Going Postcard ; The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida 9780998531878, 0998531871

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GOING POSTCARD THE LETTER(S) OF JACQUES DERRI

GOING POSTCARD THE LETTER(S) OF JACQUES DERRIDA

Edited by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

GOING POSTCARD: THE LETTER(S) OF JACQUES DERRIDA Copyright © 2017 by the Authors and Editor. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license. which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. and you may also remix. transform and build upon the material. as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work). you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever. and that for any remixing and transformation. you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2017 by dead letter office. BABEL Working Group an imprint of punctum books. Earth. Milky Way. https:llpunctumbooks.com The BABEL Working Group is a collective and desiring-assemblage of scholargypsies with no leaders or followers. no top and no bottom. and only a middle. BABEL roams and stalks the ruins of the post-historical university as a multiplicity. a pack. looking for other roaming packs with which to cohabit and build temporary shelters for intellectual vagabonds. We also take in strays. ISBN-13: 978-0-9985318-7-8 ISBN-to: 0-9985318-7-1 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent w.J. van Gerven Oei

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Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490-1500)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

J. Hillis Miller Glossing the Gloss of "Envois" in The Post Card . . .

11

Michael Naas Drawing Blanks· . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Rick Elmore Troubling Lines: The Process of Address in Derrida's The Post Card . . 59

Nicholas Royle Postcard Telepathy· . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Wan-Chuan Kao Post by a Thousand Cuts· . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Eszter Timar Ateleial Autoimmunity· . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Hannah Markley Philately on the Telephone: Reading, Touching, Loving the "Envois" . . . . . . 95

Bamonn Dunne Entre Nous· . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Zach Rivers Derrida in Correspondances: A Telephonic Umbilicus

. . . . . . . . . . . 129

Kamillea Aghtan Glossing Errors: Notes on Reading the "Envois" NOisily· . . . . . .

161

Peggy Kamuf Coming Unglued . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

171

James E. Burt Running with Derrida· . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

Julian Woifreys Perception-Framing-Love . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

Dragan Kujundiic Envoiles: Post It· .

• . . . . . • • . . . 197

Vincent w.J. van Gerven Dei Postface . . . . . . .

. . • • . . . • • • 217

*** About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

ABBREVIATIONS

pc: Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to

Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); La carte postale: de Socrate a Freud et au-de/a (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). Page numbers after the slash refer to the French edition. Other abbreviations particular to individual chapters are indicated in the footnotes.

ix

J. Hillis Miller

Glossing the Gloss of "Envois" in

The Post Card

The Post Card invites glossing of all sorts. It is an immensely complex and rich text, one of Derrida's most fascinating and challenging. La carte postale is full of specific historical and personal references that will puzzle many readers. Many formulations and allusions are enigmatic or counter-intuitive. They need explanatory glossing. Derrida uses just about every rhetorical device and figure of speech in the book. You name it, it is there (il y a la): puns (calembours), metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, catachresis, apostrophe, prosopopoeia, hyperbole, prolepsis, analepsis, ellipsis, paradox, aporia, and of course a constant pervasive destabilizing irony. How can you tell when this joker is telling the truth or speaking straight, if ever? "Envois;' moreover, is full of complex wordplay that is not exactly "figurative" in the usual sense. This wordplay is often not easily translatable from French to English. One tiny example: In the last entry for February 1979, Derrida writes: "La seance continue, tu analyse ~

f .~