This somehow makes the ancient single sex relationship between Plato and Socrates all the more timely and up to date, as if we are all at once storming ahead to reach our destination while at the same time rushing back in order to do it all over again. For the opposite is also true: we would have been, yes, impossible without a certain progress of telemachination , acceleration in the speed of angels all angels, all the messengers we have provided by slipping a coin into the automatic: we could never have gotten away with the manual, supposing that, okay , not a day without a fort:da plugged into computers of the nth generation, great grandsons of computers, descendents of the pioneers The proto- Sinaitic alphabet pioneered the combination of image and letter, of pictogram and alphabetic sign.
It can be read from the shape of the image or from the sound it has come to represent, which incorporates the spatial and pictorial dimension of the sign. It seems then that no commentary would be worth the effort, for could a more simple, more straightforward, more economical commentary be made beyond the seemingly endless restatements that the envois themselves produce?
At best such an attempt would look and sound like yet another postcard. But on the other side, each envoy is dated, reminding us once again of an imperative that insists on the irreplaceable address of each example. In that text Derrida draws attention to a fundamental division of metaphysics and onto-theology, the division between truth, which emerges as a divine creation, and its finite reflection in the ideal model of the book:.
This Logos , which speaks and immediately hears itself speak is exactly what is opened up, no longer a relay point but a delayed relay between Plato and Socrates, on the Paris Postcard. The outwork, as preface or outside text, in relation to the text itself, the main body, would thus operate in accordance with the difference between Plato and Socrates, whose writing would be true to the words of a text as yet unwritten, in a relay between one and the other. Furthermore, a letter is—always was already—divided and in pieces, some of which might make it but some of which always and always also all of which might not by virtue, inescapably, of the difference a letter must always have from itself in its repetition.
This life death as its very a priori condition survives, lives on, in the essential delay without which nothing ever arrives anywhere anyway. The following considerations play some part in the reading that follows:. An addresser addresses an addressee by letter, sending himself off into the calculated chances of a postal system with the aim of connecting sometime and perhaps awaiting a response sometime later. The fictional preface simulates while referencing the epistolary form--i.
This is what allows one to write oneself off, to get caught up in the testamentary character of writing, which implies in principle and in fact the death of the signer. The conceit of the epistolary novel: the writer long gone, the letters discovered bound and partially burned or otherwise corrupted, vital clues re-constituted in the narrative irony of the fiction.
Whose voice addresses whom? The addressee would seem to be a non-specified other we have never met, only written : the absolute other or the futural addressee whose alterity—whose otherness—remains absolute. But not only that, there are particulars too, unnamed but dotted instead with clues, titles, destinations. And the numberless dead, killed off by their implied exclusion in the dreadful holocaust of the post.
The addresser, but of course, is the signatory JD, Jacques, Derrida etc and all the names, the anagrams, the hypograms , the engrams , syngrams and other kinds of cipher that deliberately or by chance irrupt in the text.
Though sometimes Plato too addresses Socrates, addresses Freud, addresses Derrida; Socrates replies; Freud addresses the grandson, the step son, the daughter, Lacan; Kant addresses Hegel; Heidegger addresses Freud, addresses Derrida. The exchange of addresses would also in this way seem both specific and yet numberless, as if the voice gives to itself the indeterminacy of the one addressed, giving itself up by sending itself off.
The postcard: the specific one found in Oxford, drawn by Matthew Paris, in which Plato behind a seated Socrates dictates to him while pointing somewhere off beyond the stage. The scene is a kind of cipher, standing in as the privileged example here for the primal and thus secondary scene of metaphysics itself and its singular deconstruction.
The postcard seems to operate as a simple generator of extraordinarily complex aporias. The postcard depicts the aporia of metaphysics no less. The postcard itself, its recto-verso, figure-text, and visible-intelligible doubling, already in its performative function as post card carries out the same scene, the scene it depicts and reproduces in iterations in principle ad infinitum.
The picture side depicts the postal system and the postcard operates according to the rules it depicts. As Freud had taught in The Interpretation of Dreams , one overdetermined scene can be conflated with another or with many others in order usually to disguise an unbearable scene however now displaced onto and safely submerged in these condensed others. Plato addressing Socrates can also be read as Freud addressing his grandson. All address not only their particular determined or vaguely gestured to addressee but also always to the other who would ultimately, as in a romantic fiction, finish this yearning off, finish this not-quite-it off.
But these fragments are fragments, obscure references, displaced echoes of other texts, mainly by Jacques Derrida. They thus would seem to have produced an oneiric erotic reconstitution of the oeuvre. The postcard is a privileged pretext for an oeuvre that reconstitutes itself more or less entirely as pretext.
But now this pronominal I, which recurs and already can be attached to so many nominals and kinds of nominals names, nouns, signatures, addresses , leads to a further dissemination of the pronominal itself:. I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they: each plays significant and sometimes confusing games amongst the envois; sometimes the I becomes a we is this we then the I-you, then which one, and who is the they?
Paying attention to the mode of these pronouns would be essential if we really wanted to maintain the grip of our wheels on the racecourse. The pronominal function, of course, founds poststructuralism in the division of the statement and its modes of enunciation. Speculations on the meaning of the postcard follow.
JD then leaves Oxford but returns later and rediscovers the postcard, this time in the original in the Bodleian Library. More speculations and discoveries are made. JD leaves Oxford again. This is nothing less than the narrative of fort- da , the narrative of the death drive, and, one might speculate with Freud, the narrative of narrative itself.
Nevertheless, beneath the bogus clues, the planted hints, the disguises and guises of what Freud had called the work of revision adding confusing and misleading narrative continuity to the otherwise disjunctive elements of the dream text in order to intensify their disguise , the narrative functions rather like those endlessly repeated scenes in Looney Tunes : the coyote attempting to capture the roadrunner using each time the latest contraption; repetitions each time of the same scene.
The early entry dated 6 June multiplies the possibility of the animated image, foreshadowing, perhaps, the delirium still to come:. After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format. JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it. Download PDF Viewer. Contributor s van Gerven Oei, Vincent W. Show full item record. Speech and linguistic inscription are therefore said to be marked by the general economy of writing and thus prior to the hierarchic distinction of speech before and over writing see Derrida b.
Much of the Post Card , it has to be said, is quite funny. Rorty must have in mind passages like the following from Post Card :. Now it would be interesting, in another context, to unpack this. Indeed, the text is ripe for a queer reading that might, for example, delineate its critique of the phallogocentrism of philosophy. But I am ultimately going to go in a different direction. To begin, I should say that I first came by the Post Card quite by accident.
I bought the book for my brother years ago. So, I gave the book to my brother as a gift. Later, I noticed, once while visiting him, that the book appeared to have been barely touched.
I asked him what he thought of it. He confessed he had not got much out of it. I myself had never even peeked into its pages.
So, intrigued I did and was shocked by the envois. And, though it sounds too good to be true, this was my introduction to Derrida and to theory largely. I tried to read it, understand it, get it. Derrida writes:. Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? To what address? Without any desire to surprise, and thereby to grab attention by means of obscurity, I owe it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally I do not know.
Above all I would not have had the slightest interest in this correspondence and this cross-section, I mean in their publication. And it seems that the very effort, which was considerable, that I invested in that task had everything to do with his proper name. No matter what we might say about the Post Card — its questioning play with signatures, copies, reproductions, authorial erasure, reading, destination, destiny, and such — would we wonder about it in those terms if it were not for the proper name that graces the cover and is signed in the opening?
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