Richard Burt
Read After Burning:
Posthumous Publication and the Sur-vivance of Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card
In truth, posthumous, posthumus, with an h, appears
to be a faulty spelling, the grammarian tells us, and
the spelling error in it is apparently induced by the
proximity with humus, earth. . . . It’s like for
differance, with an a, which is yet another way to
posthume by differing or deferring life or, what
comes down to the same thing, deferring death. In
truth, postume, without an h, apparently
corresponds to the superlative of posterus. Posterus
qualifies the one who comes after, the one who
follows. Posterus is the follower of the descendent,
the one who is going to come, or even the future
itself, posthumous, the superlative here meaning the
last follower of all, and above all the one who,
being born after the death of the father, child or
grandchild, posterity, bears the testamentary future
and the fidelity of inheritance.
Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 174
1
“The librarian seemed to know me . . . but this did not get me out of the oath. She asked
me to read it . . . Therefore I read it and handed her back the cardboard covered with a
transparent paper that had tendered me. At this point, she starts to insist, I had not
understood : no, you have to read it out loud. I did so . . . What would an oath that you
did not say out loud be worth, an oath that you would only read, or not say be worth, an
oath that you would only read, or that while writing you would only read? Or that you
would telephone? Or whose tape you would send? I leave you to follow up. 208
Did I tell you, the oath that I had to swear out loud (and without which I could never have
been permitted to enter, stipulated, among other things, that I introduce neither fire nor
flame into the premises: “I hereby undertake . . . not to bring into the Library or kindle
therein any fire or flame . . . and I promise to obey all the rules of the library.” 215-16
Scene of reading and fire. “Read this letter now at once many times and burn it.” 58 It
now resembles a rebroadcast, a sinister play-back (but give ear closely, come near to my
lips) and while writing you I henceforth know what I am sending to the fire, what I am
letting appear and what you give me back even before receiving it. Back could have been
orchestrated all of this starting from the title: the back of Socrates and of the card: all the
dossiers that I have bound, the feed-back, the play-back, the returns to sender, etc., our
tape-recorders, our phantom cassettes. 225
You might read these envois as the preface to a book I have not written . . . As for the
“Envois” themselves, I do not know if their reading is bearable. You might consider
them, if you really wish to, as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence.
Destroyed by fire or by that which figuratively takes its place, more certain of leaving
2
what I like to call the tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are (s’il ya a la
cendre).
--Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 3 Cinders, ash of he archive, ash of cigarette in
Given Time
“Shall we burn everything?”
--Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 171
Burn before Reading
A great-holocaustic fire, a burn everything into which we would throw, finally, along
with our entire memory, our names, the letters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc.
And if nothing remains . . 40
A holocaust without fire or flame 71
Hauntology. Hauntogrammatology. Hauntotextology. What is the relation of
the ontology of the post card, and a hauntology? Is there a hauntology of the post
card? it’s deconstruction of dead letters and dead parcels, of letters and postcards,
to the ontology of The Post Card?
Possibility of reading after burning, the figure of burning, of cremation and inhumation,
To four topics.
varying degrees of pressure Derrida puts in The Post Card and beyond on what is
generally taken to be self-evident oppositions between published and unpublished
writing, between publication and posthumous publication. Rather than deconstruct these
oppositions and arrive ahead of schedule at pre-programmed aporias, I want to focus on
the structure of the “postal principle” in The Post Card not only with respect to repetition,
3
reproduction, and the repetition compulsion but with respect to the way Derrida’ss
parapsychoanalytic account of the postal principle appears to admit the possibility that a
writer could die more than once and that one read after burning one’s writing materials, a
burning that has already occurred and yet is still to come. I am doing an interrogative
reading not limited to a symptomatic reading or even a Derridean parasymptomaitc
reading.1 And I am not suggesting that Derrida’s death or deaths, as Derrida put in the
title of his commemorative essay “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” in 2004 has somehow
changed how we read The Post Card.2
Relate the topics governing bios and biblios.
First, the life of writing:
they concern the bios of writing, what Derrida in The Post Card calls the autobiography
of writing separate from testamentary writing (writing intended to be read
posthumously):
the description of Ernst’s game . . . can no longer be read solely as a theoretical
argument, as a strictly theoretical speculation that tends to conclude with the
repetition compulsion or the death drive or simply with the internal limit of the PP
[Pleasure Principle] . . . but also can be read, according to the supplementary
necessity of a parergon, as an autobiography of Freud. Not simply an
autobiography confiding his life to his own more or less testamentary writing, but
a more or less living description of his own writing, of the way of writing what he
writes, most notably Beyond . . . In question is not only a folding back or a
tautological reversal, as if the grandson, by offering him a mirror of his writing,
were in advance dictating to him what (and where) he had to set it down on paper;
4
as if Freud were writing what his descendence prescribed that he write, in sum
holding the pen prescribed that he write, in sum holding the first pen the one that
always passes from one hand to another; as if Freud were making a return to
Freud through the connivance of a grandson who dictates from his spool and
regularly brings it back, with all the seriousness of a grandson of a certain
privileged contract with the grandfather. It is not only a question of a
tautological mirror. The autobiography of the writing posits and deposits
simultaneously, in the same movement, the psychoanalytic movement. 303
Living versus dead writing, They could never give me a truly satisfactory answer on this
question, how they distinguish between a letter and a parcel, a dead letter and a dead
parcel, and why they did not sell the so-called dead letter at auction. 125
Second, The problem of the support, of the limits of what is and is not a post card.
For it to work, you will say, there have to be supports (ah yes, but the “substance” of
the support is my entire problem. It is enormous and concerns all posts and
telecommunications, their strict, literal and figurative meanings, and the tropic post turns
them into one another, etc,) there has to be some support and, for a time, copyists, seated
copyists. 160-61
“I do not believe that one can properly call “post card” a unique and original image, if
some such thing ever occurs, a painting or a drawing destined to someone in the guise of
a post card and abandoned to an anonymous third party, a neutral machinery that
5
supposedly leads the message to its destination, or at least would have the support make
its way . . . . 35
Why prefer to write on cards? First of all because of the support, doubtless, which is
more rigid, the cardboard firmer, it preserves, it resists manipulation; and then it limits
and justifies from the outside; by means of the borders, the indigence of the discourse, the
insignificance of the anecdote [sic]
Otherwise what would we have done with all the others, the films, the cassettes, the piece
of skin with the drawing? So the insupportable supports remain, post cards, I am burning
all the supports and keeping only purely verbal sequences. 186-87
Third, reproduction of images.
and then I went into a bookstore, I bought several cards and reproductions, as you know. .
. I fell upon two books of photographs that cost me a great deal, one on Freud, very rich,
the other on Heidegger, at home, with Madame and the journalists from the Spiegel in
1978), 238
The narrators of the letters talk about the book project, what the title will be, what the
preface will be: this is a correspondence, but utterly unlike the Hantai Correspondences,
which sorts out painting, letters in facsimile and in diplomatic transcription. Multiple
reproductions of the same postcard in The Post Card. Bears on the postal principle in
relation to repetition, compulsion, and reproduction, in particular reproduction of the post
card, the post card he discovers in the Bodeleian, and some pages of the fortune teller
book, but not reproducing the photos of Heidegger and of Freud. Although the criterion
for distinguishing between books and letters remains open. I do not believe in the rigor of
such a criterion. 61
6
Illustrations courtesy of the Bodelian Library, Oxford. Cover illustration: Plato and
Socrates, the frontispiece of Prognostica Socratis basilei, a fortune telling book. English,
thirteenth century, the work of Matthew Paris. MS. Ashmole 304. Fol. 3IV (detail). <<on
the copyright page.
What How bears the publication of facsimiles bear on reproduction, the publication as a
repetition? Graphic design, page lay out, topography, and so on, but also reproductions
of Adami and of Van Gogh in Truth of Painting. And even more strikingly, Memoirs of
the Blind. Memoirs of the Blind is more than simply a catalogue of an exhibition. First,
the text presented along with the drawings and paintings at the exhibition was not the
same as that found here. Second, a number of works that could not be exhibited have
been included here: while the exhibition displayed some forty-four drawings and
paintings, the book has seventy-one. Finally, the works are not presented in the same
order in the book as in the exhibition. (To compare the two orderings, one may consult
the list of illustrations where all the works exhibited are briefly described and their
number.)
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass, “Translators’ Preface,” Jacques Derrida Memoirs
of the Blind viii.
“This fine study concerns numerous works that we have had to leave in the shadows so as
to observe the law of the exhibition: to keep to the body of drawings housed at the
Louvre.”
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass,
106, n81.
7
Fourth, publishability, readability and the pancarte.
This final total card (my absolute pancarte), that you be able to read it, hold it in your
hands, our knees, under your eyes, in you, that you inherit and guard it. 68
In the “Envois,” Derrida, or one of many, infinitely divisible “Derridas” who write the
epistolary exchanges without addressing them or signing them, records a dream about the
pressure of publication: “Dream from just now: obsequious: around the word
obsequious. I was being pressed, I no longer know by whom, obsequiously, to publish, to
let be read, to divulge.”3 The pressure to publish comes from a forgotten source and
exerts itself in Derrida’s record of it through repetition of the word “obsequies” and the
equivalence of “to publish” with two infinitives that follow it, namely, “to be read,” and
“to divulge.” Derrida declines to say whether he gave into the pressure or not, whether
he or the obsequies source equates publication with permission to read and with giving up
a secret. “Obsequies” here apparently means to keep the pressure on by using different
words to say the same thing. Is there a dream of publication embedded here, a dream
about publication and reading as transparent openness? Is that a dream about repetition,
reproduction, and seriality? Is the dream of publication, if there is one, about effacing
publication as something to be read, about taking publication taken “as read”?
The dream may permit us to ask more generally, “what is the relation between
publication and the “postal principle?” Is publication about avoiding reading, about
determining the limits of avoidance? Near the end of The Post Card, Derrida writes
about ways in which one does not read all sorts of publications.
8
all the police forces of avoidance is, I can put it thus, avoidance itself. There are,
for example, what are called “publications”: one can fail to know them, this is
always possible in a given context, but one can arrange things, in a certain milieu,
in order to avoid knowing that they exist; one can also, knowing of their existence
avoid reading them; one can read while avoiding “understanding”; one can,
understanding avoid being affected by them or using them; one can also, using
them, avoid them, contain them, exclude them, and therefore, avoid them better
than ever, etc. But what is to be thought of the fact that one cannot avoid
avoiding, of inevitable avoidance in all its form—rejection, foreclusion,
denegation, incorporation, and even the introjective and idealizing assimilation of
the other at the limit of incorporation---?
“Du Tout,” 506-07
When I photograph myself alone in stations or airports, I throw it away or tear the thing
into little pieces that I let fly out the window if it is a train, leave them in an ashtray or a
magazine if it is it’s an airplane. 79
What is The Post Card? Prior to signatures and codes, ciphers, laws of genre, divisibility
of the Envois, reversibility of its chronology, written before the rest of the book and after
it has been written, and so on and other kinds of play one could locate in what Derrida
calls an “internal reading,” what is the text and an edition: under what conditions do
editions become relevant to the reading of the copy one has in hand?
Or how it is status as non-book and its readability or unreadability?
Is it a dream of Sigmund Freud’s “dreamwork” as dreamreworking, “the old dream of the
complete electro-cardo-encaphlo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-gram—I mean first of all
9
without the slightest literature, the slightest superimposed fiction, without pause, without
selection either of the code or of the tone, without the slightest secret, nothing at all, only
everything,” Paper Machine, 68 Or is it an apocalyptic fantasy, the opposite of the
holocaust?
In the name of what, in the name of whom publish, divulge—and first of all write, since it
amounts to the same? I have published a lot, but there is someone in me, I still can’t
identify him, who still hopes never to have done it. And he believes that in everything
that I have let pass, depart, a very effective mechanism that comes to annihilate the
exception, I write while concealing every possible divulging of the very thing that
appears to be published. 80
Five: Reading After Death. Derrida returns to Lacan and to his own “Facteur de la
verite” in “For the Love of Lcan,” the second of three essays that make up Resistances of
Psychonalysis.
The future of Lacanian thought as it moves beyond the Écrits is all the more
difficult in that Lacan was an incomparable listener and his discursive machine
was one of such sensitivity that everything could be inscribed there with finesse
or discretion. (This is quite right; who doesn’t try to do the same?) But, what is
more, it is inscribed there in the spoken words of a seminar that, by giving rise to
numerous stenotyped or tape-recording archivings, will have fallen prey not only
to the problem of rights . . . but also to all the problems posed by delays in
publishing and of an editing—in the American sense—that was of the most active
sort. [same thing happens to Derrida’s seminars] Since all of these things hang by
a hair, since the stakes get decided in a word, an ellipsis, a verbal modality,
10
conditional or future anterior, especially when one knows Lacan’s rhetoric, I say
good luck to shy narrator who would try to know what was said and written by
whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not said!
What about publication and speaking of the recently dead? In “Du Tout,” Derrida,
prompted by a request from Rene Major, finally supplies the name of a friend he had
hitherto kept secret because the friend was by then dead.4 And in “For the Love Lacan,”
Derrida comments humorously on the way speaking only of the dead was made a
condition of his giving a lecture at a colloquium on “Lacan avec les philosophes” [Lacan
with the Philosophers] held in 1991: “they put forward the pretext of a rule according to
which only the dead could be spoken about here and therefore, if one insisted on speaking
of me, one could so only under the pretext that I play dead, even before the fact, and that
I be given a helping hand when the occasion arose.”5 ?”
Know When to Hold ‘Em
Philippe Labarthe calls “autobiothanatography” or to what Derrida calls “auto-bio-
thanato-hetero-graphic scene of writing” (336).6 Not just ruin either. It is like a ruin that
does not come after the work but remains produced, already from the origin, by the
advent and structure of the work. In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the
origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the
origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration.
Memoirs of the Blind 65
11
Just as a memory does not restore a past (once) present, so the ruin the ruin of the face—
and of the face looked in the face in the drawing—does not indicate decaying, wearing
away, anticipated decomposition, or this being eaten away by time—something about
which the portray often betrays an apprehension. The ruin does not supervene like an
accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin.
Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the
self-portrait . . .
From corpus of book to corpse of author, reader on the side of live. Turn to account of
survivance and posthumous publication.
What is commonly called the “afterlife” of a book is given a more technical meaning
whereby survival as a metaphor for preservation becomes a notional term, “sur-vivance.”
The translators of Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 leave the French
neologism untranslated and without annotation apart from informing the reader the
“words ‘living on,’ ‘to survive,’ and ‘survival’ are in English in the text.” (131,n30).
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). The
book is not exactly a corpse that continues to live, as it were, as it decomposes or is put to
various medical uses before being buried or cremated.
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,
12
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), [<that> is not] above life, like something
sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor
indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself
to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle
voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the
substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-” is without superiority,
without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does
not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it
cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one
could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you
13
will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a
groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we
can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-
called as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is
where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless.
That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The
other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and
that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my
survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)
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 (Lieb 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
14
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 in the present modernity of a Greco-Abrahamic Europe, wonder what is
happening . . . in 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
Course called “Living to Death”
in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or
the State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in the universal
structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the
juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . . . deliver the corpse
over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says
prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)
15
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.
Sur-vivance is not exactly new. Derrida in “Living On: Borderlines” (reduced to “Living
On” in the second edition of the book in which it was originally published) and Derrida
on death would be difficult to catalogue. Also livance.
It’s a kind of self-archiving—the document that remains, literally, unsewn and resewn
into different shirts; reread but not to revise; to revisit but not reanimate? Just asking.
Derrida asserts, in the future, or a specific find of future, that is also a memorial:
Derrida cites his “I posthume as I breathe” line from Circumfessions in Beast and Sov
Vol. 2, Seventh Session, 173, and then goes on to comment on posthumous before
turning to Blanchot’s recent cremation, 174.
And in a somewhat economic way, by reason of a sort of finitude, because we must
exclude the infinite renewal of inscriptions (Niederschriften). The number of inscriptions
to be inscribed is finite – that’s finitude. For all acts of censorship act on inscriptions,
and substitutes of inscriptions in a system (it is even this concept of inscription which no
doubt motivated the choice of the word or metaphor of censorship), and the quantity of
inscriptions is finite; so one must censor. It is like a topological economy of the archive
in which one has to exclude, censor, erase, destroy or displace, virtualize, condense the
archive to gain space in the same place, in the same system, to be able to continue to
store, to make space. Finitude is also a sort of law for this economy. (B&S vol. 2, 156)
What Derrida calls “the postal principle” () also involves what he calls the
afterlifeanddeath of a text, the uncertain boundary of publication in general, a boundary
that not only complicates seemingly self-evident and unquestionable binary oppositions
16
between a published text and unpublished material, biography and bibliography,
production and waste, but brings to bear Derrida’s notion of a text’s “sur-vivance” on
what Derrida calls “unreadability”: sur-vivance involves various media transfers, various
material supports, or subjectiles, as well as various tropes for not/non/un/reading.7
The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of
finitude, this alliance of the living and the dead. I shall say that this finitude is
survivance. 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)
In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks
and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have
desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and
the character called Robinson Crusoe. . Now this survival, thanks to which the book
bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught,
saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this
survival is indeed that of the living dead. (130)
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)
17
in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or
the State, of the so-called dead boy, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in the universal
structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the
juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . . . deliver the corpse
over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says
prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)
La carte posthume
Let me begin destinerrantly by drifting into a passage regarding posthumous publication
to be found in the ninth session In the Seventh Session of Derrida’s The Beast and the
Sovereign Volume 2, from which the epigraph to the present essay is taken, Derrida
returns to the sentence “I posthume as I breathe” (see Beast and Sov, 2, 193; see 193n2
for the reference) he had written in “Circumfessions,” and after elaborately on, discusses
several works by Maurice Blanchot Derrida wrote just after Blanchot had been cremated,
pages he says he believes he has “not yet begun to read” (185). (As the editors note
[181], these pages appeared modified in the second edition of Parages as an additional
chapter entitled Maurice Blanchot est mort” [Maurice Blanchot is Dead”); that chapter
was not, however, included in the English translation of Parages, Stanford UP, 2011). In
the Ninth Session, Derrida observes that “all writings are posthumous” before proceeding
to narrow the definition of posthumous writing in which he which he includes a piece of
writing found upon Blaise Pascal’s accidentally found by Pascal’s servant.8 Pascal had
sewn the paper, the first word of which is “fire,” into his shirt. Pascal’s elder sister,
Gilberte Pascal Périer, published the writing in her Life of Blaise Pascal, introducing the
posthumous writing with a preface in which she narrates the circumstances of its
18
discovery and in which she wishes to direct how the note should note be read: it is not
Pascal’s “last word,” a master text that would govern the meaning of all of Pascal’s other
writings.9
Derrida’s interest in Pascal’s paper lies partly in the way it is “strictly posthumous,”
that is “posthumous” in the ordinary sense of the word:
As you well know, it is a posthumous piece of writing (now, of course, all
writings are posthumous, within the trace as structurally and essentially and by
destinal vocation posthumous or testamentary, there is a stricter enclave of the
posthumous, namely, what is only discovered and published after the death of the
author or signatory). Pascal’s writing on the god of Abraham was strictly
posthumous in the latter sense, even though we are not sure Pascal wanted it to be
published. This piece of paper initially takes the form of a journal, a note to self,
dated in Pascal’s hand—Pascal, who like Robinson Crusoe, here dates the
signature. He inscribes the year, the month, the day, and the hour . . . (209)
Even before it was posthumously published, apparently even if it had never been
published, Pascal’s writing remains readable.
Let us now come back to <this> “Writing Found in Pascal’s Clothing After His
Death.” There can be little doubt that this little piece of paper was destined, if not
for someone, then at least to remain, to survive the moment of its inscription, to
remain legible in an exteriority of a trace, of a document, even if it were readable
only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come. This is
indeed what has been called a memorial, to use the word of a witness, Father
Guerrier:
19
“A few days after the death of monsieur Pascal,” said Father Guerrier, “a
servant of the house noticed by chance an area in the lining of the doublet
of the illustrious deceased that appeared thicker than the rest, and having
removed the stitching at this place to see what was it was, he found there a
little folded parchment written in the hand of Monsieur Pascal, and in the
parchment of a paper written in the same hand: the one was a faithful copy
of the other. These two pieces were immediately put into the hands of
Madame Périer who showed them to several of her particular friends. All
agreed there was no doubt that this parchment, written with so much care
and with such remarkable characters, was a type of memorial that he kept
very carefully to preserve the memory of a thing that he wanted to have
always present to his eyes and mind, since for eight years he had taken
care to stitch and unstitch it from his clothes, as his wardrobe changed.
The parchment is lost; but at the beginning of the manuscript in the
Bibliothèque Nationale, one can find the paper that reproduced it, written
in the hand of Pascal, the authenticity of which was confirmed by a note
signed by the Abbé [Étienne] Périer, Pascal’s nephew. At the top was a
cross, surrounded by a ray of light.10
Derrida then cites the first word of Pascal’s note, “Fire [feu]” (212) placing it in the
middle of the page, as if it here a title. Derrida comments “This word ‘fire,’ is, then,
isolated, insularized in a single line, I’m not sure I can interpret it; I’m even sure that I
cannot interpret it in a decidable way, between the fire of the glory that reduces to ashes
and the fire that still smolders under the ashes of some cremation (Ashengloire).”
20
Derrida alludes here to his earlier discussion of Blanchot’s quotation from Paul Celan’s
poem Strette, the first of which, Derrida, notes at the end of a sentence that first links
cremation to Nazi concentration camps to Blanchot to Celan, is “ASCHENGLORIE
[ASHGLORY]” (capital letters in the original): “as for cremation, and the ashes that m
from now on, in modern and uneffaceable history of humanity, the crematoria of the
camps, let us forget nothing” (Beast and Sov 2, 179). Two kinds of reading, or
readability emerge in Derrida’s account of document entitled “Fire” (assuming the
document has a title) that happens to have kept from publication. On the one hand, the
paper always remains readable: it can be transcribed, it can be lost, its authenticity can be
vouched for on a note, and what cannot be transcribed can be described (the cross
surrounded by a ray of light). On the other hand, Derrida is not sure he can read what is
readable. Derrida could have easily distinguished the first kind of reading from the
second by using words like legible and, in opposition to it, interpretable; but he didn’t.
Instead, he calls the paper both legible and readable, using the words as synonyms, and
uses reader using and interpretable (one cannot decide what the legible writing means).
Nor did he put the two kinds of reading into paradoxical or aporetic relation with each
other, as I have done above. Neither the “strictly” posthumous publication of the paper
nor with the unpublished paper that Pascal folded up and covered by a piece of
parchment and then sewed into his shirts aligns with readability or unreadability, not
reading.
Derrida’s phrase “generation of repetitions to come” certainly invites, some reader might
even say demands, that repetition would not be the same, the generation is not a
21
mechanical program that Pascal installed and that his servant carried out after Pascal
died.
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.11
Ps. So as not to forget: the little key to the drawer is hidden in the other book. (I leave it
22
to you to divine the page.), 144
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
23
“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.
24
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?
Burn After Rereading
Reread Before Burning
Insupportable Reading
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
25
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
Doubtless the book will be called Legs de Freud 52
And it would also inscribe Le facteur de la verite as an appendix, with the great reference
to the Beyond . . . 53
This is the law of the genre/gender as was said in the note of the Facteur that they
evidently have not read at all, the note that installs the entire program, note 6 precisely:
“le poste differs from la poste only by gender” (Littré)12 54
That note is on p. 411, though the page number is not given, and Bass translates it
differently: “gateway post: Le poste [in the sense of osition] dffers from la poste {in the
sense of mail] only gender says Littré.
Bass adds a note in brackets that is longer than Derrida’s, explaining “the various editions
and translations of Lacan,” and observes that the English translation of the Écrits by
“Alan Sheridan states that the selection of the essays for the English Écrits [Bass omits
the subtitle, A Selection] is “Lacan’s own” (p.vii). Thus, for reasons to be determined,
something has changed: the “Seminar” no longer has the gateway post that Lacan
26
previously had emphasized, and, as just stated, does not appear in the volume at all.]”
421, n. 6.
Now that Bruce Fink’s Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English [Hardcover]
Jacques Lacan (Author), Bruce Fink (Translator) W. W. Norton & Company (December
16, 2005) is out, should that be read as sreotred version the way new translation of Kakfa
or new editions of Faulkner are? What is the relation between selection and complete?
Doesn’t first complete render the Écrits editions unreadable, as if there were a complete,
closed, single definitive edition? Did Lacan give the English edition a different heading?
Or did he approve, as he did Jacque Lain mIllers French editions, what Sheridan had
decided to select?
Bass note p. 420 Throughout I will refer to the English version of the Smnar, translated
by Jeffrey Mehlman, in French Freud, Yale French Studies, no 48, 1972 All references
in the text will be given by the letter S and a page number.
Derrida’s note 4, p. 420:
A note in Positions (1971-72, p. 107, n. 44) announced this reading of the “Seminar on
The Purloined Letter,” which was the object of a lecture at the Johns Hopkins University
in November 1971.
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
27
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
28
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
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 read 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
29
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
Lacan, in truth, meant to say what I said, under the heading of dissemination. What next!
As for me, all the while apparently speaking of dissemination, I would have reconstituted
this word to a last word and therefore into a destination. In other words, if it can be put
thus, Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I am only doing what he says
he is doing. And there you are, the trick has been played, destination is back in my hand
and “dessmination” is reversed into Lacan’s account. This is what I had describe to you
one day, three-card monte, the agility of the expert hands to which one would yield
oneself bound hand and foot. 151
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
30
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
31
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
32
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.
33
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
The Post Card as the title of a romance novel or a film (The Notebook; Postcards from
the Edge); the history of the post card, or the particular post card “the” post card of
Socrates writing and Plato dictates from behind, or post card of post cards Derrida finds
in Oxford, that is for sale [the post card, italicized but with “a” not “the” before it 12],
and copies of which he/whomever writes on, puts in an envelope, and mails instead of
mailing the post cards. Uses the cards instead of a letter (Kafka and Freud used letters,
they were the last to do so].
“and not only in the way a negative is developed” PC, 43
34
“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
35
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 . . .”
laser effect which would come to cut out onto the surface of the letters, and in truth our
body. 221
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
36
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:
37
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 here 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
38
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
39
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
40
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. “No dead person has ever said their last word.” Cixous, Or, les lettres de mom pere, 25;
cited by Derrida, H.C. for Life, 125, n. 113, p. 170
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
41
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), [<that> is not] above life, like something
sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor
indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself
to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle
voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the
substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-“ is without superiority,
without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does
not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it
cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one
could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you
will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a
groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we
can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-
called as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is
42
where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless.
That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The
other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and
that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my
survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)
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
43
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
1 Derrida frequently attended (frequently enough to become recognizable as a strategy or
gambit) to what he regards as “omissions.” Here is how Derrida describes it Freud’s
omission of Socrates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the second chapter of The Post
Card, “Speculations on ‘Freud’”:
Freud omits the scene of the text . . . It is the great omission. . . To omit Socrates,
when one writes, is not to omit just anything or anyone. . . The omission is not a
murder, of course, let us not overdramatize. . . If Freud in turn erases Socrates . .
374
Two pages earlier, Derrida writes about the manner of reading for fragments:
Now, in the time of this performance, Aristophanes’ discourse represents only one
episode. Freud is barely interested in this fact, and he retains only those shards of
a fragment which appear pertinent to his own hypothesis, to what he says he
means. One again, he sets himself to relating a piece of a piece of a narrative
related in the Symposium.
Derrida carefully then excuses Freud on the grounds that everyone does it, omit, erase,
that is:
This is a habitual operation. Who does not do it? And the question is no one of
approving or disapproving in the name of the law. Of what law? Beyond any
44
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
criteria or legitimation, we can nevertheless attempt to understand what is going
on in a putting to perspective, in a reading, in a writing, in citations, liftings,
omission, suspensions, etc. To do this, one must also make the relation to the
object vary. Post Card, 372
the omission in Memoirs of the Blind. spirit in Heidegger in Of Spirit
2 On Derrida’s essay “The Two Deaths of Roland Barthes,” see Pysche: Invention of the
Other, Vol 1. Trans Peggy Kamuf. Stanford UP, 2007. A number of essays Derrida
wrote upon the deaths of friends were athered together in an English book The Work of
Mourning. This htematic or genreic grouping is exceeded, however, by Derrida’s
differing ways in which he discussed, sometime more htna once, an autor’s works afeter
death. First and last essay of Roland Barthes strategy is used elsewhere for a living
author. Inhte middle for Foucault is used for Freud. Maurice Blanchot is dead appears in
Beast and Sovereign and second edition of Parages, a book almost entirely about
Blanchot but which does not name Blanchot in the title or chapter titles. Neither
translation refers ot the other. Death or deaths did not organize even if they sometimes
occasioned, Derrida’s works with respect to the subject being posthumous or not. On the
many paratextual oddities of The Work of Mourning, see Burt, “Putting Your Papers in
order. Derida’s dedication of Artaud le moma to paul Thevelin (in memory). Dedication
45
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.
as epitaph.
3 Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 199
4 Now here is the most ingenious finding: what remains a typographical error two out of
three times in given Écrits [Derrida does not specify the editions or given the relevant
page numbers] becomes [François] Roustang’s “slip,” Roustang having contented
himself, somewhat quickly it is true, with reproducing the ur-typo, everyone including its
author, turning all around that which must not be read.
Whose name I can say because he is dead”
Du Tout,” C, 519
5 “For the Love of Lacan,” 47 and 121n3. The headnote accompanying reprinting of this
essay, originally published as part of the proceedigs of the colloquium, in the book
Resistances of Psychoanlysis provides, as do some of the headnotes to The Post Card,
some idiosyncracies. Headnotes are often anonymous. In Resistances of Psychoanlaysis,
Derrida plays with indications of who wrote them. All three headnotes are unifromly
preceded with the word “NOTE” in all capitals followed, but the first person pronouns
used in each vary. In the first note, someone uses the plural “Our thanks” 119, and in the
second note someone similarly writes “we thank” but then Derrida identifies himself as
the writer by using the singular first person pronoun “I.” This variation would ordinarily
46
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
be considered unworthy of notice, even if Derrida writes a title “I writes us” in The Post
Card. In Resistnaces, it becomes noticeable though not necessarily readable only because
Derrida devotes nearly two pages of the republished lecture to the use of “we” after
citing a sentence he might say hypothetically “You see, I think that we loved each other
very much, you see.” Derrida focuses on what it means to say “’We’ when speaking all
alone of the death of the other” (42): “It is always an ‘I’ who utters ‘we’ supposing
thereby, in effect, the asymmetrical strucutre of the utterance, the other to be absent,
dead, in any case, incompetent, or even arriving too late to object. . . . If there is some
‘we’ in being-with, it is because there is always one who speaks all alonein the name of
the other, from the other; there is always one of htem who lives longe. I will not hasten to
call this one the ‘subject.’ When we are with someone, we know without delay that one
ofus will survive the other” (43). The asynchronic relation between these remarks about
first person pronouns and death in the text and the use of “we” and then “I” in the
headnote allows for, perhaps even invites a reading of the “note” that and its placement at
the head of the endnotes.
6 For variations on auto / bio / thanato / graphy, see The Post Card, 273, 293, 298, 302,
303, 322, 323, 328, 333, 356.
7
47
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
8 By “all writings are posthumous,” Derrida presumably means that all writing is like the
signature as defined in “Signature, Event, Context.” (your signature will operates even
after you are dead; to sign is to be dead). Like “I posthume I breathe.” Like the ruin in
Memoirs of the Blind. Again a para-Freudian reading of blndness, mistakes, castation,
and convresion that logs into Derrida’s own previous readings of Freud’s essay “The
Uncanny” while never mentioning Lacan.
9 Derrida continues: “Pascal was only thirty-one years old when he wrote and put into his
clothing the posthumous paper we are deciphering and he must have kept for around
eight years, as he dies in 1662, at “39 years and two months,” says his [elder] sister. . .
This is how she presents and quotes this “little paper”: (Quote and comment on Pascal)
Thus he made it appear, that he had no attachment to those he loved, for had he
been capable of having one, it would indisputably have been to my sister; since
she was undeniably the person in the world he loved most. But he carried it still
further, for not only he had no attachment to any body, but he was absolutely
against any body’s having one to him. . . . We afterwards perceived that this
principle had entered very deep into his heart, for to the end he might always have
presented it to his thoughts. He had it set down in his own handwriting, on a little
piece of paper by itself, where these words. . . . (210; 211)
48
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
Gilberte Pascal Périer then justifies publication in her Life of Blaise Pascal by stating
that she does not wish to solicit a desire for an a reading of the words on the paper as a
last word, “for I am no ultimate end of any body” (211).
10 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and Sovereign, Vol. 2, 212. By chance, a letter from
Timothy Bahti Derrida quotes at the beginning of the Seventh Session also went missing:
The editors say “we found this letter neither in the typescript of the session nor in the
Jacques Derrida archives at IMEC. The following extract in reproduced from a copy of
the letter, which is dated February 23, 2003 [and written in French], as provided by its
author” (Beast and Sovereign 2, 172n1).
11 The passages Derrida writes on Pascal I cited above are one of many “examples,”
if one wanted to call them that and momentarily suspend the question of exemplarity, in
which essays Derrida wrote under the heading of “autobiothanatographical” texts.
The parchment within the parchment, the confusion of paper and parchment—which is
lost and which is a copy—only one of two lost?
Resewing—is sewing a figure? Did the servant never see Pascal sewing the paper? Did
he never help Pascal with the unsewing and sewing?
“Drawing” the Line: The Graphic Design of Writing
In relation to publication lies another problem, and its relation to the support. The
49
“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
parergon has the same problem of the support as does publishing.
Cite Derrida on the material support as problem in The Post Card
Derrida and reproductions in The Post Card-which photographs are described, placement
of reproductions, and so on. Eccentric as compared to The Truth in Painting or Memoirs
of the Blind or “Unsensing the Subjectile” in Artaud or “Maddening the Subjectile” in
“Boundaries: Writing and Drawing” YFS (1994) or Artaud le MOMA, to name a few.
Derrida’s radical empiricism doesn’t get into drafts (though he does get into editions a
bit, but not generally philology). Relation between reception, iteration, reproduction, and
the material supports of both words and images and the boundary between them. No
reproduction of the title pages of the two editions of Rouseau’s Confessions in
Typewriter Ribbon, Ink 2: (within such limits). But reproduction of J.D. in signature,
Event. Book on Derrida, posthumous, turning editions into images. What are the limits
of reading materials for Derrida?
The boundary of writing and drawing, the parergon: it is both figurative and literal, a
narrative frame, an “invisible” narrative frame, but also a frame of a painting, and related
to paratext or signature or wall text. So what is excessive in relation to the line in Poe?
When does the explicit become seeable? Memoirs of the Blind? When does the line
50
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
becoming a drawing? What about the parergon as a facsimile, as a frontispiece, as a
painting (Van Gogh) or a drawing (Adami), Restitutions and “Parergon” in The Truth of
Painting. Does the parergon include the paratext?
Graphic design and drawing. Pun as sound activated by visual. Dessein and dessin
Drawing Between the Eye and the Hand: (On Rousseau) Bernard
Vouilloux, Christine Cano and Peter Hallward Yale French Studies,
No. 84, Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994), pp. 175-197.
Martine Reid and Nigel P. Turner “Editor's Preface: Legible/Visible”
Yale French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994),
pp. 1-12
The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books
by Renée Riese Hubert, Judd D. Hubert
Louis Aragon The adventures of Telemachus. Lincoln : University of
translated and with an introduction by Renée Riese Hubert & Judd D. Hubert. Nebraska
Press, c1988.
51
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
Renée Riese Hubert. Derrida, Dupin, Adami: "Il faut être plusieurs
pour écrire" Yale French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing &
Drawing (1994), pp. 242-264.
All Writing is Drawing: The Spatial Development of the Manuscript
Serge Tisseron Yale French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing &
Drawing (1994), pp. 29-42.
Jean-Gérard Lapacherie and Anna Lehmann Typographic Characters:
Tension Between Text and Drawing Yale French Studies, No. 84,
Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994), pp. 63-77.
Jacques Derrida and Mary Ann Caws Maddening the Subjectile Yale
French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994), pp.
154-171.
12 The Dictionnaire de la langue française by Émile Littré
52
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
53
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)13
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.
13 For more on Derrida on the subjectile, see Paper Machine (2005)
54
This essay may not have been published. If it has been published, what is it that you are reading now? Is there a future anterior of the after the fact of publication, a future of infinite reading? Has one crossed the threshold of publication before one publishes, especially if one has been invited to contribute and the chances of rejection have been minimized? On you writing on the way to publication? Is it the criterion of selection? What one decides to delete but does not destroy, does not want to publish under one’s name, material one withholds in a manner that is the opposite of plagiarism? Is there an auto-recovery involved in published unpublished not reducible to genetic criticism? Is publication always a kind of privation or deprivation? Is publication a destination of writing, to be distinguished from the destinations of unpublished materials one might call priva--cations? Under what conditions can publication no longer be sidelined as merely a juridical, institutional, and bibliographical matter and must be addressed as a philosophical question?
Is there a “die-stination” for all publication given that , for Derrida, writing is inseparable from death?
The Post Card and Beyond. What are the limits of the book, what is the status of “and
beyond”? Beyond Finitude?
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.
55
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.
Memoirs of the Blind, 68
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.
56
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
57
need of deconstruction; ruin as always already, always “before”; the apprehension. Also
the book not as corpse. The “tissue” and “weave” mixed metaphors.
Screaming Driver, Screaming Driver's Wife: You're going the wrong
way! You're going to kill somebody! Planes, Trains &
Automobiles (1987)
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?
58
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
For Crusoe, reading is reanimating, implicitly on the side of life. Pascal—is reading on the side of life, can one read for life, is it reanimation? Generation of the repetitions to come—how would this securing of non-reading as the same thing as rereading work in relation to the archive and repetition and the death drive? Biological death sometimes matters to Derrida, as in “Du Tout,” dead name, dedications of sessions of east and the Sovreign to recently deceased friends, For the Love of Lacan after Lacan is dead, same for To DO Justice to Freud. Difference between revisiting (revenant) and reviving (seeing—would one read blind, as in Memoirs Derrida talks about driving as if blind? No clothing versus naked, but clothing of Pascal like the wallet Derrida discusses in Paper Machine.
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” he answered, laughing.” The
Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Oxford 19
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
59
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
60
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’”
61
begins with the repetition compulsion, which Lacan idiosyncratically translates as
“repetition automatism.”14 “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
14 SEE BRUCE FINKS’S ENDNOTE P. 767, (11, 3)
62
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
63
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
64
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
65
Read by juxtaposition of selections: My choice is information passage (about media) in
relation to sentence about the reading he has unlocked. To get at question of the support
and the facsimile.
“This question cannot but resound when we know we are caught in a scene of reading”
On the Name, 98.
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
66
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
67
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.’”
Resistance of Psych, 53
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.
68
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
69
Derrida’s unlocked reading—a series of equivalences, nested or translated, repeated, a
series? Is it serial repetition? What kind of structural reading is being unlocked here?
What difference, if any, does the substrate make to this structural reading? What kind of
formal materiality or radical empiricism, differs from history of the book and material
culture?
Obviously I am thinking of the omission of the frame, of the play of signatures, and
notably the parergonal effect; I cannot produce the demonstration I gave in 1975 of this
misrecognition. Resistances of Psych, 59
of a continuum composed each time of words or sentences, of signs missing from the
interior, if it can be put thus, of a card, a of a letter, or of a card-letter. For the totally
incinerated envois, could not be indicated any mark. I had thought first of preserving the
figures and the dates, in other words the places of the signature, but I gave it up. What
would this book have been like? Before all else I wanted, such was one of the
destinations of my labor, to make a book—in part for reasons that remain obscure and
always will, I believe, and in part for other reasons that I must silence. A book instead of
what? Or of whom?
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.
70
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
71
“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.
72
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
--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?
73
--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.
74
---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?
Reading is the question awaiting and usually goes unasked—what is reading? Close?
How close? Slow? How so? What about random access reading scanning reading? Flip
book reading? Far reading? When is it no longer reading? What is the place of non-
reading? Reading is not about a theme, a frame, a master word.
75
First sentence
First page
First word same as the first page?
No Weg without Umweg: the detour does not overtake the road, but constitutes it, breaks
open the path. Pc, 284
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
76
“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
(In the syntax of “X: A Critical Reader,” it will, moreover, always be difficult to
determine who is the reader of whom, who the subject, who the text, who the object, and
who offers what—or whom—to whom. What one would have to criticize in the oblique,
today, without doubt, is without doubt the geometrical figure, the compromise still made
with the primitiveness of the place, the line, the angle, the diagonal, and thus of the right
angle between the vertical and the horizontal. The oblique remains the choice of a
strategy that is till crude, obliged to ward off what is most urgent, a geometric calculus
for diverting as quickly as possible both the frontal approach and the straight line:
presumed to be the shortest path form one point to another.
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
77
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
78
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.
The indivisible, singular, living, non-fragmentable integrity of the phallus” 477
Materiality, the sensory and repetitive side of the recording, the paper, drawings in ink
can be divided destroyed or set adrift” 472-73
79
That is, irreducible dis-regard, theft without return, destructibility, divisibility, the failure
to read a destination.
Only the ideality of a letter resists destructive division. “Cut a letter in small pieces, it
remains the letter it is” (S, p. 53): since this cannot be said of empirical materiality, it
must imply an ideality. . . . . If this ideality is not the content of meaning, it must be
either a certain ideality of the signifier (what is identifiable in its form to the extent that it
can be distinguished from its empirical events and re-editions), or the ‘point de caption’
464
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
80
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
Lacan made a compulsive blunder: he has said that he thought I was in analysis (laughter
from the audience, the sentence replaced by an ellipsis in Ornicar, but too late because
the transcription had circulated; once again the problem of the archive, the archive that no
one can master; here no more than ever because of the recording technique. 67-68]
81
“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 Derridas 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:
82
“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.
Bass Notes
83
Alan Bass leaves many French words untranslated into English. There are no
translator’s notes to “Envois.”15
All this to be read in the Nachlass of the 80s, surrounding this sentence which I no longer
wish to translate” At the end he returns to the phrase “To is to be continued” (cites his
15 Poe Translations for "The Purloined Letter"
This story features a lot of French and Latin. Here are some translations and
explanations, listed by page number.155 Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio
Nothing is more odious to wisdom than guilefulnessau troisième....GermainThis is
a street addressthe affair of the Rue Morgue...murder of Marie RogêtPoe's earlier
dectective stories156 boudoira woman's bedroom, dressing room, or private sitting
room157 au faitaccording to precedent (literally, to the fact)158 gimlet-dustwaste
wood left by a hand drill161 Rochefoucauld, La Bougive, Machiavelli,
CampanellaThese are writers claiming human beings are motivated by self-
interest162 non distributio mediiThe Latin name for a logical fallacy--in English,
"the undistributed middle."The error is this: All fools are poets. The Minister is a
poet. Therefore, the Minister is a fool.Il y à parièr...grand nombreIt appears that
all popular ideas, all accepted conventions, are blunders because they have been
shaped to suit the greatest number [of people].ambitus...religio...homines homesti
Dupin's point is that the original Latin meanings of these words do not correspond
with their English derivatives. Ambitus meant soliciting votes,religio referred to
84
own “La séance continue” subtitle which is taken from Freud, who said when his
daughter died.
I did not wish to cite in passing 388
To be continued 337; 409; la séance continue, 320; 376
fasting or connecting, and homines honesti signifieddecent and respectable people.
166 facilis descensus Avernifrom Virgil's Aeneid: It is easy to do down into hell
[Avernus]monstrum horrenduma horrible monsterUn dessein si funeste...Thyeste
From Crébillon's play Atreus and Thyestes: If so lethal a plot is not worthy of
Atreus, it is worthy of Thyestes. [This refers to Greek mythology--see Course
Content for a summary of the story.]
Fold 236
If there is no such thing as a total or proper meaning, it is because the blank folds-over.
The fold is not an accident that happens to the blank. . . . The fold does not come upon it
from outside it; it is the blank’s outside as well as its inside, the complication according
to which the supplementary mark of the blank (the asemic spacing) applies itself to the
set of white things (the full semantic entities) plus to itself, the fold of the veil, or text
upon itself.
Dissemination, 258
I am rereading Beyond . . . with one hand (everything in it is marvelously hermetic,
which is to say postal and trailing [trainant]—a subterrean railway, but also lame, trailing
the leg behind: he tells us NOTHING, does not make a step that he does not take back at
85
The word transference reminds one of the unity of the metaphoric network, which is
precisely metaphor and transference (Uebertragung), a network of correspondences,
connections, switch points, traffic and a semantic postal, railway sorting without which
no transferential destination would be possible, in he strictly technical sense that Freud’s
psychoanalysis has sought to assign this word . . . . 383
the next step. 140-41
Nothing works [Rien ne marche], but everything goes very fast, absolutely fast, in which
this paralysis, which I know something about. 141
The post card or telethisthat, 113
And it will remain like that in a wallet 79
Run in circles, 63
When I have nothing to do in a public place, I photograph myself and with few
exceptions burn myself. 37
“repetition compulsion” is understood even less, 35
“you are dead” 33
Want to write a grand history, a large encyclopedia of the post and of the cipher, but to
write it ciphered still in order to dispatch it to you, taking all the precautions so that
forever you are the only on to be able to decrypt it (to write, then, and to sign), to
recognize your name, the unique name I have given you . . . 13
He was sure that his death would arrive in 1907. 241
86
Obeying a law of selective economy . . . as much as the rightful pleasure that I can give
myself tonight, I will limit myself to the following traits. 372
Zuruck, 362, 409
Autoteleguiding 356, 337
Correspondence, here, between to who, according to all appearances and all usual
criteria, never read each other, and even less encountered each other. Freud and
Obviously when beneath my public signature they read these words they will have won
out (over just what?) but . . . .238
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 . . . . 196
The computers, the powers, the dupins and their bi-spoolarity (fort/da), the States, this is
what I am assessing, or computing, what I am sorting out in order to defy all sorting out
[tris]. 194
Teckne does not happen to language or to the poem, 192
I am losing the track, I no longer know to whom I am speaking, nor about what. The
difficulty I would have about in sorting out this courier with the aim of publication is due,
among other perils, to this one: you know that I do not believe in propriety, property, but
above all in the form it takes according to the opposition public / private (p/p, so be it).
87
Heidegger, Heidegger and Freud. . . . They could not read each other—therefore they
have spent all their time and exhausted their forces in doing so. 357
How has such a hypothesis, under its rubric as hypothesis, I am insisting on this, been
granted in this third chapter? I am supposing it reread. 339
Empirico-biographical, 328
185
And I say ardently that I, let me, die. Or ardently, that this book is, let this book be,
behind me. 198
I am rereading, sometimes sinking into tour immense memory, sometimes with the
meticulous attention of he philologist. 200
I have more and more difficulty writing you. 200
The dos, 201
You were already dead ten times, 201
With Socrates, with my posthumous analyst of with you, for example, okay this is even
what I say all the time. 201-02
Account of the professor and student lecture photograph, 202—we get no photo, just as
didn’t get the photos of Freud and of Heidegger, each posing with his wife.
The fortune teller book reproductions are matched to account 211
Color reproduction socartes, in black and white on he cover and in the end paper, is on p.
251.
Everything would be destroyed 253
But the support itself, which I wanted to deliver naked, we will also burn. 252
I notice that in speaking of readers with you, I always call them people 253
88
(This entire syntax is made possible by the graphics of the margin or hyphen, or the
border and the step, such as remarked elsewhere. I will exploit it here.] 317
Freud’s Legacy, the title mentioned in envois, is the title of section 2, and the chapter
opens with a comment about “The title of this chapter is a deliberately corrupt citation,
which doubtless will have been recognized. The expression “Freud’s legacy [legs de
That I burned the baby doll instead of taking it out on her. 252
Holocaust, 254
Another S.P., agreed . . . , but I would put my hand into the fire, it’s really the only one.
For the rest, they will understand nothing of my clinamen, even if they are sure of
everything, especially in that case, the worst one. Especially there where I speak, they
will see only fire. On this subject, you know that Freud’s Sophie was cremated. 255
Each of them to the other; you were in league to have me destroyed, you conspired, you
have covered al the trails, get out of it yourself. 244
Ophelia 254
Aporia 255
Proof, 255
Tomorrow I will write you again, in our foreign language. I won’t retain a word of it and
n September, without my even having seen you again, you will burn
You will burn it, you, it has to be
you. 256
But when the syngram has been published, he will no longer have anything to do with it,
or with anyone—completely elsewhere-- the literary post will forward it by itself q.e.d.
This has given me the wish, envie (that is indeed the word) to publish under my name
89
Freud] is often encountered in the writings of Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Grandoo.
Naturally I leave the reader as judge of what is going on in this corruption.
The next paragraph:
This chapter was originally published in the number of Etudes freudiennes devoted to
Nicholas Abraham. I had then prefaced it with this note: 292
things that are inconceivable, and above all unlivable, for me, thus abusing the “editorial”
credit that I have been laboriously accumulating for years the to publish under my name
things that are inconceivable with this sole aim in mind. 235
Prove it 235
Cable burial 236
Not to know how to burn 236
I read, 236
They can no longer read anything except the peforation (B A, B A, O A, OA, Ri, R I
).
Burned to a white heat, 239
When beneath my public signature they read these words 238
I now have the book on my table. I am rereading it.
So much for the fire 244
The end of the world by fire 245
After the fire 245
You’re right, I love you is not to be published. I should not shout it from the rooftops.
246
90
This is what has encouraged me to publish this fragment here. Those who wish to delimit
its import can consider it a reading of the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. 292
The last sentence of the note is “Other fragments of the same seminar will appear soon in
book form.” 293
But I tell you again. Am keeping only a very brief sequence of our film, and only of the
film, a copy, a copy of a copy, the thin black roll, hardly a veil. 246
But even though they cannot bear is what you know: that jogging is infinitely preferable
to writing for publication: it never goes very far, it comes back in a close circuit, it plays
like a child in its playpen: that jogging and writing for publication for me only a training
with you in mind. 247
And knowing that I have understood nothing, that I will die without have [sic] understood
anything. 247
Chemin, Weg, 247
A rebours, 247
You would not have liked it if I had collected your letters. 249
Not that I’m thinking about the fire 250
If I this, people are going to believe that I am inventing it for my compositional needs.
253
Between the preface and the three others, the phone calls will buzz like wasps in full
transference. 239
If not by the end, and as they never read . . . Too bad. 240
We will no longer be able to 239 write each other, we will be too late.
91
This fact will be contested by those whose truth is hidden by these themes, who are all
too happy to find in them corroboration for their truth on the basis of what they call
“hermeneutics.”
(A healthy reform of spelling would allow us to give their exploitation of this term the
import of a famillionaire practice: that of the faux-filosopher, for example, or the
fuzzyosphy, without adding any more does or I’s.)
As if it had an incipit, I am, then, opening this book. It was our agreement that I began it
at the moment of the third ring.n1 p259
Let one refer to any of the aforementioned judgments—the impossibility of a resting
point pulls the textual performance along into a singular thing.
I have abused this word, it hardly satisfies me. Drifting designates too continuous a
movement, or rather too undifferentiated, too homogenous a movement that appears to
travel away without saccade from a supposed origin, from a shore, a border, a coast with
an invisible outlne.261
Those who remain will not know how to read, 249
Read this. It’s falling into place, 206
They cannot write to each right on the thing, right on the support, they cannot accumulate
by writing to each on the subject of accumulation. 207 Derrida is speaking of stamp
collectors.
The variety of the pub. In general. 233
In order to reassure themselves they say: deconstruction does not destroy
I’m not inventing anything 233
By virtue of you, I intrigue. Sending nothing to anyone, not anyone, I am fomenting a
resurrection. Had you finally encountered him, Elijah? You were right nearby, you were
92
Their radical vice can be seen in [their approach to] the transmission of knowledge.
--Jacques Lacan, “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question,” Écrits, 193
I will do nothing for the reader henceforth—apart from pointing out, a little further on,
the aim of my Seminar—but trust in his tete-a-tete with texts that are certainly no easier,
but that are intrinsically suitable.
--Jacques Lacan, “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question,” Écrits, 189
burning. I had put you on the track and if because I love them too much I am not
publishing your letter (which by all rights belongs to me). I will be accused of erasing
you, or stifling you, or of keeping you silent. If I do publish them, they will accuse me of
appropriating you for myself, of stealing of keeping the initiative, of exploiting the body
of a woman, always the pimp, right? Ah Bettina, my love
And it
Will be even worse if I publish your letters under my name, signing in your place. Listen,
Bettina, I will restore everything to you. 230-31
We were dead, 231
I am putting on these passages to be kept, I mean to be thrown outside the fire, I am
checking them off before transcribing, again going through the alleys of the cemetery in
order to pick out epitaphs. 229
I no longer know what I am doing, and how I am “scratching,” If I am easing or writing
and hwat I am “saving.” 229
Melina, K. 226
Who will prove, 234
And if you now asked me to burn the book .. . I would do it in a second. 228
I’m rereading my Legacy, what a tangle. 248
93
(Here, I interrupt this development, If one is willing to read its consequences, including
its appendix in Facteur de la verite, one will perceive . . . 335
To which he forcibly adapts his designs, 689
Completely useless 367
Deciphers it far afar like a teleguided reading device
Socrates “is taking notes for having in mind a project of publication in modern times. He
is pretending to write but he has a small pocket tape recorder under his mantle. 218-19
Believe I am making it up, 217
Refound here the American student with whom we had coffee last Saturday, the one who
was looking for a thesis subject (comparative literature), I suggested to her something on
the telephone in literature of the 20th century (and beyond), starting with, for example, the
telephone lady in Proust or the figure of the American operator, and then asking the
question of the effects of the most advanced telematics on whatever would still remain of
literature. I spoke to her about microprocessors and computer terminals, she seemed
somewhat disgusted. She told me that she loved still literature (me too, I answered her,
mais si, mais si). Curious to know what she understood by this. 204
“Burn everything . . . publish everything” ( ; 132)
(in the same way, the “log” that runs at the bottom of the pages of Derrida’s Parages is
not, despite its position, a local note but is clearly an appendage to the text as a whole).
Genette, Paratexts, 336
Thus some delayed prefaces illustrate a variety we call the posthumous preface—
posthumous to its publication, endless to say: for the paratext as for the text itself, this is
the standard meaning of that adjective, short of a resort to séances. But in contrast to the
94
Besides, in our case, we were obliged to proceed without noise” 685 [like D—going
blind, only on audio for Dupin.
Holding up his closed hand, 689
Vacant stares 688
Its susceptibility to being produced?” I said.
text, a preface—if it is allographic – may be a posthumous production . . .
Genette, Paratexts, 175
Structure itself, the formal structure yields itself to reading, Post Card, 321
Dupes (duplicates, dummies)
Reengage materiality and so called book history in relation to the support, formal
materiality, figures.
By the aid of a most powerful microscope. Had there been any traces of recent
disturbance we should not have failed to detect it instantly.
Is the facsimile one kind of duplicate among others? Is it an exact copy of the inexact
copy Dpupin discovers D—has hidden? Or its fold up? Unfolded—unlike Pascal, whose
text is deleiver, but equallyunredable.
"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in
search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the
Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the
D-- cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S-- family. Here, the
address, to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a
certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of
95
That is to say, of being destroyed, said Dupin. [When do Derirda’s “Tropics” become
designs, drawings, writing bordering on drawing?
The Prefect . . . finally filled up and signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed
across the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and deposited in his pocket-
book; then, unlocking an escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect.
correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the
dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical
habits of D--, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the
worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of
this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the
conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly
corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect.
"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a most animated
discussion with the Minister, on a topic which I knew well had never failed to interest
and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I
committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell,
at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have
entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed
than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when
a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed
direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery
was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-
96
No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in
search. . . . But the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive 696
You will remember, perhaps, ho desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested, upon
our first interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account
of its being so very self-evident.” 696
681
directed, and re-sealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and took my departure at once,
leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table.
"The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite eagerly, the
conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a
pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a
series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. D-- rushed to a casement, threw it
open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in
my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals,) which I had
carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D-- cipher, very readily, by means of a
seal formed of bread.
"But what purpose had you," I asked, in replacing the letter by a fac-simile? Would it not
have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly, and departed?"
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (1845). In Edgar Allen Poe: Poetry and Tales.
Ed. Patrick F. Quinn, Library of America, 1984, 696-97.
Everything I have to say about The Post Card—and beyond--will necessarily be
either prolegomonal or paralipomenal--dupe
97
Ful of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pari of green spectacles. . To be even with
him [why even? Odd? ], I complained of my weak eyes [versus D’s “lynx-eyed”] and
emanated the necessity of the spectacles, under cover [under cover as in detective, but
also like a piece of paper—his glances, his eye movements, his reading al have be
concealed by the “shades” Dupin wears] I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the
apartment, while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host. [Dupin goes on
I have cited it elsewhere, but once more I reread the declaration of avoidance which
performs the inevitable, 263
Footnote 268
Detour 269
Small footnote in the Letter to d’Alembert invokes the devil “in person, so to speak, and
his apparition under the guise of the phantom of his double . . . 270
Here is the footnote I take as the exergue to my discourse 270
Then we must begin, at least, by pointing out in the hastily named “internal” reading the
places that are
Here I break off these preliminary remarks 272 (started on p.259)
open to intersecting with other networks 273
Here, it seems to me, we must pay the greatest attention to Freud’s rhetoric. 279
Freud specifies between dashes 29
See elsewhere
I believe that it is better to erase all the pictures, all the other cards, the photos, the
initials, the drawings, etc. The Oxford card is sufficient for everything. It has the
iconographic power that one can expect in order to read or to have read the whole history,
98
audio only-he is blind, but somehow he is still readable as a listener. He is actually deaf
—or has the mute button on.
Upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it
to good purpose; I paid especial attention to a large writing-table near which he sat . . .
By being too shallow or to deep, for the matter in hand; [on hand and in hand] 689
between us, the punctuated sequence of two years, from Oxford to Oxford, via two
centuries or two millennia . . . 204
It’s a photograph by Erich Salomon. 205
Soetimes I wish that everything remain illegible for them—and also for you. To become
absolutely unknowable for them. 205
Read this. It’s falling into place 206
Those that remain will not know how to read, they will go crazy. 249
When someone gives the order to fire, and to give the order is already to fire, everyone
goes to it. 248
More or less, 248
I have just received the slide in color. 250
I remember only the celluloid baby doll that was aflame in two seconds 253
Nor it’s the project of “partial publication” that has become insupportable for me, not so
much because of the publication—they will only be blinded by it--, as because the minute
cross-section to which all of this should, for my part, give rise. I see him as a perverse
copyist, seated for days in front of a correspondence, two years of voluble
correspondence, busy transcribing a given passage, scratching out a given other one in
order to prepare it for the fire, and he spends hours of knowledgeable philology sorting
99
It was nearly in two, across the middle—as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it out
as worthless had been altered, or stayed, in the second. [first, second] It had a very large
seal, bearing the D-cipher very conspicuously . . . 695
He hard foreseen all of this 693
When you have signed it, will hand you the letter. 688
Opened it with a trembling hand 688
out what derives fro this or that, in order to deliver nothing to publicity, absolute nothing
that might be proper (private, secret) in order to profane nothing, if that is possible. 182
Anything everything 183
Foreign language 183
Actual legality has no jurisprudence here, and even if you don’t want to give htem back I
could reinvent them. I will retain only whatever may be combined as a preface to the
three other texts (Legs de, Le facteur de la verite, Du tout). The ensemble will be seen as
a combine, an emitting-receiving device: nothing will be seen in it, only calls, or wires, in
every sense will be heard, that which reads the post card and which first will have been
read by it. Socrates reading Socrates. 180
Destroyed 181
Dead letter 181
Lots of tropes will be necessary. There will be several books in this book. I count four,
we will read it as our Tropics. 178
I am readin ghte check that he is in the ocurse of signing. 178
Of turning the back of the post card, 178
100
Producing a memorandum-book, proceeded to read aloud a minute account of the
internal, and especially of the external appearance of the missing document. 686-87
I made the re-examination” 687
Poe engages forensics as a kind of bibliometrics:
You looked among D----‘s papers, of course, and into the books of the library? We
opened every package and every parcel; we nervously opened every book, but we turned
I am reflecting upon a rather rigorous principle of destruction. What will we burn, what
will we keep (in order to broil it better still)? The selection (tri) , if it is possible, with in
truth be postal: I would cut out, in order to deliver it, everything that derives form the
Postal Principle . . . . And we burn the rest. Everything that from near or far touches on
the post card (this one, in which one sees Socrates reading us, or writing all the others
and every post card in general), all of this we would keep, or finally doom to loss by
publishing it . . . 176
First faux metapassage:
The rest, if there is any that remains, is us, is for us, who do not belong to the card. We
are the post card, if you will, and as such, accountable, but they will seek in vain, they
will never find us in it. In several places, I will leave all kinds of references, names of
persons and places, authentifiable dates, identifiable events, they will rush in with eyes
closed, finally believing to be there and find us there when by means of a switch point I
will send them elsewhere if we are there, with a stroke of the pen or the grattoir. I will
make everything derail, not at every instant, that would be too convenient, but
occasionally and according to a rule that I will not ever give, even were I to know it one
day. I would not work too hard on composing the thing, it is a scrap copy of scrapped
paths that I leave in their hands. Certain people will take it into their mouths, in order tor
101
over every lead in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to
the fashion of some police officers. We also measured the thickness of Every book-cover
, 686
Also storage metrics:
We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained
police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. 684
recognize the taste, occasionally in order to reject it immediately with a grimace, or in
order to bite, or to swallow, in in order to conceive, even, I mean a child 177
This is literature without literature. 197
Of love letters. The ones I have reread running in the street and I scream with pain like a
madman, they are the most beautiful that I have ever read, the first have ever been written
but also, I must tell you, the last. You were not only predestined for me, you were
predestined to write the last love letters. Afterward, they no longer will be able to, nor
will I, and this conceive a bit of pain for you. Not only because your love takes on a
somewhat eschatological and twilight tinge from this, but because, no longer knowing
how to write “love-letters,” they will never read you. 197-98
Story about Lacan thinking Derrida was “inanalysis” [sic] or that J.D. was. 202-03.
The old man who remains the last to read himself. 199
I can’t go on. I’m going to run. Spent hours rereading. I’m trying to ort [trier], it’s
impossible. I cant even reread any more. 199
I also thought that upon reading this sorted mail [courier trie] they could think that I alone
am sending these letters to myself: as soon as they are sent off they get to me 199
Second faux metapassage:
102
After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in the drawer, she was forced to place it,
open as it was, upon a table. 682
From giving him reason to suspect our design. 683
I have keys which can open any chamber of any cabinet in Paris. 683
Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain, said Dupin. 681
Especial form, 692
In the train, without telling him the essential, I recounted a bit of the project for a
“fiction”: a kind of false preface, once again, which, while parodying epistolary or
detective literature (from the Philosophical Letters to the Portuguese nun, form the
Liaisons dangereuses to Milena) would also obliquely introduce my speculations on
Freudian speculation. The entire book, according astrologies of post cards, would initiate
into speculation via the reading of Sp. Finally, that is all there would be, everything come
back and amount to the patient, interminable, serious and playful, direct or detoured,
lieral or figurative description of the Oxford card. 179
Derrida says in Rsitance of Psyhcoanlaysis tha the word “oblique” chose him
Postal principle. 176, 191
Iconography 172
Too obvious 172
Strange that this is happening to me at the same time as the glases—the problem with
close reading has accelerated sddenly. 170
Our only chance for survival now, but in what sense, would be to burn everything, in
order to ocome back to ur intial desir. Whatever “survival” it might be a quesiotn of, this
is our only chance, I mean common chance. I want to start over. Shall we brun
everything? That’s this morning’s idea, when you come back I’ll talk to you about it—as
103
Microscopes, 693
Eyes, 693
Escaped observation by dint of being excessively obvious 694
“re-directed and re-sealed”
I just copied” 698
“opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close juxtaposition to the other. 682
technically as possible. 171
Sublime nothingness, you know it preserves everything. The “correspondence” will be
destroyed better if we pretend to have several laughable fragments of it, several snapshots
good enough to put into everyone’s hands. 171
Car carsh 171
Whether it is a question of readers, which I do not like 168
One more citation for you, and I’ll stop reading, 166
Of us there wil never be a narrative. 167
Double signature, 18
What I read in my date book for the next two days, I invent nothing 167
He decheminates them 165
I know that
We would have closed all the borders on our secret. 186
I am going to die soon 164
Perhaps even to find and read, 181
I adore her, but like the others she thinks she knows what the post, in the usual, literal or
strict sense, “means”; she is sure that the exchange around the purloined letter does not
concern the “efficiency of the postal service.” Mais si, mais si—it is not sure that the
104
This cannot be done openly. 683
Policial eyes, 691
Suggestive of a design to delude the beholder 696 (Henry James—“design in the carpet”)
“And what, after all, is the matter on hand?” I asked. 681
from employing it as he must design in the end to employ it. 681
“Be a little more explicit,” I said. 681
sense of the p.s. (postal service) is itself assured of arriving at its destination, nor is the
word to post (poster). Are you sure, my love, of really understanding what this poster
means? It doubles, passes all the time 162
You know every well I refuse myself nothing-through all the chicaneries I authorize
myself everything. I send myself everything—on the condition that you let me do it 163
Chemin, 179
As if they knew about it for having read it. 197
Noting is burned in The Post Card, yet is everything published? Decipherable and
indecipherable, open and concealed.Is it naïve to ask “What is The Post Card about?”
The back cover of the English translation strongly implies that it is about post cards. This
is what paratexts do: they give you basic information that orients your reading, helps you
decide whether or not you want to read. Why would anyone bother to ask what The Post
Card is about, then? Isn’t the answer implied by the title? Isn’t the answer self-evident?
Doesn’t Derrida refer in the book to the “ontology of the post card,” a “postal structure,”
a “postal principle”? Before we consider that Derrida also asks and does not answer or
get an answer to questions he poses about the difference between a letter and a post card,
a dead letter and a dead parcel? let us pause for a moment and “read” the back cover, on
which we are invited to turn to “the other side of the card” and “look.” Before the
105
When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations. 688
The story is essentially over less than half way through the Purloined Letter. The letter is
already recovered—ended, the entire first half is already “protracted’ because Dupin
could simply have said to the Prefect. I have what you’re looking for. That’ll be 50k.
Here is my checkbook. Story over. SO it comes as a chock tht he already has the letter
when he has seemed not to even know what the case was about.
copywriter, who turns out to be Derrida, equates the post card and the book--“the thick
support of the card, a book heavy and light”—, he asks, in Heideggerian fashion: “What
does a postcard want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible?” On the back
cover, the book’s title has already been cited and not cited, incorporated as words into a
question presumably raised “in” the book. How far should our “reading” of the back
cover go? Does it matter that the initially anonymous back cover description is “signed”
J.D. at the bottom right, the same initials he signs in “Signature, event, Context.” Let us
continue to read the back cover, read it as a text that may be skipped over, one of many
paratexts such as the copyright page all readers tend to skip over. Before we fold the title
of The Post Card into a thematic reading of the book, before we can say what the book is
“really” about, perhaps something than the post card but just as homogenous, before we
can say or what we, or “you” as the reader is addressed, “were reading” (first words of
the back cover, [Derrida often comments on reading the back of the post card]), before
we read “the book,” before we, again, “you,” “situate the subject of the book,” we may
ask a more fundamental and perhaps seemingly even more bizarre question, an
ontological question, namely, “what is The Post Card? Before any we offer any thematic
or allegorical reading of The Post Card, then, Conditions of publication. Burn everything
/ publish everything. This means not only reading everything, including the paratext, but
106
The rest of the story is explanation, but most of it does not explain. The story really picks
up and finishes only in the last three pages.
So in addition to excessiveness making the copy recognizable, Dupin’s detection involves
a doubly protracted narrative.
The question is all about whether the Minister will read Dupin’s card and recognize the
handwriting. But there is also a question about whether the Prefect ever gets the letter
to ask when variations in edtions become part of the paratexutal apparatus, when book
covers, footnotes, glossaries, table of contents, the organization of chapters, some
previously published or perhaps delivered as lectures, and editions and translations
become notable, as it were, or what I call “anecnotable.”? It is to get at the conditions of
reading, unreading, and non-reading. The heterogeneity of the corpus is also at issue,
even within the original language, translations aside.
I offer a number of new questions, then, in the hope that they are what Heidegger
would call the “right questions.” When is a letter not a dead letter? My questions arise
from close formal attention to The post Card but also call into question the limits of what
Derrida often calls an “internal reading” of a text.
Conditions of publication engage repetition and reproduction, the latter in its
“iconomy,” the different economy a facsimile has from description. Republication of
Lacan, note by Derrida. Note by Bass. Re-publication of part of The Post Card.
Recursive ordering of the text through the envois, itself precursive-works cited later after
first mentioned; and you are reading something written before and after the rest of the
book was written. It never becomes the preface to legs.
Confessional metapassages—that give the reader no Archidemean interpretive
leverage but do seem accurately descriptive.
107
back to the Queen. Might D--- have not intercepted the Prefect? We never have evidence
that the Queen gets it back.
Rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out. 697
He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investigation of his premises. . .
I regarded only as ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police 693
“aims of publication”
In a posthumous fragment by our friends (one must also speak of Nietzsche’s
chance), after insisted on the Socratic origins of the novel, he “turns himself back” again
toward Socrates . . . “ 161
The survival of a book is in the hands of a scribe, whose fingers might tire (or concern
themselves with something else), but also depends upon insects and the rain) [sic].? 161
Before getting to the point of reading any given Fortune-telling book of the 13th
century, the bearer of S and p, never forget that there is something tor recount, to discern,
something to tell, to be told, on the “fortune” of the book, of the chances it was able to
get to us intact, for example to fall into my hands one day in 1977, the remainder
remaining to follow . . .
It is always a question of setting (something) on its way / voice [voix], and alley oop, by
pressing on a well-placed lever, to compel unplugging, derailing, hanging up, playing
with the switch points and sending off elsewhere, setting it off route (go to see elsewhere,
if I am there: and someone is always found there, to carry on, to take the thread of the
story (you follow).
108
First, by default of this identification, and secondly, by ill-admeasurement [first . .
second] 690
from whom especially it was her wish to conceal it. 682
“A little too self-evident. 681
An imaginary individual 687
“in the dark,” 680 (repeated on p. 680; “under cover” of the green spectacles?)
Thorough identification 689
“now they have to be destroyed,” 233
The bad reader in Derrida pc, 4
Typo and name 364
Facteur, 360
Paragon and autobiography, 303
In this great omission, Freud forgets Socrates 374
Economy of reading Freud’s footnotes in BPP
This is the object of a note which is not only the longest in the book, but also much
longer than the passage it annotates. . . . The note then follows, more than twice as long
as the citation from the Symposium. 374; 374
Reading Burns Repetition, Reproduction,
Do You Read Me?
109
I am going right to the end of this chapter, toward the site of this first pause where . .
Freud finally concludes278, 320,
Freud drops it . . like the note at the bottom of the page which punctuates the end of this
act 368
And with this word a call for something. A call for a footnote that I will read presently.
313
Derrida announces and delays reading of Freud’s two footnotes (This is how we fall on
the first of two footnotes 318) delays getting to the second on p. 320, “Let us pause after
this first footnote, 320, mentions the second note on 325 This is the sentence that calls for
a note on Sophie’s Death. Before translating this paragraph on the two negative
functions of the PP, note included, I am extracting a notation from the preceding
paragraph, I have extracted it only because it did appear dissociable to me, like a parasite
from its immediate context. Perhaps it is best read as an epigraph of for what is to
follow. In the preceding paragraph it resonates . . . 325-26 calls up the second note only
to defer analysis of it “Call for a note on Sophie’s death. Before coming to it, I
emphasize the certainty . . . , last two sentences at the bottom of 326, and then on the
middle 327 “Here, finally, is the second note” 327
But a certain reading of his text, the one I am attempting here, cannot fail to come across
its work. PC 277
Freud torso, 265
I have cited it elsewhere 263
262, n6, by translator “An allusion to Freud and the Scene of Writing
110
Comparative philology—return to philology for de Man, who considered himself a
philologist?
Old dream of cinema, 68; repeated in Paper Machine
I am teaching you pleasure , I am telling you the limit and the paradoxes of the apeiron,
and everything begins like the post card, with reproduction. Sophie and her followers,
Ernest, Heinele, myself and company dictate to Freud who dictates to Plato, who dictates
to Socrates who himself, reading the last one (for it is you who reads me, you see him
here on his card I the place where he is scratching, it is for him that is written the very
thing that he is going to sign) again will have forwarded. Postmark on the stamp,
obliteration, no one any longer heard distinctly, all rights reserved, law is the rule, but
you can always run after the addressee as well as the sender. Run in circles, but I
promise you that you will have to run faster and faster. At a speed out of proportion to
these old networks, or in nay any event to their images. Finished the post, or finally this
one, this epoch of the destinal and of the envoi . . . 63
And to “recount” it has always seemed impossible to me , pc, 167
They intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme. 232
Holocaust 232
Autobiographical story about a telephone call, 230, like the story he tells at the end of
Given Time: Counterfeit Money.
111
Van Gogh’s shoelaces as signature (drawing, painting as writing).
Reread the little one’s letters. 255
There would only be “facteurs,” and therefore no verite. Only “media,” take this into
account in every war against the media. The immediate will never be substituted for
them, only other frameworks and other forces. 194
A datem for example, when sending a message [a l’evoi d’un pli] is never perceivable,
one never sees it, it never comes to me, in any event to consciousness, there wehere it
strictly takes place, whence one dates, signs, “expedites.” 195
All posts and telelcomunications 161
Story about posting anxiety 102
Story about telephone anxiety 159
Dead letters 124
Suppose I write a book abou, let us say Palto and telecom,” 103
The whole thing would be retranslated 95
Thus I am rereading the Letters of Plato and all those admirable discussions around their
authenticirt, of their belonging, the one says, to the corpus platonicum sucha s it has been
constituted from the time of Thrasyllus. 83
French book about Derrida turning his books into images.
112
I am rereading one of the letters received yesterday. Pc, 116
For the day that there will be a reading of theOxford card, the one and true reading, will
be the end of history. 115
Dupont and Dupond 112
“entire teleorgamization” 108
Voltaire and ciphers, 70
The Purveyor of Truth
Truth (out) of the Letter from Freud's Hand, 78.- o f a Kind, Kings - Double, 100.
Pretexts
Meeting Place: Four
11s le remercient pour les grandes veritds qu'il vient de proclamer,-- car ils ont d6cou-
vert ( verificateurs de ce qui ne peut &tre vkrifie!) que tout ce qu'il a enonce est absolu-
ment vrai;-- bien que d'abord, avouent ces braves gens, ils aient eu le soupcon que ce
pouvait bien 6tre une simple fiction. Poe repond que pour son compte, il n'en a jamais
dout6.
BAUDELAIRE
Mehlman does not translate; bass does
Mehlman spkips the first six sentneces
113
Were does psychoanalysis, always, alrady, find itself to be refound? 413
The author of thE book of which I am speaking, himself, not his name (therefore pardon
me for no† naming him) is himself pc, 99
Au Revoir
A very trivial remark , the relations between post, police and media are called upon to
transform themselves profoundly , as in the amorous message (which is more and more
watched over, even if it has always been), by virtue of informitization. So be it. And
therefore all the networks of the p.p. (psych and pol). [play on PP as pleasure principle]
But will the relation between the police, the psychoanalytic insitutioand letters be
affected? Inveitably, and it is beginning. Could Poe adapt The Purloined Letter to this?
Is it capable of adaptation? Here I would bet yes but it would be very difficult. The end of
a postal epoch is doubtless the end of literature. 104
PL, facteur, Poe appear in Envois: 28, 71, 94, 95, 104, 148-49, 200, 218, 222, 233
Lacan on on 150-51; Play on Purloined with “Purim” and “Pur . . . lot” 72 and possible
play on Dupin with “Dupont” and “Dupond”
From page 307 of Finnegan’s Wake: “visit to Guiness’s Brewery, Clubs, Advantages of
the enny Post. When is aPun not a Pun?” 142
Derrida’s use of the parergon rather than Genette’s paratext, does not analyze the borders
between notes and editorial annotations in translations, the extent to which one may read
publication history. (B Johnson’s fabricated title page in Dissemination. On the Name,
translation of a book that does not exist in French.)
No master word or first word or last word. Pc,151
114
Last word after the last word and first word before the first word In typewriter Ribbon,
Ink II: (Within such limits)
I am spending my time rereading you. 50
Since I am a true network of resistance, with internal cells, those little groups of three
who communicate only on one side (what is it called?), so that nothing can be extorted so
that no one gives way under torture, and finally so that no one able to betray. What one
hand does the other does not know (definition of Islamic alms?) 42
No history of the posts6-67
Dossier dos, 201
At the moment, I am thinking that thinking that every “production” as they say, f a
concept or system which is never without a name and effigy, is also the meission of a
postage stamp which itself is a post card (picture, text, reproduction, and most often ina
rectangular shape. Pc, 200
Heidegger and Freud, 191 masters of the post.
End of an epoch 190
I have lost my life writing 143
I had put it in my pocket, without reading it right away, the note you left me. 141
Question of geometry of the card and the frame. Oblique and geometry in On the Name.
115
These reminders, of which countless other examples could be given, make us aware of
the effects of the frame, and of the paradoxes in the parergonal logic. Our purpose is not
to prove that "The Purloined Letter" functions within a frame (omitted by the Seminar,
which can thus be assured of its triangular interior by an active, surreptitious limitation
starting with a metalinguistic overhang), but to prove that the structure of the framing
effects is such that no totalization of the border is even possible. The frames are always
framed: thus by some of their content. Pieces with- out a whole, "divisions" without a
totality-this is what thwarts the dream of a letter without division, allergic to division.
From this point on, the seme "phallus" is errant, begins by disseminating, not even by
being disseminated.
The naturalizing neutralization of the frame permits the Seminar, by imposing or
importing an Oedipal outline, by finding it (self there) in truth -and it is there, in fact, but
as a piece, even if a precisely central one, within the letter-to constitute a metalanguage
and to exclude all of the general text in all of the dimensions we began here by recalling
(return to the "first page").
pp. n 36
Supplement to the Investigation
a little too self-evident . 39
“A note in Positions augured this reading of "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'"
which was originally the object of a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, Nov., 1971.”
116
39, n5
Those "literary critics" in France who have been influenced by psychoanalysis have not
yet posed the question of the text.
2. Although it is not the earliest of Lacan's Bcrits chrono-
logically, the Seminar comes at the head of this collection after its determinant strategic
place has been prepared by an overture.
6
Delivered in 1955, committed to paper in 1956 and published in 1957, only in 1966 does
the Seminar receive its place at the head of Bcrits, thus following an order which, not
being chronological, does not arise in any simple way from his theoretico-didactic
system. It might stage Bm'ts in a particular way. The necessity of this priority, in any
event, happens to be confirmed, recalled and emphasized by the introduction to Bcrits in
the "Points" edition (1970): ". .. the text, which here keeps the entry post it possesses
elsewhere. . ." Anyone wishing to narrow the scope of the questions raised here can by all
means keep those questions in the "place" given to the Seminar by its "author": entry
post. "This post [le poste] differs from another post [la poste] only in gender," according
to Littre. 40, n6
Finally, the Seminar is part of a larger investigation of the repetition automatism
117
[Wiederholungszwang] which, in the group of texts dating from 1919-1920 (Jenseits,
Das Unheimliche) trans- forms, at least in principle (cf. La Double Sbance, notes 44 and
56), the relationship between psychoanalysis and literary fiction.7 41
7 See Jacques Derrida, La Dissemination (Paris: Le Seuil, 1972), pp. 279-280 and pp.
300-301. Within a rather long text ,questioning the literary process through Plato and
Mallarme, Derrida tackles Freud's dealing with a work of art and notably the
displacement in Freud's approach before and after Das Unheimliche. Derrida also points
out there how Freud in Das Unheimliche is sensitive to the undecidable ambivalence,
"the game of the double, the endless interplay between the fantastic and the real." -Ed.
"Our inquiry has led us to the point of recognizing that the repetition automatism
[wiederholungszwang] finds its basis in what we have called the insistence of the
signifying chain. We have elaborated that notion itself as a correlate of the ex-istence (or:
excentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the subject of the unconscious if we
are to take Freud's discovery seriously."8 These are the opening lines of the Seminar.
41
Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'," trans. J. Mehlman, French Freud,
pp. 38-72. Hereafter cited in the text as SPL fol- lowed by the page number. The
problematic set forth in The Purveyor of Truth can best be grasped through a rereading of
Poe's Purloined Letter and of the Seminar as well as the editorial notes of Jeffrey
Meh1man.-Ed. 41, n8
This passage has been closely preceded by a reference to Heidegger, and that is not
118
surprising; it carries the Dasein back to the subject, and that is more surprising.
42
As for the Envois themselves, I do not know if their reading is bearable. 3 (firt page of
pc)
In every support,is something les than ideal, and therefore can be destroyed without
remaining. . 79
But you know that with you I never reread. 229
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 unintelligible, you do not begin with what
follows—if not by the end, and as they never reread . . . Too bad. 240
To stop becomes impossible, 242
Finnegans Wake 240
I am rereading your note from yesterday: what counts in post cards, and moreover, in
everything, is the tempo. Say you. 247
What I told you is that Socates is now the name of a logiciel. You don’t know what this
is? One calls logiciel the corpus of programs, procedures, or rules that assure the smooth
functioning of a system in the treatment of information. The storage banks depend upon
a logiciel. 242
I am rereading (and indeed for the first time since I have been writing to you) because
119
you overtook me while writing at the moment when you called form the café. No, I repeat
what I have just told you; there was nothing “decisive” in my PR letter—moreover, I
have not reopened it--, only details which perhaps, perhaps would have made you
understand and approve, if you wanted, if you could. Okay, let’s drop out. I am rereading
myself, that, . . . 81
This is how it is to be read, and written, the carte of the adestination. Abject literature is n
its way. 29
The charter is the contract for, which quite stupidly one has to believe; Socrates comes
before Plato, there is between them—and in general—an order of generations, an
irreversible sequence of inheritance. Socrates is before, not in front of, but before Plato,
therefore behind him, and the charter binds us to this order: this is how to orient one’s
thought, this is the left and right [alluding to Kant’s “What is Orientation in Thinking”],
march. 20
Post card anxiety, 21
When I first wrote “burn everything,” it was neither out of prudence and a taste for the
clandestine, nor out a concern for inernal guarding but out of what ws necessary (he
condition, he given) for the affirmation to be reborn at very instant, without memory. 23
Read Reading Station, 208
I rpeat to you, it was dangerous to keep the letters, and yet I cravenly dreamed that they
would be stolen from us; now they have to be destroyed, the countdown has started, less
than a month, you will be here. 233
120
Yellow pages of the telephone Book act as a way round resistance—you can dial up
pages, placed them through the index. You can trace a call, as it were.
Once again, I am holding the book open to its middle and I am trying to understand, it’s
not easy. 216
I am opening the Traumdeutung approximately in its middle. 414
First published in Poetique 21 (1975), a special issue put together by Phillipe Lacoue-
Labarthe under the title Litterature et philosophie melees. 412
The table of contents divides the introduction from the glossary, makes them sequential.
But the text sutures them, making Glossary a subheading in the text rather than title at the
top of he page, a new page, in the same size font.
Also implicit pun on letters—we get alphabetic letters L before K—seems nonsensical—
and also wrong L obviously comes after K)
We have forgotten to talk about the color of paper, the color of ink, and their comparative
chromatics: a vast subject. That will be for another time. Paper Machine (53)
Survive one’s children 241 to understand postal letters, post cards.
Reverse sde of the facsimile.
Signautre is a quotation, not Dupin’s name.
121
(Derrida reads titles and tables of contents of Blanchot in Parages.
You know that J.D. is in analysis.” 203; Derrida returns to Lacan’s misreading in
Resistances of Psychoanalysis.
Historicism 139
If a book has been republished or published in parts, is it a book? Is the postcard a book?
Can on eread it in iolation from other texts written by Derrida (other than the ones he
specifies in his notes? Note also the way his references to his own works becomes
bibiorhicaly incomplete over time.
He refuses to turn his own works into a network, to provide the reader with a complete
narrative thread to follow thorugh and properly xit without a faux pas.
For the Love of Lacan—in REsistances of Pyshoanalysis
Freud and the Scene of Writing 55
62-63—he narrates an account of its inscription in the post card.
problem of the archive 68
2. The Hinge
To begin, let us indicate a few telling signs. If most of the explicit references to Freud
122
are grouped in the conclusion of the book (at the end of “The Birth of the Asylum and in
the beginning of “The Anthropological Circle”,) 6 what I would call a charniere, a hinge,
comes earlier on, right in he middle of the volume, to divide at once he book and the
book’s relation to Freud. To Do Justice to Freud, 78
The first sign comes right in the middle of the book. To Do Justice to Freud, 79
This, therefore, will not have been a book.” Dissemination.
Simulacrum of illustrations of fortune telling book, of color illustration used on the cover
as inside flap, like Baudelaire story in Counter Money.
Economy of note and annotation in Freud, 374
Apocalypse 169 The countdown is accelerating, don’t’ you think?” 163
Reread the little one’s letters. 255
If you had listened to me, you would have burned everything 23
In the beginning, n principle, was the post, and I will never get over it. But in the end I
know it, I become aware of it as of our death sentence . . . 29
Undated (probably the same period)
Date-abiity—Heidegger and Derrida
What Freud states about secondary revision (Freud's explaining text) is already staged
123
and represented in advance in the text explained (Andersen's fairy tale).
This text, too, described the scene of analysis, the position of the analyst, the forms of his
language, the metaphorico-conceptual structures of what he seeks and what he finds. The
locus of one text is in the other.
Freud pays no attention to a fold in the text, a structural com- plication that envelops his
discourse and within which his discourse must inevitably be situated.
Would there then be no difference between the two texts?
Writing is dated, but not reading (or it can be now—annotations can be linearized—but
that is pointless exercise in genetic criticism, or it is more like Holmes than Poe
The ideal reasoned, 114—cause and effect, first and last, a line back and forward.
Burt Glossator
Tempting to see the Glossary as a reading of the Post Card. Tile is L before K and the
glossary comes first rather than last, at the end of the book. But also because the terms
forma network of back and forth references. See this before reading this.
Translotr’s Introudction LBefore K” vii
Glossary, xiii
Repetition and reversal, or reversibility.
124
Postal reading not reducible to a labrythine and infinite deferral of the referent, of the
seme, of definition (limits). This would be to stop reading by diagramming reading.
Vresus John Leavey’s Glasary
These retreats faux pas, false exits, Bass, 377
Sequencing becomes running in circles for Derrida. Linear is already a circle. See
Derrida on the circle in Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2.
What relation is the unbreable reading of the envois and the reading of the PL that
follows? One could aska similar quesotn about the mentions of Beyond the PP
Edgar Allan Poe, Double Assassinat dans la rue Morgue
In le facteur, he mentions the hermeneutical circle and names Heidegger in the next page.
He puts the uncanny against Lacan’s imaginary, doubling and divisibility; but he
nowhere mentions or cites or reads Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny.”
Also, two, successive long notes on Poe’s Purloined Letter in On the Name.
Derrida discusses the publication history of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter.”
125
He also mentions the facsimile, but only in relation to Dupin’s signature, not in relation
to the materiality of the signifier and the divisibility of the letter. He folds the facsimile,
like the simulacrum or replica, even the double, into the same structure of reading he says
he unlocks.
Importance of the facsimile—word and image, boundary of word and image, of line and
drawing (see YFS issue)
Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires / par Edgar Poe ; traduction de Charles Baudelaire
Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849
1884 Translator: Charles Baudelaire
Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires / par Edgar Poe ; traduction de Charles Baudelaire
Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849
Double assassinat dans la rue Morgue (The Murders in the Rue Morgue dans l'édition
originale) est une nouvelle d'Edgar Allan Poe, parue en avril 1841 dans le Graham's
Magazine, traduite en français d'abord par Isabelle Meunier puis, en 1856, par Charles
Baudelaire dans le recueil Histoires extraordinaires. C'est la première apparition du
détective inventé par Poe, le Chevalier Dupin qui doit faire face à une histoire de meurtre
incompréhensible pour la police.
126
Derrida writes of Murders in the rue Morgue as if it had been written after The Purloined
Letter.
Whereupon he has but to withdraw, after "forgetting" his snuff-box on the table, in order
to return the following day to reclaim it-armed with a facsimile of the letter in its present
state. As an incident in the street, prepared for the proper moment, draws the Minister to
the window, Dupin in turn seizes the opportunity to seize the letter while substituting the
imitation, and has only to maintain the appearances of a normal exit.
YFS 55-56
But at the Minister who " 'is well acquainted with my MS.,' " Dupin strikes a blow signed
brother or confrere, twin or younger or older brother (Atreus / T'hyestes). This rival and
duplicitous identification of the brothers, far from fitting into the symbolic space of the
family triangle (the first, the second, or the one after), carries it off infinitely far away in a
labyrinth of doubles without originals, of facsimile without an authentic, an indivisible
letter, of casual counterfeits [contrefacons sans facon], imprinting the purloined letter
with an incorrigible indirection.
YFS 109-110
Thus Dupin wants to sign, indeed, doubtless, the last word of the last message of the
purloined letter. First by being unable to resist leaving his own mark-the seal, at least,
with which he must be identified-on the facsimile that he leaves for the Minister. He fears
the facsimile and, insisting on his utterly confraternal vengeance, he demands that the
127
Minister know where it came from. Thus he limits the facsimile, the counterfeit exterior
of the letter. The interior is authentic and properly identifiable. Indeed: at the moment
when the madman (" 'the pretended lunatic' " who is " 'a man in my own pay' ") distracts
everyone with his "frantic behavior," what does Dupin do? He adds a note. He leaves the
false letter, that is, the one that interests him, the real one, which is not a facsimile except
for the exterior. If there were a man of truth, a lover of the authentic, in all this, Dupin
would indeed be the model: "'In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter,
put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals [quantd
I'exte'rieur],)which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D--cipher, very
readily, by means of a seal formed of
bread.' "
Thus D-will have to decipher, on the inside, what the decipherer meant and whence and
why he deciphered, with what end in mind, in the name of whom and what. The initial-
the same, D, for the Minister and for Dupin-is a facsimile on the outside but on the inside
it is the thing itself.
YFS, 100-11
The Question of Reading: Again (rather than Otherwise)
Paraphrase Heidegger, reading is always the question what is reading?, a repetition of the
question. Heidegger repeats the hermeneutic circle passage in division tone in division
two and titles his first chapter on the repetition.
128
Is reading different from rereading? Is reading different from not reading? Can you read
without not reading? What s the economy of reading literature and pyschoanlysis? How
much literature do you need? Where do you get to stop? When has reading arrived? If it
is not a program, what saves it from being an iteration of the same moves made on
different texts, and from a development, progress narrative, ora genetic or teleological
model? What saves it from being saved? Saving a question of the economy of reading as
expenditure.
How to read sequentially—can one sequence reading? Poe, Lacan, Derrida, Johnson.
Vulgar historical time of biographical and bibliographical history. Who published first.
This kind of linearization is inescapable. It is not just a matter of institutional norms and
paratextual dating, bibliographic codes. Question of reference not reducible to such
historicism, vulgar time for Heidegger, irreversible, empty homogenous time, for
Benjamin. Question of dates, dateability for Heidegger and Derrida. Occurrence and
event for Heidegger, Derrida (and Badiou). Ecstatic time. Heidegger in Being and Time
on the repletion of the question. Not a question of a trope, or a master trope like the
frame either, that merely reinscribes the sequence and formalizes it as a blind spot of
re/reading.
Johnson’s essay appeared in two versions. Poe read in Baudelaire’s translation. Lacan
rewrites his essay, starts it again less than half way through. Derrida’s essay
decontextualized from The Post Card. Published in translation separately, twice.
129
Derrida rereading the same texts—“Freud and the Scene of Writing.” “Madness and
Civilization” in an essay title of which is about Freud.
Apart from complications publication presents to linearization, we may ask what comes
first other than Poe. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Cited in the notes by Lacan.
The focus of Speculations on Freud, precedes “Le facteur de la verite” in The Post Card.
Question of speculation in psychoanalysis and philosophy like the question of literature
and philosophy: what are the limits of philosophical discourse? What does it mean to
read “beyond,” a word Derrida uses in his title that conspicuously repeats the title of
Freud’s work? Is reading always as step not beyond, a faux pas, in Maurice Blanchot’s
terms, an error and an aporia, a distinerrance? Or does copying, the facsimile come into
play? The facsimile of Derrida’s signature in Signature Event Context.
Empiricism of the facsimile, or fauxsimile. It is repated in Singature, Event Context.
Derrida brings up repetition compulsion in le facteur in relation to Marie Bonaparte but
also in relation to Po—Murders in the Rue Morgue similar to Purloined Letter.
But Derrida does not read that story or read that repetition. His attention s to the structure
of repetition, not to empirical examples of it.
Derrida returns to Rousseau and de Man via the title of an an earlier essay, “Limited Ink
II”
130
Derrida’s essay on titles in PArages and on the title in Kafka “Before the Law.”
Illustration of writing and reversibility in The Post Card. Reading for Lacan and for
Derrida is not about Master and disciple.
In Poe, its the idea of the copy that matters, not the material referent. See William
WIlson
In "Unsensing the Subjectile," he discusses Artaud's posthumously published drawings.
To file: (1) “I could . . . file,” break into the figure in yet another way. Still by rubbing,
to be sure, and scraping, but this time according to the obliqueness of the metal teeth,
molars against millstones. But (2) the aggression which thus reduces the surface is
destined to polish, make delicate, adjust, inform, beautify, still save the truth of the body
in straining it, purifying it, from it any uncleaness and useless excrescences. The taking
away of the unclean has the virtue of laying bare and catharsis.
--Jacques Derrida, "Unsensing the Subjectile," in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud,
Trans. and Ed. Mary Ann Caws (MIT 1998), 140.
We won’t tell the story of the subjectile, rather some record of its coming-to-be.
--Jacques Derrida, "Unsensing the Subjectile," in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud,
Trans. and Ed. Mary Ann Caws (MIT 1998), 61
There is a good chance he never finished either one or the other and that he destroyed
131
these sketches.
Paul Thevenin, “In Search for a Lost World,” in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, Trans.
and Ed. Mary Ann Caws, 8
Thevenin’s anecdote about Artaud drawing him in 1946, and the drawing, one of three,
getting lost during the framing of it for an exhibition. The lost one is the one. Thevenin
remembers Artaud drawing this portrait and wants to see again. (3-31). Enndote 76
explains how it got lost.
It can’t analzye it’s “no longer was”, it’s “has not yet been,” or “not yet having been.”
He can’t look back from the future at something that never was.
Mary Ann Caws writes:
It is deeply regrettable that the Artaud estate did not allow us to use in this volume
the reproduction of the very paintings and drawings that were at the origin of
these texts. (Many of them can be found in two other publications: Mary Ann
Caws, Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper [Museum of Modern art] and The
Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter [MIT Press, 1997]) it is also deeply
ironic, given Jacques Derrida’s work on the absence of origin.
Mary Ann Caws, preface, xiv The Secret Writing of of Antonin Artaud.
But another kind of irony that may be merely uncaught typographical error or related
Freudian slips. Two errors of attribution go uncorrected. Caws mistakenly gives her own
132
name as the author of Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper. It is actually by Paule Thévenin
and translated by Margit Rowell. Caws also omits the author of the second book, a book
she herself wrote.
Post/Card/Match/Book/"Envois"/Derrida
David Wills
SubStance
Vol. 13, No. 2, Issue 43 (1984), pp. 19-38
The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida
Barbara Johnson
133
Yale French Studies, No. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading:
Otherwise. (1977), pp. 457-505.
The Purveyor of Truth
Jacques Derrida; Willis Domingo; James Hulbert; Moshe Ron; M.-R. L.
Yale French Studies, No. 52, Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy.
(1975), pp. 31-113.
The title is not trsnslated, but left in French, “Le faceteur de la vertie”
Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud au-delà was first published in 1980.
Jacques Derrida. The Postcard. Chicago: CUP, 1989.
---. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 1985.
---. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stamford: Stamford University Press, 1999.
THE PURLOINED LETTER
by Edgar Allan Poe
(1845)
Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio. - Seneca.
At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18--, I was enjoying the
134
twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste
Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisieme, No. 33, Rue Dunot,
Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while
each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with
the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself,
however, I was mentally discussing certain topics which had formed matter for
conversation between us at an earlier period of the evening; I mean the affair of the Rue
Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of Marie Roget. I looked upon it,
therefore, as something of a coincidence, when the door of our apartment was thrown
open and admitted our old acquaintance, Monsieur G--, the Prefect of the Parisian police.
We gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as
of the contemptible about the man, and we had not seen him for several years. We had
been sitting in the dark, and Dupin now arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but sat
down again, without doing so, upon G.'s saying that he had called to consult us, or rather
to ask the opinion of my friend, about some official business which had occasioned a
great deal of trouble.
"If it is any point requiring reflection," observed Dupin, as he forbore to enkindle the
wick, "we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark."
"That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every
thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion
of "oddities."
135
"Very true," said Dupin, as he supplied his visitor with a pipe, and rolled towards him a
comfortable chair.
"And what is the difficulty now?" I asked. "Nothing more in the assassination way, I
hope?"
"Oh no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is very simple indeed, and I make
no doubt that we can manage it sufficiently well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin
would like to hear the details of it, because it is so excessively odd."
"Simple and odd," said Dupin.
"Why, yes; and not exactly that, either. The fact is, we have all been a good deal puzzled
because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether."
"Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault," said my friend.
"What nonsense you do talk!" replied the Prefect, laughing heartily.
"Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain," said Dupin.
"Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?"
"A little too self-evident."
"Ha! ha! ha! --ha! ha! ha! --ho! ho! ho!" --roared our visitor, profoundly amused, "oh,
Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!"
136
"And what, after all, is the matter on hand?" I asked.
"Why, I will tell you," replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, steady, and contemplative
puff, and settled himself in his chair. "I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin,
let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should
most probably lose the position I now hold, were it known that I confided it to any one.
"Proceed," said I.
"Or not," said Dupin.
"Well, then; I have received personal information, from a very high quarter, that a certain
document of the last importance, has been purloined from the royal apartments. The
individual who purloined it is known; this beyond a doubt; he was seen to take it. It is
known, also, that it still remains in his possession."
"How is this known?" asked Dupin.
"It is clearly inferred," replied the Prefect, "from the nature of the document, and from the
nonappearance of certain results which would at once arise from its passing out of the
robber's possession; --that is to say, from his employing it as he must design in the end to
employ it."
"Be a little more explicit," I said.
"Well, I may venture so far as to say that the paper gives its holder a certain power in a
certain quarter where such power is immensely valuable." The Prefect was fond of the
137
cant of diplomacy.
"Still I do not quite understand," said Dupin.
"No? Well; the disclosure of the document to a third person, who shall be nameless,
would bring in question the honor of a personage of most exalted station; and this fact
gives the holder of the document an ascendancy over the illustrious personage whose
honor and peace are so jeopardized."
"But this ascendancy," I interposed, "would depend upon the robber's knowledge of the
loser's knowledge of the robber. Who would dare--"
"The thief," said G., is the Minister D--, who dares all things, those unbecoming as well
as those becoming a man. The method of the theft was not less ingenious than bold. The
document in question --a letter, to be frank --had been received by the personage robbed
while alone in the royal boudoir. During its perusal she was suddenly interrupted by the
entrance of the other exalted personage from whom especially it was her wish to conceal
it. After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in a drawer, she was forced to place it,
open as it was, upon a table. The address, however, was uppermost, and, the contents thus
unexposed, the letter escaped notice. At this juncture enters the Minister D--. His lynx
eye immediately perceives the paper, recognises the handwriting of the address, observes
the confusion of the personage addressed, and fathoms her secret. After some business
transactions, hurried through in his ordinary manner, he produces a letter somewhat
similar to the one in question, opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close
juxtaposition to the other. Again he converses, for some fifteen minutes, upon the public
138
affairs. At length, in taking leave, he takes also from the table the letter to which he had
no claim. Its rightful owner saw, but, of course, dared not call attention to the act, in the
presence of the third personage who stood at her elbow. The minister decamped; leaving
his own letter --one of no importance --upon the table."
"Here, then," said Dupin to me, "you have precisely what you demand to make the
ascendancy complete --the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber."
"Yes," replied the Prefect; "and the power thus attained has, for some months past, been
wielded, for political purposes, to a very dangerous extent. The personage robbed is more
thoroughly convinced, every day, of the necessity of reclaiming her letter. But this, of
course, cannot be done openly. In fine, driven to despair, she has committed the matter to
me."
"Than whom," said Dupin, amid a perfect whirlwind of smoke, "no more sagacious agent
could, I suppose, be desired, or even imagined."
"You flatter me," replied the Prefect; "but it is possible that some such opinion may have
been entertained."
"It is clear," said I, "as you observe, that the letter is still in possession of the minister;
since it is this possession, and not any employment of the letter, which bestows the
power. With the employment the power departs."
"True," said G. "and upon this conviction I proceeded. My first care was to make
thorough search of the minister's hotel; and here my chief embarrassment lay in the
139
necessity of searching without his knowledge. Beyond all things, I have been warned of
the danger which would result from giving him reason to suspect our design."
"But," said I, "you are quite au fait in these investigations. The Parisian police have done
this thing often before."
"Oh yes; and for this reason I did not despair. The habits of the minister gave me, too, a
great advantage. He is frequently absent from home all night. His servants are by no
means numerous. They sleep at a distance from their master's apartment, and, being
chiefly Neapolitans, are readily made drunk. I have keys, as you know, with which I can
open any chamber or cabinet in Paris. For three months a night has not passed, during the
greater part of which I have not been engaged, personally, in ransacking the D-- Hotel.
My honor is interested, and, to mention a great secret, the reward is enormous. So I did
not abandon the search until I had become fully satisfied that the thief is a more astute
man than myself. I fancy that I have investigated every nook and corner of the premises
in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed."
"But is it not possible," I suggested, "that although the letter may be in possession of the
minister, as it unquestionably is, he may have concealed it elsewhere than upon his own
premises?"
"This is barely possible," said Dupin. "The present peculiar condition of affairs at court,
and especially of those intrigues in which D-- is known to be involved, would render the
instant availability of the document --its susceptibility of being produced at a moment's
notice --a point of nearly equal importance with its possession."
140
"Its susceptibility of being produced?" said I.
"That is to say, of being destroyed," said Dupin.
"True," I observed; "the paper is clearly then upon the premises. As for its being upon the
person of the minister, we may consider that as out of the question."
"Entirely," said the Prefect. "He has been twice waylaid, as if by footpads, and his person
rigorously searched under my own inspection.
"You might have spared yourself this trouble," said Dupin. "D--, I presume, is not
altogether a fool, and, if not, must have anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of
course."
"Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove
from a fool."
"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, "although I
have been guilty of certain doggerel myself."
"Suppose you detail," said I, "the particulars of your search."
"Why the fact is, we took our time, and we searched every where. I have had long
experience in these affairs. I took the entire building, room by room; devoting the nights
of a whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened
every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained police agent,
such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. Any man is a dolt who permits a 'secret'
141
drawer to escape him in a search of this kind. The thing is so plain. There is a certain
amount of bulk --of space --to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have accurate
rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. After the cabinets we took the chairs.
The cushions we probed with the fine long needles you have seen me employ. From the
tables we removed the tops."
"Why so?"
"Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece of furniture, is removed
by the person wishing to conceal an article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited
within the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of bedposts are employed in
the same way."
"But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?" I asked.
"By no means, if, when the article is deposited, a sufficient wadding of cotton be placed
around it. Besides, in our case, we were obliged to proceed without noise."
"But you could not have removed --you could not have taken to pieces all articles of
furniture in which it would have been possible to make a deposit in the manner you
mention. A letter may be compressed into a thin spiral roll, not differing much in shape or
bulk from a large knitting-needle, and in this form it might be inserted into the rung of a
chair, for example. You did not take to pieces all the chairs?"
"Certainly not; but we did better --we examined the rungs of every chair in the hotel, and,
indeed, the jointings of every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful
142
microscope. Had there been any traces of recent disturbance we should not have failed to
detect it instantly. A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as
obvious as an apple. Any disorder in the glueing --any unusual gaping in the joints --
would have sufficed to insure detection."
"I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and the plates, and you probed
the beds and the bed-clothes, as well as the curtains and carpets."
"That of course; and when we had absolutely completed every particle of the furniture in
this way, then we examined the house itself. We divided its entire surface into
compartments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed; then we scrutinized
each individual square inch throughout the premises, including the two houses
immediately adjoining, with the microscope, as before."
"The two houses adjoining!" I exclaimed; "you must have had a great deal of trouble."
"We had; but the reward offered is prodigious.
"You include the grounds about the houses?"
"All the grounds are paved with brick. They gave us comparatively little trouble. We
examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed."
"You looked among D--'s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?"
"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we
turned over every leaf in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake,
143
according to the fashion of some of our police officers. We also measured the thickness
of every book-cover, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to each the
most jealous scrutiny of the microscope. Had any of the bindings been recently meddled
with, it would have been utterly impossible that the fact should have escaped observation.
Some five or six volumes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed,
longitudinally, with the needles."
"You explored the floors beneath the carpets?"
"Beyond doubt. We removed every carpet, and examined the boards with the
microscope."
"And the paper on the walls?"
"Yes.
"You looked into the cellars?"
"We did."
"Then," I said, "you have been making a miscalculation, and the letter is not upon the
premises, as you suppose.
"I fear you are right there," said the Prefect. "And now, Dupin, what would you advise
me to do?"
"To make a thorough re-search of the premises."
144
"That is absolutely needless," replied G--. "I am not more sure that I breathe than I am
that the letter is not at the Hotel."
"I have no better advice to give you," said Dupin. "You have, of course, an accurate
description of the letter?"
"Oh yes!" --And here the Prefect, producing a memorandum-book, proceeded to read
aloud a minute account of the internal, and especially of the external appearance of the
missing document. Soon after finishing the perusal of this description, he took his
departure, more entirely depressed in spirits than I had ever known the good gentleman
before.
In about a month afterwards he paid us another visit, and found us occupied very nearly
as before. He took a pipe and a chair and entered into some ordinary conversation. At
length I said,--
"Well, but G--, what of the purloined letter? I presume you have at last made up your
mind that there is no such thing as overreaching the Minister?"
"Confound him, say I --yes; I made the reexamination, however, as Dupin suggested --
but it was all labor lost, as I knew it would be."
"How much was the reward offered, did you say?" asked Dupin.
"Why, a very great deal --a very liberal reward --I don't like to say how much, precisely;
but one thing I will say, that I wouldn't mind giving my individual check for fifty
145
thousand francs to any one who could obtain me that letter. The fact is, it is becoming of
more and more importance every day; and the reward has been lately doubled. If it were
trebled, however, I could do no more than I have done."
"Why, yes," said Dupin, drawlingly, between the whiffs of his meerschaum, "I really --
think, G--, you have not exerted yourself--to the utmost in this matter. You might --do a
little more, I think, eh?"
"How? --In what way?"
"Why --puff, puff --you might --puff, puff --employ counsel in the matter, eh? --puff,
puff, puff. Do you remember the story they tell of Abernethy?"
"No; hang Abernethy!"
"To be sure! hang him and welcome. But, once upon a time, a certain rich miser
conceived the design of spunging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up,
for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to
the physician, as that of an imaginary individual.
"'We will suppose,' said the miser, 'that his symptoms are such and such; now, doctor,
what would you have directed him to take?'
"'Take!' said Abernethy, 'why, take advice, to be sure.'"
"But," said the Prefect, a little discomposed, "I am perfectly willing to take advice, and to
pay for it. I would really give fifty thousand francs to any one who would aid me in the
146
matter."
"In that case," replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and producing a check-book, "you may
as well fill me up a check for the amount mentioned. When you have signed it, I will
hand you the letter."
I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunderstricken. For some minutes he
remained speechless and motionless, less, looking incredulously at my friend with open
mouth, and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; then, apparently in some
measure, he seized a pen, and after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and
signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across the table to Dupin. The
latter examined it carefully and deposited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an
escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This functionary grasped it in a
perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents,
and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from
the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested
him to fill up the check.
When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.
"The Parisian police," he said, "are exceedingly able in their way. They are persevering,
ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem
chiefly to demand. Thus, when G-- detailed to us his mode of searching the premises at
the Hotel D--, I felt entire confidence in his having made a satisfactory investigation --so
far as his labors extended."
147
"So far as his labors extended?" said I.
"Yes," said Dupin. "The measures adopted were not only the best of their kind, but
carried out to absolute perfection. Had the letter been deposited within the range of their
search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it."
I merely laughed --but he seemed quite serious in all that he said.
"The measures, then," he continued, "were good in their kind, and well executed; their
defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly
ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly
adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the
matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight
years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal
admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his
hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd.
If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I
allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing;
and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents.
For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks,
'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial
he wins, for he then says to himself, the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and
his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I
will therefore guess odd'; --he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree
above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I
148
guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself upon the first impulse, a
simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought
will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it
even as before. I will therefore guess even' guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of
reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed "lucky," --what, in its last analysis,
is it?"
"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his
opponent."
"It is," said Dupin;" and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the
thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows:
'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any
one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as
accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what
thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the
expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious
profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli,
and to Campanella."
"And the identification," I said, "of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent,
depends, if I understand you aright upon the accuracy with which the opponent's intellect
is admeasured."
"For its practical value it depends upon this," replied Dupin; and the Prefect and his
149
cohort fall so frequently, first, by default of this identification, and, secondly, by ill-
admeasurement, or rather through non-admeasurement, of the intellect with which they
are engaged. They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for
anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it. They are
right in this much --that their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the
mass; but when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their own,
the felon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is above their own, and very
usually when it is below. They have no variation of principle in their investigations; at
best, when urged by some unusual emergency --by some extraordinary reward --they
extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles. What,
for example, in this case of D--, has been done to vary the principle of action? What is all
this boring, and probing, and sounding, and scrutinizing with the microscope, and
dividing the surface of the building into registered square inches --what is it all but an
exaggeration of the application of the one principle or set of principles of search, which
are based upon the one set of notions regarding human ingenuity, to which the Prefect, in
the long routine of his duty, has been accustomed? Do you not see he has taken it for
granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter, --not exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a
chair-leg --but, at least, in some hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of thought
which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg? And do
you not see also, that such recherches nooks for concealment are adapted only for
ordinary occasions, and would be adopted only by ordinary intellects; for, in all cases of
concealment, a disposal of the article concealed --a disposal of it in this recherche
manner, --is, in the very first instance, presumable and presumed; and thus its discovery
150
depends, not at all upon the acumen, but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and
determination of the seekers; and where the case is of importance --or, what amounts to
the same thing in the policial eyes, when the reward is of magnitude, --the qualities in
question have never been known to fall. You will now understand what I meant in
suggesting that, had the purloined letter been hidden anywhere within the limits of the
Prefect's examination --in other words, had the principle of its concealment been
comprehended within the principles of the Prefect --its discovery would have been a
matter altogether beyond question. This functionary, however, has been thoroughly
mystified; and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a
fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels;
and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are
fools."
"But is this really the poet?" I asked. "There are two brothers, I know; and both have
attained reputation in letters. The Minister I believe has written learnedly on the
Differential Calculus. He is a mathematician, and no poet."
"You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would
reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would
have been at the mercy of the Prefect."
"You surprise me," I said, "by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice
of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The
mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.
151
"'Il y a a parier,'" replied Dupin, quoting from Chamfort, "'que toute idee publique, toute
convention recue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre.' The
mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to
which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as truth. With
an art worthy a better cause, for example, they have insinuated the term 'analysis' into
application to algebra. The French are the originators of this particular deception; but if a
term is of any importance --if words derive any value from applicability --then 'analysis'
conveys 'algebra' about as much as, in Latin, 'ambitus' implies 'ambition,' 'religio' religion
or 'homines honesti,' a set of honorable men."
"You have a quarrel on hand, I see," said I, "with some of the algebraists of Paris; but
proceed."
"I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any
especial form other than the abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed
by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity;
mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity.
The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are
abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the
universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of
general truth. What is true of relation --of form and quantity --is often grossly false in
regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the
aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom falls. In the
consideration of motive it falls; for two motives, each of a given value, have not,
152
necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are
numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation.
But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an
absolutely general applicability --as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his
very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that
'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and
make inferences from them as existing realities.' With the algebraists, however, who are
Pagans themselves, the 'Pagan fables' are believed, and the inferences are made, not so
much through lapse of memory, as through an unaccountable addling of the brains. In
short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of equal
roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x squared + px
was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of
experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur where x squared + px is
not altogether equal to q, and, having made him understand what you mean, get out of his
reach as speedily as convenient, for, beyond doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down.
I mean to say," continued Dupin, while I merely laughed at his last observations, "that if
the Minister had been no more than a mathematician, the Prefect would have been under
no necessity of giving me this check. I knew him, however, as both mathematician and
poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with reference to the circumstances
by which he was surrounded. I knew him as a courtier, too, and as a bold intriguant. Such
a man, I considered, could not fall to be aware of the ordinary policial modes of action.
He could not have failed to anticipate --and events have proved that he did not fail to
anticipate --the waylayings to which he was subjected. He must have foreseen, I
153
reflected, the secret investigations of his premises. His frequent absences from home at
night, which were hailed by the Prefect as certain aids to his success, I regarded only as
ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police, and thus the sooner to
impress them with the conviction to which G--, in fact, did finally arrive --the conviction
that the letter was not upon the premises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought,
which I was at some pains in detailing to you just now, concerning the invariable
principle of policial action in searches for articles concealed --I felt that this whole train
of thought would necessarily pass through the mind of the Minister. It would
imperatively lead him to despise all the ordinary nooks of concealment. He could not, I
reflected, be so weak as not to see that the most intricate and remote recess of his hotel
would be as open as his commonest closets to the eyes, to the probes, to the gimlets, and
to the microscopes of the Prefect. I saw, in fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of
course, to simplicity, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter of choice. You will
remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested, upon our first
interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account of its
being so very self-evident."
"Yes," said I, "I remember his merriment well. I really thought he would have fallen into
convulsions."
"The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the
immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that
metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a
description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics
154
and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more
difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is
commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster
capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than
those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of
hesitation in the first few steps of their progress. Again: have you ever noticed which of
the street signs, over the shop doors, are the most attractive of attention?"
"I have never given the matter a thought," I said.
"There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map. One party
playing requires another to find a given word --the name of town, river, state or empire --
any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the
game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely
lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one
end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the
street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical
oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect
suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably
self-evident. But this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or beneath the understanding
of the Prefect. He never once thought it probable, or possible, that the Minister had
deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of best
preventing any portion of that world from perceiving it.
"But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing, and discriminating ingenuity of D--;
155
upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it to
good purpose; and upon the decisive evidence, obtained by the Prefect, that it was not
hidden within the limits of that dignitary's ordinary search --the more satisfied I became
that, to conceal this letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious
expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all.
"Full of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine
morning, quite by accident, at the Ministerial hotel. I found D-- at home, yawning,
lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He
is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive --but that is only when
nobody sees him.
"To be even with him, I complained of my weak eyes, and lamented the necessity of the
spectacles, under cover of which I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the apartment,
while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host.
"I paid special attention to a large writing-table near which he sat, and upon which lay
confusedly, some miscellaneous letters and other papers, with one or two musical
instruments and a few books. Here, however, after a long and very deliberate scrutiny, I
saw nothing to excite particular suspicion.
"At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree card-
rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just
beneath the middle of the mantelpiece. In this rack, which had three or four
compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much
156
soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle --as if a design, in the
first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second.
It had a large black seal, bearing the D-- cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed,
in a diminutive female hand, to D--, the minister, himself. It was thrust carelessly, and
even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the upper divisions of the rack.
"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in
search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the
Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the
D-- cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S-- family. Here, the
address, to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a
certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of
correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the
dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical
habits of D--, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the
worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of
this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the
conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly
corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect.
"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a most animated
discussion with the Minister, on a topic which I knew well had never failed to interest
and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I
committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell,
157
at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have
entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed
than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when
a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed
direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery
was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-
directed, and re-sealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and took my departure at once,
leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table.
"The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite eagerly, the
conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a
pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a
series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. D-- rushed to a casement, threw it
open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in
my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals,) which I had
carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D-- cipher, very readily, by means of a
seal formed of bread.
"But what purpose had you," I asked, in replacing the letter by a fac-simile? Would it not
have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly, and departed?"
"D--," replied Dupin, "is a desperate man, and a man of nerve. His hotel, too, is not
without attendants devoted to his interests. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest, I
158
might never have left the Ministerial presence alive. The good people of Paris might have
heard of me no more. But I had an object apart from these considerations. You know my
political prepossessions. In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For
eighteen months the Minister has had her in his power. She has now him in hers; since,
being unaware that the letter is not in his possession; he will proceed with his exactions
as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction.
His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk
about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of
singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no
sympathy --at least no pity --for him who descends. He is the monstrum horrendum, an
unprincipled man of genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the
precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms 'a
certain personage,' he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the card-
rack."
"How? did you put any thing particular in it?"
"Why --it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior blank --that would have been
insulting. D--, at Vienna once, did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-
humoredly, that I should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard
to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not to give him a
clue. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just copied into the middle of the blank
sheet the words--
--Un dessein si funeste, S'il n'est digne d'Atree, est digne de Thyeste.
159
They are to be found in Crebillon's 'Atree.'"
“For those who, lacking the ability to read, would be simple and hasty enough to
content themselves with such an objection.” “The Double Session,”
Dissemination,181n.8
160