Richard Burt

Read After Burning:

Delivering Derrida’s Post . . . Posthumously (with love, without such limits)1

You Aren’t Here

Here is what I am going to do. I am going to engage to The Post Card and ask what

it means to read after Derrida’s death, his death in the brute facticity of that event,

its history, as an infinite gloss but not infinite conversation. I will consider a

number of challenges to reading The Post . . . after Derrida’s death, challenges I will

1 I shorten the title of Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond , trans Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) to Post . . . to mark Derrida’s practice of using “faux-tires,” of “half titles” in The Post Card. Peggy Kamuf has a footnote on "faux-titres" in Derrida’s Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 198) 94 n. 16: “In typography, a ‘faux-titre’ is a half title or bastard title. (Trans.)” Transliterated into English, “faux-titre” means “false title.” In The Post Card, Derrida repeatedly uses “faux-titres,” notably referring to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as “Beyond . . .” Derrida also shortens the title of the third chapter: “They intersect with the Facteur, its title and its theme” (222). Derrida similarly refers and to his own chapter “Speculations on ‘Freud’” as “doubtless the book will be called Legs de Freud,” 52. When left untranslated in the English translation, the French word Legs [legacies] becomes a half-title within the title “Legacies of ‘Freud.’” “Freud’s Legacy,” the title mentioned in “Envois,” is the title of section 2, and this section begins with a comment about “The title of this chapter is a deliberately corrupt citation, which doubtless will have been recognized. The expression “Freud’s legacy [legs de Freud] is often encountered in the writings of Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Grandoo. Naturally I leave the reader as judge of what is going on in this corruption” (292). In the next paragraph, Derrida writes: “This chapter was originally published in the number of Études freudiennes devoted to Nicholas Abraham. I had then prefaced it with this note. This is what has encouraged me to publish this fragment here. Those who wish to delimit its import can consider it a reading of the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (292). For similar examples, “I’m rereading my Legacy, what a tangle,” 248; “I am trying anew to work on my legacy and on this accursed preface” (158) in which the nearly three page long “Envois” are recategorized as a preface, which he later calls a “kind of false preface” (179).

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route first through Derrida’s reading of what Lacan said to Derrida and what

Derrida said about Lacan after Lacan’s death in “Love Lacan,” and that I will then

route through Derrida’s posthumously published The Beast and the Sovereign 2 in

which Derrida talks about posthumous publication and asks “What is the other—

what are others—going to make of me when I am departed, deceased, passed away,

gone, absolutely without defense, disarmed, in their hands, i.e., as they say, so to

speak, dead?”2 These challenges may be enumerated as follows in an anticipatory

manner, given that what I say now follows from readings of texts to which we have

not yet attended:

1. Taking into account the death, in the ordinary sense of the word, of the

person of whom the living speak while at the same time taking into account

the way that any such saying is neither dead nor alive, all the while taking

into account that this distinction is fair from rigorous given that one cannot

always tell when the dead are dead, even when, or especially when, a death

certificate has been issued by the proper medical and legal authorities.3

2. Taking into account that we are not talking about the speech of the dead (or

of the living, for that matter, of speech as living presence) but their saying,

their having a say in what is still being said, of the justice of what is being

2 The Beast and the Sovereign 2 trans, Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2011), 127. Derrida asks the same question less directly on p. 126.3 See Derrida’s comment, for example, on his own response: “The response echoes, always, like a response that can be identified neither as a living present nor as the pure and simply absence of someone dead,” in “Marx and Sons,” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 213. On the death certificate, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International trans Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 48.

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said about the dead in their absence, however complicated the meaning of

the word “absence” may be. “No dead person has ever said their last word,”

Helene Cixous writes.4

3. Taking into account that the lack of rigor in any distinction between what the

living and what the dead say nevertheless retaining that distinction to ask

questions such as How do the dead say? How do they keep on saying? What

kind of say in what is being said do the dead have? And if the living say, in

print, from a place that is neither life nor death, how does what the living say

differ from what the dead say? Did the dead or do the living ever say

anything?

4. Asking why the tense of saying something about the dead--future anterior,

future anterior in the conditional, past perfect--so crucial to Derrida?

5. Asking why the question of what the dead say, the personal, dare as I say it,

the personal question of Derrida saying or not saying that he and Lacan loved

each other very much, become very quickly subsumed by Derrida under the

more general problem of the archive and hence its radical destruction?

6. Asking how do these questions become a question of the protection of the

dead, of the proper name and the title of a saying (as said in print), and a

question of their effacement and erasure?

7. Asking how does the question of reading the dead become a question of the

paratext, the name and the title being what was for Gérard Genette the most

fundamental of paratexts,5 and a question the managing of the paratext and

4 Or, les lettres de mon père, 25; cited by Derrida, H.C. for Life, 125, n. 113, p. 1705 Gérard Genette, Paratexts.

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text to archive both references the name and title and what has already read

or said and hence does not have to be repeated?

8. Asking why questions of the dead saying, the archive, the proper name,

paratexts, and so on, become for Derrida a quasi-methodological question of

deconstruction and psychoanalysis, of psychoanalysis being philosophical?

9. Is there a posthumous principle or posthumous structure that differs from

the postal principle or postal structure? Or would any notion of the

posthumous be subsumed by the posterous and the postal?

All of these questions turn on the assumptions that there is such a thing as reading

and that we know what reading is. A reading may be bad, it may be strong, it may

be a misreading, it may be a reading that resists reading, it may be a reading that

didn’t bother to read and hence an irresponsible reading, but a reading is still

irreducibly a reading. Similarly, there is reading and rereading, reading that may

take years, that may be infinite. Derrida turns this assumption on its head, I shall

maintain, in “Love Lacan” by introducing a single letter, the letter “X,” to stand for a

proper name. Derrida’s “last point” (69) in “Love Lacan” is that the “question of

knowing whether or not there is some psychoanalysis—X-ian, his, yours, mine that

the degree—that can hold up or that is coming, this incalcaluable, unimaginable,

unaccountable, unattribuable question is displaced to the degree that the analytic

siutation, and thus the analytic institution, is deconstructed, as if by itself, without

deconstruction or deconstructive project” (69). Ordinarily, one would not read the

the letter “X” in the sentence above. One one would simply pass over it as a variable

for which any proper name could be substituted and move on. Simiarly, names,

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titles, and other titles ordinarily don’t get read beause they an iconic rather than

indexical value. In the glosses to follow, however, I will be doing something out of

the ordinary, something that is quite secondary to what usually gets talked about in

academic discourse, even in discourse about deconstruciton. Among many textual,

paratextual, bibliographical, and typographical features, including typos, in

Derrida’s texts in and around The Post Card, I will take the letter in the “word” “X-

ian” (and Derrida’s use of the phrase “X without X”) to be the something like a crux.

The letter “X” in “X-ian,” the substitution of a letter for a proper name, any proper

name, turned into an adjective becomes something to be glossed by virtue of the

relatively “ex”terior paratextual space in the endnotes of “Love Lacan.” In the

headnote and again in the third endnote, Derrida refers his reader to the “Annexes”

[appendices] of Lacan avec les philosophes, in which “Love Lacan” first appeared,

even as Derrida X-s out, as it were, his own paratextual contribution to thse

Annexes, a post-script entitled “Après Tout: Les Chance du College” in which

Derrida discusses the erasure of his name from the original colloquium title, “Is

there a Derridean Psychoanalysis?,” and its replacement with the colloquium and

book’s title Lacan avec les philosophes.

I will unfold and these quasi- cruxes by glossing them, which is not the same

thing as reading them. I do not consider the distinction between glossing and

reading to be rigorous both because I think glossing, although secondary to reading,

is not limited to the ways glosing may serve reading, and because I am not sure

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when reading becomes ronreading. “Those who remain will not know how to read,”

Derrida writes in The Post Card.6 Will they know how to gloss either?

Just Saying

What wouldn’t Derrida have said!

What will he not have said!

This is an exclamation, not a question . . .

In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida tells two anecdotes about the two times he

met Jacques Lacan in person: “I remark that the only two times we met and spoke

briefly one with the other, it was a question of death between us, and first of all from

Lacan’s mouth. In Baltimore, for example, he spoke to me of way in which he

thought he would be read, in particular by me, after his death.”7 Furthermore,

Derrida devotes a paragraph summarizing his relation to Lacan as one of death:

So there was a question between us of death; it was especially a question of

death. I will say even only of the death of one of us, as it is with or chez all

those who love each other. Or rather he spoke about it, he aloe, since for my

part I never breathed a word about it. He spoke, alone, about our death,

about his death that would not fail to arrive, and about the death or rather

the dead one that, according to him, I was playing.8

6 The Post Card, 249. 7 “For the Love of Lacan,” in Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 39-69; to 50-51. I will hereafter frequently shorten the title to “Love Lacan.”

8 Ibid, 52.

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Will how we read The Post Card, a text to which Derrida returns in “Love Lacan,”

have changed now that its author is dead, in the ordinary sense of the word?9 Can

we read it? Or can we gloss what remains of its burning, its ashes, its considers,

“gloss” being a synonym for luster and derived from Old English, Scandiavanian, and

Icelandic words for flame and glow? Does reading mean glossing over the question

of glossing?10

So You Say

In response to this question, let me cite two passages in The Post Card, both of

which concern and a Lacanian reading of Derrida Lacan’s reading of Derrida

personally that will help us begin glossing what I have called quasi-cruxes. The

passage from the Post . . . I will cite first will recall Derrida’s exclamations, not

questions, in “Love Lacan” about what Lacan will or would have said or not have

said. This passage concerns Lacan and Derrida did (not) saying about Edgar Allen

9 On the two editions of Parages, 1986 and 2003, see footnote 2 above. A number of essays Derrida wrote on the occasion of the death of a friend were gathered together in an book, first published in English as The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). On the many paratextual oddities of The Work of Mourning, see Richard Burt, "Putting Your Papers in Order: The Matter of Kierkegaard’s Writing Desk, Goethe’s Files, and Derrida’s Paper Machine, or the Philology and Philosophy of Publishing After Death," Rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010).

10 Although gloss is a shimmer or shine in Germanic languages, a more likely source historically for the word in the sense of "elaborate, define." “Glossa” means "tongue" in Greek, and then passes to Latin and Romance languages to mean, initially, a hard word and then the explanation one puts in the margin to elucidate it.  It enters English first as "gloze" then changes to gloss mid 16th century (see the OED, s.v. gloss).  This sense is no doubt primary--although phrases like "gloss over" probably fudge the difference.  Fortuitously, I think this brings us to the distances between glossing and reading. I thank Jacob Riley and William West for drawing my attention to the etymology of gloss.

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Poe’s The Purloined Letter in the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” and in “Le

facteur de la vérité.” The passage is remarkable not only for the absence of

bibliographical references but for about who said what but for having an

anonymous third party tell this story about who meant to say what according to

someone who goes mentioned and is therefore not exactly saying anything in the

future anterior in the conditional:

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

What next! As for me, all the while apparently speaking of dissemination, I

reconstituted this word and therefore into a destination. In other words, if it

can be put thus, Lacan already meant what I will have said, and myself I am

only doing what he says he is doing. And there you are, the trick has been

played, destination is back in my hand and “dissemination” is reversed into

Lacan’s account. This is what I had describe to you one day, three-card

monte, the agility of the expert hands to which one would yield oneself

bound hand and foot.11

Who is speaking here in this envoi? Derrida? Maybe. Why is “dessimination” put in

scare quotes? The speaker’s analogy between three card monte and what was said

about Derrida merely repeating Lacan clearly serves to imply that a shell game has

been unjustly played on Derrida’s texts / lectures about Lacan: “Lacan already

meant what I will have said, and myself I am only doing what he says he is doing.”

Derrida has been falsely said (but said by whom?) to have said what Lacan meant to

have said then shrink-wrapped into one of three cards and entered into play in a

11 Op cit, 151.

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game which Derrida will always lose. But Derrida does not say that. Is Derrida

rigging the reading of what is still to be read, not just defensively and preemptively

having someone voice a complaint about an injustice done—by who knows whom--

to Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter?”

In “For the Love of Lacan,” a text that Derrida wrote, as I have said, after Lacan

was dead, Derrida returns to the other passage in The Post Card I mentioned above,

a passage which Derrida retells a story about Lacan misreading Derrida: “Lacan

made a compulsive blunder; he said that he thought I was in analysis . . . The thing

has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card (202-04).”12 Derrida

spares the reader the task of rereading it but also allows any reader to stop reading

“Love Lacan” and go to the Post . . . and reread it. Yet if the reader were to go to

pages 202-04 of the Post . . . he or she would find that Derrida does not quote

Lacan’s words when discussing what Lacan mistakenly said about Derrida was in

analysis. See for yourselves. Only very near the end of “Love Lacan” does Derrida

deliver the story along with the quotation from Lacan he left out of The Post Card:

“In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever withdrawn

from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the syntax and the

reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about whom I did not know that

–to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not know that he was in analysis—

about whom I did not know that he was in analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis

—his name is Jacques Derrida, who has written a preface to this Verbier.”13 We will

12 Op cit, 68. 13 Ibid, 68. “Verbier” is translated in English as “magic word.” Aubier-Flammirion is the name of the press that published Abraham and Torok’s Cryptonymie. Lacan refers here to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s Cryptonymie: Le verbier de

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return to this passage later and attend several times in a necessarily paratactic

fashion to Derrida’s retellings of this story. For now, I wish only to say that in “Love

Lacan,” Derrida retells the anecdote he had already told before in the Post . . . in a

way that makes it fully readable. Only in this later text, “For the Love of Lacan,”

written, as I have said, after Lacan was dead, does Derrida retrieve Lacan’s words

from the archive and cite them. Having retrieved them, however, Derrida does not

read them. Nor does he quote Lacan’s next sentence in which Lacan reads Derrida’s

preface “Fors” as evidence for Lacan’s supposition, not declaration, that Derrida is in

analysis. Does it matter that to a reading of “For the Love of Lacan” that Derrida

returned to what Lacan said about him and to what Derrida said about Lacan in

nearly twenty years earlier, by Derrida’s count, in The Post Card, after Lacan died?

Does the media Derrida references with respect to the archive in “Love Lacan,” the

tape recorders in front of him recording what he says as he speaks, matter in

relation to Lacan’s death the way the fax matters to Derrida when discussing Freud’s

reliance on letters in Archive Fever?14

Say again?

As I have said, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” for a colloquium on Lacan organized

and held after Lacan was dead, and “Love Lacan” was published first as an article in

Lacan avec les philosophes (1991) and subsequently as the second chapter of

Derrida’s book, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996). The three sentences with

L’Homme aux translated as The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans Nicholas Rand, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

14 See Derrida’s aside: “(look at the tape recorders that are in this room),” op cit, 40.

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which I began the present essay paraphrase the first three sentences of “Love

Lacan.” These sentences of “Love Lacan” are set off typographically on the page as

three different lines:

What wouldn’t Lacan have said!

What will he not have said!

This is an exclamation, not a question . . . .15

Derrida repeats the phrase three times, the second inverting exactly the first, and on

the same page just after the first paragraph: “What will Lacan not have said! What

wouldn’t he have said!” This second, inverted repetition of the first two sentences,

printed continuously on the page rather than broken into two separate lines as the

first two sentences are. Derrida exclaims the nearly the same words a third time

near the end of the section Derrida calls the “third protocol”: “what would Lacan

have said or not have said!”16

As I have already said more than once, Derrida wrote “Love Lacan” after Lacan

died, and Derrida sends off “Love Lacan” as if by he, Derrida, were already dead,

already taking Lacan place, as if looking to how he, Derrida, will be read after his

death. In this case, however, Derrida significantly leaving out the first of Derrida’s

first two sentences about Lacan and the second of the second two: “What will I not

have said today!”17 Derrida retains only the negative formulation for himself, allows

only what he will not have said, not what he will have said. He thereby leaves, as if

15 Ibid., 39.16 Ibid., 62. 17 Ibid., 39; 69.

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shut, access to the exclamation of what he will or would have said today by erasing

the published half of his archive in the form of an article.

Just Us

I must you to wait patiently for just a bit longer before we return to the passages

in the Post . . . I cited and attend further to these stylistic repetitions concerning

what will or wouldn’t have been said or not said, Derrida’s insistence that they are

exclamations, not questions, and Derrida’s subtle but deliberate different

rephrasings of the opening two lines, his division of Lacan and his division of

himself from Lacan. For the moment, let me note a similar stylistic repetition to

which we will need to attend alongside, or “with” the those I have just cited above:

Derrida uses the words “I say good luck” twice, although he punctuates them

differently:

to those who are waiting for me to take a position [“saying Lacan is right or

doing right by Lacan”] so they can reach a decision [arreter leur judgment], I

say, “Good luck.”18

And:

I say good luck to any narrator who would try to know what was said and

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

said! 19

18 Ibid, 58.19 Ibid, 62.

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Derrida’s repetition of the words “I say good luck” invert the order of Derrida’s

repetition of what Lacan and Derrida would or would not have said. Two inverted

repetitions bind, a word I use advisedly since Derrida uses it when discussing the

publication of Lacan’s Écrits in “Love Lacan,” these repetitions bind Derrida to Lacan

in relation to their reading and publications: in the first set of repetitions, Derrida

takes Lacan’s place (at the end of the essay, after Lacan takes his place a second time

in reverse) as someone who will or would not have said in one case and Lacan takes

the place Derrida had earlier assigned himself in the second instance.20

In binding these two repetitions together within the same sentence, Derrida

makes the question of what Lacan or Derrida has or hasn’t said under the heading of

the archive (and under the subheading of “death”).21 If we cite the lines preceding

Derrida repeats the lines “what will Lacan not have said today!” at the end of a

discussion of the archive:

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

difficult in that Lacan was an incomparable listener and his discursive

machine was one of such sensitivity that everything could be inscribed there

with finesse or discretion. (This is quite right; who doesn’t try to do the

20 Other stylistic repetitions appear to be equally deliberate. In The Post Card, one finds similar stylistic repetitions such as “To be continued (la séance continue)”; 190, 320, 337, 362, 376, 409, 451. Derrida also uses nearly the same word to describe his reading practice in The Post Card and “Love Lacan.” For one example, see “extremely careful and slow, bringing micrological refinement For Love” (op cit, 44); and “microscopic examination” (ibid., 45). Derrida uses frequently uses “I have said” and variations on the phrase customarilty to be found in academic prose, none of which are necessarily mean anything but all of which nevertheless cary a charge, however small, given the repetitions of phrases about what Lacan and Derrida “said.” These repeitions are beyond the limits of my capacity to gloss.21 62, 66.

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same?) But, what is more, it is inscribed there in the spoken words of a

seminar that, by giving rise to numerous stenotyped or tape-recording

archivings, will have fallen prey not only to the problem of rights . . . but also

to all the problems posed by delays in publishing and of an editing—in the

American sense—that was of the most active sort. Since all of these things

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

modality, conditional or future anterior, especially when one knows Lacan’s

rhetoric, I say good luck to any narrator who would try to know what was

said and written by whom on which date: what would Lacan have said or not

have said!22

As we shall see, Derrida similar situates his comment about what he will not have

said in relation to the “problem of the archive.”23

In “Love Lacan,” Derrida places the “just us” of saying or not saying or saying you

are not sure you will say about the dead (who include the living, who always dead,

Derrida says, when you speak for them) is placed under the title “love,” a title that is

of course reversible, about loving Lacan and what Lacan loved. Derrida does not

comment in the essay on “love” and whether he will say that he and Lacan loved

each other more marks the limit of what can or can not have been said by Derrida in

“Love Lacan,” and by extension about what each of the said about the other when

they were both alive and what Derrida still says about Lacan now that Lacan is dead.

22 The same sorts of things happens to Derrida’s published seminars. See Richard Burt, “Putting Your Papers in Order,” op cit.

23 Ibid., 43.

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Lacan’s archivization the future reading of Lacan, or anyone else, as the archive is a

question of the future, not the past, in Archive Fever.24

Après tout: ‘Pas’ “Du tout”

In order to address these broader questions, let us attempt to grasp more exactly

what motivates them, especially Derrida’s turn to the archive, by proceeding in an X-

centric manner now to gloss another set of cruxes, with respect the way Derrida

makes reading Lacan a question of the archive, in the last chapter of The Post Card,

“Du tout,” and parentheses in a passage in “Love Lacan” the end of the sometimes

forgotten last chapter “Du tout,” left untranslated as is “Le facteur de la vérité.”25

First, let me pause to gloss the title “Du tout.” In The Post Card, Derrida several

places talks about the Paratext as a book and its paratexts in different ways, as not a

book, as a book with a false preface, as a book with four chapters, of “Facteur” as an

appendix.26 At one point, Derrida goes so far as enter a chapter of “To Speculate--on

‘Freud’” as a paratext even though the chapter is not finished: Of “Seven:

24 In “Love Lacan,” Derrida never actually directly “says” anything about his relationship with Lacan—first he says he “is not sure if” he “will say” that he and Lacan loved each other very much, then he asks if he has not said that they did: “Now, wasn't this a way of saying that I loved and admired him greatly?” Is Derrida saying that he and Lacan did love each other very much without saying so or saying and not saying they did? If so, is Derrida’s manner of not saying just given that Lacan is dead? What is the relation between justice and saying or not saying in Derrida’s lines? (See Derrida’s note on“the undeconstructible injunction of justice” in Specters of Marx, op cit 267, n73.) 25 On the first page of “Love Lacan,” Derrida immediately places his introductory exclamations about Lacan’s saying under the heading of the archive: “To deal with this enigma of the future anterior and the conditional . . . is to deal with the problem of archivization” op. cit, 39-40. 26 You might read these envois as the preface of a book that I have not written” (ibid., 3); “Beyond all else I wanted, . . to make a book” (ibid., 5).

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Postscript,” Derrida says that “it resembles another postscript, another codicil, the

postscript or codicil to the entire book this time. . . . This is the end: an appendix that

is as reduced as possible, free, detachable too, a play appendix.”27 The most

anarchivic of Derrida’s remixes of his book is “Du tout,” a chapter that is arguably a

long paratext to Derrida’s discussion of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,”

the “Facteur,” an epitext when published as an article but then turned peritext when

published in The Post Card. Yet Derrida never reads “Du tout” as a paratext. He just

refers to it as one of the “three last parts of the present work.”28 “Du tout” is most

“anarchivically” archival insofar as its inclusion is not motivated, not read as such,

and therefore resembles the “seventh chapter” of The Post Card that “in certain

respects adds nothing.”29

Les mots juste

Rather than catalogue in order to read Derrida’s routing of Lacan to the archive, I

want to pursue the anarchivity of Derrida’s archive as limits the meaning of archive

not only to translation and media but to the storage and publication of Derrida’s

texts, including their publishing history, errata, editions, editions, bindings, copies,

and so on.30 Derrida uses the word “anarchivic” in Archive Fever to mean “the

27 Ibid., 387. 28 Ibid.,, 3. 29 Ibid., 386. 30 On Derrida’s interest in the archive and the shift from print to electronic media, see Richard Burt, "Life Supports: 'Paperless' People, the New Media Archive, and the Hold of Reading," in New Formations special issue on "Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net," eds. Nicholas Toburn and Says May. Forthcoming, 2013.

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violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence”.31 Reading Freud’s

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida finds that Freud’s concept of the “death drive

is above all anarchivic, one could say archiviolithic. It will always have been archive

–destroying . . . . Archiviolthic force leaves nothing of its own behind . . . The death

drive is . . . what we will later call mal d’archive, “archive fever.”32 Anarchivity is the

radical destruction of the archive and the remains of what can never be archived,

the ash of the archive.

By unfolding, carefully and patiently specific quasi-cruxes in Derrida’s various

archiving of his publications related to The Post Card, we may grasp how the

question of reading Derrida now, after his death, is also a question of the anarchivity

of his archived texts, a force which may not properly brought under the heading of a

pre-fabricated, ready-made term like “performavity” since this anarchivity puts into

question any binary opposition between publication and ash, between the legible or

readable and the illegible or unreadable, between between memory and the present

and past tenses—it is archived or it has been archived—and forgetting and the

future anterior--it will have been archive destroying.33 As Derrida says of Lacan,

“since the legal archive covers less and less of the whole archive, this archive

remains unmasterable and continues on its way, in continuity with the anarchive.”34

The same thing, more or less, could be said of Derrida’s archive.

31 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans, Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998), 7.32 Ibid., 10; 11.33 For the catalogue, I refer the reader to note 13.34 “Love Lacan,” op cit, 68.

17

The delirious anarchivity of Derrida’s publications puts the limits of their

reading, or their future anterior (in the conditionl) reading after (the fact of)

Derrida’s death, into question, such that as we turn now to what I am calling quasi-

cruxes, or cruxes for the sake of economy, we are no longer talking about the

symptom or even a “parerpraxis.”35 I want to compare a crux in “Du tout” to a crux

in “Love Lacan.” Here is the crux in “Du tout”: there is a remote relation between

Derrida’s discussion of how to read an error in the first two editions of Lacan’s

Écrits and a story Derrida tells involving a dead friend, a story that inverts a story

one of the letter writers of the “Envois” tells about a mistake Lacan made about

Derrida.

The mention of someone’s death occurs a few pages (513-15) after a lengthy

discussion of whether Lacan’s misquotation of “dessein” (“plot,” “scheme,” or

“design”) from the last lines of Poe’s The Purloined Letter as “destin” (“destiny” or

“fate”) in the last sentence of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” “an altering

citation,” Derrida says, but one about which “’Le facteur de la vérité’ did not say all

that I [Derrida] think, but that in any event carefully refrained from qualifying as a

“typographical error” or a “slip,” even supposing, you are going to see why I am

saying this, that a somewhat lighthearted analytic reading could content itself with

such a distinction, I mean between a “typo” and a “slip.”36 Derrida then permits

35 My neologism is designed to give the Freudian lapsus, or parapraxis, a Derridean inflection by punning on Derrida’s interest in the parergon, the frame, and the border. I mean to suggest as well that the limits of a “Derridean” reading, Derrida’s name turned into an adjective are also broached.36 Ibid, 513. In Lacan’s Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, ed and trans, Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007) Fink leaves the error Lacan made at the end of “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” in mistaking “dessein” for “destin” when citing Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter.

18

himself to cite what he said before launching into a full-scale assault on François

Roustang’s reading of the mistake as a slip, not a typo:

Now here is the most ingenious finding: what remains a typographical error

two out of three times in given Écrits [Derrida does not specify the editions

or give the relevant page numbers] becomes Roustang’s “slip,” Roustang

having contented himself, somewhat quickly it is true, with reproducing the

ur-typo, everyone including its author, turning all around that which must

not be read.37

Prompted by a request from René Major, one of the conference organizers, Derrida,

supplies the name of a friend he had hitherto kept secret: “She probably had in

mind someone whose name I can say because I believe that he is dead.”38

As I Was Saying

The question of what is an error is an typo or a slip is what textual critics

would ordinarily regard as a crux. The mention of the dead friend would have no

bearing on the story about the error in the Écrits involving a crux the meaning of

which Derrida aparently wants to leave undecided. In order to understand what I

take to be a remote relation between mention and the story, I now move to what

will be perhaps the most X-centric or perhaps the most XOXXOOOX-centric of the

cruxes Derrida uses in “Love Lacan” and The Post Card, among all of those I will

gloss. I say they are perhaps most X-centric because they are perhaps the hardest to

37 Ibid, 513.38 Ibid, 519.

19

notice; Derrida is not deliberately drawing his reader’s attention to them as he does

the repetitions and inversions we saw in “Love Lacan.”

The crux I gloss bears directly on the questions we will have been asking

about Derrida’s effacement of both the proper name and the title. In the first

repetition and inversion, Derrida says Lacan told about him to a similar story

someone else told Derrida at a conference, both of which Derrida tells with

reference to a dead friend. In a passage in “Du tout” that repeats, or precedes,

“p/repeats,” as if in reverse order, the passage in “Love Lacan” in which Derrida

parenthetically mentions a dead friend while discussing Lacan’s blunder, Derrida

tells a story soon after castigating Roustang about saying that what may have been a

typo was actually a slip, Derrida says that he would “prefer to tell [us] a brief story,”

a story that bears a remarkable, Derrida might (not) have said uncanny,

resemblance to “Derrida’s story about Lacan saying that Derrida was “inanalysis”

(sic).39 The story Derrida reverses Derrida’s relationship to the analyst. This time

Derrida himself is said to be the analyst. At a conference, someone came up to tell

Derrida she knew he was psychoanalyzing someone but didn’t give Derrida a name:

‘I know that so and so has been in analysis with you for more than ten

years.” My interlocutor, a woman, knew that I was not an analyst, and for my

own part I knew, to refer to the same shared criteria, that what she was

saying with so much assurance was false, quite simply false.40

In addition to the way the two stories invert Derrida’s position as analyst and

analysand, both stories mention, as I have said, a dead friend of Derrida’s. This is

39 Ibid., 518; 202. 40 Ibid., 518.

20

the second repetition and inversion. Immediately after this story, in the telling of

which Derrida leaves the woman unnamed, René Major invites Derrida to state the

name of the person who was not in analysis: “Given the point we have reached,

what prevents you from saying who is in question? To state his name now seems

inevitable.”41 Major does not ask Derrida to give the name of the woman who said

she knew who Derrida was (not) analyzing. Derrida responds as follows:

René Major asks me the name of the analyst in question. Is this really

necessary? Moreover, my interlocutor did not name him. She contented

herself with characteristics . . . No name was pronounced. It was only after

the fact, reflecting on the composite that she had sketched, that I attempted

an induction.42

Here is the first narrative repetition. In the last pages of “Love Lacan,” repeats and

inverts the woman’s story he tells in “Du tout”: this time Derrida tells the story of

Lacan having said that Derrida having been an analysand, a story also about an

error, the dead friend is mentioned in a parenthetical sentence within Derrida’s

story about what Lacan said rather than before it or after it: “Lacan made a

compulsive blunder,” Derrida writes; “he said that he thought I was in analysis.”

Derrida proceeds to quote Lacan’s unofficial version. I now quote it again:

In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever

withdrawn from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the

syntax and the reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about

whom I did not know that –to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did

41 Ibid., 518. 42 Ibid., 518-19.

21

not know that he was in analysis—about whom I did not know that he was in

analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who

has written a preface to this Verbier.”43

Derrida then introduces in parentheses an anecdote in “Love Lacan” about the death

of the a friend: “(Lacan . . . was then obviously unaware of the fact that one of the

two [Derrida and his supposed analyst], was dead by the time I wrote the preface in

question, which was this written to his memory, as homage, and in his absence.”44

Only after inserting this parenthentical remark about a dead friend does Derrida

return to Lacan’s blunder and ask “How could Lacan have made his listeners laugh . .

. on the basis of a blunder, his own . . . ? How could he insist on two occasions on”

Derrida’s “real status as noninstitutional analyst and on what he wrongly supposed

to be my status as institutional analysand, whereas he ought to have been the first to

. . .”45

So You (Would Have) Said

Having glossed these narrative repetitions and inversions, we may also gloss

stylistic repetitions and inversions in the passage we have just not “read.” Just as

the story in “Du Tout” repeats the story about Lacan in the “Envois,” so in “Love

Lacan” Derrida refers the reader back to the same story in the “Envois”: “The thing

has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card.”46 These repetitions

come with omissions and additions that may be glossed, if one can still call what I

43 Op cit, 68.44 Ibid., 68.45 Ibid., 68-69.46 Op cit., 202-04.

22

am doing “glossing,” as having inverted each other. For example, Derrida does not

give the quotation from Lacan in “Envois,” but he does give it in “Love Lacan”;

inversely, Derrida names the dead friend in “Du tout” but does not in “Love Lacan.”

One could go even further and point out the parentheses uses in “Love Lacan” to

mention his dead friend and to say Lacan was mistaken recall the figurative

parentheses in which Derrida places the anecdote about Roustang in “Du Tout”: “A

few words in parenthesis”; “I will not close this short parenthesis”; “Here I close this

parenthesis.”47

These cruxes are at the outer limits of the borders of glossing, or of any glossing

to come. As with the title “Du tout,” we come at these limits to the anarchivity of

Derrida’s own texts the question of reading after death becomes a question of the

title, anecdotes, and publication. In the last crux, I will gloss, Derrida again tells a

story about an error, in this case, an error Lacan made, one of many, when speaking

about Derrida. Derrida puts this story in a long parenthetical paragraph and to the

way that paragraph follows the second anecdote Derrida tells about meeting Lacan

in person, an anecdote Derrida that involves dates and a posterous order of

publication and that Derrida defers for so long that he finally begins telling it by

saying “I am not forgetting.”48 Here are the first and last sentences of the paragraph

that follows the first anecdote: “Prior to any grammatology: “Of Grammatology” was

the first title of an article published some five years before Lacan’s new title of an

article published some five years before Lacan’s new introduction and—and this

was one of the numerous mistakes or misrecognitions made by Lacan--it never

47 Ibid., 512; 513; nd 515.48 Op cit, 52.

23

proposed a grammatology. . . The book that treated of grammatology was anything

but a grammatology”) (52).49 Derrida does not put write of grammatology with

initial capital letters, as it should be written, Of Grammatology. Why not? And why

does Derrida enclose this very general accusation about Lacan’s mistakes with

parentheses?

We can best respond to these questions, I think, by turning the the anecdote that

immediately precedes this paragraph in parentheses, an anecdote Derrida tells a

story about what Lacan told concerning the publication of :

I am not forgetting the binding which all of this is bound up. The other worry

Lacan confided me in Baltimore concerned the binding of the Écrits, which

had not yet appeared, although its publication was imminent. Lacan was

worried and slightly annoyed, it seemed to me, with those at Le Seuil, his

publishers, who had advised him not to assemble everything in a single large

volume of more than nine hundred pages. There was thus a risk that the

binding would not be strong enough and would give way “You’ll see,” he told

me with a gesture of his hands, “it’s not going to hold up.” The republication

in the two-volume paperback edition in 1970 will thus have reassured him,

in passing, not only to confirm, the necessity of placing the “Seminar on the

Purloined Letter” at the “entry post” of the Écrits, but also to fire off one of

those future anteriors (antedates or antidotes) that will have been the

privileged mode of all the declarations of love that he so often made to me, by

49 The title of the text to which Derrida refers is not properly capitalized here. The text is Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivack (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974; second, corrected edition, 1997.

24

mentioning (I dare not say by antedating), and I quote, “what I will literally

call the instance prior to any grammatology’.”50

This is what the first of what Derrida says are two first anecdotes about meeting.

Lacan. Before returning to the question of Derrida’s use of all lower case letters for

his book Of Grammatology and his use of parentheses, let me gloss this potentially

unlimited crux even further. the anecdote he defers telling, just after talking about

his reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” followed from the way

Lacan published the Écrits and before returning to “the republication of the

paperback edition in 1970”:

Now if there is one text that stands more than any other in this position and

at this post of binder [sic], it is the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” As

you know, the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” is given a “privilege,”

which is Lacan’s word; I quote Lacan: “the privilege of opening the sequence

[the sequence of the Écrits] despite its diachrony. In other words, Écrits

collects and binds together all the texts out of which it is composed, with the

exception of the seem which, by coming at the beginning, is thereby given the

‘privilege’ of figuring the synchronic configuration of the set and thus binding

the whole together. It therefore seemed legitimate to me to take a privileged

interest in this privilege. If I use the word binding here, the binding that

holds the moment of reading and rereading, it is because on one of the two

sole occasions in my life on which I met Lacan and spoke briefly with him, he

himself spoke to me of binding and of the binding of the Écrits.51

50 Ibid, 52.51 (52);

25

With the borders of this gloss thus expanded to include a question of textual

criticism and publication as a question of reading and rereading in ancdote told in

reverse order and conspicuously deferred, we may now return to Derrida’s

parenthetical paragraph in which he writes “of grammatology.” Through the use of

parentheses, Derrida allows himself to say some things about Lacan with greater

force and even more decisiveness descisvely outs does two partly. Derrida corrects

Lacan by appealing to dates (“five years before”), but does not bother to archive all

of Lacan’s many other mistakes or misrecognitions. At the same time, Derrida

allows himself to depart from the bibliographical norm for titles. By citing the title

of grammatology in lower case letters and introducing a pointless yet conscipuous

error, Derrida turns the relation of his own work and its title inside out, then stating

only what his book was not about. Whatever “of grammatology” is about, or why it

bears that title, or why Derrida waits to make such a bold and general accusation

right after telling the anecdote, all remain completely unclear, at rest and arrested.

The crux implodes and explodes: One wonders what kind of mistake Lacan is

supposed to have made by antedating his texts. Derrida’s reading, in the past tense,

of Lacan’s use of the future anterior, becomes Derrida’s non-reading of his own

works. “Was anything but” is perhaps echoed in the equally negatively stated

sentence near the end of “Love Lacan”: What I will not have said today!”52

The least—or the most—we can say is that it is not clear in “Love Lacan” that one

can one use the future anterior to speak of the what the dead will have said that

differs significantly from speaking of the dead using the past tense; that is, it is by no

52 (69).

26

means clear whether or not the future anterior just reappropriating, hence unjustly,

what has been said not only about by the dead by the living but of what the living

said or will have said about the living. When Derrida says Lacan fired “off one of

those future anteriors (antedates or antidotes)” (49) he uses the future anterior to

describe Lacan’s use of the future anterior as an act of love: “that will have been the

privileged mode of all the declarations of love that he so often made to me” (49). Yet

Derrida puts this point about Lacan’s mode of declaring his love in the past tense:

“he so often made to me.” When Derrida comes to the end of “Love Lacan” and

accuses Lacan of having made a “compulsive blunder,” Derrida equates Lacan’s use

of the future anterior quite negatively with reapproriation: “Here is a better known

episode that occurred some ten years later after Lacan used the future anterior

several times to reappropriate by way of antedating when he said, for example . . . )

In a session of the seminar [XXIV] in 1977 (still “l’Insu-que-sait”), Lacan made a

compulsive blunder.”53 By collapsing the future anterior into the past tense, Derrida

leaves us to wonder whether any declaration of love is not also a declaration of war,

as if psychoanalysis and deconstruction could only make love and war, not “make

love, not war.”

Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead

Having unfolded the cruxes above, we are now in a position to route the

question of what it means to read Derrida after Derrida’s death, a question that has

informed our glossing of Derrida’s attention to the future of a reading Lacanian

53 (67),

27

discourse in “Love Lacan,” to a question of the effacement of the title and of the

proper name. Before turning to the next crux let me point out that Derrida several

times excuses himself in “Love Lacan ”from rereading passages or summarizing

what he said in the Post . . . in one case on the grounds that he has already

“formalized readability” in general: “I have already sufficiently formalized

readability under erasure and the logic of the event as graphematic event—notably

as event of the proper name, in which the little devil arrives only to erase itself / by

erasing itself—to be spared having to add anything here for the moment” (48).54 I

turn now now to very last crux, there always being a last gloss after the last, to the

very, very last crux I will gloss before returning to the one with which I began,

namely the letter “X” in “X-ian.”55 In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida comments on a

condition made on his giving a lecture at a colloquium on “Lacan avec les

philosophes”: “they put forward the pretext of a rule according to which only the

dead could be spoken about here and therefore, if one insisted on speaking of me,

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

54 Derrida also states “It goes wihtout saying that my reading [in Facteur] concerned explicitly . . the question of Lacan’s name, the problems of legacy, of science and institution, and the aporias of archivization in whichthat name is involved. (LL, 41)55 For another crux I won’t gloss, see Derrida’s comments in Love Lcan on “we” and “I” in relation to “who will ever have has the right to say: “’we love each other’?” (43); to the death of the one of whom one speaks; and to “what is getting archived!” (43). This instance concerns Derrida’s uses of “I” and “we” in the body of the text and in the third endnote of the book, Resistances of Psychoanalysis. All three headnotes are uniformly preceded with the word “NOTE” in all capitals followed, but the first person pronouns used in each vary. In the first note, someone uses the plural “Our thanks” 119, and in the second note someone similarly writes “we thank” but then Derrida identifies himself as the writer by using the singular first person pronoun “I.”

28

be given a helping hand when the occasion arose”(47).56 In an anecdote Derrida

relays or relates about meeting Lacan, Derrida says Lacan said something very

similar to Derrida: “At our second and last encounter, during dinner offered by his

in-laws, he insisted on publicly archiving in his own way, with regard to something I

had told him, the disregard of the Other that I had supposedly attempted ‘by playing

dead’”(61). Although Lacan made his comment about playing dead to Derrida

before the conference at which Derrida is speaking happened, but Derrida tells that

anecdote about what Lacan said only after Derrida states the condition unnamed

colloquium conference organizers put on his speaking only if he played dead: “That

is (was enough just to think of it) to make me disappear nominally as a live person

—because I am alive—to me disappear for life” (“Love Lacan,” 47). Derrida adds

that he would not allow himself to be offended or discouraged by the “lamentable

and indecent incident of the barring of my proper name from the program and that

he was “shocked” by the “symptomatic and compulsive violence” of forcing to act

dead in order to speak at the conference, but refers the reader in an endnote to the

appendices of Lacan avec les philosophes and does not make anything of the way

Lacan’s words “playing dead” repeat those Derrida used when speaking of the

colloquium.57

56 “Love Lacan,” 47 and 121n3. The repetition of the word “play” is not as exact in the French versions as it is the English translation, and it is possible that Derrida deliberately chose not repeat the same words exactly. In “Pour l’amour de Lacan,” Derrida uses two different verbs rather than one, “je fasse le mort” (Lacan avec les philosophes, 403; Resistances, 65) and “en jouant du mort” (Lacan avec les philosophes 406; Resistances, 69). I by no means fault the translator of the English edition for translating these two different French verbs as “play” rather than, for example, as “act” dead and “play” dead. The crux is as much about Derrida’s variation in word choice as it is the translator’s repetition of the same word. 57 47.

29

Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead

Having glossed these cruxes, we are ready to return to “Love Lacan” and gloss

Derrida’s use of “X-ian” to stand for any proper name that would modify the noun

“psychoanalysis.” Let me begin this gloss with a gloss from another text by Derria

related to the letter “X.” It is getting late, I know, to introduce another text. Please

follow along. You’re almost not there. The degree to which Derrida’s sentence

about “X-ian” psychoanalysis and deconstruction, let us consider the investment

Derrida has in psychoanalysis with relation to “X” in the title by turning to an

endnote to “Marx & Sons,” that is, in Derrida’s response to a group of academic

readers commenting on Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Derrida glosses the phrase “X

without X,” a phrase in which X may stand either for a noun or a name in a title.

Derrida writes—rather scathingly—of Terry Eagleton’s adoption of the phrase “X

without X” in the title of contribution to the volume:

Eagleton is undoubtedly convinced that, with the finesse, grace and elegance

he is universally acknowledged to possess, he has hit upon a title (‘Marxism

without Marxism’) which is a flash of wit, an ironic dart, a witheringly

sarcastic critique, aimed at me or, for example, Blanchot, who often says –I

have discussed this at length elsewhere—‘X without X.’ Every ‘good Marxist’

knows , however, that noting is closer to Marx, more faithful to Marx, than

this Marxism without Marxism was, to begin with, the Marxism of Marx

himself, if that name still means anything.58

58 Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 213–69; to 265.n. 29. On the “X without X” formulation, see ibid, 213–69 where Derrida explains the meaning of his

30

In citing from a text related to Specters of Marx, I mean to move us closer, nor

further, to the question of reading Derrida reading Lacan after Lacan’s death amd

our reading The Post Card and “Love Lacan” after Derrida’s death by using “X

wihtout X” to link even more strongly these questions to the way deconstruction

turn on the displacement of the question of psychoanlaysis having a proper name,

any proper name, in front of it. Derrida introduces the phantasm in Specters of Marx

via psychoanalysis. As Derrida writes in “Marx & Sons,” “the motifs of mourning,

inheritance, and promise are, in Specters of Marx, anything but ‘metaphors’ in the

ordinary sense of the word . . . They also allow me to introduce questions of a

psychoanalytic type (those of the specter or phantasma—which also means specter

in Greek) . . . All this presupposes a transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself . . . I

have elsewhere, tried to discuss how the transformation might be brought about,

and discuss this at length here” (235). In “Marx & Sons,” then, Derrida once again

raises the question he had raised in “Love Lacan,” citing Resistances of

Psychoanalysis and The Post Card as two of five texts he lists in endnote 32 (265) as

formulation “messianicity without messianism” see Derrida (ibid: 265, n.29 and 267, n.69, where the translator supplies a helpful note. On the “x without x” formulation itself, see also Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. The Instant of My Death and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 88–9). For Derrida’s variations on the “x without x” formulation, see “Marx & Sons where Derrida explains the meaning of his formulation “messianicity without messianism” see Derrida (op cit, 265, n.29 and 267, n.69, where the translator supplies a helpful commentary on Derrida’s phrases “death without death” and “relation without relations(s)”). On the “community without community” see Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.: 37, 42, 46–7, n.15; 1999: 250–2); see also Derrida’s discussion of what he calls a “materiality without matter” (Derrida, Jacques. “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits’),” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. Eds. Tom Cohen et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 277–360.

31

those in which he does the transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself.” In the

endnotes, in a relatively exterior paratextual space, Derrida makes the letter “X” a

mathematical variable of a title. An unreadable letter stands for a word composed

of readable letters in a title is central to the question of quasi-methodological status

of deconstruction and what Derrida calls the transformation of psychoanalytic logic

itself.

“Mort” to Say

In turning now to the crux, “X-ian,” with which we began, we are considering as

part of it the sentence that follows it, “What I will not have said today!” We will

gloss the “X” in relation to what Derrida did not say, to the way he collapses what he

will have said or would have said into the negative, the not said: “ What I will not

have said today!” (68). That’s what Derrida said. Yet what Derrida said, the way he

limits himself to the negative, becomes something “to be glossed” because he

introduces an asymmetry between what he says and what about what Lacan will

have said and won’t have said. Turning his text into an archive, Derrida “says” that

consists only of what he will “not have said,” not, as was the case with Lacan also

what he will or would have said. Of course, Derrida doesn’t say that. At least not

exactly. And that is precisely my point. The question I raising here concerns not

only what Derrida did not say, but what the limits of not saying are: where does the

opposition between saying and not saying deconstruct? Why does Derrida

“destruct” it rather than deconstruction?

Let us begin glossing the crux of the “X-ian.” What is it that Derrida has not

said in “Love Lacan” about the name and the title that bears on his erasure of any

32

proper name that might modify psychoanalysis, on “X-ian?” Derrida has not said

that he wrote one of the postscripts of Lacan avec les philosophes to which he

directs the reader in the headnote and the third endnote of “Love Lacan.” The post-

script is entitled “Après Tout: Les Chance du College.”59 What does Derrida say in

this postscript? What he says bears directly on the “adjective” “X-ian”: in the

postscript Derrida talks about the erasure of his name, in the form of an adjective,

from the original colloquium title, “Is there a Derridean Psychoanalaysis?,” and its

replacement with the colloquium and book’s title Lacan avec les philosophes.

By not citing his postscript to Lacan avec avec les philosophes in the paratexts—

headnote and endnote--of “Love Lacan,” Derrida effectively writes about the erasure

of his name from the original title in invisible ink, as it were. “X-ian” marks the spot .

. . less, the invisible ink, or, in Derrida’s words, “the history that in France and

especially in Eastern France, has been written, so to speak, not in ink but in the

effacement of the name”60

Sayve My Name, Sayve My Name

And with the effacement of the name goes the effacement of the title. Derrida has

already given the reader everything he or she would need to find the dossier

regarding the changed title Lacan avec les pilosophes in his headnote and endotes to

“Love Lacan.” I leave some of the materials relevant to a glossing to come filed away

59 Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris, Albin Michel, 1991), 421-52.60 “Love Lacan,” op cit, 47-48. In relation to Derrida’s use of “X-ian” in “Love Lacan,”see the indecipherable (coded?) letters or words “EGEK HUM RSXVI STR, if I am not mistaken” (150) and “P.R.” as “Poste Restante” (50) in The Post Card.

33

in the footnote below, materials to which refers in his post-script as a “dossier” and

as “archived.”61 I wll point only that Derrida mentions his shock at the change made

to the title of the colloquium and insists that the absence of his name makes no

difference to him at all. Yet he nowhere comments on the condition that he play

dead if he is to participate in the confernece. Alone among all of the contributors to

the appendices, Alain Badiou, who was the person who demanded that no proper

names other than Lacan’s appear in the colloquium title, only Badiou mentions the

condition of playing dead, and he brings it up only to say he is not guilty as charged:

“D’autres, ou les memes, ont jugé exorbitant, stalinien, et relevant du desire de mort,

61 In “Après Tout: Les Chance du College,” op cit., Derrida repeats almost exactly what he said at two different points in “Love Lacan: “Therefore to save time I will not add anything more for the moment—because I find all this increasingly tedious and because, let’s say, ‘I know only too well’” (op cit, 47) and “all the texts, which, are, after all, available and in principle legible by whoever wants to look at them” (ibid., 41).” Compare the following passages, from Après Tout, which I leave you to translate, should you wish to do: “Par souci d’économie, je n’ajouterai donc pas grand-chose. D’une part les documents d’un dossier (une bonne partie de cette “archive” à laquelle je fais allusion dans mon exposé) sont disponibles, et je l’èspere facilement lisibles. A chacun de les interpréter” (ibid, 443). Derrida then adds that he could only repeat what he already said: “D’autre part, je ne pourais ici que répéter ce j’ai dit lors de cette réunion, a savoir, pour schémetiser,” ibid, 443. On the archive, Derrida says: “C’est aussi a ces principes et a ces règles que je me référais dans mons intervention au colloque en évoquant l’objectivité têtue de certains faits gestes maintenant archivés et que je préfère voir livrés a l’inteprétation de chacun.,”ibid, 446. And on the publication of the title, Derrida comments: “A ce silence, le fait est officelement consigné, René Major ne s’était jamais engage, et je l’en approuve. ) et quand, après que René Major eut bien faits de rompre et silence en publie et qu’il eut parlé, comme je l’ai fait aussie, de ce que tout le monde n’vait d’ailleurs pas manqué de remarquer (le changement de titre entre de deux announces publiques) et de ce don’t tous les participants avaient le droit de connaitre. Alain Badiou et quelques autres s’en sont plaints, encore une fois non pas de séance publique mais, autre épreuve de force, en menaçent l’existence des Actes du Colloque et tentant alors de mettre comme condition à la publication de leurs exposés un deuxieme effet de censure, l’effacement ou le retrait de ce qui avait été effectivement et publiquement pronouncé. De qui pouvait-on serieusement espérer une telle soumission?” ibid, 446.

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que je demande qu’un nom proper, parce qu’il était le seul d’un contemporain à être

mis en balance avec celui de Lacan, soit ou éfface, ou équilibré par d’autres.”62 To

have allowed the colloquium title to include Derrida’s name or any name, Badiou

adds, would have been to betrayal [trahison] of Lacan.63

The question I am interested is less about what the contributors of the appendices

said about the change to the conference title than in the way Derrida reserves a

texutal and archival space in “Love Lacan” to say what he as to say. Derrida says he

will not insist on “silencing what he thinks of all of this, but only at the end, ‘off the

record,’ as one says in English.”64 Derrida then glosses this English phrase in

relation to the archive: “Off the record” means not recorded, outside the archive.

We are thus brought back to the difficult question of the record, history, and the

archive. Is there an “outside-the-archive”? Impossible, but the impossible is

deconstruction’s affair.”65 (48). Whatever Derrida says he will say “only at the end”

(48) will be in a paratextual “off the record” space Derrida calls a “post-scriptum, in

parentheses” (48).66 Only “only at the end” (48) never arrives. There is no post-

scriptum in “Love Lacan,” as there is in Derrida’s “Force of Law,” among many other

texts, no postscript as there is in Archive Fever, among many other texts, and no

parentheses either.

When Derrida exlaims “what will I not have said today!” is he saying that he has

not said anything? Or that someone else---no one else?—will not have heard him

62 Ibid, 440. 63 Ibid, 440. 64 Op cit, 48. 65 Ibid, 48.66 Ibid, 48.

35

say what he said, that any hearing will have been a non-hearing? Whether Derrida

is saying anytng or not saying it or syaing it by not saying it, and so on, makes no

difference insofar as the question would be the same: where does Derrida say / not

say what he will not have said? At a number of moments in “For the Love of Lacan,”

Derrida goes out of his way to say that he has nothing to say or that he need not say

again what he said before: “It is certainly not because I think I have something more

or irreplaceable to say on these matters; the discussion of what I ventured almost

twenty years ago around those questions would demand a microscopic examination

for which neither you nor I have the time or the patience; as I have already said . . . “;

“I attempted to show this in “Le facteur de la vérité” and elsewhere; I would be

unable to reconstitute all this here in so little time.”67 Is Derrida ever speaking on

the record? It would appear that there is no record of what Derrida said against

which one could empirically show was later retated in an accurate or inaccurate

way.

Even “Mort” to say

What is the relation in “Love Lacan” between speaking of Lacan after his death

and Derrida’s X-ing out any name in relation to pyschoanlaysis at the end? Derrida

erases the proper name says “perhaps we step beyond psychoanalysis” by attending

to the “radical destruction of the archive, in ashes” (45). As I said earlier, Derrida’s

“last point” (69) in “Love Lacan” involves the priority of deconstruction over

psychoanalysis, “the degree” to which “the analytic situation, the analytic institution,

67 Op cit, 45; 55.

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is deconstructed, as if by itself, without deconstruction or deconstructive project”

(69). Derrida here divorces deconstruction from psychonalysis by erasing without

erasing, at least not in this text, his name, or any name from deconstruction. If

deconstruction subsumes pyschoanalysis through the archive and recasts it, in

effect as “so-called psychoanalysis,” a psychoanalysis that is to some degree without

psychoanalysis, why does Derrida turn to psychoanalysis in order to make his

argument about the archive, its “radical destruction, as ashes” (44)? If the problem

of the archivization does If Lacan is just an example of the larger problem of the

archive, why does Derrida choose Lacan as his example?68 Similarly, when Derrida

writes a book on the archive entitled Archive Fever, why it also a book about Freud?

Why does Freud’s name turn up as an adjective in the book’s subtitle, “A Freudian

Impression?” Why is the last paragraph of Archive Fever about Freud burning?

We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he [Freud] may have

burned. We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive

fever, what have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or of

his “life.” Burned without limit, without remains, and without knowledge.

With no possible response, be it spectral or not, short of or beyond

suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without

a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash.

68 In “Love Lacan,” why does Derrida proceed to locate the problem of the archive, its paradoxes,” in psychoanalysis, say that “keen attention is required with what may be problematic in psychoanalytic discourse—for example, Lcan’s—as concerns precisely, archivization, the economy of repression as guard, inscription, effacement, the indestructibility of the letter or the name” (“Love Lacan,” op cit, 44)?

37

Naples, 22-28 May 199469

When writing on the archive, Derrida does not return to psychoanaysis in general

but to specific texts by Freud and Lacan.

In “Love Lacan,” Derrida returns to Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter”

and Derrida’s own reading of it in “Facteur.” In Archive Fever, Derrida goes back to

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the same text that Derrida says in “Love Lacan” he

attempted “a reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. . . (in ‘To Speculate--on

Freud”’),” rereading in Freud’s text in Archive Fever in relation to the archive and the

death drive, to the archive oriented toward the future, not the past, in which

anarchival repetition is, if not without without repetition, at least repetiton without

compulsion. 70 The importance of psychoanlaysis no longer lies only in the ways it

contributes to a deconstructive account of the problem of the archive through its

interests in “inscription, erasure, blanks, the non-said, memory storage, and new

69 Archive Fever Postscript,” op cit, 101. We may add in passing that what Freud burned of his archive is itself uncertain. See the the introduction to Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G Jung, xix.70 Post Card, op cit, 41. See also “The librarian seemed to know me . . . but this did not get me out of the oath. She asked me to read it . . . Therefore I read it and handed her back the cardboard covered with a transparent paper that had tendered me. At this point, she starts to insist, I had not understood: no, you have to read it out loud. I did so . . . What would an oath that you did not say out loud be worth, an oath that you would only read, or not say be worth, an oath that you would only read, or that while writing you would only read? Or that you would telephone? Or whose tape you would send? I leave you to follow up.” 208 “Did I tell you, the oath that I had to swear out loud (and without which I could never have been permitted to enter, stipulated, among other things, that I introduce neither fire nor flame into the premises: “I hereby undertake . . . not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame . . . and I promise to obey all the rules of the library.” 215-16. And see, among others, the passages relating reading and fire on pp. 23; 40; 58; 171; 176; 180; 233; and 225.

38

techniques of archivization” (40) or what would might more commonly be called the

symptomatic reading.

Ghlossed Protocol

We may now say what these glossings, glossing of “configurations” that are not as

stable as those of any “reading” because they have no limits and for which there are

no “protocols,” as there are even for a history of the archive that may never be

possible to write.71 More radically, glossing canonot be limited to the reading of a

single version of a text, a single edition, as Derrida does in “Love Lacan” with respect

to the Ecrits, which he calls a “stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of

the collection and binding of Écrits, in other words, in 1966.”72 Can deconstruction

write off psychoanalysis, as Derrida does in “Love Lacan” (1991), a text written and

published three years before Archive Fever (1994) but published again in

Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996) of two years after Archive Fever?73 Can

deconstruction transform the logic of psychoanalysis, as Derrida says in Specters of

Marx? Or does the gesture of writing pyschoanalysis off depend on pyschonalysis

having to call itself something, on its having a name that modifies it? Is

deconstruction nameless, that is not dependent on Derrida’s name? Or does it

involve archiving of Derrida’s name from the original the title of the collouqium

erased, even as Derrida erases all proper names that could modify pychoanlysis

71 The words in quotation marks are all take from Derida’s description of which Lacan he read “Facteur” in “Love Lacan,” op cit, 48-49; 53.

72 Ibid, 48-49.73 These are the French publication dates.

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with the letter “X?” Or is there a Freudian deconstruction? A Lacanian

deconstruction? I cannot answer these questions—can anyone?—nor canI say that

the last two questions haven’t already put us on the wrong track in bringing back

the proper name as an adjective in a way that assumes that we already know what a

Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis is.

La carte posthume

I can only make these questions more forceful by extending the question of

reading after death (Derrida’s, Lacan’s, X’s, yours, mine, ours, and so on) with which

we began to the one time Derrida’s explicitly engages with posthumous publication

but does so without reference to psychoanalysis even though it is under the heading

of the phantasm.74 Glossing only renders, and hence rends any distinction between

glossing and reading.

74 See this passage: “The logic of the phantasm, as we are concerned with it here (be it about living death, the ghost or the revenant, about cremation or the posthumous), [this logic of the phantasm] is not strictly speaking a logic, it resists the logos, the legein of the logos, somewhat in the same way as the eschato-logical is both the thing of the logos and which exceeds and comes after the logos, the logic of the logos, the extremity of the last, of the last word of the last man, the extremity of the last extremity situated both in speech, in logos as the last word, still and already out of speech, falling out of it into the posthumous that is already breathing, precisely, the logic of the phantasm resists, defies and dislocates logos and logic . . . There is therefore no logic of the phantasm, strictly speaking, since as Freud reminds us, the phantasm, just as much as the drive, is to be found on both sides of the limit between two opposing concepts. . . . There is therefore no logic or logos of the phantasm of the ghost or the spectral. Unless the logos itself be precisely the phantasm, the very element, the origin and the resource of the phantasm itself, the form and the formation of the phantasm, or even of the revenant.” (Beast and Sovereign, 2, op cit., )

40

Here we also return to the questions I asked at the outset about whether there a

posthumous principle or posthumous structure that differs from the postal principle

or postal structure, whether the posthumous be subsumed by the posterous and the

postal? Derrida engages the “phantasm” in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, and the

posthumous publication is a note Pascal wrote. The note just happens to begin with

the word “fire.” Derrida’s discussion of Pascal’s note occurs in relation to the

phantasm, the survivance of a text, which is not the same thing as the survival or a

corpse decaying.75 His interest in Pascal’s paper lies partly in the way it is “strictly

posthumous,” that is published after Pascal’s death:

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

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

by destinal vocation posthumous or testamentary, there is a stricter enclave

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

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

was strictly posthumous in the latter sense, even though we are not sure

75 In the Ninth Session of the The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, Derrida observes that “all writings are posthumous” before proceeding to narrow the definition of posthumous writing to Pascal’s note. Posthumous publication in general bears comparsson to Derrida saying “I posthume when I breathe,” in that all life is an expenditure without return: “When I wrote one day, in ‘Circumfession,’ if I remember correctly, ‘I posthume as I breathe,’ that’s pretty much what I wanted to have felt, that’s pretty much what I wanted to have felt, rather than thought, or even speculated, or it’s pretty much what I wanted to have myself pre-sense. . . . “ Beast and Sovereign, 2, 173. Derrida adds that “posthumous, posthumus, with an h, appears to be a faulty spelling, the grammarian tells us, and the spelling error in it is apparently induced by the proximity with humus, earth. . . . It’s like for differance, with an a, which is yet another way to posthume by differing or deferring life or, what comes down to the same thing, deferring death,” The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, op cit, 173-174.

41

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 would have remained readable even it was never read.

Earn Burial

Derrida almost says that the note would arrive at its destination. It does, any

case, have a destiny, not a destinerrance. I quote at length:

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

Death.” There can be little doubt that this little piece of paper was destined,

if not for someone, then at least to remain, to survive the moment of its

inscription, to remain legible in an exteriority of a trace, of a document, even

if it were readable only for Pascal himself, later, in the generation of

repetitions to come. This is indeed what has been called a memorial, to use

the word of a witness, Father Guerrier.

Here I quote Derrida quoting Guerrier:

“A few days after the death of Monsieur Pascal . . . a servant of the

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

illustrious deceased that appeared thicker than the rest, and having

removed the stitching . . . found there a little folded parchment . . . and

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

42

faithful copy of the other. . . . All agreed there was no doubt that this

parchment, written with so much care and with such remarkable

characters, was a type of memorial that he kept very carefully to

preserve the memory of a thing that he wanted to have always present

to his eyes and mind, since for eight years he had taken care to stitch

and unstitch it from his clothes, as his wardrobe changed. The

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

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

written in the hand of Pascal, the authenticity of which was confirmed

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

top was a cross, surrounded by a ray of light.76

The material support has been lost; the copy has survived; it has been archived; it

has been published; Derrida takes a father’s word for its authenticity. The note has

been “destined” to remain, and to remain legible, “even if it were readable only for

Pascal himself, later, in the generation of repetitions to come.” That generation is

apparently infinite.77

What Derrida calls Pascal’s “strictly” posthumously published note has arrived at

a future even if that future arrives. It remains readable. For generations to come.

But can it be read? Derrida is not so sure. He places the first word of Pascal’s note,

“Fire [feu]” (212) in the middle of the page, as if it were the title of the note that

follows. And then Derrida says he is uncertain whether he can read it: “This word

76 The Beast and Sovereign, Vol. 2, op cit, 212. 77 On Derrida’s account of a material archival support related to Pascal’s doublet, namely, the wallet, see Richard Burt, "Life Supports,” op cit. .

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‘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).”78 Feu la cindre, Derrida might have said, citing the title of

a text in which Derrida’s many references to a holocaust in The Post Card become

recast as references to the Holocaust, an event Derrida recalls in his coments on

Pascal’s note by glossing it in relation to Paul Celan’s poem, Aschenglorie, one of

many Celan’s poems Derrida also finds difficult to read.79

78 Derrida alludes here to his earlier discussion of Blanchot’s quotation from Paul Celan’s poem Strette, the first word of which, Derrida notes at the end of a sentence linking cremation to Nazi concentration camps and to Blanchot, is “ASCHENGLORIE [ASHGLORY]” (capital letters in the original): “as for cremation, and the ashes that from now on, in modern and uneffaceable history of humanity, the crematoria of the camps, let us forget nothing” (Beast and Sovereign 2, op. cit, 179).79 See, for example, tehse clauses from The Post Card: ““a great-holocaustic fire, a burn everything into which we would throw, finally, along with our entire memory, our names, the letters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc. And if nothing remains . . .” (op cit, 40) and “a holocaust without fire or flame” (op cit, 71). See also Derrida’s comment on Paul Celan’s poem “Einem, der vor der Tuer stand,” a poem also has difficulty reading: “Let us read this poem . . . I cannot claim I can read or decipher this poem,” Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Forham University Press, 2005) 56; 58. I should add that Derrida never ceases to use “holocaust” even when referring to the Holocaust: “Forgive me if I do not name, here, the holocaust, that is to say, literally, as I chose to call it elsewhere, the all-burning. Except to say this . . . every hour counts its holocaust” (ibid, 46). If one wished to read Derrida’s work on the archive in relation to psychoanalysis as a question Derrida engages in Archive Fever, namely, “Is psychonalysis a Jewish science?” and move from there to a reading of Badiou’s erasure of Derrida’s name from the colloquium title as an anti-semitic act, as Derrida obliquely suggests it was in referring to “the sinister political memory of the history that, in France . . . , has been written” (Love Lacan,47), in order to raise a similar question about deconstruction and Judaism in relation to psychoanlaysis would have to take into account Derrida’s “forgetting” of circumcission in The Post Card (222) and in Archive Fever (12) and his replacing it, more overtly than he merely recirculates the word phantasm, with a word he coined, namely, “circumfession,” and that he first used as the title of a para-autobiographical book he wrote. See “A Testimony Given” in Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elizabeth Weber, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) 39-58

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However the note might be read, it is not to be read, as Pascal’s elder sister,

Gilberte Pascal Périer who published her dead brother’s “little paper” in her Life of

Blaise Pascal, in her preface introducing the posthumous writing in which she

narrates the circumstances of its discovery--Pascal had sewn the paper into his

doublet, Derrida tells us, and a servant found it after Pascal died—the note is not to

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

of Pascal’s other writings.80 She justifies its posthumous publication in her Life of

Blaise Pascal by stating that she does not wish to solicit a desire for an a reading of

the words on the paper as a last word, “for I am no ultimate end of any body.”81

Les Dernier Mots and Other “Lacanuae”

Jacques Derrida is dead. Is he gone? Or has he just come back? Would his

distinction between posthumous writing in general and strictly posthumous

Generations of readings to come—repetition would that come out differently if

Derrida had read this note not only in relation to the phantasm but remembering

and “Abraham, the Other, in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. and trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Forham University Press, 2007), 1-55.80 Derrida nevers wants a last word: “As for me, all the while apparently speaking of dissemination, I would have reconstituted this word to a last word and therefore into a destination” (Post Card, op cit, 150). Derrida’s use of the verb “reconstitute” in in The Post Card (see 226) and in “Love Lacan” (see note 47)raises a question about reading. How does the reconstitution of a reading or a dossier bear on the question of restitution Derrida raises in “Restitutions of the truth n pointing [pointure]” in The Truth of Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 355-82? Can reconstitution only fail to be done justly, something one has to excuse oneself from not having done or that when done, will require one to defend onself from the accusation that it has been done unjustly? 81 The Beast and the Soverign 2, op cit, 211.

45

what he said earleier in the seminar, namely, that “Freud reminds us” of something

crucial about the phantasm, perhaps even remembering what Derrida said about

Freud in the Sixth Session of the Seminar?82 Did Derrida forget psychoanalysis?83

Did he ever forget it? Did ever forget Freud or Lacan?84 Who can say? If we say that

all readings of Derrida after his death will about about what he will not have said

and would not have said, and I am not saying we can, we can also say Derrida’s

account of Pascal’s paper as a note destined to be read depends on Derrida’s belief

in its indestructibility, one might even says its indivisibility, and hence its

undeconstructibility.85 Does the word “fire” in Pascal’s note make the poem difficult

to read because one cannot read while burning? Does the endlessness of burning

82 Op cit, 147-5883 Memoirs of the Blind is a somewhat paradoxical case of Derrida’s never yet ever goodbye to psychoanalysis. Derrida offers a para-Freudian reading of blindness, mistakes, castation, and conversion that logs into Derrida’s own previous readings of Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” while never mentioning Lacan even as Derrida uses some of Lacan’s terms. I thank John Michael Archer for pointing this out to me in converation.84 See Jacques Derrida, “Let us not Forget—Psychoanalysis,” Oxford Literary Review Special Issue on “Psychoanalysis and Literature” Volume 12, July 1990, 3-8.

85 As Maurice Blanchot remarks, that “the strange nature of posthumous publications is to be inexhaustible.” See "The Last Word," in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford UP), 252-92. In relation to the lack of rigor in Derrida’s distinction between strictly and general posthumous publiaction, one could reread Derrida’s reading of Maurice Blancot’s The Instant of My Death in Demeures: Fiction and Testimony, especially Derida’s reading of Blanchot’s sentence “I am dead” and of Blanchot’s dating his death from the time he was granted a reprieve just before he was to be executed in a letter he wrote Derrida from which Derrida quotes the following: “I will therefore quote the fragment of a letter I received from Blanchot last summer, just a year ago, almost to the day, as if today were the anninversary of the day on which I received this letter, after July 20. Here are its first two lines; they speak of the anniversary of a death that took place without taking place. Blanchot wrote me thus, on July 20, first making note of the anniversary date: ‘July 20. Fifty years ago I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death’” (52). What would it mean to read Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death as a posthumous publication?

46

here, the collapse of a fire lit before and its aftermath, mean that one can only gloss

the poem while making the limits of any such glossing impossible to determine,

extending glossing well past the determination of meaning that glossing apparently

delivers or is commonly thought to deliver to reading? Is Pascal’s note itself a gloss,

his shirt a kind of urn burial or portable columbarium for it?

In isolating this note as a strictly posthumous publication, Derrida forgets that all

of Pascal’s Pensées were published posthumously in 1670, along with this note, in

the same book. The distinction Derrida draws between strictly and generally

posthumous writing is not at all rigorous, and indeed depends in the case Derrida

singles out on factoring out the facteur, on forgetting the mailman, in may untenable

only in very different ways, and the forgetting of the servant’s name who sent off the

note, the servant whose name was already forgotten by the Father. Let Derrida have

the lost words, so to speak, or ghlost words: “And moreover I obey at every

moment without seeming to: to burn everything, forget everything . . . and while

driving I held it on the steering wheel.”86

86 The Post Card, op. cit. 43.

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REnd Notes

“41. In the session, Derrida added nothing here.” Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the

Sovereign 2, 277.

“The unfortunate effect of all this is to give a large can of petrol and a flame-thrower

to those prejudiced types who would like to terminate not Shakespeare but the

“queer theory” which is currently the hottest thing on the American academic

scene.”

48

, Review of Richard Burt, Unspeakable (1998); TLS 28 May 1999

Screen captures from Alain Resnais’s documentary film Toute la memoire du monde

(1956), on the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

49