Richard Burt - University of Florida
Richard Burt
Read After Burning:
The Sur-vivance and Posthumography of Derrida’s Post . . . to Be Published . . . to Be Continued . . . Posthumously (with love, without such limits)[1]
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Posthumography a way of thinking about where psychoanalysis would come into pay in relation to deconstruction with regard to survivance and posthumous publication.
Derrida sidelines posthumous publication, but nevertheless uses posthumous and posthume frequently as synoums for spectral, revenant, or return. Why the additional word?.
Drrida refers to “I posthume” in Circonfessions”
That I believe have not yet truly begun to be read” 185 (263)
The logic of the hantasm, asw we are concerned wih it here (be it about living death, the ghost or the revenant, about cremation or the posthumous, [this ogic of the phantasm] 184 (262
2 versions of Thomas the Obscure 183 (260)
the order of what comes before after in statements, an order of what follows, posterous, and of what is posterior in the logical series of statements. 9194 (274)
at least in the beginning of a sentence so as to understand the end and what follows (posterus and posthumus). 204 (288) Beast and the Sovereign Volume 2
I am dead—dead. From Thomas the Obscure. 189 (268)
The spectral and the posthumous 185 (263)
He also names followed by a question mark, “The posthumous disaster?” and especially, lastly, among all these pages I am asking you to reread, “The calm, the burn of the holocaust, the annihilation of noon—the calm of the disaster.” 181 ( 258)
Some people are born posthumously.
Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” 100
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.
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 173-174[2]
Burning By Heart
See also the following passage from Jacques Derrida’s “Maurice Blanchot est morte” in Parages, revised and augmented edition, 2003:
Non cessé de nous tourner la tete a donner a entendre la phrase “Maurice Blanchot est mort”? D’ailleurs, pour ma part, je pourrais raconteur, sans voulour en dire d’avantage ici, que ce fut en deux temps, dont le premier fut celui d’une fausse nouvelle ou d’une nouvelle seulement anticipe de quinze jours, que j’ai appris que “Maurice Blanchot était mort”. Je dis “était” et non “est”, ce qui nous donnerait a penser cette autre tentation, au fond, de Maurice Blanchot: nous avons tous, a commencer sans doute par lui, endure la terrible tentation (c’est de tentation que je voudrais le aujourd’hui) de penser que la vraie position, ce que, depuis toujours, 270. This chapter, which Derrida added to the second edition of Parages, is rather As Derrida writes in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2:
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. (174)
In a later discussion, Derrida questions the logic of the posterous, a word Derrida glosses this way: “It indicates an order of presuppositions, the order of what comes before and what comes after in statements, an order of what follows, posterous, and of what is posterior in the logical series of valid statements.”[3] What happens to the order or logical series of statements when they are published? If publications may also be organized according to bibliographical order, how might the publications rend the order of logic of saying what is said, has been said, will or would have been said?
The challenge of saying in positive terms exactly how Derrida’s death will or would have mattered remains and meeting it requires sideling at least two kinds of reductive readings: either (auto)bio(thanato)graphy and (ego) psychologism, on the one hand, or a Derridean parergonal frame, on the other, to which “not reading” would immediately default, frames that come with both pre-fabricated accessorized tropes in the form of “key words” such as “differance,” “dissemination,” “unreadability,” “erasure,” “performativity,” “aporia,” chiasmus,” or “chiasmatic invagination” and with a specific tense such as the future anterior. None of these words should be considered taboo, of course.[4] There can be no question of a single word. As Derrida writes in Cinders, You said that he could not have an “up to date” phrase for this cinder word. Yes, there is perhaps only one worth publishing, it would tell of the all-burning, otherwise called holocaust and the crematory oven, in German in all Jewish languages of the world.”[5] It’s the way these words and others like them may be used in the service of so-called reading that I am questioning by doing a non reading that does not program the “postal principle” (Post Card, 27) in advance not only to a last word in the future anterior in the conditional, as Derrida put it in the passage I cited above: “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” (150). My non reading practice of dechemination does not program even future anterior reading, any reading to the end, any reading after my death, to the last word, the last word before the last, the very last word, the first words, the first words before the first, or to an achrony of young and old.[6] In my defense, if one is needed, let remind the reader that no omission is too small for Derrida to discuss, no change to a text or to a paratext to small, no variant too trivial to be dismissed, and no reading that will not be rushed at some point, making it necessary for Derrida to distinguish reading from leaping.[7] The “anarchivity” of the archive of Derrida’s own texts, texts that he either does not write about or does not reopen, renders their publication and republication not only divided and disseminated but destroyed, burned, if not before delivery, then at least on delivery, whether or not one assumes that publication may be equated with delivery.[8]
[9]
One last word of advice: My critical practice, let us call it for the moment “decheminX-ian,” a word I hope you will be hear both as a noun and as an adjective, my critical practice of not reading, I am saying, will be highly X-centric but still close to you. I will return from one of Derrida’s terms in one the texts I have mentioned to another nearly synonymous term in the same text or a different text, and then circle or loop back to an earlier, and so on. I am reading a kind of “prepetition,” a sort of repetition before repetition that may be impossible to differentiate from what Derrida calls “compulsive and repeated precipitation” (70). In any case, I’ll remember to tell you when to get off. As for me, I am stoked.
Say again?
oddly (and without explanation by the editor) not included in the translation of Parages edited by John Leavey for Stanford UP. A shorter version of it has appeared in The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2. See the editors’ note in that volume, .
First Editions: Let the Write One In
“che-mains” 179 (256)
It’s like for difference, with an a, which is another way to posthume, by differing or deferring life or, what comes down to the same thing, deferring death. 172 (250)
I will not propose a linear and continuous reading of Heidegger’s seminar, any more than I am of Robinson Crusoe. This does not mean that such a reading m uninterrupted from start to finish, word for word and irreversibly consecutive and consequential, is not necessary; I even hold it to be indispensable . . . . I am also convinced, having also begun by obeying this injunction myself before inviting you to do so in your turn, that one must read and reread these two works in a linear, continuous and repeated way, each of these readings being promised to promise you surprises, changes of accent, a thousand discoveries in moments that are apparently furtive or secondary, etc. 205 (289)
Falling out of it into the posthumous that it is already breathing 185 (263)
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 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;
Any morte Morgue-aging derrida. Amortization? Hemmorgueing
Thus some delayed prefaces illustrate a variety we call the posthumous preface—posthumous to its publication, needless 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 text, a preface—if it is allographic – may be a posthumous production . . .
This has encouraged me to publish this fragment here. 292
Top of 293, the last sentence of the long quotation of a preface that is a note:
“Other fragments of the same seminar will appear soon in book form.” 293
Binding—central to speculate on Freud—also part about Freud binding of the Ecrits in love Lacan.
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 Écrits, 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 Écrits, 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’.”[10]
Surivance life death / borderline / parergonal supplements , posthumography introduces Published unpublished / which is not a necropolis or a columbarium nor a legal matter nor a bibliographical matter but part of a biobiblioontological essence. “ implications for pyshcoanalysis and deconstruction but also for biopolitics and bare life, Derrida’s rather fierce criticisms of Girigo Agamben’s Homo Scaer.
You Aren’t Here (Any morte ) Right Now, On this Page
In his posthumously published last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign 2 Derrida himself asks “What is the other—what are others—going to make of me when I am departed, deceased, passed away, gone, absolutely without defense, disarmed, in their hands, i.e., as they say, so to speak, dead?”[11] Derrida’s question indirectly invites a question about posthumous publication I wish to engage in this essay. Is there a posthumous effect that differs from what Derrida calls the postal effect? Does publication introduce a different structure than that of the envois and the post card? It would appear not. Derrida writes that If every invention, as invention of the trace, then becomes a movement of différance or sending, envoi, as I have attempted to show elsewhere, the postal framework is thereby privileged, as I should like simply to stress here once again. And to illustrate according to Montaigne, from whose writings I shall quote here, as a detached supplement to la carte postale, the following fragment from Des postes (2.22), which names "invention: and situates it between the animal socius and the human socius: [anecdote about using pigeons to send letters].
“Psyche: Invention of the Other”
n1. 423
Although Derrida here asserts that “the postal framework is . . . privileged,” it is worth noting that he does so in an endnote to an essay published separately from The Post Card. Moreover, the history of the publication of The Post Card involved an accidental exclusion of material Derrida later published separately as the essay eneitled “Telepathy” and to which he appended the following endnote:
Such a remainder [restant], I am no doubt publishing it in order to come closer to what remains inexplicable even to this day. These cards and letters had become inaccessible to me, materially speaking at least, by a semblance of accident, at some precise moment. They should have appeared as fragments and in accordance with the plan [dispositif] adopted at that time in "Envois" [Section One of la carte postale [Paris: Aubie-Flammarion, 1980]. In a manner that was apparently just as fortuitous, I rediscovered them very close at hand, but too late, when the proofs for the book had already been sent back for the second time. There will perhaps be talk of omission through "resistance" and such other things. Certainly, but resistance to what? to whom? Dictated by whom, to whom, how, according to what routes [voies]? From this bundle of daily dispatches that all date from the same week, I have exacted only a portion for the moment, for lack of space. Lack of time too, and for the treatment to which I had to submit this mail [courrier], triage, fragmentation, destruction, etc., the interested reader may refer to "Envois," 7ff.
I quote this note in full in order to suggest that what Derrida calls the survivance , or “living death” of a text puts pressure on Derrida’s own notion of the postal when it comes to publication, an event I do not wish to subsume under dissemmination.
Life death of postal relay tied up with published and unpublished. Jean Luc nancy.
There is always a closed and inviolable book in the middle of every book that is opened, held apart between the hands that turn its pages, and whose every revolution, each turn from recto to verso begins to fail to achieve its dechipering, to shed light on its sense. For that reason every book, inasmuch as it is a book, is unpublished, even though it repeats and relays individually, as each one does, the thousands of other books that are reflected in it like worlds in a monad. The book is unpublished [inedit], and it is that inedit that the publisher [editeur] publishes. The editor (Latin) is the one who brings to the light of day, exposes to the outside offers (edo) to view and to knowledge. That doesn’t, however, mean that once it is published the book is no longer unpublished; on the contrary, it remains that, and even becomes it more and more It offers in full light of day, in full legibility, the insistent tracing of its intelligibility.
--Jean-Luc Nancy, The Commerce of Thinking,
Tio Be published La séance conti ue (deaht of Freud’s daughter) This is to be continued To leave, lave behind—debt, bequest, gift, mourning, legacy, all ted up with publication. Publication is ot reducible to genetic criticism, which s to say genetic criticismis already aposthumous criticism
Tense of future anterior conditoinal
Top of 293, the last sentence of the long quotation of a preface that is a note:
“Other fragments of the same seminar will appear soon in book form.” 293
Derrida witholds some of the chapter “Telepathy” that he doesn’t publish. Are they in an archive? Did they not make it to the archive? Internal to The Post Card. Speculate on freud is only part of a three eyar seminar. The other two parts are not published. Publish everything and burn everything economy of the “Envois.” will consider a number of challenges to reading The Post . . . after Derrida’s death, challenges I will route first through Derrida’s reading of what Lacan said to Derrida and what Derrida said about Lacan after Lacan’s death in “For the Love of Lacan,” and that I will then route through Derrida’s posthumously published The Beast and the Sovereign 2 in which Derrida talks about posthumous publication . I will not, as in so many colections, such as “Late Derrida” and other works written after Derrida’s death in 2005, take his biological death as my point of departure. Nor even The Last Interview. Juxtapotionof the Post Card, Love Lcan and B And S texts is the occasion to outline proptocols of reading “Jacques Derrida Is Dead,” the title of an essay Derrida might have written about himself, being atitle he gave an essay about Maurice Blanchot is dead (in the seminar and in Pareges,second editon) inrletion to publicaiton and unpublication, survivance. . This is not a matter of philogir of bibliography, as if they could be sidelined from biobilbiontological essence. Norcan it be folded into Autiobiothantoherot etc. successive ediitons with their copyright dates, and so , and posthumous publication not be reducible to the archivable. 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 were 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)
Puncutation as well as paratext
and asks “What is the other—what are others—going to make of me when I am departed, deceased, passed away, gone, absolutely without defense, disarmed, in their hands, i.e., as they say, so to speak, dead?”[12] These challenges may be posted and enumerated as follows in an anticipatory manner, given that what I say now follows from readings of texts to which we have not yet attended, artificially separated for the sake of exposition:
1. The to be read Rereading / returns / repeition What is the difference between footnotes about work “to be published” and work that is posthumously published? Is there a difference? Does it matter that Derrida returns to Le facteur de la verite after Lacan is dead , epsecially if he talk s about returnoing to Freud’s Mysitic Writing Pad” in To Speculate on Frued? ? Does it alter the archive? Derrida speaking on Cixcous giving the BNF her dream notebooks, most of which have not been published. every one of theeir brilliant {geniaux} inventors, is potentially incommernsurable with any library supposed to house htem classify them, shelve them. Bigger and stronger than the libraries that act as if they have the capcity to hold them, if only virtually, they derange all archival and indexing spaces by the disporportion of undeciadable writing for which as yet no complete formalization exists. pp.14-15 great allegorical library, 15
2. On the other hand, I believe that Helene Cixous means to leave all or a part of her dreams, countless noteooks which have served, over decades, to collect her dreams. All or a part but which part? Where will she draw the line? How wil she disguise or censor them? I refer here to the dreams noted upon waking, tens of thousands of pages, some of which wilbe immediately accessible, others much later, others perhaps never or never bequeathed, and with cause the BNF {Bibliotheque Nationale de France, French Naitonal Library} daunting and, I fear or hope, I’m not sure which, oneiorcritical and deontological, technical and ethico-legal. 24
3. Could you tell whether these titles, written earlier and filed away in the archives, make up a single title titles of the same text, titles of the recit (which of course figures as an impractible mode in the book), or the title of a genre? 214-15
4.
5.
6. One might be tempted to take recourse in the law or the rights that govern published texts. One might be tempted to argue as follows; all these insoluble progrlems of delimiation are raised “on the inside” of a book classified as a work of literature or literatry fiction. Persuant to these judicial norms, this book has a beginnign and an end thatleave no opening for indecision. The book has a determinable beginning and an end that leave no room for indecision. This book has a determinable beginning nad end, a title, an author, a publisher, its distinctive denomination is La folie du jour. P. 238
7. The first words .. . that come after the word “recit“ and its question mark. . . mark a collapse that is unthinkable, unrepresentable, unsituable within a linear order of succession, within a spatial or temporal sequenceiality, within an objectifiable topology or chronology. P. 234[i]
I mean a book made, among other things, in order to speak t the BNF
One question card and letter not differntiated , but what about a card and abook?
I will say the same the same things I have deliberately left out of this defense, works such as Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche or la carte postale, which each it its own what, nevertheless extend a reading (of Freud, Nietzsche, and some others) begun at an earlier stage, the deconstruction of a certain hermeneutics as well as the theorization of a the signifier and the letter with its authority and institutional owner . . . to locate their effects where I could spot them—but these effects are everywhere, even where they remain unnoticed. “Punctuations,” in Eyes of the University: Right to philosophy 2 trans Jan Plu & Others Stanford UP, 2004, 124 Although among the works I have included neither the texts I have signed or those that I have prepared as a militant of Greph, nor a fortiori, the collective actions in which I have participated or which I have endorsed I that capacity, I consider them to be inseparable, let us say again—from other public acts—most notably among my other publications. 126
8. Manhaatan is a book about the archive and, in advace, deliberately,reallly and truly, destined fo the BNF, for the truth of the BNF; I mean a book made, among other thins, in order to speak to the BNF about the BNF,to tell of its achievements and its work, aat a time when the author was already aware of the allieance ordained , already underwaybetween the BNF and herlself. Manhatta is a pro- and a post-BNF book Genese Secret of the Archive , 80 it so happens that a recent, and thorough re-reading of Rembrance of Things Past for a recent and unprecedneted seminar course led Helene Cixous to write the following, exerceptedf form a long reverie on the ‘destiny’ into which , she claims, Proust ‘fell.’ Fell [tombe} is her word, it is not just any word.. . . (84)
9. Question of non-difference between card and letter (or dead leter) extended to a quesiton of the card and the book, te post office and the library (Post aoffice seems not to be an archive)
10.
11. The “to be” Published and survivance versus the to come and the future
12. Survivance and The Paratext versus the parergon
13. Survivance and the archive. Here we are dealing hypothetically with a total and remainderless destruction of the archive. This destruction would take place for the first time and it would lack any common proportion with, for example, the burning of a library, even that of Alexandria, which occasioned so many written accounts and nourished so many literatures. The hypothesis of this total destruction watches over deconstruction, it guides its footsteps…deconstruction, at least what is being advanced today in its name, belongs to the nuclear age. And to the age of literature…The only referent that is absolutely real is thus of the scope or dimension of an absolute nuclear catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity, would destroy the “movement of survival,” what I call “survivance,” at the very heart of life.[ii]
14. Surviance, the archive, and media. The post as network.
15. Freud writing on the dead; about instant of my death.
16. Can the archive include letters never sent? Is there always a send off? Is this return any different from the reveannt? The repturn of the rerpressed? Iterability? Even if the rearrival is never gauanteed. Is sending guaranttaneed? Does it have any bearing on the scene of writing and autbiiographics or auto-bio-thanato-hertoro-graphy in “To Speculate on Freud?” Derrida often did not follow bibliographical norms when citing his works or works by other writers. In “To Speculate—On ‘Freud’,” Derrida “Leaving” and “departing, or “de-parting, rather than division, a wake up recalling of the “party” in “departi . . . ng.” “to appear” as in a prediction of a ghost, an appriation, as in the apparition du livre. Top of 293, the last sentence of the long quotation of a preface that is a note: “Other fragments of the same seminar will appear soon in book form.” 293 Note 6. Donner—le temps (To Give—time, in preparation, to appear later. Other essays (to appear) analyze this figure under the heading of “double chiasmatic invagination of the borders.” 391 8. An allusion, in the seminar Life death, to other seminars organized, or three years running, under the title of La Chose (The Thing) (Heidegger / Ponge, Heidegger / Blanchot, Heidegger / Freud), at Yale and in Paris. Perhaps they will give rise to other publications later. 401. Footnote 10, p. 403”10. The problematic of the “Il y a” (Es gibt, There is) was engaged in another seminar (Donner—le temps), fragments of which are to be published. 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. Also the problem of the name, of the proper name, but also naming the problem Freud says and his writing does, the “overlap”? that cannot be named? Spectrality as well of the orgnaic and inorganic—even writing can haunt. ND lalso the relation between the transference, the hedding for al the other trans words, and leaving words in other lanaguages behind, not translating them, or using the German word after it has been trnslated. Bass not trnslated in French words in “Envoovis.” So this a kind of unsettled debt? Is it a work of morning passed on to the reader, a resistnace to a transfernce,a posting of the transference or a tranaseference of fhte postal effect? See AppendiX question of annexation in the posst Card, the Anschluss (also in restitutions. Transference can fail; but what about trnanslation; why is metaphor—also translation suordinate ot he unity , hteetowrof thetransferece?
4. Seven: Postscript
INSOLVENCY—POST EFFECT
Letter never sent. The archival effect in The Post Card mentioned once. “will become archival” 342
17. Cite my New Formations essay.v
18. Taking into account the death, in the ordinary sense of the word as the opposite of life, of the person of whom the living speak while at the same time taking into account the way that any such saying is neither dead nor alive, and all the while taking into account that this distinction is fair from rigorous given that one cannot always tell when the dead are dead, even when, or especially when, a death certificate has been issued by the proper medical and legal authorities.[13]
19.
20. Last Words / Frist Words Taking into account that we are not talking about the speech of the dead (or of the living, for that matter, of speech as living presence) but their saying, their having a say in what is still being said, of the justice of what is being said about them dead in their absence, however complicated the meaning of the word “absence” may be. “No dead person has ever said their last word,” Helene Cixous writes. Ia that damnation, never to stop talking? Or is it the possibility of justice, or a plea? Or as Maurice Blanchot, writes in "The Last Word," , "The strange nature of posthumous publications is to be inexhaustible." [14]Maurice Blanchot, writes in "The Last Word," , "The strange nature of posthumous publications is to be inexhaustible." [15] A gift or a curse that publication is infinite? The frequent retentions references to his audience, to his giving a lecture, the mementos of a performative rhetoric that records its occasion and date, the recourse to the verb “to say” rather than “to write.”.
21. Taking into account that the lack of rigor in any distinction between what the living and what the dead say nevertheless retaining that distinction to ask questions such as How do the dead say? How do they keep on saying? What kind of say in what is being said do the dead have? And if the living say, in print, from a place that is neither life nor death, how does what the living say differ from what the dead say? Did the dead or do the living ever say anything?
22. Asking why the tense of saying something about the dead--future anterior, future anterior in the conditional, past perfect--so crucial to Derrida?
23. Asking why the question of what the dead say, the personal, dare as I say it, the personal question of Derrida saying or not saying that he and Lacan loved each other very much, become very quickly subsumed by Derrida under the more general problem of the archive and hence its radical destruction?
24. Asking how these questions become a question of the protection of the dead, of the proper name and the title of a saying (as said in print), and a question of their effacement and erasure.
25. Asking how the question of reading the published and yet to be published or will have been published by the dead becomes a question of the paratext, the name and the title being what was for Gérard Genette the most fundamental of paratexts,[16] and a question the managing of the paratext and text to archive both references the name and title and what has already read or said and hence does not have to be repeated. Is the relation of the text and paratext, the postscript, the description of Freud’s last chapter as a postscript, a matter not only of losen, or solving, a word linked up to the drive of the drive, the binding and the stricture or lacing, but of the lassen, the Nachlass at the end, the left, abandoned, deserted, deprivation of the reader in face of is it exhaustion or just a change of mind—how to read “I no longer wish to translate? [Cite Derrida on annexation to Speculate on Freud. Relation between footnotes, which JD reads carefully in To Speculate, and text, a relation of losen, of structure of lacing, or of lassen, “to leave”. Also Erlaubnis, to takea leave of oabsence, or Urlaub, to leave on vacation—the references to holiday and vacation. Cite Freud on hiday.
26. Asking why questions of the dead saying, the archive, the proper name, paratexts, and so on, become for Derrida in a return to The Post Card in “For the Love of Lacan,” a quasi-methodological question of deconstruction and psychoanalysis, of psychoanalysis being philosophical?
27. Is there a posthumous principle or posthumous structure that differs from the postal principle or postal structure? Or would any notion of the posthumous be subsumed by the posterous and the postal?
All of these questions turn on the assumptions that there is such a thing as reading and that we know what reading is. A reading may be bad, it may be strong, it may be a misreading, it may be a reading that resists reading, it may be a reading that didn’t bother to read and hence an irresponsible reading, but a reading is still irreducibly a reading. Similarly, there is reading and rereading, reading that may take years, that may be infinite. Derrida turns this assumption on its head, I shall maintain, in “Love Lacan” by introducing a single letter, the letter “X,” to stand for a proper name. Derrida’s “last point” (69) in “Love Lacan” 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. Simiarly, names, titles, and other titles ordinarily don’t get read beause they an iconic rather than indexical value. In the glosses to follow, however, I will be doing something out of the ordinary, something that is quite secondary to what usually gets talked about in academic discourse, even in discourse about deconstruciton. Among many textual, paratextual, bibliographical, and typographical features, including typos, in Derrida’s texts in and around The Post Card, 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.
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.” In the headnote and again in the third endnote, Derrida refers his reader to the “Annexes” [appendices] of Lacan avec les philosophes, in which “Love Lacan” first appeared, even as Derrida X-s out, as it were, his own paratextual contribution to thse Annexes, a post-script entitled “Après Tout: Les Chance du College” in which Derrida discusses the erasure of his name from the original colloquium title, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?,” and its replacement with the colloquium and book’s title Lacan avec les philosophes.
I will unfold and these quasi- cruxes by glossing them, which is perhaps not the same thing as reading them. I do not consider the distinction between glossing and reading to be rigorous both because I think glossing, although secondary to reading, is not limited to the ways glosing may serve reading, and because I am not sure when reading becomes ronreading. Just as the limits f he Post Car are not conifned ot the words published in the bound book under that tile, so oo there are not limits of the indivisible “Derrideme,” as it were the smallest unit of deconstruction semantic or synatic in structure or the proper name and the siganture. “Those who remain will not know how to read,” Derrida writes in The Post Card.[17] Will they know how to gloss either?
Just Saying
What 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.”[18] 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.[19]
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?[20] 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?[21]
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 personally 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.[22]
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).”[23] 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.”[24] 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,” written, as I have said, after Lacan was dead, 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?[25]
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 . . . .[26]
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!”[27]
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!”[28] 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.”[29]
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! [30]
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 Écrits 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.[31]
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”).[32] 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 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. 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![33]
As we shall see, Derrida similar situates his comment about what he will not have said in relation to the “problem of the archive.”[34]
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.[35]
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.”[36] 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.[37] 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.”[38] 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.”[39] “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.”[40]
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?”[41] 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.[42] 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.[43] 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.[44] Derrida uses the word “anarchivic” in Archive Fever to mean “the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence”.[45] 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.”[46] 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.[47] 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.”[48] 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.”[49] 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 Écrits 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.”[50] Derrida then permits himself to cite what he said before launching into a full-scale assault on François 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 Écrits [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.[51]
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.”[52]
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 Écrits 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).[53] 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.[54]
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.”[55] 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.[56]
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.”[57]
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.”[58] 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 . . .”[59]
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.”[60] 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.”[61]
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.”[62] 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).[63] 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 Écrits, 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 Écrits, 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’.”[64]
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 Écrits 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 Écrits] despite its diachrony. In other words, Écrits 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 Écrits.[65]
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!”[66]
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.”[67] 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).[68] 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.”[69] 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).[70] 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 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.[71]
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.[72]
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.”[73] 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”[74]
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.”[75] 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.”[76] To have allowed the colloquium title to include Derrida’s name or any name, Badiou adds, would have been to betrayal [trahison] of Lacan.[77]
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.”[78] 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.”[79] (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).[80] 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.”[81] 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?[82] 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 1994[83]
When 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. [84] 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.[85] 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 Écrits, in other words, in 1966.”[86] Can deconstruction write off psychoanalysis, as Derrida does in “Love Lacan” (1991), a text written and published three years before Archive Fever (1994) but published again in Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996) of two years after Archive Fever?[87] Can deconstruction transform the logic of psychoanalysis, as Derrida says 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 can only make these questions more forceful 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.[88] Glossing only renders, and hence rends any distinction between glossing and reading.
Here we also return to the questions I asked at the outset about whether there a posthumous principle or posthumous structure that differs from the postal principle or postal structure, whether the posthumous be subsumed by the posterous 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.[89] 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 . . . [90]
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 “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 [Étienne] Périer, Pascal’s nephew. At the top was a cross, surrounded by a ray of light.[91]
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.[92]
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).”[93] 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.[94]
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.[95] 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.”[96]
Les Dernier Mots and Other “Lacanuae”
Jacques Derrida is dead. Is he gone? Or has he just come back? Would his distinction between posthumous writing in general and strictly posthumous Generations of readings to come—repetition would that come out differently if Derrida had read this note not only in relation to the phantasm but remembering what he said earleier 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?[97] Did Derrida forget psychoanalysis?[98] Did he ever forget it? Did ever forget Freud or Lacan?[99] Who can say? If we say that all readings of Derrida after his death will about 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.[100] 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 meaning 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?
In isolating this 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.”[101]
REnd Notes
“41. In the session, Derrida added nothing here.” Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 277.
[pic]
“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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Screen captures from Alain Resnais’s documentary film Toute la memoire du monde (1956), on the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
Richard Burt
AppendiX (anneX)
“la séance continue”:
Derrida’s Quotation from Nietzsche Translated into English
In The Post Card, Derrida ends the chapter “Speculations on ‘Freud’” in a strikingly curious way at the end of a postscript. Without giving any explanation, he says he no longer wishes to translate a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Nachlass. He then cites the passage in German. Alan Bass does not translate the German word “Nachlass,” nor does he translate the sentence in German by Nietzsche. Nachlass literally means “left behind,” and Derrida refers to Nietzsche’s notebooks housed in the Nietzsche archive that were only published posthumously.[102] Derrida does not give a full bibliographical reference to the citation from Nietzsche, just the title: “All this to be read in the Nachlass of the 80s, surrounding this sentence which I no longer wish to translate” At the end of the quotation, Derridae adds “To is to be continued.” [103]
Although I cannot provide the bibliographical information, here is the passage in German, taken from the English translation by Alan Bass, followed by its translation into English:
All this to be read in the Nachlass of the 80s, surrounding this sentence which I no longer wish to translate: “ . . . 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. 408-09.
Here is the passage translated into English:
A passage that I no longer wish to translate: “ . . . 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 . . . This is to be continued.
This passage might be glossed in relation to translation, archival remainders, titles, references, desire, media, and posthumous publication.
I thank Peter Krapp for his help translating this passage.
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[1] I shorten the title of Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond , trans Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) to Post . . . to mark Derrida’s practice of using “faux-tires,” of “half titles” in The Post Card. Peggy Kamuf has a footnote on "faux-titres" in Derrida’s Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 198) 94 n. 16: “In typography, a ‘faux-titre’ is a half title or bastard title. (Trans.)” Transliterated into English, “faux-titre” means “false title.” In The Post Card, Derrida repeatedly uses “faux-titres,” notably referring to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as “Beyond . . . .” Derrida also ccsionally shortens the title of the third chapter of The Post Card to its first word: “They intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme” (222). Derrida similarly refers and to his own chapter “Speculations on ‘Freud’” as “doubtless the book will be called Legs de Freud,” 52. When left untranslated in the English translation, the French word Legs [legacies] becomes a half-title within the title “Legacies of ‘Freud.’” “Freud’s Legacy,” the title mentioned in “Envois,” is the title of section 2, and this section begins 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 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” (292). In the next paragraph, Derrida writes: “This chapter was originally published in the number of Études freudiennes devoted to Nicholas Abraham. I had then prefaced it with this note. 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). For similar examples, “I’m rereading my Legacy, what a tangle,” 248; “I am trying anew to work on my legacy and on this accursed preface” (158) in which the nearly three page long “Envois” are recategorized as a preface, which he later calls a “kind of false preface” (179). Like the “fake lectures” he describes Freud as having written in “Telepathy.”
[2] Derrida returns here to an earlier text: “When I wrote one day, in ‘Circumfession,’ if I remember correctly, ‘I posthume as I breathe,’ that’s pretty much what I wanted to have felt, that’s pretty much what I wanted t have felt, rather than thought, or even speculated, or it’s pretty much what I wanted to have myself pre-sense. . . . “ Beast and Sovereign, 2, 173.
[3] Derrida is commenting on Heidegger’s use of the word “umgekehrt,” the past participle of the infinitive umkerhren, to turn things around,). Beast and S, 2 (194).
[4] See Derrida’s essay about his thesis too, quickly, I think reduces effects to those that are not noticed and those that haven’t yet been but are waiting to be noticed: “I will say the same the same things I have deliberately left out of this defense, works such as Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche or la carte postale, which each it its own what, nevertheless extend a reading (of Freud, Nietzsche, and some others) begun at an earlier stage, the deconstruction of a certain hermeneutics as well as the theorization of a the signifier and the letter with its authority and institutional power . . . to locate their effects where I could spot them—but these effects are everywhere, even where they remain unnoticed.” “Punctuations,” in Eyes of the University: Right to philosophy 2 trans Jan Plu & Others Stanford UP, 2004, 124. Derrida’s remarks install a way of shelving reading under the heading of his autobiography, or, in this essay, apologia pro sua vita.
[5] Cinders, 57
[6] On Maurice Blanchot, see note above. Paul de Man’s “last word after the last word” are cited in Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink (2): (within such limits),” in which one will also finds Derida’s first words before the first formulation. “never so young and never so old” in “Punctuations,” On reading to the end, see the Post-Script to Demeures.
[7] For an example of Derrida’s attention to tiny omissions, in this case a few words from a quotation that Paul de Man elides, see Derrida’s “Typewriter Ribbon Ink (2); and for a change in the table of contents to the title of Maurice Blanchot’s Death Sentence,” a change so small most readers would not think it worthy of notice if they did note it but that Derrida feels is so significant that it bears the pages of the journal in which the first version appeared are reproduced in two full page facsimiles, see “Survivre ( Living On)” in Parages. Derrida rather humorously does and does not rush the reader of “Restitutions” at two points, both I watch I quote in full:
And Shapiro [Meyer] quotes these two paragraphs which you all find so ridiculous or so imprudent. Let’s reread them first, in German, in French, and in English.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
--It’s done. (294)
Se these direction Derrida gives the reader 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). On reading as opposed to leaping, see this elegant and inspired passage from The Beast and the Sovereign, 2: Having recalled this, and having taken this precaution as a matter of principle, I am not doing what one ought to do and cannot do it with you in a seminar. I cannot do all that again with you here for at least two reasons, as I was saying. The one has to do with the obvious lack of time: it would take us years. The other, less obvious, is that I also believe in the necessity, sometimes, in a seminar the work of which is not simply reading, in the necessity, and even the fecundity, when I’m optimistic and confident, of a certain number of leaps, certain new perspectives from a turn in the text, from a stretch of path that gives you another view of the whole, like, for example, when you’re driving a car on a mountain road, a hairpin or a turn, an abrupt and precipitous elevation suddenly gives you in an instant a new perspective on the whole, or a large part of the itinerary or of what orients, designs, or destines it. And here there intervene not only each person’s reading-idioms, with their history, their way of driving (it goes without saying that each of my choices and my perspectives depends broadly here, as I will never try to hide, on my history, my previous work, my way of driving, driving on this read, on my drives, desires and phantasms, even if I always try to make them both intelligible, shareable, convincing and open to discussion) [here there intervene, not only each person’s reading-idioms, with their history, their way of driving] in the mountains or on the flat, on dirt roads or on highways, following this or that map, this or that route, but also the crossing, the decision already taken and imposed by you by fiat as soon as it was proposed to you, to read a given seminar by Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe, i.e., two discourses also on the way and on the path which can multiply perspectives from which two vehicles can light up, their headlights crossing, the overall cartography and the landscape in which we are traveling and driving together, driving on all these paths interlaced, intercut, overloaded with bridges, fords, no entries or one-way streets, etc.
[8] Derrida plays out this paradox as a double bind of publishing and not publishing in the following passage: “You were right nearby, you were 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.”
[9] Had I a higher word count, I would discussed the ways letters are used as evidence (a little too evident) both in Derrida’s “Facteur” and in Derrida’s Demeure: Fiction and Testimony; the “faux-pas” in “Pas” in Parages in relation to justice, error; the facsimile in The Purloined Letter and what Lacan called the “faux-filosopher”: “(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 fuzzyosophy, without adding any more does or I’s.) 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. After first engaging The Post Card through a detour into “For the Love of Lacan” and its “Annexes,” I will engage Derrida’s larger question about “whether or not there is some psychoanalysis—X-ian, his, yours, mine” at the end of this essay in relation to the archive and publication, by juxtaposing two texts by Lacan with one by Derrida: Lacan’s self-described “posteffacing” “Postface” to The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (this postface is not included in Alan Sheridan’s English translation) in which Lacan remarks on the survival of his unreadable sayings that are not writings but his “poublelication”s [punning on the French word “poublie,” meaning “trash can”] and a passage in Encore Seminar XX about how Lacan loved to be read; and, a passage in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2, in which Derrida discusses what calls the “survivance” (left in French in Geoff Bennington’s translation) of a “strictly posthumous” (209) publication, a note by Blaise Pascal sewn into Pascal’s shirt that was discovered by his servant soon after his death.
[10] Ibid, 52.
[11] The Beast and the Sovereign 2 trans, Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2011), 127. Derrida asks the same question less directly on p. 126. What we do we do with Derrida now that he is dead? Does Derrda’s death change the way we read him? That may seem like a naïve question, given Derrida’s work on autobiography and “autobiographics” in The Post Card and elsewhere as well as his work on hauntology, life and death, and so on? Yet Derrida wrote essays and books on the occasion of the death of friends many times and revisted their works as in Resistance to Pyschoanalysis, Work of Mourning, Memoires of Paul De Man, among others.
[12] The Beast and the Sovereign 2 trans, Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2011), 127. Derrida asks the same question less directly on p. 126.
[13] See Derrida’s comment, for example, on his own response: “The response echoes, always, like a response that can be identified neither as a living present nor as the pure and simply absence of someone dead,” in “Marx and Sons,” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 213. On the death certificate, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International trans Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 48.
[14] Friendship (1997). See "Putting Your Papers in Order: The Matter of Kierkegaard's Writing Desk, Goethe's Files, and Derrida's Paper Machine, or the Philology and Philosophy of Publishing After Death" Rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010).
[15] Friendship (1997). See "Putting Your Papers in Order: The Matter of Kierkegaard's Writing Desk, Goethe's Files, and Derrida's Paper Machine, or the Philology and Philosophy of Publishing After Death" Rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010).
[16] Gérard Genette, Paratexts. Trans, Jane Lewin (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1997).
[17] The Post Card, 249.
[18] “For the Love of Lacan,” in Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 39-69; to 50-51. I will hereafter frequently shorten the title to “Love Lacan.”
[19] Ibid, 52.
[20] On the two editions of Parages, 1986 and 2003, see footnote 2 above. A number of essays Derrida wrote on the occasion of the death of a friend were gathered together in an book, first published in English as The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). On the many paratextual oddities of The Work of Mourning, see Richard Burt, "Putting Your Papers in Order: The Matter of Kierkegaard’s Writing Desk, Goethe’s Files, and Derrida’s Paper Machine, or the Philology and Philosophy of Publishing After Death," Rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010).
[21] Although gloss is a shimmer or shine in Germanic languages, a more likely source historically for the word in the sense of "elaborate, define." “Glossa” means "tongue" in Greek, and then passes to Latin and Romance languages to mean, initially, a hard word and then the explanation one puts in the margin to elucidate it. It enters English first as "gloze" then changes to gloss mid 16th century (see the OED, s.v. gloss). This sense is no doubt primary--although phrases like "gloss over" probably fudge the difference. Fortuitously, I think this brings us to the distances between glossing and reading. I thank Jacob Riley and William West for drawing my attention to the etymology of gloss.
[22] Op cit, 151.
[23] Op cit, 68.
[24] Ibid, 68. “Verbier” is translated in English as “magic word.” Aubier-Flammirion is the name of the press that published Abraham and Torok’s Cryptonymie. Lacan refers here to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s Cryptonymie: Le verbier de L’Homme aux translated as The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans Nicholas Rand, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
[25] See Derrida’s aside: “(look at the tape recorders that are in this room),” op cit, 40.
[26] Ibid., 39.
[27] Ibid., 62.
[28] Ibid., 39; 69.
[29] Ibid, 58.
[30] Ibid, 62.
[31] Other stylistic repetitions are equally deliberate. In The Post Card, one finds similar stylistic repetitions such as “To be continued (la séance continue)”; 36; 190, 320, 337, 362, 376, 409, 451. [add other examples to speculate on Freud] Derrida also uses nearly the same word to describe his reading practice in The Post Card and “Love Lacan.” For one example, see “extremely careful and slow, bringing micrological refinement “Love Lacan” (op cit, 44); and “microscopic examination” (ibid., 45). Derrida uses frequently uses “I have said” and variations on the phrase customarilty to be found in academic prose, none of which are necessarily mean anything but all of which nevertheless carry a charge, however small, given the repetitions of phrases about what Lacan and Derrida “said.” These repetitions are beyond the limits of my capacity to gloss. Derrida sometimes reduces the problem of distinguishing between glossing and reading or between reading and not reading to effects that he has noticed and those that haven’t yet been noticed but are waiting to be noticed. See, for example, “I will say the same the same things I have deliberately left out of this defense, works such as Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche or la carte postale, which each it its own what, nevertheless extend a reading (of Freud, Nietzsche, and some others) begun at an earlier stage, the deconstruction of a certain hermeneutics as well as the theorization of a the signifier and the letter with its authority and institutional power . . . to locate their effects where I could spot them—but these effects are everywhere, even where they remain unnoticed.” “Punctuations,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plu & Others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 124. Derrida’s distinction effectively shelves his readings under the heading of his autobiography, or, in this essay, under the heading of an apologia pro sua vita.
[32] 62, 66.
[33] The same sorts of things happens to Derrida’s published seminars. See Richard Burt, “Putting Your Papers in Order,” op cit.
[34] Ibid., 43.
[35] In “Love Lacan,” Derrida never actually directly “says” anything about his relationship with Lacan—first he says he “is not sure if” he “will say” that he and Lacan loved each other very much, then he asks if he has not said that they did: “Now, wasn't this a way of saying that I loved and admired him greatly?” Is Derrida saying that he and Lacan did love each other very much without saying so or saying and not saying they did? If so, is Derrida’s manner of not saying just given that Lacan is dead? What is the relation between justice and saying or not saying in Derrida’s lines? (See Derrida’s note on“the undeconstructible injunction of justice” in Specters of Marx, op cit 267, n73.)
[36] On the first page of “Love Lacan,” Derrida immediately places his introductory exclamations about Lacan’s saying under the heading of the archive: “To deal with this enigma of the future anterior and the conditional . . . is to deal with the problem of archivization” op. cit, 39-40.
[37] You might read these envois as the preface of a book that I have not written” (ibid., 3); “Beyond all else I wanted, . . to make a book” (ibid., 5).
[38] Ibid., 387.
[39] Ibid, 3.
[40] “Title to Be Specified,” in Parages, ed. John Leavey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011) 193-215; to; 386. For an even more curious case, see translator Thomas Dutoit’s note to Derrida’s On the Name : “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.” “Translating the Name?” in On the Name, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), ix.
[41] Ibid; 198-99; Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986, 219-47; to 227. A ssecond edtion includes Blanchot’s name in the title of the last chapter, “Maurice Blanchot est mort,” Parages, revised and augmented edition, Paris: Galilée, 2003, 267-300. This chapter is nto incuded in Leavey’s translation, ibid.
[42] In a note, 103, Derrida gives the original title and subtitle of this chapter, first published in English, as “LIVING ON. Border Lines” but does not explain why he dropped the subtitle. See Parages, 1986, 118. In Parages, 2001, the typography appears as “Living On / Border Lines,” 102. In Deconstruction and Criticism, the typography is as follows; “Living On . Borderlines.” (the dot is the middle of the space between “On” and “Border”; it is not a period). The subtitle is dropped from the first page of the essay but then appears as LIVING ON: Border Lines” on 75; 76. In the second edition, the subtitle has been removed from the table of contents and the first page of the essay, 9; 62; 63. If anyone thinks that this kind of micro-philological attention is de facto a waste of time, let him or her consult Derrida’s reading of the differences between the titles in the reverse order of Blanchot’s name and the title “un reçit” in two versions of Blanchot’s Folie due jour [Madness of the Day] in Parages, ibid, 113-123. To be sure, Derrida never paid that kind of attnetion to differences in translations and editions.
[43] Here are the passages, first in French, and then, the relevant part, in English:
Atopie, hypertopie, lieu sans lieu, cette voix narrative en appellee dans le texte du sans qui vient si fréquemment, dans le texte de Blanchot, neutraliser (sans poser, sans nier) un mot, un concept, un terme (X sans X). Sans sans privation ni negativité ni manqué (sans sans “sans”) don’t j’ai tenté d’analyser a nécessité dans Le “sans” de la coupure pure et dans Pas. . . . “Lieu sans lieu”, nous l’avons lu, et voici maintenant “à distance sans distance” . . . .
“Survivre,” Parages, ibid, 151
A word, a concept, a term (x-less x): without (or “-less”), without privation or negativity or lack (“without” without without, less-less “-less”)l the necessity of which I have tried to analyze in “The Sans of the Pure Cut” and “Pace Not(s).”
“Living On,” Parages, ibid, 103-215; to 132-33. Derrida references Parages in relation to the phrase In this graphics desire is without “without,” is a without without without” in “To Speculate on Freud”: “9. A Cf. Pas and Le Paeregon in La Veritie en peinture. [The phrase here is “un sans snas sans.]” See note 9, p. .
[44] On Derrida’s interest in the archive and the shift from print to electronic media, see Richard Burt, "Life Supports: 'Paperless' People, the New Media Archive, and the Hold of Reading," in New Formations special issue on "Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net," eds. Nicholas Toburn and Says May. Forthcoming, 2013.
[45] Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans, Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998), 7.
[46] Ibid., 10; 11.
[47] For the catalogue, I refer the reader to note 13.
[48] “Love Lacan,” op cit, 68.
[49] My neologism is designed to give the Freudian lapsus, or parapraxis, a Derridean inflection by punning on Derrida’s interest in the parergon, the frame, and the border. I mean to suggest as well that the limits of a “Derridean” reading, Derrida’s name turned into an adjective are also broached.
[50] Ibid, 513. In Lacan’s Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, ed and trans, Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007) Fink leaves the error Lacan made at the end of “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” in mistaking “dessein” for “destin” when citing Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter.
[51] Ibid, 513.
[52] Ibid, 519.
[53] Ibid., 518; 202.
[54] Ibid., 518.
[55] Ibid., 518.
[56] Ibid., 518-19.
[57] Op cit, 68.
[58] Ibid., 68.
[59] Ibid., 68-69.
[60] Op cit., 202-04.
[61] Ibid., 512; 513; nd 515.
[62] Op cit, 52.
[63] The title of the text to which Derrida refers is not properly capitalized here. The text is Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivack (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974; second, corrected edition, 1997.
[64] Ibid, 52.
[65] (52);
[66] (69).
[67] (67),
[68] Derrida also states “It goes wihtout saying that my reading [in Facteur] concerned explicitly . . the question of Lacan’s name, the problems of legacy, of science and institution, and the aporias of archivization in whichthat name is involved. (LL, 41)
[69] For another crux I won’t gloss, see Derrida’s comments in Love Lcan on “we” and “I” in relation to “who will ever have has the right to say: “’we love each other’?” (43); to the death of the one of whom one speaks; and to “what is getting archived!” (43). This instance concerns Derrida’s uses of “I” and “we” in the body of the text and in the third endnote of the book, Resistances of Psychoanalysis. All three headnotes are uniformly 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.”
[70] “Love Lacan,” 47 and 121n3. The repetition of the word “play” is not as exact in the French versions as it is the English translation, and it is possible that Derrida deliberately chose not repeat the same words exactly. In “Pour l’amour de Lacan,” Derrida uses two different verbs rather than one, “je fasse le mort” (Lacan avec les philosophes, 403; Resistances, 65) and “en jouant du mort” (Lacan avec les philosophes 406; Resistances, 69). I by no means fault the translator of the English edition for translating these two different French verbs as “play” rather than, for example, as “act” dead and “play” dead. The crux is as much about Derrida’s variation in word choice as it is the translator’s repetition of the same word.
[71] 47.
[72] Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 213–69; to 265.n. 29. On the “x without x” formulation itself, see also Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. The Instant of My Death and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 88–9) and “Living On,” op cit, 132-33. See “Marx & Sons,” for “messianicity without messianism” see Derrida (ibid: 265, n.29 and 267, n.69. For Derrida’s variations on the “x without x” formulation, see “Marx & Sons,” in bid, wherein Derrida explains the meaning of his formulation “messianicity without messianism” see Derrida (op cit, 265, n.29 and 267, n.69, where the translator supplies a helpful commentary on Derrida’s phrases “death without death” and “relation without relations(s)”). On “community without community” see Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.: 37, 42, 46–7, n.15; 1999: 250–2); see also Derrida’s discussion of “materiality without matter” in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits’),” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory eds, Tom Cohen et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 277–360.
[73] Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris, Albin Michel, 1991), 421-52.
[74] “Love Lacan,” op cit, 47-48. In relation to Derrida’s use of “X-ian” in “Love Lacan,”see the indecipherable (coded?) letters or words “EGEK HUM RSXVI STR, if I am not mistaken” (150) and “P.R.” as “Poste Restante” (50) in The Post Card.
[75] In “Après Tout: Les Chance du College,” op cit., Derrida repeats almost exactly what he said at two different points in “Love Lacan: “Therefore to save time I will not add anything more for the moment—because I find all this increasingly tedious and because, let’s say, ‘I know only too well’” (op cit, 47) and “all the texts, which, are, after all, available and in principle legible by whoever wants to look at them” (ibid., 41).” Compare the following passages, from Après Tout, which I leave you to translate, should you wish to do: “Par souci d’économie, je n’ajouterai donc pas grand-chose. D’une part les documents d’un dossier (une bonne partie de cette “archive” à laquelle je fais allusion dans mon exposé) sont disponibles, et je l’èspere facilement lisibles. A chacun de les interpréter” (ibid, 443). Derrida then adds that he could only repeat what he already said: “D’autre part, je ne pourais ici que répéter ce j’ai dit lors de cette réunion, a savoir, pour schémetiser,” ibid, 443. On the archive, Derrida says: “C’est aussi a ces principes et a ces règles que je me référais dans mons intervention au colloque en évoquant l’objectivité têtue de certains faits gestes maintenant archivés et que je préfère voir livrés a l’inteprétation de chacun.,”ibid, 446. And on the publication of the title, Derrida comments: “A ce silence, le fait est officelement consigné, René Major ne s’était jamais engage, et je l’en approuve. ) et quand, après que René Major eut bien faits de rompre et silence en publie et qu’il eut parlé, comme je l’ai fait aussie, de ce que tout le monde n’vait d’ailleurs pas manqué de remarquer (le changement de titre entre de deux announces publiques) et de ce don’t tous les participants avaient le droit de connaitre. Alain Badiou et quelques autres s’en sont plaints, encore une fois non pas de séance publique mais, autre épreuve de force, en menaçent l’existence des Actes du Colloque et tentant alors de mettre comme condition à la publication de leurs exposés un deuxieme effet de censure, l’effacement ou le retrait de ce qui avait été effectivement et publiquement pronouncé. De qui pouvait-on serieusement espérer une telle soumission?” ibid, 446. Badiou returned to this “affair” after Derrida died in a failed effort to turn Derrida into Gilles Deleuze. See Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, (Being and Event 2) trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum; 2009), 545-546.
[76] Ibid, 440.
[77] Ibid, 440.
[78] Op cit, 48.
[79] Ibid, 48.
[80] Ibid, 48.
[81] Op cit, 45; 55.
[82] In “Love Lacan,” why does Derrida proceed to locate the problem of the archive, its paradoxes,” in psychoanalysis, say that “keen attention is required with what may be problematic in psychoanalytic discourse—for example, Lcan’s—as concerns precisely, archivization, the economy of repression as guard, inscription, effacement, the indestructibility of the letter or the name” (“Love Lacan,” op cit, 44)?
[83] Archive Fever Postscript,” op cit, 101. We may add in passing that what Freud burned of his archive is itself uncertain. See the the introduction to Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G Jung, xix.
[84] Post Card, op cit, 41. See also “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. And see, among others, the passages relating reading and fire on pp. 23; 40; 58; 171; 176; 180; 233; and 225.
[85] The words in quotation marks are all take from Derida’s description of which Lacan he read “Facteur” in “Love Lacan,” op cit, 48-49; 53.
[86] Ibid, 48-49.
[87] These are the French publication dates.
[88] See this passage: “The logic of the phantasm, as we are concerned with it here (be it about living death, the ghost or the revenant, about cremation or the posthumous), [this logic of the phantasm] is not strictly speaking a logic, it resists the logos, the legein of the logos, somewhat in the same way as the eschato-logical is both the thing of the logos and which exceeds and comes after the logos, the logic of the logos, the extremity of the last, of the last word of the last man, the extremity of the last extremity situated both in speech, in logos as the last word, still and already out of speech, falling out of it into the posthumous that is already breathing, precisely, the logic of the phantasm resists, defies and dislocates logos and logic . . . There is therefore no logic of the phantasm, strictly speaking, since as Freud reminds us, the phantasm, just as much as the drive, is to be found on both sides of the limit between two opposing concepts. . . . There is therefore no logic or logos of the phantasm of the ghost or the spectral. Unless the logos itself be precisely the phantasm, the very element, the origin and the resource of the phantasm itself, the form and the formation of the phantasm, or even of the revenant.” (Beast and Sovereign, 2, op cit., )
[89] In the Ninth Session of the The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, Derrida observes that “all writings are posthumous” before proceeding to narrow the definition of posthumous writing to Pascal’s note. Posthumous publication in general bears comparsson to Derrida saying “I posthume when I breathe,” in that all life is an expenditure without return: “When I wrote one day, in ‘Circumfession,’ if I remember correctly, ‘I posthume as I breathe,’ that’s pretty much what I wanted to have felt, that’s pretty much what I wanted to have felt, rather than thought, or even speculated, or it’s pretty much what I wanted to have myself pre-sense. . . . “ Beast and Sovereign, 2, 173. Derrida adds that “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,” The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, op cit, 173-174.
[90] Ibid, 209.
[91] The Beast and Sovereign, Vol. 2, op cit, 212.
[92] On Derrida’s account of a material archival support related to Pascal’s doublet, namely, the wallet, see Richard Burt, "Life Supports,” op cit.
[93] Derrida alludes here to his earlier discussion of Blanchot’s quotation from Paul Celan’s poem Strette, the first word of which, Derrida notes at the end of a sentence linking cremation to Nazi concentration camps and to Blanchot, is “ASCHENGLORIE [ASHGLORY]” (capital letters in the original): “as for cremation, and the ashes that from now on, in modern and uneffaceable history of humanity, the crematoria of the camps, let us forget nothing,” Beast and Sovereign 2, op cit, 179.
[94] See, for example, tehse clauses from The Post Card: ““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 . . .” (op cit, 40) and “a holocaust without fire or flame” (op cit, 71). See also Derrida’s comment on Paul Celan’s poem “Einem, der vor der Tuer stand,” a poem also has difficulty reading: “Let us read this poem . . . I cannot claim I can read or decipher this poem,” Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Forham University Press, 2005), 56; 58. I should add that Derrida never ceases to use “holocaust” even when referring to the Holocaust: “Forgive me if I do not name, here, the holocaust, that is to say, literally, as I chose to call it elsewhere, the all-burning. Except to say this . . . every hour counts its holocaust” (ibid, 46). If one wished to read Derrida’s work on the archive in relation to psychoanalysis as a question Derrida engages in Archive Fever, namely, “Is psychonalysis a Jewish science?” and move from there to a reading of Badiou’s erasure of Derrida’s name from the colloquium title as an anti-semitic act, as Derrida obliquely suggests it was in referring to “the sinister political memory of the history that, in France . . . , has been written” (“Love Lacan,” 47), in order to raise a similar question about deconstruction and Judaism in relation to psychoanlaysis would have to take into account Derrida’s “forgetting” of circumcission in The Post Card, ibid, 222 and in Archive Fever, ibid, 12 and his replacing it, more overtly than he merely recirculates the word phantasm, with a word he coined, namely, “circumfession,” and that he first used as the title of a para-autobiographical book he wrote. See “A Testimony Given” in Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elizabeth Weber, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 39-58 and “Abraham, the Other, in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. and trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Forham University Press, 2007), 1-55.
[95] Derrida never wants a last word: “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” (Post Card, op cit, 150). Derrida’s use of the verb “reconstitute” in in The Post Card (ibid, 226) and in “Love Lacan” (see note 47)raises a question about reading. How does the reconstitution of a reading or a dossier bear on the question of restitution Derrida raises in “Restitutions of the truth in pointing [pointure]” in The Truth of Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 355-82. Can reconstitution only fail to be done justly, something one has to excuse oneself from not having done or that when done, will require one to defend onself from the accusation that it has been done unjustly?
[96] The Beast and the Soverign 2, op cit, 211.
[97] Op cit, 147-58.
[98] Memoirs of the Blind is a somewhat paradoxical case of Derrida’s never yet ever goodbye to psychoanalysis. Derrida offers a para-Freudian reading of blindness, mistakes, castation, and conversion that logs into Derrida’s own previous readings of Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” while never mentioning Lacan even as Derrida uses some of Lacan’s terms. I thank John Michael Archer for pointing this out to me in converation.
[99] See Jacques Derrida, “Let us not Forget—Psychoanalysis,” Oxford Literary Review Special Issue on “Psychoanalysis and Literature” Volume 12, July 1990, 3-8.
[100] As Maurice Blanchot remarks, that “the strange nature of posthumous publications is to be inexhaustible.” See "The Last Word," in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford UP), 252-92. In relation to the lack of rigor in Derrida’s distinction between strictly and general posthumous publiaction, one could reread Derrida’s reading of Maurice Blancot’s The Instant of My Death in Demeures: Fiction and Testimony, especially Derida’s reading of Blanchot’s sentence “I am dead” and of Blanchot’s dating his death from the time he was granted a reprieve just before he was to be executed in a letter he wrote Derrida from which Derrida quotes the following: “I will therefore quote the fragment of a letter I received from Blanchot last summer, just a year ago, almost to the day, as if today were the anniversary of the day on which I received this letter, after July 20. Here are its first two lines; they speak of the anniversary of a death that took place without taking place. Blanchot wrote me thus, on July 20, first making note of the anniversary date: ‘July 20. Fifty years ago I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death,’” 52. What would it mean to read Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death as a posthumous publication?
[101] The Post Card, op. cit. 43.
[102] “Nachlass is a German word, used in academia to describe the collection of manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and so on left behind when a scholar dies. The Nachlass of an important scholar is often placed in a research library or scholarly archive.”
[103] In Bass’s translation, Derrida cites, in English, one of the chapter’s subtitles, that Bass leaves in French “La séance continue,” a subtitle which Derrida takes from Freud, who said the words“la séance continue”, in French, when his one of his daughters died. The last line, “to be continued,” repeats earlier appearances of the same phrase on pp. 337 and 409; the same phrase, left by Bass in the original French, “la séance continue,” appears on pp. 320 and 376. In French, “séance” also means “session,” as in a psychoanalytic session.
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[i] H.C for Only a few words, too brief, a programmatic as much as a prophetic note. Life on “sans papiers” 137 and translator’s endnote 123, p. 171 on the term. “and not only the cause of women or of other, often undocumented [sans papiers] victims of persecution throughout the world . . 137
They do not read her 138
Certainly those men and women who organize a declared resistance do not read her. But conversely, those men and women who do not read her, even if they declare themselves to be her allies or friends in all fields . . . are not merely her allies.: they also belong, whether they like it or not, to the camp of the resistance, . . . . , 139
My own reading, as the years went by, has been nothing but a long experience of more or less successfully overcome resistances, and it will be so for life. She herself is not innocent of it . . . she resists herself by herself. 139
Rsistance beings by resisting itself. . . 140
And for me. And my desire was to remember, through a memory at once active and patchy, deceitful, reconstructed, maybe hallucinated and filled with wonder, what my first reading of her first book will have truly been, for example, without retrospective illusion. To tell you the truth in a nutshell, in two words, on the one hand I can remember only a spectral outline of it, and I am going to describe it to you. On the other hand, and this is what matters to me more, I have the impression that I start being able and knowing how to read the book inly today, some thirty-five years later. And what I have said so far was merely a preparatory move, for me in any case. . . in a moment, I start beginning again to read Le Prenom to Dieu in this very place. 145
First place and therefore also the last 156
I foresee, therefore, and I foretell, I announce that will take place one day, when one reads her [quand on lira] at last. “One will read her,” this impersonal future does not mean that she will have been read by nobody so far. Far from that, and we are testifying to that at present. The private, even singular reading remains de rigeur, and it is an adventure about which I have nothing to say, within myself, of others than myself. Rather “one will read her” designates the moment when a certain public, shared reading of her work will have crossed a threshold of recognition . . . . Then this singular work will not only be read by a happy few . . . 135
Derrida on the metonym one book for the whole, not metonymy kills he says, so each book is solitary, is absolutely alone. 77-78
“I will probably speak directly . . . only of the first and last books published to date by Helen Cixous. Which is most unjust, for, even, if Le Prenom de Dieu and OR have a metonymic thrust and stand for the entire work, each book is a singular and irreplaceable living entity. Each book has a (hi)story, each book is a unique (hi)story and living breath, which then command an absolute and absolutely solitary reading. Each book is a beginning, including the on called Les Commencements. And this is also why it is necessary to begin again with her.” 77-78 [see 121, 134, 144]
“Each book has a proper noun: it would be a crime too speak of it only metonymically, to call by the name or in the name of another. For a metonymy can also kill. Each book has a proper noun, each work is a proper noun, even when the name, or of the first name, does not appear, as in does on the other hand it titles such as Prenome de personne . . . 78
Therefore each book is absolutely alone, it is a beginning that is as absolute as a proper noun, even if, however, a vast hall of echoes and mirrors, the labyrinth of so many tangled-up threads turns to these solitary books, which are irreducible the one to the other, across so many generations, into a single genealogical and elemental signature, that is to say, greater than itself. Nothing will be able to justify the limits of the reading today, save the decency that forces me not to keep you for too long, listening to me rather than to her, a decency that goes together with the wish or the order that I dare pronounce: Would that you might read her, as I think it must be done, infinitely. 78-79
Next to last words, next to last story; 124, 150, 152, 154, 156 cf. Typewriter Ribbon, Ink
H.C for Only a few words, too brief, a programmatic as much as a prophetic note. Life on “sans papiers” 137 and translator’s endnote 123, p. 171 on the term. “and not only the cause of women or of other, often undocumented [sans papiers] victims of persecution throughout the world . . 137
They do not read her 138
Certainly those men and women who organize a declared resistance do not read her. But conversely, those men and women who do not read her, even if they declare themselves to be her allies or friends in all fields . . . are not merely her allies.: they also belong, whether they like it or not, to the camp of the resistance, . . . . , 139
[ii] Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” Diacritics 14, no. 2 “Nuclear Criticism” {~?~AU: What is “Nuclear Criticism” the title of? If the issue’s title, it is unnecessary.}(Summer 1984): 27.
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