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

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  W. J. T. Mitchell Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2007), pp. 219-228
  
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  Jacques Derrida
  

Jacques Derrida

Translated by Gila Walker

“Jacques wanted no rites and no orations. He knows from experience what an ordeal it is for the friend who takes on this task. He asks me to thank you for coming and to bless you. He beseeches you not to be sad, to think only of the many happy moments you gave him the chance to share with him.

Smile for me, he says, as I will have smiled for you until the end.

Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival…

Written in the present tense—dictated by Jacques—what he says—wherever he is now. The “Survie” capitalized followed by an ellipsis “ . . . . ,” with “la,” as if inserted after the fact in front of it to its upper left, and a downward angle. Space after fist name “Jacque” meant to indicate the missing last name?

Restance is

so on. That means to think the rest otherwise or to think the rest as another, if you will.

Freddy Tellez and Bruno Mazzoldi, “The Pocket‐Size Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2007), pp. 362-388
“I will not claim to propose anything other than a brief note, and so as to narrow my topic even further, a note on a note.”

Jacques Derrida, “The Retrait of Metaphor,” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, 53.

Kamuf’s foreword just gives up on the possibility of anything like a bibliography with headnotes, the sort of work done by the editors of Work of Mourning, where each essay gets a headnote with its publication history. Reference my essay about the problems.

These texts have accompanied, in some fashion, the works I have published over the last ten years.1 But they have also been disassociated from those works, separated, distracted. . . . Each of the essays appears to be devoted, destined, or even singularly dedicated to someone, very often to the friend, man of woman, close or distant, living or not, known or unknown . . . Certain texts seem to bear witness better than others to this quasi-epistolary situation. “Letter to a Japanese Friend, “Envoi,” “Telepathy,” “Plato’s Letter,” or “Seven Missives.” “Seven Missives,” for example, might have stood in the place of the title or preface, thanks to the play of metonymy. I made another choice.

“Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, xii

“By disrupting the chronological order only once, I thought that “Psyche: Invention of the Other” might better perform this role.”

Derrida has a note in his preface

“2. When they are not simply unpublished, like the longest and the most recent among them, or unpublished in French, like a large number of them, these texts never conform exactly to their first versions, whose place of publication is noted each time.”

“Author’s Preface” in Psyche: Invention of the Other Vol. 1, 413.

“My Chances / Mes chances,” 368

“My Chances / Mes chances,” 369

“My Chances / Mes chances,” 376

in “Telepathy” 249

“pilot of the ship”

Retrait of Metaphor 49-50

One can treat responsibility as a precisely academic theme. One would exhume this archived topos, whose code would no longer be our own, along the lines of a celebration, an anniversary.

Jacques Derirda, “Mochlos”, Eyes of the University, 89

“Sendoffs (for the College International de Philosophie) (1982) Eyes of the University, 216-49.

“Everything begins in Belgium with a strange story of letters. Letters that are more or less purloined or detoured in their destination. . . “’Le Parjure,’ Perhaps,” Without Alibi, 175

Essays “Me—Psychonalysis” in Psyche, Invention of the Other VOl 1, 129-142 and also “Geopsychoanlaysis ‘and the rest of the world’,” Pysche, Invention of the Other VOl 1, 318-343

“The other reason concerns the place that one must recognize for Heidegger in Lacanian theory. This point was also imporant to me in my interterreation of Lacan’s Seeminar of Poe’s “Purloined Letter.”

The Rest of the World

““What I Would Have Said . . . ,” in Negotiatons: Interventons and Interviews 1971-2001 Trans. ElizabethRottenberg Standord 2002, 55-68.

Jacques Derrida Chapter four title “A Marginal Note or Remark—The Two Loose Pages” in The Archaelogy of the Friviolous: Reading Condillac, John P. Leavey Jr. , university of Nebraska, 1987, 113

Read the Post Card “intratexutally” in several ways.

Derrida assuems the finitude of the support vesus the infinity of reading (HC for Life “read her infinitely” 79 and textual criticism and literature (edition) on the other. He sidleines publishing and genetic criticism under the heading of the archive (Geneses Arhive)and all ediitons and adaptions under narrative and survivance of Robinson Crusoe in Beast and Sovereign 2

Unreadable takes for granted publication—another version of finitude—the egal constraints—around which Derrida reads parergonally. He reds back to ediitons, but not to manuscripts.

Historicist critique based on actor network theory or systems theory or someother cosicl cirucaltion model all close down rading. So does French genetique criticism.

Derrida also pays clsoe attention to publication and original occasion. Various kinds of embalming / archiving practices, self-citations and other reshelving operations of publishing histoyr. This is not find Derida is a simple logical contradiciotn but to question the way he makes sending a priori. In order to get around Heidegger (destiny) and Lacan (arrival), Derrida , in favor of chance, the aleatory, destinerrance , has to postulate that the post is sent just as the call isplaced, the phonerings. Or the phone meschnine records. So archive / ash follows—a kind offigure of what cannot be archived replaces the various things that do not get archived, like the prier d’inserer. Post card versus posthue.

No linearizaiton or biogrpahical reduciton, no narrative of Derrida’s progress thatwould situate the Post Card in one place.

Hegel’s irony is double: He knows htat elsewhere , objected to mnemotechnic formalism and learning “byheart.” Age of Hegel, 133

Let us come back to Matthew (Chap. 6). On three occasions there returns this truth, ike some obsessive reminder to belearned by heart. . . . It is a truth ‘to be learned by heart’ in the first place because one has the impression of having to learn it without understanding it, like a repeated and repeatable forumla (like our tout autre est tout autre just now . . . like a sealed message that can be passed to hand to hand or whispered mouth to ear). It is a matter of learning ‘by heart’ beyond any semantic comprehension.

“Tout autre est tout autre,” Gift of Death, 97

"Sortie: Le reve de J.D." in your fascinating and very timely (NSA scandal) book, Sur l'ecoute: esthetique de l'espionage I am also interested in whether posthumous publication might offer a wrinkle in your account of the "panacousticon" (great neologism, by the way) in that the spy is also a ghost, a revenant ecrit that makes itself hear with the voice of the Other (autre). I think of Derrida's chapter in The Gift of Death, "tout autre est tout autre."  Or has Derrida put us on hold, unable to hear "him" speak but forced to ask, as in Hamlet, "who's there?" Do we have to hold our breath?  Or posthume as we breathe (Circonfession, le bete et le souverain 2)?  Is l'autre a spectre? a living dead?  “53 “Supposing that—Glas or The POscard havea so’seclector,; a princieple or choice or discrimination (thematic or formal) for example the two columns . . Circonfessions, 276

“36 . .and I am trying to disinterest myselffrom myselfto withdraw from death by making the “I,” to whom death is supoed to happen, gradually go away,no,to be destroyedbefore death cometo meet it, so that at the end already there should benooneleft tobe scared oflosig the worldin losing hinselg in it, andhte last of the Jews that I stillam is doing nothing here other than destroying the worldon the pretext of making truth, but just as well the instense relation to survival that wiritng is =, not driven by the desire that somethingremain after me, sine I shall not be there to enjoy it iina word, there where the point is, rather, in producing these remains and therefre te witnesses of my radical absence, t live today, here and now, this death of me, for example, the very counterexample which finally reveals the truth of the world such as it is, itself, i.e. without me, and all the more intensely to enjoy this light I am producing through the present experimentation of my possible survival, i.e. of absolute death, I tell myself this every time I am walkingin the streets of tha city I love, in which I love, on whose walls I weep myself and was weeping myself again yesterday in the sight of the rue de l’Abbe de l’Epee not long after leaving you, G., at Gatwick. Circonfession. 190-92.

Cite the The Post Card on p. 89 in the caption to a cover of a notebook of 1976 concerning Elijah and circumcision.

There is a photo of JD’s Macintosh with a citation below, and the words in a boc across the screen “Cette command va creer un paragraphe trop long [This command will create an paragraph tha tis too long.” Not translated. No transcription of the words blocked out by the command either.

Photo of Derrida working at Ris Orangi Circonfessions, 11

you write in footnote 12, p. 152 that Derrida's "dernier mots" were read at his funeral.  Do you know who read them?  Did that person attribute the words to J.D. or say "quote" and "unquote" to indicate the quotation marks? Did the person offer any kind of critical commentary to explain what she or he was reading?  Second, do you know anything about the "arrangements," so to speak, Derrida made to have his note, reproduced in rue descartes on p. 7 (and also in an issue of Critical Inquiry and entitled "Final Words"), do you know if Derrida arranged for it to be read?  Did he plan to have it published?  Or did someone else decide to publish it?  Third, so you know if a title was given in rue descartes? Critical Inquiry cites the title "Derniers mots," but on p. 6 of Rue descartes, only "Jacque Derrida" is printed (at least in the online version).  And table des matieres gives only "Introduction."  (Btw, Critical Inquiry oddly--to my mind--translates "dernier" as "final" rather than "last," as in "Final Words.")  I am struck by the quotation marks Derrida placed around the note and his use of the third person.   and the lack of an addressee (preceding the remarks) or a signatory (J.D.).  Derrida appears to have wanted to be spoken for from beyond the grave (d'outre tombe) like Chateaubriand's mémoires d'outre tombe with the voice of an Other, a voice citing not J.D. but a citation J.D. did not sign and hence speaking for Derrida but not in his name (since he refused to sign) or even "his" words.  "Tout outre," as it were, "est tout outre."

The Age of Hegel, learning by heart and mnenotechnics

“philosophemes” 37

Section subtitled “The Signature: Art of Invenitng, Art of Sending”36-41

We could evoke the politics of publishing, the orders of booksellers or art merchants, studies of themarket, cultural policies, whether state-promoted or not, and the politics of research and, as we say these days, the ‘orientations’ that this poltiics imposes throughout our institutions of higher education . . . 27

I have just quoted my chances wiith regard to Poe’s pas de chance because what we have here is a preface or postface to “The Purveyor of truth,” to the thought of sending [la pensee de l’envoi] that gets relaunched there, to the randomness of missives ando the sendings of chance. My Chances,

“Of a Materiality Without Matter” susbtitle of typewriter ribbon Ink, Without Alibi, 128, like X without X”

Derrida postals, recalls, not a single channel, as with digital in Kittler. One medium morphs into another, as it does through langauge—telephone, post office, phone card, post card, etc. Configuration of skeuomorphs as metaphors, analogues.

Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire Trans. Charlotte Mandell

Michel Butor, Dans les flammes: Chanson du mone a Madame Nu (Paris, 1988)

“The good hour of the Purloined Letter,” Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, 105-06

Dying a living death being buried or swallowed up alive, is indeed, for Robinson, to be delivered over, in his body, defenseless, to the other (138)

Dying alive, swallowed alive, buried alive apply both to RC and to the book (133) and to the narrative (132).

Is swallowed” (eaten) already a psychoanlaytic register here? Burial cllpases into eating? A kind of auto-canaiblaizaiton of het xorpse, or zombie effect on the living (who become cannibals) ?
Dying a living death being buried or swallowed up alive, is indeed, for Robinson, to be delivered over, in his body, defenseless, to the other (138)

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)

Then Derrida wants to wake from this reading as reanimation psycho-anthropology of cultures . . present modernity of Greco-Abrahamic Europe, like ours,. . wonder what is happening to us that is very specific . . . 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)

A dead person is one who cannot him or himself put into operation any decision concerning the future of his or her corpse. The dead person no longer has the corpse at his or her disposal, there is no longer any habeas corpus. Habeas corpus, at least, is not a habeas corpse, supposing there ever were such a thing. Habeas corpus concerns the living body and not the corpse. Supposing, I repeat, that there ever were such a habeas corpus for the living body. Because you can guess that I believe that this habeas corpus never existed and is a legal emergence, however important it may be, designates merely a way of taking into account or managing the effects of heteronomy and an irreducible non habeas corpus, And the non habeas corpus at the moment of death, shows up the truth of this non habeas corpus during the lifetime of said corpus. 144

if one extends a little the idiom and the juridical law that binds this concept and this law to England, habeas corpus [see Agamben Homo Sacer on Habeas corpus as an extension of biopolitics; Derrida also uses the “zone” metaphor in B and S vol 2] accords a sort of proprietorial sovereignty over one’s own living body. I have the property of my own body proper, that’s the habeas corpus poss as to birth, conception, birth control, medicine, experimentation, organ transplants, etc [in other words, what Foucault calls biopolitics], to limit myself to the treatment of death. I shall not even speak of the specific problems of autosopy, DNA research , etc. I shall limit myself to the decision, the choice, the alternative between bury and cremate, and its relation to the fantasy of the living dead. [Derrida doesn’tntote that the canniblas both bury and cremate the uneaten remains of their dead prisoners. The cannibals are both raw and cooked, to recall Levi-Strauss.]

In the jewish community of Algeria, where people are buried, of

course, with no coffin, straight intthe ground in the shroud , ,  to

make ssure ice is not burying someone living, one plugs all the

orifices and lays out the corpse on cold titles long enough fir

stiffening, rigor mortis, to confirm beyond all doubt the legal or

medical certification of death that in the end one does not absolutely

trust. 145

Instead of starting with a fantasmatics “the fantasy of dying a living death” [a psycho-anthropological point of view] 144 leading to apoertics of inhumation ad cremation, we can start with a living corpse. Habeas corpse is the literary remains. Robinson C’s anxiety / fantasy is shared by Rousseau only in relation to the fate of his works. Rousseau stopping writing for publication. So Derrida too quickly invokes inheritance as a metaphor for textual transmission, or he boxes up what he could have unfoled but simly did not.

Agamben’s Homo Sacer as he situates his account of biopolitics directly in relation to Foucault and maintains that he has radicalized Foucault. Agamben ‘s critique of liberal democracy turns in part on habeas corpus:

The first recording of bare life as the new political subject is already implicit in the document that is generally placed at the foundation of modern democracy: the 1679 writ of habeas corpus . . . Nothing allows one to measure the difference between ancient and medieval freedom and the freedom at the basis of modern democracy better than this formula.  It is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the subject of politics.  And democracy is born precisely as the assertion and presentation of this “body”: habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, “you will have to have the body to show” (124-125).

Bring in de Certeau here as away of rethinking his notion of reading as sovereignty in order to make our book intelligible to history of the book people.

+ Chartier + Agamben equals Biopolitics of reading

We should try to rediscover the movements of this reading within the body itself, which seems to stay docile and silent but mines the reading in its own way: from the nooks of all sorts of “reading rooms” (including lavatories) emerge subconscious gestures, grumblings, tics, stretchings, rustlings, unexpected noises, in short wild orchestrations of the body. But elsewhere, at its most elementary level, reading has become, over the last three centuries, a visual poem.  It is no longer accompanied, as it used to be, by the murmur of a vocal articulation nor by the movement of a muscular manducation.  To read without uttering the words aloud or at least mumbling them is a “modern” experience, unknown for millennia. In earlier times, the reader interiorized the text; he made his voice the body of the other; he was an actor.  Today, the text no longer imposes its own rhythm on the subject, it no longer manifests itself through the reader’s voice.  This withdrawal of the body, which is the condition of its autonomy, is a distancing of the text. It is the reader’s habeas corpus (175-176).

Several friends recently brought to my attention a recent publication (“a pathetic Parisian tabloid in the style of Gala,” as one of them put it), whose author pontificates, without verifying anything, on what I’ve written and taught for a number of years now under the name unconditional hospitality. Obviously understanding nothing, the author even gives me, as if still back in high school, a bad grade and exclaims peremptorily in the margins of my paper: “Absurd!” Well, what can I say? . . . . note 12, 172 (Rogues)

Gives several self-citations on p 173 (still n.12) and then concludes

“as for the notion of sacrifice, which the same newspaper confusedly throws into the mix, I’ve written so much on the subject that a whole page of references would not suffice. One last bit of advice—uttered out of desperation: read everything! And ten, if need be, reread it!”

Derrida, “Privilege,” in Who’s Afraid of Philosophy

The possiblization of this power can also be read in the “internal” organization of Kantian discourse. 52 As for the “internal” difficulties of this machinery . . . 53
Derrida on Hegel’s letter written, when Hegel was 52, to the Royal Ministry of Spiritual Academic, and Medical Affairs,” appendix to “The Age of Hegel” in Who’s Afraid of Philosophy, 117—49; “Appendix,” 150-57, after Hegel last major work, Elements of the Philosophy of Right had been published.

See Derrida’s note 2, p. 203

Reference to the texts of the Philosophy of Right of Berlin as well as to the political scene of the epoch is a precondition for the minimal intelligibility of this letter. We should therefore specify immediately that it is becoming increasingly clear we must speak of the “Philosophies of Right” of Berlin. This multiplicity is not simply a matter of revisions, versions, editions, or additions.

Learning ‘by heart.’” (132)

In other words, Derrida comes up agains the publication history only to dimssis it.

Derrida citing Hegel’s letter: “if I do not die a professor of the Royal University, my contributions to the University Widows’ Fund will be entirely lost.” 127

memory, the recollection of certain lifeless contrents, 132

Hegel played the lottery . . . scrap of paper 130

All that, moreover, for a widow and children about whom he already thinks posthumously and thus with the paradoxical disinterestedness of the dead?” (128)

If this ‘special report’ has more or less disappeared from the great circulation of “canonized” texts, can this be explained entirely by reasons relating to its ‘form’? It is, first of all, a letter. Of course, there is a venerable tradition of philosophical letters. But what does this tradition consist and what does it preserve? Either ‘fictive’ letters on topics . . .They are usually read as they were novels or memoirs.. . . This tradition, as we have described it. Cannot find a place of Hegel’s ‘letter.’ It is not really a ‘letter,’ although it bears the marks of one. It is less addressed to a person than to a function. 136; 137

“at least in the form of a political metaphor, the theme of a Bemachtigungstrieb, a drive for ascendancy, for power, or for possession. I tried to show elsewhere, in a long Post Card, how the word and concept of Bemachtigung,” however discreet they are and however underanalyzed by Freud’s readers, are present beginning in he Three Essays and play in Beyond a decisive role, beyond or on this side of the principles, as principal drive, if I can say that, notably in love / hate ambivalence and the unleashing of cruelty that calls up the hypothesis of originary sadism. . . there would thus be a concept of a drive that for power . . that organizes . . the whole order of what Lacan called the symbolic.” 258

Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty,” Without Alibi, 238-80; to 262.

“In this text [Aristotle’s Politics], as in so many others both by Plato and Aristotle, the distinction between bios and zoe--or zen—is more than tricky or precarious; in no way does it correspond to the strict opposition on which Agamben bases the quasi-totality of his argument about sovereignty and the biopolitical in Homo Sacer (but let’s leave that for another time).” P. 24

Pun on “card” in English (not “carnet and “carte” but like “post” as mail and police in French)

It would be necessary to dissociate a certain unconditional independence of thought, of deconstruction, of justice, of the Humanities, of the university, and so forth from any phantasm of indivisible sovereignty and of sovereign mastery.”

“The University Without Condition,” in Without Alibi, 235

“Sending” chapter 10, 108-14 in Rogues, and

“To Arrive—At at the Ends of the State (and of War, and of World War),” Rogues 141-59; “revois” , p. 38

Examples of self-citation note 8, 162

Inn both cases it seemed to me more approriate to publish these texts as such in order to respectnot only the constrints and limits imposed on htem but also in their original aduiences. None of the distinguishing features provided by the original lcontexts have thus been edited out or modidfied: on such a day, in such a place, before such an audience. Only a few notes were added after the fact. N3.162 self-citations, n. 12, 173

Heideggerian deconstruction (Destruktion) never relaly opposed logicentrism or even logos. Indeed, it often, on the contrary, in the name of a more “orginary” deeper interpretation that it carried out thedeconstruction of lasical ontology or ontotheology.

2

The “deconstrction” that I attempt or that tempts me is not only distinct (in ways too numerous and too widely discussed welwwhere for me to recall here) from the one practised by Heidegger. Note 14, 173 in Rogues

Hence I never associated the theme of decnstruciton with the the themes s that were constantly being brought up during the discussion, themes of ‘diagonosis,” of “after” or “post,” of “death” (death of philosophy, death of metaphysics, and so on) of”completion” or “surpassing” (Uberwindung or Scritt zuruck), of the “end.” One will find no trace of such a vocabulary in nay of my texts. Note 2, 174 Rogues,

“Psychoanalysis would be the same of that which which, without theological or other alibi, would be turned toward what is most proper to cruelty. Psychoanalysis . . . would be another name for the “without alibii.” “Psychoanalysis Searches”, Without Alibi 240 “cruelty, sovereignty, resistance” 242; “Freudian psychoanalysis” 257

Freudian psychoanalytic discurse” 258
Derrida on Die Welst ist fort, ich Paul Celan’s dich tragen” (see also Rogues, 155)
“I carry you then in the void, the time it takes to fly or swim not from one island to another in the world, but from one non-shore to a non-shore, between two non-arrivals.”

Beast and Sov 2, 268 (369)
“the finite time of such an impossible voyage between two non-shores where nothing happens”

268 (370)

Can Derrida Die?"  (It would be a reframing of

JD's reading of Heidegger on the animal perishing but not dying

(Sterben) as only Dasein can in relation to a paragraph in Being and

Time on "after death,"  as a paragraph that follows Heidegger's

distinction between demise / perish and death on which Derrida does

not comment; the reframing would open up the notion of posthumographic

criticism, oriented to the future, to publication--as opposed to

genetic criticism, oriented to the past, to manuscripts, to unpublished

materials--so that one would not pass from the disorder of an archive

of papers and mss to the order of a published work but from one kind

of mess to another.  In other words, one would not pass.)   Did I tell

you I found a will--just published in English translation--that