The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
With The Post Card, as with Glas (Univ. of Nebraska , 1986), Derrida appears more as writer than as philosopher. Or we could say that here, in what is in part a mock epistolary novel (the long section is called "Envois," roughly, "dispatches" ), he stages his writing more overtly than in the scholarly works. The uninitiated reader will find Gregory L. Ulmer's Applied Grammatology (Johns Hopkins, 1984) indispensable for understanding this performative dimension of Derrida's work. Whether this feature comes across fully in the English is open to question, though Bass is dependable as translator and helpful in his glosses. The Post Card also contains a series of self-reflective essays, largely focused on Freud, in which Derrida is beautifully lucid and direct. Alexander Gelley, Univ. of California, IrvineCopyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.