The Last Instance of My Death

“It is a word and above all a writing gesture, a singular pragmatic use, signed by Heidegger who, presenting himself as . . . Beast and Sov (2982)

Derrida makes some rather astonsihing claims for this note. A prayer.

What Derrida calls Pascal’s “strictly” posthumously published note has arrived at a future even if that future never arrives. Derrida almost says that the note would arrive at its destination. It does, any case, have a destiny, not a destinerrance:

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. The note remains readable, even if only to Pascal. For generations to come. But can it be read? Derrida places the first word of Pascal’s note, “Fire [feu]” (212) in the middle of the page, as if it were the title of the note that follows. And then Derrida says he is not sure he can read it: “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).”¹⁹ The note has been “destined” to remain, and to remain legible, “even if it were readable only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come.” That generation is apparently infinite.²⁰ Derrida writes:

This is indeed what has been called a memorial, to use the word of a witness, Father Guerrier.

Does the destiny of the posthumously published depend on the burning, as it were, of the support, on Pascal’s burning by heart his note already on fire and yet extinguished?²¹

Derrida situates Pascal in a session on prayer focused on Heidegger, and in the following session, continuing the question of prayer, recalls Freud on the uncanny in relation to Hediegger’s Being and Time and Lacan’s reading of Robinson Crusoe in Le seminar V: Les formations de l’inconscient (1957-58), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: le Seuil, 1998), pp. 342-43. P. 23637 ((330-31; 246-51 ending with “there is, it seems to meme, a profound congruence between Lacan and Heidegger.” 251. (ninth session)

Faut pouvoir (power, to be able to) Derrida says he shall not give examples after “faced with an exploit that one admires or condemns, one exclaims in stupefaction: “Ah! They dared to write that, faut pouvoir, eh . . . Ah! That idiot dared write and publish that shameful thing at a given moment, this or hta weekly dared to go in for that abjection, faut pouvoir, faut pouvoir, implying faut pouvoir le faire, it takes ome doing to be abject, it’s quite something [faut le faire].

Freud and Heidegger on uncanny, pp 242-43

It is not the difference between different Xs” 252

“traces remain, hen, that he would have wished to be both effaceable and ineffaceable. Could he [MH] that in the posterity of the probable improbable archive, the day would come when a French animal [i.e. Derrida], in turn conducting a seminar on the seminar and every Wednesday sniffing out the footprints or the track of an impossible Friday, would come to worry away at these “pas d’avue (non avowals, steps of avowals],” on these traceless traces . . . yesterday, now, and tomorrow? 240-41 (335-36)

Heidegger is speaking of prayer and of God, but he is neither praying to nor addressing a God who would not be the God of the philosophers and onto-theology. Robinson Crusoe . . . is writing a book which . . . is a sort of prayer . . . The book itself does not pray, but Robinson nevertheless quotes, and several times, which Heidegger never does, insistently quotes prayers, and prayers that are essentially linked to the Christian revelation: (208-09; 293-950)

I shall start out again from prayer as a crossing point between Heidegger’s seminar or problematic and Robinson Crusoe. I shall not go back over wheat we said about the new apprenticeship of prayer by Robinson . . . the training in view of a prayer the vocation of which—if I can put it this way—is Christian. There is, in the course of Heidegger’s seminar, a moment where an allusion to prayer—to this odd type of statement that prayer is, but then evoked in Greek in a context marked rather by Aristotle and from which Christianity appears to be absent . . .”206-07 (290-91)

What is it to pray, How to pray? How not to pray? More precisely, if prayer consists in doing something, in a gesture of the body or a movement of the soul, what is one doing when one prays? Is one doing something? . . . I am not choosing to begin with this question because we have spoken so much these last weeks of death, of consigning to earth or fire, of cremators and inhumers, and because it is difficult even when a church does not take charge of the thing, is that so-called atheistic milieu, it is a difficlt and rare thing not to give voice, during ritual ceremonies, during ones thoughts or one’s experience, to a movement that resembles prayer. And so to some hymn or oration. No, without for the moment linking prayer to death, to the the theme of death and the posthumus, to death and dying, to such and such a death, to the eve and the day after such and such a death (and in the French the day after a death is its veille, its wake), no, I shall give this question, “what is it to pray?” a more general and apparently neutral scope [portee]. Pp. 202-03 (285-286)

[Tranlators note:] je vous en prie, which can mean “I pray you (for it),” is more often the standand polite response to thanks, as in “you’re welcome” or “don’t mention it.” Note 4, 203 (286)

But can one say sincerely to someone: “forget me?” can one say “forget me” other htan to mean: do not forget to forget me, remember me, at least enough to forget me. Or to get off my back! . . . So, remember this question about prayer that I abandon here, that I am abandoning to you here—to keep it in your memory. 205 (289)

What is one doing whenone says to someone “Ipray you,”Je vous enprie, “I pray you to”? Can one pray wihtout praying to soeone, i.e. without “addressing” one’s prayer ot the singularity of a “who”? Cane one [ray without praying to . . . ? Can one pray without asing or expecting something in retreturn? Is there a link between the quotiddian and trivial “je vous en prie” and the orison or chant of religious and sacred prayer that rises and lifts itself above the quotidian, even if it lifts itself every day, at fixed times, or some solmenly once a year [is there a link and analogy] between the anemic and mechanical “je vous en prie” and, on the other hand, prayer in the strong sense, with or wihtout active faith, which grips one, and brings with it a sort of ecstasy beyond automatic triviality? 203 (287)

The back cover copy of the Post Card is a signed prier d’inserer. ²²

prière d'insérer. A reading inserted, a prayer an address and a date, whether to God Pascal) or Heidegger(atheist).

The prière d'insérer on the back cover of of The Post Card is a prayer, not just a prgamatic address to the reader, as Genette thinks.

Derrida “Le suriviant, le sursis, le sursaut”
Derrida ends with a final section not named in the title. (each word in the title gets its own section). In it Derrida activiates pun please insert and prayer.

“Prier’ d’inserer. Ja’I deja un mal a me reconnaitre , pour y souscrire, dans chachune ds images que he viens d’exposer. Je me suis putot expose et lasisse prendre, une foisde plus: par un autre pour un autre. Je me suis laisse prendre en photographie (instantane ou photomaton) ou surprendre par un radar qui juge et snctioone la viteese sans vous laiser le temps ni la place de prendre la parole pour faire valoir vos driots, come il le faudrait. Je signe toute fois sincerement ce que vous venez peu-etre de lire. Non comme le symptome d’une “verite”, la mienne, plutot come une priere, , celle dont Aristote dissit si justement qu’elle n’est “ni vrai ni fausse.” Le mai 2004 , 16

What counts as a prier d’inserer? Is it inhte article a kind of postface, the way the back coer isalso a postface as well as a “blurb” (or will be misrecogized as a blurb, a s written by someone other than the author, or leftunsigned if written as an allographic blurb?

Is The Post Card an archive? Hat does it include of the the unpublished? What does it leave behind?

What does not get dessiminated?
To pray is to address, to recall, to remember. So it is a kind of guaranteeing of the archive. The prayer sends, like the card, even if it is never heard, even if there is no one to hear it. ²³ http://www.prayerrequest.com http://www.bennyhinn.org/prayer/prayer-request

“reprinted in the posthumous book by Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis, ed Marie-Louis Mallet (Paris: Galilee, 2006), pp. 163-91,” Beast and Sov 2, 237 (331), note 8.

The question is whether prayer as neither false nor true, is excluded form Heidegger’s account of truth as empirically truth and untruth (revealing and concealing), and his reinscription of a different kind of atheistic nonpolitical theological sovereignty, one closer to the God of onto-theology than those who pray, kneel and offer sacrifices to are . . .

Is there a posthumous principle or posthumous structure that differs from the postal principle or postal structure, whether the postal be subsumed by the posterous, the phantasm, and the posthumous.

Even before it was posthumously published, apparently even if it had never been published, Pascal’s writing would have remained readable even it was never read.

Derrida engages the “phantasm” in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, and the posthumous publication is a note Pascal wrote. The note just happens to begin with the word “fire.” Derrida’s discussion of Pascal’s note occurs in relation to the phantasm, the survivance of a text, which is not the same thing as the survival or a corpse decaying. His interest in Pascal’s paper lies partly in the way it is “strictly posthumous,” that is published after Pascal’s death:

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 . . . ²⁴

Derrida survivance and a prier d’inserer. Note reocvered on the body, worn. (cf Derrida on the wallet)

Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, 244, asterisked footnote.

Il y a divers etats de la disquette, que je ne garde pas, en general. Il m’est arrive une fois ou dexus, pour Circonfession, de garder quelque etapes. Mai pour la plupart des textes, je me garde rien, ca se trasforme et ca ne laisse pas des traces. 68
“Derrida entre entre le corp ecrivant et l’ecriture”

Genesis 17, 2001, 59-72.

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

Derrida says
some things about his work that are the exact opposite of what he says
in the other interview published in Genesis.
J. DERRIDA : Peut-être. Quand je serai mort, il y aura un oiseau, une
fourmi qui dira « moi » pour moi et quand quelqu’un dit « moi » pour
moi, c’est moi. Mais alors pour enchaîner sur ce que vous avez dit
tous les deux sur vos papiers, moi, j’ai détruit une fois une
correspondance. Avec un acharnement terrible : j’avais broyé – ça ne
marchait pas ; brûlé – ça ne marchait pas… J’ai détruit une
correspondance que je n’aurais pas dû détruire et je le regretterai
toute ma vie. Pour le reste – et là on va parler du problème de
l’archive – je n’ai jamais rien perdu ou détruit. Jusqu’aux petits
papiers, quand j’étais étudiant et que Bourdieu ou Balibar venait
mettre sur ma porte un petit mot disant « je repasse tout à l’heure »…
Ou de Bourdieu : « Je vais t’appeler », et je l’ai toujours – et j’ai
tout. Les choses les plus importantes et les choses apparemment les
plus insignifiantes. Toujours en espérant, bien sûr, qu’un jour – non
pas grâce à l’immortalité, mais grâce à la longévité – je pourrais
relire, me rappeler, revenir, et en quelque sorte, me réapproprier
tout ça. Et puis, j’ai fait l’expérience cruelle et amère – maintenant
que toute cette correspondance est archivée et classée pour la majeure
partie hors de chez moi – que malheureusement je ne relirai jamais ces
choses…

http://www.cairn.info/revue-rue-descartes-2006-2-page-86.htm

-- Derrida entre entre le corp ecrivant et l’ecriture
Genesis 17, 2001, 59-72.
Niave: Benoit Peters—fantasy of preservation somewhere.
Footnote: Benoit Peters Jacques Derrida: A Biography on Derrida saying he destroyed correspondence. p. 244

Cite the Post Card as if it were evidence. I found a note in Benoit Peeters biography of Derrida (attached the

capture).  he says that Derrida did not destroy the correspondence

with Sylviane (though he says he does not know where the letters are).

 I've requested Penser avec Derrida, the source he cites in which

Derrida says he did destroy a correspondence but does not say which it

was. .  Apart from Peeters says Derrida never destroyed  a scrap of

paper on which he had written, which is the opposite of what Derrida

says in the Genesis interview.  However, Derrida's assertion that he

destroyed all drafts except for 1 or 2 floppy discs he used for

Circonfession is belied by the existence of the Derrida archive in UC

Irvine and the facsimiles of pages of notes and of a notebook of

Derrida's printed in the very same interview (lol?). Peeters use of

the Post Card as autobiographical evidence of Derrida's NOT burning of

Sylviane's letters is exceedingly stupid since the letters in the PC

are unsigned, just sent off.  He reads the letter writer quite

literally--"I burned everything" even though on the first page of the

"Envois" Derrida suggests that one read the correspondence that

follows as if it had been destroyed, burned.  Peeters also clams that

Sylviane has preserved 1k letters of Derrida but not published them.

Cite the Post Card as if it were evidence. I found a note in Benoit Peeters biography of Derrida (attached the

capture).  he says that Derrida did not destroy the correspondence

with Sylviane (though he says he does not know where the letters are).

 I've requested Penser avec Derrida, the source he cites in which

Derrida says he did destroy a correspondence but does not say which it

was. .  Apart from Peeters says Derrida never destroyed  a scrap of

paper on which he had written, which is the opposite of what Derrida

says in the Genesis interview.  However, Derrida's assertion that he

destroyed all drafts except for 1 or 2 floppy discs he used for

Circonfession is belied by the existence of the Derrida archive in UC

Irvine and the facsimiles of pages of notes and of a notebook of

Derrida's printed in the very same interview (lol?). Peeters use of

the Post Card as autobiographical evidence of Derrida's NOT burning of

Sylviane's letters is exceedingly stupid since the letters in the PC

are unsigned, just sent off.  He reads the letter writer quite

literally--"I burned everything" even though on the first page of the

"Envois" Derrida suggests that one read the correspondence that

follows as if it had been destroyed, burned.  Peeters also clams that

Sylviane has preserved 1k letters of Derrida but not published them.

“Prier’ d’inserer. Ja’I deja un mal a me reconnaitre , pour y souscrire, dans chachune ds images que he viens d’exposer. Je me suis putot expose et lasisse prendre, une foisde plus: par un autre pour un autre. Je me suis laisse prendre en photographie (instantane ou photomaton) ou surprendre par un radar qui juge et snctioone la viteese sans vous laiser le temps ni la place de prendre la parole pour faire valoir vos driots, come il le faudrait. Je signe touteffois sincerement ce que vous venez peu-etre de lire. Non comme le symptome d’une “verite”, la mienne, plutot come une priere, , celle don’t Aristote dissit si justement qu’elle n’est “ni vrai ni fausse.” Le mai 2004 , 16

--Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 118-19.⁵

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 173-174⁶

and I focus on The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2 in part because it is a posthumous publication that engages posthumous publication and takes up a posthumously published note Pascal wrote that his servant found when he discovered Pascal dead. (The note by Pascal is coincidentally entitled “Fire,” and happens to, like Derrida’s and burned papers in The Post Card, parts of which Derrida quotes in Cinders, and Derrida’s ash of the archive in Archive Fever.) This note, however, emrges not just as a letter, like the letter form Blanchot in Demeure, but in a discussion of the prayer.

Letter cited by Derrida in seesion 7 of Beast and Sov 2 has gone missing, according to a note.

Because of publication and archive, effects are always tied to material support of an edition; anarchivity limited to page layout in “Tympan,” in Margins of philosophy, the columns in Glas, --with banks, a kind ofMallarmean aesthiec, eccentric ways of using bibliographic codes; so the coherence of a tropological reading—aporia, and the questioning of an internal reading, its limits, all depend on publication, just as for Genette the threshold or “seuil” of reading is always something published. The post Card is a publication. The post card is sent a priori.

Anarchivity from the way the published works are like a general text overflowing a given text to render it readable. Or unreadable.

Simulacra of destruction. Corpse.
What remains—passage by freud. So the general text is not ashen the way the arhive is

Quasi-machine of survivance, de Man and Rousseau on Typewriter Ribbon Ink

Archive means a psychoanalytic reading—Freud burns
No book history could sort out the references and so on, create a file, since Derrida refers to the Post Card as a post card., cites passages in his own anacrhivic archive, Cinders..

Question of animal and human

Of prayer and Post card

An posthumous publication

Heidegger—no death—in Why Poets? No destiny either.

Derrrida’s sending is the limit of his reading.
Because no one knows whether the publisher has intervened. Case of ON the Name. Nt up to the translator.
Publication constitutes its own kind of anarchvity.

Derrida often respects the distinction between published and unpublished,, private and public.

Quesiton of the animal is a question of the archive—a question about death of the writer. Or about the way death enters in a biological sense in derrida’s writing even as he pursues tsurivance and publication and unreadability (went back tohe text to add “Maurice Blanchot is Dead,” also the Beast and the Sovereign 2 (identified in an editor’s note). Editor as caretaker.
Post Marks / Like a Prayer: Reading Around Derrida with(out) Derrida (Still) Around

The reader may recall that Derrida, who kept the least little scrap of paper, in his last public conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe related how, one day, he had destroyed a correspondence ‘with grim determination’: ‘I destroyed a correspondence that I should not have destroyed and I will regret it all my life long (rue Descartes no. 52, 2006, p. 96). Like other people, no doubt, I first though that these destroyed letters were those from Sylviane Agacinski. But this auto-da-fe is also referred to in The Post Card as having occurred several years before Jacques and Sylvane met: [think of Jonthan [[Culler]]and Cynthia [[Chase]]and other proper names of will known critics] “. . . I burned everything , slowly, at the side of the road. I told myself that I would never start again’ (The Post Card, p. 33). I do not know where the letters sent by Agacinsku to Derrida are now; but it is known that he did not destroy them. And, according to acquaintances, nearly a thousand letters from Derrida have been preserved by Agacinski. In the pages of the present work, the reader will have had a chance to appreciate how talented a letter-writer Derrida was; so one may indulge in dreaming of these letters [Derrida in Fichus on dream of Walter Benjamin in a letter] and hoping they will be published one day, even if far in the future.

Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, 244, asterisked footnote.

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

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

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

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

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

These questions about what remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s writings are also biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical questions concerning the archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own works, from which he sometimes quoted.

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

This question I have just raised about whether sending [schicken] as burning has priority over the letter’s address under the heading of the word posthumography, is not only a question about repetition. It is a question of whether, on the one hand, reading or rereading is guaranteed by repetition, insured as it were, even before it is dispatched, always given back, the “envoi” always already backed up, copied, deposited in vault when sent, such that publishing can become of a form of destruction rather than preservation, or, on the other hand.³¹ In the “Envois” in The Post Card, Derrida asserts that reading is always already rereading and reroutes rereading and the “origin of the post card” (59-60) through a Freudian post office to memory, and repetition burning after reading: But in fact, yes, had understood my order or my prayer, the demand of the first letter: “burn everything,” understood it so well that you told me you copied over (“I am burning, stupid impression of being faithful, neverthelss kept several simulacra, etc.,” isn’t that it?), in your writing, and in pencil, the words of that first letter (not the others). Another way of saying that you reread it, no? which is what one begins by doing when one reads, even for the first time, repetition, memory, etc. I love you by heart, there between the parentheses or quotation marks, such is the origin of the post card.³² The origin of the post card consists of words placed in a space by quotation marks and parentheses (they are identical puncutation marks in French), words already cited, iterable, and so on. But are they also words that have been redeemed or words that can always be redeemed, that are to be redeemed because they have by heart, the origin being a love letter? Even if the letter cannot be amortized, as Derrida insists it cannot, can the letter be “morgue-aged,” a word I coin at the risk of sounding merely facetious; that is, is the letter credited as such by virtue of having been stored before any sorting, an partition, even if what is stored cannot be retrieved, restored, revived, or reanimated? Is the heart that learns a bleeding heart? a heart that never stops pumping yet never stops bleeding, that just keeps hemmorgueing, that survives by refusing to know it is dead?

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

What wouldn’t Derrida have said!

What will he not have said!

This is an exclamation, not a question . . .

In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida tells two anecdotes about the two times he met Jacques Lacan in person: “I remark that the only two times we met and spoke briefly one with the other, it was a question of death between us, and first of all from Lacan’s mouth. In Baltimore, for example, he spoke to me of way in which he thought he would be read, in particular by me, after his death.”⁴⁷ Furthermore, Derrida devotes a paragraph summarizing his relation to Lacan as one of death:So there was a question between us of death; it was especially a question of death. I will say even only of the death of one of us, as it is with or chez all those who love each other. Or rather he spoke about it, he aloe, since for my part I never breathed a word about it. He spoke, alone, about our death, about his death that would not fail to arrive, and about the death or rather the dead one that, according to him, I was playing.⁴⁸ Will how we read The Post Card, a text to which Derrida returns in “Love Lacan,” have changed now that its author is dead, in the ordinary sense of the word?⁴⁹ Can we read it? Or can we gloss what remains of its burning, its ashes, its considers, “gloss” being a synonym for luster and derived from Old English, Scandiavanian, and Icelandic words for flame and glow? Does reading mean glossing over the question of glossing?⁵⁰

So You Say

In response to this question, let me cite two passages in The Post Card, both of which concern and a Lacanian reading of Derrida Lacan’s reading of Derrida that will help us begin glossing what I have called quasi-cruxes. The passage from the Post . . . I will cite first will recall Derrida’s exclamations, not questions, in “Love Lacan” about what Lacan will or would have said or not have said. This passage concerns Lacan and Derrida did (not) saying about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter in the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” and in “Le facteur de la vérité.” The passage is remarkable not only for the absence of bibliographical references but for about who said what but for having an anonymous third party tell this story about who meant to say what according to someone who goes mentioned and is therefore not exactly saying anything in the future anterior in the conditional:

Lacan, in truth, meant to say what I said, under the heading of dissemination. What next! As for me, all the while apparently speaking of dissemination, I reconstituted this word and therefore into a destination. In other words, if it can be put thus, Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I am only doing what he says he is doing. And there you are, the trick has been played, destination is back in my hand and “dissemination” is reversed into Lacan’s account. This is what I had describe to you one day, three-card monte, the agility of the expert hands to which one would yield oneself bound hand and foot.⁵¹ Who is speaking here in this envoi? Derrida? Maybe. Why is “dessimination” put in scare quotes? The speaker’s analogy between three card monte and what was said about Derrida merely repeating Lacan clearly serves to imply that a shell game has been unjustly played on Derrida’s texts / lectures about Lacan: “Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I am only doing what he says he is doing.” Derrida has been falsely said (but said by whom?) to have said what Lacan meant to have said then shrink-wrapped into one of three cards and entered into play in a game which Derrida will always lose. But Derrida does not say that. Is Derrida rigging the reading of what is still to be read, not just defensively and preemptively having someone voice a complaint about an injustice done—by who knows whom--to Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter?”

In “For the Love of Lacan,” a text that Derrida wrote, as I have said, after Lacan was dead, Derrida returns to the other passage in The Post Card I mentioned above, a passage which Derrida retells a story about Lacan misreading Derrida: “Lacan made a compulsive blunder; he said that he thought I was in analysis . . . The thing has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card (202-04).”⁵² Derrida spares the reader the task of rereading it but also allows any reader to stop reading “Love Lacan” and go to the Post . . . and reread it. Yet if the reader were to go to pages 202-04 of the Post . . . he or she would find that Derrida does not quote Lacan’s words when discussing what Lacan mistakenly said about Derrida was in analysis. See for yourselves. Only very near the end of “Love Lacan” does Derrida deliver the story along with the quotation from Lacan he left out of The Post Card: “In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever withdrawn from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the syntax and the reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about whom I did not know that –to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not know that he was in analysis—about whom I did not know that he was in analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who has written a preface to this Verbier.”⁵³ We will return to this passage later and attend several times in a necessarily paratactic fashion to Derrida’s retellings of this story. For now, I wish only to say that in “Love Lacan,” Derrida retells the anecdote he had already told before in the Post . . . in a way that makes it fully readable. Only in this later text, “For the Love of Lacan,” does Derrida retrieve Lacan’s words from the archive and cite them. Having retrieved them, however, Derrida does not read them. Nor does he quote Lacan’s next sentence in which Lacan reads Derrida’s preface “Fors” as evidence for Lacan’s supposition, not declaration, that Derrida is in analysis. Does it matter that to a reading of “For the Love of Lacan” that Derrida returned to what Lacan said about him and to what Derrida said about Lacan in nearly twenty years earlier, by Derrida’s count, in The Post Card, after Lacan died? Does the media Derrida references with respect to the archive in “Love Lacan,” the tape recorders in front of him recording what he says as he speaks, matter in relation to Lacan’s death the way the fax matters to Derrida when discussing Freud’s reliance on letters in Archive Fever?⁵⁴

As I have said, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” for a colloquium on Lacan organized and held after Lacan was dead, and “Love Lacan” was published first as an article in Lacan avec les philosophes (1991) and subsequently as the second chapter of Derrida’s book, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996). The three sentences with which I began the present essay paraphrase the first three sentences of “Love Lacan.” These sentences of “Love Lacan” are set off typographically on the page as three different lines:

What wouldn’t Lacan have said!

What will he not have said!

This is an exclamation, not a question . . . .⁵⁵Derrida repeats the phrase three times, the second inverting exactly the first, and on the same page just after the first paragraph: “What will Lacan not have said! What wouldn’t he have said!” This second, inverted repetition of the first two sentences, printed continuously on the page rather than broken into two separate lines as the first two sentences are. Derrida exclaims the nearly the same words a third time near the end of the section Derrida calls the “third protocol”: “what would Lacan have said or not have said!”⁵⁶ As I have already said more than once, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” after Lacan died, and Derrida sends off “Love Lacan” as if by he, Derrida, were already dead, already taking Lacan place, as if looking to how he, Derrida, will be read after his death. In this case, however, Derrida significantly leaving out the first of Derrida’s first two sentences about Lacan and the second of the second two: “What will I not have said today!”⁵⁷ Derrida retains only the negative formulation for himself, allows only what he will not have said, not what he will have said. He thereby leaves, as if shut, access to the exclamation of what he will or would have said today by erasing the published half of his archive in the form of an article.

JustUs

I must you to wait patiently for just a bit longer before we return to the passages in the Post . . . I cited and attend further to these stylistic repetitions concerning what will or wouldn’t have been said or not said, Derrida’s insistence that they are exclamations, not questions, and Derrida’s subtle but deliberate different rephrasings of the opening two lines, his division of Lacan and his division of himself from Lacan. For the moment, let me note a similar stylistic repetition to which we will need to attend alongside, or “with” the those I have just cited above: Derrida uses the words “I say good luck” twice, although he punctuates them differently:

In order to address these broader questions, let us attempt to grasp more exactly what motivates them, especially Derrida’s turn to the archive, by proceeding in an X-centric manner now to gloss another set of cruxes, with respect the way Derrida makes reading Lacan a question of the archive, in the last chapter of The Post Card, “Du tout,” and parentheses in a passage in “Love Lacan” the end of the sometimes forgotten last chapter “Du tout,” left untranslated as is “Le facteur de la vérité.”⁶⁵ First, let me pause to gloss the title “Du tout.” In The Post Card, Derrida several places talks about the Paratext as a book and its paratexts in different ways, as not a book, as a book with a false preface, as a book with four chapters, of “Facteur” as an appendix.⁶⁶ At one point, Derrida goes so far as enter a chapter of “To Speculate--on ‘Freud’” as a paratext even though the chapter is not finished: Of “Seven: Postscript,” Derrida says that “it resembles another postscript, another codicil, the postscript or codicil to the entire book this time. . . . This is the end: an appendix that is as reduced as possible, free, detachable too, a play appendix.”⁶⁷ The most anarchivic of Derrida’s remixes of his book is “Du tout,” a chapter that is arguably a long paratext to Derrida’s discussion of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” the “Facteur,” an epitext when published as an article but then turned peritext when published in The Post Card. Yet Derrida never reads “Du tout” as a paratext. He just refers to it as one of the “three last parts of the present work.”⁶⁸ “Du tout” is most “anarchivically” archival insofar as its inclusion is not motivated, not read as such, and therefore resembles the “seventh chapter” of The Post Card that “in certain respects adds nothing.”⁶⁹

The question of what is an error is an typo or a slip is what textual critics would ordinarily regard as a crux. The mention of the dead friend would have no bearing on the story about the error in the Écrits involving a crux the meaning of which Derrida aparently wants to leave undecided. In order to understand what I take to be a remote relation between mention and the story, I now move to what will be perhaps the most X-centric or perhaps the most XOXXOOOX-centric of the cruxes Derrida uses in “Love Lacan” and The Post Card, among all of those I will gloss. I say they are perhaps most X-centric because they are perhaps the hardest to notice; Derrida is not deliberately drawing his reader’s attention to them as he does the repetitions and inversions we saw in “Love Lacan.”

The crux I gloss bears directly on the questions we will have been asking about Derrida’s effacement of both the proper name and the title. In the first repetition and inversion, Derrida says Lacan told about him to a similar story someone else told Derrida at a conference, both of which Derrida tells with reference to a dead friend. In a passage in “Du tout” that repeats, or precedes, “p/repeats,” as if in reverse order, the passage in “Love Lacan” in which Derrida parenthetically mentions a dead friend while discussing Lacan’s blunder, Derrida tells a story soon after castigating Roustang about saying that what may have been a typo was actually a slip, Derrida says that he would “prefer to tell [us] a brief story,” a story that bears a remarkable, Derrida might (not) have said uncanny, resemblance to “Derrida’s story about Lacan saying that Derrida was “inanalysis” (sic).⁸² The story Derrida reverses Derrida’s relationship to the analyst. This time Derrida himself is said to be the analyst. At a conference, someone came up to tell Derrida she knew he was psychoanalyzing someone but didn’t give Derrida a name: ‘I know that so and so has been in analysis with you for more than ten years.” My interlocutor, a woman, knew that I was not an analyst, and for my own part I knew, to refer to the same shared criteria, that what she was saying with so much assurance was false, quite simply false.⁸³ In addition to the way the two stories invert Derrida’s position as analyst and analysand, both stories mention, as I have said, a dead friend of Derrida’s. This is the second repetition and inversion. Immediately after this story, in the telling of which Derrida leaves the woman unnamed, René Major invites Derrida to state the name of the person who was not in analysis: “Given the point we have reached, what prevents you from saying who is in question? To state his name now seems inevitable.”⁸⁴ Major does not ask Derrida to give the name of the woman who said she knew who Derrida was (not) analyzing. Derrida responds as follows:René Major asks me the name of the analyst in question. Is this really necessary? Moreover, my interlocutor did not name him. She contented herself with characteristics . . . No name was pronounced. It was only after the fact, reflecting on the composite that she had sketched, that I attempted an induction.⁸⁵ Here is the first narrative repetition. In the last pages of “Love Lacan,” repeats and inverts the woman’s story he tells in “Du tout”: this time Derrida tells the story of Lacan having said that Derrida having been an analysand, a story also about an error, the dead friend is mentioned in a parenthetical sentence within Derrida’s story about what Lacan said rather than before it or after it: “Lacan made a compulsive blunder,” Derrida writes; “he said that he thought I was in analysis.” Derrida proceeds to quote Lacan’s unofficial version. I now quote it again:

In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever withdrawn from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the syntax and the reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about whom I did not know that –to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not know that he was in analysis—about whom I did not know that he was in analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who has written a preface to this Verbier.”⁸⁶ Derrida then introduces in parentheses an anecdote in “Love Lacan” about the death of the a friend: “(Lacan . . . was then obviously unaware of the fact that one of the two [Derrida and his supposed analyst], was dead by the time I wrote the preface in question, which was this written to his memory, as homage, and in his absence.”⁸⁷ Only after inserting this parenthentical remark about a dead friend does Derrida return to Lacan’s blunder and ask “How could Lacan have made his listeners laugh . . . on the basis of a blunder, his own . . . ? How could he insist on two occasions on” Derrida’s “real status as noninstitutional analyst and on what he wrongly supposed to be my status as institutional analysand, whereas he ought to have been the first to . . .”⁸⁸

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 :