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

It was found written on a piece of paper found in Pascal's clothing after his death. . . 209

And Pascal was only thirty-one years old when he wrote and put into his clothing the posthumous paper 210

To whom did he write this? To whom did he write in general? For there is in Pascal . . . a “do not remember me,” a ‘keep me in oblivion,’ . . . a ‘forget me’ about which one can always wonder if it is not also praying that one remember to forget and even attach oneself to the one thus praying that one not attach oneself to him. 210

“[there is no doubt, then, that the general form of the posthumous fragment by Pascal us both, indissociably, that of the prayer and of a journal for self or for other humans, other neighbors and brothers in sin], and also, [primarily, a prayer addressed to God and to Jesus his son], even though often this prayer quotes words from the the Bible . . . ,” 213
The paradox of the “forget me,” “do not love me,” is to be found in Pascal, and there is again consigned to another paper as his elder sister Gilberte Pascal says 210
This is indeed what has been called a memorial, to use the word of a witness, Father Guerrier” 212
“Memorial” is inserted at the head of the note in the Oxford World Classics translation

1. Ps. XXVIII, 16. --- Ces trois denieres lignes ne figurent pas sur la autographe de la Bibliotecque nationale: il est possbible cependant eq’elles aient appartenus au parchemin original.” 143.

A special receipt was issue for the Memorial when it was deposited on 25 September 1711, to the library of the of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, demonstrating that it was considered a document apart from the fragments now known as the Pensees. The document, presumably written within hours of the experience it records, captures the moments of a movement of profound spiritual exaltation. pp. 24—45, note 178

“Opuscules—Deuxieme partie,” in Pensées et opuscules / Blaise Pascal ; publiés avec une introduction, des notices, des notes et deux fac-similés du manuscrit des Pensées ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris : Hachette, 1946), 142.
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its moment on, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving the body of a thing buried in a library, a bookstore, in cellars, urns, drowned in the world-wide waves of a Web, etc., but a dead thing that resucitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality ontends it and makes it live again by animating it, like as the Husserl of The Origin of Geometry woould say, a “geistige Leiblichkeit,” a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Lieb and not Körper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. 131

The 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 for 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. A weave of survival, like death in life or life in death, a weave that does not come along to clothe a more originary existence, a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist under this clothing. The Beast and Sovereign 2, pp. 131-32 (194-95)

Compare the weaving / clothing metaphor to Pascal’s shirt.

Derrida’s analysis of Heidegger in The Animal That Therefore I Am as well as in The Beast and Sovereign 2 focuses on Heidgger’s distinction between demise (Ableben) and dying [Sterben]: “Dasein . . . qua Dasein . . does not simply perish. We call this intermediate phenomenon its demise (Ableben). Let the term dying [Sterben] stand for the way of being in which Dasein is toward its death. Thus we can say Dasein never peishes. Dasein can suffer demise only as long as it dies.”

The ontological analysis of being toward the end . . . does not anticipate any existentiell stance toward death. If death is defined as the “end” of Dasein, that is, of being-in-the-world, no ontic decision has been made as to whether “after death” another being [Sein] is still possible, either higher or lower, whether Dasein “lives on” or even, “outliving itself,” is “immortal.” Nor is anything decided ontically about the otherwordly and its ossibility, any more than about “this worldly,” as of norms and rules for behavior toward death should be proposed for edification.” But our analysis of death remains purely “this-worldly”in that it interprets the phenomenon solely with respect to the question of how it enters into each and every Dasein as its possibility-of-being. We cannot even ask with any methodological assurance about what is after death until death is understood in its full ontological essence. Whether such a question presents a possible theoretical question at all is not to be decided here. The this-world ontological interpretation of death comes before any ontic, other-worldly speculation . . . The existential analsyis is methodologically prior to questions of a biology, psychology, theodicy,and theology of death. P 238; 239 (248); see the end of the last sentence of the note on “’problems of life’”at the bottom of page 239, after the last sentence of the body of the text.

Kittler, Post Card, 180