users.clas.ufl.eduusers.clas.ufl.edu/burt/Burt Glossator/Burt Glossator[39] .… · Web viewRead...

Richard Burt

Read After Burning:

Posthumous Publication and the Sur-vivance of Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card

In truth, posthumous, posthumus, with an h, appears

to be a faulty spelling, the grammarian tells us, and

the spelling error in it is apparently induced by the

proximity with humus, earth. . . . It’s like for

differance, with an a, which is yet another way to

posthume by differing or deferring life or, what

comes down to the same thing, deferring death. In

truth, postume, without an h, apparently

corresponds to the superlative of posterus. Posterus

qualifies the one who comes after, the one who

follows. Posterus is the follower of the descendent,

the one who is going to come, or even the future

itself, posthumous, the superlative here meaning the

last follower of all, and above all the one who,

being born after the death of the father, child or

grandchild, posterity, bears the testamentary future

and the fidelity of inheritance.

Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 174

1

“The librarian seemed to know me . . . but this did not get me out of the oath. She asked

me to read it . . . Therefore I read it and handed her back the cardboard covered with a

transparent paper that had tendered me. At this point, she starts to insist, I had not

understood : no, you have to read it out loud. I did so . . . What would an oath that you

did not say out loud be worth, an oath that you would only read, or not say be worth, an

oath that you would only read, or that while writing you would only read? Or that you

would telephone? Or whose tape you would send? I leave you to follow up. 208

Did I tell you, the oath that I had to swear out loud (and without which I could never have

been permitted to enter, stipulated, among other things, that I introduce neither fire nor

flame into the premises: “I hereby undertake . . . not to bring into the Library or kindle

therein any fire or flame . . . and I promise to obey all the rules of the library.” 215-16

Scene of reading and fire. “Read this letter now at once many times and burn it.” 58 It

now resembles a rebroadcast, a sinister play-back (but give ear closely, come near to my

lips) and while writing you I henceforth know what I am sending to the fire, what I am

letting appear and what you give me back even before receiving it. Back could have been

orchestrated all of this starting from the title: the back of Socrates and of the card: all the

dossiers that I have bound, the feed-back, the play-back, the returns to sender, etc., our

tape-recorders, our phantom cassettes. 225

You might read these envois as the preface to a book I have not written . . . As for the

“Envois” themselves, I do not know if their reading is bearable. You might consider

them, if you really wish to, as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence.

Destroyed by fire or by that which figuratively takes its place, more certain of leaving

2

what I like to call the tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are (s’il ya a la

cendre).

--Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 3 Cinders, ash of he archive, ash of cigarette in

Given Time

“Shall we burn everything?”

--Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 171

Burn before Reading

A great-holocaustic fire, a burn everything into which we would throw, finally, along

with our entire memory, our names, the letters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc.

And if nothing remains . . 40

A holocaust without fire or flame 71

Hauntology. Hauntogrammatology. Hauntotextology. What is the relation of

the ontology of the post card, and a hauntology? Is there a hauntology of the post

card? it’s deconstruction of dead letters and dead parcels, of letters and postcards,

to the ontology of The Post Card?

Possibility of reading after burning, the figure of burning, of cremation and inhumation,

To four topics.

varying degrees of pressure Derrida puts in The Post Card and beyond on what is

generally taken to be self-evident oppositions between published and unpublished

writing, between publication and posthumous publication. Rather than deconstruct these

oppositions and arrive ahead of schedule at pre-programmed aporias, I want to focus on

the structure of the “postal principle” in The Post Card not only with respect to repetition,

3

reproduction, and the repetition compulsion but with respect to the way Derrida’ss

parapsychoanalytic account of the postal principle appears to admit the possibility that a

writer could die more than once and that one read after burning one’s writing materials, a

burning that has already occurred and yet is still to come. I am doing an interrogative

reading not limited to a symptomatic reading or even a Derridean parasymptomaitc

reading.1 And I am not suggesting that Derrida’s death or deaths, as Derrida put in the

title of his commemorative essay “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” in 2004 has somehow

changed how we read The Post Card.2

Relate the topics governing bios and biblios.

First, the life of writing:

they concern the bios of writing, what Derrida in The Post Card calls the autobiography

of writing separate from testamentary writing (writing intended to be read

posthumously):

the description of Ernst’s game . . . can no longer be read solely as a theoretical

argument, as a strictly theoretical speculation that tends to conclude with the

repetition compulsion or the death drive or simply with the internal limit of the PP

[Pleasure Principle] . . . but also can be read, according to the supplementary

necessity of a parergon, as an autobiography of Freud. Not simply an

autobiography confiding his life to his own more or less testamentary writing, but

a more or less living description of his own writing, of the way of writing what he

writes, most notably Beyond . . . In question is not only a folding back or a

tautological reversal, as if the grandson, by offering him a mirror of his writing,

were in advance dictating to him what (and where) he had to set it down on paper;

4

as if Freud were writing what his descendence prescribed that he write, in sum

holding the pen prescribed that he write, in sum holding the first pen the one that

always passes from one hand to another; as if Freud were making a return to

Freud through the connivance of a grandson who dictates from his spool and

regularly brings it back, with all the seriousness of a grandson of a certain

privileged contract with the grandfather. It is not only a question of a

tautological mirror. The autobiography of the writing posits and deposits

simultaneously, in the same movement, the psychoanalytic movement. 303

Living versus dead writing, They could never give me a truly satisfactory answer on this

question, how they distinguish between a letter and a parcel, a dead letter and a dead

parcel, and why they did not sell the so-called dead letter at auction. 125

Second, The problem of the support, of the limits of what is and is not a post card.

For it to work, you will say, there have to be supports (ah yes, but the “substance” of

the support is my entire problem. It is enormous and concerns all posts and

telecommunications, their strict, literal and figurative meanings, and the tropic post turns

them into one another, etc,) there has to be some support and, for a time, copyists, seated

copyists. 160-61

“I do not believe that one can properly call “post card” a unique and original image, if

some such thing ever occurs, a painting or a drawing destined to someone in the guise of

a post card and abandoned to an anonymous third party, a neutral machinery that

5

supposedly leads the message to its destination, or at least would have the support make

its way . . . . 35

Why prefer to write on cards? First of all because of the support, doubtless, which is

more rigid, the cardboard firmer, it preserves, it resists manipulation; and then it limits

and justifies from the outside; by means of the borders, the indigence of the discourse, the

insignificance of the anecdote [sic]

Otherwise what would we have done with all the others, the films, the cassettes, the piece

of skin with the drawing? So the insupportable supports remain, post cards, I am burning

all the supports and keeping only purely verbal sequences. 186-87

Third, reproduction of images.

and then I went into a bookstore, I bought several cards and reproductions, as you know. .

. I fell upon two books of photographs that cost me a great deal, one on Freud, very rich,

the other on Heidegger, at home, with Madame and the journalists from the Spiegel in

1978), 238

The narrators of the letters talk about the book project, what the title will be, what the

preface will be: this is a correspondence, but utterly unlike the Hantai Correspondences,

which sorts out painting, letters in facsimile and in diplomatic transcription. Multiple

reproductions of the same postcard in The Post Card. Bears on the postal principle in

relation to repetition, compulsion, and reproduction, in particular reproduction of the post

card, the post card he discovers in the Bodeleian, and some pages of the fortune teller

book, but not reproducing the photos of Heidegger and of Freud. Although the criterion

for distinguishing between books and letters remains open. I do not believe in the rigor of

such a criterion. 61

6

Illustrations courtesy of the Bodelian Library, Oxford. Cover illustration: Plato and

Socrates, the frontispiece of Prognostica Socratis basilei, a fortune telling book. English,

thirteenth century, the work of Matthew Paris. MS. Ashmole 304. Fol. 3IV (detail). <<on

the copyright page.

What How bears the publication of facsimiles bear on reproduction, the publication as a

repetition? Graphic design, page lay out, topography, and so on, but also reproductions

of Adami and of Van Gogh in Truth of Painting. And even more strikingly, Memoirs of

the Blind. Memoirs of the Blind is more than simply a catalogue of an exhibition. First,

the text presented along with the drawings and paintings at the exhibition was not the

same as that found here. Second, a number of works that could not be exhibited have

been included here: while the exhibition displayed some forty-four drawings and

paintings, the book has seventy-one. Finally, the works are not presented in the same

order in the book as in the exhibition. (To compare the two orderings, one may consult

the list of illustrations where all the works exhibited are briefly described and their

number.)

Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass, “Translators’ Preface,” Jacques Derrida Memoirs

of the Blind viii.

“This fine study concerns numerous works that we have had to leave in the shadows so as

to observe the law of the exhibition: to keep to the body of drawings housed at the

Louvre.”

Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass,

106, n81.

7

Fourth, publishability, readability and the pancarte.

This final total card (my absolute pancarte), that you be able to read it, hold it in your

hands, our knees, under your eyes, in you, that you inherit and guard it. 68

In the “Envois,” Derrida, or one of many, infinitely divisible “Derridas” who write the

epistolary exchanges without addressing them or signing them, records a dream about the

pressure of publication: “Dream from just now: obsequious: around the word

obsequious. I was being pressed, I no longer know by whom, obsequiously, to publish, to

let be read, to divulge.”3 The pressure to publish comes from a forgotten source and

exerts itself in Derrida’s record of it through repetition of the word “obsequies” and the

equivalence of “to publish” with two infinitives that follow it, namely, “to be read,” and

“to divulge.” Derrida declines to say whether he gave into the pressure or not, whether

he or the obsequies source equates publication with permission to read and with giving up

a secret. “Obsequies” here apparently means to keep the pressure on by using different

words to say the same thing. Is there a dream of publication embedded here, a dream

about publication and reading as transparent openness? Is that a dream about repetition,

reproduction, and seriality? Is the dream of publication, if there is one, about effacing

publication as something to be read, about taking publication taken “as read”?

The dream may permit us to ask more generally, “what is the relation between

publication and the “postal principle?” Is publication about avoiding reading, about

determining the limits of avoidance? Near the end of The Post Card, Derrida writes

about ways in which one does not read all sorts of publications.

8

all the police forces of avoidance is, I can put it thus, avoidance itself. There are,

for example, what are called “publications”: one can fail to know them, this is

always possible in a given context, but one can arrange things, in a certain milieu,

in order to avoid knowing that they exist; one can also, knowing of their existence

avoid reading them; one can read while avoiding “understanding”; one can,

understanding avoid being affected by them or using them; one can also, using

them, avoid them, contain them, exclude them, and therefore, avoid them better

than ever, etc. But what is to be thought of the fact that one cannot avoid

avoiding, of inevitable avoidance in all its form—rejection, foreclusion,

denegation, incorporation, and even the introjective and idealizing assimilation of

the other at the limit of incorporation---?

“Du Tout,” 506-07

When I photograph myself alone in stations or airports, I throw it away or tear the thing

into little pieces that I let fly out the window if it is a train, leave them in an ashtray or a

magazine if it is it’s an airplane. 79

What is The Post Card? Prior to signatures and codes, ciphers, laws of genre, divisibility

of the Envois, reversibility of its chronology, written before the rest of the book and after

it has been written, and so on and other kinds of play one could locate in what Derrida

calls an “internal reading,” what is the text and an edition: under what conditions do

editions become relevant to the reading of the copy one has in hand?

Or how it is status as non-book and its readability or unreadability?

Is it a dream of Sigmund Freud’s “dreamwork” as dreamreworking, “the old dream of the

complete electro-cardo-encaphlo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-gram—I mean first of all

9

without the slightest literature, the slightest superimposed fiction, without pause, without

selection either of the code or of the tone, without the slightest secret, nothing at all, only

everything,” Paper Machine, 68 Or is it an apocalyptic fantasy, the opposite of the

holocaust?

In the name of what, in the name of whom publish, divulge—and first of all write, since it

amounts to the same? I have published a lot, but there is someone in me, I still can’t

identify him, who still hopes never to have done it. And he believes that in everything

that I have let pass, depart, a very effective mechanism that comes to annihilate the

exception, I write while concealing every possible divulging of the very thing that

appears to be published. 80

Five: Reading After Death. Derrida returns to Lacan and to his own “Facteur de la

verite” in “For the Love of Lcan,” the second of three essays that make up Resistances of

Psychonalysis.

The future of Lacanian thought as it moves beyond the Écrits is all the more

difficult in that Lacan was an incomparable listener and his discursive machine

was one of such sensitivity that everything could be inscribed there with finesse

or discretion. (This is quite right; who doesn’t try to do the same?) But, what is

more, it is inscribed there in the spoken words of a seminar that, by giving rise to

numerous stenotyped or tape-recording archivings, will have fallen prey not only

to the problem of rights . . . but also to all the problems posed by delays in

publishing and of an editing—in the American sense—that was of the most active

sort. [same thing happens to Derrida’s seminars] Since all of these things hang by

a hair, since the stakes get decided in a word, an ellipsis, a verbal modality,

10

conditional or future anterior, especially when one knows Lacan’s rhetoric, I say

good luck to shy narrator who would try to know what was said and written by

whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not said!

What about publication and speaking of the recently dead? In “Du Tout,” Derrida,

prompted by a request from Rene Major, finally supplies the name of a friend he had

hitherto kept secret because the friend was by then dead.4 And in “For the Love Lacan,”

Derrida comments humorously on the way speaking only of the dead was made a

condition of his giving a lecture at a colloquium on “Lacan avec les philosophes” [Lacan

with the Philosophers] held in 1991: “they put forward the pretext of a rule according to

which only the dead could be spoken about here and therefore, if one insisted on speaking

of me, one could so only under the pretext that I play dead, even before the fact, and that

I be given a helping hand when the occasion arose.”5 ?”

Know When to Hold ‘Em

Philippe Labarthe calls “autobiothanatography” or to what Derrida calls “auto-bio-

thanato-hetero-graphic scene of writing” (336).6 Not just ruin either. It is like a ruin that

does not come after the work but remains produced, already from the origin, by the

advent and structure of the work. In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the

origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the

origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration.

Memoirs of the Blind 65

11

Just as a memory does not restore a past (once) present, so the ruin the ruin of the face—

and of the face looked in the face in the drawing—does not indicate decaying, wearing

away, anticipated decomposition, or this being eaten away by time—something about

which the portray often betrays an apprehension. The ruin does not supervene like an

accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin.

Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the

self-portrait . . .

From corpus of book to corpse of author, reader on the side of live. Turn to account of

survivance and posthumous publication.

What is commonly called the “afterlife” of a book is given a more technical meaning

whereby survival as a metaphor for preservation becomes a notional term, “sur-vivance.”

The translators of Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 leave the French

neologism untranslated and without annotation apart from informing the reader the

“words ‘living on,’ ‘to survive,’ and ‘survival’ are in English in the text.” (131,n30).

Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense

that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130). The

book is not exactly a corpse that continues to live, as it were, as it decomposes or is put to

various medical uses before being buried or cremated.

In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks

and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have

desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and

the character called Robinson Crusoe . . . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book

bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught,

12

saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this

survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed with any trace, in the sense I give

this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this

machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each

wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left

behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or

other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the

opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The

book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude,

this alliance of the dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance.

Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense

that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that

is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or

fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something

sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor

indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself

to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle

voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the

substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-” is without superiority,

without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does

not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it

cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one

could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you

13

will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a

groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we

can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-

called as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is

where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless.

That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The

other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and

that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my

survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)

Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead

machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in

the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a

breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time

an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a

spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Lieb and not Koerper), a body proper animated,

activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)

This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to

engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at

work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the

archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living experience

is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living experience,” but

“tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors and derails “tissue”

skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like death in life or life in

14

death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more originary existence, a life or a

body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked under this this clothing. For, on he

contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance, comprehended, they live and die, they live

to death as the very inextricability of this weave. It is against the groundless ground of

this quasi-transcendentality of living to death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one

hand, one can say that “Robinson Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the

book, were, according to a first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and

desire attested to by this book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or

metonymy, [were all] buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can

and one must, one must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and

like the experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-

anthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson

Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like ours, I

mean in the present modernity of a Greco-Abrahamic Europe, wonder what is

happening . . . in the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the family

and/or State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132

Course called “Living to Death”

in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or

the State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in the universal

structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the

juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . . . deliver the corpse

over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says

prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)

15

Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies created

by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-vivance.

Sur-vivance is not exactly new. Derrida in “Living On: Borderlines” (reduced to “Living

On” in the second edition of the book in which it was originally published) and Derrida

on death would be difficult to catalogue. Also livance.

It’s a kind of self-archiving—the document that remains, literally, unsewn and resewn

into different shirts; reread but not to revise; to revisit but not reanimate? Just asking.

Derrida asserts, in the future, or a specific find of future, that is also a memorial:

Derrida cites his “I posthume as I breathe” line from Circumfessions in Beast and Sov

Vol. 2, Seventh Session, 173, and then goes on to comment on posthumous before

turning to Blanchot’s recent cremation, 174.

And in a somewhat economic way, by reason of a sort of finitude, because we must

exclude the infinite renewal of inscriptions (Niederschriften). The number of inscriptions

to be inscribed is finite – that’s finitude. For all acts of censorship act on inscriptions,

and substitutes of inscriptions in a system (it is even this concept of inscription which no

doubt motivated the choice of the word or metaphor of censorship), and the quantity of

inscriptions is finite; so one must censor. It is like a topological economy of the archive

in which one has to exclude, censor, erase, destroy or displace, virtualize, condense the

archive to gain space in the same place, in the same system, to be able to continue to

store, to make space. Finitude is also a sort of law for this economy. (B&S vol. 2, 156)

What Derrida calls “the postal principle” () also involves what he calls the

afterlifeanddeath of a text, the uncertain boundary of publication in general, a boundary

that not only complicates seemingly self-evident and unquestionable binary oppositions

16

between a published text and unpublished material, biography and bibliography,

production and waste, but brings to bear Derrida’s notion of a text’s “sur-vivance” on

what Derrida calls “unreadability”: sur-vivance involves various media transfers, various

material supports, or subjectiles, as well as various tropes for not/non/un/reading.7

The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of

finitude, this alliance of the living and the dead. I shall say that this finitude is

survivance. Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and

simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death.

(130)




the character called Robinson Crusoe. . Now this survival, thanks to which the book



survival is indeed that of the living dead. (130)






spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated,


17

in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or

the State, of the so-called dead boy, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in the universal

structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the

juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . . . deliver the corpse

over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says

prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)

La carte posthume

Let me begin destinerrantly by drifting into a passage regarding posthumous publication

to be found in the ninth session In the Seventh Session of Derrida’s The Beast and the

Sovereign Volume 2, from which the epigraph to the present essay is taken, Derrida

returns to the sentence “I posthume as I breathe” (see Beast and Sov, 2, 193; see 193n2

for the reference) he had written in “Circumfessions,” and after elaborately on, discusses

several works by Maurice Blanchot Derrida wrote just after Blanchot had been cremated,

pages he says he believes he has “not yet begun to read” (185). (As the editors note

[181], these pages appeared modified in the second edition of Parages as an additional

chapter entitled Maurice Blanchot est mort” [Maurice Blanchot is Dead”); that chapter

was not, however, included in the English translation of Parages, Stanford UP, 2011). In

the Ninth Session, Derrida observes that “all writings are posthumous” before proceeding

to narrow the definition of posthumous writing in which he which he includes a piece of

writing found upon Blaise Pascal’s accidentally found by Pascal’s servant.8 Pascal had

sewn the paper, the first word of which is “fire,” into his shirt. Pascal’s elder sister,

Gilberte Pascal Périer, published the writing in her Life of Blaise Pascal, introducing the

posthumous writing with a preface in which she narrates the circumstances of its

18

discovery and in which she wishes to direct how the note should note be read: it is not

Pascal’s “last word,” a master text that would govern the meaning of all of Pascal’s other

writings.9

Derrida’s interest in Pascal’s paper lies partly in the way it is “strictly posthumous,”

that is “posthumous” in the ordinary sense of the word:

As you well know, it is a posthumous piece of writing (now, of course, all

writings are posthumous, within the trace as structurally and essentially and by

destinal vocation posthumous or testamentary, there is a stricter enclave of the

posthumous, namely, what is only discovered and published after the death of the

author or signatory). Pascal’s writing on the god of Abraham was strictly

posthumous in the latter sense, even though we are not sure Pascal wanted it to be

published. This piece of paper initially takes the form of a journal, a note to self,

dated in Pascal’s hand—Pascal, who like Robinson Crusoe, here dates the

signature. He inscribes the year, the month, the day, and the hour . . . (209)

Even before it was posthumously published, apparently even if it had never been

published, Pascal’s writing remains readable.

Let us now come back to <this> “Writing Found in Pascal’s Clothing After His

Death.” There can be little doubt that this little piece of paper was destined, if not

for someone, then at least to remain, to survive the moment of its inscription, to

remain legible in an exteriority of a trace, of a document, even if it were readable

only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come. This is

indeed what has been called a memorial, to use the word of a witness, Father

Guerrier:

19

“A few days after the death of monsieur Pascal,” said Father Guerrier, “a

servant of the house noticed by chance an area in the lining of the doublet

of the illustrious deceased that appeared thicker than the rest, and having

removed the stitching at this place to see what was it was, he found there a

little folded parchment written in the hand of Monsieur Pascal, and in the

parchment of a paper written in the same hand: the one was a faithful copy

of the other. These two pieces were immediately put into the hands of

Madame Périer who showed them to several of her particular friends. All

agreed there was no doubt that this parchment, written with so much care

and with such remarkable characters, was a type of memorial that he kept

very carefully to preserve the memory of a thing that he wanted to have

always present to his eyes and mind, since for eight years he had taken

care to stitch and unstitch it from his clothes, as his wardrobe changed.

The parchment is lost; but at the beginning of the manuscript in the

Bibliothèque Nationale, one can find the paper that reproduced it, written

in the hand of Pascal, the authenticity of which was confirmed by a note

signed by the Abbé [Étienne] Périer, Pascal’s nephew. At the top was a

cross, surrounded by a ray of light.10

Derrida then cites the first word of Pascal’s note, “Fire [feu]” (212) placing it in the

middle of the page, as if it here a title. Derrida comments “This word ‘fire,’ is, then,

isolated, insularized in a single line, I’m not sure I can interpret it; I’m even sure that I

cannot interpret it in a decidable way, between the fire of the glory that reduces to ashes

and the fire that still smolders under the ashes of some cremation (Ashengloire).”

20

Derrida alludes here to his earlier discussion of Blanchot’s quotation from Paul Celan’s

poem Strette, the first of which, Derrida, notes at the end of a sentence that first links

cremation to Nazi concentration camps to Blanchot to Celan, is “ASCHENGLORIE

[ASHGLORY]” (capital letters in the original): “as for cremation, and the ashes that m

from now on, in modern and uneffaceable history of humanity, the crematoria of the

camps, let us forget nothing” (Beast and Sov 2, 179). Two kinds of reading, or

readability emerge in Derrida’s account of document entitled “Fire” (assuming the

document has a title) that happens to have kept from publication. On the one hand, the

paper always remains readable: it can be transcribed, it can be lost, its authenticity can be

vouched for on a note, and what cannot be transcribed can be described (the cross

surrounded by a ray of light). On the other hand, Derrida is not sure he can read what is

readable. Derrida could have easily distinguished the first kind of reading from the

second by using words like legible and, in opposition to it, interpretable; but he didn’t.

Instead, he calls the paper both legible and readable, using the words as synonyms, and

uses reader using and interpretable (one cannot decide what the legible writing means).

Nor did he put the two kinds of reading into paradoxical or aporetic relation with each

other, as I have done above. Neither the “strictly” posthumous publication of the paper

nor with the unpublished paper that Pascal folded up and covered by a piece of

parchment and then sewed into his shirts aligns with readability or unreadability, not

reading.

Derrida’s phrase “generation of repetitions to come” certainly invites, some reader might

even say demands, that repetition would not be the same, the generation is not a

21

mechanical program that Pascal installed and that his servant carried out after Pascal

died.

Survivance—as a structuring strucutre that genrates a series of differeneces that matter or

don’t accrding to at various historical moments, what copy you have, what lanuguage it is

in, what edition, hardcover or apperback, paper used,etc. and revivified by the reader.

Wetwares storage notion of the archive. Diffference betweenarhcival materials and

their publication—recursive since new editions can be published.

Assumption is that paper only is paper once it is written on—only papers with writing in

the ordinary sense can be archived. But move from archive to publication introduces

media that remediate the archival materials.

Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies created

by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-vivance.

Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense

that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130).

Relation of selection and sur-vivance. Is the “Envois” a disturbed or unfilled fantasy of

genetic criticism, the author telling the story about what was or was not destroyed, what

was allowed to live? In Beast and S 2, Derrida mentions RC and later versions, but starts

with the first edition.

First word before the first word—first publication before the first publication; a last

publication after the last word, as in last word after the last word?

Bears on the problem of the material support, the problem of reading (or not reading),

and the problem of narrative.11

Ps. So as not to forget: the little key to the drawer is hidden in the other book. (I leave it

22

to you to divine the page.), 144

The post without post, 159

He has read all of us 148

Phone anxiety, 159

Says Socrates, our friend, whom I rereading in translation of our friends, 158

I am trying anew to work on my legacy and on this accursed preface. 158

Now “Legs” and Legacies” are no longer a title of a book but Derrida’s own legacy.

Reread the whole thing (p.100), it’s wonderful. 158

Note p. 150 on Lacan

The secret without measure: it does exclude publication, it measures publication against

itself. . . at how many thousands of readers do the family circles end? 144

“Dechimenation,” 142

Therefore you must not read me. 142

Who reads me 147

Reread what follows 142

Reading the Post Card after Écrits (2005)

Cite Blaise Pacal fire—poem / note to self posthumously published, Derrida’s discussion.

Compare to Foucault in response to Derrida, this paper this fire

Derrida on signature, 136

Derrida abbreviates titles, truncates them to their first word. Beyond . . . p. 139, 147;

legs ;

Specter, 132

Idiomatic, 138

23

“See also” 139

proof 136

but read closely, turning slowly, the for corners, around the 4 times 4 rectangles, perhaps

it does not form a single sentence but this is my life and I dedicate it to you. 139

Passage on posthumous publication deserves attention in itself But dead letter and letters.

Derrida does not deconstruction that distinction. Always already dead. Yet on the way

to being published. Bibliographical information about editions get pushed over into the

notes, generally, both by Derrida and by Alan Bass (who operates as both in Living On,

and to copyright pages. But all kinds of differences between editions and translations do

not get archived. Idiosyncratic narratives may be told, end up as a narrative. . If we

want to dismiss these microdifferences as fetishes, in the name of what non-problematic

level of generality would we do so? Generality is more a problem for Derrida that

fetishism is.

There is no parergon of this history, of its traits, retraits, and so on in book history,

textual practice, and so on, no frame of reference, confined by the relay “See also”.

Commentary without comment, not like Marxism without Marx. When does comment,

annotation, become discursive? Anecdote an anecnote?

Difficult to tell not because one reaches an aporia but instead confronts not reading and

nonreading? Paratext supposed by go to be unread, invisible. JD conceals ciphers

illegible. An economy of no returns. Speculation. But kind of investment? Graphic

economy as opposed to an “Icon”omy. Value of reproduction(s) of the postcard, the hit of

the image, as opposed to describing it. No comment as a comment, a non-denial denial,

All the President’s Men.

24

Burn everything as opposed to publish everything. No way to know that it is a postcard,

however, as the reverse side is not reproduced, the side with information, caption, etc.

This part is not published, not transcribed.

Is the first line a quotation of first line of Dissemination, also about prefaces?

Burn After Rereading

Reread Before Burning

Insupportable Reading

IS the notion of a beginning merely naïve? The end as the beginning, with the move to

“tu” in the footnote. The paratext as a graphic “place” ; Glossary stops shot of an index.

Gives the note number, but not the page number.

Reading randomly; backwards; by chance, as in “Meschances.”

Decipher, 42

Facsimiles in The Post Card. Already reproductions, iconography, versus ekphrasis

Cutting and pasting, 41

And moreover I obey at every moment without seeming to: to burn everything, forget

everything . . .

Facteur de la verite, 40

For the moment I am cutting and pasting. 41

And while driving I held it on the steering wheel 43

Decipher, 43

The stamp is not a metaphor. 46

25

Who is driving? Doesn’t it really look like a historical vehicle? A gondola? No, except

plato is playing gondolier, perched in the back, looking away in front of him the way one

guides the blind. He is showing the direction. 46

For us, for our future, nobody can tell. 47

She will put the letter back into circulation once she has read it. 49

And the case will be proven, 51

To enclose myself in a book project. 51

False preface to Freud, 51

Doubtless the book will be called Legs de Freud 52

And it would also inscribe Le facteur de la verite as an appendix, with the great reference

to the Beyond . . . 53

This is the law of the genre/gender as was said in the note of the Facteur that they

evidently have not read at all, the note that installs the entire program, note 6 precisely:

“le poste differs from la poste only by gender” (Littré)12 54

That note is on p. 411, though the page number is not given, and Bass translates it

differently: “gateway post: Le poste [in the sense of osition] dffers from la poste {in the

sense of mail] only gender says Littré.

Bass adds a note in brackets that is longer than Derrida’s, explaining “the various editions

and translations of Lacan,” and observes that the English translation of the Écrits by

“Alan Sheridan states that the selection of the essays for the English Écrits [Bass omits

the subtitle, A Selection] is “Lacan’s own” (p.vii). Thus, for reasons to be determined,

something has changed: the “Seminar” no longer has the gateway post that Lacan

26

previously had emphasized, and, as just stated, does not appear in the volume at all.]”

421, n. 6.

Now that Bruce Fink’s Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English [Hardcover]

Jacques Lacan (Author), Bruce Fink (Translator) W. W. Norton & Company (December

16, 2005) is out, should that be read as sreotred version the way new translation of Kakfa

or new editions of Faulkner are? What is the relation between selection and complete?

Doesn’t first complete render the Écrits editions unreadable, as if there were a complete,

closed, single definitive edition? Did Lacan give the English edition a different heading?

Or did he approve, as he did Jacque Lain mIllers French editions, what Sheridan had

decided to select?

Bass note p. 420 Throughout I will refer to the English version of the Smnar, translated

by Jeffrey Mehlman, in French Freud, Yale French Studies, no 48, 1972 All references

in the text will be given by the letter S and a page number.

Derrida’s note 4, p. 420:

A note in Positions (1971-72, p. 107, n. 44) announced this reading of the “Seminar on

The Purloined Letter,” which was the object of a lecture at the Johns Hopkins University

in November 1971.

French cover and Chicago book cover both reproduce the image.

“Bass Notes” (La-Bas)

My post card dissertation 54

But I would really like to call the book philately 65

No, I will never rewrite it, that letter. 57

I’m not making it up! 63

27

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_2?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=Bruce%20Fink&ie=UTF8&search-alias=books&sort=relevancerank

http://www.amazon.com/Jacques-Lacan/e/B000APRT36/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

You see him reading me at this very instant 67

No rigorous theory of “reception,” however necessary it might be, will get to the end of

that literature. 71

Finally, he would consent, see The Purloined Letter, and the queen too, and Dupin too,

and the psychoanalyst too” 71

Purim Pur lot 72; 74-75

Difficult to tell 74

Believe without proof 76

Amnesia 77

Okay, let’s drop it. I am rereading myself, thus at the end of the word “lottery” 81

When you are reading, 79

It has to be read in Greek, 87

Okay, let’s drop it, I will continue to scratch, read while writing my knowing letter, rather

than taking note’s on those little white pieces of cardboard that you always don’t give a

damn about. 87

And he adds, following my finger (I am citing but always rearranging a little. Guess the

number of false citations in my publications . . . ):” 89

Literature epistolary genres, 88

To read among others, the Socratic letters in which he grouped the anecdotes concerning

the life, method, and even the death of the Athenian philosopher [Socrates]” 91

Prophylactic guarding of the letter incorporated in the “by heart.” 93

The Oxford card is looking at me. I am rereading Plato’s letters. 93

Always reports, feigns reporting, as if he were reading 93

28

But contrary to what goes on in The Purloined Letter 95

Reading it will be impossible to understand94

The other does not answer, is not published 96

The one who scratches and pretends to write in the pace of the other who writes and

pretends to scratch. 98

Dream of the original imprint . . Visa or Mastercharge. . . tympan 101

Ciphered letters, 93

I have said it elsewhere 124

Phomomaton of myself 125

Derrida anticipates the cell phone on vibrator mode:

When will we be able to call without ringing? There would be a warning light or one

could even carry it one oneself, near the heart or in the pocket, for certain coded calls,

some signal. 87

Rite versus lean by heart 82

Burn by Heart

Strange story. Again you suspect me of have sent it. I do no dare open it to reread it . . .

But I will not send it to you a second time—in any case, I will never read it. 76

No more than this card that you are reading now, that you are holding in your hands or on

your knees. 73

Signature 73

Reading the last one (for it is he who reads me, you see him here . . . 63

Another way of saying that you had reread it, no? which is what one begins doing when

on rereads, even for the first time. Repetition, memory, etc. . . . P. asks D. to reread

29

before burning, so be it, in order to incorporate the letter (like a member of the resistance

under torture). 59-60

Rearview mirror of an automobile that pauses 60

One day, please, read me no more, and even forget that you have read me. 36

And soon we will be able to afford that answering machine. 36

I’ll see you before you read this. 36

I always come back to the same card. 34

Repetition compulsion is understood even less, 35

All this because you didn’t want to burn the first letters, 14

Lacan, in truth, meant to say what I said, under the heading of dissemination. What next!

As for me, all the while apparently speaking of dissemination, I would have reconstituted

this word to a last word and therefore into a destination. In other words, if it can be put

thus, Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I am only doing what he says

he is doing. And there you are, the trick has been played, destination is back in my hand

and “dessmination” is reversed into Lacan’s account. This is what I had describe to you

one day, three-card monte, the agility of the expert hands to which one would yield

oneself bound hand and foot. 151

With stupefying dexterity they move three cards after having you choose one. 36

The coded “words” to which Alan Bass refers in his glossary are “EGEK HUM XSR

STR” p. 148 (Bass does not give the page reference, and is no longer glossing, though the

last entry does refer the reader a footnote.)

I await everything from an event that I am incapable of anticipating. 47

30

Speaking of which, M., who has read the seminar on Life Death along with several

friends, tell me I should publish the notes without changing anything. This is impossible,

of course, unless I detach the sessions on Freud, or only the one on Freud’s legacy, the

story of the fort/da with little Ernest. 41

Without seeming to burn everything, 40

I think I made this film for myself even before I knew how to drive. If I were not afraid

of waking everyone I would come, in any case I would telephone. When will we be able

to call without ringing [anticipates the vibe setting on cell phones]. There would be a

warning light or one could even carry it on oneself, near the heart or in the pocket, for

certain coded calls, some signal. 87

“and not only in the way a negative is developed” PC, 43

“These letters of “Plato,” that Socrates, of course, would have neither read nor written., I

now find them greater than the works. I could like to call you to read out loud several

extracts from the “stands” they have mandated, commanded, programmed for centuries

as I would like to use them for my legs. I am typing them, or rather one day you will

return this letter to me). . . . And if I read out loud, the most irreplaceable ones, don’t you

think . . . you always imitate better than I). Listen . . .[reread it as if I had written it

myself, starting from the “philosopher’s notes, especially the end which more or less

[note Derrida’s comments on “more or les” a phrase his father used, in “For the Love of

Lacan”] says this—but the whole thing would have to be retranslated: This letter, all

three must be read together as much as possible, if not at the same time and as often as

you are able. Look at it as a way to take an oath and as a convention having the force of

law, on which it is legitimate to swear with a seriousness mixed with grace and with the

31

badinage of the serious . . . Take as a witness the god chief among all things present and

future, and the all-powerful father of the chief and its cause, whom we all know, if we

philosophize truly and with all the clarity possible for men enjoying beatitude.” It has to

be read in Greek, my very sweet one, as if I were writing it to you. Myself.) So then I

pick up my citation again,

8586; 86-87

Derrida will make more mistakes, 27 (“reprosuction” instead of “reproduction”), 27

Typo versus slip, 513

Typo? 216, “head” instead of the more obvious “had”

Typos, 152, 228

Reproduction of reproduction, 35; 37

It is Socrates’ writing surface” 17

Thereby to give the slightest hope of reading it one day 127

I want to reread the entire corpus platonicum 129

Brotherl 129

You can feel he has a hard-on in his back 128

And they publish everything 132

I remember the ashes. What a chance, to burn, yes yes [no punctuation] 23

This entire post card ontology 22

Two hands, the mystic writing pad, 25

That we will be able to send sperm by post card, 24

32

For example, I write on post cards, oh well I write on post cards. “I” begins again with a

reprosuction (say, I just wrote reproSuction: have you noticed that I make more and more

strange mistakes, is it fatigue or age, occasionally the spelling goes, phonetic writing

come back in force, as in elementary school, only to others whom I confusedly looked

down on—the lapsus or “slips” obviously). And by means of a reproduction that is itself

reproduced serially, always the same picture on another support, but an identical support,

differing only in numero. 27

The postal principle 27

7 hours in the car with the old film of the accident to resolve everything, 87

I still do not know how to see what there is to see. 16

As if he were running to catch a moving train, 17

On the back of the same card, I write you all the time, 16

Out of this atrocious exclusion that we make of all of them—and every possible reader.

The whole reader. 16

I had read in his glance that he was begging for the impossible. 14

Write it in cipher, 1

Silent move, 13

But that which checks

As if what is invisible here could take a reading into account.

502

archive, 506

the decrypting, in these conditions, can no longer come from the simple and alleged

interior of what is still called, provisionally, psychoanalysis.

33

540

Rene Major: I first of all would like you to convey to you the profound malaise I

experience reading Glas,

Du Tout, 499

I ask you to forget, to preserve in amnesia. 12

The secret of reproduction, 12

Look closely at this card, it’s a reproduction.

I confide to you this solemn and sententious aphorism: di not everything between us

begin with a reproduction? Yes, and at the same time . .. the tragedy is there. 9

I will have sent you only cards. Even if they are letters and if I always put more than one

in the same envelope. 8

What a couple. Socrates turns his back to plato [sic], who has made him write whatever

he wanted while pretending to receive it from him. This reproduction is sold here as a

post card, you have noticed, with greetings and address. Socrates writing, do you notice,

on a post card. 12

The Post Card as the title of a romance novel or a film (The Notebook; Postcards from

the Edge); the history of the post card, or the particular post card “the” post card of

Socrates writing and Plato dictates from behind, or post card of post cards Derrida finds

in Oxford, that is for sale [the post card, italicized but with “a” not “the” before it 12],

and copies of which he/whomever writes on, puts in an envelope, and mails instead of

mailing the post cards. Uses the cards instead of a letter (Kafka and Freud used letters,

they were the last to do so].

“and not only in the way a negative is developed” PC, 43

34

“Tell you a brief story,”

Op cit 518

[This story is like Lacan thinking that Derrida is “inanalysis” [a neologism]—this time

the person, a woman, thinks Derrida is the analyst, and never names the person he is

supposedly analyzing].

“Du Tout,” PC, 514-15

This text is not cited in the headnote of “For the Love of Lacan” in Resistances of

Psychoanalysis.

I am afraid that the readers will exclude them too quickly, will conclude precipitously

that: these are third parties, they cannot be the secret addressee of these letters. 223

Versus the bad reader who does not rad slowly. But you cannot avoid avoiding, so “the

readers” can’t fall out into two groups, sorted into slow at the correct speed and get a

ticket for reading too fast, going over the reading speed limit.

Burning everything in The Post Card with the burning of Archive Fever, the ash.

On the last page of the volume of Letters to Milena, which I wouldn’t have read without

you, Blanchot cites Kafka” [Derrida then cites the Kafka citation Blanchot cites]PC, 222

[reference to Kafka letter, Kafka now named, whereas p. 35 referred to without a name

“You had me read that letter to me where he [no referent of the pronoun] more or less

says that, speculating with spirit, denuding oneself before them; he wrote only (on) letters

that one, one of the last along with Freud finally. 35

circumcise 222

I am here signing my proper name, Jacques Derrida.1

35

1 regret that you [tu] [so, using the tutoyer, Derrida has already moved into

epistolary mode in his note before the Envois begins.] do not very much trust my

signature, on the pretext that it might be several.” P. 6

Introduction / Glossary

Voler, see “Le facteur,” note 9. PC, xxix

At the end of the letters 15 June and 20 June 1978, you will find some “words” in capital

letters. These have been transposed from the original, but they are particularly

problematic in the translation. If the original text is crypted, as it claims to be, is the

translation equally crypted? Is there a possible key to the translation of a crypted text?

Does the translation hold out the same promise of decrypting (of translation) as the

original? Such are the question of EGEK . . .”

laser effect which would come to cut out onto the surface of the letters, and in truth our

body. 221

I’m going to read L’enfant du chien-assis by Jos, alias L’ete rouge.

Or quite simply because he is---reading and that is always on some reading, you know

something about this, that I transfer. 218

He is taking notes having in mind a prospect of publication in modern times. He is

pretending to write but he has a small pocket tape recorder under his mantle, or rather

above his head, under his pointed hat: the arm of the mike is stretched above the head of

plato. 218-19

Dream, 216-17

36

Vacation reading, 252I’ve just received the slide in color. Be very careful with it. I’ll

need it in the reproduction. I have never found them so resigned to their beauty. What a

couple. 250

Right in the moment of slipping this into the envelope: don’t forget that all of this tookthe

wish to make this picture into the cover of a book, all of it pushed back into the margins,

the title, may name, the name of the publisher, and miniaturized (I mean in red) on

Socrates’ phallus. 251

The most anonymous support, 175

That Plato is calling Socrates, gives him an order (jussic performative one says at Oxford,

of the “send a card to Freud” type there, right away, it’s done.) . . . you all transfer

everything, and everyone, onto Socrates. You don’t know if this is an order or an

affirmation. Nor if the amorous transference takes place because Socrates is writing or

precisely because he is not writing, since armed with a pen and the grattoir [scapel,

knife], presently he is doing both while doing neither the one nor the other. And if he is

not writing, you do not know why he is not writing presently, because he has suspended

his pen for a second or because he is erasing by scratching out or because he cannot write

or because he can not write, because he does not know how or knows how not, etc., or

quite simply 218

In the first publication of this text. . . The deletion of this phrase (which is

inconsequential) is the only modification of this essay since its first publication. Footnote

68, 495 to Le facteur

Derrida reshelves the entire book:

37

On the contrary, the necessity of everything [du tout] announces itself terribly, the fatality

of saving everything from destruction: what is there, rigorously in our letters does not

derive from the fort: da, from the vocabulary of going-coming, of the step, of the way or

the away, of the near and the far, of all the frameworks in tele-, of the adestination, of the

address and maladdress, of everything that is passed and comes to pass between Socrates

and Plato, Freud and Heidegger, the “truth,” of the facteur, “du tout,” of the transference,

of the inheritance and the genealogy, of the paradoxes of nomination, of the king an, of

the queen and of their ministers, of the magister and of the ministries, of the public and

private detectives? Is here a word, a letter, an atom of a message that rigorously speaking

should not be withdrawn from the burning with the aim of publication? . . . If I

circumcise, and I will, it will have to bleed around the edges, and we all put in their

hands, under their eyes, shards of our body, of what is most secret in our soul.

Very intrigued, at Oxford, by the arrival of the kings and the answers by 4. They

intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme. 222

Rereading the Legacy 225

March-April 1979.

I’ve started to reread, to sort, to dig around in the box (my first gift, suddenly, it no longer

sufficed.) 186

Derrida satirizes a reading of his work that fold it back into Lacan, one that say that

Derrida s only saying what Lacan already said. 150-51

S/p is for Socrates and Plato but p/S is “for Poe, for Dupin, and the narrator. 148

When one reads everything that is still written today, and so seriously, in such a

businesslike way (spoudaios!) on the subject of this great telephonic farce . . . 146

38

Not a word that would not be dictated upside down, programmed on the back [au dos], in

the back of the post card. Everything will consist in describing Socrates with Plato as a

child in his back, and I will retain only the lexicon required from every line [trait] in the

drawing. In a word, there will only be back (du dos), even the word “dos,” if you are

willing to pay faithful attention to it and keep the memory.

187

“If you’re not there, leave an message on the answering machine.” 189

I am haunted by Heidegger’s ghost in the city, 189

“the crushing repetition compulsion” 458, PC, then Derrida cites marie Bonaparte using

the same phrase , 458

Here, the insistent monotony has at least led to the construction of a textual network, the

demonstration of the recurrence of certain motifs . . . outside The Purloined Letter. Thus

the letter hanging under the mantelpiece has its equivalent in The Murders in the Rue

Morgue. For us, the interest of this recurrence, and of pointing it out, is not that of an

empirical enrichment, an experimental verification, the illustration of a repetitive

insistence. It is structural. It inscribes The Purloined Letter in a texture, to which it

belongs, and within which the Seminar had effected a cursory framing or cross-section.

We know that The Purloined Letter belongs to what Baudelaire called “A kind of trilogy,

along with The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget. The

Seminar does not breathe a word about this trilogy; not only odes it lift out the narrated

triangles (the “real drama”) in order to center the narration in them hear the burden of the

interpretation (the destruction of the letter), but that it omits like a naturalized frame.

458-59

39

But it happens that her [Marie Bonaparte’s] laborious analysis opens up textual structures

that remain closed to Lacan. 459

Headnotes about publication of various chapters in Écrits along with notes in the

Biographical Appendix as well as the Index Jacques Lain Miller provides, but is not

keyed to words but to concepts.

He returns to Archive Fever in “Typewriter Ribbon” 302-03. “Typewriter Ribbon:

Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits,’)” in Tom Cohen et al (eds), Material Events:

Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001), p.286,

289; 331 originally published as the first chapter of the French edition of Papier

Machine. “Fichus” is not in the French edition of Paper Machine while “Typewriter

Ribbon, Inc” is not included in the English translation (three other short essays

along with “Typewriter Ribbon, Inc” which is the subtitle and centerpiece of the

French edition drop out in the English translation; Bowlby does have a note about

the excluded and included essays, pp.ix-x).

Jacques Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” in Paper Machine, trans.

Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). I am dreaming. I am sleepwalking” (169) “First, when I dream of an absolute memory—well, when I sigh after the keeping of everything, really (it’s my very respiration)—my imagination continues to protect this archive of paper. Not on a screen, even though it might occur to me, but on a strip of paper. . . I wouldn’t write, but everything would get written down, by itself, right on the strip. With no work. . . . But what I thereby leave to write itself would not be a book, a codex, but rather a strip of paper. I would roll itself up, on itself, an electrogram of everything that happened (to me) bodies, ideas, images, words, songs, thoughts, tears. Others. The world forever, in the faithful and polyrhythmic recording of itself and all its speeds. Everything all the same without delay, and on paper—that is why I am telling you. On paperless paper. Paper is in the world that is not a book.” “Paper or Me, You Know . . .” 65

Fichus is a separate publication in French. A stand alone book. It is not included in Papier Machine. Translation of Derrida into English (among 39 other languages) is a kind of dissemination that in philological terms recollects the writings and rebinds

40

them into new “cuts.” Essays not in the French book are cut form the English, translated in two different collections (Typewriter Ribbon); essays not in it are added Editors and translators reshelve Derrida. “No dead person has ever said their last word.” Cixous, Or, les lettres de mom pere, 25;

cited by Derrida, H.C. for Life, 125, n. 113, p. 170

Next to last words, next to last story; 124, 150, 152, 154, 156 cf. Typewriter Ribbon, Ink

Where was I? 147

not just in the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the

organized manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures

whereby we . .deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse

and prepare ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying

alive or dying dead (132)




the character called Robinson Crusoe. . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book



survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed with any trace, in the sense I give

this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this

machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each

41

wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left

behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or

other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the

opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The

book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude,

this alliance of the dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance.

Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense

that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that

is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or

fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something

sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor

indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself

to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle

voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the

substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-“ is without superiority,

without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does

not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it

cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one

could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you

will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a

groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we

can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-

called as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is

42

where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless.

That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The

other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and

that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my

survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)






spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated,


This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to

engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at

work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the

archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living experience

is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living experience,” but

“tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors and derails “tissue”

skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like death in life or life in

death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more originary existence, a life or a

body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked under this this clothing. For, on he

contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance, comprehended, they live and die, they live

to death as the very inextricability of this weave. It is against the groundless ground of

43

this quasi-transcendentality of living to death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one

hand, one can say that “Robinson Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the

book, were, according to a first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and

desire attested to by this book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or

metonymy, [were all] buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can

and one must, one must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and

1 Derrida frequently attended (frequently enough to become recognizable as a strategy or

gambit) to what he regards as “omissions.” Here is how Derrida describes it Freud’s

omission of Socrates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the second chapter of The Post

Card, “Speculations on ‘Freud’”:

Freud omits the scene of the text . . . It is the great omission. . . To omit Socrates,

when one writes, is not to omit just anything or anyone. . . The omission is not a

murder, of course, let us not overdramatize. . . If Freud in turn erases Socrates . .

374

Two pages earlier, Derrida writes about the manner of reading for fragments:

Now, in the time of this performance, Aristophanes’ discourse represents only one

episode. Freud is barely interested in this fact, and he retains only those shards of

a fragment which appear pertinent to his own hypothesis, to what he says he

means. One again, he sets himself to relating a piece of a piece of a narrative

related in the Symposium.

Derrida carefully then excuses Freud on the grounds that everyone does it, omit, erase,

that is:

This is a habitual operation. Who does not do it? And the question is no one of

approving or disapproving in the name of the law. Of what law? Beyond any

44

like the experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-

anthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson

Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like ours, I

mean . . the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the family and/or

State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132

criteria or legitimation, we can nevertheless attempt to understand what is going

on in a putting to perspective, in a reading, in a writing, in citations, liftings,

omission, suspensions, etc. To do this, one must also make the relation to the

object vary. Post Card, 372

the omission in Memoirs of the Blind. spirit in Heidegger in Of Spirit

2 On Derrida’s essay “The Two Deaths of Roland Barthes,” see Pysche: Invention of the

Other, Vol 1. Trans Peggy Kamuf. Stanford UP, 2007. A number of essays Derrida

wrote upon the deaths of friends were athered together in an English book The Work of

Mourning. This htematic or genreic grouping is exceeded, however, by Derrida’s

differing ways in which he discussed, sometime more htna once, an autor’s works afeter

death. First and last essay of Roland Barthes strategy is used elsewhere for a living

author. Inhte middle for Foucault is used for Freud. Maurice Blanchot is dead appears in

Beast and Sovereign and second edition of Parages, a book almost entirely about

Blanchot but which does not name Blanchot in the title or chapter titles. Neither

translation refers ot the other. Death or deaths did not organize even if they sometimes

occasioned, Derrida’s works with respect to the subject being posthumous or not. On the

many paratextual oddities of The Work of Mourning, see Burt, “Putting Your Papers in

order. Derida’s dedication of Artaud le moma to paul Thevelin (in memory). Dedication

45

Derrida then proceeds to outline what he takes to be the two options for the

disposal of corpses now available: inhumation and cremation. (132-33). He then

returns to Robinson Crusoe to discuss Crusoe’s fear of being buried alive. At p. 143

Derrida then returns to inhumation and cremation and finishes the Fifth Session

with that topic (146). Derrida returns to the topic in pp. 162-71 of the Sixth Session.

as epitaph.

3 Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” Post Card, 199

4 Now here is the most ingenious finding: what remains a typographical error two out of

three times in given Écrits [Derrida does not specify the editions or given the relevant

page numbers] becomes [François] Roustang’s “slip,” Roustang having contented

himself, somewhat quickly it is true, with reproducing the ur-typo, everyone including its

author, turning all around that which must not be read.

Whose name I can say because he is dead”

Du Tout,” C, 519

5 “For the Love of Lacan,” 47 and 121n3. The headnote accompanying reprinting of this

essay, originally published as part of the proceedigs of the colloquium, in the book

Resistances of Psychoanlysis provides, as do some of the headnotes to The Post Card,

some idiosyncracies. Headnotes are often anonymous. In Resistances of Psychoanlaysis,

Derrida plays with indications of who wrote them. All three headnotes are unifromly

preceded with the word “NOTE” in all capitals followed, but the first person pronouns

used in each vary. In the first note, someone uses the plural “Our thanks” 119, and in the

second note someone similarly writes “we thank” but then Derrida identifies himself as

the writer by using the singular first person pronoun “I.” This variation would ordinarily

46

Effective exorcism pretends to declare the death only in order to put to death. As a

coroner might do, it certifies the death but here it is in order to inflict it. This is a

familiar tactic. The constative form tends to reassure. The certification is effective. . .

. But here effectivity phantomalizes itself. It is in face [en effet] a matter of a

performative that seeks to reassure to but first of all to reassure itself, for nothing is

be considered unworthy of notice, even if Derrida writes a title “I writes us” in The Post

Card. In Resistnaces, it becomes noticeable though not necessarily readable only because

Derrida devotes nearly two pages of the republished lecture to the use of “we” after

citing a sentence he might say hypothetically “You see, I think that we loved each other

very much, you see.” Derrida focuses on what it means to say “’We’ when speaking all

alone of the death of the other” (42): “It is always an ‘I’ who utters ‘we’ supposing

thereby, in effect, the asymmetrical strucutre of the utterance, the other to be absent,

dead, in any case, incompetent, or even arriving too late to object. . . . If there is some

‘we’ in being-with, it is because there is always one who speaks all alonein the name of

the other, from the other; there is always one of htem who lives longe. I will not hasten to

call this one the ‘subject.’ When we are with someone, we know without delay that one

ofus will survive the other” (43). The asynchronic relation between these remarks about

first person pronouns and death in the text and the use of “we” and then “I” in the

headnote allows for, perhaps even invites a reading of the “note” that and its placement at

the head of the endnotes.

6 For variations on auto / bio / thanato / graphy, see The Post Card, 273, 293, 298, 302,

303, 322, 323, 328, 333, 356.

7

47

less sure, that what one would like to see dead is indeed dead. It speaks in the name

of life. It claims to know what that is. Who knows better than someone who is

alive . . . . now, it says (to itself), what used to be living is no longer alive, it does not

remain effective in death itself, don’t worry. (What is going on here is a way of not

wanting to know . . . what everyone alive knows . . . , namely, that that the dead can

often be more powerful than the living. . . In short, it is often a matter of pretending

8 By “all writings are posthumous,” Derrida presumably means that all writing is like the

signature as defined in “Signature, Event, Context.” (your signature will operates even

after you are dead; to sign is to be dead). Like “I posthume I breathe.” Like the ruin in

Memoirs of the Blind. Again a para-Freudian reading of blndness, mistakes, castation,

and convresion that logs into Derrida’s own previous readings of Freud’s essay “The

Uncanny” while never mentioning Lacan.

9 Derrida continues: “Pascal was only thirty-one years old when he wrote and put into his

clothing the posthumous paper we are deciphering and he must have kept for around

eight years, as he dies in 1662, at “39 years and two months,” says his [elder] sister. . .

This is how she presents and quotes this “little paper”: (Quote and comment on Pascal)

Thus he made it appear, that he had no attachment to those he loved, for had he

been capable of having one, it would indisputably have been to my sister; since

she was undeniably the person in the world he loved most. But he carried it still

further, for not only he had no attachment to any body, but he was absolutely

against any body’s having one to him. . . . We afterwards perceived that this

principle had entered very deep into his heart, for to the end he might always have

presented it to his thoughts. He had it set down in his own handwriting, on a little

piece of paper by itself, where these words. . . . (210; 211)

48

to certify death there where the death certificate is still the performative of an act of

war or the important of gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution. Jacques

Derrida, Specters of Marx: (48).

“the lifeline of live words [mots de vie]” Derrida, H.C. for Life, 95

Gilberte Pascal Périer then justifies publication in her Life of Blaise Pascal by stating

that she does not wish to solicit a desire for an a reading of the words on the paper as a

last word, “for I am no ultimate end of any body” (211).

10 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and Sovereign, Vol. 2, 212. By chance, a letter from

Timothy Bahti Derrida quotes at the beginning of the Seventh Session also went missing:

The editors say “we found this letter neither in the typescript of the session nor in the

Jacques Derrida archives at IMEC. The following extract in reproduced from a copy of

the letter, which is dated February 23, 2003 [and written in French], as provided by its

author” (Beast and Sovereign 2, 172n1).

11 The passages Derrida writes on Pascal I cited above are one of many “examples,”

if one wanted to call them that and momentarily suspend the question of exemplarity, in

which essays Derrida wrote under the heading of “autobiothanatographical” texts.

The parchment within the parchment, the confusion of paper and parchment—which is

lost and which is a copy—only one of two lost?

Resewing—is sewing a figure? Did the servant never see Pascal sewing the paper? Did

he never help Pascal with the unsewing and sewing?

“Drawing” the Line: The Graphic Design of Writing

In relation to publication lies another problem, and its relation to the support. The

49

“the live-ance of life [vivement de vie],” Derrida, H.C. for Life, 84

When it is not associated—like life, moreover, or a silk paper with a veil or

canvas, writing’s blank white, spacing, gaps, the “blanks which become what is

important,” always opens up onto a base of paper. Basically, paper often

parergon has the same problem of the support as does publishing.

Cite Derrida on the material support as problem in The Post Card

Derrida and reproductions in The Post Card-which photographs are described, placement

of reproductions, and so on. Eccentric as compared to The Truth in Painting or Memoirs

of the Blind or “Unsensing the Subjectile” in Artaud or “Maddening the Subjectile” in

“Boundaries: Writing and Drawing” YFS (1994) or Artaud le MOMA, to name a few.

Derrida’s radical empiricism doesn’t get into drafts (though he does get into editions a

bit, but not generally philology). Relation between reception, iteration, reproduction, and

the material supports of both words and images and the boundary between them. No

reproduction of the title pages of the two editions of Rouseau’s Confessions in

Typewriter Ribbon, Ink 2: (within such limits). But reproduction of J.D. in signature,

Event. Book on Derrida, posthumous, turning editions into images. What are the limits

of reading materials for Derrida?

The boundary of writing and drawing, the parergon: it is both figurative and literal, a

narrative frame, an “invisible” narrative frame, but also a frame of a painting, and related

to paratext or signature or wall text. So what is excessive in relation to the line in Poe?

When does the explicit become seeable? Memoirs of the Blind? When does the line

50

remains for us on the basis of the basis. The base figure on the basis of which

figures and letters are separated out. The indeterminate “base” of paper, the

basis of the basis en abyme, when it is also surface, support, and substance,

material substratum, formless matter and for force in force, virtual or dynamic

power of virtuality—see how it appeals to an interminable genealogy of these

becoming a drawing? What about the parergon as a facsimile, as a frontispiece, as a

painting (Van Gogh) or a drawing (Adami), Restitutions and “Parergon” in The Truth of

Painting. Does the parergon include the paratext?

Graphic design and drawing. Pun as sound activated by visual. Dessein and dessin

Drawing Between the Eye and the Hand: (On Rousseau) Bernard

Vouilloux, Christine Cano and Peter Hallward Yale French Studies,

No. 84, Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994), pp. 175-197.

Martine Reid and Nigel P. Turner “Editor's Preface: Legible/Visible”

Yale French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994),

pp. 1-12

The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books

by Renée Riese Hubert, Judd D. Hubert

Louis Aragon The adventures of Telemachus. Lincoln : University of

translated and with an introduction by Renée Riese Hubert & Judd D. Hubert. Nebraska

Press, c1988.

51

http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?ix=kw&st=Renee+Riese+Hubert&Submit=Find&V=D&S=1411342819577269&I=4#top

great philosophemes. “Paper or Me, You Know . . . (New Speculations on a

Luxury of the Poor)” Paper Machine, 53.

Type Writer Ribbing of Derrida

I will contemplate about, and look [in mock Derridean

Renée Riese Hubert. Derrida, Dupin, Adami: "Il faut être plusieurs

pour écrire" Yale French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing &

Drawing (1994), pp. 242-264.

All Writing is Drawing: The Spatial Development of the Manuscript

Serge Tisseron Yale French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing &

Drawing (1994), pp. 29-42.

Jean-Gérard Lapacherie and Anna Lehmann Typographic Characters:

Tension Between Text and Drawing Yale French Studies, No. 84,

Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994), pp. 63-77.

Jacques Derrida and Mary Ann Caws Maddening the Subjectile Yale

French Studies, No. 84, Boundaries: Writing & Drawing (1994), pp.

154-171.

12 The Dictionnaire de la langue française by Émile Littré

52

fashion] for, his typewriter ribbons." And also for his computers and discs, and

even the hard drive. Now where are those ribbons, anyway? And what traces did

JD leave on them? Did he re-ink them? Or did he buy new ones each time?

As Derrida writes of Rousseau’s purloined ribbon, stolen and passed from hand

to hand turned typewriter ribbon,

a formidable writing machine, a ribbon of ink along which so many

signs transited so irresistibly, a skin on which or under which so

many words will have been printed, a phantasmatic body through

which waves of ink will have been made to flow. An affluence or

confluence of limited ink, to be sure, because a typewriter ribbon,

like a computer printer, has only a finite reserve of coloring

substance. The material potentiality of this ink remains modest,

that is true, but it capitalizes, virtually, for the sooner or later, an

impressive quantity of text: not only a great flux of liquid, good for

writing, but a growing flux at the rhythm of a capital—on a day

when speculation goes crazy in the capitals of the stock markets.

And when one makes ink flow, figuratively or not, one can also

figure that one causes to flow or lets flow all that which, by spilling

itself this way, can invade or fertilize some cloth or tissue and the

surface and ink of an immense bibliography . . . . The ribbon will

always shave been more or less a subject. It was always already

at the origin a material support, at once a subjectile on which one

writes and the piece of a machine thanks to which one will never

53

have done with inscribing: discourse upon discourse, exegesis on

top of exegesis, beginning with those of Rousseau. . . [Marion]

with or without annunciation . . . will have been fertilized with ink

through the ribbon of a terrible and tireless writing machine that is

now relayed, this floating sea of characters, by the apparently liquid

element of computer screens and from time to time by ink

cartridges for an Apple printer. (2001, 322-23)13

How comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the

only real Tissue, should have been overlooked by science—the vestural Tissue, namely,

of woole or other Cloth; which Man’s Soul wears as to its outermost wrappage and

overall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole faculties

at work, his whole Self lives, moves, has its being? 4

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford Classics) ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor.

Caryle makes the same move form tissue to cloth Derrida does.

Derrida says that de Man was going to call “Excuses (Confessions)" “The

"Purloined Ribbon," but Derrida does not state that that was the original title of de

Man’s essay when it was first published in Glyph.

Derrida resists glossing. Sur-vivance; no key words, no synonyms, no chain even, necessarily. “Driving” by car is one instance of many. Survivance.

13 For more on Derrida on the subjectile, see Paper Machine (2005)

54

This essay may not have been published. If it has been published, what is it that you are reading now? Is there a future anterior of the after the fact of publication, a future of infinite reading? Has one crossed the threshold of publication before one publishes, especially if one has been invited to contribute and the chances of rejection have been minimized? On you writing on the way to publication? Is it the criterion of selection? What one decides to delete but does not destroy, does not want to publish under one’s name, material one withholds in a manner that is the opposite of plagiarism? Is there an auto-recovery involved in published unpublished not reducible to genetic criticism? Is publication always a kind of privation or deprivation? Is publication a destination of writing, to be distinguished from the destinations of unpublished materials one might call priva--cations? Under what conditions can publication no longer be sidelined as merely a juridical, institutional, and bibliographical matter and must be addressed as a philosophical question?

Is there a “die-stination” for all publication given that , for Derrida, writing is inseparable from death?

The Post Card and Beyond. What are the limits of the book, what is the status of “and

beyond”? Beyond Finitude?

I will lay down cards and play a few hands. I have no trumps, no wild cards. I may not

be playing with a full deck. I just shuffle and reshuffle, like iTunes. I’ll take “mes”

chances.

The Post Card is not about publication—what is it about? Not a thematic reading.

Publcation is sufficiently internal and external to pose come questions, leave the reader

some callng cards, or “interjections d’apel”

Media addressed separately, as it were, in the “Envois.” Also separated by a lack of

translators notes and footnotes. There are none. And that distinction is complicated by

Derrida’s readings of Freud’s footnotes and of their completely useless—and himself

writes a completely useless one. And set adrift is already an operative metaphor in The

Post Card.

55

For you may consider them as calling cards, or “interjections d’apel.” Placing a call,

asking a question

Paper—not material versus virtual—Paper Machine; Echographies—reduction of media

to technology as machines versus as techne, as repletion.

Where does ash go in survivance? How does one read the ash in other than figurative

terms, in not in empirical terms either (Derrida’s typewriter ribbons). Cinders. Strictly

posthumous just happens to be about fire, yet it is not destroyed—destructibility and

divisibility of the letter, but also the name of the dead person. Death of letter writer/s in

“Envois.” Useless footnotes. Economy of the footnote and of reading the footnote.

Inattention and attention to the paratext. Letter as destructible versus the support.

The issue of publication comes up in problem of typographical error versus Freudian slip,

though Derrida just says slip, in “Du Tout.” So how to decide the limits of the

undecidable? What is the relation between error in general and destinerrance in general,

drifting and idling. The typographical error and destinerrance.

Both specific to The Post Card and beyond. What are the limits of reading the

heterogeneity of Derrida’s corpus? How does he deal with Lacan—not a model for

dealing with Derrida—he dedicated Artaud le MOMA to Paul Thevelin, who wrote part

of the Artaud book.

Memoirs of the Blind, 68

Derrida in “restitutions” is replying as if to Hegel’s preface to he phenomenology and the

complaint people make about reading philosophy. You have to read too much before you

can read. Preparation and reparation.

56

The beyond of this its actual existence hovers over the corpse of the vanished

independence of a real being, or the being of faith, merely as the exaltation of a stale gas,

or the vacuous Etre supreme. “Of Spirit,” Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A. V.

Miller, 358.

The aim by itself is a lifeless universal, just as the guiding tendency is a mere drive that

as yet lacks an actual existence; and the bare result is the corpse which has left the

guiding tendency behind it.

Preface, 2-3

This abnormal inhibition of thought is in large measure the course of complaints

regarding the unintelligibility of philosophical writings from individuals who otherwise

possess the educational requirements for understanding them. Here we see the reason

behind one particular complaint made so often against: that so much has to be read over

and over again before it can be understood—a complaint whose burden is presumed to be

quite outrageous and, if justified, to admit of no defense. . . . We learn by experience that

we mean something else something other than what we meant to mean, and this

correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and

understand it some other way.

Preface, 39

paraFreudian reading of networks and media, without rerouting them via Lacan’s return

to Freud and language and the unconscious. A more radical return, a return to what is

refound, etc. in relation to media, metaphor, and the parergon.

Point of Pascal is to set up a problem of involved in The Post Card—media, reading,

burning. The sidelining of history, of law, thee juridical and history both discourses in

57

need of deconstruction; ruin as always already, always “before”; the apprehension. Also

the book not as corpse. The “tissue” and “weave” mixed metaphors.

Screaming Driver, Screaming Driver's Wife: You're going the wrong

way! You're going to kill somebody! Planes, Trains &

Automobiles (1987)

Topics a problem of media and the subjectile. Cite passage in Derrida about the problem

of the subjective. Not empirical materiality as opposed to idealization of the

transcendental signifier, deconstructed in facteur. But does have a model of writing that

skips over publication, over relation between Memoirs of Blind and the event of the

exhibition that occasioned it. Ditto for Artaud le Moma. Not an error, not a mistake for

which Derrida should be punished. (See Memoirs of Blind). But his lecture versus

publication format could have been placed between slide show lecture and powerpoint.

Instead, he distributed handouts or Xerox copies. Impact does not include publication,

virtual or otherwise.

Finitude of archive and finitude of ink and typewriter ribbon.

Finitude of the archive.

Is the paper an absolute conservation and preservation, an archive without anarchivity?

Or is it pure expenditure, a sealing that keeps what it destroys, a kind unburned ash of he

archive? Where do the generations of repetitions fit in relation out the finitude of the

archive? The finitude of survivance? Why did Pascal have two pieces of parchment?

58

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093748/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093748/

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0888792/

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0596156/

Did Pascal copy it? Are both pieces of parchment written on? Or is one blank? Is one

the back up of the other? What happens to the referent before publication? Does

For Crusoe, reading is reanimating, implicitly on the side of life. Pascal—is reading on the side of life, can one read for life, is it reanimation? Generation of the repetitions to come—how would this securing of non-reading as the same thing as rereading work in relation to the archive and repetition and the death drive? Biological death sometimes matters to Derrida, as in “Du Tout,” dead name, dedications of sessions of east and the Sovreign to recently deceased friends, For the Love of Lacan after Lacan is dead, same for To DO Justice to Freud. Difference between revisiting (revenant) and reviving (seeing—would one read blind, as in Memoirs Derrida talks about driving as if blind? No clothing versus naked, but clothing of Pascal like the wallet Derrida discusses in Paper Machine.

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” he answered, laughing.” The

Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Oxford 19

The glance of reading (Lacan)—look at instead of look up—retinal reading. Derrida, “I

didn’t know where to start reading, looking , opening.” 209 Instead of WB’s essay made

up entirely of quotations, one would write an essay with a list of words not keyed to

anything, prior to any indexing. Glancing as somewhere between glossing and reading.

Having recalled this, and having taken this precaution as a matter of principle, I am not

doing what one ought to do and cannot do it with you in a seminar. I cannot do all that

again with you here for at least two reasons, as I was saying. The one has to do with the

obvious lack of time: it would take us years. The other, less obvious, is that I also believe

in the necessity, sometimes, in a seminar the work of which is not simply reading, in the

necessity, and even the fecundity, when I’m optimistic and confident, of a certain number

of leaps, certain new perspectives from a turn in the text, from a stretch of path that gives

you another view of the whole, like, for example, when you’re driving a car on a

59

mountain road, a hairpin or a turn, an abrupt and precipitous elevation suddenly gives you

in an instant a new perspective on the whole, or a large part of the itinerary or of what

orients, designs, or destines it. And here there intervene not only each person’s reading-

idioms, with their history, their way of driving (it goes without saying that each of my

choices and my perspectives depends broadly here, as I will never try to hide, on my

history, my previous work, my way of driving, driving on this read, on my drives, desires

and phantasms, even if I always try to make them both intelligible, shareable, convincing

and open to discussion) [here there intervene, not only each person’s reading-idioms,

with their history, their way of driving] in the mountains or on the flat, on dirt roads or on

highways, following this or that map, this or that route, but also the crossing, the decision

already taken and imposed by you by fiat as soon as it was proposed to you, to read a

given seminar by Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe, i.e., two discourses also on the way

and on the path which can multiply perspectives from which two vehicles can light up,

their headlights crossing, the overall cartography and the landscape in which we are

traveling and driving together, driving on all these paths interlaced, intercut, overloaded

with bridges, fords, no entries or one-way streets, etc.

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2, (2012) 206

Reading in Color: Kindle with and without color images.

Facsimiles in The Post Card as well. Description of it

“I didn’t know where to start reading, looking, opening.” PC, 209 when he gets the book

without the frontispiece and things he got the wrong book, then holds it again with both

60

hands and finds the right page with the image of Plato and Socrates and describes the

image, the blue and the red lettering—non-signifying patterns

"Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. 'No doubt you think that you are complimenting

me in comparing me to Dupin,' he observed. 'Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very

inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos

remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had

some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe

appeared to imagine.'" Study in Scarlet

Repetition—structure is not only about a sequence, first Queen, then Minister; first

Minister, then Dupin—but also about reversibility, from inside to outside, from outside in

(Invagination) or top to bottom or upside down.

Dupin’s signature in Facteur is not “Dupin,” it’s the citation from Astree, a note left

behind by which the Minister will know Dupin found it and found him out. But will the

minister ever read it? Will the facsimile arrive at its destination? Is Poe (and Derrida)

making an exception-due to different kinds of marking (support of the facsimile) and

re/marking (citation as signature), both of which are easily misrecognized or not

recognized at all? Will the Minister repeat Dupin’s recognition, or has Dupin duped

himself?

“Purloined Letter” cited in an endnote to Oxford Worlds Classics “Scandal in Bohemia.”

In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Ed Owen Dudley Edwards, 299, n4 It’s one of

A.C. Doyle’s sources.

Derrida forgets to mention Lacan’s “Overture to this Collection,” 3-5, which explains the

order of the Écrits as well as the first sentence of ‘The Seminar on ‘Purloined Letter’”

61

begins with the repetition compulsion, which Lacan idiosyncratically translates as

“repetition automatism.”14 “My research has led me to the realization that the repetition

automatism (Wiederholungszwang) has its basis in what I have called the insistence of

the signifying chain.” 6 The opening section of the essay ends at a page spacing by

returns to repetition compulsion. “This is what will confirm for us that it is repetition

automatism. P. 10

“This is what happens in repetition automatism.” 21

“The idea here is that one will already find in Lacan’s 1956 “Seminar on the ‘Purloined

Letter’” ideas that were not fully developed until the 1960s. Bruce Fink, 766, n (10, 5).

In other words, Lacan is not relineazing his collection , putting a master text at the “head”

of the book, but staging a reading as a rereading, a circular process “Exmplified” by this

text. This text doubles back on itself. Unlike most revisions, it includes the alternate

drafts. The first version brings over, placed and dated: Guitrancourt and Sans Cascinao,

mid-May to mid-August 1956 and then a new italicized subtitle represents the second

version tat followed “Presentation of the Suite” 30) followed by an identically italicized

subtitle “Introduction” on p. 33 which begins “The class of my seminar that I have

written up to the present here was given on April 26, 1955. It represents a moment in the

commentary that I devoted to Beyond the Pleasure Principle for the whole of that year.”

33 This section is undated in the text presumably because the edition in which it was

publishes establishes the date on the copyright page. . A final section is subtitled in

italics “Parenthesis of Parentheses (Added in 1966).” The last paragraphs constitute an

intellectual autobiography of the essay’s non-linear composition. 45-46. The endnotes

have been updated so that the default reference is to the 1966 edition. But Fink’s

14 SEE BRUCE FINKS’S ENDNOTE P. 767, (11, 3)

62

translation records the dates of footnote added later “[Added in 1968:] and even “[Added

in 1966].” Some endnotes offer more bibliographical information. The second to last

endnote reads: “[Added in 1966] The text written in 1955 resumes here. The introduction

of a structural approach through such exercises was, in fact, followed by important

developments in my teaching. Concepts related to subjectivization progressed hand-in-

hand with a reference to the analysis situs in which I claim the subjective progress.” 48,

n. 29. The break is not graphically consistent. The endnote occurs roughly four pages

before the essay ends. When Lacan talks why he “is publishing a version of it here,” both

the referent of “version” and “here” keep the published text in an unfinished state. When

Lacan writes about why he reworked the essay in accordance with the requirements of

writing” and “increasingly promoted the notion of the symbol here,” To obscure its

historical traits through a sort of historical feint would have seemed, I believe, artificial to

my students.” Lacan may make the “historical traits” apparent, but he does not make tem

clear, he does not follow the biobibliograhical conventions which would provide a clear,

progress narrative. Instead, the apparence of the essay’s historical traits” is inseparable

from the graphic appearance and variations in its paratexts, which apparently demands

recursive reading.

Compare “version” when used by Derrida.

The epigraph from Goethe’s Faust is kept in German, translated in the endnotes, 767

(11,2)

“Was Hiesst Lesen?”

“Was Hiesst Lesen?” Das Tragende (support for carrying, like a strecher) und Leitende

(Leader, Head) im Lesen ist die Sammlung. Worauf [What drives] sammelt sie? Auf die

63

Gescrhiebene, auf das in der Schrift Gesagte. Das eingenliche Lesen ist die Sammlung

auf das, was ohne unser Wissen einst shchon unser Wesen in den Anspruch genommenon

hast, moegen wir dabei ihm entsprechen oder versagen.

Ohne das eigenliche Lesen vermoegen wir auch nicht das uns Anblinkended zu sehe und

das Erscheinende und Scheinedne zu schauen.

“Was Hiesst Lesen?” in Denkerfahrungen, 1910-1974. Ed. Hermann Heidegger. Vittorio

Klostermann: Krankfurst am Main, 1983, 61.

Bruce Fink’s endnotes—a kind of glossary sensitive to the repetitions of Lacan’s terms

precedes the endnotes, which gloss a particular word.

Do these various bibliographic recursions constitute a structural repetition akin to the

structures of repetition that Lacan and Derrida debate and that differnitate them (the letter

is indivisblle, the triangle intersubjective, the letter is pre-graamatoligcal, and the letter

always arrives at its destination, versus the letter is always divisible (because material),

the letter is always already grammmatological, and the triangle is not intersubjective, and

the letter is subject to disinterrance such it does not always arrive at its destination? Does

Lacan particular staging of his argument have any relation to the way Derrida restages le

facteur de la verite by placing it at the end of The Post Card (inverting the place of the

Seminar?), including of an already published article to which Derrida appends to a “pre-

note” about his setting it adrift? Is this republication a new version of the essay? And

would be reading it mean making it a symptom, reading symptomatic? Is this a structure

yet to be read? Does it bear on the repetition compulsion? Is it a variation on compulsive

reading? Where does the deconstruction of a text’s parergon, its title and its borders

64

begin and end? What does Derrida do to reconfigure a text have to be re/configured for

Derrida to read it? Look at For the Love of Lacan. Says he is not standing outside the

text, but still in a scene of reading.

Yet derrida does not deconstruct his own reading and Lacan’s. He does not show how his

own reading repeats the kinds of msrecognitions he finds in Lacan, even if he does nto

calim to have “corrected,” as it were, Lacan’s reading.

Does orienting ourselves through page design nad paratextss, philogical and

bibliographical issues pt us on a path to such a deconstruction?

Must these questions beheld in suspense? Are they yet another aporia?

I propose to address these readings in a preliminary way by turn to For the Love of

Lacan, a passage in Le facteur in which Derrida unlocks his reading, and a passage in

Poe’s Purloined Letter regarding the facsimile. The facsimile in Poe is a particular kind

of copy, a particular kind of supplement. In Poe’s letter, it is a supplement. But Derrida

uses an actual facsimile of his signature, “J.D” several times in “Signature, Event,

Context.” Memoirs of the Blind, Artaud le Moma, The Sense of the Subjectile, Hantai,

Correspondence, Truth of Painting all make use of facsimiles. Bok on Derrida turning

his publications into facsmiles. Neither Lacan nor Derrida read the facsimile in Poe’s

story. Is it one kind of iteration among others, or does its particularity, a matter of verbal

description in Poe’s story, of course, make a difference to difference, the trace, arche-

writing, the impression, and so on?

Hand Delivered Reading

Derrida uses “internal reading” in Memoirs of the Blind

65

Read by juxtaposition of selections: My choice is information passage (about media) in

relation to sentence about the reading he has unlocked. To get at question of the support

and the facsimile.

“This question cannot but resound when we know we are caught in a scene of reading”

On the Name, 98.

I have already sufficiently formalized readability under erasure and the logic of the event

as graphematic event—notably as event of the proper name, in which the little devil

arrives only to erase itself / by erasing itself—to be spared having to add anything here

for the moment. Resistances, 48. Derrida does not provide a citation.

“Off the record” means not recorded, outside the archive. We are thus brought back to the

difficult question of the record, history, and the archive. Is there an “outside-the-

archive”? Impossible, but the impossible is deconstruction’s affair. At bottom, beneath

the question that I will call once again the remaining [restance] of the archive—which

does anything but remain in the sense of the permanent subsistence of a presence—

beneath this question of the differance or the distinerrance of there archive.

Thus, not with Lacan in general —who for me does not exist, and I never speak of a

philosopher or a corpus in general as it were a matter of a homogenous body: I did not

do so for Lacan any more than for any other. The discussion was begun rather with a

forceful, relatively coherent, and stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of the

collection and binding of Écrits, in other words, in 1966.

Resistances, 48-49

66

Now if there is one text that stands more than any other in this position and at this post of

binder [sic], it is the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” As you know, the “Seminar on

‘The Purloined Letter’” is given a “privilege,” which is Lacan’s word; I quote Lacan:

“the privilege of opening the sequence [the sequence of the Écrits] despite its

diacnhrony.”4 In other words, Écrits collects and binds together all the texts out of which

it is composed in chronological order (according to the “diachrony” of prior publication

with the exception of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” which, by coming at

beginning is thereby given the privilege of figuring the synchronic configuration of the

set and thus the binding the whole together. It therefore seemed legitimate to take a

privileged interest in this privilege. If I use the word binding here, the binding that holds

together the moment of reading and rereading, it is because of one of the two sole

occasions in my life on which I met Lacan and spoke briefly with him, he himself spoke

to me of binding and the binding of the Écrits. I am not telling these stories for the same

of amusement or the distraction of anecdotes, but because we are supposed to be talking

here about the encounter, tukhe, contingency—or not—and what binds, if you will the

signature of the event to the theorem.

Resistances, 49

Here Derrida stops reading the publishing history, the gap between 1975 and 1966, and

moves to an extra-discursive but somehow more immediate and therefore better

justification for what he did because Lacan personally, as it were, gave him permission.

He proceeds to tell the anecdotes about meeting Lacan over the next two and a half pages

before returning to “the republication of the paperback edition in 1970” (52). But

Derrida forgets that the Écrits publishes the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” in two

67

versions; the essay begins over. Seminar is not an isolated heading, a caption that binds;

it already subverts that function. Furthermore, Lacan cites Beyond the Pleasure

Principle and. Although Derrida reads some of Freud’s notes very closely, he does not

read the paratexts of the Écrits.

Instead, he reconfigures the configuration:

I link this and bind it once again to the binding of the great book. I go back then to the

period (the end of the 1960s, 1965, 1966-67) when Écrits was being bound under the sign

of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’”

Resistance of Psych, 53

Cite first sentence of Envois

First sentence of Envois

Cite unbearable

First page of envois

Have we begun at the beginning? Are we already reading too quickly?

Philology versus philosophy

Derrida on the bad reader, next page

Because I still like him, I can foresee the impatience of the bad reader: this is the way I

name or accuse the fearful reader, the reader in a hurry to be determined, decided upon

deciding (in order to annul in other words, to bring back to oneself, one has to wish to

know in advance what to expect, one wishes to expect what has happened, one wishes to

expect (oneself)). Now, it is bad, and know no other definition of the bad, it is bad to

predestine one’s reading, it is always bad to foretell. It is bad, reader, no longer to like

retracing’s one’s steps.

68

Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, 4

Yet he says he is not using bad in a moral sense but in a literary sense in Resistances.

Is glossing a form of extreme close reading, a line by line commentary? Is glossing not

reading insofar as it takes the text as a given, as complete.

The text entitled "The Purloined Letter" imprints / is imprinted in these effects of

indirection. I have only indicated the most conspicuous of these-effects in order to begin

to unlock their reading: the game of doubles, the endless divisibility, the textual

references from facsimile to facsimile, the framing of frames, the interminable

supplementarity of quotation marks, the insertion of "The Purloined Letter" in a

purloined letter that begins with it, throughout the narratives of narrative of "The Murders

in the Rue Morgue," the newspaper clippings of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" ("A

Sequel to 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' "). Above all else, the mise en abime of the

title: "The Purloined Letter" is the text, the text in a text (the purloined letter as a trilogy).

The title is the title of the text, it names the text, it names itself and thus includes itself

while pretending to name an object described in the text. "The Purloined Letter"

functions as a text that escapes all assignable destination and produces, or rather induces

by deducing itself, this inassignability at the exact moment in which it narrates the arrival

of a letter. It pretends to mean [vouloir-dire]and to make one think that "a letter always

arrives at its destination," authentic, intact, and undivided, at the moment and the place

where the simulation, as writing avant la lettre, leaves its path. In order to make another

leap to the side. At this very place, of course.

YFS, 110

69

Derrida’s unlocked reading—a series of equivalences, nested or translated, repeated, a

series? Is it serial repetition? What kind of structural reading is being unlocked here?

What difference, if any, does the substrate make to this structural reading? What kind of

formal materiality or radical empiricism, differs from history of the book and material

culture?

Obviously I am thinking of the omission of the frame, of the play of signatures, and

notably the parergonal effect; I cannot produce the demonstration I gave in 1975 of this

misrecognition. Resistances of Psych, 59

of a continuum composed each time of words or sentences, of signs missing from the

interior, if it can be put thus, of a card, a of a letter, or of a card-letter. For the totally

incinerated envois, could not be indicated any mark. I had thought first of preserving the

figures and the dates, in other words the places of the signature, but I gave it up. What

would this book have been like? Before all else I wanted, such was one of the

destinations of my labor, to make a book—in part for reasons that remain obscure and

always will, I believe, and in part for other reasons that I must silence. A book instead of

what? Or of whom?

PC, 4-5

The misrecognition of the failure to account of the literary structure of narration,

Cite Derrida, For the Love of Lacan, I do not think of Lacan as a homogenous body.

Same could be said for Derrida’s own works.

Derrida does not read line by line and provides his own directions for reading.

70

Nevertheless , we may ask where glossing ends and reading begins, whether glossary is a

kind of non-reading, a supplement that is continuous or discontinuous with the text (more

corridors in a labyrinth or the thread that takes one in and out of the labyrinth of the text

it is graphically marked off from?

Let’s start over. Let’s begin with the paratexts of the Post Card, the translation’s

introduction and glossary, entitled “L before K.” Is the glossary a kind of reading of the

Post Card, a reading that is also a non-linear reading but instead gives the reader a

network before rather than after the text? And where is that reading? Is the glossary

separate from the introduction, as it is in the table of contents where the glossary is

printed in the same font size as the introduction, or is it part of the introduction, in which

Glossary appears as a subheading, not the title at the head of a new page in the same size

as the font used for the Introduction, but in a smaller font on the same page of the

introduction? Consider Derrida’s reading of the small , barely noticeable but

nevertheless significant differences between title of Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour

(The Madness of the Day), reproduced in facsimile images of the table of contents and in

Parages. (Is John P. Leavey’s Glassary a reading of Derrida’s Glas? How does one gloss

these paratextual differences in a paratext not in Derrida’s French edition? How should

one gloss, how does one read the paratexts in Derrida’s text? Should we read the notes

that precede Speculations and “Le facteur “on facing pages the same way we read

Derrida’s preface? Are these unsigned notes written by Derrida? Consider Derrida’s

note to the translator in his extended footnote running across the bottom of each page of

71

“Living On: Borderlines?” And does glossing exclude the reprinting in a smaller font

and repagination as Living On,” dropping the subtitle?

Is glossing restricted to alphabetic lettering without regard to the support or substrate?

How should one account for the variation in the placement of notes in translations

Derrida’s works? Stanford University Press Notes precede each of the endnotes to the

three reprinted essays in Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Chicago UP favors putting them

before each essay (See The Truth in Painting). Are these to regarded as meaningless

vagaries of publication? Is Stanford’s more awkward in having to include references in

the text to the notes (See Headnote one)? Or should the so-called materiality of any

edition be read? Should the medium be read, the different stocks of paper for the printed

text and for the facsimiles in The Post card?

The pronoun “I” is used in the first, “we” and “I” are used in the second? And what are

we to make of “first version” or the “first version was initially published?” Should we

track down these different versions and catalogue their variations? In the second

endnote, the author, apparently Derrida, recommends we read two essays given at a

conference to which his paper responds? Should we read these notes differently from the

way we read Derrida’s autobiographical anecdotes about how he arrived at the title of his

work (Archive Fever, Typewriter Ribbon, Memoirs of the Blind, and so on? Derrida’s

own rereading of Envois and The Purloined Letter in For the Love of Lacan. Derrida

writes in “Restitutions,” And Shapiro [Meyer] quotes these two paragraphs which you all

find so ridiculous or so imprudent. Lets reread them first, in German, in French, and in

English.

72

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

--It’s done. (294)

Or two pages later,

In other words, would it not be on the basis of thing as work or product that is general

interpretation (or one that is claimed as general) of the thing as informed matter was

secretly constituted? Now reread the chapter. 296

Should one read such moments? Or are they to be gathered and shelved under the rubric

of Derrida’s rhetoric?

Does anything go missing between glossing and reading? In addition to what Derrida

calls “unreadability” in Living On: Borderlines?” is there also non reading, nto be

confused with not reading? And where would this nonreading be situated in relation to

reading and unreading?

--Do you think you need to start over again? What happened to passages from The Post

Card you cited at the beginning of your essay? Can you do what Derrida calls in various

places an “internal reading” of that book, even if the limits of that reading are artificially

and arbitrarily imposed, for the sake of clarity?

73

--Of course. One always “does” such readings. My purpose thus far is slow the speed of

such reading or what Derrida calls the rush in Memoirs of the Blind. My reading has thus

far been radically empiricist in ask a basic bibliographical question about The Post Card:

What is it? We have already put deconstructive pressure on reading, on its difference

form glossing and from nonreading. Let’s take a leap, then, and examine the title of my

essay, “What is Called Reading?” My question alludes to Martin Heidegger’s “What is

Called Thinking?” Derrida pairs Freud and Heidegger in The Post Card in order to

establish the end of an epoch. Derrida also mentions “the hermeneutical circle,” which

orients Heidegger’s orientation of thinking as questioning, without mentioning

Heidegger. (Derrida returns to it at length in Beast and the Sovereign Part Two). Derrida

obviously does not omit Heidegger, but he arguably does delivers a nonreading of him.

Focusing on repetition in Freud, on the repetition compulsion , on psychoanalysis as the

finding of the refound, Derrida forgets reception in Heidegger. The question of Being in

Being and Time is the repetition. Division Two is at points overtly a repetition of

Division One, and passages about Descartes and Kant appear in almost the same place in

both divisions. Moreover, the passage on the hermeneutical circle in division one is

repeated in division two. To the earlier questions about reading we may now ask what is

rereading? Following Heidegger’s move in Introduction to Metaphysics, in which he

sows that metaphysics is the question “What is metaphyics?,” not any particular answer

to that question, I want to suggest that re/reading Derrida and the texts he reads and does

not read, always happens at the threshold of the question waiting to be asked, namely

“what is called reading?” Derrida is not exemplary nor is he just an example. But he

does reward reading.

74

---OK. I’m beginning to get it. You want to stay with the text in a radically empirical

way, maybe a hyperglossative way, and, at the same time, you want to push close reading

to its limits—how close is close? How slow is slow? What is the proper speed of good

reading? Does good reading does not mean merely linear reading, word by word, page

by page, but a recursive return from later to earlier passages, scanning the book like a flip

book, indexing it, and random accessing it. And you want to push the, as Derrida

frequently does, the limits of writing and drawing (Memoirs of the blind) to the consider

the reprodocution of images in his works, including The Post Card but the way the

printing of some his texts begins to turn them into images (Living On, Glas, etc)?.

Mes Chances—reading by chance—I remembered a line when reading Foucault, then In

Love of Lcan by chance?

Reading not something that can be folded into a mise-en-abyme, or a parergon—reading

derrida reading. Or my autobiographical narrative. Quesiron about narrative. Can you

tell a story that is already about retelling?

Reading is the question awaiting and usually goes unasked—what is reading? Close?

How close? Slow? How so? What about random access reading scanning reading? Flip

book reading? Far reading? When is it no longer reading? What is the place of non-

reading? Reading is not about a theme, a frame, a master word.

75

First sentence

First page

First word same as the first page?

No Weg without Umweg: the detour does not overtake the road, but constitutes it, breaks

open the path. Pc, 284

Here I am asking question in the dark. PC, 278

Not to frame Derrida, not parergonalize him , not to shrink-wrap him, is to read sideways,

glancing from passage to another, a kind of comparative philology that freely associative

reading in that it has not predetermined limits about what constitutes writing in the

ordinary sense(as opposed to arche-writing, the mark, the trace). Not be spaced as in

Glas under two columns and two texts as in Borderlines, two running texts or in Jacques

Derrida (Bennington and Derrida), which licenses a kind of key words Derridabase

repackaging, reshelving, hack job, complete with photos from the family album.

As for the 52 signs, the 52 mute spaces, in question is a cipher that I had wanted to be

symbolic and secret—in a word a clever cryptogram, that is, a very naïve one, tat had

cost me long calculations. If I state now, and this is the truth, I swear, that have totally

forgotten the rule as well as the elements of such a calculation, as if I had thorn it into the

fire, I know in advance all the types of reaction that this will not fail to induce. 5

76

“Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? to what address?

Without any desire to surprise, and thereby to grab attention by means of obscurity, I owe

it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally that I do not know.” 5

(In the syntax of “X: A Critical Reader,” it will, moreover, always be difficult to

determine who is the reader of whom, who the subject, who the text, who the object, and

who offers what—or whom—to whom. What one would have to criticize in the oblique,

today, without doubt, is without doubt the geometrical figure, the compromise still made

with the primitiveness of the place, the line, the angle, the diagonal, and thus of the right

angle between the vertical and the horizontal. The oblique remains the choice of a

strategy that is till crude, obliged to ward off what is most urgent, a geometric calculus

for diverting as quickly as possible both the frontal approach and the straight line:

presumed to be the shortest path form one point to another.

Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” in On the Name, 13-14 [Kant is the

critical reader, see p. 8)

Jacque Derrida’s On the Name compromises three essays . . . the three essays appeared

in France as a Collection of three separately bound but matching books published by

Editions Galilee. On the Name, the title this book published by Stanford University Press,

thus is not a translation of any French book title by Jacques Derrida; it is a name given to

what is a hypothetical book in France. The title On the Name would in French be Sur le

nom.

Thomas dutoit, “Translating the Name?” in On the Name, (1995) ix

77

Not possible to bring these threads together into a htematic unity, under a signature,

attached to a single proper name.

“Biodegradables”—have not read me-vitriol at Spivack in Ghostlier Demarcations

Can deconstruction deliver? Oronly pomise?

[For the Lacan

Saying Lacan is right or doing right by Lacan . . . makes my text still more unreadable

for readers in a rush to decide between the “pro and the con,” in short, for those minds

who believed I was opposed to Lacan or showing him to be wrong. The question lies

elsewhere: it is the question of reason and the principle of reason. Thus, not only was I

not criticizing Lacan, but I was not even writing a sort of overseeing or objectifying

metadiscourse on Lacan or on a text by Lacan. My writing involved me in a scene, which

scene I was showing at the same time (no doubt inn small phrases (no doubt in small

phrases that no one reads) could not be closed or framed. All of this has since been

constantly put back into play other scenes of en abyme that have been deployed here and

there, more often there than here, which is to say, once again, abroad. Moreover, for all

these reasons, the argument of “Le facteur de la verite” does not lend itself to being

framed [the TN note on the French title awaits the reader of the PC, 413] in the text

bearing this title; it is played, set adrift in The Post Card, the book with that title, which

inscribes “Le facteur de la verite” like a piece in a borderless fiction, neither public nor

private, with and without a general narrator. It is inscribed first of all in the “Envois” 63

78

And above all the (duplicitous and identificatory) opening set off to the side, in the

direction of the (narrating-narrated) narrator, brings back one letter only to set another

adrift. The Post Card, Facteur, 492

This is why we have insisted on this key or theoretical safety lock of the Seminar 469

Therefore nothing begins. Only a drifting or disorientation from which it one does not

emerge 484

Derrida talks about the opening that Lacan does not read, 484

Hermeneut interested in the center of the picture 484

“invisible framing” 483

One cannot define the ‘hermeneutical circle’” Post Card, 474

It hears itself say what it cannot hear or understand.

MEETING PLACE:

THE DOULE SQUARE OF KINGS

But it cannot read the story it tells itself. 483

The double, repetition, recording, and the mimeme in general are excluded from the

system, along with the entire graphematic structure they imply” 472

“Unpublished Journal” 468

empirical versus unconscious letter, 467

empirical versus or transcendental, material or ideal signifier, 464; 466; 477-79.

The indivisible, singular, living, non-fragmentable integrity of the phallus” 477

Materiality, the sensory and repetitive side of the recording, the paper, drawings in ink

can be divided destroyed or set adrift” 472-73

79

That is, irreducible dis-regard, theft without return, destructibility, divisibility, the failure

to read a destination.

Only the ideality of a letter resists destructive division. “Cut a letter in small pieces, it

remains the letter it is” (S, p. 53): since this cannot be said of empirical materiality, it

must imply an ideality. . . . . If this ideality is not the content of meaning, it must be

either a certain ideality of the signifier (what is identifiable in its form to the extent that it

can be distinguished from its empirical events and re-editions), or the ‘point de caption’

464

Dessein—“design,” as in deliberate, intent-but also graphic design, even drawing.

Typographical marks as part of design. (Joyce, Restored Finnegans Wake—Derrida on

Joyce)

“What is a signature between quotation marks?” 495

It’s the graphology that Dupin depends on—“he knows my hand”—not the quotation

itself.

Hermeneutic deciphering 441

Derrida’s apparently useless footnote versus Freud’s “completely useless footnote,” p.

495 on a change made to the first edition that concludes: “The deletion of this phrase

(which is inconsequential) is the only modification of this essay since its first

publication.” Is the note completely useless? Or is there, on the next to last page of the

essay in order to contrast his account of Lacan to Lacan’s revisions and re-editing of the

Seminar? See Heidegger’s preface to the second edition of his book on Kant. Is the note

a symptom? Another open secret there to be deciphered? Doesn’t Derrida decipher

Dupin’s “signature” in the fac-simile? The “signature” is not a proper name; it is a

80

quotation, between quotations and placed in the middle of the blank (like the center at

which the hermenut looks)

Going from Derrida on Pascal—posthumous to cremation versus inhumation—to

cremation in PC to “For the Love of Lacan”—to Derrida’s own mocking self-

deconstruction of his account of Poe and Lacan’s, to publication and editions, paratexts—

to repetition and reading—to destruction—to dessein / design, to drawing, to icon, image

and writing support, to facsimile. Unrevealed contents of purloined letter; unnamed book

Dupin and narrator are both looking and that Poe, as Derrida, never makes clear whether

they find it.

“And they publish everything.” 132

signature, proof, 136

The post is a banking agency. 139

“’I just copied into the middle of the blank sheets these words’” Citation from Poe, 494

Is the middle like the hermenut’s center? Is the Minister a hermenut, like Lacan?

The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of

commentary upon the propositions just advanced. Citation from Poe, 487

And the voice retains [garde] all the more in that one believes one can retrain [garder] it

without external accessory, without paper, and without envelope. 465

. . . without quoting myself, 63

Lacan made a compulsive blunder: he has said that he thought I was in analysis (laughter

from the audience, the sentence replaced by an ellipsis in Ornicar, but too late because

the transcription had circulated; once again the problem of the archive, the archive that no

one can master; here no more than ever because of the recording technique. 67-68]

81

“dessein”—design, plan; subtracting a letter, “dessin” –drawing, cartoon, sketch and also

design (a pattern), grid, layout; “dessiner,” “to draw” ; to sketch; to trace;

there is no audible difference in the pronunciation of “dessein” and “dessin,” like “je

nous” and “genoux.” Closeness in spelling, allows for a pun, rather than two meanings

present in “design.” Poe uses “design” to mean “plan.” “Un dessin si funeste”

translated as “plot”

Relation between sight (pun) and sound--what you hear—noise versus silence (Prefect

says nothing after writing out the check in PL), in Purloined Letter.

Can one ever finish with obliqueness? The secret, if there is one, is not hidden at the

corner of an angle, it does not lay itself open to a double view or a squinting gaze. It

cannot be seen, quite simply. No more than a word. As soon as there are words--and this

is true of the trace in general, and of the chance that it is—direction intuition no longer

has any chance. One can reject, as we have done, the word “oblique”; one cannot deny

the disinterrant indirection [indirection distinerrante: see Derridas The Post Card . . . Tr.]

as soon as there is a trace. Or if you prefer, one can only deny it.

“Passions,” On the Name, Trans David Wood, Ed. Thomas Dutoit, 30

Green spectacles like the cover of he mystic writing pad, the protective sheet, in Poe, a

“cover.”

“When is a pun not a pun?” Finnegans Wake, cited by J.D. Poe writes the address in

French at the end of the first sentence of the Purloined Letter:

“au troisieme, No. 33. Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain.” 680

citation at the end:

82

“Un dessein si funeste, s'il nést digne d'Atrée est digne de Thyeste"

[Derrida says he doesn’t want to translate the German passage he cites at length from

Nietzsche at the end of “Speculations on ‘Freud’” p. 408-09:

but in sudden falls, if observed closely, the countermotion comes

visibly earlier than the sensation of pain. It would be bad for me if I had to wait

when making a misstep until the fact rings the bell of consciousness and a hint of

what to do is telegraphed back. Rather I discern as clearly as possible that first

comes the countermotion of the foot that prevents the fall, and then ...

“ . . . aber in plotzlichichen Faellen kommt, wenn man genau beobachtet, die

Gegenbewegung ersichtlic frueher als Schmerzzempfindung. Es stuende schlimm um

mich, wenn ich bei einem Fehltritt zu warten haette, bis das Faktum an die Gloeke des

Bewussteins schluege und ein Wink, was zu tun ist, zururcktelegraphiert wuerde.

Vielmehr unterschiede ich so deutlich als moeglich, das erst die Gegenbewugung des

Fusses, um den Fall zu verhueten, folget und dann . . .” This is to be continued.

Bass Notes

83

Alan Bass leaves many French words untranslated into English. There are no

translator’s notes to “Envois.”15

All this to be read in the Nachlass of the 80s, surrounding this sentence which I no longer

wish to translate” At the end he returns to the phrase “To is to be continued” (cites his

15 Poe Translations for "The Purloined Letter"

This story features a lot of French and Latin. Here are some translations and

explanations, listed by page number.155 Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio

Nothing is more odious to wisdom than guilefulnessau troisième....GermainThis is

a street addressthe affair of the Rue Morgue...murder of Marie RogêtPoe's earlier

dectective stories156 boudoira woman's bedroom, dressing room, or private sitting

room157 au faitaccording to precedent (literally, to the fact)158 gimlet-dustwaste

wood left by a hand drill161 Rochefoucauld, La Bougive, Machiavelli,

CampanellaThese are writers claiming human beings are motivated by self-

interest162 non distributio mediiThe Latin name for a logical fallacy--in English,

"the undistributed middle."The error is this: All fools are poets. The Minister is a

poet. Therefore, the Minister is a fool.Il y à parièr...grand nombreIt appears that

all popular ideas, all accepted conventions, are blunders because they have been

shaped to suit the greatest number [of people].ambitus...religio...homines homesti

Dupin's point is that the original Latin meanings of these words do not correspond

with their English derivatives. Ambitus meant soliciting votes,religio referred to

84

own “La séance continue” subtitle which is taken from Freud, who said when his

daughter died.

I did not wish to cite in passing 388

To be continued 337; 409; la séance continue, 320; 376

fasting or connecting, and homines honesti signifieddecent and respectable people.

166 facilis descensus Avernifrom Virgil's Aeneid: It is easy to do down into hell

[Avernus]monstrum horrenduma horrible monsterUn dessein si funeste...Thyeste

From Crébillon's play Atreus and Thyestes: If so lethal a plot is not worthy of

Atreus, it is worthy of Thyestes. [This refers to Greek mythology--see Course

Content for a summary of the story.]

Fold 236

If there is no such thing as a total or proper meaning, it is because the blank folds-over.

The fold is not an accident that happens to the blank. . . . The fold does not come upon it

from outside it; it is the blank’s outside as well as its inside, the complication according

to which the supplementary mark of the blank (the asemic spacing) applies itself to the

set of white things (the full semantic entities) plus to itself, the fold of the veil, or text

upon itself.

Dissemination, 258

I am rereading Beyond . . . with one hand (everything in it is marvelously hermetic,

which is to say postal and trailing [trainant]—a subterrean railway, but also lame, trailing

the leg behind: he tells us NOTHING, does not make a step that he does not take back at

85

The word transference reminds one of the unity of the metaphoric network, which is

precisely metaphor and transference (Uebertragung), a network of correspondences,

connections, switch points, traffic and a semantic postal, railway sorting without which

no transferential destination would be possible, in he strictly technical sense that Freud’s

psychoanalysis has sought to assign this word . . . . 383

the next step. 140-41

Nothing works [Rien ne marche], but everything goes very fast, absolutely fast, in which

this paralysis, which I know something about. 141

The post card or telethisthat, 113

And it will remain like that in a wallet 79

Run in circles, 63

When I have nothing to do in a public place, I photograph myself and with few

exceptions burn myself. 37

“repetition compulsion” is understood even less, 35

“you are dead” 33

Want to write a grand history, a large encyclopedia of the post and of the cipher, but to

write it ciphered still in order to dispatch it to you, taking all the precautions so that

forever you are the only on to be able to decrypt it (to write, then, and to sign), to

recognize your name, the unique name I have given you . . . 13

He was sure that his death would arrive in 1907. 241

86

Obeying a law of selective economy . . . as much as the rightful pleasure that I can give

myself tonight, I will limit myself to the following traits. 372

Zuruck, 362, 409

Autoteleguiding 356, 337

Correspondence, here, between to who, according to all appearances and all usual

criteria, never read each other, and even less encountered each other. Freud and

Obviously when beneath my public signature they read these words they will have won

out (over just what?) but . . . .238

Before my death I would give orders. If you aren’t there, my body is to be pulled out of

the lake and burned, my ashes are to be sent to you, the urn well protected (“fragile”) but

not registered, in order to tempt fate. This would be an envoi of / from me un envoi de

moi which no longer would come from me (or an envoi come from me, who would have

ordered it, but no longer an envoi of/from me, as you like). And then you would enjoy

mixing my ashes with what you eat (morning coffee, brioche, tea at 5 o’clock, etc.) After

a certain dose, you would start to go numb, to fall in love with yourself. I would watch

you slowly advance toward death . . . . 196

The computers, the powers, the dupins and their bi-spoolarity (fort/da), the States, this is

what I am assessing, or computing, what I am sorting out in order to defy all sorting out

[tris]. 194

Teckne does not happen to language or to the poem, 192

I am losing the track, I no longer know to whom I am speaking, nor about what. The

difficulty I would have about in sorting out this courier with the aim of publication is due,

among other perils, to this one: you know that I do not believe in propriety, property, but

above all in the form it takes according to the opposition public / private (p/p, so be it).

87

Heidegger, Heidegger and Freud. . . . They could not read each other—therefore they

have spent all their time and exhausted their forces in doing so. 357

How has such a hypothesis, under its rubric as hypothesis, I am insisting on this, been

granted in this third chapter? I am supposing it reread. 339

Empirico-biographical, 328

185

And I say ardently that I, let me, die. Or ardently, that this book is, let this book be,

behind me. 198

I am rereading, sometimes sinking into tour immense memory, sometimes with the

meticulous attention of he philologist. 200

I have more and more difficulty writing you. 200

The dos, 201

You were already dead ten times, 201

With Socrates, with my posthumous analyst of with you, for example, okay this is even

what I say all the time. 201-02

Account of the professor and student lecture photograph, 202—we get no photo, just as

didn’t get the photos of Freud and of Heidegger, each posing with his wife.

The fortune teller book reproductions are matched to account 211

Color reproduction socartes, in black and white on he cover and in the end paper, is on p.

251.

Everything would be destroyed 253

But the support itself, which I wanted to deliver naked, we will also burn. 252

I notice that in speaking of readers with you, I always call them people 253

88

(This entire syntax is made possible by the graphics of the margin or hyphen, or the

border and the step, such as remarked elsewhere. I will exploit it here.] 317

Freud’s Legacy, the title mentioned in envois, is the title of section 2, and the chapter

opens with a comment about “The title of this chapter is a deliberately corrupt citation,

which doubtless will have been recognized. The expression “Freud’s legacy [legs de

That I burned the baby doll instead of taking it out on her. 252

Holocaust, 254

Another S.P., agreed . . . , but I would put my hand into the fire, it’s really the only one.

For the rest, they will understand nothing of my clinamen, even if they are sure of

everything, especially in that case, the worst one. Especially there where I speak, they

will see only fire. On this subject, you know that Freud’s Sophie was cremated. 255

Each of them to the other; you were in league to have me destroyed, you conspired, you

have covered al the trails, get out of it yourself. 244

Ophelia 254

Aporia 255

Proof, 255

Tomorrow I will write you again, in our foreign language. I won’t retain a word of it and

n September, without my even having seen you again, you will burn

You will burn it, you, it has to be

you. 256

But when the syngram has been published, he will no longer have anything to do with it,

or with anyone—completely elsewhere-- the literary post will forward it by itself q.e.d.

This has given me the wish, envie (that is indeed the word) to publish under my name

89

Freud] is often encountered in the writings of Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Grandoo.

Naturally I leave the reader as judge of what is going on in this corruption.

The next paragraph:

This chapter was originally published in the number of Etudes freudiennes devoted to

Nicholas Abraham. I had then prefaced it with this note: 292

things that are inconceivable, and above all unlivable, for me, thus abusing the “editorial”

credit that I have been laboriously accumulating for years the to publish under my name

things that are inconceivable with this sole aim in mind. 235

Prove it 235

Cable burial 236

Not to know how to burn 236

I read, 236

They can no longer read anything except the peforation (B A, B A, O A, OA, Ri, R I

).

Burned to a white heat, 239

When beneath my public signature they read these words 238

I now have the book on my table. I am rereading it.

So much for the fire 244

The end of the world by fire 245

After the fire 245

You’re right, I love you is not to be published. I should not shout it from the rooftops.

246

90

This is what has encouraged me to publish this fragment here. Those who wish to delimit

its import can consider it a reading of the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure

Principle. 292

The last sentence of the note is “Other fragments of the same seminar will appear soon in

book form.” 293

But I tell you again. Am keeping only a very brief sequence of our film, and only of the

film, a copy, a copy of a copy, the thin black roll, hardly a veil. 246

But even though they cannot bear is what you know: that jogging is infinitely preferable

to writing for publication: it never goes very far, it comes back in a close circuit, it plays

like a child in its playpen: that jogging and writing for publication for me only a training

with you in mind. 247

And knowing that I have understood nothing, that I will die without have [sic] understood

anything. 247

Chemin, Weg, 247

A rebours, 247

You would not have liked it if I had collected your letters. 249

Not that I’m thinking about the fire 250

If I this, people are going to believe that I am inventing it for my compositional needs.

253

Between the preface and the three others, the phone calls will buzz like wasps in full

transference. 239

If not by the end, and as they never read . . . Too bad. 240

We will no longer be able to 239 write each other, we will be too late.

91

This fact will be contested by those whose truth is hidden by these themes, who are all

too happy to find in them corroboration for their truth on the basis of what they call

“hermeneutics.”

(A healthy reform of spelling would allow us to give their exploitation of this term the

import of a famillionaire practice: that of the faux-filosopher, for example, or the

fuzzyosphy, without adding any more does or I’s.)

As if it had an incipit, I am, then, opening this book. It was our agreement that I began it

at the moment of the third ring.n1 p259

Let one refer to any of the aforementioned judgments—the impossibility of a resting

point pulls the textual performance along into a singular thing.

I have abused this word, it hardly satisfies me. Drifting designates too continuous a

movement, or rather too undifferentiated, too homogenous a movement that appears to

travel away without saccade from a supposed origin, from a shore, a border, a coast with

an invisible outlne.261

Those who remain will not know how to read, 249

Read this. It’s falling into place, 206

They cannot write to each right on the thing, right on the support, they cannot accumulate

by writing to each on the subject of accumulation. 207 Derrida is speaking of stamp

collectors.

The variety of the pub. In general. 233

In order to reassure themselves they say: deconstruction does not destroy

I’m not inventing anything 233

By virtue of you, I intrigue. Sending nothing to anyone, not anyone, I am fomenting a

resurrection. Had you finally encountered him, Elijah? You were right nearby, you were

92

Their radical vice can be seen in [their approach to] the transmission of knowledge.

--Jacques Lacan, “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question,” Écrits, 193

I will do nothing for the reader henceforth—apart from pointing out, a little further on,

the aim of my Seminar—but trust in his tete-a-tete with texts that are certainly no easier,

but that are intrinsically suitable.

--Jacques Lacan, “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question,” Écrits, 189

burning. I had put you on the track and if because I love them too much I am not

publishing your letter (which by all rights belongs to me). I will be accused of erasing

you, or stifling you, or of keeping you silent. If I do publish them, they will accuse me of

appropriating you for myself, of stealing of keeping the initiative, of exploiting the body

of a woman, always the pimp, right? Ah Bettina, my love

And it

Will be even worse if I publish your letters under my name, signing in your place. Listen,

Bettina, I will restore everything to you. 230-31

We were dead, 231

I am putting on these passages to be kept, I mean to be thrown outside the fire, I am

checking them off before transcribing, again going through the alleys of the cemetery in

order to pick out epitaphs. 229

I no longer know what I am doing, and how I am “scratching,” If I am easing or writing

and hwat I am “saving.” 229

Melina, K. 226

Who will prove, 234

And if you now asked me to burn the book .. . I would do it in a second. 228

I’m rereading my Legacy, what a tangle. 248

93

(Here, I interrupt this development, If one is willing to read its consequences, including

its appendix in Facteur de la verite, one will perceive . . . 335

To which he forcibly adapts his designs, 689

Completely useless 367

Deciphers it far afar like a teleguided reading device

Socrates “is taking notes for having in mind a project of publication in modern times. He

is pretending to write but he has a small pocket tape recorder under his mantle. 218-19

Believe I am making it up, 217

Refound here the American student with whom we had coffee last Saturday, the one who

was looking for a thesis subject (comparative literature), I suggested to her something on

the telephone in literature of the 20th century (and beyond), starting with, for example, the

telephone lady in Proust or the figure of the American operator, and then asking the

question of the effects of the most advanced telematics on whatever would still remain of

literature. I spoke to her about microprocessors and computer terminals, she seemed

somewhat disgusted. She told me that she loved still literature (me too, I answered her,

mais si, mais si). Curious to know what she understood by this. 204

“Burn everything . . . publish everything” ( ; 132)

(in the same way, the “log” that runs at the bottom of the pages of Derrida’s Parages is

not, despite its position, a local note but is clearly an appendage to the text as a whole).

Genette, Paratexts, 336

Thus some delayed prefaces illustrate a variety we call the posthumous preface—

posthumous to its publication, endless to say: for the paratext as for the text itself, this is

the standard meaning of that adjective, short of a resort to séances. But in contrast to the

94

Besides, in our case, we were obliged to proceed without noise” 685 [like D—going

blind, only on audio for Dupin.

Holding up his closed hand, 689

Vacant stares 688

Its susceptibility to being produced?” I said.

text, a preface—if it is allographic – may be a posthumous production . . .

Genette, Paratexts, 175

Structure itself, the formal structure yields itself to reading, Post Card, 321

Dupes (duplicates, dummies)

Reengage materiality and so called book history in relation to the support, formal

materiality, figures.

By the aid of a most powerful microscope. Had there been any traces of recent

disturbance we should not have failed to detect it instantly.

Is the facsimile one kind of duplicate among others? Is it an exact copy of the inexact

copy Dpupin discovers D—has hidden? Or its fold up? Unfolded—unlike Pascal, whose

text is deleiver, but equallyunredable.

"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in

search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the

Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the

D-- cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S-- family. Here, the

address, to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a

certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of

95

That is to say, of being destroyed, said Dupin. [When do Derirda’s “Tropics” become

designs, drawings, writing bordering on drawing?

The Prefect . . . finally filled up and signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed

across the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and deposited in his pocket-

book; then, unlocking an escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect.

correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the

dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical

habits of D--, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the

worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of

this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the

conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly

corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect.

"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a most animated

discussion with the Minister, on a topic which I knew well had never failed to interest

and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I

committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell,

at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have

entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed

than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when

a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed

direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery

was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-

96

No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in

search. . . . But the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive 696

You will remember, perhaps, ho desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested, upon

our first interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account

of its being so very self-evident.” 696

681

directed, and re-sealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and took my departure at once,

leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table.

"The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite eagerly, the

conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a

pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a

series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. D-- rushed to a casement, threw it

open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in

my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals,) which I had

carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D-- cipher, very readily, by means of a

seal formed of bread.

"But what purpose had you," I asked, in replacing the letter by a fac-simile? Would it not

have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly, and departed?"

Edgar Allen Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (1845). In Edgar Allen Poe: Poetry and Tales.

Ed. Patrick F. Quinn, Library of America, 1984, 696-97.

Everything I have to say about The Post Card—and beyond--will necessarily be

either prolegomonal or paralipomenal--dupe

97

Ful of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pari of green spectacles. . To be even with

him [why even? Odd? ], I complained of my weak eyes [versus D’s “lynx-eyed”] and

emanated the necessity of the spectacles, under cover [under cover as in detective, but

also like a piece of paper—his glances, his eye movements, his reading al have be

concealed by the “shades” Dupin wears] I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the

apartment, while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host. [Dupin goes on

I have cited it elsewhere, but once more I reread the declaration of avoidance which

performs the inevitable, 263

Footnote 268

Detour 269

Small footnote in the Letter to d’Alembert invokes the devil “in person, so to speak, and

his apparition under the guise of the phantom of his double . . . 270

Here is the footnote I take as the exergue to my discourse 270

Then we must begin, at least, by pointing out in the hastily named “internal” reading the

places that are

Here I break off these preliminary remarks 272 (started on p.259)

open to intersecting with other networks 273

Here, it seems to me, we must pay the greatest attention to Freud’s rhetoric. 279

Freud specifies between dashes 29

See elsewhere

I believe that it is better to erase all the pictures, all the other cards, the photos, the

initials, the drawings, etc. The Oxford card is sufficient for everything. It has the

iconographic power that one can expect in order to read or to have read the whole history,

98

audio only-he is blind, but somehow he is still readable as a listener. He is actually deaf

—or has the mute button on.

Upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it

to good purpose; I paid especial attention to a large writing-table near which he sat . . .

By being too shallow or to deep, for the matter in hand; [on hand and in hand] 689

between us, the punctuated sequence of two years, from Oxford to Oxford, via two

centuries or two millennia . . . 204

It’s a photograph by Erich Salomon. 205

Soetimes I wish that everything remain illegible for them—and also for you. To become

absolutely unknowable for them. 205

Read this. It’s falling into place 206

Those that remain will not know how to read, they will go crazy. 249

When someone gives the order to fire, and to give the order is already to fire, everyone

goes to it. 248

More or less, 248

I have just received the slide in color. 250

I remember only the celluloid baby doll that was aflame in two seconds 253

Nor it’s the project of “partial publication” that has become insupportable for me, not so

much because of the publication—they will only be blinded by it--, as because the minute

cross-section to which all of this should, for my part, give rise. I see him as a perverse

copyist, seated for days in front of a correspondence, two years of voluble

correspondence, busy transcribing a given passage, scratching out a given other one in

order to prepare it for the fire, and he spends hours of knowledgeable philology sorting

99

It was nearly in two, across the middle—as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it out

as worthless had been altered, or stayed, in the second. [first, second] It had a very large

seal, bearing the D-cipher very conspicuously . . . 695

He hard foreseen all of this 693

When you have signed it, will hand you the letter. 688

Opened it with a trembling hand 688

out what derives fro this or that, in order to deliver nothing to publicity, absolute nothing

that might be proper (private, secret) in order to profane nothing, if that is possible. 182

Anything everything 183

Foreign language 183

Actual legality has no jurisprudence here, and even if you don’t want to give htem back I

could reinvent them. I will retain only whatever may be combined as a preface to the

three other texts (Legs de, Le facteur de la verite, Du tout). The ensemble will be seen as

a combine, an emitting-receiving device: nothing will be seen in it, only calls, or wires, in

every sense will be heard, that which reads the post card and which first will have been

read by it. Socrates reading Socrates. 180

Destroyed 181

Dead letter 181

Lots of tropes will be necessary. There will be several books in this book. I count four,

we will read it as our Tropics. 178

I am readin ghte check that he is in the ocurse of signing. 178

Of turning the back of the post card, 178

100

Producing a memorandum-book, proceeded to read aloud a minute account of the

internal, and especially of the external appearance of the missing document. 686-87

I made the re-examination” 687

Poe engages forensics as a kind of bibliometrics:

You looked among D----‘s papers, of course, and into the books of the library? We

opened every package and every parcel; we nervously opened every book, but we turned

I am reflecting upon a rather rigorous principle of destruction. What will we burn, what

will we keep (in order to broil it better still)? The selection (tri) , if it is possible, with in

truth be postal: I would cut out, in order to deliver it, everything that derives form the

Postal Principle . . . . And we burn the rest. Everything that from near or far touches on

the post card (this one, in which one sees Socrates reading us, or writing all the others

and every post card in general), all of this we would keep, or finally doom to loss by

publishing it . . . 176

First faux metapassage:

The rest, if there is any that remains, is us, is for us, who do not belong to the card. We

are the post card, if you will, and as such, accountable, but they will seek in vain, they

will never find us in it. In several places, I will leave all kinds of references, names of

persons and places, authentifiable dates, identifiable events, they will rush in with eyes

closed, finally believing to be there and find us there when by means of a switch point I

will send them elsewhere if we are there, with a stroke of the pen or the grattoir. I will

make everything derail, not at every instant, that would be too convenient, but

occasionally and according to a rule that I will not ever give, even were I to know it one

day. I would not work too hard on composing the thing, it is a scrap copy of scrapped

paths that I leave in their hands. Certain people will take it into their mouths, in order tor

101

over every lead in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to

the fashion of some police officers. We also measured the thickness of Every book-cover

, 686

Also storage metrics:

We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained

police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. 684

recognize the taste, occasionally in order to reject it immediately with a grimace, or in

order to bite, or to swallow, in in order to conceive, even, I mean a child 177

This is literature without literature. 197

Of love letters. The ones I have reread running in the street and I scream with pain like a

madman, they are the most beautiful that I have ever read, the first have ever been written

but also, I must tell you, the last. You were not only predestined for me, you were

predestined to write the last love letters. Afterward, they no longer will be able to, nor

will I, and this conceive a bit of pain for you. Not only because your love takes on a

somewhat eschatological and twilight tinge from this, but because, no longer knowing

how to write “love-letters,” they will never read you. 197-98

Story about Lacan thinking Derrida was “inanalysis” [sic] or that J.D. was. 202-03.

The old man who remains the last to read himself. 199

I can’t go on. I’m going to run. Spent hours rereading. I’m trying to ort [trier], it’s

impossible. I cant even reread any more. 199

I also thought that upon reading this sorted mail [courier trie] they could think that I alone

am sending these letters to myself: as soon as they are sent off they get to me 199

Second faux metapassage:

102

After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in the drawer, she was forced to place it,

open as it was, upon a table. 682

From giving him reason to suspect our design. 683

I have keys which can open any chamber of any cabinet in Paris. 683

Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain, said Dupin. 681

Especial form, 692

In the train, without telling him the essential, I recounted a bit of the project for a

“fiction”: a kind of false preface, once again, which, while parodying epistolary or

detective literature (from the Philosophical Letters to the Portuguese nun, form the

Liaisons dangereuses to Milena) would also obliquely introduce my speculations on

Freudian speculation. The entire book, according astrologies of post cards, would initiate

into speculation via the reading of Sp. Finally, that is all there would be, everything come

back and amount to the patient, interminable, serious and playful, direct or detoured,

lieral or figurative description of the Oxford card. 179

Derrida says in Rsitance of Psyhcoanlaysis tha the word “oblique” chose him

Postal principle. 176, 191

Iconography 172

Too obvious 172

Strange that this is happening to me at the same time as the glases—the problem with

close reading has accelerated sddenly. 170

Our only chance for survival now, but in what sense, would be to burn everything, in

order to ocome back to ur intial desir. Whatever “survival” it might be a quesiotn of, this

is our only chance, I mean common chance. I want to start over. Shall we brun

everything? That’s this morning’s idea, when you come back I’ll talk to you about it—as

103

Microscopes, 693

Eyes, 693

Escaped observation by dint of being excessively obvious 694

“re-directed and re-sealed”

I just copied” 698

“opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close juxtaposition to the other. 682

technically as possible. 171

Sublime nothingness, you know it preserves everything. The “correspondence” will be

destroyed better if we pretend to have several laughable fragments of it, several snapshots

good enough to put into everyone’s hands. 171

Car carsh 171

Whether it is a question of readers, which I do not like 168

One more citation for you, and I’ll stop reading, 166

Of us there wil never be a narrative. 167

Double signature, 18

What I read in my date book for the next two days, I invent nothing 167

He decheminates them 165

I know that

We would have closed all the borders on our secret. 186

I am going to die soon 164

Perhaps even to find and read, 181

I adore her, but like the others she thinks she knows what the post, in the usual, literal or

strict sense, “means”; she is sure that the exchange around the purloined letter does not

concern the “efficiency of the postal service.” Mais si, mais si—it is not sure that the

104

This cannot be done openly. 683

Policial eyes, 691

Suggestive of a design to delude the beholder 696 (Henry James—“design in the carpet”)

“And what, after all, is the matter on hand?” I asked. 681

from employing it as he must design in the end to employ it. 681

“Be a little more explicit,” I said. 681

sense of the p.s. (postal service) is itself assured of arriving at its destination, nor is the

word to post (poster). Are you sure, my love, of really understanding what this poster

means? It doubles, passes all the time 162

You know every well I refuse myself nothing-through all the chicaneries I authorize

myself everything. I send myself everything—on the condition that you let me do it 163

Chemin, 179

As if they knew about it for having read it. 197

Noting is burned in The Post Card, yet is everything published? Decipherable and

indecipherable, open and concealed.Is it naïve to ask “What is The Post Card about?”

The back cover of the English translation strongly implies that it is about post cards. This

is what paratexts do: they give you basic information that orients your reading, helps you

decide whether or not you want to read. Why would anyone bother to ask what The Post

Card is about, then? Isn’t the answer implied by the title? Isn’t the answer self-evident?

Doesn’t Derrida refer in the book to the “ontology of the post card,” a “postal structure,”

a “postal principle”? Before we consider that Derrida also asks and does not answer or

get an answer to questions he poses about the difference between a letter and a post card,

a dead letter and a dead parcel? let us pause for a moment and “read” the back cover, on

which we are invited to turn to “the other side of the card” and “look.” Before the

105

When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations. 688

The story is essentially over less than half way through the Purloined Letter. The letter is

already recovered—ended, the entire first half is already “protracted’ because Dupin

could simply have said to the Prefect. I have what you’re looking for. That’ll be 50k.

Here is my checkbook. Story over. SO it comes as a chock tht he already has the letter

when he has seemed not to even know what the case was about.

copywriter, who turns out to be Derrida, equates the post card and the book--“the thick

support of the card, a book heavy and light”—, he asks, in Heideggerian fashion: “What

does a postcard want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible?” On the back

cover, the book’s title has already been cited and not cited, incorporated as words into a

question presumably raised “in” the book. How far should our “reading” of the back

cover go? Does it matter that the initially anonymous back cover description is “signed”

J.D. at the bottom right, the same initials he signs in “Signature, event, Context.” Let us

continue to read the back cover, read it as a text that may be skipped over, one of many

paratexts such as the copyright page all readers tend to skip over. Before we fold the title

of The Post Card into a thematic reading of the book, before we can say what the book is

“really” about, perhaps something than the post card but just as homogenous, before we

can say or what we, or “you” as the reader is addressed, “were reading” (first words of

the back cover, [Derrida often comments on reading the back of the post card]), before

we read “the book,” before we, again, “you,” “situate the subject of the book,” we may

ask a more fundamental and perhaps seemingly even more bizarre question, an

ontological question, namely, “what is The Post Card? Before any we offer any thematic

or allegorical reading of The Post Card, then, Conditions of publication. Burn everything

/ publish everything. This means not only reading everything, including the paratext, but

106

The rest of the story is explanation, but most of it does not explain. The story really picks

up and finishes only in the last three pages.

So in addition to excessiveness making the copy recognizable, Dupin’s detection involves

a doubly protracted narrative.

The question is all about whether the Minister will read Dupin’s card and recognize the

handwriting. But there is also a question about whether the Prefect ever gets the letter

to ask when variations in edtions become part of the paratexutal apparatus, when book

covers, footnotes, glossaries, table of contents, the organization of chapters, some

previously published or perhaps delivered as lectures, and editions and translations

become notable, as it were, or what I call “anecnotable.”? It is to get at the conditions of

reading, unreading, and non-reading. The heterogeneity of the corpus is also at issue,

even within the original language, translations aside.

I offer a number of new questions, then, in the hope that they are what Heidegger

would call the “right questions.” When is a letter not a dead letter? My questions arise

from close formal attention to The post Card but also call into question the limits of what

Derrida often calls an “internal reading” of a text.

Conditions of publication engage repetition and reproduction, the latter in its

“iconomy,” the different economy a facsimile has from description. Republication of

Lacan, note by Derrida. Note by Bass. Re-publication of part of The Post Card.

Recursive ordering of the text through the envois, itself precursive-works cited later after

first mentioned; and you are reading something written before and after the rest of the

book was written. It never becomes the preface to legs.

Confessional metapassages—that give the reader no Archidemean interpretive

leverage but do seem accurately descriptive.

107

back to the Queen. Might D--- have not intercepted the Prefect? We never have evidence

that the Queen gets it back.

Rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out. 697

He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investigation of his premises. . .

I regarded only as ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police 693

“aims of publication”

In a posthumous fragment by our friends (one must also speak of Nietzsche’s

chance), after insisted on the Socratic origins of the novel, he “turns himself back” again

toward Socrates . . . “ 161

The survival of a book is in the hands of a scribe, whose fingers might tire (or concern

themselves with something else), but also depends upon insects and the rain) [sic].? 161

Before getting to the point of reading any given Fortune-telling book of the 13th

century, the bearer of S and p, never forget that there is something tor recount, to discern,

something to tell, to be told, on the “fortune” of the book, of the chances it was able to

get to us intact, for example to fall into my hands one day in 1977, the remainder

remaining to follow . . .

It is always a question of setting (something) on its way / voice [voix], and alley oop, by

pressing on a well-placed lever, to compel unplugging, derailing, hanging up, playing

with the switch points and sending off elsewhere, setting it off route (go to see elsewhere,

if I am there: and someone is always found there, to carry on, to take the thread of the

story (you follow).

108

First, by default of this identification, and secondly, by ill-admeasurement [first . .

second] 690

from whom especially it was her wish to conceal it. 682

“A little too self-evident. 681

An imaginary individual 687

“in the dark,” 680 (repeated on p. 680; “under cover” of the green spectacles?)

Thorough identification 689

“now they have to be destroyed,” 233

The bad reader in Derrida pc, 4

Typo and name 364

Facteur, 360

Paragon and autobiography, 303

In this great omission, Freud forgets Socrates 374

Economy of reading Freud’s footnotes in BPP

This is the object of a note which is not only the longest in the book, but also much

longer than the passage it annotates. . . . The note then follows, more than twice as long

as the citation from the Symposium. 374; 374

Reading Burns Repetition, Reproduction,

Do You Read Me?

109

I am going right to the end of this chapter, toward the site of this first pause where . .

Freud finally concludes278, 320,

Freud drops it . . like the note at the bottom of the page which punctuates the end of this

act 368

And with this word a call for something. A call for a footnote that I will read presently.

313

Derrida announces and delays reading of Freud’s two footnotes (This is how we fall on

the first of two footnotes 318) delays getting to the second on p. 320, “Let us pause after

this first footnote, 320, mentions the second note on 325 This is the sentence that calls for

a note on Sophie’s Death. Before translating this paragraph on the two negative

functions of the PP, note included, I am extracting a notation from the preceding

paragraph, I have extracted it only because it did appear dissociable to me, like a parasite

from its immediate context. Perhaps it is best read as an epigraph of for what is to

follow. In the preceding paragraph it resonates . . . 325-26 calls up the second note only

to defer analysis of it “Call for a note on Sophie’s death. Before coming to it, I

emphasize the certainty . . . , last two sentences at the bottom of 326, and then on the

middle 327 “Here, finally, is the second note” 327

But a certain reading of his text, the one I am attempting here, cannot fail to come across

its work. PC 277

Freud torso, 265

I have cited it elsewhere 263

262, n6, by translator “An allusion to Freud and the Scene of Writing

110

Comparative philology—return to philology for de Man, who considered himself a

philologist?

Old dream of cinema, 68; repeated in Paper Machine

I am teaching you pleasure , I am telling you the limit and the paradoxes of the apeiron,

and everything begins like the post card, with reproduction. Sophie and her followers,

Ernest, Heinele, myself and company dictate to Freud who dictates to Plato, who dictates

to Socrates who himself, reading the last one (for it is you who reads me, you see him

here on his card I the place where he is scratching, it is for him that is written the very

thing that he is going to sign) again will have forwarded. Postmark on the stamp,

obliteration, no one any longer heard distinctly, all rights reserved, law is the rule, but

you can always run after the addressee as well as the sender. Run in circles, but I

promise you that you will have to run faster and faster. At a speed out of proportion to

these old networks, or in nay any event to their images. Finished the post, or finally this

one, this epoch of the destinal and of the envoi . . . 63

And to “recount” it has always seemed impossible to me , pc, 167

They intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme. 232

Holocaust 232

Autobiographical story about a telephone call, 230, like the story he tells at the end of

Given Time: Counterfeit Money.

111

Van Gogh’s shoelaces as signature (drawing, painting as writing).

Reread the little one’s letters. 255

There would only be “facteurs,” and therefore no verite. Only “media,” take this into

account in every war against the media. The immediate will never be substituted for

them, only other frameworks and other forces. 194

A datem for example, when sending a message [a l’evoi d’un pli] is never perceivable,

one never sees it, it never comes to me, in any event to consciousness, there wehere it

strictly takes place, whence one dates, signs, “expedites.” 195

All posts and telelcomunications 161

Story about posting anxiety 102

Story about telephone anxiety 159

Dead letters 124

Suppose I write a book abou, let us say Palto and telecom,” 103

The whole thing would be retranslated 95

Thus I am rereading the Letters of Plato and all those admirable discussions around their

authenticirt, of their belonging, the one says, to the corpus platonicum sucha s it has been

constituted from the time of Thrasyllus. 83

French book about Derrida turning his books into images.

112

I am rereading one of the letters received yesterday. Pc, 116

For the day that there will be a reading of theOxford card, the one and true reading, will

be the end of history. 115

Dupont and Dupond 112

“entire teleorgamization” 108

Voltaire and ciphers, 70

The Purveyor of Truth

Truth (out) of the Letter from Freud's Hand, 78.- o f a Kind, Kings - Double, 100.

Pretexts

Meeting Place: Four

11s le remercient pour les grandes veritds qu'il vient de proclamer,-- car ils ont d6cou-

vert ( verificateurs de ce qui ne peut &tre vkrifie!) que tout ce qu'il a enonce est absolu-

ment vrai;-- bien que d'abord, avouent ces braves gens, ils aient eu le soupcon que ce

pouvait bien 6tre une simple fiction. Poe repond que pour son compte, il n'en a jamais

dout6.

BAUDELAIRE

Mehlman does not translate; bass does

Mehlman spkips the first six sentneces

113

Were does psychoanalysis, always, alrady, find itself to be refound? 413

The author of thE book of which I am speaking, himself, not his name (therefore pardon

me for no† naming him) is himself pc, 99

Au Revoir

A very trivial remark , the relations between post, police and media are called upon to

transform themselves profoundly , as in the amorous message (which is more and more

watched over, even if it has always been), by virtue of informitization. So be it. And

therefore all the networks of the p.p. (psych and pol). [play on PP as pleasure principle]

But will the relation between the police, the psychoanalytic insitutioand letters be

affected? Inveitably, and it is beginning. Could Poe adapt The Purloined Letter to this?

Is it capable of adaptation? Here I would bet yes but it would be very difficult. The end of

a postal epoch is doubtless the end of literature. 104

PL, facteur, Poe appear in Envois: 28, 71, 94, 95, 104, 148-49, 200, 218, 222, 233

Lacan on on 150-51; Play on Purloined with “Purim” and “Pur . . . lot” 72 and possible

play on Dupin with “Dupont” and “Dupond”

From page 307 of Finnegan’s Wake: “visit to Guiness’s Brewery, Clubs, Advantages of

the enny Post. When is aPun not a Pun?” 142

Derrida’s use of the parergon rather than Genette’s paratext, does not analyze the borders

between notes and editorial annotations in translations, the extent to which one may read

publication history. (B Johnson’s fabricated title page in Dissemination. On the Name,

translation of a book that does not exist in French.)

No master word or first word or last word. Pc,151

114

Last word after the last word and first word before the first word In typewriter Ribbon,

Ink II: (Within such limits)

I am spending my time rereading you. 50

Since I am a true network of resistance, with internal cells, those little groups of three

who communicate only on one side (what is it called?), so that nothing can be extorted so

that no one gives way under torture, and finally so that no one able to betray. What one

hand does the other does not know (definition of Islamic alms?) 42

No history of the posts6-67

Dossier dos, 201

At the moment, I am thinking that thinking that every “production” as they say, f a

concept or system which is never without a name and effigy, is also the meission of a

postage stamp which itself is a post card (picture, text, reproduction, and most often ina

rectangular shape. Pc, 200

Heidegger and Freud, 191 masters of the post.

End of an epoch 190

I have lost my life writing 143

I had put it in my pocket, without reading it right away, the note you left me. 141

Question of geometry of the card and the frame. Oblique and geometry in On the Name.

115

These reminders, of which countless other examples could be given, make us aware of

the effects of the frame, and of the paradoxes in the parergonal logic. Our purpose is not

to prove that "The Purloined Letter" functions within a frame (omitted by the Seminar,

which can thus be assured of its triangular interior by an active, surreptitious limitation

starting with a metalinguistic overhang), but to prove that the structure of the framing

effects is such that no totalization of the border is even possible. The frames are always

framed: thus by some of their content. Pieces without a whole, "divisions" without a

totality-this is what thwarts the dream of a letter without division, allergic to division.

From this point on, the seme "phallus" is errant, begins by disseminating, not even by

being disseminated.

The naturalizing neutralization of the frame permits the Seminar, by imposing or

importing an Oedipal outline, by finding it (self there) in truth -and it is there, in fact, but

as a piece, even if a precisely central one, within the letter-to constitute a metalanguage

and to exclude all of the general text in all of the dimensions we began here by recalling

(return to the "first page").

pp. n 36

Supplement to the Investigation

a little too self-evident . 39

“A note in Positions augured this reading of "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'"

which was originally the object of a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, Nov., 1971.”

116

39, n5

Those "literary critics" in France who have been influenced by psychoanalysis have not

yet posed the question of the text.

2. Although it is not the earliest of Lacan's Bcrits chrono-

logically, the Seminar comes at the head of this collection after its determinant strategic

place has been prepared by an overture.

6

Delivered in 1955, committed to paper in 1956 and published in 1957, only in 1966 does

the Seminar receive its place at the head of Bcrits, thus following an order which, not

being chronological, does not arise in any simple way from his theoretico-didactic

system. It might stage Bm'ts in a particular way. The necessity of this priority, in any

event, happens to be confirmed, recalled and emphasized by the introduction to Bcrits in

the "Points" edition (1970): ". .. the text, which here keeps the entry post it possesses

elsewhere. . ." Anyone wishing to narrow the scope of the questions raised here can by all

means keep those questions in the "place" given to the Seminar by its "author": entry

post. "This post [le poste] differs from another post [la poste] only in gender," according

to Littre. 40, n6

Finally, the Seminar is part of a larger investigation of the repetition automatism

117

[Wiederholungszwang] which, in the group of texts dating from 1919-1920 (Jenseits,

Das Unheimliche) trans- forms, at least in principle (cf. La Double Sbance, notes 44 and

56), the relationship between psychoanalysis and literary fiction.7 41

7 See Jacques Derrida, La Dissemination (Paris: Le Seuil, 1972), pp. 279-280 and pp.

300-301. Within a rather long text ,questioning the literary process through Plato and

Mallarme, Derrida tackles Freud's dealing with a work of art and notably the

displacement in Freud's approach before and after Das Unheimliche. Derrida also points

out there how Freud in Das Unheimliche is sensitive to the undecidable ambivalence,

"the game of the double, the endless interplay between the fantastic and the real." -Ed.

"Our inquiry has led us to the point of recognizing that the repetition automatism

[wiederholungszwang] finds its basis in what we have called the insistence of the

signifying chain. We have elaborated that notion itself as a correlate of the ex-istence (or:

excentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the subject of the unconscious if we

are to take Freud's discovery seriously."8 These are the opening lines of the Seminar.

41

Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'," trans. J. Mehlman, French Freud,

pp. 38-72. Hereafter cited in the text as SPL followed by the page number. The

problematic set forth in The Purveyor of Truth can best be grasped through a rereading of

Poe's Purloined Letter and of the Seminar as well as the editorial notes of Jeffrey

Meh1man.-Ed. 41, n8

This passage has been closely preceded by a reference to Heidegger, and that is not

118

surprising; it carries the Dasein back to the subject, and that is more surprising.

42

As for the Envois themselves, I do not know if their reading is bearable. 3 (firt page of

pc)

In every support,is something les than ideal, and therefore can be destroyed without

remaining. . 79

But you know that with you I never reread. 229

You are right in part, it would have to have been made into, precisely, a post-face, this is

indeed the word, in particular because it’s unintelligible, you do not begin with what

follows—if not by the end, and as they never reread . . . Too bad. 240

To stop becomes impossible, 242

Finnegans Wake 240

I am rereading your note from yesterday: what counts in post cards, and moreover, in

everything, is the tempo. Say you. 247

What I told you is that Socates is now the name of a logiciel. You don’t know what this

is? One calls logiciel the corpus of programs, procedures, or rules that assure the smooth

functioning of a system in the treatment of information. The storage banks depend upon

a logiciel. 242

I am rereading (and indeed for the first time since I have been writing to you) because

119

you overtook me while writing at the moment when you called form the café. No, I repeat

what I have just told you; there was nothing “decisive” in my PR letter—moreover, I

have not reopened it--, only details which perhaps, perhaps would have made you

understand and approve, if you wanted, if you could. Okay, let’s drop out. I am rereading

myself, that, . . . 81

This is how it is to be read, and written, the carte of the adestination. Abject literature is n

its way. 29

The charter is the contract for, which quite stupidly one has to believe; Socrates comes

before Plato, there is between them—and in general—an order of generations, an

irreversible sequence of inheritance. Socrates is before, not in front of, but before Plato,

therefore behind him, and the charter binds us to this order: this is how to orient one’s

thought, this is the left and right [alluding to Kant’s “What is Orientation in Thinking”],

march. 20

Post card anxiety, 21

When I first wrote “burn everything,” it was neither out of prudence and a taste for the

clandestine, nor out a concern for inernal guarding but out of what ws necessary (he

condition, he given) for the affirmation to be reborn at very instant, without memory. 23

Read Reading Station, 208

I rpeat to you, it was dangerous to keep the letters, and yet I cravenly dreamed that they

would be stolen from us; now they have to be destroyed, the countdown has started, less

than a month, you will be here. 233

120

Yellow pages of the telephone Book act as a way round resistance—you can dial up

pages, placed them through the index. You can trace a call, as it were.

Once again, I am holding the book open to its middle and I am trying to understand, it’s

not easy. 216

I am opening the Traumdeutung approximately in its middle. 414

First published in Poetique 21 (1975), a special issue put together by Phillipe Lacoue-

Labarthe under the title Litterature et philosophie melees. 412

The table of contents divides the introduction from the glossary, makes them sequential.

But the text sutures them, making Glossary a subheading in the text rather than title at the

top of he page, a new page, in the same size font.

Also implicit pun on letters—we get alphabetic letters L before K—seems nonsensical—

and also wrong L obviously comes after K)

We have forgotten to talk about the color of paper, the color of ink, and their comparative

chromatics: a vast subject. That will be for another time. Paper Machine (53)

Survive one’s children 241 to understand postal letters, post cards.

Reverse sde of the facsimile.

Signautre is a quotation, not Dupin’s name.

121

(Derrida reads titles and tables of contents of Blanchot in Parages.

You know that J.D. is in analysis.” 203; Derrida returns to Lacan’s misreading in

Resistances of Psychoanalysis.

Historicism 139

If a book has been republished or published in parts, is it a book? Is the postcard a book?

Can on eread it in iolation from other texts written by Derrida (other than the ones he

specifies in his notes? Note also the way his references to his own works becomes

bibiorhicaly incomplete over time.

He refuses to turn his own works into a network, to provide the reader with a complete

narrative thread to follow thorugh and properly xit without a faux pas.

For the Love of Lacan—in REsistances of Pyshoanalysis

Freud and the Scene of Writing 55

62-63—he narrates an account of its inscription in the post card.

problem of the archive 68

2. The Hinge

To begin, let us indicate a few telling signs. If most of the explicit references to Freud

122

are grouped in the conclusion of the book (at the end of “The Birth of the Asylum and in

the beginning of “The Anthropological Circle”,) 6 what I would call a charniere, a hinge,

comes earlier on, right in he middle of the volume, to divide at once he book and the

book’s relation to Freud. To Do Justice to Freud, 78

The first sign comes right in the middle of the book. To Do Justice to Freud, 79

This, therefore, will not have been a book.” Dissemination.

Simulacrum of illustrations of fortune telling book, of color illustration used on the cover

as inside flap, like Baudelaire story in Counter Money.

Economy of note and annotation in Freud, 374

Apocalypse 169 The countdown is accelerating, don’t’ you think?” 163

Reread the little one’s letters. 255

If you had listened to me, you would have burned everything 23

In the beginning, n principle, was the post, and I will never get over it. But in the end I

know it, I become aware of it as of our death sentence . . . 29

Undated (probably the same period)

Date-abiity—Heidegger and Derrida

What Freud states about secondary revision (Freud's explaining text) is already staged

123

and represented in advance in the text explained (Andersen's fairy tale).

This text, too, described the scene of analysis, the position of the analyst, the forms of his

language, the metaphorico-conceptual structures of what he seeks and what he finds. The

locus of one text is in the other.

Freud pays no attention to a fold in the text, a structural complication that envelops his

discourse and within which his discourse must inevitably be situated.

Would there then be no difference between the two texts?

Writing is dated, but not reading (or it can be now—annotations can be linearized—but

that is pointless exercise in genetic criticism, or it is more like Holmes than Poe

The ideal reasoned, 114—cause and effect, first and last, a line back and forward.

Burt Glossator

Tempting to see the Glossary as a reading of the Post Card. Tile is L before K and the

glossary comes first rather than last, at the end of the book. But also because the terms

forma network of back and forth references. See this before reading this.

Translotr’s Introudction LBefore K” vii

Glossary, xiii

Repetition and reversal, or reversibility.

124

Postal reading not reducible to a labrythine and infinite deferral of the referent, of the

seme, of definition (limits). This would be to stop reading by diagramming reading.

Vresus John Leavey’s Glasary

These retreats faux pas, false exits, Bass, 377

Sequencing becomes running in circles for Derrida. Linear is already a circle. See

Derrida on the circle in Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2.

What relation is the unbreable reading of the envois and the reading of the PL that

follows? One could aska similar quesotn about the mentions of Beyond the PP

Edgar Allan Poe, Double Assassinat dans la rue Morgue

In le facteur, he mentions the hermeneutical circle and names Heidegger in the next page.

He puts the uncanny against Lacan’s imaginary, doubling and divisibility; but he

nowhere mentions or cites or reads Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny.”

Also, two, successive long notes on Poe’s Purloined Letter in On the Name.

Derrida discusses the publication history of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter.”

125

He also mentions the facsimile, but only in relation to Dupin’s signature, not in relation

to the materiality of the signifier and the divisibility of the letter. He folds the facsimile,

like the simulacrum or replica, even the double, into the same structure of reading he says

he unlocks.

Importance of the facsimile—word and image, boundary of word and image, of line and

drawing (see YFS issue)

Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires / par Edgar Poe ; traduction de Charles Baudelaire

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849

1884 Translator: Charles Baudelaire

Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires / par Edgar Poe ; traduction de Charles Baudelaire

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849

Double assassinat dans la rue Morgue (The Murders in the Rue Morgue dans l'édition

originale) est une nouvelle d'Edgar Allan Poe, parue en avril 1841 dans le Graham's

Magazine, traduite en français d'abord par Isabelle Meunier puis, en 1856, par Charles

Baudelaire dans le recueil Histoires extraordinaires. C'est la première apparition du

détective inventé par Poe, le Chevalier Dupin qui doit faire face à une histoire de meurtre

incompréhensible pour la police.

126

Derrida writes of Murders in the rue Morgue as if it had been written after The Purloined

Letter.

Whereupon he has but to withdraw, after "forgetting" his snuff-box on the table, in order

to return the following day to reclaim it-armed with a facsimile of the letter in its present

state. As an incident in the street, prepared for the proper moment, draws the Minister to

the window, Dupin in turn seizes the opportunity to seize the letter while substituting the

imitation, and has only to maintain the appearances of a normal exit.

YFS 55-56

But at the Minister who " 'is well acquainted with my MS.,' " Dupin strikes a blow signed

brother or confrere, twin or younger or older brother (Atreus / T'hyestes). This rival and

duplicitous identification of the brothers, far from fitting into the symbolic space of the

family triangle (the first, the second, or the one after), carries it off infinitely far away in a

labyrinth of doubles without originals, of facsimile without an authentic, an indivisible

letter, of casual counterfeits [contrefacons sans facon], imprinting the purloined letter

with an incorrigible indirection.

YFS 109-110

Thus Dupin wants to sign, indeed, doubtless, the last word of the last message of the

purloined letter. First by being unable to resist leaving his own mark-the seal, at least,

with which he must be identified-on the facsimile that he leaves for the Minister. He fears

the facsimile and, insisting on his utterly confraternal vengeance, he demands that the

127

Minister know where it came from. Thus he limits the facsimile, the counterfeit exterior

of the letter. The interior is authentic and properly identifiable. Indeed: at the moment

when the madman (" 'the pretended lunatic' " who is " 'a man in my own pay' ") distracts

everyone with his "frantic behavior," what does Dupin do? He adds a note. He leaves the

false letter, that is, the one that interests him, the real one, which is not a facsimile except

for the exterior. If there were a man of truth, a lover of the authentic, in all this, Dupin

would indeed be the model: "'In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter,

put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals [quantd

I'exte'rieur],)which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D--cipher, very

readily, by means of a seal formed of

bread.' "

Thus D-will have to decipher, on the inside, what the decipherer meant and whence and

why he deciphered, with what end in mind, in the name of whom and what. The initial-

the same, D, for the Minister and for Dupin-is a facsimile on the outside but on the inside

it is the thing itself.

YFS, 100-11

The Question of Reading: Again (rather than Otherwise)

Paraphrase Heidegger, reading is always the question what is reading?, a repetition of the

question. Heidegger repeats the hermeneutic circle passage in division tone in division

two and titles his first chapter on the repetition.

128

Is reading different from rereading? Is reading different from not reading? Can you read

without not reading? What s the economy of reading literature and pyschoanlysis? How

much literature do you need? Where do you get to stop? When has reading arrived? If it

is not a program, what saves it from being an iteration of the same moves made on

different texts, and from a development, progress narrative, ora genetic or teleological

model? What saves it from being saved? Saving a question of the economy of reading as

expenditure.

How to read sequentially—can one sequence reading? Poe, Lacan, Derrida, Johnson.

Vulgar historical time of biographical and bibliographical history. Who published first.

This kind of linearization is inescapable. It is not just a matter of institutional norms and

paratextual dating, bibliographic codes. Question of reference not reducible to such

historicism, vulgar time for Heidegger, irreversible, empty homogenous time, for

Benjamin. Question of dates, dateability for Heidegger and Derrida. Occurrence and

event for Heidegger, Derrida (and Badiou). Ecstatic time. Heidegger in Being and Time

on the repletion of the question. Not a question of a trope, or a master trope like the

frame either, that merely reinscribes the sequence and formalizes it as a blind spot of

re/reading.

Johnson’s essay appeared in two versions. Poe read in Baudelaire’s translation. Lacan

rewrites his essay, starts it again less than half way through. Derrida’s essay

decontextualized from The Post Card. Published in translation separately, twice.

129

Derrida rereading the same texts—“Freud and the Scene of Writing.” “Madness and

Civilization” in an essay title of which is about Freud.

Apart from complications publication presents to linearization, we may ask what comes

first other than Poe. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Cited in the notes by Lacan.

The focus of Speculations on Freud, precedes “Le facteur de la verite” in The Post Card.

Question of speculation in psychoanalysis and philosophy like the question of literature

and philosophy: what are the limits of philosophical discourse? What does it mean to

read “beyond,” a word Derrida uses in his title that conspicuously repeats the title of

Freud’s work? Is reading always as step not beyond, a faux pas, in Maurice Blanchot’s

terms, an error and an aporia, a distinerrance? Or does copying, the facsimile come into

play? The facsimile of Derrida’s signature in Signature Event Context.

Empiricism of the facsimile, or fauxsimile. It is repated in Singature, Event Context.

Derrida brings up repetition compulsion in le facteur in relation to Marie Bonaparte but

also in relation to Po—Murders in the Rue Morgue similar to Purloined Letter.

But Derrida does not read that story or read that repetition. His attention s to the structure

of repetition, not to empirical examples of it.

Derrida returns to Rousseau and de Man via the title of an an earlier essay, “Limited Ink

II”

130

Derrida’s essay on titles in PArages and on the title in Kafka “Before the Law.”

Illustration of writing and reversibility in The Post Card. Reading for Lacan and for

Derrida is not about Master and disciple.

In Poe, its the idea of the copy that matters, not the material referent. See William

WIlson

In "Unsensing the Subjectile," he discusses Artaud's posthumously published drawings.

To file: (1) “I could . . . file,” break into the figure in yet another way. Still by rubbing,

to be sure, and scraping, but this time according to the obliqueness of the metal teeth,

molars against millstones. But (2) the aggression which thus reduces the surface is

destined to polish, make delicate, adjust, inform, beautify, still save the truth of the body

in straining it, purifying it, from it any uncleaness and useless excrescences. The taking

away of the unclean has the virtue of laying bare and catharsis.

--Jacques Derrida, "Unsensing the Subjectile," in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud,

Trans. and Ed. Mary Ann Caws (MIT 1998), 140.

We won’t tell the story of the subjectile, rather some record of its coming-to-be.

--Jacques Derrida, "Unsensing the Subjectile," in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud,

Trans. and Ed. Mary Ann Caws (MIT 1998), 61

There is a good chance he never finished either one or the other and that he destroyed

131

these sketches.

Paul Thevenin, “In Search for a Lost World,” in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, Trans.

and Ed. Mary Ann Caws, 8

Thevenin’s anecdote about Artaud drawing him in 1946, and the drawing, one of three,

getting lost during the framing of it for an exhibition. The lost one is the one. Thevenin

remembers Artaud drawing this portrait and wants to see again. (3-31). Enndote 76

explains how it got lost.

It can’t analzye it’s “no longer was”, it’s “has not yet been,” or “not yet having been.”

He can’t look back from the future at something that never was.

Mary Ann Caws writes:

It is deeply regrettable that the Artaud estate did not allow us to use in this volume

the reproduction of the very paintings and drawings that were at the origin of

these texts. (Many of them can be found in two other publications: Mary Ann

Caws, Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper [Museum of Modern art] and The

Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter [MIT Press, 1997]) it is also deeply

ironic, given Jacques Derrida’s work on the absence of origin.

Mary Ann Caws, preface, xiv The Secret Writing of of Antonin Artaud.

But another kind of irony that may be merely uncaught typographical error or related

Freudian slips. Two errors of attribution go uncorrected. Caws mistakenly gives her own

132

name as the author of Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper. It is actually by Paule Thévenin

and translated by Margit Rowell. Caws also omits the author of the second book, a book

she herself wrote.

Post/Card/Match/Book/"Envois"/Derrida

David Wills

SubStance

Vol. 13, No. 2, Issue 43 (1984), pp. 19-38

The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida

Barbara Johnson

133

Yale French Studies, No. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading:

Otherwise. (1977), pp. 457-505.

The Purveyor of Truth

Jacques Derrida; Willis Domingo; James Hulbert; Moshe Ron; M.-R. L.

Yale French Studies, No. 52, Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy.

(1975), pp. 31-113.

The title is not trsnslated, but left in French, “Le faceteur de la vertie”

Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan

Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud au-delà was first published in 1980.

Jacques Derrida. The Postcard. Chicago: CUP, 1989.

---. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 1985.

---. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stamford: Stamford University Press, 1999.

THE PURLOINED LETTER

by Edgar Allan Poe

(1845)

Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio. - Seneca.

At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18--, I was enjoying the

134

twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste

Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisieme, No. 33, Rue Dunot,

Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while

each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with

the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself,

however, I was mentally discussing certain topics which had formed matter for

conversation between us at an earlier period of the evening; I mean the affair of the Rue

Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of Marie Roget. I looked upon it,

therefore, as something of a coincidence, when the door of our apartment was thrown

open and admitted our old acquaintance, Monsieur G--, the Prefect of the Parisian police.

We gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as

of the contemptible about the man, and we had not seen him for several years. We had

been sitting in the dark, and Dupin now arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but sat

down again, without doing so, upon G.'s saying that he had called to consult us, or rather

to ask the opinion of my friend, about some official business which had occasioned a

great deal of trouble.

"If it is any point requiring reflection," observed Dupin, as he forbore to enkindle the

wick, "we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark."

"That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every

thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion

of "oddities."

135

"Very true," said Dupin, as he supplied his visitor with a pipe, and rolled towards him a

comfortable chair.

"And what is the difficulty now?" I asked. "Nothing more in the assassination way, I

hope?"

"Oh no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is very simple indeed, and I make

no doubt that we can manage it sufficiently well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin

would like to hear the details of it, because it is so excessively odd."

"Simple and odd," said Dupin.

"Why, yes; and not exactly that, either. The fact is, we have all been a good deal puzzled

because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether."

"Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault," said my friend.

"What nonsense you do talk!" replied the Prefect, laughing heartily.

"Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain," said Dupin.

"Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?"

"A little too self-evident."

"Ha! ha! ha! --ha! ha! ha! --ho! ho! ho!" --roared our visitor, profoundly amused, "oh,

Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!"

136

"And what, after all, is the matter on hand?" I asked.

"Why, I will tell you," replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, steady, and contemplative

puff, and settled himself in his chair. "I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin,

let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should

most probably lose the position I now hold, were it known that I confided it to any one.

"Proceed," said I.

"Or not," said Dupin.

"Well, then; I have received personal information, from a very high quarter, that a certain

document of the last importance, has been purloined from the royal apartments. The

individual who purloined it is known; this beyond a doubt; he was seen to take it. It is

known, also, that it still remains in his possession."

"How is this known?" asked Dupin.

"It is clearly inferred," replied the Prefect, "from the nature of the document, and from the

nonappearance of certain results which would at once arise from its passing out of the

robber's possession; --that is to say, from his employing it as he must design in the end to

employ it."

"Be a little more explicit," I said.

"Well, I may venture so far as to say that the paper gives its holder a certain power in a

certain quarter where such power is immensely valuable." The Prefect was fond of the

137

cant of diplomacy.

"Still I do not quite understand," said Dupin.

"No? Well; the disclosure of the document to a third person, who shall be nameless,

would bring in question the honor of a personage of most exalted station; and this fact

gives the holder of the document an ascendancy over the illustrious personage whose

honor and peace are so jeopardized."

"But this ascendancy," I interposed, "would depend upon the robber's knowledge of the

loser's knowledge of the robber. Who would dare--"

"The thief," said G., is the Minister D--, who dares all things, those unbecoming as well

as those becoming a man. The method of the theft was not less ingenious than bold. The

document in question --a letter, to be frank --had been received by the personage robbed

while alone in the royal boudoir. During its perusal she was suddenly interrupted by the

entrance of the other exalted personage from whom especially it was her wish to conceal

it. After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in a drawer, she was forced to place it,

open as it was, upon a table. The address, however, was uppermost, and, the contents thus

unexposed, the letter escaped notice. At this juncture enters the Minister D--. His lynx

eye immediately perceives the paper, recognises the handwriting of the address, observes

the confusion of the personage addressed, and fathoms her secret. After some business

transactions, hurried through in his ordinary manner, he produces a letter somewhat

similar to the one in question, opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close

juxtaposition to the other. Again he converses, for some fifteen minutes, upon the public

138

affairs. At length, in taking leave, he takes also from the table the letter to which he had

no claim. Its rightful owner saw, but, of course, dared not call attention to the act, in the

presence of the third personage who stood at her elbow. The minister decamped; leaving

his own letter --one of no importance --upon the table."

"Here, then," said Dupin to me, "you have precisely what you demand to make the

ascendancy complete --the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber."

"Yes," replied the Prefect; "and the power thus attained has, for some months past, been

wielded, for political purposes, to a very dangerous extent. The personage robbed is more

thoroughly convinced, every day, of the necessity of reclaiming her letter. But this, of

course, cannot be done openly. In fine, driven to despair, she has committed the matter to

me."

"Than whom," said Dupin, amid a perfect whirlwind of smoke, "no more sagacious agent

could, I suppose, be desired, or even imagined."

"You flatter me," replied the Prefect; "but it is possible that some such opinion may have

been entertained."

"It is clear," said I, "as you observe, that the letter is still in possession of the minister;

since it is this possession, and not any employment of the letter, which bestows the

power. With the employment the power departs."

"True," said G. "and upon this conviction I proceeded. My first care was to make

thorough search of the minister's hotel; and here my chief embarrassment lay in the

139

necessity of searching without his knowledge. Beyond all things, I have been warned of

the danger which would result from giving him reason to suspect our design."

"But," said I, "you are quite au fait in these investigations. The Parisian police have done

this thing often before."

"Oh yes; and for this reason I did not despair. The habits of the minister gave me, too, a

great advantage. He is frequently absent from home all night. His servants are by no

means numerous. They sleep at a distance from their master's apartment, and, being

chiefly Neapolitans, are readily made drunk. I have keys, as you know, with which I can

open any chamber or cabinet in Paris. For three months a night has not passed, during the

greater part of which I have not been engaged, personally, in ransacking the D-- Hotel.

My honor is interested, and, to mention a great secret, the reward is enormous. So I did

not abandon the search until I had become fully satisfied that the thief is a more astute

man than myself. I fancy that I have investigated every nook and corner of the premises

in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed."

"But is it not possible," I suggested, "that although the letter may be in possession of the

minister, as it unquestionably is, he may have concealed it elsewhere than upon his own

premises?"

"This is barely possible," said Dupin. "The present peculiar condition of affairs at court,

and especially of those intrigues in which D-- is known to be involved, would render the

instant availability of the document --its susceptibility of being produced at a moment's

notice --a point of nearly equal importance with its possession."

140

"Its susceptibility of being produced?" said I.

"That is to say, of being destroyed," said Dupin.

"True," I observed; "the paper is clearly then upon the premises. As for its being upon the

person of the minister, we may consider that as out of the question."

"Entirely," said the Prefect. "He has been twice waylaid, as if by footpads, and his person

rigorously searched under my own inspection.

"You might have spared yourself this trouble," said Dupin. "D--, I presume, is not

altogether a fool, and, if not, must have anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of

course."

"Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove

from a fool."

"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, "although I

have been guilty of certain doggerel myself."

"Suppose you detail," said I, "the particulars of your search."

"Why the fact is, we took our time, and we searched every where. I have had long

experience in these affairs. I took the entire building, room by room; devoting the nights

of a whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened

every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained police agent,

such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. Any man is a dolt who permits a 'secret'

141

drawer to escape him in a search of this kind. The thing is so plain. There is a certain

amount of bulk --of space --to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have accurate

rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. After the cabinets we took the chairs.

The cushions we probed with the fine long needles you have seen me employ. From the

tables we removed the tops."

"Why so?"

"Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece of furniture, is removed

by the person wishing to conceal an article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited

within the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of bedposts are employed in

the same way."

"But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?" I asked.

"By no means, if, when the article is deposited, a sufficient wadding of cotton be placed

around it. Besides, in our case, we were obliged to proceed without noise."

"But you could not have removed --you could not have taken to pieces all articles of

furniture in which it would have been possible to make a deposit in the manner you

mention. A letter may be compressed into a thin spiral roll, not differing much in shape or

bulk from a large knitting-needle, and in this form it might be inserted into the rung of a

chair, for example. You did not take to pieces all the chairs?"

"Certainly not; but we did better --we examined the rungs of every chair in the hotel, and,

indeed, the jointings of every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful

142

microscope. Had there been any traces of recent disturbance we should not have failed to

detect it instantly. A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as

obvious as an apple. Any disorder in the glueing --any unusual gaping in the joints --

would have sufficed to insure detection."

"I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and the plates, and you probed

the beds and the bed-clothes, as well as the curtains and carpets."

"That of course; and when we had absolutely completed every particle of the furniture in

this way, then we examined the house itself. We divided its entire surface into

compartments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed; then we scrutinized

each individual square inch throughout the premises, including the two houses

immediately adjoining, with the microscope, as before."

"The two houses adjoining!" I exclaimed; "you must have had a great deal of trouble."

"We had; but the reward offered is prodigious.

"You include the grounds about the houses?"

"All the grounds are paved with brick. They gave us comparatively little trouble. We

examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed."

"You looked among D--'s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?"

"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we

turned over every leaf in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake,

143

according to the fashion of some of our police officers. We also measured the thickness

of every book-cover, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to each the

most jealous scrutiny of the microscope. Had any of the bindings been recently meddled

with, it would have been utterly impossible that the fact should have escaped observation.

Some five or six volumes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed,

longitudinally, with the needles."

"You explored the floors beneath the carpets?"

"Beyond doubt. We removed every carpet, and examined the boards with the

microscope."

"And the paper on the walls?"

"Yes.

"You looked into the cellars?"

"We did."

"Then," I said, "you have been making a miscalculation, and the letter is not upon the

premises, as you suppose.

"I fear you are right there," said the Prefect. "And now, Dupin, what would you advise

me to do?"

"To make a thorough re-search of the premises."

144

"That is absolutely needless," replied G--. "I am not more sure that I breathe than I am

that the letter is not at the Hotel."

"I have no better advice to give you," said Dupin. "You have, of course, an accurate

description of the letter?"

"Oh yes!" --And here the Prefect, producing a memorandum-book, proceeded to read

aloud a minute account of the internal, and especially of the external appearance of the

missing document. Soon after finishing the perusal of this description, he took his

departure, more entirely depressed in spirits than I had ever known the good gentleman

before.

In about a month afterwards he paid us another visit, and found us occupied very nearly

as before. He took a pipe and a chair and entered into some ordinary conversation. At

length I said,--

"Well, but G--, what of the purloined letter? I presume you have at last made up your

mind that there is no such thing as overreaching the Minister?"

"Confound him, say I --yes; I made the reexamination, however, as Dupin suggested --

but it was all labor lost, as I knew it would be."

"How much was the reward offered, did you say?" asked Dupin.

"Why, a very great deal --a very liberal reward --I don't like to say how much, precisely;

but one thing I will say, that I wouldn't mind giving my individual check for fifty

145

thousand francs to any one who could obtain me that letter. The fact is, it is becoming of

more and more importance every day; and the reward has been lately doubled. If it were

trebled, however, I could do no more than I have done."

"Why, yes," said Dupin, drawlingly, between the whiffs of his meerschaum, "I really --

think, G--, you have not exerted yourself--to the utmost in this matter. You might --do a

little more, I think, eh?"

"How? --In what way?"

"Why --puff, puff --you might --puff, puff --employ counsel in the matter, eh? --puff,

puff, puff. Do you remember the story they tell of Abernethy?"

"No; hang Abernethy!"

"To be sure! hang him and welcome. But, once upon a time, a certain rich miser

conceived the design of spunging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up,

for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to

the physician, as that of an imaginary individual.

"'We will suppose,' said the miser, 'that his symptoms are such and such; now, doctor,

what would you have directed him to take?'

"'Take!' said Abernethy, 'why, take advice, to be sure.'"

"But," said the Prefect, a little discomposed, "I am perfectly willing to take advice, and to

pay for it. I would really give fifty thousand francs to any one who would aid me in the

146

matter."

"In that case," replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and producing a check-book, "you may

as well fill me up a check for the amount mentioned. When you have signed it, I will

hand you the letter."

I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunderstricken. For some minutes he

remained speechless and motionless, less, looking incredulously at my friend with open

mouth, and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; then, apparently in some

measure, he seized a pen, and after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and

signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across the table to Dupin. The

latter examined it carefully and deposited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an

escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This functionary grasped it in a

perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents,

and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from

the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested

him to fill up the check.

When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.

"The Parisian police," he said, "are exceedingly able in their way. They are persevering,

ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem

chiefly to demand. Thus, when G-- detailed to us his mode of searching the premises at

the Hotel D--, I felt entire confidence in his having made a satisfactory investigation --so

far as his labors extended."

147

"So far as his labors extended?" said I.

"Yes," said Dupin. "The measures adopted were not only the best of their kind, but

carried out to absolute perfection. Had the letter been deposited within the range of their

search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it."

I merely laughed --but he seemed quite serious in all that he said.

"The measures, then," he continued, "were good in their kind, and well executed; their

defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly

ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly

adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the

matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight

years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal

admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his

hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd.

If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I

allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing;

and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents.

For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks,

'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial

he wins, for he then says to himself, the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and

his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I

will therefore guess odd'; --he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree

above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I

148

guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself upon the first impulse, a

simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought

will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it

even as before. I will therefore guess even' guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of

reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed "lucky," --what, in its last analysis,

is it?"

"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his

opponent."

"It is," said Dupin;" and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the

thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows:

'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any

one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as

accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what

thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the

expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious

profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli,

and to Campanella."

"And the identification," I said, "of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent,

depends, if I understand you aright upon the accuracy with which the opponent's intellect

is admeasured."

"For its practical value it depends upon this," replied Dupin; and the Prefect and his

149

cohort fall so frequently, first, by default of this identification, and, secondly, by ill-

admeasurement, or rather through non-admeasurement, of the intellect with which they

are engaged. They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for

anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it. They are

right in this much --that their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the

mass; but when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their own,

the felon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is above their own, and very

usually when it is below. They have no variation of principle in their investigations; at

best, when urged by some unusual emergency --by some extraordinary reward --they

extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles. What,

for example, in this case of D--, has been done to vary the principle of action? What is all

this boring, and probing, and sounding, and scrutinizing with the microscope, and

dividing the surface of the building into registered square inches --what is it all but an

exaggeration of the application of the one principle or set of principles of search, which

are based upon the one set of notions regarding human ingenuity, to which the Prefect, in

the long routine of his duty, has been accustomed? Do you not see he has taken it for

granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter, --not exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a

chair-leg --but, at least, in some hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of thought

which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg? And do

you not see also, that such recherches nooks for concealment are adapted only for

ordinary occasions, and would be adopted only by ordinary intellects; for, in all cases of

concealment, a disposal of the article concealed --a disposal of it in this recherche

manner, --is, in the very first instance, presumable and presumed; and thus its discovery

150

depends, not at all upon the acumen, but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and

determination of the seekers; and where the case is of importance --or, what amounts to

the same thing in the policial eyes, when the reward is of magnitude, --the qualities in

question have never been known to fall. You will now understand what I meant in

suggesting that, had the purloined letter been hidden anywhere within the limits of the

Prefect's examination --in other words, had the principle of its concealment been

comprehended within the principles of the Prefect --its discovery would have been a

matter altogether beyond question. This functionary, however, has been thoroughly

mystified; and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a

fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels;

and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are

fools."

"But is this really the poet?" I asked. "There are two brothers, I know; and both have

attained reputation in letters. The Minister I believe has written learnedly on the

Differential Calculus. He is a mathematician, and no poet."

"You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would

reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would

have been at the mercy of the Prefect."

"You surprise me," I said, "by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice

of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The

mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.

151

"'Il y a a parier,'" replied Dupin, quoting from Chamfort, "'que toute idee publique, toute

convention recue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre.' The

mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to

which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as truth. With

an art worthy a better cause, for example, they have insinuated the term 'analysis' into

application to algebra. The French are the originators of this particular deception; but if a

term is of any importance --if words derive any value from applicability --then 'analysis'

conveys 'algebra' about as much as, in Latin, 'ambitus' implies 'ambition,' 'religio' religion

or 'homines honesti,' a set of honorable men."

"You have a quarrel on hand, I see," said I, "with some of the algebraists of Paris; but

proceed."

"I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any

especial form other than the abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed

by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity;

mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity.

The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are

abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the

universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of

general truth. What is true of relation --of form and quantity --is often grossly false in

regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the

aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom falls. In the

consideration of motive it falls; for two motives, each of a given value, have not,

152

necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are

numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation.

But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an

absolutely general applicability --as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his

very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that

'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and

make inferences from them as existing realities.' With the algebraists, however, who are

Pagans themselves, the 'Pagan fables' are believed, and the inferences are made, not so

much through lapse of memory, as through an unaccountable addling of the brains. In

short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of equal

roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x squared + px

was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of

experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur where x squared + px is

not altogether equal to q, and, having made him understand what you mean, get out of his

reach as speedily as convenient, for, beyond doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down.

I mean to say," continued Dupin, while I merely laughed at his last observations, "that if

the Minister had been no more than a mathematician, the Prefect would have been under

no necessity of giving me this check. I knew him, however, as both mathematician and

poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with reference to the circumstances

by which he was surrounded. I knew him as a courtier, too, and as a bold intriguant. Such

a man, I considered, could not fall to be aware of the ordinary policial modes of action.

He could not have failed to anticipate --and events have proved that he did not fail to

anticipate --the waylayings to which he was subjected. He must have foreseen, I

153

reflected, the secret investigations of his premises. His frequent absences from home at

night, which were hailed by the Prefect as certain aids to his success, I regarded only as

ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police, and thus the sooner to

impress them with the conviction to which G--, in fact, did finally arrive --the conviction

that the letter was not upon the premises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought,

which I was at some pains in detailing to you just now, concerning the invariable

principle of policial action in searches for articles concealed --I felt that this whole train

of thought would necessarily pass through the mind of the Minister. It would

imperatively lead him to despise all the ordinary nooks of concealment. He could not, I

reflected, be so weak as not to see that the most intricate and remote recess of his hotel

would be as open as his commonest closets to the eyes, to the probes, to the gimlets, and

to the microscopes of the Prefect. I saw, in fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of

course, to simplicity, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter of choice. You will

remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested, upon our first

interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account of its

being so very self-evident."

"Yes," said I, "I remember his merriment well. I really thought he would have fallen into

convulsions."

"The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the

immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that

metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a

description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics

154

and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more

difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is

commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster

capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than

those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of

hesitation in the first few steps of their progress. Again: have you ever noticed which of

the street signs, over the shop doors, are the most attractive of attention?"

"I have never given the matter a thought," I said.

"There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map. One party

playing requires another to find a given word --the name of town, river, state or empire --

any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the

game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely

lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one

end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the

street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical

oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect

suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably

self-evident. But this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or beneath the understanding

of the Prefect. He never once thought it probable, or possible, that the Minister had

deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of best

preventing any portion of that world from perceiving it.

"But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing, and discriminating ingenuity of D--;

155

upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it to

good purpose; and upon the decisive evidence, obtained by the Prefect, that it was not

hidden within the limits of that dignitary's ordinary search --the more satisfied I became

that, to conceal this letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious

expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all.

"Full of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine

morning, quite by accident, at the Ministerial hotel. I found D-- at home, yawning,

lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He

is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive --but that is only when

nobody sees him.

"To be even with him, I complained of my weak eyes, and lamented the necessity of the

spectacles, under cover of which I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the apartment,

while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host.

"I paid special attention to a large writing-table near which he sat, and upon which lay

confusedly, some miscellaneous letters and other papers, with one or two musical

instruments and a few books. Here, however, after a long and very deliberate scrutiny, I

saw nothing to excite particular suspicion.

"At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree card-

rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just

beneath the middle of the mantelpiece. In this rack, which had three or four

compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much

156

soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle --as if a design, in the

first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second.

It had a large black seal, bearing the D-- cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed,

in a diminutive female hand, to D--, the minister, himself. It was thrust carelessly, and

even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the upper divisions of the rack.

"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in

search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the

Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the

D-- cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S-- family. Here, the

address, to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a

certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of

correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the

dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical

habits of D--, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the

worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of

this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the

conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly

corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect.

"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a most animated

discussion with the Minister, on a topic which I knew well had never failed to interest

and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I

committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell,

157

at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have

entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed

than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when

a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed

direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery

was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-

directed, and re-sealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and took my departure at once,

leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table.

"The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite eagerly, the

conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a

pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a

series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. D-- rushed to a casement, threw it

open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in

my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals,) which I had

carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D-- cipher, very readily, by means of a

seal formed of bread.

"But what purpose had you," I asked, in replacing the letter by a fac-simile? Would it not

have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly, and departed?"

"D--," replied Dupin, "is a desperate man, and a man of nerve. His hotel, too, is not

without attendants devoted to his interests. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest, I

158

might never have left the Ministerial presence alive. The good people of Paris might have

heard of me no more. But I had an object apart from these considerations. You know my

political prepossessions. In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For

eighteen months the Minister has had her in his power. She has now him in hers; since,

being unaware that the letter is not in his possession; he will proceed with his exactions

as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction.

His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk

about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of

singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no

sympathy --at least no pity --for him who descends. He is the monstrum horrendum, an

unprincipled man of genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the

precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms 'a

certain personage,' he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the card-

rack."

"How? did you put any thing particular in it?"

"Why --it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior blank --that would have been

insulting. D--, at Vienna once, did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-

humoredly, that I should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard

to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not to give him a

clue. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just copied into the middle of the blank

sheet the words--

--Un dessein si funeste, S'il n'est digne d'Atree, est digne de Thyeste.

159

They are to be found in Crebillon's 'Atree.'"

“For those who, lacking the ability to read, would be simple and hasty enough to

content themselves with such an objection.” “The Double Session,”

Dissemination,181n.8

160

users.clas.ufl.eduusers.clas.ufl.edu/burt/Burt Glossator/Burt Glossator[39] .… · Web viewRead...

Documents

Transcript of users.clas.ufl.eduusers.clas.ufl.edu/burt/Burt Glossator/Burt Glossator[39] .… · Web viewRead...