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

Derrida Destroyed . . . Derrida Archived . . . Derrida Published . . . Derrida Perished [Ableben] . . . Derrida Died [Sterben] . . . Derrida Survived [Uberleben] . . . Derrida Posted . . . “Jacques Said . . .”

Hence, if my letters and the like could be important at all, no collection of them should be published since such a collection only serves the curiosity and the comfort of those who want to evade the ask of thinking.

--Martin Heidegger, “On Preserving What Is Attempted”²

What would happen if the pack of the curious once throws itself at the “posthumous works”! It cannot be expected from this commotion grasp anything at all or to transform what is grasped into the futural. [G428] For the gang of the curious only longs for that which completes this gang’s own already established calculation and confirms it in each case.

--Martin Heidegger, “On Preserving What Is Attempted,” in Mindfulness (Besinnung). trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, Continuum, 2006, 270-78, to 277.
If deep down these “posthumous works” do not possess the power of ‘letting-go-ahead’ [Vorlassen]—do not posses[sic] the power of path-opening-grasping-ahead into an entirely other and quite drawn-out questioning—these “posthumous works” would not be worth being pondered upon. The mere enlargement of what is already published is superfluous.

--Martin Heidegger, “On Preserving What Is Attempted,” in Mindfulness (Besinnung). trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, Continuum, 2006, 270-78, to 277.

--Jacques Derrida, The Post Card¹

--Jacques Derrida, Post Card²

James Joyce, Ulysses³

--Edgar Allan Poe, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1850) ⁴

--Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets,” in Off the Beaten Track⁶

--Jacques Derrida, The Post Card⁷

Ainisi, je ne laisse un papier inédit excepté quelques bribes imprimées que vous trouverez puis le Coup de Dés⁸ et Héroiodae terminé s’il plait au sort.

-- Stéphane Mallarmé, “A Marie et Genvieve Mallarmé [le 8 septembre, 1898]

Recommendation quant a mes Papiers

(Pour quand le liront mes chéries)” ⁹
Hölderlin is the forerunner of the poets in a desolate time. That is why no poet can overtake him. The forerunner, however, does not go away into a future, rather he arrives from it in such a way that in the advent [Ankunft] of his words alone the future [Zukunft] presences. The more purely the advent takes place, the more essentially, the more essenced, it remains. . . . That is why it would be erroneous to say that Hölderlin’s time would arrive come only when “everyone” understands his poetry. It will never come in such a deformed way. . . . What has merely passed away is already, in advance of its passing away, without destiny. What has been in an essential way, by contrast, is the destining. In what we suppose is eternity, something merely transitory [Vergängliches] has been concealed, but away into the void of a now without duration.”

--Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets,” in Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege] ¹⁰

--Jacques Lacan, “The Function of the Written,” On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Encore XX 1972-1973), 37 Ed. Bruce Fink, Jacques-Alain Miller.³

--Maurice Blanchot, "The Last Word," in Friendship⁴

Courage! Courage, now! You need heart and courage to think . . . the living dead.

--Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 2¹¹

--Helene Cixous, Or, les lettres de mom pere¹²

[. . .] J’arrive donc le dernier, une fois encore, avec ma letter, apres la fete.

--Jacques Derrida

The posthumous is becoming the very element mixes in everywhere with the air we breathe . . .

--Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2, op cit, 181 (258) and 179 (256).

This is what I dream . . . Before my death I would give orders. If you aren’t there, my body is to be pulled out of the lake and burned, my ashes are to be sent to you, the urn well protected (“fragile”) but not registered, in order to tempt fate. This would be an envoi of / from me un envoi de moi which no longer would come from me (or an envoi come from me, who would have ordered it, but no longer an envoi of / from me, as you like). And then you would enjoy mixing my ashes with what you eat (morning coffee, brioche, tea at 5 o’clock, etc.). After a certain dose, you would start to go numb, to fall in love with yourself, I would watch you slowly advance toward death , you would approach me within you with a serenity that we have no idea of, absolute reconciliation. And you would give orders . . . While waiting for you I’m going to sleep, you’re always there, my sweel love.

The Postcard, 196¹³
Before my death I would give orders. If you aren’t there, my body is to be pulled out of the lake [lac] and burned, my ashes are to be sent to you, the urn well protected (‘fragile’) but not registered, in order to tempt fate. This would be an envois of / from me [an envoi de moi] which no longer would come from me (or an envoi sent by me, who would have ordered it, but no longer an envoi of me as you like). And then you would enjoy mixing my cinders with what you eat (morning coffee, bricohe, tea at 5 o’clock, etc.). After a certain dose you would start to go numb, to fall in love with yourself, I would watch you slowly advance towards death, you would appraoch me within you with a serenity that we have no idea of, absolute reconciliation. And you would give orders . . . While waiting for you I’m going to sleep, you’re always there, my sweel love.”

Jacques Derrida, Cinders (Derrida’s ellipsis)¹⁴

Tom Mueller “CSI: Italian Renaissance,” Smithsonian magazine, July-August 2013,50-59 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/CSI-Italian-Renaissance-213878331.html#Italian-Renaissance-female-skeleton-1.jpg Such work is not without its critics, who brand scholars such as Fornaciari as little more than grave-robbers, rejecting their efforts as a pointless, even prurient, disturbance of the dead’s eternal rest. Yet paleo-sleuthing has demonstrated its value for the study of the past and future. As Fornaciari has solved some of history’s oldest riddles and murder mysteries, his work also holds life-and-death relevance.

Jane Buikstra Charlotte Roberts, The Global History of Paleopathology:

“there is never a choice between what is to be read in an open book (as visible as the nose in the middle of one’s ‘face’!) and the most hermetic script. It’s the same—insupportable support. I didn’t dare say “like a post card,” the atmosphere was too pious. On the way out, diverse presentations. “With you, one can no longer present oneself,” a young American (I think) woman says to me. She gives me to understand that she has read (before me, therefore, she was just coming from the U.S.) “Moi, la psychanalyse” in which I let play, in English the so difficult-to-translate cvocabulary of presentation, of presentations, of “introductions,” etc. [Me—Psychoanalysis, trnaslated in Psyche Invention of the Other.

The Postcard, 197

Imperative will always be the question of principle, the question of principles, and the question of the principle—of the principial, of the sovereign prince, and of princedom. Freudian psychoanalysis—psychoanalysis as science, psychoanalysis that never abandons its aim to be a science, although a science apart from others—will have reckoned a lot with principles, as is well known.

Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches” Without Alibi, 257

Derrida Glas corpse Hegel mourning burial citizen

The Gelke psassae is in book two SPirt, of The henomenology of Spirit, pp. 269-778. A.V. Miller trans.

Levinas discusses the same passage in “From the Science of Logic to the Phenomenology,” in God, Death, and Time, 79-87; to 83.

Since the Gee text remains to be read, I re-form here its ellipse around two foci: (the) burial place), the liaison between brother and sister. . . . in its essentiality, singularity can only disappear, can posit itself as such only in death. If the family thus has the singularity of its own proper object, it can only busy itself around death. Death it is essential object. Its destination is the cult of the dead; the family must consecrate itself to the reorganization of the burial (place). . . (2142) The pure singularity, stripped but incapable of passing to universality, is the dead—more precisely the name of the dead—is the corpse, the impotent shadow, the negation of the living being-there inasmuch as that singularity has not yet given rise to the life of the citizen. Already dead (as empiric existence), not yet living (as ideal universality). If the family’s thing is pure singularity, one belongs to a family only in busying oneself around the dead: the toilette of the dead, institution of death, wake, monumentalization, archive, heritage, genealogy, classification of proper names, engraving on tombs, burying, shrouding, burial place, funeral song, and so on. . . . Entrusting with death, the guardian of a marrowless body, on the condition that the woman erect his burial place after shrouding the rigid corpse (unction, bandages, etc.), maintaining it thus in a living, monumental, interminable surrection. (143)

Pure singularity: neither the empiric individual that death destroys, decomposes, analyzes, nor the rational universality of the citizen, of the living subject. (143)

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