Richard Burt - University of Florida



Richar BurtRead After Burning:Notes on a Possibly Psychoanalytic Posthumography of Jacques Derrida’s Post Card and the Biobibliothanatopolitics of its Remains . . . to Be Archived . . . to Be Published . . . to Be Inhumed . . . to Live on [Sur-vivre] . . . to Be Cremated . . . to Be Wetwared . . . to Be Continued . . . to Be Read (X-uent Omnes?) One day, please, read me no more, and forget that you have read me. --Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, 36 We cannot develop this analysis here; it is to be read elsewhere.--Jacques Derrida, Post Card, 466A hundred similar instances go to show that the MS. so inconsiderately published, was merely a rough note-book, meant only for the writer's own eye, but an inspection of the pamphlet will convince almost any thinking person of the truth of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. . . . I verily believe that his last moments would have been rendered wretched, could he have suspected that his wishes in regard to burning this 'Diary' (full of crude speculations) would have been unattended to; as, it seems, they were. I say 'his wishes,' for that he meant to include this note-book among the miscellaneous papers directed 'to be burnt,' I think there can be no manner of doubt. Whether it escaped the flames by good fortune or by bad, yet remains to be seen.--Edgar Allan Poe, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1850)Before my death I would give orders. If you aren’t there, my body is to be pulled out of the lake [lac] and burned, my ashes are to be sent to you, the urn well protected (‘fragile’) but not registered, in order to tempt fate. This would be an envois of / from me [an envoi de moi] which no longer would come from me (or an envoi sent [come] by me, who would have ordered it, but no longer an envoi of [/from] me as you like). And then you would enjoy mixing my cinders [ashes] with what you eat (morning coffee, bricohe, tea at 5 o’clock, etc.) After a certain dose you would start to go numb. . . Cinders, 74; quoted from The Post Card, 196, from a letter dated 31 May, 1979, without the dateWhat must we do to allow a text to live?“Living On [Survivance],” Parages, 178Courage! Courage, now! You need heart and courage to think . . . the living dead.The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 147 (215).Intestates of Exeption In the horror film After.Life (dir. Agnieszka Wójtowicz-Vosloo, 2009), Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) wakes up--just after we saw her apparently die in a car accident--on the table of a mortician and spiritual medium named Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson) who can talk to the dead. Unable to move her body, she nevertheless exclaims “I’m not dead.” But Deacon says tells her otherwise. He knews she’s dead and he’s got her death certificate to prove it. She was D.OA. In horror movies, it would appear, corpses always arrive at their destination whether they know it or not, sometimes even ahead of schedule.Death, as Derrida knew, is always a matter of paperwork, the death certificate, a paper that does not necessarily reassure. Post Marks: Reading Around Derrida with(out) Derrida (Still) Around Let me begin again by departing from this scene in After.Life to say a few things about posthumography so that it will not be confused with a pre-deconstructive, pre-psychoanalytic psychobiography or psychobiohagiography of Derrida that takes his biological death as the basis for linearizing his publications and highlighting certain themes he wrote on toward the end of his death thought to be key due to their proximity to his death, nor do I divide his posthumously published publications from his “humous” publications. In order to “out-work-line” (hors d’ouevre ligne) a kind of reading Derrida sometimes performs, a kind of reading I call posthumographic, I will read The Post Card with “For the Love of Lacan,” and with The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2 (and some related writings along onr on the way the way). As I go, indeed already have begun to go, you may notice that the footnotes take on a life or death of their own, to think, without fully registering or performing, what it means to read in relation to the eco-specificity of a book’s destruction, fire being Derrida’s element of choice: “As for the “Envois” . . . .you might consider them . . . as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence. Destroyed by fire or by that which figuratively takes its place, more certain of leaving what I like to call the tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are (s’il y a là cendre)” (3). I consider The Post Card, not just the “Envois,” a hostage to the burnt book, to the raised or razed ground of posthumographic writing, a ground that never quite settles into something as stable as a grave, memorial, haunt or a crime scene to be reconstructed or an archive that could be completed or deferred to a time to come or a time that remains. It’s only by playing (back) with fire, by cremating my thoughts about The Post Card as I go in the cinders ashes and other cre-mains of these notes that I may proceed to leave the “che-mains” rendering what I leave you difficult to read, perhaps even unreadable, by making it next to impossible to move easily between the text and my footnotes. By exceeding the academic norms of footnote length without creating a separate running border separating them on each page as a seemingly coherent paratext from a seemingly coherent text, norms meant to guide the reader through the text, I want you to know that I have rendered any decision to read either the text first and then the footnotes, or vice versa, inconsequential. I can offer encouragement to the reader, but I can offer no reassurance. I have burned before reading. I have not saved the (la folie de) the day, or daybreak. By introducing the term posthumography I am trying to capture something in Derrida’s writings, something related to biopolitics and the paper machine, or biobibliopolitics, something difficult to articulate because it will either have been captured in advance, that is to say routinized, familiarized by editors and translators and even Derrida, then routed under already established headings, or “Derridemes,” such as distinerrance, performativity, phantasm, aborder (approach), revenant, parage, the secert, d’abord (above all, border), de-bordement (overrun), survivance, parergon, frame, performativity, a-thesis, pas [step; not], faux-pas, pas au-delà (no / step beyond) the “to-come,” paralysis, the secret, autobiothanatoheterography, cinders, aporia, iterability, and so on, or it will have been rejected and repulsed as an allergen for which Derrida has no auto-immunity. (The same kind of capture of posthumography could be performed with Freudiamemes—the repetition compulsion, death drive, Herrschaft (mastery), Unheimlich [uncanny], etc. or with Lacaniamemes—objet petit a, lack, point de caption, the Other, the letter, between two deaths, etc.) Let me say at once, to avoid an unncessary misunderstanding or perhaps to ensure it, I am not sure which, posthumographic reading is not a philospheme, an internal supplement to the postal principle by which Derrida could be shown to reinscribe binary opositions between life and death, nor is it outside, au-delà or even au-dessous the “Postal Principle.” Although Derrida many times took someone’s death the occasion as the occasion to write about that personwrote numerous times on, sometimes in dedications in seminars, sometimes in essays, Derrida’s writings on the dead, the could use the same interpretive stragedy when write on a living author and a dead one. Similarly, Derrida does not distinguish dead languages and living languges. Morever, Derrida often accords importance to the last chapter, the last sentence of a writing (Post Card, )to the “very end of the end” (Parages, 162) but he does not accord the last words of a person importance. There is no set of texts by Derrida that may be decisively classified or declassified as posthumographic. There is no rigorous distinction between posthumographic and humographic writings., and posthumography subsumes rather than opposes genetic criticism even though genetic critics are indifferent to the difference between publication and posthumous publication. Nevertheless, I will read The Post Card in relation to “For the Love of Lacan” in part because Derrida wrote it after Lacan’s death, and I focus on The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2 in part because it is a posthumous publication that engages posthumous publication and takes up a posthumously published note Pascal wrote that his servant found when he discovered Pascal dead. (The note by Pascal is coincidentally entitled “Fire,” and happens to, like Derrida’s and burned papers in The Post Card, parts of which Derrida quotes in Cinders, and Derrida’s ash of the archive in Archive Fever.) I attend at great length and in great detail to their publication history and at even greater length and detail to what Derrida does with the publishing history of the writings he reanders as a “scene” in The Post Card, with two tenses—the future anterior and the future anterior conditional—he uses in “For the Love of Lacan,” thereby making questions about reading and archiving the dead questions both about what was published and about what was said, hence questions of rumor and testimony, and The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2. However, unlike psychobiographers and unlike genetic critics, I do not give any priority, chronological, biological, or otherwise, to one of these texts over the other. Posthumography raises arguably psychoanalytic as well as deconstructive questions about how Derrida’s archive mis/management Derrida is “to be” read, about what has been left to be read and about how reading is a practice to be, unlimited, the definition of the unreadable always to be reopened. “Those who remain will not know how to read,” Derrida writes in The Post Card, “those who remain” meaning, I take it, “those who have survived.” These questions about what remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s writings are also biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical questions concerning the archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own works, from which he sometimes quoted, sometimes including handwritten notebooks as well as published works. One could organize a reading of The Post Card according to a bibliographical and editorial logic in relation to its self-ruination and self-fragmentation (Envois are liked to burned letters; “To Speculate—‘On Freud’” is a fragment) and texts Derrida published after The Post Card in which he referred to it, discussed it, or added to it, as he did in “Telepathy.” This logic, however, is pre-critical. It always arrives at its destination, as it were, a dead end. Moreover, it glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future publications. These questions about what remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s writings are also biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical questions concerning the archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own works, from which he sometimes quoted. As an archiving operation, posthumography is conerned not only with posthumous publication or thanatography but with what is “to be” read, what suruvives rests on how the boundaries of publication are drawn, what counts as published or unpublished. Publication is a question of surviv-ability, of what publication renders not to be read of whatever survives. A given text’s survival is subject to the conditions and structures of of publish-ability, a neologism that may be divided and recombined into a cluster of others, including unpublish-ability, republish-ablility, and pre-publishability, all of which, as we shall see, are related, to binding and unbinding. Publish-ability determines of the limits of readability and is a question about the justice of reading what remains to be read, of any reading “to come.” In H.C., For Life, Derrida links just reading to reading everthing: “one must read everything, of course, letter by letter: I ill-treat everything by thus selecting and chopping with unforgivable violence, Unable to do justice to this book, as to the fifty others . . . H.C., For Life, 119. But the limits of what survive, the possibility of being in tact, left aside for a reading to come, are not reducible to the finitude of a given material support that makde publication possible and the infinity of reading whatever ahs been published. Publish-ability concerns the limits of “everything” that is to be read: is “everything” what has been published, republished? Whatever falls under the category of “internal” is not limited to what Derrida calls the “normal category of readability” Parages, 187 or “normal reading,” but neither does “unreadability” (Living On,” Parages, 188) amount to the text’s overruning of the protective legal aspects of publication—“ protective measure [structures de garde] and institutions as the registering of copyright, the Library of Congress or the Bibliotheque Nationale, or something like a flyleaf” Parages, 114-115. These bibliographic protections are themselves self-corroding, I maintain, and the effects of their corrosion, corrosion produced by bibliographical logic that limits, forgets, neglects, consigns to oblivion data, effects that are structurally excluded from whatever is said, assumed, or taken to survive through publication. Editing and translating often produce the same kinds of corrision effects, often paraadoxically in an effort to repair a text. Derrida’s works into English sometimes supply as much information about each version of a text while others think that the most recent renders others obsolete, the last version being the supposedly definitive version. This bibliographic, editorial, and translative logic glosses over—renders unreadable and even impossible to mourn, as in “you need not have read that so I don’t need to tell you about what you’re missing”--Derrida’s own self-corroding (re)publication practices and his idosyncratic bibliographic practices, his frequent omissions of bibliographic information both in the body of his text and in his footnotes, omissions which are sometimes filled in by his English translators, sometimes not, as well as his attention to the titles of published works (Parages) and the corruption of titles, or use of “faux-titres,” perhaps better called “feu-titres” or even “fou-titres.” (Curiously, Derrida drops the accent aigu from the “E” in the title of Lacan’s ?crits in La Post Carte postale, spelling it as Ecrits. See, for example, 484n9. Alan Bass follows suit in his translation.) Moreover, this logic glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future publications, promises that Derrida sometimes fulfilled and sometimes did not. What I am calling the reshelving or archival operations of posthumography delimit a given text as a single text, an unpublished, published, or republished text in order to render it readable, permitting what Derrida often called an “internal reading” or the demarcation of a scene of reading that stores the not yet read and appears to guarantee that what is “to be” read has always already been sent. These biobibliopolitical questions are also psychoanalytic questions as they are irreducible in advance to a so-called ethics of reading, however, as if one could decide what reading carefully was and what carelessly was, as one could ever do justice by reading everything. Posthumographic reading, like all reading, is necessarily “err-responsible.” Since it is an archival or reshelving operation according to bibliographical norms publication, it involves omissions of information, not limited to “editorial data,” that do not default to the staus of a clue, evidence, symptom, detail and do not have the significance Derrida accords Freud’s omission, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of Socrates (Post Card, 344), Lacan’s omission of stories by Poe other or Lacan’s omission of Marie Bonaparte, Paul de Man’s omission of two words from a quotation from Rousseau that Derrida discusses in “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink (2),” and so on on.” The kinds of omissions, or self-corroding effects of publication and what surives to be read, normally or otherwise, I attend to in Derrida’s works are idiosyncratic because they are errors, self-cremations that do not amount to self-incriminations, but are more like quasi-illegal driving that sometimes crosses the line. These omissions involve the ways in which Derrida preps a published work for reading, and hence shelves what is not to be read, what can be skipped, what is insignificant, what is effectively invisible; these omissions of information related translations and publications may be likened to wounds, perhaps just scratches, that have been covered up, bandaged, hence repressed. But even if they have been repressed, the do not necessarily fall in line with repetition compulsion, the death drive, the uncanny fort-da, chance, destiny, and so on, not that any of those terms is unified or definable. Thus, I will not be writing a Psychopathology of Derrida’s Everyday Life. Posthumography has a kind of priority mail status, a kind of a-priority mail status “within” what Derrida calls the postal network, a status that permits us to take a detour, follow a pathway off the beaten track, and rephrase Derrida’s Heideggerian question “is there death as such?” as a question of whether, for Derrida, the letter is always sent, even if it does not always arrive at its destination, whether it is always given even if never received, left unclaimed, whether it is always in the mail on the way whether or not there is a sender to return to whom one could return it, whether it is sent quasi-automatically rather than by an organic being, whether sending always has priority over whatever is sent, even if the sent is a residue that amounts to nothing, that “adds nothing,” whether the letter rests “en souffrance” (undelivered), whether the letter is divisibile or not, whether the letter is a post card or not, whether the letter is a dead or living letter, whether the letter is always sent “c/o,” in care [Sorge] of, or sometimes “in care-less-ness.” Burning by Heart: What Remains to be Read(?) and for Whom? This question I have just raised about whether sending [schicken] has priority over the letter’s address under the heading of the word posthumography, is not only a question about repetition. It is a question of whether, on the one hand, reading or rereading is guaranteed by repetition, insured as it were, even before it is dipatched, always given back, the “envoi” always already backed up, copied, deposited in vault when sent, such that publishing can become of a form of destruction rather than preservation, or, on the other hand, such that what Derrida calls the “origin of the post card” (59-60) means one may only burn after reading. In the “Envois” in The Post Card, Derrida asserts that reading is always already rereading and reroutes rereading through a Freudian post office to burning, memory, and repetition: But in fact, yes, had understood my order or my prayer, the demand of the first letter: “burn everything,” understood it so well that you told me you copied over (“I am burning, stupid impression of being faithful, neverthelss kept several simulacra, etc.,” isn’t that it?), in your writing, and in pencil, the words of that first letter (not the others). Another way of saying that you reread it, no? which is what one begins by doing when one reads, even for the first time, repetition, memory, etc. I love you by heart, there between the parentheses or quotation marks, such is the origin of the post card. The origin of the post card consists of words placed in a space by quotation marks and parentheses (they are identical puncutation marks in French), words already cited, iterable, and so on. But are they also words that have been redeemed or words that can always be redeemed, that are to be redeemed because they have by heart, the origin being a love letter? Even if the letter cannot be amortized, as Derrida insists it cannot, can the letter be “morgue-aged,” a word I coin at the risk of sounding facetious; that is, can the letter credited by virtue of having been stored before any sorting, an partition, even if what is stored cannot be retireved, restored, revived, or reanimated? Is the heart that learns a bleeding heart? a heart that never stops bleedingm, that just keeps hemmorgueing? These questions about the priority of sending in Derrida’s postal network can be productively addressed, I think, if we close reading a shelving operation Derrida performs on the contents of The Post Card the first page. Echoing the first sentence of Dissemination (“This will therefore not have been a book”), Derrida begins the “Envois” writing: “You might read these envois as the preface to a book I have not written” (3). Derrida goes on to draw distinction between the last three parts of the book, preserve, and the the first part, “Envois,” destroyed. Derrida binds the heterography of The Post Card, the second chapter of which Derrida calls a “fragment” (292) he “extracted from a seminar” (PC, 259n1): and the last two chapters previously published, by dividing the book into two parts, in other words: “The three last parts of the present work, “To Speculate—on ‘Freud,’” “Le facteur de la vérité,” “Du tout” are all different by virtue of their length, their circumstance or pretext, their manner and their dates. But they preserve the memory of this project, occasionally even exhibit it (3).” Derrida continues: “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 what I like to call the tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are (s’il y a là cendre)” (PC, 3). Derrida can thereby go on to say in the “Envois” both “burn everything, forget everything” and “publish everything” while occasionally deconstructing the opposition between burning and publishing. Derrida reshelves the book’s table of contents (given on p. 551 in la carte postale but m.i.a. in the English translation) as a kind of preface to a book “not written” but that Derrida nevertheless dispatches the book by prepping it, by publishing only a selection of envois that were “spared or if you prefer ‘saved’ (I already hear murmured ‘registered,’ as is said for a kind of receipt)” (3). Does Derrida’s division of The Post Card’s four parts into two mean that sending is a p/repetition, as it were? Is sending a priori? Has sending been sent, as it were, before any preface, even if that preface is inside the text rather than a paratext, before the repetition that makes reading always rereading? Does sending what has been sent guarantee, as I suggested above, that what is “to be” read precedes any burning of what is to be reread, even if what is “to be” read is not destined, not fated, not archivable, but always “to come,” even if there is no one (even no machine or quasi-human, quasi-machine) to read it or who will know how to read it when it arrives? Is the sending of the letter a given, always a gift that may be gone from the start and thus never given? Is there a difference between sending a letter and publishing a book? Derrida says he does not think the distinction between letters and post cards to be a rigorous one, and he compares post cards to identity cards, as if anticipating machine-readable passports. If The Post Card will not have been a book (3) despite its having been published, does Derrida effectively shelves what is “to be” read by rendering publications as marked playing cards or Tarot cards which he reshuffles and then deals from a stacked deck in order to delimit what is to be read or to be considered read, what bets are to be placed, whose fortune told? Fort : Da, Can’t You See I’m Burning? Before proceeding to discuss “For the Love of Lacan” and The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2, I want to make two general points about the kind of posthumographic reading Derrida does of Lacan. Both points concern what is to be read in relation to what remains, whose remains, “remains” understood both in the biological of a coorpse or cremains and in the bibiliographic sense of papers left to be read either unpublished or published. First, the remains in both sense involve the survival a reading practice like psychoanlaysis or deconstruction in relation to the proper name. As Derrida writes of Freud, “that he hoped for this survival of psychoanalysis is probable, but in his name, survival on the condition of his name: by virtue of which he says that he survives it as the proper place of the name.” Deconstruction was often pronounced dead during Derrida’s lifetime, but the survival of deconstruction under Derrida’s name is not my concern here. Rather I am concerned with the erasure and rephrasing of aa question about Derrida and psychoanalysis that did not survive, a question that was also to be a title of a colloquium organized by René Major and the title of the published conference proceedings, namely, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?” The proposed title the colloquium, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?,” was replaced by the title Lacan avec les philosophes, and the conference proceedings were published as a book bearing that same Lacan avec les philosophes. Derrida tells this story in the Annexes [appendices] to Lacan avec les philosophes, a post-script entitled “Après Tout: Les Chance du College.” In the “For the Love of Lacan” in the republished version in Resistances to Psychoanalysis, Derrida does not tell this story but twice refers his reader headnote and again in the third endnote to the “Annexes” [my emphasis ] of Lacan avec les philosophes, the publication in which “Love Lacan” first appeared. Derrida both archives and “X-s” out, as it were , the story he to concerning the erasure of his name in the two notes to “Love Lacan”, the story he does not retell but leaves to waiting be told to the reader who takes up Derrida’s invitation to consult the postscript. More crucially, Derrida revises the suppressed question of the collouquim title “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?” in “Love Lacan” by taking out the proper name alotogther. Derrida’s “last point” (69) is that the “question of knowing whether or not there is some psychoanalysis—X-ian, his, yours, mine that the degree—that can hold up or that is coming, this incalcaluable, unimaginable, unaccountable, unattribuable question is displaced to the degree that the analytic siutation, and thus the analytic institution, is deconstructed, as if by itself, without deconstruction or deconstructive project” (69). Ordinarily, one would not read the the letter “X” in the sentence above. One one would simply pass over it as a variable for which any proper name could be substituted and move on. I will take the letter in the “word” “X-ian” (and Derrida’s use of the phrase “X without X”) to be the something like a crux, survival of psychoanalysis under someone’s name, turning on a letter, a letter that is neither a proper name nor the lack of one. The letter “X” in “X-ian,” the substitution of a letter for a proper name, any proper name, turned into an adjective becomes something to be glossed by virtue of the relatively “ex”terior paratextual space in the endnotes of “Love Lacan.” My second point regarding reading Derrida’s Post Card under the heading of posthumography concerns the way does Derrida tends to separate the two meanings of “remains” I noted above into bios and biblios, thereby keepinge seprate from bibliopolitics. In a sentence I cited above from The Post Card, Derrida writes, “Those who remain will not know how to read.” I take it that “those who remain” means “those who survive.” In The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 2, however, Derrida asks a question about the remains of those who will have been survived by others: What is the other—What is the other—or what are others—going to make of me when, after the distancing step [pas] of the passing [trépas], after this passage, when I am past, when I have passed, when I am departed, deceased, passed away, gone, absolutely without defense, disarmed, in their hands, i.e., as they say, so to speak, dead.” The other appears to me as the other as such, qua he, she, or they who might survive me, survive my decease and then proceed as they wish, sovereignly, and sovereignly have at my disposal the future of my remains, if there are any. . . .” The human remains are very much a political question for Derrida. In the ninth session of the Beast and the Sovreign Vol 2, Derrida discusses the disposition of the corpse as a biopolitical question he relates to the democracy to come. I quote at length:Would not the democracy to come gain by opening still wider the spectrum of possible choices? For one can not indeed imagine and see coming another epoch of humanity in which, tomorrow, one would no longer deal with corpses either by cremation or by inhumation, either by earth or by fire? Would not the democracy to come gain by opening still wider the spectrum of possible choices? Will one not invent unheard-of techniques, fitted like their predecessors to the dictatorial power of a phantasm as well as to technical possibilities and which would then deliver them over corpses, if there still are any, neither to the subsoil of humus, nor to fire of heaven or hell? In this future, with these other ways of treating the corpse, if there still are any, today’s institutions, today’s orders, would appear as vestiges, anachronistic orders or sects of a new modern Middle Ages. People would speak of cremators and the inhumers . . . as oddities that were both unheimlich and dated, as archaic curiosities for historians or anthropologists of death. . . .You have to be to dream. 233 (326). Derrida limits the political question about the disposal of human remains to two (he forgets burial at sea and cryogenics, but no matter). Although Derrida also discusses the survivance, living on of a published work, recalling the title of an essay published in Parages, and as living death, also under the heading of the phantasm, he does not examine either the ways the written remains, or cremains, are stored or question the politics of their storage. Is there no such thing as a living will when it comes to the survivance of one’s papers? Does the specificty of eco-destruction of a given support or subjectile not matter? Just SayingWhat wouldn’t Derrida have said!What will he not have said!This is an exclamation, not a question . . . In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida tells two anecdotes about the two times he met Jacques Lacan in person: “I remark that the only two times we met and spoke briefly one with the other, it was a question of death between us, and first of all from Lacan’s mouth. In Baltimore, for example, he spoke to me of way in which he thought he would be read, in particular by me, after his death.” Furthermore, Derrida devotes a paragraph summarizing his relation to Lacan as one of death:So there was a question between us of death; it was especially a question of death. I will say even only of the death of one of us, as it is with or chez all those who love each other. Or rather he spoke about it, he aloe, since for my part I never breathed a word about it. He spoke, alone, about our death, about his death that would not fail to arrive, and about the death or rather the dead one that, according to him, I was playing. Will how we read The Post Card, a text to which Derrida returns in “Love Lacan,” have changed now that its author is dead, in the ordinary sense of the word? Can we read it? Or can we gloss what remains of its burning, its ashes, its considers, “gloss” being a synonym for luster and derived from Old English, Scandiavanian, and Icelandic words for flame and glow? Does reading mean glossing over the question of glossing?So You Say In response to this question, let me cite two passages in The Post Card, both of which concern and a Lacanian reading of Derrida Lacan’s reading of Derrida that will help us begin glossing what I have called quasi-cruxes. The passage from the Post . . . I will cite first will recall Derrida’s exclamations, not questions, in “Love Lacan” about what Lacan will or would have said or not have said. This passage concerns Lacan and Derrida did (not) saying about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter in the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” and in “Le facteur de la vérité.” The passage is remarkable not only for the absence of bibliographical references but for about who said what but for having an anonymous third party tell this story about who meant to say what according to someone who goes mentioned and is therefore not exactly saying anything in the future anterior in the conditional: 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 reconstituted this 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 “dissemination” 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. Who is speaking here in this envoi? Derrida? Maybe. Why is “dessimination” put in scare quotes? The speaker’s analogy between three card monte and what was said about Derrida merely repeating Lacan clearly serves to imply that a shell game has been unjustly played on Derrida’s texts / lectures about Lacan: “Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I am only doing what he says he is doing.” Derrida has been falsely said (but said by whom?) to have said what Lacan meant to have said then shrink-wrapped into one of three cards and entered into play in a game which Derrida will always lose. But Derrida does not say that. Is Derrida rigging the reading of what is still to be read, not just defensively and preemptively having someone voice a complaint about an injustice done—by who knows whom--to Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter?” In “For the Love of Lacan,” a text that Derrida wrote, as I have said, after Lacan was dead, Derrida returns to the other passage in The Post Card I mentioned above, a passage which Derrida retells a story about Lacan misreading Derrida: “Lacan made a compulsive blunder; he said that he thought I was in analysis . . . The thing has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card (202-04).” Derrida spares the reader the task of rereading it but also allows any reader to stop reading “Love Lacan” and go to the Post . . . and reread it. Yet if the reader were to go to pages 202-04 of the Post . . . he or she would find that Derrida does not quote Lacan’s words when discussing what Lacan mistakenly said about Derrida was in analysis. See for yourselves. Only very near the end of “Love Lacan” does Derrida deliver the story along with the quotation from Lacan he left out of The Post Card: “In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever withdrawn from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the syntax and the reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about whom I did not know that –to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not know that he was in analysis—about whom I did not know that he was in analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who has written a preface to this Verbier.” We will return to this passage later and attend several times in a necessarily paratactic fashion to Derrida’s retellings of this story. For now, I wish only to say that in “Love Lacan,” Derrida retells the anecdote he had already told before in the Post . . . in a way that makes it fully readable. Only in this later text, “For the Love of Lacan,” does Derrida retrieve Lacan’s words from the archive and cite them. Having retrieved them, however, Derrida does not read them. Nor does he quote Lacan’s next sentence in which Lacan reads Derrida’s preface “Fors” as evidence for Lacan’s supposition, not declaration, that Derrida is in analysis. Does it matter that to a reading of “For the Love of Lacan” that Derrida returned to what Lacan said about him and to what Derrida said about Lacan in nearly twenty years earlier, by Derrida’s count, in The Post Card, after Lacan died? Does the media Derrida references with respect to the archive in “Love Lacan,” the tape recorders in front of him recording what he says as he speaks, matter in relation to Lacan’s death the way the fax matters to Derrida when discussing Freud’s reliance on letters in Archive Fever? Say again? As I have said, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” for a colloquium on Lacan organized and held after Lacan was dead, and “Love Lacan” was published first as an article in Lacan avec les philosophes (1991) and subsequently as the second chapter of Derrida’s book, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996). The three sentences with which I began the present essay paraphrase the first three sentences of “Love Lacan.” These sentences of “Love Lacan” are set off typographically on the page as three different lines:What wouldn’t Lacan have said!What will he not have said!This is an exclamation, not a question . . . .Derrida repeats the phrase three times, the second inverting exactly the first, and on the same page just after the first paragraph: “What will Lacan not have said! What wouldn’t he have said!” This second, inverted repetition of the first two sentences, printed continuously on the page rather than broken into two separate lines as the first two sentences are. Derrida exclaims the nearly the same words a third time near the end of the section Derrida calls the “third protocol”: “what would Lacan have said or not have said!” As I have already said more than once, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” after Lacan died, and Derrida sends off “Love Lacan” as if by he, Derrida, were already dead, already taking Lacan place, as if looking to how he, Derrida, will be read after his death. In this case, however, Derrida significantly leaving out the first of Derrida’s first two sentences about Lacan and the second of the second two: “What will I not have said today!” Derrida retains only the negative formulation for himself, allows only what he will not have said, not what he will have said. He thereby leaves, as if shut, access to the exclamation of what he will or would have said today by erasing the published half of his archive in the form of an article. JustUs I must you to wait patiently for just a bit longer before we return to the passages in the Post . . . I cited and attend further to these stylistic repetitions concerning what will or wouldn’t have been said or not said, Derrida’s insistence that they are exclamations, not questions, and Derrida’s subtle but deliberate different rephrasings of the opening two lines, his division of Lacan and his division of himself from Lacan. For the moment, let me note a similar stylistic repetition to which we will need to attend alongside, or “with” the those I have just cited above: Derrida uses the words “I say good luck” twice, although he punctuates them differently:to those who are waiting for me to take a position [“saying Lacan is right or doing right by Lacan”] so they can reach a decision [arreter leur judgment], I say, “Good luck.” And:I say good luck to any narrator who would try to know what was said and written by whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not have said! Derrida’s repetition of the words “I say good luck” invert the order of Derrida’s repetition of what Lacan and Derrida would or would not have said. Two inverted repetitions bind, a word I use advisedly since Derrida uses it when discussing the publication of Lacan’s ?crits in “Love Lacan,” these repetitions bind Derrida to Lacan in relation to their reading and publications: in the first set of repetitions, Derrida takes Lacan’s place (at the end of the essay, after Lacan takes his place a second time in reverse) as someone who will or would not have said in one case and Lacan takes the place Derrida had earlier assigned himself in the second instance. In binding these two repetitions together within the same sentence, Derrida makes the question of what Lacan or Derrida has or hasn’t said under the heading of the archive (and under the subheading of “death”). If we cite the lines preceding Derrida repeats the lines “what will Lacan not have said today!” at the end of a discussion of the archive:The future of Lacanian thought as it moves beyond the ?crits 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. Since all of these things hang by a hair, since the stakes get decided in a word, an ellipsis, a verbal modality, conditional or future anterior, especially when one knows Lacan’s rhetoric, I say good luck to any narrator who would try to know what was said and written by whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not have said! As we shall see, Derrida similar situates his comment about what he will not have said in relation to the “problem of the archive.” In “Love Lacan,” Derrida places the “just us” of saying or not saying or saying you are not sure you will say about the dead (who include the living, who always dead, Derrida says, when you speak for them) is placed under the title “love,” a title that is of course reversible, about loving Lacan and what Lacan loved. Derrida does not comment in the essay on “love” and whether he will say that he and Lacan loved each other more marks the limit of what can or can not have been said by Derrida in “Love Lacan,” and by extension about what each of the said about the other when they were both alive and what Derrida still says about Lacan now that Lacan is dead. Lacan’s archivization the future reading of Lacan, or anyone else, as the archive is a question of the future, not the past, in Archive Fever. Après tout: ‘Pas’ “Du tout” In order to address these broader questions, let us attempt to grasp more exactly what motivates them, especially Derrida’s turn to the archive, by proceeding in an X-centric manner now to gloss another set of cruxes, with respect the way Derrida makes reading Lacan a question of the archive, in the last chapter of The Post Card, “Du tout,” and parentheses in a passage in “Love Lacan” the end of the sometimes forgotten last chapter “Du tout,” left untranslated as is “Le facteur de la vérité.” First, let me pause to gloss the title “Du tout.” In The Post Card, Derrida several places talks about the Paratext as a book and its paratexts in different ways, as not a book, as a book with a false preface, as a book with four chapters, of “Facteur” as an appendix. At one point, Derrida goes so far as enter a chapter of “To Speculate--on ‘Freud’” as a paratext even though the chapter is not finished: Of “Seven: Postscript,” Derrida says that “it resembles another postscript, another codicil, the postscript or codicil to the entire book this time. . . . This is the end: an appendix that is as reduced as possible, free, detachable too, a play appendix.” The most anarchivic of Derrida’s remixes of his book is “Du tout,” a chapter that is arguably a long paratext to Derrida’s discussion of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” the “Facteur,” an epitext when published as an article but then turned peritext when published in The Post Card. Yet Derrida never reads “Du tout” as a paratext. He just refers to it as one of the “three last parts of the present work.” “Du tout” is most “anarchivically” archival insofar as its inclusion is not motivated, not read as such, and therefore resembles the “seventh chapter” of The Post Card that “in certain respects adds nothing.”Les mots juste Rather than catalogue the ways in which Derrida routes Lacan to the archive, I want to make two points that bear on the quasi-crux, “X-ian.” First, Derrida makes the titel the condition of the archive. In “Title to Be Specified,” he writes: “the noun titleer would signify two things. In Old French, a titleer (titrier]—was a monk responsible for the archives of a monastery. He was an archivist, the archivist par excellence, for if every archivist must prevail over the order of titles—how can there be an archive without a title [pas d’archive sans titre]—what is to be said of the guardian of titles?” I have spoken earlier of Derrida’s use of “faux-tires,” and offer in a footnote below an example of variations Derrida or a publisher made the title from a different chapter of Parages. Second, translation complicates ableit in microscopic ways, the philological task of determining what is to be glossed and how it is to be glossed. I offer an example of the different ways the letter “X” appears typographically in a passage from Parages on “X without X,” a phrase to which we will return, in French and in the English translation in the footnote below. I want to pursue the anarchivity of Derrida’s archive as the limit of what can ne archived not only to translation and media but to the storage and publication of Derrida’s texts, including their publishing history, errata, editions, editions, bindings, copies, and so on. Derrida uses the word “anarchivic” in Archive Fever to mean “the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence”. Reading Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida finds that Freud’s concept of the “death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say archiviolithic. It will always have been archive –destroying . . . . Archiviolthic force leaves nothing of its own behind . . . The death drive is . . . what we will later call mal d’archive, “archive fever.” Anarchivity is the radical destruction of the archive and the remains of what can never be archived, the ash of the archive. By unfolding, carefully and patiently some specific quasi-cruxes in Derrida’s various archiving of his publications related to The Post Card, we may grasp how the question of reading Derrida now, after his death, is also a question of the anarchivity of his archived texts, anarchivity being a force which may not properly brought under the heading of a pre-fabricated, ready-made term like “performavity” since this anarchivity puts into question any binary opposition between publication and ash, between the legible or readable and the illegible or unreadable, between between memory and the present and past tenses—it is archived or it has been archived—and forgetting and the future anterior--it will have been archive destroying. As Derrida says of Lacan, “since the legal archive covers less and less of the whole archive, this archive remains unmasterable and continues on its way, in continuity with the anarchive.” The same thing, more or less, could be said of Derrida’s archive. The delirious anarchivity of Derrida’s publications puts the limits of their reading, or their future anterior (in the conditionl) reading after (the fact of) Derrida’s death, into question, such that as we turn now to what I am calling quasi-cruxes, or cruxes for the sake of economy, we are no longer talking about the symptom or even a “parerpraxis.” I want to compare a crux in “Du tout” to a crux in “Love Lacan.” Here is the crux in “Du tout”: there is a remote relation between Derrida’s discussion of how to read an error in the first two editions of Lacan’s ?crits and a story Derrida tells involving a dead friend, a story that inverts a story one of the letter writers of the “Envois” tells about a mistake Lacan made about Derrida. The mention of someone’s death occurs a few pages (513-15) after a lengthy discussion of whether Lacan’s misquotation of “dessein” (“plot,” “scheme,” or “design”) from the last lines of Poe’s The Purloined Letter as “destin” (“destiny” or “fate”) in the last sentence of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” “an altering citation,” Derrida says, but one about which “’Le facteur de la vérité’ did not say all that I [Derrida] think, but that in any event carefully refrained from qualifying as a “typographical error” or a “slip,” even supposing, you are going to see why I am saying this, that a somewhat lighthearted analytic reading could content itself with such a distinction, I mean between a “typo” and a “slip.” Derrida then permits himself to cite what he said before launching into a full-scale assault on Fran?ois Roustang’s reading of the mistake as a slip, not a typo:Now here is the most ingenious finding: what remains a typographical error two out of three times in given ?crits [Derrida does not specify the editions or give the relevant page numbers] becomes 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. Prompted by a request from René Major, one of the conference organizers, Derrida, supplies the name of a friend he had hitherto kept secret: “She probably had in mind someone whose name I can say because I believe that he is dead.” As I Was Saying The question of what is an error is an typo or a slip is what textual critics would ordinarily regard as a crux. The mention of the dead friend would have no bearing on the story about the error in the ?crits involving a crux the meaning of which Derrida aparently wants to leave undecided. In order to understand what I take to be a remote relation between mention and the story, I now move to what will be perhaps the most X-centric or perhaps the most XOXXOOOX-centric of the cruxes Derrida uses in “Love Lacan” and The Post Card, among all of those I will gloss. I say they are perhaps most X-centric because they are perhaps the hardest to notice; Derrida is not deliberately drawing his reader’s attention to them as he does the repetitions and inversions we saw in “Love Lacan.” The crux I gloss bears directly on the questions we will have been asking about Derrida’s effacement of both the proper name and the title. In the first repetition and inversion, Derrida says Lacan told about him to a similar story someone else told Derrida at a conference, both of which Derrida tells with reference to a dead friend. In a passage in “Du tout” that repeats, or precedes, “p/repeats,” as if in reverse order, the passage in “Love Lacan” in which Derrida parenthetically mentions a dead friend while discussing Lacan’s blunder, Derrida tells a story soon after castigating Roustang about saying that what may have been a typo was actually a slip, Derrida says that he would “prefer to tell [us] a brief story,” a story that bears a remarkable, Derrida might (not) have said uncanny, resemblance to “Derrida’s story about Lacan saying that Derrida was “inanalysis” (sic). The story Derrida reverses Derrida’s relationship to the analyst. This time Derrida himself is said to be the analyst. At a conference, someone came up to tell Derrida she knew he was psychoanalyzing someone but didn’t give Derrida a name: ‘I know that so and so has been in analysis with you for more than ten years.” My interlocutor, a woman, knew that I was not an analyst, and for my own part I knew, to refer to the same shared criteria, that what she was saying with so much assurance was false, quite simply false. In addition to the way the two stories invert Derrida’s position as analyst and analysand, both stories mention, as I have said, a dead friend of Derrida’s. This is the second repetition and inversion. Immediately after this story, in the telling of which Derrida leaves the woman unnamed, René Major invites Derrida to state the name of the person who was not in analysis: “Given the point we have reached, what prevents you from saying who is in question? To state his name now seems inevitable.” Major does not ask Derrida to give the name of the woman who said she knew who Derrida was (not) analyzing. Derrida responds as follows:René Major asks me the name of the analyst in question. Is this really necessary? Moreover, my interlocutor did not name him. She contented herself with characteristics . . . No name was pronounced. It was only after the fact, reflecting on the composite that she had sketched, that I attempted an induction. Here is the first narrative repetition. In the last pages of “Love Lacan,” repeats and inverts the woman’s story he tells in “Du tout”: this time Derrida tells the story of Lacan having said that Derrida having been an analysand, a story also about an error, the dead friend is mentioned in a parenthetical sentence within Derrida’s story about what Lacan said rather than before it or after it: “Lacan made a compulsive blunder,” Derrida writes; “he said that he thought I was in analysis.” Derrida proceeds to quote Lacan’s unofficial version. I now quote it again:In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever withdrawn from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the syntax and the reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about whom I did not know that –to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not know that he was in analysis—about whom I did not know that he was in analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who has written a preface to this Verbier.” Derrida then introduces in parentheses an anecdote in “Love Lacan” about the death of the a friend: “(Lacan . . . was then obviously unaware of the fact that one of the two [Derrida and his supposed analyst], was dead by the time I wrote the preface in question, which was this written to his memory, as homage, and in his absence.” Only after inserting this parenthentical remark about a dead friend does Derrida return to Lacan’s blunder and ask “How could Lacan have made his listeners laugh . . . on the basis of a blunder, his own . . . ? How could he insist on two occasions on” Derrida’s “real status as noninstitutional analyst and on what he wrongly supposed to be my status as institutional analysand, whereas he ought to have been the first to . . .” So You (Would or Will Have) Said Having glossed these narrative repetitions and inversions, we may also gloss stylistic repetitions and inversions in the passage we have just not “read.” Just as the story in “Du Tout” repeats the story about Lacan in the “Envois,” so in “Love Lacan” Derrida refers the reader back to the same story in the “Envois”: “The thing has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card.” These repetitions come with omissions and additions that may be glossed, if one can still call what I am doing “glossing,” as having inverted each other. For example, Derrida does not give the quotation from Lacan in “Envois,” but he does give it in “Love Lacan”; inversely, Derrida names the dead friend in “Du tout” but does not in “Love Lacan.” One could go even further and point out the parentheses uses in “Love Lacan” to mention his dead friend and to say Lacan was mistaken recall the figurative parentheses in which Derrida places the anecdote about Roustang in “Du Tout”: “A few words in parenthesis”; “I will not close this short parenthesis”; “Here I close this parenthesis.” These cruxes are at the outer limits of the borders of glossing, or of any glossing to come. As with the title “Du tout,” we come at these limits to the anarchivity of Derrida’s own texts the question of reading after death becomes a question of the title, anecdotes, and publication. In the last crux, I will gloss, Derrida again tells a story about an error, in this case, an error Lacan made, one of many, when speaking about Derrida. Derrida puts this story in a long parenthetical paragraph and to the way that paragraph follows the second anecdote Derrida tells about meeting Lacan in person, an anecdote Derrida that involves dates and a posterous order of publication and that Derrida defers for so long that he finally begins telling it by saying “I am not forgetting.” Here are the first and last sentences of the paragraph that follows the first anecdote: “Prior to any grammatology: “Of Grammatology” was the first title of an article published some five years before Lacan’s new title of an article published some five years before Lacan’s new introduction and—and this was one of the numerous mistakes or misrecognitions made by Lacan--it never proposed a grammatology. . . The book that treated of grammatology was anything but a grammatology”) (52). Derrida does not put write of grammatology with initial capital letters, as it should be written, Of Grammatology. Why not? And why does Derrida enclose this very general accusation about Lacan’s mistakes with parentheses? We can best respond to these questions, I think, by turning the the anecdote that immediately precedes this paragraph in parentheses, an anecdote Derrida tells a story about what Lacan told concerning the publication of, a passage that I cited as an epigraph and cite yet once more : I am not forgetting the binding which all of this is bound up. The other worry Lacan confided me in Baltimore concerned the binding of the ?crits, which had not yet appeared, although its publication was imminent. Lacan was worried and slightly annoyed, it seemed to me, with those at Le Seuil, his publishers, who had advised him not to assemble everything in a single large volume of more than nine hundred pages. There was thus a risk that the binding would not be strong enough and would give way “You’ll see,” he told me with a gesture of his hands, “it’s not going to hold up.” The republication in the two-volume paperback edition in 1970 will thus have reassured him, in passing, not only to confirm, the necessity of placing the “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” at the “entry post” of the ?crits, but also to fire off one of those future anteriors (antedates or antidotes) that will have been the privileged mode of all the declarations of love that he so often made to me, by mentioning (I dare not say by antedating), and I quote, “what I will literally call the instance prior to any grammatology’.” This is what the first of what Derrida says are two first anecdotes about meeting. Lacan. Before returning to the question of Derrida’s use of all lower case letters for his book Of Grammatology and his use of parentheses, let me gloss this potentially unlimited crux even further. the anecdote he defers telling, just after talking about his reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” followed from the way Lacan published the ?crits and before returning to “the republication of the paperback edition in 1970”: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 ?crits] despite its diachrony. In other words, ?crits collects and binds together all the texts out of which it is composed, with the exception of the seem which, by coming at the beginning, is thereby given the ‘privilege’ of figuring the synchronic configuration of the set and thus binding the whole together. It therefore seemed legitimate to me to take a privileged interest in this privilege. If I use the word binding here, the binding that holds the moment of reading and rereading, it is because on 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 of the binding of the ?crits. With the borders of this gloss thus expanded to include a question of textual criticism and publication as a question of reading and rereading in ancdote told in reverse order and conspicuously deferred, we may now return to Derrida’s parenthetical paragraph in which he writes “of grammatology.” Through the use of parentheses, Derrida allows himself to say some things about Lacan with greater force and even more decisiveness descisvely outs does two partly. Derrida corrects Lacan by appealing to dates (“five years before”), but does not bother to archive all of Lacan’s many other mistakes or misrecognitions. At the same time, Derrida allows himself to depart from the bibliographical norm for titles. By citing the title of grammatology in lower case letters and introducing a pointless yet conscipuous error, Derrida turns the relation of his own work and its title inside out, then stating only what his book was not about. Whatever “of grammatology” is about, or why it bears that title, or why Derrida waits to make such a bold and general accusation right after telling the anecdote, all remain completely unclear, at rest and arrested. The crux implodes and explodes: One wonders what kind of mistake Lacan is supposed to have made by antedating his texts. Derrida’s reading, in the past tense, of Lacan’s use of the future anterior, becomes Derrida’s non-reading of his own works. “Was anything but” is perhaps echoed in the equally negatively stated sentence near the end of “Love Lacan”: What I will not have said today!” The least—or the most—we can say is that it is not clear in “Love Lacan” that one can one use the future anterior to speak of the what the dead will have said that differs significantly from speaking of the dead using the past tense; that is, it is by no means clear whether or not the future anterior just reappropriating, hence unjustly, what has been said not only about by the dead by the living but of what the living said or will have said about the living. When Derrida says Lacan fired “off one of those future anteriors (antedates or antidotes)” (49) he uses the future anterior to describe Lacan’s use of the future anterior as an act of love: “that will have been the privileged mode of all the declarations of love that he so often made to me” (49). Yet Derrida puts this point about Lacan’s mode of declaring his love in the past tense: “he so often made to me.” When Derrida comes to the end of “Love Lacan” and accuses Lacan of having made a “compulsive blunder,” Derrida equates Lacan’s use of the future anterior quite negatively with reapproriation: “Here is a better known episode that occurred some ten years later after Lacan used the future anterior several times to reappropriate by way of antedating when he said, for example . . . ) In a session of the seminar [XXIV] in 1977 (still “l’Insu-que-sait”), Lacan made a compulsive blunder.” By collapsing the future anterior into the past tense, Derrida leaves us to wonder whether any declaration of love is not also a declaration of war, as if psychoanalysis and deconstruction could only make love and war, not “make love, not war.” Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead Having unfolded the cruxes above, we are now in a position to route the question of what it means to read Derrida after Derrida’s death, a question that has informed our glossing of Derrida’s attention to the future of a reading Lacanian discourse in “Love Lacan,” to a question of the effacement of the title and of the proper name. Before turning to the next crux let me point out that Derrida several times excuses himself in “Love Lacan ”from rereading passages or summarizing what he said in the Post . . . in one case on the grounds that he has already “formalized readability” in general: “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” (48). I turn now now to very last crux, there always being a last gloss after the last, to the very, very last crux I will gloss before returning to the one with which I began, namely the letter “X” in “X-ian.” In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida comments on a condition made on his giving a lecture at a colloquium on “Lacan avec les philosophes”: “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”(47). In an anecdote Derrida relays or relates about meeting Lacan, Derrida says Lacan said something very similar to Derrida: “At our second and last encounter, during dinner offered by his in-laws, he insisted on publicly archiving in his own way, with regard to something I had told him, the disregard of the Other that I had supposedly attempted ‘by playing dead’”(61). Although Lacan made his comment about playing dead to Derrida before the conference at which Derrida is speaking happened, but Derrida tells that anecdote about what Lacan said only after Derrida states the condition unnamed colloquium conference organizers put on his speaking only if he played dead: “That is (was enough just to think of it) to make me disappear nominally as a live person—because I am alive—to me disappear for life” (“Love Lacan,” 47). Derrida adds that he would not allow himself to be offended or discouraged by the “lamentable and indecent incident of the barring of my proper name from the program and that he was “shocked” by the “symptomatic and compulsive violence” of forcing to act as if he were dead in order to speak at the conference, but refers the reader in an endnote to the appendices of Lacan avec les philosophes and does not make anything of the way Lacan’s words “playing dead” repeat those Derrida used when speaking of the colloquium. Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead Having glossed these cruxes, we are ready to return to “Love Lacan” and gloss Derrida’s use of “X-ian” to stand for any proper name that would modify the noun “psychoanalysis.” Let me begin this gloss with a gloss from another text by Derria related to the letter “X.” It is getting late, I know, to introduce another text. Please follow along. You’re almost not there. The degree to which Derrida’s sentence about “X-ian” psychoanalysis and deconstruction, let us consider the investment Derrida has in psychoanalysis with relation to “X” in the title by turning to an endnote to “Marx & Sons,” that is, in Derrida’s response to a group of academic readers commenting on Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Derrida glosses the phrase “X without X,” a phrase in which X may stand either for a noun or a name in a title. Derrida writes—rather scathingly—of Terry Eagleton’s adoption of the phrase “X without X” in the title of contribution to the volume:Eagleton is undoubtedly convinced that, with the finesse, grace and elegance he is universally acknowledged to possess, he has hit upon a title (‘Marxism without Marxism’) which is a flash of wit, an ironic dart, a witheringly sarcastic critique, aimed at me or, for example, Blanchot, who often says –I have discussed this at length elsewhere—‘X without X.’ Every ‘good Marxist’ knows , however, that noting is closer to Marx, more faithful to Marx, than this Marxism without Marxism was, to begin with, the Marxism of Marx himself, if that name still means anything. In citing from a text related to Specters of Marx, I mean to move us closer, nor further, to the question of reading Derrida reading Lacan after Lacan’s death amd our reading The Post Card and “Love Lacan” after Derrida’s death by using “X wihtout X” to link even more strongly these questions to the way deconstruction turn on the displacement of the question of psychoanlaysis having a proper name, any proper name, in front of it. Derrida introduces the phantasm in Specters of Marx via psychoanalysis. As Derrida writes in “Marx & Sons,” “the motifs of mourning, inheritance, and promise are, in Specters of Marx, anything but ‘metaphors’ in the ordinary sense of the word . . . They also allow me to introduce questions of a psychoanalytic type (those of the specter or phantasma—which also means specter in Greek) . . . All this presupposes a transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself . . . I have elsewhere, tried to discuss how the transformation might be brought about, and discuss this at length here” (235). In “Marx & Sons,” then, Derrida once again raises the question he had raised in “Love Lacan,” citing Resistances of Psychoanalysis and The Post Card as two of five texts he lists in endnote 32 (265) as those in which he does the transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself.” In the endnotes, in a relatively exterior paratextual space, Derrida makes the letter “X” a mathematical variable of a title. An unreadable letter stands for a word composed of readable letters in a title is central to the question of quasi-methodological status of deconstruction and what Derrida calls the transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself. “Mort” to Say In turning now to the crux, “X-ian,” with which we began, we are considering as part of it the sentence that follows it, “What I will not have said today!” We will gloss the “X” in relation to what Derrida did not say, to the way he collapses what he will have said or would have said into the negative, the not said: “ What I will not have said today!” (68). That’s what Derrida said. Yet what Derrida said, the way he limits himself to the negative, becomes something “to be glossed” because he introduces an asymmetry between what he says and what about what Lacan will have said and won’t have said. Turning his text into an archive, Derrida “says” that consists only of what he will “not have said,” not, as was the case with Lacan also what he will or would have said. Of course, Derrida doesn’t say that. At least not exactly. And that is precisely my point. The question I raising here concerns not only what Derrida did not say, but what the limits of not saying are: where does the opposition between saying and not saying deconstruct? Why does Derrida “destruct” it rather than deconstruction? Let us begin glossing the crux of the “X-ian.” What is it that Derrida has not said in “Love Lacan” about the name and the title that bears on his erasure of any proper name that might modify psychoanalysis, on “X-ian?” Derrida has not said that he wrote one of the postscripts of Lacan avec les philosophes to which he directs the reader in the headnote and the third endnote of “Love Lacan.” The post-script is entitled “Après Tout: Les Chance du College.” What does Derrida say in this postscript? What he says bears directly on the “adjective” “X-ian”: in the postscript Derrida talks about the erasure of his name, in the form of an adjective, from the original colloquium title, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalaysis?,” and its replacement with the colloquium and book’s title Lacan avec les philosophes. By not citing his postscript to Lacan avec avec les philosophes in the paratexts—headnote and endnote--of “Love Lacan,” Derrida effectively writes about the erasure of his name from the original title in invisible ink, as it were. “X-ian” marks the spot . . . less, the invisible ink, or, in Derrida’s words, “the history that in France and especially in Eastern France, has been written, so to speak, not in ink but in the effacement of the name” Sayve My Name, Sayve My Name And with the effacement of the name goes the effacement of the title. Derrida has already given the reader everything he or she would need to find the dossier regarding the changed title Lacan avec les pilosophes in his headnote and endotes to “Love Lacan.” I leave some of the materials relevant to a glossing to come filed away in the footnote below, materials to which refers in his post-script as a “dossier” and as “archived.” I wll point only that Derrida mentions his shock at the change made to the title of the colloquium and insists that the absence of his name makes no difference to him at all. Yet he nowhere comments on the condition that he play dead if he is to participate in the confernece. Alone among all of the contributors to the appendices, Alain Badiou, who was the person who demanded that no proper names other than Lacan’s appear in the colloquium title, only Badiou mentions the condition of playing dead, and he brings it up only to say he is not guilty as charged: “D’autres, ou les memes, ont jugé exorbitant, stalinien, et relevant du desire de mort, que je demande qu’un nom proper, parce qu’il était le seul d’un contemporain à être mis en balance avec celui de Lacan, soit ou éfface, ou équilibré par d’autres.” To have allowed the colloquium title to include Derrida’s name or any name, Badiou adds, would have been to betrayal [trahison] of Lacan. The question I am interested is less about what the contributors of the appendices said about the change to the conference title than in the way Derrida reserves a texutal and archival space in “Love Lacan” to say what he as to say. Derrida says he will not insist on “silencing what he thinks of all of this, but only at the end, ‘off the record,’ as one says in English.” Derrida then glosses this English phrase in relation to the archive: “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.” (48). Whatever Derrida says he will say “only at the end” (48) will be in a paratextual “off the record” space Derrida calls a “post-scriptum, in parentheses” (48). Only “only at the end” (48) never arrives. There is no post-scriptum in “Love Lacan,” as there is in Derrida’s “Force of Law,” among many other texts, no postscript as there is in Archive Fever, among many other texts, and no parentheses either. When Derrida exlaims “what will I not have said today!” is he saying that he has not said anything? Or that someone else---no one else?—will not have heard him say what he said, that any hearing will have been a non-hearing? Whether Derrida is saying anytng or not saying it or syaing it by not saying it, and so on, makes no difference insofar as the question would be the same: where does Derrida say / not say what he will not have said? At a number of moments in “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida goes out of his way to say that he has nothing to say or that he need not say again what he said before: “It is certainly not because I think I have something more or irreplaceable to say on these matters; the discussion of what I ventured almost twenty years ago around those questions would demand a microscopic examination for which neither you nor I have the time or the patience; as I have already said . . . “; “I attempted to show this in “Le facteur de la vérité” and elsewhere; I would be unable to reconstitute all this here in so little time.” Is Derrida ever speaking on the record? It would appear that there is no record of what Derrida said against which one could empirically show was later retated in an accurate or inaccurate way. Even “Mort” to say What is the relation in “Love Lacan” between speaking of Lacan after his death and Derrida’s X-ing out any name in relation to pyschoanlaysis at the end? Derrida erases the proper name says “perhaps we step beyond psychoanalysis” by attending to the “radical destruction of the archive, in ashes” (45). As I said earlier, Derrida’s “last point” (69) in “Love Lacan” involves the priority of deconstruction over psychoanalysis, “the degree” to which “the analytic situation, the analytic institution, is deconstructed, as if by itself, without deconstruction or deconstructive project” (69). Derrida here divorces deconstruction from psychonalysis by erasing without erasing, at least not in this text, his name, or any name from deconstruction. If deconstruction subsumes pyschoanalysis through the archive and recasts it, in effect as “so-called psychoanalysis,” a psychoanalysis that is to some degree without psychoanalysis, why does Derrida turn to psychoanalysis in order to make his argument about the archive, its “radical destruction, as ashes” (44)? If the problem of the archivization does If Lacan is just an example of the larger problem of the archive, why does Derrida choose Lacan as his example? Similarly, when Derrida writes a book on the archive entitled Archive Fever, why it also a book about Freud? Why does Freud’s name turn up as an adjective in the book’s subtitle, “A Freudian Impression?” Why is the last paragraph of Archive Fever about Freud burning? We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he [Freud] may have burned. We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive fever, what have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or of his “life.” Burned without limit, without remains, and without knowledge. With no possible response, be it spectral or not, short of or beyond suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash.Naples, 22-28 May 1994When writing on the archive, Derrida does not return to psychoanaysis in general but to specific texts by Freud and Lacan. In “Love Lacan,” Derrida returns to Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” and Derrida’s own reading of it in “Facteur.” In Archive Fever, Derrida goes back to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the same text that Derrida says in “Love Lacan” he attempted “a reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. . . (in ‘To Speculate--on Freud”’),” rereading in Freud’s text in Archive Fever in relation to the archive and the death drive, to the archive oriented toward the future, not the past, in which anarchival repetition is, if not without without repetition, at least repetiton without compulsion. The importance of psychoanlaysis no longer lies only in the ways it contributes to a deconstructive account of the problem of the archive through its interests in “inscription, erasure, blanks, the non-said, memory storage, and new techniques of archivization” (40) or what would might more commonly be called the symptomatic reading.Ghlossed Protocol We may now say what these glossings, glossing of “configurations” that are not as stable as those of any “reading” because they have no limits and for which there are no “protocols,” as there are even for a history of the archive that may never be possible to write. More radically, glossing canonot be limited to the reading of a single version of a text, a single edition, as Derrida does in “Love Lacan” with respect to the Ecrits, which he calls a “stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of the collection and binding of ?crits, in other words, in 1966.” Can deconstruction write off psychoanalysis, as Derrida apparently does in “Love Lacan” (1991)? Can deconstruction transform the logic of psychoanalysis, as Derrida says it can in Specters of Marx? Or does the gesture of writing pyschoanalysis off depend on pyschonalysis having to call itself something, on its having a name that modifies it? Is deconstruction nameless, that is not dependent on Derrida’s name? Or does it involve archiving of Derrida’s name from the original the title of the collouqium erased, even as Derrida erases all proper names that could modify pychoanlysis with the letter “X?” Or is there a Freudian deconstruction? A Lacanian deconstruction? I cannot answer these questions—can anyone?—nor canI say that the last two questions haven’t already put us on the wrong track in bringing back the proper name as an adjective in a way that assumes that we already know what a Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis is. La carte posthume I do not have answers to these questions. I can only make them more audible—leave you with them ringing in your ears –by extending the question of reading after death (Derrida’s, Lacan’s, X’s, yours, mine, ours, and so on) with which we began to the one time Derrida’s explicitly engages with posthumous publication but does so without reference to psychoanalysis even though it is under the heading of the phantasm. Glossing only renders, and hence rends any distinction between glossing and reading. Here we also ask whether there is a posthumous principle or posthumous structure that differs from the postal principle or postal structure, whether the posthumous be subsumed by the posterous, the phantasm, and the postal. Derrida engages the “phantasm” in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, and the posthumous publication is a note Pascal wrote. The note just happens to begin with the word “fire.” Derrida’s discussion of Pascal’s note occurs in relation to the phantasm, the survivance of a text, which is not the same thing as the survival or a corpse decaying. His interest in Pascal’s paper lies partly in the way it is “strictly posthumous,” that is published after Pascal’s death: 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 . . . Even before it was posthumously published, apparently even if it had never been published, Pascal’s writing would have remained readable even it was never read.Earn Burial Derrida almost says that the note would arrive at its destination. It does, any case, have a destiny, not a destinerrance. I quote at length: 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. Here I quote Derrida quoting Guerrier:“A few days after the death of Monsieur Pascal . . . 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 . . . found there a little folded parchment . . . and in the parchment of a paper written in the same hand: the one was a faithful copy of the other. . . . 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 [?tienne] Périer, Pascal’s nephew. At the top was a cross, surrounded by a ray of light. The material support has been lost; the copy has survived; it has been archived; it has been published; Derrida takes a father’s word for its authenticity. The note has been “destined” to remain, and to remain legible, “even if it were readable only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come.” That generation is apparently infinite.Screen captures of Pascal’s Pensees, stored in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris from Alain Resnais’s documentary film Toute la memoire du monde (1956). What Derrida calls Pascal’s “strictly” posthumously published note has arrived at a future even if that future arrives. It remains readable. For generations to come. But can it be read? Derrida is not so sure. He places the first word of Pascal’s note, “Fire [feu]” (212) in the middle of the page, as if it were the title of the note that follows. And then Derrida says he is uncertain whether he can read it: “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).” Feu la cindre, Derrida might have said, citing the title of a text in which Derrida’s many references to a holocaust in The Post Card become recast as references to the Holocaust, an event Derrida recalls in his coments on Pascal’s note by glossing it in relation to Paul Celan’s poem, Aschenglorie, one of many Celan’s poems Derrida also finds difficult to read. However the note might be read, it is not to be read, as Pascal’s elder sister, Gilberte Pascal Périer who published her dead brother’s “little paper” in her Life of Blaise Pascal, in her preface introducing the posthumous writing in which she narrates the circumstances of its discovery--Pascal had sewn the paper into his doublet, Derrida tells us, and a servant found it after Pascal died—the note is not to be read as Pascal’s “last word,” as a master text that would govern the meaning of all of Pascal’s other writings. She justifies its posthumous 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.”Les Dernier Mots and Other “Lacanuae” Jacques Derrida may be presumed dead, of course. I have tried to show that asking whether deconstruction will survives its death, a question Derrida addressed in 1994, in Derrida’s name, is the wrong question to ask. To address that question will produce defensive psychobiographies and thematic, pre-critical reshelvings of Derirda’s writings, key word by key word. The question of the survival of deconstruction is a question, properly or improperly, about the survial of a practice without a name, a practice that overlaps with psychoanalysis yet cannot be separated rom it. Let me “Speculate –On ‘Derrida’” for a moment. Derrida might have rethought the distinction he makes between posthumous writing in general and strictly posthumous generations of readings to come—had he remembered what he said earlier in the seminar, namely, that “Freud reminds us” of something crucial about the phantasm, perhaps even remembering what Derrida said about Freud in the Sixth Session of the Seminar? Did Derrida forget psychoanalysis? Did he ever forget it? Did ever forget Freud or Lacan? Who can say? If we can say that all readings of what sur-vives or lives on of Derrida’s writings after his death will be about what he will not have said and would not have said, and I am not saying we can, we can also say Derrida’s account of Pascal’s paper as a note destined to be read depends on Derrida’s belief in its indestructibility, one might even says its indivisibility, and hence its undeconstructibility. Does the word “fire” in Pascal’s note make the poem difficult to read because one cannot read while burning? Does the endlessness of burning here, the collapse of a fire lit before and its aftermath, mean that one can only gloss the poem while making the limits of any such glossing impossible to determine, extending glossing well past the determination of the meaning of a word, phrase, sentnece, or passage that glossing apparently delivers or is commonly thought to deliver to reading? Is Pascal’s note itself a gloss, his shirt a kind of urn burial or portable columbarium for it? Does glossing necessarily gloss over itself? In isolating Pascal’s note as a strictly posthumous publication, Derrida forgets that all of Pascal’s Pensées were published posthumously in 1670, along with this note, in the same book. The distinction Derrida draws between strictly and generally posthumous writing is not at all rigorous, and indeed depends in the case Derrida singles out on factoring out the facteur, on forgetting the mailman, in may untenable only in very different ways, and the forgetting of the servant’s name who sent off the note, the servant whose name was already forgotten by the Father. Let Derrida have the lost words, so to speak, or “ghlost” words: “And moreover I obey at every moment without seeming to: to burn everything, forget everything . . . and while driving I held it on the steering wheel.”After-PeaceOne still has to take note of this. And to finish that Second Letter: “. . . Consider these facts and take care lest you sometime come to repent of having now unwisely published. It is a very great safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing. . . . What are now called his . . . Sokratous estin kalou kai neou gegonots . . . are the work of a Socrates embellished and modernized. Farewell and believe. Read this letter now at once many times and burn it . . . .”--I hope this one won’t get lost. Quick, a duplicate . . . graphite . . . carbon . . . reread this letter . . . burn it. Il y a là cendre. And now to distinguish between two repeitions.” “I hope this one won’t get lost. Quick, a duplicate . . . graphite . . . carbon . . . reread this letter . . . burn it. . . . And now to distinguish between two repeitions.”--Derrida, “Play: From Pharmakon to the Letter” in “Plato’s Parmacy” in Dissemination, 170-71 -- also cited uin Derrida, Cinders III, 56, the whole part with the end up to “And now to distinguish between two repetitions” and Cinders n. IV, p. 58.“Bye Bye that Song Bye Thank You Like You Love You See You Next Time Bye Miss You”REnd Notes“41. In the session, Derrida added nothing here.” Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 277. The last chapter of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle “adds nothing . . seems to add nothing” (Post Card, 386; 387). “The unfortunate effect of all this is to give a large can of petrol and a flame-thrower to those prejudiced types who would like to terminate not Shakespeare but the “queer theory” which is currently the hottest thing on the American academic scene.”, Review of Richard Burt, Unspeakable (1998); TLS 28 May 1999 ................
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