Read After Burning, I pray You, or la carte posthume

Final Words are ot planned by Derrida by the way Édouard Levé planned the posthumus publication of Suicide trans Jan Steyn

Derrida insists on the divisbility of the instant and on the divisbility of the letter.

“I didn’t know where to start reading, looking, opening.”

The Postcard, 209

8 July 1979

and even if I had wanted to, I would not yet have confided this secreet to you, it is the place of the dead being for whom I write (I say the dead being, or more htan liviving, it is not yet born despite its immerial advent. . . .”

The Postcard, 202

“insteaof reachign you, it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you. And you love and you do not love, it makes ofyou what you wish, it takes you, it leaves you, it gives you.

Back cover of The Postcard

Try to translate “nous nous verroons mourir” (‘we will see ourselves / each othedie.”

Vismann, Cornelia. “The Love of Ruins”

pp. 196-209.

Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology, trans Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008)
Cornelia Vismann, “The Archive and the Beginning of Law” in Derrida and Legal Philosophy Ed. Peter Goodrich. (Palgrave Macmillan, November 2008), 41-54.

Yesterday, during the symposium, a Candadian friend tells me that in montreal, during a very well atteded lecture, Serge Doubrovksy had wanted to get a certain effect from some news he beleieved he could bring to the knowledge of his audience: I was supposed to be in analysis! . . . This friend whom I have no reason to doubt, tells me in tthat context was more or less the following: do you know that J.D. is in analysis as I myself (S.D.) have been, this is whay I have written what I have written, let’s see what is going to happen with him!! I tell you. The big deal here, what truly fascinates me in this story is not the stupefying assurance with which they invent and drag out the sham, it’s above all that they do not resist the desire to gain an advantageeous effect from it (revelation, denunciation, triumph, enclosing, I don’t know, in any event something that suddenly gets bigger from the fact that the other is “inanalysis”: what is true in any event is that this would really please S.D.). Remark, I’m not so surprised. Once that upon the appearance of the Verbier and of Fors Lacan let himself go at it right in his seminar (while running the risk of then retracting the faux-pas under ellipsis in Ornicar—I’d really like to know what made him feel contstrained to do so, but I have several hypotheses), the rumor in a way became legitimate. Why does one wish to say that someone be inanalysis? Of whom does one say iin this case: if it’s not true it it has to be invented? And by the same token it becomes “true”: true that for Lacan and Doubrovsky, for example, it is necessary that I be inanalysis. . . .To be continued, in any event, I’m sure that it won’t remain there.

I believe in effect htat it is better to erase all the pictures all the other cards, the photos, the initials, the drawings, etc. The Oxford card is sufficient for everything. It has the iconographic power that one can expect in order to read or to have read the whole history, between us, this punctuated sequence of two years, from Oxford to Oxford, via two centuries or two millenia . . .

Sometimes I wish that everything remain illegible for them—and also for you. To become absolutely unowable for them.

Like the “envois,” are what remains of a dated series of supposedly private texts that are nowpublic—like a published coresopondence, or a series of intercepted post cards. Alan Bass, “Translator’s Introduction: L before K,” The Postcard, xi

“K should come after L. Why? Why not L before K?

Alan Bass, “Translator’s Introduction: L before K,” The Postcard, xi

Did=fferent prier d’inserer’s and publicationntoes inFnrech not cotorlled by Derrida, necessarily, even though the same press published all htree books.

Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath, Trans. David Wills (,Stanford University Press, 2004) Chapter 16 “Correspondences” with subtitles for “Telegram”; “Stamp”; “Postcard”; “Telephone”; Fax”; and “Telepathy.” Chapter 12: The Postal Principle.” Subtitles “In the Beginning Was the Post” and “Epochs of the Postal”

Photo of Bodleian with a citation from the Postcard serving as the caption on p. 187 n chapter 17 “The Oxford Scene” and the page facing the table of contents has a grey box under the with the word “CORRPESONDENCE “ all in capital letters, then this stennce, without a period, aligned as follows:

Letters and Postcards (Extracts)

Jacques Derrida writes to Catherine Malabou

during his travels from May 1997 to May 1998,

as he waits for, then reads her essay

“The Parting of Ways”

xvii

In the horror film After.Life (dir. Agnieszka Wójtowicz-Vosloo, 2009), Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) wakes up on an autoposy--just after we saw her apparently die in a car accident after walking out on her fiancee of a restruant--on the table of a mortician who doubles as a spiritual medium named Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson) who can talk to the dead. Unable to move any part her body below her neck, she defiantly exclaims “I’m not dead.” ¹⁵ But Deacon says otherwise. He knows she’s dead and he’s got her death certificate to prove it. She was D.OA. In horror movies, it would appear, corpses always arrive at their destination whether they know it or not, sometimes even ahead of schedule.¹⁶

Death, as Derrida knew, is always a matter of paperwork, the death certificate, a paper that does not necessarily reassure. ¹⁷ In the rest of the film, she discovers she is buried, then survives in the mortuary, and hten is was actually alive all along, but then is buried alive, and hten seemingly found alive by her fiancee but it turns out he too diedinacar accident and wakes up in the morgue with Eliot telling him he is relaly dead.. (The movie continues, she is buried, but “survives” in the morgue and is eventually discovered alive by her boyfriend.¹⁸

Thre is sno signature on the certificate, nor is there a name of the dead. It is “there”to be read, presuambly readable by her. All that matters to us and ot her is the time and date of death.

While After.life is not worth a Derridean reading, I begin with it because it provides an orientation to The Post Card through the lens of the posthumous, re-routing the carte postal through what I call the carte posthume a reading that involves Derrida’s returns to The Post Card after Lacan was dead in resistnaces of Pychoanlaysis and his turn, for the first time, to prayer and corse disposal (Derrida doesn’t investiage lws protecting corpses). the post card in relation to the prayer and to posthumous publication, not only because of its with its repeition compulsion, fetishism—alive or dead played out in a horror suspense—am I am not? Is she or not? But because it relates

“Life without life” or survivance Instant of My Death and Demeure

Not taking Beast and Sovereign as Derrida’s last will and testament. It’s the way the posthumous poses a limit or does not that is at stake in a way of organizing Derrida to be read than it is in a sending that precedes all reshelvings. A priori. Definition of a letter, dead letter, of a post card versus a letter (but not a visiting card in purloined letter? Is there a diffference between the letter and the card? A love letter. Learning by heart.

Jacques Derrida, « Le survivant, le sursis, le sursaut », dans La quinzaine littéraire, n° 882, 11-31 août 2004, pp. 15-16.

“For renvoi signifies putting off to later the repreive [sursis] that remits or defers [sursoit] democracy until the next resurgence [sursault] or until the next turn around . . . .” Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason

In both senses of différance, then, democracy is differential; it is différance, renvoi, and spacing. That is why, let me repeat, the theme of spacing, the theme of the interval or the gap of the trace as gap [écart], of the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space, plays such an important role as early as Of Gramatology and “Différance.” Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason

Jacques Derrida, “Différance” Trans Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp 3-27.

Derrida in “Fichus” (in Paper Machine in English) on the letter WB wrote about his dream while in a concentration camp.

Letters reproduced as works of art, effectively, in Simon Hantai, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, La correspondence des textes: Lecture d’un manuscript illisble (Correspondances) Letter by Hegel in The Age of Hegel; letter in Demeure

Derrida on his nightmare about having to defend Bush and Saddam Hussein in Beast and Sov 2,tenth session, pp. 260-61 when Derrida had the flu then the nightmare becoming a dream, p. 273, then the dream of Kant becoming nightmare (274) in “Conjectures on the Beginnings” about Noah’s Ark (Noah was 600 years old) and Kant on people living to be 800.