One Day, Please, Read Me No More, and Forget That You Have Read Me

Richar Burt

Read After Burning:

Notes on a Possibly Psychoanalytic Posthumography of Jacques Derrida’s Post Card and the Biobibliothanatopolitics of its Remains . . . to Be Archived . . . to Be Published. . . to Be Inhumed . . . to Live on [Sur-vivre] . . . to Be Cremated . . . to Be Wetwared . . . to Be Continued . . . to Be Read(X-uent Omnes?)

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

--Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, 36

We cannot develop this analysis here; it is to be read elsewhere.

--Jacques Derrida, Post Card, 466

A hundred similar instances go to show that the MS. so inconsiderately published, was merely a rough note-book, meant only for the writer's own eye, but an inspection of the pamphlet will convince almost any thinking person of the truth of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. . . . I verily believe that his last moments would have been rendered wretched, could he have suspected that his wishes in regard to burning this 'Diary' (full of crude speculations) would have been unattended to; as, it seems, they were. I say 'his wishes,' for that he meant to include this note-book among the miscellaneous papers directed 'to be burnt,' I think there can be no manner of doubt. Whether it escaped the flames by good fortune or by bad, yet remains to be seen.

--Edgar Allan Poe,“Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1850)

Before my death I would give orders. If you aren’t there, my body is to be pulled out of the lake [lac] and burned, my ashes are to be sent to you, the urn well protected (‘fragile’) but not registered, in order to tempt fate. This would be an envois of / from me [an envoi de moi] which no longer would come from me (or an envoi sent [come] by me, who would have ordered it, but no longer an envoi of [/from] me as you like). And then you would enjoy mixing my cinders [ashes] with what you eat (morning coffee, bricohe, tea at 5 o’clock, etc.) After a certain dose you would start to go numb. . .

Cinders, 74; quoted from The Post Card, 196, from a letter dated 31 May, 1979, without the date

What must we do to allow a text tolive?

“Living On [Survivance],”Parages, 178

Courage! Courage, now! You need heart and courage to think . . . the living dead.

The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 147 (215).

Intestates of Exeption

In the horror film After.Life (dir. Agnieszka Wójtowicz-Vosloo, 2009), Anna Taylor(Christina Ricci) wakes up--just after we saw her apparently die in a car accident--on the table of a mortician and spiritual medium named Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson) who can talk to the dead. Unable to move her body, she nevertheless exclaims “I’m not dead.”[1] But Deacon says tells her otherwise. He knews she’s dead and he’s got her death certificate to prove it. She was D.OA. In horror movies, it would appear, corpses always arrive at their destination whether they know it or not, sometimes even ahead of schedule.[2]

Death, as Derrida knew, is always a matter of paperwork, the death certificate, a paper that does not necessarily reassure.

Post Marks: Reading Around Derrida with(out) Derrida (Still) Around

Let me begin again by departing from this scene in After.Life to say a few thingsabout posthumography so that it will not be confused with a pre-deconstructive, pre-psychoanalytic psychobiography or psychobiohagiography of Derrida that takes his biological death as the basis for linearizing his publications and highlighting certain themes he wrote on toward the end of his death thought to be key due to their proximity to his death, nor do I divide his posthumously published publications from his “humous” publications.[3] In order to “out-work-line” (hors d’ouevre ligne) a kind of reading Derrida sometimes performs, a kind of reading I call posthumographic, I will read The Post Card with “For the Love of Lacan,” and with The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2 (and some related writings along onr on the way the way). As I go, indeed alreadyhave begun to go, you may notice that the footnotes take on a life or death of their own, to think, without fully registering or performing, what it means toread in relation to the eco-specificity of a book’s destruction, fire being Derrida’s element of choice: “As for the “Envois” . . . .you might consider them . . . 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 (s’il y alà cendre)” (3).[4] I consider The Post Card, not just the “Envois,” a hostage to the burnt book,to the raised or razed ground of posthumographic writing, a ground that never quite settles into something as stable as a grave, memorial, haunt or a crime scene to be reconstructed or an archive that could be completed or deferred to a time to come or a time that remains. It’s only by playing (back) with fire, by cremating my thoughts about The Post Cardas I go in the cinders ashes and other cre-mains of these notes that I may proceed to leave the “che-mains” rendering what I leave you difficult to read, perhaps even unreadable, by making it next to impossible to move easily between the text and my footnotes.[5] By exceeding the academic norms of footnote length without creating a separate running border separating them on each page as a seemingly coherent paratext from a seemingly coherent text, norms meant to guide the reader through the text, I want you to know that I have rendered any decision to read either the text first and then the footnotes, or vice versa, inconsequential.[6] I can offer encouragement to the reader, but I can offer no reassurance. I have burned before reading. I have not saved the (la folie de) the day, or daybreak.

By introducing the term posthumography I am trying to capture something in Derrida’s writings, something related to biopolitics and the paper machine, or biobibliopolitics,something difficult to articulate because it will eitherhave been captured in advance, that is to say routinized, familiarized by editors and translators and even Derrida, then routed under already established headings, or “Derridemes,” such as distinerrance, performativity, phantasm, aborder (approach), revenant, parage, the secert, d’abord(above all, border), de-bordement (overrun), survivance, parergon, frame, performativity, a-thesis, pas [step; not], faux-pas, pasau-delà(no / step beyond) the “to-come,” paralysis, the secret, autobiothanatoheterography, cinders, aporia, iterability, and so on, or it will have been rejected and repulsed as an allergen for which Derrida has no auto-immunity. (The same kind of capture of posthumography could be performed with Freudiamemes—the repetition compulsion, death drive, Herrschaft (mastery), Unheimlich [uncanny], etc.or with Lacaniamemes—objet petit a, lack, point de caption, the Other, the letter, between two deaths, etc.)

Let me say at once, to avoid an unncessary misunderstanding or perhaps to ensure it, I am not sure which, posthumographic reading is not a philospheme, an internal supplement to the postal principle by which Derrida could be shown to reinscribe binary opositions between life and death, nor is it outside, au-delà or even au-dessous the “Postal Principle.”[7] Although Derrida many times took someone’s death the occasion as the occasion to write about that personwrote numerous times on, sometimes in dedications in seminars, sometimes in essays, Derrida’s writings on the dead, the could use the same interpretive stragedy when write on a living author and a dead one.[8] Similarly, Derrida does not distinguish dead languages and living languges.[9] Morever, Derrida often accordsimportance to the last chapter, the last sentence of a writing (Post Card, )to the “very end of the end” (Parages,162) but he does not accord the last words of a person importance.[10] There is no set of texts by Derrida that may be decisively classified or declassified as posthumographic.[11] There is no rigorous distinction between posthumographic and humographic writings., and posthumography subsumes rather than opposes genetic criticism even though genetic critics are indifferent to the difference between publication and posthumous publication.[12]

Nevertheless, I will read The Post Card in relation to “For the Love of Lacan” in part because Derrida wrote it after Lacan’s death, and I focus on The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2 in part because it is a posthumous publication that engages posthumous publication and takes up a posthumously published note Pascal wrote that his servant found when he discovered Pascal dead. (The note by Pascal is coincidentally entitled “Fire,” and happens to, like Derrida’s and burned papers in The Post Card, parts of which Derrida quotes in Cinders,and Derrida’s ash of the archive in Archive Fever.) I attend at great length and in great detail to their publication history and at even greater length and detail to what Derrida does with the publishing history of the writings he reanders as a “scene” in The Post Card, with two tenses—the future anterior and the future anterior conditional—he uses in “For the Love of Lacan,” thereby making questions about reading and archiving the dead questions both about what was published and about what was said, hence questions of rumor and testimony, and The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol 2.

However, unlike psychobiographers and unlike genetic critics, I do not give any priority, chronological, biological, or otherwise, to one of these texts over the other.[13] Posthumography raises arguably psychoanalytic as well as deconstructive questions about how Derrida’s archive mis/management Derrida is “to be” read, about what has been left to be read and about how reading is a practice to be, unlimited, the definition of the unreadable always to be reopened.[14] “Those who remain will not know how to read,” Derrida writes in The Post Card,[15]“those who remain” meaning, I take it, “those who have survived.” These questions about what remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s writings are also biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical questions concerning the archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own works, from which he sometimes quoted, sometimes including handwritten notebooks as well as published works.[16] One could organize a reading of The Post Card according to a bibliographical and editorial logic in relation to its self-ruination and self-fragmentation (Envois are liked to burned letters; “To Speculate—‘On Freud’” is a fragment) and texts Derrida published after The Post Card in which he referred to it, discussed it, or added to it, as he did in “Telepathy.”[17] This logic, however, is pre-critical. It always arrives at its destination, as it were, a dead end. Moreover, it glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future publications.[18]

These questions about what remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s writings are also biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical questions concerning the archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own works, from which he sometimes quoted. As an archiving operation, posthumography is conerned not only with posthumous publication or thanatography but with what is “to be” read, what suruvives rests on how the boundaries of publication are drawn, what counts as published or unpublished. Publication is a question of surviv-ability, of what publication renders not to be read of whatever survives. A given text’s survival is subject to the conditions and structures of of publish-ability, a neologism that may be divided and recombined into a cluster of others, including unpublish-ability, republish-ablility, and pre-publishability, all of which, as we shall see, are related, to binding and unbinding.[19] Publish-ability determines of the limits of readability and is a question about the justice of reading what remains to be read, of any reading “to come.”[20] In H.C., For Life, Derrida links just reading to reading everthing: “one must read everything, of course, letter by letter: I ill-treat everything by thus selecting and chopping with unforgivable violence, Unable to do justice to this book, as to the fifty others . . . H.C., For Life, 119.[21] But the limits of what survive, the possibility of being in tact, left aside for a reading to come, are not reducible to the finitude of a given material support that makde publication possible and the infinity of reading whatever ahs been published. Publish-ability concerns the limits of “everything” that is to be read: is “everything” what has been published, republished? Whatever falls under the category of “internal” is not limited to what Derrida calls the “normal category of readability” Parages, 187 or “normal reading,” but neither does “unreadability” (Living On,”Parages, 188) amount to the text’s overruning of the protective legal aspects of publication—“protective measure [structures de garde] and institutions as the registering of copyright, the Library of Congress or the Bibliotheque Nationale, or something like a flyleaf” Parages, 114-115.[22] These bibliographicprotections are themselves self-corroding, I maintain, and the effects of their corrosion, corrosion produced by bibliographical logic that limits, forgets, neglects, consigns to oblivion data, effects that are structurally excluded from whatever is said, assumed, or taken to survive through publication. Editing and translatingoften produce the same kinds of corrision effects, often paraadoxically in an effort to repair a text. Derrida’s works into English sometimes supply as much information about each version of a text while others think that the most recent renders others obsolete, the last version being the supposedly definitive version.[23] This bibliographic, editorial, and translative logic glosses over—renders unreadable and even impossible to mourn, as in “you need not have read that so I don’t need to tell you about what you’re missing”--Derrida’s own self-corroding (re)publication practices and his idosyncratic bibliographic practices, his frequent omissions of bibliographic information both in the body of his text and in his footnotes, omissions which are sometimes filled in by his English translators, sometimes not, as well as his attention to the titles of published works (Parages) and the corruption of titles, or use of “faux-titres,” perhaps better called “feu-titres” or even “fou-titres.”[24] (Curiously, Derrida drops the accent aigu from the “E” in the title of Lacan’s Écrits in La Post Carte postale, spelling it as Ecrits. See, for example, 484n9. Alan Bass follows suit in his translation.) Moreover, this logic glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future publications, promises that Derrida sometimes fulfilled and sometimes did not.

What I am calling the reshelving or archival operations of posthumography delimit a given text as a single text, an unpublished, published, or republished text in order to render it readable, permitting what Derrida often called an “internal reading” or the demarcation of a scene of reading that stores the not yet read and appears to guarantee that what is “to be” read has always already been sent.[25] These biobibliopolitical questions are also psychoanalytic questions as they are irreducible in advance to a so-called ethics of reading, however, as if one could decide what reading carefully was and what carelessly was, as one could ever do justice by reading everything.Posthumographic reading, like all reading, is necessarily “err-responsible.” Since it is an archival or reshelving operationaccording to bibliographical norms publication, it involves omissions of information, not limited to “editorial data,”[26]that do not default to the staus of a clue, evidence, symptom, detail and do not have the significance Derrida accords Freud’s omission,in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of Socrates (Post Card, 344), Lacan’s omission of stories by Poe other or Lacan’s omission of Marie Bonaparte, Paul de Man’s omission of twowords froma quotation from Rousseau that Derrida discusses in “Typewriter Ribbon, Ink (2),” and so on on.”[27]

The kinds of omissions, or self-corroding effects of publication and what surives to be read, normally or otherwise, I attend to in Derrida’s works are idiosyncratic because they are errors, self-cremations that do not amount to self-incriminations, but are more like quasi-illegal driving that sometimes crosses the line.[28] These omissions involve the ways in which Derrida preps a published work for reading, and hence shelves what is not to be read, what can be skipped, what is insignificant, what is effectivelyinvisible; these omissions of information related translations and publications may be likened to wounds, perhaps just scratches, that have been covered up, bandaged, hence repressed. But even if they have been repressed, the do not necessarily fall in line with repetition compulsion, the death drive, the uncanny fort-da, chance, destiny, and so on, not that any of those terms is unified or definable. Thus, I will not be writing a Psychopathology of Derrida’s Everyday Life.

Posthumography has a kind of priority mail status, a kind of a-priority mailstatus “within” what Derridacalls the postal network, a status that permits us to take a detour, follow a pathwayoff the beaten track,and rephrase Derrida’s Heideggerian question “is there death as such?” as a question of whether,for Derrida,the letter is always sent, even if it does not always arrive at its destination, whether it is always given even if never received, left unclaimed, whether it is always in the mail on the way whether or not there is a sender to return to whom one could return it, whether it is sent quasi-automatically rather than by an organic being, whether sending always has priority over whatever is sent, even if the sent is a residue that amounts to nothing, that “adds nothing,”whether the letter rests “en souffrance” (undelivered), whether the letter is divisibile or not, whether the letter is a post card or not, whether the letter is a dead or living letter, whether the letter is always sent “c/o,” in care [Sorge] of, or sometimes “in care-less-ness.”[29]