Read After Burning, I pray You, or la carte posthume
Download 2.22 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Burn After Rereading Reread Before Burning Insupportable Reading
- Burn by Heart
- Type Writer Ribbing of Derrida
- Screaming Driver , Screaming Drivers Wife
Survivance—as a structuring strucutre that genrates a series of differeneces that matter or don’t accrding to at various historical moments, what copy you have, what lanuguage it is in, what edition, hardcover or apperback, paper used,etc. and revivified by the reader. Wetwares storage notion of the archive. Diffference betweenarhcival materials and their publication—recursive since new editions can be published.Assumption is that paper only is paper once it is written on—only papers with writing in the ordinary sense can be archived. But move from archive to publication introduces media that remediate the archival materials. Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies created by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-vivance. Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130). Relation of selection and sur-vivance. Is the “Envois” a disturbed or unfilled fantasy of genetic criticism, the author telling the story about what was or was not destroyed, what was allowed to live? In Beast and S 2, Derrida mentions RC and later versions, but starts with the first edition. First word before the first word—first publication before the first publication; a last publication after the last word, as in last word after the last word? Bears on the problem of the material support, the problem of reading (or not reading), and the problem of narrative.19 I have already sufficiently formalized readability under erasure and the logic of the event as graphematic event—notably as event of the proper name, in which the little devil arrives only to erase itself / by erasing itself—to be spared having to add anything here for the moment. Resistances, 48. Derrida does not provide a citation. “Off the record” means not recorded, outside the archive. We are thus brought back to the difficult question of the record, history, and the archive. Is there an “outside-the-archive”? Impossible, but the impossible is deconstruction’s affair. At bottom, beneath the question that I will call once again the remaining [restance] of the archive—which does anything but remain in the sense of the permanent subsistence of a presence—beneath this question of the differance or the distinerrance of there archive. Thus, not with Lacan in general —who for me does not exist, and I never speak of a philosopher or a corpus in general as it were a matter of a homogenous body: I did not do so for Lacan any more than for any other. The discussion was begun rather with a forceful, relatively coherent, and stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of the collection and binding of Écrits, in other words, in 1966. Resistances, 48-49 Now if there is one text that stands more than any other in this position and at this post of binder [sic], it is the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” As you know, the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” is given a “privilege,” which is Lacan’s word; I quote Lacan: “the privilege of opening the sequence [the sequence of the Écrits] despite its diacnhrony.”4 In other words, Écrits collects and binds together all the texts out of which it is composed in chronological order (according to the “diachrony” of prior publication with the exception of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” which, by coming at beginning is thereby given the privilege of figuring the synchronic configuration of the set and thus the binding the whole together. It therefore seemed legitimate to take a privileged interest in this privilege. If I use the word binding here, the binding that holds together the moment of reading and rereading, it is because of one of the two sole occasions in my life on which I met Lacan and spoke briefly with him, he himself spoke to me of binding and the binding of the Écrits. I am not telling these stories for the same of amusement or the distraction of anecdotes, but because we are supposed to be talking here about the encounter, tukhe, contingency—or not—and what binds, if you will the signature of the event to the theorem. Resistances, 49 Here Derrida stops reading the publishing history, the gap between 1975 and 1966, and moves to an extra-discursive but somehow more immediate and therefore better justification for what he did because Lacan personally, as it were, gave him permission. He proceeds to tell the anecdotes about meeting Lacan over the next two and a half pages before returning to “the republication of the paperback edition in 1970” (52). But Derrida forgets that the Écrits publishes the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” in two versions; the essay begins over. Seminar is not an isolated heading, a caption that binds; it already subverts that function. Furthermore, Lacan cites Beyond the Pleasure Principle and. Although Derrida reads some of Freud’s notes very closely, he does not read the paratexts of the Écrits. Instead, he reconfigures the configuration: I link this and bind it once again to the binding of the great book. I go back then to the period (the end of the 1960s, 1965, 1966-67) when Écrits was being bound under the sign of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’”
The post without post, 159 He has read all of us 148 Phone anxiety, 159 Says Socrates, our friend, whom I rereading in translation of our friends, 158 I am trying anew to work on my legacy and on this accursed preface. 158 Now “Legs” and Legacies” are no longer a title of a book but Derrida’s own legacy. Reread the whole thing (p.100), it’s wonderful. 158 Note p. 150 on Lacan The secret without measure: it does exclude publication, it measures publication against itself. . . at how many thousands of readers do the family circles end? 144 “Dechimenation,” 142 Therefore you must not read me. 142 Who reads me 147 Reread what follows 142 Reading the Post Card after Écrits (2005) Cite Blaise Pacal fire—poem / note to self posthumously published, Derrida’s discussion. Compare to Foucault in response to Derrida, this paper this fire Derrida on signature, 136 Derrida abbreviates titles, truncates them to their first word. Beyond . . . p. 139, 147; legs ; Specter, 132 Idiomatic, 138 “See also” 139 proof 136 but read closely, turning slowly, the for corners, around the 4 times 4 rectangles, perhaps it does not form a single sentence but this is my life and I dedicate it to you. 139 Passage on posthumous publication deserves attention in itself But dead letter and letters. Derrida does not deconstruction that distinction. Always already dead. Yet on the way to being published. Bibliographical information about editions get pushed over into the notes, generally, both by Derrida and by Alan Bass (who operates as both in Living On, and to copyright pages. But all kinds of differences between editions and translations do not get archived. Idiosyncratic narratives may be told, end up as a narrative. . If we want to dismiss these microdifferences as fetishes, in the name of what non-problematic level of generality would we do so? Generality is more a problem for Derrida that fetishism is. There is no parergon of this history, of its traits, retraits, and so on in book history, textual practice, and so on, no frame of reference, confined by the relay “See also”. Commentary without comment, not like Marxism without Marx. When does comment, annotation, become discursive? Anecdote an anecnote? Difficult to tell not because one reaches an aporia but instead confronts not reading and nonreading? Paratext supposed by go to be unread, invisible. JD conceals ciphers illegible. An economy of no returns. Speculation. But kind of investment? Graphic economy as opposed to an “Icon”omy. Value of reproduction(s) of the postcard, the hit of the image, as opposed to describing it. No comment as a comment, a non-denial denial, All the President’s Men. Burn everything as opposed to publish everything. No way to know that it is a postcard, however, as the reverse side is not reproduced, the side with information, caption, etc. This part is not published, not transcribed. Is the first line a quotation of first line of Dissemination, also about prefaces?
IS the notion of a beginning merely naïve? The end as the beginning, with the move to “tu” in the footnote. The paratext as a graphic “place” ; Glossary stops shot of an index. Gives the note number, but not the page number. Reading randomly; backwards; by chance, as in “Meschances.” Decipher, 42 Facsimiles in The Post Card. Already reproductions, iconography, versus ekphrasis Cutting and pasting, 41 And moreover I obey at every moment without seeming to: to burn everything, forget everything . . . Facteur de la verite, 40 For the moment I am cutting and pasting. 41 And while driving I held it on the steering wheel 43 Decipher, 43 The stamp is not a metaphor. 46 Who is driving? Doesn’t it really look like a historical vehicle? A gondola? No, except plato is playing gondolier, perched in the back, looking away in front of him the way one guides the blind. He is showing the direction. 46 For us, for our future, nobody can tell. 47 She will put the letter back into circulation once she has read it. 49 And the case will be proven, 51 To enclose myself in a book project. 51 False preface to Freud, 51 And it would also inscribe Le facteur de la verite as an appendix, with the great reference to the Beyond . . . 53 French cover and Chicago book cover both reproduce the image. “Bass Notes” (La-Bas) My post card dissertation 54 But I would really like to call the book philately 65 No, I will never rewrite it, that letter. 57 I’m not making it up! 63 You see him reading me at this very instant 67 No rigorous theory of “reception,” however necessary it might be, will get to the end of that literature. 71 Finally, he would consent, see The Purloined Letter, and the queen too, and Dupin too, and the psychoanalyst too” 71 Purim Pur lot 72; 74-75 Difficult to tell 74 Believe without proof 76 Amnesia 77 Okay, let’s drop it. I am rereading myself, thus at the end of the word “lottery” 81 When you are reading, 79 It has to be read in Greek, 87 Okay, let’s drop it, I will continue to scratch, read while writing my knowing letter, rather than taking note’s on those little white pieces of cardboard that you always don’t give a damn about. 87 And he adds, following my finger (I am citing but always rearranging a little. Guess the number of false citations in my publications . . . ):” 89 Literature epistolary genres, 88 To read among others, the Socratic letters in which he grouped the anecdotes concerning the life, method, and even the death of the Athenian philosopher [Socrates]” 91 Prophylactic guarding of the letter incorporated in the “by heart.” 93 The Oxford card is looking at me. I am rereading Plato’s letters. 93 Always reports, feigns reporting, as if he were reading 93 But contrary to what goes on in The Purloined Letter 95 Reading it will be impossible to understand94 The other does not answer, is not published 96 The one who scratches and pretends to write in the pace of the other who writes and pretends to scratch. 98 Dream of the original imprint . . Visa or Mastercharge. . . tympan 101 Ciphered letters, 93 I have said it elsewhere 124 Phomomaton of myself 125 Derrida anticipates the cell phone on vibrator mode: When will we be able to call without ringing? There would be a warning light or one could even carry it one oneself, near the heart or in the pocket, for certain coded calls, some signal. 87 Rite versus lean by heart 82 Tomorrow, if I want to write this preface, I will set myself to running down all the paleo- and neo-testamentary courriers. And why not, while I’m at all the death dentneces [arrets de mort] and all the police regulations [arrestes de police] on the pretext that they are sent or signify! And htat everything that is is sent willy-nilly is law . . . Alo turns the law,plays on it, but that’s the law. Postcard, 75 This owld be like a purificiation by fire. Not a single trace, an absolute camoflaging by means of too much evidence: cards on the table, they won’t be able to see anything. They will throw themselves onto unitelligible remainders. Come from who knows where in order to preface a book about the Platonic inheritance, the era of the posts, the structure of the letter and other common goods and places. Postcard, 175 Undated (probably the same period) That you have put an end to the “remission” by once again remembering the “dead letter,” the “past” and all the rest does not astonish me. Postcard, 137 For example in le Factuer de la verite a note amoutns to agreeing, a note they have not even been able to read it was so unberable)” postcard, 40 On the dead letter office, 124 14 october 1977“’Divison of dead letters’ is a stroke of genius. Myself, I say, “division of living letters,” and this is what more or less aounts to the same. Everything isplayed out, remains, wins-and-loses, on the basiss of my ‘divisibility’” 124
I’m taking ntoes for the preface . . [Socrates and Plato] stand guard and satellize every one of our phrases (one day, I will be dead, if you reread the post cards I sent you, by thousan,ds not so, even before I fell upon S. and p., . . 121 Perversion of the playback, 120 One can say he is writng, a mirror, or on a rearview mirror 119 Like music paper, 118 Once again I am affixing myself to put an endto my letter: another photoaumaton of myself,pitiless, no? 125 13 August 1979 You are right in part, it would have to have been made into, precisely, a post-face, this is indeed the word, in particular because it’s uninteilligible fif you do nto beginw ith what follows—if notby the end, and as they never reread . . . Too bad. Postcard, 240 I scratch and I erase everything with the other hand. Therefore you must not read me. Postcard,143 Reread what follows . . . Postcard, 142 Burn by Heart Strange story. Again you suspect me of have sent it. I do no dare open it to reread it . . . But I will not send it to you a second time—in any case, I will never reread it. 76 No more than this card that you are reading now, that you are holding in your hands or on your knees. 73 Signature 73 Reading the last one (for it is he who reads me, you see him here . . . 63 Another way of saying that you had reread it, no? which is what one begins doing when on rereads, even for the first time. Repetition, memory, etc. . . . P. asks D. to reread before burning, so be it, in order to incorporate the letter (like a member of the resistance under torture). 59-60 Rearview mirror of an automobile that pauses 60 One day, please, read me no more, and even forget that you have read me. 36 And soon we will be able to afford that answering machine. 36 I’ll see you before you read this. 36 I always come back to the same card. 34 Repetition compulsion is understood even less, 35 All this because you didn’t want to burn the first letters, 14 With stupefying dexterity they move three cards after having you choose one. 36 The coded “words” to which Alan Bass refers in his glossary are “EGEK HUM XSR STR” p. 148 (Bass does not give the page reference, and is no longer glossing, though the last entry does refer the reader a footnote.) I await everything from an event that I am incapable of anticipating. 47 Speaking of which, M., who has read the seminar on Life Death along with several friends, tell me I should publish the notes without changing anything. This is impossible, of course, unless I detach the sessions on Freud, or only the one on Freud’s legacy, the story of the fort/da with little Ernest. 41 Without seeming to burn everything, 40 I think I made this film for myself even before I knew how to drive. If I were not afraid of waking everyone I would come, in any case I would telephone. When will we be able to call without ringing [anticipates the vibe setting on cell phones]. There would be a warning light or one could even carry it on oneself, near the heart or in the pocket, for certain coded calls, some signal. 87 “and not only in the way a negative is developed” PC, 43 “These letters of “Plato,” that Socrates, of course, would have neither read nor written., I now find them greater than the works. I could like to call you to read out loud several extracts from the “stands” they have mandated, commanded, programmed for centuries as I would like to use them for my legs. I am typing them, or rather one day you will return this letter to me). . . . And if I read out loud, the most irreplaceable ones, don’t you think . . . you always imitate better than I). Listen . . .[reread it as if I had written it myself, starting from the “philosopher’s notes, especially the end which more or less [note Derrida’s comments on “more or les” a phrase his father used, in “For the Love of Lacan”] says this—but the whole thing would have to be retranslated: This letter, all three must be read together as much as possible, if not at the same time and as often as you are able. Look at it as a way to take an oath and as a convention having the force of law, on which it is legitimate to swear with a seriousness mixed with grace and with the badinage of the serious . . . Take as a witness the god chief among all things present and future, and the all-powerful father of the chief and its cause, whom we all know, if we philosophize truly and with all the clarity possible for men enjoying beatitude.” It has to be read in Greek, my very sweet one, as if I were writing it to you. Myself.) So then I pick up my citation again, 8586; 86-87 Derrida will make more mistakes, 27 (“reprosuction” instead of “reproduction”), 27 Typo versus slip, 513 Typo? 216, “head” instead of the more obvious “had” Typos, 152, 228 Reproduction of reproduction, 35; 37 It is Socrates’ writing surface” 17 Thereby to give the slightest hope of reading it one day 127 I want to reread the entire corpus platonicum 129 Brotherl 129 You can feel he has a hard-on in his back 128 And they publish everything 132 I remember the ashes. What a chance, to burn, yes yes [no punctuation] 23 This entire post card ontology 22 Two hands, the mystic writing pad, 25 That we will be able to send sperm by post card, 24 For example, I write on post cards, oh well I write on post cards. “I” begins again with a reprosuction (say, I just wrote reproSuction: have you noticed that I make more and more strange mistakes, is it fatigue or age, occasionally the spelling goes, phonetic writing come back in force, as in elementary school, only to others whom I confusedly looked down on—the lapsus or “slips” obviously). And by means of a reproduction that is itself reproduced serially, always the same picture on another support, but an identical support, differing only in numero. 27 The postal principle 27 7 hours in the car with the old film of the accident to resolve everything, 87 I still do not know how to see what there is to see. 16 As if he were running to catch a moving train, 17 On the back of the same card, I write you all the time, 16 Out of this atrocious exclusion that we make of all of them—and every possible reader. The whole reader. 16 I had read in his glance that he was begging for the impossible. 14 Write it in cipher, 1 Silent move, 13 But that which checks As if what is invisible here could take a reading into account. 502
archive, 506 the decrypting, in these conditions, can no longer come from the simple and alleged interior of what is still called, provisionally, psychoanalysis. 540 Rene Major: I first of all would like you to convey to you the profound malaise I experience reading Glas, Du Tout, 499 I ask you to forget, to preserve in amnesia. 12 The secret of reproduction, 12 Look closely at this card, it’s a reproduction. I confide to you this solemn and sententious aphorism: di not everything between us begin with a reproduction? Yes, and at the same time . .. the tragedy is there. 9 I will have sent you only cards. Even if they are letters and if I always put more than one in the same envelope. 8 What a couple. Socrates turns his back to plato [sic], who has made him write whatever he wanted while pretending to receive it from him. This reproduction is sold here as a post card, you have noticed, with greetings and address. Socrates writing, do you notice, on a post card. 12
“and not only in the way a negative is developed” PC, 43 “Tell you a brief story,” Op cit 518 [This story is like Lacan thinking that Derrida is “inanalysis” [a neologism]—this time the person, a woman, thinks Derrida is the analyst, and never names the person he is supposedly analyzing]. “Du Tout,” PC, 514-15 This text is not cited in the headnote of “For the Love of Lacan” in Resistances of Psychoanalysis. I am afraid that the readers will exclude them too quickly, will conclude precipitously that: these are third parties, they cannot be the secret addressee of these letters. 223 Versus the bad reader who does not rad slowly. But you cannot avoid avoiding, so “the readers” can’t fall out into two groups, sorted into slow at the correct speed and get a ticket for reading too fast, going over the reading speed limit. Burning everything in The Post Card with the burning of Archive Fever, the ash. On the last page of the volume of Letters to Milena, which I wouldn’t have read without you, Blanchot cites Kafka” [Derrida then cites the Kafka citation Blanchot cites]PC, 222 [reference to Kafka letter, Kafka now named, whereas p. 35 referred to without a name “You had me read that letter to me where he [no referent of the pronoun] more or less says that, speculating with spirit, denuding oneself before them; he wrote only (on) letters that one, one of the last along with Freud finally. 35 circumcise 222 I am here signing my proper name, Jacques Derrida.1 regret that you [tu] [so, using the tutoyer, Derrida has already moved into epistolary mode in his note before the Envois begins.] do not very much trust my signature, on the pretext that it might be several.” P. 6 Introduction / Glossary Voler, see “Le facteur,” note 9. PC, xxix At the end of the letters 15 June and 20 June 1978, you will find some “words” in capital letters. These have been transposed from the original, but they are particularly problematic in the translation. If the original text is crypted, as it claims to be, is the translation equally crypted? Is there a possible key to the translation of a crypted text? Does the translation hold out the same promise of decrypting (of translation) as the original? Such are the question of EGEK . . .”
I’m going to read L’enfant du chien-assis by Jos, alias L’ete rouge. Or quite simply because he is---reading and that is always on some reading, you know something about this, that I transfer. 218 He is taking notes having in mind a prospect of publication in modern times. He is pretending to write but he has a small pocket tape recorder under his mantle, or rather above his head, under his pointed hat: the arm of the mike is stretched above the head of plato. 218-19 Dream, 216-17 Vacation reading, 252I’ve just received the slide in color. Be very careful with it. I’ll need it in the reproduction. I have never found them so resigned to their beauty. What a couple. 250 Right in the moment of slipping this into the envelope: don’t forget that all of this tookthe wish to make this picture into the cover of a book, all of it pushed back into the margins, the title, may name, the name of the publisher, and miniaturized (I mean in red) on Socrates’ phallus. 251 The most anonymous support, 175 That Plato is calling Socrates, gives him an order (jussic performative one says at Oxford, of the “send a card to Freud” type there, right away, it’s done.) . . . you all transfer everything, and everyone, onto Socrates. You don’t know if this is an order or an affirmation. Nor if the amorous transference takes place because Socrates is writing or precisely because he is not writing, since armed with a pen and the grattoir [scapel, knife], presently he is doing both while doing neither the one nor the other. And if he is not writing, you do not know why he is not writing presently, because he has suspended his pen for a second or because he is erasing by scratching out or because he cannot write or because he can not write, because he does not know how or knows how not, etc., or quite simply 218 In the first publication of this text. . . The deletion of this phrase (which is inconsequential) is the only modification of this essay since its first publication. Footnote 68, 495 to Le facteur Derrida reshelves the entire book: On the contrary, the necessity of everything [du tout] announces itself terribly, the fatality of saving everything from destruction: what is there, rigorously in our letters does not derive from the fort: da, from the vocabulary of going-coming, of the step, of the way or the away, of the near and the far, of all the frameworks in tele-, of the adestination, of the address and maladdress, of everything that is passed and comes to pass between Socrates and Plato, Freud and Heidegger, the “truth,” of the facteur, “du tout,” of the transference, of the inheritance and the genealogy, of the paradoxes of nomination, of the king an, of the queen and of their ministers, of the magister and of the ministries, of the public and private detectives? Is there a word, a letter, an atom of a message that rigorously speaking should not be withdrawn from the burning with the aim of publication? . . . If I circumcise, and I will, it will have to bleed around the edges, and we all put in their hands, under their eyes, shards of our body, of what is most secret in our soul. Very intrigued, at Oxford, by the arrival of the kings and the answers by 4. They intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme. 222 Rereading the Legacy 225 March-April 1979. I’ve started to reread, to sort, to dig around in the box (my first gift, suddenly, it no longer sufficed.) 186 Derrida satirizes a reading of his work that fold it back into Lacan, one that say that Derrida s only saying what Lacan already said. 150-51 S/p is for Socrates and Plato but p/S is “for Poe, for Dupin, and the narrator. 148 When one reads everything that is still written today, and so seriously, in such a businesslike way (spoudaios!) on the subject of this great telephonic farce . . . 146 Not a word that would not be dictated upside down, programmed on the back [au dos], in the back of the post card. Everything will consist in describing Socrates with Plato as a child in his back, and I will retain only the lexicon required from every line [trait] in the drawing. In a word, there will only be back (du dos), even the word “dos,” if you are willing to pay faithful attention to it and keep the memory. 187 “If you’re not there, leave an message on the answering machine.” 189 I am haunted by Heidegger’s ghost in the city, 189 “the crushing repetition compulsion” 458, PC, then Derrida cites marie Bonaparte using the same phrase , 458 Here, the insistent monotony has at least led to the construction of a textual network, the demonstration of the recurrence of certain motifs . . . outside The Purloined Letter. Thus the letter hanging under the mantelpiece has its equivalent in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. For us, the interest of this recurrence, and of pointing it out, is not that of an empirical enrichment, an experimental verification, the illustration of a repetitive insistence. It is structural. It inscribes The Purloined Letter in a texture, to which it belongs, and within which the Seminar had effected a cursory framing or cross-section. We know that The Purloined Letter belongs to what Baudelaire called “A kind of trilogy, along with The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget. The Seminar does not breathe a word about this trilogy; not only odes it lift out the narrated triangles (the “real drama”) in order to center the narration in them hear the burden of the interpretation (the destruction of the letter), but that it omits like a naturalized frame. 458-59 But it happens that her [Marie Bonaparte’s] laborious analysis opens up textual structures that remain closed to Lacan. 459 Headnotes about publication of various chapters in Écrits along with notes in the Biographical Appendix as well as the Index Jacques Lain Miller provides, but is not keyed to words but to concepts. He returns to Archive Fever in “Typewriter Ribbon” 302-03. “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits,’)” in Tom Cohen et al (eds), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001), p.286, 289; 331 originally published as the first chapter of the French edition of Papier Machine. “Fichus” is not in the French edition of Paper Machine while “Typewriter Ribbon, Inc” is not included in the English translation (three other short essays along with “Typewriter Ribbon, Inc” which is the subtitle and centerpiece of the French edition drop out in the English translation; Bowlby does have a note about the excluded and included essays, pp.ix-x). Jacques Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). I am dreaming. I am sleepwalking” (169) “First, when I dream of an absolute memory—well, when I sigh after the keeping of everything, really (it’s my very respiration)—my imagination continues to protect this archive of paper. Not on a screen, even though it might occur to me, but on a strip of paper. . . I wouldn’t write, but everything would get written down, by itself, right on the strip. With no work. . . . But what I thereby leave to write itself would not be a book, a codex, but rather a strip of paper. I would roll itself up, on itself, an electrogram of everything that happened (to me) bodies, ideas, images, words, songs, thoughts, tears. Others. The world forever, in the faithful and polyrhythmic recording of itself and all its speeds. Everything all the same without delay, and on paper—that is why I am telling you. On paperless paper. Paper is in the world that is not a book.” “Paper or Me, You Know . . .” 65 Fichus is a separate publication in French. A stand alone book. It is not included in Papier Machine. Translation of Derrida into English (among 39 other languages) is a kind of dissemination that in philological terms recollects the writings and rebinds them into new “cuts.” Essays not in the French book are cut form the English, translated in two different collections (Typewriter Ribbon); essays not in it are added Editors and translators reshelve Derrida. Next to last words, next to last story; 124, 150, 152, 154, 156 cf. Typewriter Ribbon, Ink Where was I? 147 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) 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. As is indeed with any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [ Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131) This 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 with 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. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living experience,” but “tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors and derails “tissue” skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like death in life or life in death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more originary existence, a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked under this this clothing. For, on he contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance, comprehended, they live and die, they live to death as the very inextricability of this weave. It is against the groundless ground of this quasi-transcendentality of living to death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one hand, one can say that “Robinson Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the book, were, according to a first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and desire attested to by this book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or metonymy, [were all] buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can and one must, one must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and like the experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-anthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like ours, I mean . . the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the family and/or State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132 Derrida then proceeds to outline what he takes to be the two options for the disposal of corpses now available: inhumation and cremation. (132-33). He then returns to Robinson Crusoe to discuss Crusoe’s fear of being buried alive. At p. 143 Derrida then returns to inhumation and cremation and finishes the Fifth Session with that topic (146). Derrida returns to the topic in pp. 162-71 of the Sixth Session. Effective exorcism pretends to declare the death only in order to put to death. As a coroner might do, it certifies the death but here it is in order to inflict it. This is a familiar tactic. The constative form tends to reassure. The certification is effective. . . . But here effectivity phantomalizes itself. It is in face [en effet] a matter of a performative that seeks to reassure to but first of all to reassure itself, for nothing is less sure, that what one would like to see dead is indeed dead. It speaks in the name of life. It claims to know what that is. Who knows better than someone who is alive . . . . now, it says (to itself), what used to be living is no longer alive, it does not remain effective in death itself, don’t worry. (What is going on here is a way of not wanting to know . . . what everyone alive knows . . . , namely, that that the dead can often be more powerful than the living. . . In short, it is often a matter of pretending to certify death there where the death certificate is still the performative of an act of war or the important of gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: (48). “the lifeline of live words [mots de vie]” Derrida, H.C. for Life, 95 “the live-ance of life [vivement de vie],” Derrida, H.C. for Life, 84 When it is not associated—like life, moreover, or a silk paper with a veil or canvas, writing’s blank white, spacing, gaps, the “blanks which become what is important,” always opens up onto a base of paper. Basically, paper often remains for us on the basis of the basis. The base figure on the basis of which figures and letters are separated out. The indeterminate “base” of paper, the basis of the basis en abyme, when it is also surface, support, and substance, material substratum, formless matter and for force in force, virtual or dynamic power of virtuality—see how it appeals to an interminable genealogy of these great philosophemes. “Paper or Me, You Know . . . (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)” Paper Machine, 53. Type Writer Ribbing of Derrida I will contemplate about, and look [in mock Derridean fashion] for, his typewriter ribbons." And also for his computers and discs, and even the hard drive. Now where are those ribbons, anyway? And what traces did JD leave on them? Did he re-ink them? Or did he buy new ones each time? As Derrida writes of Rousseau’s purloined ribbon, stolen and passed from hand to hand turned typewriter ribbon, a formidable writing machine, a ribbon of ink along which so many signs transited so irresistibly, a skin on which or under which so many words will have been printed, a phantasmatic body through which waves of ink will have been made to flow. An affluence or confluence of limited ink, to be sure, because a typewriter ribbon, like a computer printer, has only a finite reserve of coloring substance. The material potentiality of this ink remains modest, that is true, but it capitalizes, virtually, for the sooner or later, an impressive quantity of text: not only a great flux of liquid, good for writing, but a growing flux at the rhythm of a capital—on a day when speculation goes crazy in the capitals of the stock markets. And when one makes ink flow, figuratively or not, one can also figure that one causes to flow or lets flow all that which, by spilling itself this way, can invade or fertilize some cloth or tissue and the surface and ink of an immense bibliography . . . . The ribbon will always shave been more or less a subject. It was always already at the origin a material support, at once a subjectile on which one writes and the piece of a machine thanks to which one will never have done with inscribing: discourse upon discourse, exegesis on top of exegesis, beginning with those of Rousseau. . . [Marion] with or without annunciation . . . will have been fertilized with ink through the ribbon of a terrible and tireless writing machine that is now relayed, this floating sea of characters, by the apparently liquid element of computer screens and from time to time by ink cartridges for an Apple printer. (2001, 322-23)20 How comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been overlooked by science—the vestural Tissue, namely, of woole or other Cloth; which Man’s Soul wears as to its outermost wrappage and overall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole faculties at work, his whole Self lives, moves, has its being? 4 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford Classics) ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor. Caryle makes the same move form tissue to cloth Derrida does. Derrida says that de Man was going to call “Excuses (Confessions)" “The "Purloined Ribbon," but Derrida does not state that that was the original title of de Man’s essay when it was first published in Glyph. Derrida resists glossing. Sur-vivance; no key words, no synonyms, no chain even, necessarily. “Driving” by car is one instance of many. Survivance.
I will lay down cards and play a few hands. I have no trumps, no wild cards. I may not be playing with a full deck. I just shuffle and reshuffle, like iTunes. I’ll take “mes” chances. The Post Card is not about publication—what is it about? Not a thematic reading. Publcation is sufficiently internal and external to pose come questions, leave the reader some callng cards, or “interjections d’apel” Media addressed separately, as it were, in the “Envois.” Also separated by a lack of translators notes and footnotes. There are none. And that distinction is complicated by Derrida’s readings of Freud’s footnotes and of their completely useless—and himself writes a completely useless one. And set adrift is already an operative metaphor in The Post Card. For you may consider them as calling cards, or “interjections d’apel.” Placing a call, asking a question Paper—not material versus virtual—Paper Machine; Echographies—reduction of media to technology as machines versus as techne, as repletion. Where does ash go in survivance? How does one read the ash in other than figurative terms, in not in empirical terms either (Derrida’s typewriter ribbons). Cinders. Strictly posthumous just happens to be about fire, yet it is not destroyed—destructibility and divisibility of the letter, but also the name of the dead person. Death of letter writer/s in “Envois.” Useless footnotes. Economy of the footnote and of reading the footnote. Inattention and attention to the paratext. Letter as destructible versus the support. The issue of publication comes up in problem of typographical error versus Freudian slip, though Derrida just says slip, in “Du Tout.” So how to decide the limits of the undecidable? What is the relation between error in general and destinerrance in general, drifting and idling. The typographical error and destinerrance. Both specific to The Post Card and beyond. What are the limits of reading the heterogeneity of Derrida’s corpus? How does he deal with Lacan—not a model for dealing with Derrida—he dedicated Artaud le MOMA to Paul Thevelin, who wrote part of the Artaud book.
Derrida in “restitutions” is replying as if to Hegel’s preface to he phenomenology and the complaint people make about reading philosophy. You have to read too much before you can read. Preparation and reparation. The beyond of this its actual existence hovers over the corpse of the vanished independence of a real being, or the being of faith, merely as the exaltation of a stale gas, or the vacuous Etre supreme. “Of Spirit,” Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A. V. Miller, 358. The aim by itself is a lifeless universal, just as the guiding tendency is a mere drive that as yet lacks an actual existence; and the bare result is the corpse which has left the guiding tendency behind it. Preface, 2-3 This abnormal inhibition of thought is in large measure the course of complaints regarding the unintelligibility of philosophical writings from individuals who otherwise possess the educational requirements for understanding them. Here we see the reason behind one particular complaint made so often against: that so much has to be read over and over again before it can be understood—a complaint whose burden is presumed to be quite outrageous and, if justified, to admit of no defense. . . . We learn by experience that we mean something else something other than what we meant to mean, and this correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it some other way. Preface, 39 paraFreudian reading of networks and media, without rerouting them via Lacan’s return to Freud and language and the unconscious. A more radical return, a return to what is refound, etc. in relation to media, metaphor, and the parergon. Point of Pascal is to set up a problem of involved in The Post Card—media, reading, burning. The sidelining of history, of law, thee juridical and history both discourses in need of deconstruction; ruin as always already, always “before”; the apprehension. Also the book not as corpse. The “tissue” and “weave” mixed metaphors.
Topics a problem of media and the subjectile. Cite passage in Derrida about the problem of the subjective. Not empirical materiality as opposed to idealization of the transcendental signifier, deconstructed in facteur. But does have a model of writing that skips over publication, over relation between Memoirs of Blind and the event of the exhibition that occasioned it. Ditto for Artaud le Moma. Not an error, not a mistake for which Derrida should be punished. (See Memoirs of Blind). But his lecture versus publication format could have been placed between slide show lecture and powerpoint. Instead, he distributed handouts or Xerox copies. Impact does not include publication, virtual or otherwise. Finitude of archive and finitude of ink and typewriter ribbon. Finitude of the archive. Is the paper an absolute conservation and preservation, an archive without anarchivity? Or is it pure expenditure, a sealing that keeps what it destroys, a kind unburned ash of he archive? Where do the generations of repetitions fit in relation out the finitude of the archive? The finitude of survivance? Why did Pascal have two pieces of parchment? Did Pascal copy it? Are both pieces of parchment written on? Or is one blank? Is one the back up of the other? What happens to the referent before publication? Does
The glance of reading (Lacan)—look at instead of look up—retinal reading. Derrida, “I didn’t know where to start reading, looking , opening.” 209 Instead of WB’s essay made up entirely of quotations, one would write an essay with a list of words not keyed to anything, prior to any indexing. Glancing as somewhere between glossing and reading. Having recalled this, and having taken this precaution as a matter of principle, I am not doing what one ought to do and cannot do it with you in a seminar. I cannot do all that again with you here for at least two reasons, as I was saying. The one has to do with the obvious lack of time: it would take us years. The other, less obvious, is that I also believe in the necessity, sometimes, in a seminar the work of which is not simply reading, in the necessity, and even the fecundity, when I’m optimistic and confident, of a certain number of leaps, certain new perspectives from a turn in the text, from a stretch of path that gives you another view of the whole, like, for example, when you’re driving a car on a mountain road, a hairpin or a turn, an abrupt and precipitous elevation suddenly gives you in an instant a new perspective on the whole, or a large part of the itinerary or of what orients, designs, or destines it. And here there intervene not only each person’s reading-idioms, with their history, their way of driving (it goes without saying that each of my choices and my perspectives depends broadly here, as I will never try to hide, on my history, my previous work, my way of driving, driving on this read, on my drives, desires and phantasms, even if I always try to make them both intelligible, shareable, convincing and open to discussion) [here there intervene, not only each person’s reading-idioms, with their history, their way of driving] in the mountains or on the flat, on dirt roads or on highways, following this or that map, this or that route, but also the crossing, the decision already taken and imposed by you by fiat as soon as it was proposed to you, to read a given seminar by Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe, i.e., two discourses also on the way and on the path which can multiply perspectives from which two vehicles can light up, their headlights crossing, the overall cartography and the landscape in which we are traveling and driving together, driving on all these paths interlaced, intercut, overloaded with bridges, fords, no entries or one-way streets, etc. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2, (2012) 206 Reading in Color: Kindle with and without color images. Facsimiles in The Post Card as well. Description of it “I didn’t know where to start reading, looking, opening.” PC, 209 when he gets the book without the frontispiece and things he got the wrong book, then holds it again with both hands and finds the right page with the image of Plato and Socrates and describes the image, the blue and the red lettering—non-signifying patterns "Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. 'No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,' he observed. 'Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.'" Study in Scarlet Repetition—structure is not only about a sequence, first Queen, then Minister; first Minister, then Dupin—but also about reversibility, from inside to outside, from outside in (Invagination) or top to bottom or upside down. Dupin’s signature in Facteur is not “Dupin,” it’s the citation from Astree, a note left behind by which the Minister will know Dupin found it and found him out. But will the minister ever read it? Will the facsimile arrive at its destination? Is Poe (and Derrida) making an exception-due to different kinds of marking (support of the facsimile) and re/marking (citation as signature), both of which are easily misrecognized or not recognized at all? Will the Minister repeat Dupin’s recognition, or has Dupin duped himself? “Purloined Letter” cited in an endnote to Oxford Worlds Classics “Scandal in Bohemia.” In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Ed Owen Dudley Edwards, 299, n4 It’s one of A.C. Doyle’s sources. Derrida forgets to mention Lacan’s “Overture to this Collection,” 3-5, which explains the order of the Écrits as well as the first sentence of ‘The Seminar on ‘Purloined Letter’” begins with the repetition compulsion, which Lacan idiosyncratically translates as “repetition automatism.”21 “My research has led me to the realization that the repetition automatism (Wiederholungszwang) has its basis in what I have called the insistence of the signifying chain.” 6 The opening section of the essay ends at a page spacing by returns to repetition compulsion. “This is what will confirm for us that it is repetition automatism. P. 10 “This is what happens in repetition automatism.” 21 “The idea here is that one will already find in Lacan’s 1956 “Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter’” ideas that were not fully developed until the 1960s. Bruce Fink, 766, n (10, 5). In other words, Lacan is not relineazing his collection , putting a master text at the “head” of the book, but staging a reading as a rereading, a circular process “Exmplified” by this text. This text doubles back on itself. Unlike most revisions, it includes the alternate drafts. The first version brings over, placed and dated: Guitrancourt and Sans Cascinao, mid-May to mid-August 1956 and then a new italicized subtitle represents the second version tat followed “Presentation of the Suite” 30) followed by an identically italicized subtitle “Introduction” on p. 33 which begins “The class of my seminar that I have written up to the present here was given on April 26, 1955. It represents a moment in the commentary that I devoted to Beyond the Pleasure Principle for the whole of that year.” 33 This section is undated in the text presumably because the edition in which it was publishes establishes the date on the copyright page. . A final section is subtitled in italics “Parenthesis of Parentheses (Added in 1966).” The last paragraphs constitute an intellectual autobiography of the essay’s non-linear composition. 45-46. The endnotes have been updated so that the default reference is to the 1966 edition. But Fink’s translation records the dates of footnote added later “[Added in 1968:] and even “[Added in 1966].” Some endnotes offer more bibliographical information. The second to last endnote reads: “[Added in 1966] The text written in 1955 resumes here. The introduction of a structural approach through such exercises was, in fact, followed by important developments in my teaching. Concepts related to subjectivization progressed hand-in-hand with a reference to the analysis situs in which I claim the subjective progress.” 48, n. 29. The break is not graphically consistent. The endnote occurs roughly four pages before the essay ends. When Lacan talks why he “is publishing a version of it here,” both the referent of “version” and “here” keep the published text in an unfinished state. When Lacan writes about why he reworked the essay in accordance with the requirements of writing” and “increasingly promoted the notion of the symbol here,” To obscure its historical traits through a sort of historical feint would have seemed, I believe, artificial to my students.” Lacan may make the “historical traits” apparent, but he does not make tem clear, he does not follow the biobibliograhical conventions which would provide a clear, progress narrative. Instead, the apparence of the essay’s historical traits” is inseparable from the graphic appearance and variations in its paratexts, which apparently demands recursive reading. Compare “version” when used by Derrida. The epigraph from Goethe’s Faust is kept in German, translated in the endnotes, 767 (11,2) “Was Hiesst Lesen?” “Was Hiesst Lesen?” Das Tragende (support for carrying, like a strecher) und Leitende (Leader, Head) im Lesen ist die Sammlung. Worauf [What drives] sammelt sie? Auf die Gescrhiebene, auf das in der Schrift Gesagte. Das eingenliche Lesen ist die Sammlung auf das, was ohne unser Wissen einst shchon unser Wesen in den Anspruch genommenon hast, moegen wir dabei ihm entsprechen oder versagen. Ohne das eigenliche Lesen vermoegen wir auch nicht das uns Anblinkended zu sehe und das Erscheinende und Scheinedne zu schauen. “Was Hiesst Lesen?” in Denkerfahrungen, 1910-1974. Ed. Hermann Heidegger. Vittorio Klostermann: Krankfurst am Main, 1983, 61. Bruce Fink’s endnotes—a kind of glossary sensitive to the repetitions of Lacan’s terms precedes the endnotes, which gloss a particular word. Do these various bibliographic recursions constitute a structural repetition akin to the structures of repetition that Lacan and Derrida debate and that differnitate them (the letter is indivisblle, the triangle intersubjective, the letter is pre-graamatoligcal, and the letter always arrives at its destination, versus the letter is always divisible (because material), the letter is always already grammmatological, and the triangle is not intersubjective, and the letter is subject to disinterrance such it does not always arrive at its destination? Does Lacan particular staging of his argument have any relation to the way Derrida restages le facteur de la verite by placing it at the end of The Post Card (inverting the place of the Seminar?), including of an already published article to which Derrida appends to a “pre-note” about his setting it adrift? Is this republication a new version of the essay? And would be reading it mean making it a symptom, reading symptomatic? Is this a structure yet to be read? Does it bear on the repetition compulsion? Is it a variation on compulsive reading? Where does the deconstruction of a text’s parergon, its title and its borders begin and end? What does Derrida do to reconfigure a text have to be re/configured for Derrida to read it? Look at For the Love of Lacan. Says he is not standing outside the text, but still in a scene of reading. Yet derrida does not deconstruct his own reading and Lacan’s. He does not show how his own reading repeats the kinds of msrecognitions he finds in Lacan, even if he does nto calim to have “corrected,” as it were, Lacan’s reading. Does orienting ourselves through page design nad paratextss, philogical and bibliographical issues pt us on a path to such a deconstruction? Must these questions beheld in suspense? Are they yet another aporia? I propose to address these readings in a preliminary way by turn to For the Love of Lacan, a passage in Le facteur in which Derrida unlocks his reading, and a passage in Poe’s Purloined Letter regarding the facsimile. The facsimile in Poe is a particular kind of copy, a particular kind of supplement. In Poe’s letter, it is a supplement. But Derrida uses an actual facsimile of his signature, “J.D” several times in “Signature, Event, Context.” Memoirs of the Blind, Artaud le Moma, The Sense of the Subjectile, Hantai, Correspondence, Truth of Painting all make use of facsimiles. Bok on Derrida turning his publications into facsmiles. Neither Lacan nor Derrida read the facsimile in Poe’s story. Is it one kind of iteration among others, or does its particularity, a matter of verbal description in Poe’s story, of course, make a difference to difference, the trace, arche-writing, the impression, and so on? Hand Delivered Reading Derrida uses “internal reading” in Memoirs of the Blind
“This question cannot but resound when we know we are caught in a scene of reading” On the Name, 98. Cite first sentence of Envois First sentence of Envois Cite unbearable First page of envois Have we begun at the beginning? Are we already reading too quickly? Philology versus philosophy Derrida on the bad reader, next page Because I still like him, I can foresee the impatience of the bad reader: this is the way I name or accuse the fearful reader, the reader in a hurry to be determined, decided upon deciding (in order to annul in other words, to bring back to oneself, one has to wish to know in advance what to expect, one wishes to expect what has happened, one wishes to expect (oneself)). Now, it is bad, and know no other definition of the bad, it is bad to predestine one’s reading, it is always bad to foretell. It is bad, reader, no longer to like retracing’s one’s steps. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, 4 Yet he says he is not using bad in a moral sense but in a literary sense in Resistances. Is glossing a form of extreme close reading, a line by line commentary? Is glossing not reading insofar as it takes the text as a given, as complete. The text entitled "The Purloined Letter" imprints / is imprinted in these effects of indirection. I have only indicated the most conspicuous of these-effects in order to begin to unlock their reading: the game of doubles, the endless divisibility, the textual references from facsimile to facsimile, the framing of frames, the interminable supplementarity of quotation marks, the insertion of "The Purloined Letter" in a purloined letter that begins with it, throughout the narratives of narrative of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the newspaper clippings of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" ("A Sequel to 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' "). Above all else, the mise en abime of the title: "The Purloined Letter" is the text, the text in a text (the purloined letter as a trilogy). The title is the title of the text, it names the text, it names itself and thus includes itself while pretending to name an object described in the text. "The Purloined Letter" functions as a text that escapes all assignable destination and produces, or rather induces by deducing itself, this inassignability at the exact moment in which it narrates the arrival of a letter. It pretends to mean [vouloir-dire]and to make one think that "a letter always arrives at its destination," authentic, intact, and undivided, at the moment and the place where the simulation, as writing avant la lettre, leaves its path. In order to make another leap to the side. At this very place, of course. YFS, 110
PC, 4-5
The misrecognition of the failure to account of the literary structure of narration, Cite Derrida, For the Love of Lacan, I do not think of Lacan as a homogenous body. Same could be said for Derrida’s own works. Derrida does not read line by line and provides his own directions for reading. Nevertheless , we may ask where glossing ends and reading begins, whether glossary is a kind of non-reading, a supplement that is continuous or discontinuous with the text (more corridors in a labyrinth or the thread that takes one in and out of the labyrinth of the text it is graphically marked off from? Let’s start over. Let’s begin with the paratexts of the Post Card, the translation’s introduction and glossary, entitled “L before K.” Is the glossary a kind of reading of the Post Card, a reading that is also a non-linear reading but instead gives the reader a network before rather than after the text? And where is that reading? Is the glossary separate from the introduction, as it is in the table of contents where the glossary is printed in the same font size as the introduction, or is it part of the introduction, in which Glossary appears as a subheading, not the title at the head of a new page in the same size as the font used for the Introduction, but in a smaller font on the same page of the introduction? Consider Derrida’s reading of the small , barely noticeable but nevertheless significant differences between title of Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour (The Madness of the Day), reproduced in facsimile images of the table of contents and in Parages. (Is John P. Leavey’s Glassary a reading of Derrida’s Glas? How does one gloss these paratextual differences in a paratext not in Derrida’s French edition? How should one gloss, how does one read the paratexts in Derrida’s text? Should we read the notes that precede Speculations and “Le facteur “on facing pages the same way we read Derrida’s preface? Are these unsigned notes written by Derrida? Consider Derrida’s note to the translator in his extended footnote running across the bottom of each page of “Living On: Borderlines?” And does glossing exclude the reprinting in a smaller font and repagination as Living On,” dropping the subtitle? Is glossing restricted to alphabetic lettering without regard to the support or substrate? How should one account for the variation in the placement of notes in translations Derrida’s works? Stanford University Press Notes precede each of the endnotes to the three reprinted essays in Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Chicago UP favors putting them before each essay (See The Truth in Painting). Are these to regarded as meaningless vagaries of publication? Is Stanford’s more awkward in having to include references in the text to the notes (See Headnote one)? Or should the so-called materiality of any edition be read? Should the medium be read, the different stocks of paper for the printed text and for the facsimiles in The Post card? The pronoun “I” is used in the first, “we” and “I” are used in the second? And what are we to make of “first version” or the “first version was initially published?” Should we track down these different versions and catalogue their variations? In the second endnote, the author, apparently Derrida, recommends we read two essays given at a conference to which his paper responds? Should we read these notes differently from the way we read Derrida’s autobiographical anecdotes about how he arrived at the title of his work (Archive Fever, Typewriter Ribbon, Memoirs of the Blind, and so on? Derrida’s own rereading of Envois and The Purloined Letter in For the Love of Lacan. Derrida writes in “Restitutions,” And Shapiro [Meyer] quotes these two paragraphs which you all find so ridiculous or so imprudent. Lets reread them first, in German, in French, and in English. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . --It’s done. (294) Or two pages later, In other words, would it not be on the basis of thing as work or product that is general interpretation (or one that is claimed as general) of the thing as informed matter was secretly constituted? Now reread the chapter. 296 Should one read such moments? Or are they to be gathered and shelved under the rubric of Derrida’s rhetoric? Does anything go missing between glossing and reading? In addition to what Derrida calls “unreadability” in Living On: Borderlines?” is there also non reading, nto be confused with not reading? And where would this nonreading be situated in relation to reading and unreading? --Do you think you need to start over again? What happened to passages from The Post Card you cited at the beginning of your essay? Can you do what Derrida calls in various places an “internal reading” of that book, even if the limits of that reading are artificially and arbitrarily imposed, for the sake of clarity? --Of course. One always “does” such readings. My purpose thus far is slow the speed of such reading or what Derrida calls the rush in Memoirs of the Blind. My reading has thus far been radically empiricist in ask a basic bibliographical question about The Post Card: What is it? We have already put deconstructive pressure on reading, on its difference form glossing and from nonreading. Let’s take a leap, then, and examine the title of my essay, “What is Called Reading?” My question alludes to Martin Heidegger’s “What is Called Thinking?” Derrida pairs Freud and Heidegger in The Post Card in order to establish the end of an epoch. Derrida also mentions “the hermeneutical circle,” which orients Heidegger’s orientation of thinking as questioning, without mentioning Heidegger. (Derrida returns to it at length in Beast and the Sovereign Part Two). Derrida obviously does not omit Heidegger, but he arguably does delivers a nonreading of him. Focusing on repetition in Freud, on the repetition compulsion , on psychoanalysis as the finding of the refound, Derrida forgets reception in Heidegger. The question of Being in Being and Time is the repetition. Division Two is at points overtly a repetition of Division One, and passages about Descartes and Kant appear in almost the same place in both divisions. Moreover, the passage on the hermeneutical circle in division one is repeated in division two. To the earlier questions about reading we may now ask what is rereading? Following Heidegger’s move in Introduction to Metaphysics, in which he sows that metaphysics is the question “What is metaphyics?,” not any particular answer to that question, I want to suggest that re/reading Derrida and the texts he reads and does not read, always happens at the threshold of the question waiting to be asked, namely “what is called reading?” Derrida is not exemplary nor is he just an example. But he does reward reading. ---OK. I’m beginning to get it. You want to stay with the text in a radically empirical way, maybe a hyperglossative way, and, at the same time, you want to push close reading to its limits—how close is close? How slow is slow? What is the proper speed of good reading? Does good reading does not mean merely linear reading, word by word, page by page, but a recursive return from later to earlier passages, scanning the book like a flip book, indexing it, and random accessing it. And you want to push the, as Derrida frequently does, the limits of writing and drawing (Memoirs of the blind) to the consider the reprodocution of images in his works, including The Post Card but the way the printing of some his texts begins to turn them into images (Living On, Glas, etc)?. Mes Chances—reading by chance—I remembered a line when reading Foucault, then In Love of Lcan by chance? Reading not something that can be folded into a mise-en-abyme, or a parergon—reading derrida reading. Or my autobiographical narrative. Quesiron about narrative. Can you tell a story that is already about retelling?
First page First word same as the first page?
Here I am asking question in the dark. PC, 278 Not to frame Derrida, not parergonalize him , not to shrink-wrap him, is to read sideways, glancing from passage to another, a kind of comparative philology that freely associative reading in that it has not predetermined limits about what constitutes writing in the ordinary sense(as opposed to arche-writing, the mark, the trace). Not be spaced as in Glas under two columns and two texts as in Borderlines, two running texts or in Jacques Derrida (Bennington and Derrida), which licenses a kind of key words Derridabase repackaging, reshelving, hack job, complete with photos from the family album. As for the 52 signs, the 52 mute spaces, in question is a cipher that I had wanted to be symbolic and secret—in a word a clever cryptogram, that is, a very naïve one, tat had cost me long calculations. If I state now, and this is the truth, I swear, that have totally forgotten the rule as well as the elements of such a calculation, as if I had thorn it into the fire, I know in advance all the types of reaction that this will not fail to induce. 5 “Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? to what address? Without any desire to surprise, and thereby to grab attention by means of obscurity, I owe it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally that I do not know.” 5
Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” in On the Name, 13-14 [Kant is the critical reader, see p. 8) Jacque Derrida’s On the Name compromises three essays . . . the three essays appeared in France as a Collection of three separately bound but matching books published by Editions Galilee. On the Name, the title this book published by Stanford University Press, thus is not a translation of any French book title by Jacques Derrida; it is a name given to what is a hypothetical book in France. The title On the Name would in French be Sur le nom. Thomas dutoit, “Translating the Name?” in On the Name, (1995) ix Not possible to bring these threads together into a htematic unity, under a signature, attached to a single proper name. “Biodegradables”—have not read me-vitriol at Spivack in Ghostlier Demarcations Can deconstruction deliver? Oronly pomise? [For the Lacan Saying Lacan is right or doing right by Lacan . . . makes my text still more unreadable for readers in a rush to decide between the “pro and the con,” in short, for those minds who believed I was opposed to Lacan or showing him to be wrong. The question lies elsewhere: it is the question of reason and the principle of reason. Thus, not only was I not criticizing Lacan, but I was not even writing a sort of overseeing or objectifying metadiscourse on Lacan or on a text by Lacan. My writing involved me in a scene, which scene I was showing at the same time (no doubt inn small phrases (no doubt in small phrases that no one reads) could not be closed or framed. All of this has since been constantly put back into play other scenes of en abyme that have been deployed here and there, more often there than here, which is to say, once again, abroad. Moreover, for all these reasons, the argument of “Le facteur de la verite” does not lend itself to being framed [the TN note on the French title awaits the reader of the PC, 413] in the text bearing this title; it is played, set adrift in The Post Card, the book with that title, which inscribes “Le facteur de la verite” like a piece in a borderless fiction, neither public nor private, with and without a general narrator. It is inscribed first of all in the “Envois” 63 And above all the (duplicitous and identificatory) opening set off to the side, in the direction of the (narrating-narrated) narrator, brings back one letter only to set another adrift. The Post Card, Facteur, 492 This is why we have insisted on this key or theoretical safety lock of the Seminar 469 Therefore nothing begins. Only a drifting or disorientation from which it one does not emerge 484 Derrida talks about the opening that Lacan does not read, 484 Hermeneut interested in the center of the picture 484 “invisible framing” 483 One cannot define the ‘hermeneutical circle’” Post Card, 474 It hears itself say what it cannot hear or understand. MEETING PLACE: THE DOULE SQUARE OF KINGS But it cannot read the story it tells itself. 483 The double, repetition, recording, and the mimeme in general are excluded from the system, along with the entire graphematic structure they imply” 472 “Unpublished Journal” 468 empirical versus unconscious letter, 467 empirical versus or transcendental, material or ideal signifier, 464; 466; 477-79. Dessein—“design,” as in deliberate, intent-but also graphic design, even drawing. Typographical marks as part of design. (Joyce, Restored Finnegans Wake—Derrida on Joyce) “What is a signature between quotation marks?” 495 It’s the graphology that Dupin depends on—“he knows my hand”—not the quotation itself. Hermeneutic deciphering 441 Derrida’s apparently useless footnote versus Freud’s “completely useless footnote,” p. 495 on a change made to the first edition that concludes: “The deletion of this phrase (which is inconsequential) is the only modification of this essay since its first publication.” Is the note completely useless? Or is there, on the next to last page of the essay in order to contrast his account of Lacan to Lacan’s revisions and re-editing of the Seminar? See Heidegger’s preface to the second edition of his book on Kant. Is the note a symptom? Another open secret there to be deciphered? Doesn’t Derrida decipher Dupin’s “signature” in the fac-simile? The “signature” is not a proper name; it is a quotation, between quotations and placed in the middle of the blank (like the center at which the hermenut looks) Going from Derrida on Pascal—posthumous to cremation versus inhumation—to cremation in PC to “For the Love of Lacan”—to Derrida’s own mocking self-deconstruction of his account of Poe and Lacan’s, to publication and editions, paratexts—to repetition and reading—to destruction—to dessein / design, to drawing, to icon, image and writing support, to facsimile. Unrevealed contents of purloined letter; unnamed book Dupin and narrator are both looking and that Poe, as Derrida, never makes clear whether they find it. “And they publish everything.” 132 signature, proof, 136 The post is a banking agency. 139 “’I just copied into the middle of the blank sheets these words’” Citation from Poe, 494 Is the middle like the hermenut’s center? Is the Minister a hermenut, like Lacan? The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of commentary upon the propositions just advanced. Citation from Poe, 487 And the voice retains [garde] all the more in that one believes one can retrain [garder] it without external accessory, without paper, and without envelope. 465 . . . without quoting myself, 63 “dessein”—design, plan; subtracting a letter, “dessin” –drawing, cartoon, sketch and also design (a pattern), grid, layout; “dessiner,” “to draw” ; to sketch; to trace; there is no audible difference in the pronunciation of “dessein” and “dessin,” like “je nous” and “genoux.” Closeness in spelling, allows for a pun, rather than two meanings present in “design.” Poe uses “design” to mean “plan.” “Un dessin si funeste” translated as “plot” Relation between sight (pun) and sound--what you hear—noise versus silence (Prefect says nothing after writing out the check in PL), in Purloined Letter. Can one ever finish with obliqueness? The secret, if there is one, is not hidden at the corner of an angle, it does not lay itself open to a double view or a squinting gaze. It cannot be seen, quite simply. No more than a word. As soon as there are words--and this is true of the trace in general, and of the chance that it is—direction intuition no longer has any chance. One can reject, as we have done, the word “oblique”; one cannot deny the disinterrant indirection [indirection distinerrante: see Derrida’s The Post Card . . . Tr.] as soon as there is a trace. Or if you prefer, one can only deny it. “Passions,” On the Name, Trans David Wood, Ed. Thomas Dutoit, 30 Green spectacles like the cover of he mystic writing pad, the protective sheet, in Poe, a “cover.” “When is a pun not a pun?” Finnegans Wake, cited by J.D. Poe writes the address in French at the end of the first sentence of the Purloined Letter: “au troisieme, No. 33. Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain.” 680 citation at the end: “Un dessein si funeste, s'il nést digne d'Atrée est digne de Thyeste" [Derrida says he doesn’t want to translate the German passage he cites at length from Nietzsche at the end of “Speculations on ‘Freud’” p. 408-09: but in sudden falls, if observed closely, the countermotion comes visibly earlier than the sensation of pain. It would be bad for me if I had to wait when making a misstep until the fact rings the bell of consciousness and a hint of what to do is telegraphed back. Rather I discern as clearly as possible that first comes the countermotion of the foot that prevents the fall, and then ... “ . . . aber in plotzlichichen Faellen kommt, wenn man genau beobachtet, die Gegenbewegung ersichtlic frueher als Schmerzzempfindung. Es stuende schlimm um mich, wenn ich bei einem Fehltritt zu warten haette, bis das Faktum an die Gloeke des Bewussteins schluege und ein Wink, was zu tun ist, zururcktelegraphiert wuerde. Vielmehr unterschiede ich so deutlich als moeglich, das erst die Gegenbewugung des Fusses, um den Fall zu verhueten, folget und dann . . .” This is to be continued.
Directory: burt burt -> - burt -> I spent this week once again finding Robotic heads. I found a few more interesting models. Here are a few examples burt -> Yet to Be Read: Exhuming the Camp as the Arche-Archive to Come Download 2.22 Mb. Share with your friends:
|