Richard Burt

Read After Burning:

Posthumous Publication and the Sur-vivance of Jacques Derridas The Post Card

I went to the fortune teller / To have my fortune read/ I didn't know what to tell her. . .

Before I open, let me raise the ante by laying down a series of cards quoting passages by Derrida, all but one taken from The Post Card, as if they were a series of epigraphs:

Thus, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Which I open to the first page, without any other precaution, as navely as possible. Without having it, I am giving myself the right to jump over all the methodological or juridical protocols which, with all the legitimacy on he world, could slow me down to the point of paralysis here. So be it.

Nevertheless, the first page of the first chapter already contains . . .

--Jacques Derrida, I WRITES US in Speculations on Freud in The Post Card, 273.

This (therefore) will not have been a book. Still less, despite appearances, will it have been a collection of three essays whose itinerary it would be time, after the fact, to recognize; whose continuity and underlying laws could now be pointed out; indeed, whose overall concept or meaning could at last, with all the insistence required on such occasion, be squarely set forth.

--Jacques Derrida, Outwork, Dissemination, 3

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 what I like to call the tongue of fire, not even the cinders if cinders there are (sil ya a la cendre).

--Jacques Derrida, Envois, Post Card, 3

It is the missing page in the book. If I publish this, they are going to think I am making it up, but they could verify it.

--Jacques Derrida, Envois, Post Card,

Shall we burn everything?

--Jacques Derrida, Envois, Post Card, 171

I note what you told me this morning in order make use of it in my coming publications (you know that I am still thinking about the preface to legs?)

--Jacques Derrida, Envois, Post Card, 132

I will not read these epigraphs but offer them to warm up the reader. In The Beast and the Sovereign Volume 2, Derrida takes a brief detour, and observing 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 Pascals accidentally found by Pascals servant. Pascal had sewn the paper, the first word of which is fire into his clothing. Pascals elder sister, Gilberte Pascal Prier, published the writing in her Life of Blaise Pascal, introducing the posthumous writing with a preface in which she narrates the circumstances of its discovery and in which she wishes to direct how the note should note be read: it is not Pascals last word, a master text that would govern the meaning of all of Pascals other writings.

Derridas interest in this publication 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). Pascals 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 Pascals handPascal, who like Robinson Crusoe, here dates the signature. He inscribes the year, the month, the day, and the hour . . . (209)

The interest of Pascals writing is that it is

Let us now come back to Writing Found in Pascals 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:

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 Prier 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 Bibliothque 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 Abb [tienne] Prier, Pascals nephew. At the top was a cross, surrounded by a ray of light.

Derrida then cites the first word of 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, Im not sure I can interpret it; Im 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).

Although the anecdote about Pascal compels attention because it is both eccentric and exceptional, Derridas detour away from his discussion of his two main texts, Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heideggers Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, is relatively brief. I will return to Derridas detour later in the present essay.

For now, I wish to ask what it would mean not to be sure if you can read The Post Card by placing that book that Derrida has not written under the heading of posthumous publication. Rather than demarcate a space for strictly posthumous writing within posthumous writing in general, as Derrida does in his discussion of Pascals paper, I want to consider posthumous publication in relation what Derrida calls the postal principle, as an uncertain boundary of publication in general, a boundary that not only complicates the seemingly self-evident and unquestioned binary opposition between a publication and unpublished material, biography and bibliography, production and waste, but brings to bear Derridas notion of a texts sur-viance on what Derrida calls unreadability: sur-vivance involves various media transfers, various material supports, or subjectile, as well as various tropes for not/non/un/reading. Posthumous publication, as I am considering it, is largely invisible largely becomes it gets absorbed into writing in general, as Derrida does, or into genetic criticism. Publication gets linearized, and a narrative of how a work was written is or it end to its beginnings. Unpublished papers discovered after a writer has died are usually explained in one of two ways: the writer (or the guardians of the writers estate) withheld the work from publication; the work was rejected for publication. Texts are customarily separated into categories of marking composition: notes, drafts, editions, revisions, and so on. Notebooks are sometimes published separately, as are facsimiles of drafts. Sometimes notes take literary form, as in Rilkes The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge or Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs The Waste Books. The time of writing is the time of biography, and that time is uncritically taken to be linear, chronological, empty, and homogenous. Dating is matter of calendars. If necessary, the archive may be opened and experts in textual forensics may be called in to examine differences in paper stocks used at different times by the same author; graphologists may be called in to determine the authenticity of a manuscript; and so on. But the master distinction is also the obvious distinction is between publication and pre-publication. Post-publication is merely an add-on, with editors sometimes basing their edition of the last version and sometimes on the first version of a given work; any inclusion of pre-publication material gets sorted into the paratext, or scholarly apparatus of a given edition.

To clarify what I hope is more than a simple inversion of genetic criticism or substitution of thanatography for biography, let me hazard a Derridean pun on posthumous publication and create a neologism: wait for it . . . . post/al/humous publication. I am not suggesting that Derridas death changes how we read The Post Card. The Post Card is obviously not a posthumously published work. My aim is not replace or displace genetic criticism but to rethink the relation between publication and reading as synonymous, as if distinerrance were something that happened to texts only after they are published, as if publication were itself a parergon the borders of which were as secure as they were invisible, as if what Derrida calls the unreadability of a text begins with its publication. The facsimile of a draft, the turnig of text into image, as opposed to diplomatic transcriptions.

In the Post Cards Envois, Derrida, or one of many, infinitely divisible Derridas 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. The pressure to publish comes from a forgotten source and exerts itself in Derridas 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.

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 formrejection, foreclusion, denegation, incorporation, and even the introjective and idealizing assimilation of the other at the limit of incorporation---?

Du Tout, 506-07

Sur-vivance of living dead book.

Survivanceas a structuring strucutre that genrates a series of differeneces that matter or dont 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 publicationrecursive since new editions can be published.

Assumption is that paper only is paper once it is written ononly papers with writing in the ordinary sense can be archived. But move from archive to publication introduces media that remediate the archival materials.

In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks and the one keeping a journal, all that theythere are already a lot of them-might have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe. . Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritorsthis survival is indeed that of the living dead. (130)

The book lives its beautiful death. Thats 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)

Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)

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)

Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivancealso about contingencies created by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-vivance.

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 wordfirst 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.

Is it a dream of Sigmun Freuds dreamwork as dreamreworking, the old dream of the complete electro-cardo-encaphlo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-gramI mean first of all 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?

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

Questions of authenticity, lost manuscript, a note that is a memorial, or made one, through publication, a publication framed by a note from a relative offering an interpretation of how not to interpret, a kind of no comment commentary, burning, inhumation and cremation.

Reads aloud, 69

Reading Supports

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

Derrida, also the copy, the cipher (can anyone read Pascal? Is the encrypted note encrypted? The loss of the support disappears or is not part of Derridas reading, however.

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?

What is the relation of the ontology of the post card, and a haunotlogy? Is there a huantology of the post card? its deconstruction of dead letters and dead parcels, of letters and postcards, to the ontology of The Post Card?

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

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

There is one thing I will never do, you see, the worst sin if it is one, incomparable to any other: to plug in a tape recorder at the moment when the other is burning up the post by telling you his love or another secret of the same genre. And even if it is done with the best intentions in the world, the most pious ones. 159-60

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 Derridas own legacy.

Reread the whole thing (p.100), its 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 Ecrits (2005)

Cite Blaise Pacal firepoem / note to self posthumously published, Derridas 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

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 Iconomy. 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 Presidents Men.

Burn everything as opposed to publish everything. 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. 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 nave? 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 . . .

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

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

Who is driving? Doesnt 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 (Littr) 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 Littr.

Bass adds a note in brackets that is nlonger htan Derridas, explainging the various editions and translations of Lacan, and observes that the English translation of the Ecrits by Alan Sheridan states that the slection of the essays for the English Ecrits [Bass omits the subtitle, A Selection] is Lacans own (p.vii). Thus, fr reasons to be determined, something has changed: the Semnar no longer has he ateway post that Lacan previously had emphasized, and, as just staed, does not appear in the volume at all.] 421, n. 6.

Now that Bruce Finks Ecrits: 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? Doesnt first complete render the Ecrits 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.

Derridas 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)

Illustrations courtesy of the Bodelian Lbrary, 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).