular surviving can give. This is the element of the problematic.

The text credited to Baudelaire, which we have barely begun to read, belongs to a scene of writing and therefore to therefore to the scene of a gift unthinkable for any subject. It is within this exceeded and excessive scene, within its destiny and its destination without identifiable addressee and without certain addressor, that our corpus is carved out, But insofar as it tells the story of a gift, this corpus is going to say :in:” itself, “of” itself the exceeding that frames it and that exceeds tis frame. It is going to re-mark in a supplementary abyme that absolute dissemination that destines the text to depart in ashes or go up in smoke. For example, tobacco ashes and tobacco smoke.

Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, 102
In truth, posthumous, posthumus, with an h, appears to be a faulty spelling, the grammarian tells us, and the spelling error in it is apparently induced by the proximity with humus, earth. . . . It’s like for differance, with an a, which is yet another way to posthume by differing or deferring life or, what comes down to the same thing, deferring death. In truth, postume, without an h, apparently corresponds to the superlative of posterus. Posterus qualifies the one who comes after, the one who follows. Posterus is the follower of the descendent, the one who is going to come, or even the future itself, posthumous, the superlative here meaning the last follower of all, and above all the one who, being born after the death of the father, child or grandchild, posterity, bears the testamentary future and the fidelity of inheritance.

Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 174

I attempted to show his in “Le facteur de la verite” and elsewhere; I would be unable to reconstitute all this here in so little time. “For the Love of Lacan,” 55

Burning by Heart

What does it mean to reconstitute a reading? Is there a cryonics metaphor there? Wetwares of publication. Freeze-dried food for astronauts? Reading with the other text in hand?

I am reflecting upon a rather rigorous principle of destruction. What will we burn, what will we keep (in order to broil it better still)? The selection (tri), if it is possible, with in truth be postal: I would cut out, in order to deliver it, everything that derives form the Postal Principle . . . . And we burn the rest. Everything that from near or far touches on the post card (this one, in which one sees Socrates reading us, or writing all the others and every post card in general), all of this we would keep, or finally doom to loss by publishing it . . . 176

“The librarian seemed to know me . . . but this did not get me out of the oath. She asked me to read it . . . Therefore I read it and handed her back the cardboard covered with a transparent paper that had tendered me. At this point, she starts to insist, I had not understood : no, you have to read it out loud. I did so . . . What would an oath that you did not say out loud be worth, an oath that you would only read, or not say be worth, an oath that you would only read, or that while writing you would only read? Or that you would telephone? Or whose tape you would send? I leave you to follow up. 208

Did I tell you, the oath that I had to swear out loud (and without which I could never have been permitted to enter, stipulated, among other things, that I introduce neither fire nor flame into the premises: “I hereby undertake . . . not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame . . . and I promise to obey all the rules of the library.” 215-16

Scene of reading and fire. “Read this letter now at once many times and burn it.” 58⁸ It now resembles a rebroadcast, a sinister play-back (but give ear closely, come near to my lips) and while writing you I henceforth know what I am sending to the fire, what I am letting appear and what you give me back even before receiving it. Back could have been orchestrated all of this starting from the title: the back of Socrates and of the card: all the dossiers that I have bound, the feed-back, the play-back, the returns to sender, etc., our tape-recorders, our phantom cassettes. 225 I am reflecting upon a rather rigorous principle of destruction. What will we burn, what will we keep (in order to broil it better still)? The selection (tri), if it is possible, with in truth be postal: I would cut out, in order to deliver it, everything that derives form the Postal Principle . . . . And we burn the rest. Everything that from near or far touches on the post card (this one, in which one sees Socrates reading us, or writing all the others and every post card in general), all of this we would keep, or finally doom to loss by publishing it . . . 176

You might read these envois as the preface to a book I have not written . . . 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 ya a la cendre).

--Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 3

Derrida and inhumation versus cremation but not liquidation—dumping—as waste management of capital and paperless money, versus burning of letters and books (or Kindle books).

For other uses of fire by Derrida, see Cinders, ash of the archive for what cannot be archived in Archive Fever, ash of cigarette in Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money,

“Shall we burn everything?”

--Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 171

Actual legality has no jurisprudence here, and even if you don’t want to give them back I could reinvent them. I will retain only whatever may be combined as a preface to the three other texts (Legs de, Le facteur de la verite, Du tout). The ensemble will be seen as a combine, an emitting-receiving device: nothing will be seen in it, only calls, or wires, in every sense will be heard, that which reads the post card and which first will have been read by it. Socrates reading Socrates. 180

Destroyed 181

Dead letter 181

Lots of tropes will be necessary. There will be several books in this book. I count four, we will read it as our Tropics. 178

Publication becomes destruction.

A great-holocaustic fire, a burn everything into which we would throw, finally, along with our entire memory, our names, the letters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc. And if nothing remains . . 40

A holocaust without fire or flame 71

Hauntology. Hauntogrammatology. Hauntotextology. What is the relation of the ontology of the post card, and a hauntology? Is there a hauntology of the post card? it’s deconstruction of dead letters and dead parcels, of letters and postcards, to the ontology of The Post Card?

Possibility of reading after burning, the figure of burning, of cremation and inhumation,

To four topics.

Fire-Wall Paper

Derrida’s return to Lacan versus his engagement with Lacan in The Post Card with reference to Dissemination.

varying degrees of pressure Derrida puts in The Post Card and beyond on what is generally taken to be self-evident oppositions between published and unpublished writing, between publication and posthumous publication. Rather than deconstruct these oppositions and arrive ahead of schedule at pre-programmed aporias, I want to focus on the structure of the “postal principle” in The Post Card not only with respect to repetition, reproduction, and the repetition compulsion but with respect to the way Derrida’s parapsychoanalytic account of the postal principle appears to admit the possibility that a writer could die more than once and that one read after burning one’s writing materials, a burning that has already occurred and yet is still to come. I am doing an interrogative reading not limited to a symptomatic reading or even a Derridean parasymptomaitc reading.⁹ And I am not suggesting that Derrida’s death or deaths, as Derrida put in the title of his commemorative essay “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” in 2004 has somehow changed how we read The Post Card.¹⁰

Relate the topics governing bios and biblios.

First, the life of writing:

they concern the bios of writing, what Derrida in The Post Card calls the autobiography of writing separate from testamentary writing (writing intended to be read posthumously):

the description of Ernst’s game . . . can no longer be read solely as a theoretical argument, as a strictly theoretical speculation that tends to conclude with the repetition compulsion or the death drive or simply with the internal limit of the PP [Pleasure Principle] . . . but also can be read, according to the supplementary necessity of a parergon, as an autobiography of Freud. Not simply an autobiography confiding his life to his own more or less testamentary writing, but a more or less living description of his own writing, of the way of writing what he writes, most notably Beyond . . . In question is not only a folding back or a tautological reversal, as if the grandson, by offering him a mirror of his writing, were in advance dictating to him what (and where) he had to set it down on paper; as if Freud were writing what his descendence prescribed that he write, in sum holding the pen prescribed that he write, in sum holding the first pen the one that always passes from one hand to another; as if Freud were making a return to Freud through the connivance of a grandson who dictates from his spool and regularly brings it back, with all the seriousness of a grandson of a certain privileged contract with the grandfather. It is not only a question of a tautological mirror. The autobiography of the writing posits and deposits simultaneously, in the same movement, the psychoanalytic movement. 303
Living versus dead writing, They could never give me a truly satisfactory answer on this question, how they distinguish between a letter and a parcel, a dead letter and a dead parcel, and why they did not sell the so-called dead letter at auction. 125
Second, The problem of the support, of the limits of what is and is not a post card.

For it to work, you will say, there have to be supports (ah yes, but the “substance” of the support is my entire problem. It is enormous and concerns all posts and telecommunications, their strict, literal and figurative meanings, and the tropic post turns them into one another, etc,) there has to be some support and, for a time, copyists, seated copyists. 160-61

“I do not believe that one can properly call “post card” a unique and original image, if some such thing ever occurs, a painting or a drawing destined to someone in the guise of a post card and abandoned to an anonymous third party, a neutral machinery that supposedly leads the message to its destination, or at least would have the support make its way . . . . 35

Why prefer to write on cards? First of all because of the support, doubtless, which is more rigid, the cardboard firmer, it preserves, it resists manipulation; and then it limits and justifies from the outside; by means of the borders, the indigence of the discourse, the insignificance of the anecdote [sic]

Otherwise what would we have done with all the others, the films, the cassettes, the piece of skin with the drawing? So the insupportable supports remain, post cards, I am burning all the supports and keeping only purely verbal sequences. 186-87

Third, reproduction of images.

and then I went into a bookstore, I bought several cards and reproductions, as you know. . . I fell upon two books of photographs that cost me a great deal, one on Freud, very rich, the other on Heidegger, at home, with Madame and the journalists from the Spiegel in 1978), 238

The narrators of the letters talk about the book project, what the title will be, what the preface will be: this is a correspondence, but utterly unlike the Hantai Correspondences, which sorts out painting, letters in facsimile and in diplomatic transcription. Multiple reproductions of the same postcard in The Post Card. Bears on the postal principle in relation to repetition, compulsion, and reproduction, in particular reproduction of the post card, the post card he discovers in the Bodeleian, and some pages of the fortune teller book, but not reproducing the photos of Heidegger and of Freud. Although the criterion for distinguishing between books and letters remains open. I do not believe in the rigor of such a criterion. 61

Illustrations courtesy of the Bodelian Library, Oxford. Cover illustration: Plato and Socrates, the frontispiece of Prognostica Socratis basilei, a fortune telling book. English, thirteenth century, the work of Matthew Paris. MS. Ashmole 304. Fol. 3IV (detail). <

What How bears the publication of facsimiles bear on reproduction, the publication as a repetition? Graphic design, page lay out, topography, and so on, but also reproductions of Adami and of Van Gogh in Truth of Painting. And even more strikingly, Memoirs of the Blind. Memoirs of the Blind is more than simply a catalogue of an exhibition. First, the text presented along with the drawings and paintings at the exhibition was not the same as that found here. Second, a number of works that could not be exhibited have been included here: while the exhibition displayed some forty-four drawings and paintings, the book has seventy-one. Finally, the works are not presented in the same order in the book as in the exhibition. (To compare the two orderings, one may consult the list of illustrations where all the works exhibited are briefly described and their number.)

Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass, “Translators’ Preface,” Jacques Derrida Memoirs of the Blind viii.

“This fine study concerns numerous works that we have had to leave in the shadows so as to observe the law of the exhibition: to keep to the body of drawings housed at the Louvre.”

Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass, 106, n81.

Fourth, publishability, readability and the pancarte.

This final total card (my absolute pancarte), that you be able to read it, hold it in your hands, our knees, under your eyes, in you, that you inherit and guard it. 68

In the “Envois,” Derrida, or one of many, infinitely divisible “Derridas” who write the epistolary exchanges without addressing them or signing them, records a dream about the pressure of publication: “Dream from just now: obsequious: around the word obsequious. I was being pressed, I no longer know by whom, obsequiously, to publish, to let be read, to divulge.”¹¹ The pressure to publish comes from a forgotten source and exerts itself in Derrida’s record of it through repetition of the word “obsequies” and the equivalence of “to publish” with two infinitives that follow it, namely, “to be read,” and “to divulge.” Derrida declines to say whether he gave into the pressure or not, whether he or the obsequies source equates publication with permission to read and with giving up a secret. “Obsequies” here apparently means to keep the pressure on by using different words to say the same thing. Is there a dream of publication embedded here, a dream about publication and reading as transparent openness? Is that a dream about repetition, reproduction, and seriality? Is the dream of publication, if there is one, about effacing publication as something to be read, about taking publication taken “as read”?

The dream may permit us to ask more generally, “what is the relation between publication and the “postal principle?” Is publication about avoiding reading, about determining the limits of avoidance? Near the end of The Post Card, Derrida writes about ways in which one does not read all sorts of publications.

all the police forces of avoidance is, I can put it thus, avoidance itself. There are, for example, what are called “publications”: one can fail to know them, this is always possible in a given context, but one can arrange things, in a certain milieu, in order to avoid knowing that they exist; one can also, knowing of their existence avoid reading them; one can read while avoiding “understanding”; one can, understanding avoid being affected by them or using them; one can also, using them, avoid them, contain them, exclude them, and therefore, avoid them better than ever, etc. But what is to be thought of the fact that one cannot avoid avoiding, of inevitable avoidance in all its form—rejection, foreclusion, denegation, incorporation, and even the introjective and idealizing assimilation of the other at the limit of incorporation---?

“Du Tout,” 506-07

When I photograph myself alone in stations or airports, I throw it away or tear the thing into little pieces that I let fly out the window if it is a train, leave them in an ashtray or a magazine if it is it’s an airplane. 79

What is The Post Card? Prior to signatures and codes, ciphers, laws of genre, divisibility of the Envois, reversibility of its chronology, written before the rest of the book and after it has been written, and so on and other kinds of play one could locate in what Derrida calls an “internal reading,” what is the text and an edition: under what conditions do editions become relevant to the reading of the copy one has in hand?

Or how it is status as non-book and its readability or unreadability?

Is it a dream of Sigmund Freud’s “dreamwork” as dreamreworking, “the old dream of the complete electro-cardo-encaphlo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-gram—I mean first of all without the slightest literature, the slightest superimposed fiction, without pause, without selection either of the code or of the tone, without the slightest secret, nothing at all, only everything,” Paper Machine, 68 Or is it an apocalyptic fantasy, the opposite of the holocaust?

In the name of what, in the name of whom publish, divulge—and first of all write, since it amounts to the same? I have published a lot, but there is someone in me, I still can’t identify him, who still hopes never to have done it. And he believes that in everything that I have let pass, depart, a very effective mechanism that comes to annihilate the exception, I write while concealing every possible divulging of the very thing that appears to be published. 80

Five: Reading After Death. Derrida returns to Lacan and to his own “Facteur de la verite” in “For the Love of Lacan,” the second of three essays that make up Resistances of Psychonalysis.

The future of Lacanian thought as it moves beyond the Écrits is all the more difficult in that Lacan was an incomparable listener and his discursive machine was one of such sensitivity that everything could be inscribed there with finesse or discretion. (This is quite right; who doesn’t try to do the same?) But, what is more, it is inscribed there in the spoken words of a seminar that, by giving rise to numerous stenotyped or tape-recording archivings, will have fallen prey not only to the problem of rights . . . but also to all the problems posed by delays in publishing and of an editing—in the American sense—that was of the most active sort. [same thing happens to Derrida’s seminars] Since all of these things hang by a hair, since the stakes get decided in a word, an ellipsis, a verbal modality, conditional or future anterior, especially when one knows Lacan’s rhetoric, I say good luck to shy narrator who would try to know what was said and written by whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not have said!

What about publication and speaking of the recently dead? In “Du Tout,” Derrida, prompted by a request from Rene Major, finally supplies the name of a friend he had hitherto kept secret because the friend was by then dead.¹² And in “For the Love Lacan,” Derrida comments humorously on the way speaking only of the dead was made a condition of his giving a lecture at a colloquium on “Lacan avec les philosophes” [Lacan with the Philosophers] held in 1991: “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.”¹³ ?”

Know When to Hold ‘Em

Philippe Labarthe calls “autobiothanatography” or to what Derrida calls “auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphic scene of writing” (336).¹⁴ Not just ruin either. It is like a ruin that does not come after the work but remains produced, already from the origin, by the advent and structure of the work. In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration.

Memoirs of the Blind 65

Just as a memory does not restore a past (once) present, so the ruin the ruin of the face—and of the face looked in the face in the drawing—does not indicate decaying, wearing away, anticipated decomposition, or this being eaten away by time—something about which the portray often betrays an apprehension. The ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the self-portrait . . .

From corpus of book to corpse of author, reader on the side of live. Turn to account of survivance and posthumous publication.

What is commonly called the “afterlife” of a book is given a more technical meaning whereby survival as a metaphor for preservation becomes a notional term, “sur-vivance.” The translators of Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 leave the French neologism untranslated and without annotation apart from informing the reader the “words ‘living on,’ ‘to survive,’ and ‘survival’ are in English in the text.” (131,n30).

Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130). The book is not exactly a corpse that continues to live, as it were, as it decomposes or is put to various medical uses before being buried or cremated.
In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe . . . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed with any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [ is not] above life, like something sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-” is without superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-called as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)

Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Lieb and not Koerper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)

This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living experience is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living experience,” but “tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors and derails “tissue” skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like death in life or life in death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more originary existence, a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked under this this clothing. For, on he contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance, comprehended, they live and die, they live to death as the very inextricability of this weave. It is against the groundless ground of this quasi-transcendentality of living to death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one hand, one can say that “Robinson Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the book, were, according to a first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and desire attested to by this book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or metonymy, [were all] buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can and one must, one must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and like the experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-anthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like ours, I mean in the present modernity of a Greco-Abrahamic Europe, wonder what is happening . . . in the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the family and/or State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132

Course called “Living to Death”

in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or the State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . . . deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)

Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies created by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-vivance.

Sur-vivance is not exactly new. Derrida in “Living On: Borderlines” (reduced to “Living On” in the second edition of the book in which it was originally published) and Derrida on death would be difficult to catalogue. Also livance.

It’s a kind of self-archiving—the document that remains, literally, unsewn and resewn into different shirts; reread but not to revise; to revisit but not reanimate? Just asking.

Derrida asserts, in the future, or a specific find of future, that is also a memorial:

Derrida cites his “I posthume as I breathe” line from Circumfessions in Beast and Sov Vol. 2, Seventh Session, 173, and then goes on to comment on posthumous before turning to Blanchot’s recent cremation, 174.

And in a somewhat economic way, by reason of a sort of finitude, because we must exclude the infinite renewal of inscriptions (Niederschriften). The number of inscriptions to be inscribed is finite – that’s finitude. For all acts of censorship act on inscriptions, and substitutes of inscriptions in a system (it is even this concept of inscription which no doubt motivated the choice of the word or metaphor of censorship), and the quantity of inscriptions is finite; so one must censor. It is like a topological economy of the archive in which one has to exclude, censor, erase, destroy or displace, virtualize, condense the archive to gain space in the same place, in the same system, to be able to continue to store, to make space. Finitude is also a sort of law for this economy. (B&S vol. 2, 156)

What Derrida calls “the postal principle” () also involves what he calls the afterlifeanddeath of a text, the uncertain boundary of publication in general, a boundary that not only complicates seemingly self-evident and unquestionable binary oppositions between a published text and unpublished material, biography and bibliography, production and waste, but brings to bear Derrida’s notion of a text’s “sur-vivance” on what Derrida calls “unreadability”: sur-vivance involves various media transfers, various material supports, or subjectiles, as well as various tropes for not/non/un/reading.¹⁵

The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the living and the dead. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130)

In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe. . Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. (130)

Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)

in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or the State, of the so-called dead boy, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . . . deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)

La carte posthume
Let me begin destinerrantly by drifting into a passage regarding posthumous publication to be found in the ninth session In the Seventh Session of Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign Volume 2, from which the epigraph to the present essay is taken, Derrida returns to the sentence “I posthume as I breathe” (see Beast and Sov, 2, 193; see 193n2 for the reference) he had written in “Circumfessions,” and after elaborately on, discusses several works by Maurice Blanchot Derrida wrote just after Blanchot had been cremated, pages he says he believes he has “not yet begun to read” (185). (As the editors note [181], these pages appeared modified in the second edition of Parages as an additional chapter entitled Maurice Blanchot est mort” [Maurice Blanchot is Dead”); that chapter was not, however, included in the English translation of Parages, Stanford UP, 2011). In the Ninth Session, Derrida observes that “all writings are posthumous” before proceeding to narrow the definition of posthumous writing in which he which he includes a piece of writing found upon Blaise Pascal’s accidentally found by Pascal’s servant.¹⁶ Pascal had sewn the paper, the first word of which is “fire,” into his shirt. Pascal’s elder sister, Gilberte Pascal Périer, published the writing in her Life of Blaise Pascal, introducing the posthumous writing with a preface in which she narrates the circumstances of its discovery and in which she wishes to direct how the note should note be read: it is not Pascal’s “last word,” a master text that would govern the meaning of all of Pascal’s other writings.¹⁷

Derrida’s interest in Pascal’s paper lies partly in the way it is “strictly posthumous,” that is “posthumous” in the ordinary sense of the word:

As you well know, it is a posthumous piece of writing (now, of course, all writings are posthumous, within the trace as structurally and essentially and by destinal vocation posthumous or testamentary, there is a stricter enclave of the posthumous, namely, what is only discovered and published after the death of the author or signatory). Pascal’s writing on the god of Abraham was strictly posthumous in the latter sense, even though we are not sure Pascal wanted it to be published. This piece of paper initially takes the form of a journal, a note to self, dated in Pascal’s hand—Pascal, who like Robinson Crusoe, here dates the signature. He inscribes the year, the month, the day, and the hour . . . (209)

Even before it was posthumously published, apparently even if it had never been published, Pascal’s writing remains readable.

Let us now come back to “Writing Found in Pascal’s Clothing After His Death.” There can be little doubt that this little piece of paper was destined, if not for someone, then at least to remain, to survive the moment of its inscription, to remain legible in an exteriority of a trace, of a document, even if it were readable only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come. This is indeed what has been called a memorial, to use the word of a witness, Father Guerrier:

“A few days after the death of monsieur Pascal,” said Father Guerrier, “a servant of the house noticed by chance an area in the lining of the doublet of the illustrious deceased that appeared thicker than the rest, and having removed the stitching at this place to see what was it was, he found there a little folded parchment written in the hand of Monsieur Pascal, and in the parchment of a paper written in the same hand: the one was a faithful copy of the other. These two pieces were immediately put into the hands of Madame Périer who showed them to several of her particular friends. All agreed there was no doubt that this parchment, written with so much care and with such remarkable characters, was a type of memorial that he kept very carefully to preserve the memory of a thing that he wanted to have always present to his eyes and mind, since for eight years he had taken care to stitch and unstitch it from his clothes, as his wardrobe changed. The parchment is lost; but at the beginning of the manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, one can find the paper that reproduced it, written in the hand of Pascal, the authenticity of which was confirmed by a note signed by the Abbé [Étienne] Périer, Pascal’s nephew. At the top was a cross, surrounded by a ray of light.¹⁸

Derrida then cites the first word of Pascal’s note, “Fire [feu]” (212) placing it in the middle of the page, as if it here a title. Derrida comments “This word ‘fire,’ is, then, isolated, insularized in a single line, I’m not sure I can interpret it; I’m even sure that I cannot interpret it in a decidable way, between the fire of the glory that reduces to ashes and the fire that still smolders under the ashes of some cremation (Ashengloire).” Derrida alludes here to his earlier discussion of Blanchot’s quotation from Paul Celan’s poem Strette, the first of which, Derrida, notes at the end of a sentence that first links cremation to Nazi concentration camps to Blanchot to Celan, is “ASCHENGLORIE [ASHGLORY]” (capital letters in the original): “as for cremation, and the ashes that m from now on, in modern and uneffaceable history of humanity, the crematoria of the camps, let us forget nothing” (Beast and Sov 2, 179). Two kinds of reading, or readability emerge in Derrida’s account of document entitled “Fire” (assuming the document has a title) that happens to have kept from publication. On the one hand, the paper always remains readable: it can be transcribed, it can be lost, its authenticity can be vouched for on a note, and what cannot be transcribed can be described (the cross surrounded by a ray of light). On the other hand, Derrida is not sure he can read what is readable. Derrida could have easily distinguished the first kind of reading from the second by using words like legible and, in opposition to it, interpretable; but he didn’t. Instead, he calls the paper both legible and readable, using the words as synonyms, and uses reader using and interpretable (one cannot decide what the legible writing means). Nor did he put the two kinds of reading into paradoxical or aporetic relation with each other, as I have done above. Neither the “strictly” posthumous publication of the paper nor with the unpublished paper that Pascal folded up and covered by a piece of parchment and then sewed into his shirts aligns with readability or unreadability, not reading.

Derrida’s phrase “generation of repetitions to come” certainly invites, some reader might even say demands, that repetition would not be the same, the generation is not a mechanical program that Pascal installed and that his servant carried out after Pascal died.