I believe in effect that it is better to erase all the pictures all the other cards, the photos, the initials, the drawings, etc. The Oxford card is sufficient for everything. It has the iconographic power that one can expect in order to read or to have read the whole history, between us, this punctuated sequence of two years, from Oxford to Oxford, via two centuries or two millenia . . . The Postcard, 204 Sometimes I wish that everything remain illegible for them—and also for you. To become absolutely unknowable for them. The Postcard, 205 I remember only the celluloid baby doll that was aflame in two seconds . . . That I burned the baby doll instead of taking it out on her—if I publish this people are to believe that I am inventing to suit my compositional needs. The Postcard, 253 Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath, David Wills ,Stanford University Press, 2004) Chapter 16 “Correspondences” with subtitles for “Telegram”; “Stamp”; “Postcard”; “Telephone”; Fax”; and “Telepathy.” Chapter 12: The Postal Principle.” Subtitles “In the Beginning Was the Post” and “Epochs of the Postal” Photo of Bodleian with a citation from the Postcard serving as the caption on p. 187 n chapter 17 “The Oxford Scene” and the page facing the table of contents has a grey box under the with the word “CORRPESONDENCE “ all in capital letters, then this stennce, without a period, aligned as follows: Letters and Postcards (Extracts) Jacques Derrida writes to Catherine Malabou
Only very near the end of “Love Lacan” does Derrida deliver the story along with the quotation from Lacan he left out of The Post Card: “In a remark that has been archived by recording machines but forever withdrawn from the official archive, Lacan says this (notice and admire the syntax and the reference to non-knowledge and truth): “someone about whom I did not know that –to tell the truth I believe he is in analysis—did not know that he was in analysis—about whom I did not know that he was in analysis—but this is merely a hypothesis—his name is Jacques Derrida, who has written a preface to this Verbier.” We will return to this passage later and attend several times in a necessarily paratactic fashion to Derrida’s retellings of this story. For now, I wish only to say that in “Love Lacan,” Derrida retells the anecdote he had already told before in the Post . . . in a way that makes it fully readable. Only in this later text, “For the Love of Lacan,” does Derrida retrieve Lacan’s words from the archive and cite them. Having retrieved them, however, Derrida does not read them. Nor does he quote Lacan’s next sentence in which Lacan reads Derrida’s preface “Fors” as evidence for Lacan’s supposition, not declaration, that Derrida is in analysis. Does it matter that to a reading of “For the Love of Lacan” that Derrida returned to what Lacan said about him and to what Derrida said about Lacan in nearly twenty years earlier, by Derrida’s count, in The Post Card, after Lacan died? Does the media Derrida references with respect to the archive in “Love Lacan,” the tape recorders in front of him recording what he says as he speaks, matter in relation to Lacan’s death the way the fax matters to Derrida when discussing Freud’s reliance on letters in Archive Fever?
has now been recounted and commented in The Post Card.” These repetitions come with omissions and additions that may be glossed, if one can still call what I am doing “glossing,” as having inverted each other. For example, Derrida does not give the quotation from Lacan in “Envois,” but he does give it in “Love Lacan”; inversely, Derrida names the dead friend in “Du tout” but does not in “Love Lacan.” One could go even further and point out the parentheses uses in “Love Lacan” to mention his dead friend and to say Lacan was mistaken recall the figurative parentheses in which Derrida places the anecdote about Roustang in “Du Tout”: “A few words in parenthesis”; “I will not close this short parenthesis”; “Here I close this parenthesis.” These cruxes are at the outer limits of the borders of glossing, or of any glossing to come. As with the title “Du tout,” we come at these limits to the anarchivity of Derrida’s own texts the question of reading after death becomes a question of the title, anecdotes, and publication. In the last crux, I will gloss, Derrida again tells a story about an error, in this case, an error Lacan made, one of many, when speaking about Derrida. Derrida puts this story in a long parenthetical paragraph and to the way that paragraph follows the second anecdote Derrida tells about meeting Lacan in person, an anecdote Derrida that involves dates and a posterous order of publication and that Derrida defers for so long that he finally begins telling it by saying “I am not forgetting.” Here are the first and last sentences of the paragraph that follows the first anecdote: “Prior to any grammatology: “Of Grammatology” was the first title of an article published some five years before Lacan’s new title of an article published some five years before Lacan’s new introduction and—and this was one of the numerous mistakes or misrecognitions made by Lacan--it never