TRAVELING WITH JACQUES DERRIDA [PDF]
NB references are marked JD or CM
on travel narrative
the adventure of representation
khora
metaphor
the postal system
the postcard
The event that abducts the traveler’s identity and allows an opening to alterity to become experience of the world in general must occur by surprise and remain incalculable. […] There is no true voyage without an event […] [CM, 2]
According to the traditional conception of the voyage, everything comes to pass as if one of the senses of deriving or arrival (prevenance, accomplishment) in fact had priority over the other (drift, sidetracking, fortune, accident). Derrida shows that this systematic locking-out of chance constitutes the metaphysics of the voyage and perhaps governs metaphysics as a whole.
katastrophe
For him, the way in which the relation between voyage and destination, voyage and event, voyage and truth, is currently determined corresponds to a certain treatment of catastrophe. [CM, 4]
In fact, the Greek word katastrophe signifies first the end (the end of a life, or the denouement of a dramatic plot and the end of the play), and second, a reversal or upset, the tragic and unforseeable event that brings about the ruin of the established order [so the sunset in both senses]. As a result, catastrophe refers as much toi the truth, the accomplishment of a play or a life, as to the accident whose surprise interrupts the teleological trajectory. [CM, 4]
The metaphysics of the voyage installs a hierarchy among the plural senses of catastrophe: denouement exercises control over event, thus implicitly but surely determining the meaning of the voyage. [CM, 4]
In one way or another, the Western traveler always follows in the steps of Ulysses.
For Derrida, there is no ‘lived’ voyage, no ‘experience’ of travel that does not involve a venture of sense. It is precisely this conjuncture of experience and of sense that determines the voyage as economy, or, which amounts to the same thing, as metaphysics. [CM, 6]
The Odyssean paradigm presumes that in being transported to places of vacation – by means of metaphor for example – sense keeps close to itself, thereby anticipating a return to itself.
postcards / destinerrance
The ‘geocastrophe’, that contradicts teleology, involves a veritable tragedy of destination. Inasmuch as it does not derive from an assignable origin, every address made to the other, and consequently every correspondence, every apostrophe can always not arrive, or miss its addressee. From voyage to voyage the text of The Post Card as a whole inscribes upon inscription itself this ‘destinerrance’, the being-destined-to-wander of the message and of destining itself. […] The gamble that governs, without governing, the destiny of the letter, card, telegram, the immense ‘postal’ apparatus, prevents us from considering Ulysses, the archetype of every traveler, as anything other than a ‘gramo-phone’, other than by means of the trace of death and absence in his voice. Joyce knew this, for in Ulysses ‘the motif of postal difference, of remote control and telecommunications, is already powerfully at work.’ [CM, 18]
Destinerrance is in fact accentuated further by ‘the new structure of spacio-temporal differance constructed by new techniques of telecommunication’. This ‘new structure’ is also one of ‘deracination, delocalisation, disincarnation, formalisation’, rendering more undecidable still the frontier between here and elsewhere. The world is henceforth a spectral space in which everything is reproducible ‘from anywhere to anywhere’ […] [CM, 18]
‘In the history […] of the reflection on space, whether implicit or explicit, the discourse and the subject of discourse have always tended to be localised. Even when they moved toward the themes of nomadism, instability, delocalisation, dislocation, they claimed to proceed from a site, from a fixed place, and always to maintain a mooring. […] Nomadism itself, whether discourse or experience, operated from a centre or a capital, or at least from their mirage, from a place that was not just anywhere. Can we indeed speak of nomadism today? Is the opposition between nomadic and sedentary still current?’ [JD, ‘Faxitecture’]
on travel narrative
[…] the travel narrative always presumes to accord a privilege to the present – presentation of the country, phenomena of a culture, manifestation of a political apparatus – and the possibility of recounting would be derived precisely from that, with writing becoming transparent to the actual ‘object’ of the narrative. […]
All types of travel narratives, journals, stories of conquest, diaries, ethnological observations, ‘pilgrimage narratives, … every poem in the direction of a ‘paradise lost’ or a ‘promised land’, … utopias, … old or new Jerusalems, Athenses, Romes (Moscow was also the other Rome of Christianity),… accounts of the French Revolution, all of which are so many reflective, historical, philosophical narrations signed by foreign travelers,’ obey a law that decrees that the truth of travel amounts to unveiling a sense of the foreign that rtemains accessible to the traveler and conforms to criteria drawn from theri own culture. […]
Against such assurances, Derrida stakes a claimfor a voyage without truth, one that ‘would never again reach the thing itself,… would above all never touch it. WOuldn’t even touch the veil behind which a thing is supposed to be standing.’ Such a voyage would stand rather in the imminence of a catastrophe that ‘tears no veil’. Derrida travels in the twilight of that imminence, perpetually missing his appointment with Ulysses, whispering ‘No apocalypse, not now’: ‘I would also like, in my own way, to name… the voyage, but a voyage without return, without a circle or journey round the world in any case, or, if you prefer, a return to life that’s not a resurrection… neither an Odyssey nor a Testament.’ [CM, 29. JD quotes from ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’ Veils]
the adventure of representation
In the Western tradition an entire conceptualisation of the sign is upheld by the Odyssean paradigm of the voyage. According to that thinking the sign is organised, in both concept and function, as the adventure of representation.
The adventure of representation is confused with that of sense in general. Sense gets exported, removed from itself, is sent anywhere at all, only to the extent that it remains capable of returning to itself […]. This adventure, which constitutes the history of metaphysics as a whole, is structured by a series of oppositions (presence/representation, cause/effect, essence/accident, transcendental/empirical) which are governed by the overarching opposition between ‘originary’ and ‘derivative’.
JD emphasises in particular two exemplatry cases of this schema of derivation: that of the relation between spoken and written, and that between literal, or proper, and figurative sense. [CM, 40]
Traditionally, writing is conceived of as a phenomenon derived from speech, and metaphorical sense as derived from, or a drift away from, the literal.
This symbolic economy of the voyage structures at the same time the concept of travel itself. The voyage is an exportation, a provisionhal drift or diversion between two fixed terms of departure and return.
‘The world is going badly…’ What is happening to the world today is a catastrophe. Derrida never stops saying so, wherever he goes, on every one of his travels. [CM,60]
What logic and discourse are we talking about here, presuming such words are still pertinent? If travel, the expereince of the other, the opening of the world cn not, or no longer, respond to the ‘phenomenological motif’ that allows one to etablish diagnoses, to propose dogmatic solutions, to draw up assessments by relying on a truth or a sense of presence, then it must be shown that what has come to pass, what is coming to pass today, and what can come to pass tomorrow does not derive from any existing or assignable origin or cause. What has come to pass, what is coming to pass, or what can come to pass draws its resourse from a non-place: the pure possibility – which can never present itself or presentify itself – of the event, something that no event can could ever, will ever be able to fully satisfy. [CM, 61]
khora I
[…] what if, at bottom, every event, whatever its age, owed its possibility to a non-place, to a non-arrival? And what if at bottom nuclear war was itself only a version (a certain occurrence, a certain face, a certain interpretation) of an atopia that was paradoxically constitutive of the world, a non-place of place, so old as to be ageless? In Plato’s Timaeus, the name for this non-place is khora. The womb or matrix of all forms, itself impassive and indifferent to all forms, the khora is the nothing that gives birth to everything. [CM,62]
Derrida recalls the current senses of khora in Greek: ‘place’, ‘location’, ‘placement’, ‘region’, ‘country’ [in ‘Khora’ in On the Name PDF]. This is a most important point for thinking the voyage, namely that what gives rise to or makes place for place, country, region, land is itself stateless, without place or origin. Khora does not make a world, is nothing in itself, but it makes place for everything that is.
the time of the world
‘The world is going badly, the picture is bleak, one could almost say black.’
The course of the world is out of kilter, limping. Time is disjointed. [CM, 93]
‘In ‘The time is out of joint’, time is either le temps itself, the temporality of time, or else what temporality makes possible (time as histoire, the way things are at a certain time, the time that we are living, nowadays, the period), or else, consequently, the monde, the world as it turns , our world today, our today, currentness itself, current affairs: there where it’s going okay (whither) and there where it’s not going so well, where it is rotting or withering, there where it’s working [ca marche] or not working well, there where it’s going ok without running as it should nowadays. Time: it is le temps, but also l’histoire, and it is le monde, time, history, world.'[JD, Specters Of Marx, The State Of The Debt, The Work Of Mourning, And The New International PDF]
Political, legal, and ethnic delocalisation has created a general spectrality which give the traveler the feeling he is losing his grounding, as if the world has ceased constituting a community. However, this violent deterritorialisation also appears as a promise. There is thus a second sense that Derrida finds in the sentence ‘The time is out of joint’, one which no longer amounts to finding something wrong, but which instead announces the possibility of discontinuing things as they are. […] For every present harbours within itself a reserve of the possible. [CM, 99]
khora II
[…] every event owes its chance to non-arrival, to the imminence of the wholly other in the voyage towards arrival.
Non-arrival designates a non-place in the place and stead of the origin.
An origin from which nothing can derive is obviously atopian and anachronic: it has neither place nor time. The origin of the event allows itself to be conceived of, therefore, as a non-place in space and as anon-time in time, as the very possibility, for the present of the now, of disjointing itself and detaching itself from itself.
Paradoxically, this non-place and non-time are inscribed deep within the metaphysical discourse of the origin, and from the very beginning. In fact, we find the perspective of another thinking, another origin, another thinking of the origin, breaking itself off from Platonic philosophy at the very level of its foundation. Its name is khora, the impassiveness of the Timaeus, an-archic and an-archivable.
[see here]
Khora becomes more and more insistant in Derrida’s texts, developed as the wholly other of what derives. Although very ancient, khora haunts out present time.
Freed from chronological order it belongs to an ‘ageless contemporaneity’. This is what explains its capacity to appear or reappear, phantomatically, in our era, threatened as it is by a radical event, namely nuclear catastrophe, an event that is itself un-archivable.
Khora and atomic fission go together without following one from the other, in an unheard of complicity that forms – without giving it form – the constitutive anachrony of all history, the fantastic and phantamatic memory of every voyage today, the invisible face of the world, not yet come, still to come. [CM, 143]
Inasmuch as khora means in Greek an inhabited place, post, or position – point of departure and destination of every voyage – it can also refer to the origin, the source of what is; it could even designate the very basis of being, its cause, principle, the taking- or being-place of every place. Now, when it appeared for the first time on the philosophical scene in Plato’s Timaeus, it distanced itself from the ontological dignity that its name nevertheless invokes. INdeed, by means of its impassiveness or neutrality it resisted all foundational logic. Mother of all forms – ‘[it] figures the place of inscription of all that is marked on the world‘ – it remains itself foreign to form. [CM, 144]
In ‘Faith and Knowledge’ Derrida declares that ‘chora is nothing (no being, no present).‘ Given that, one cannot even speak about it in terms of metaphor. For khora there is neither metaphor nor literal sense; no forst sense which, in, by, or through it, could let itself figure as something that would become a concept. Because it disturbs every dialectical polarity (sensible/intelligible, same/other), khora subverts the derivative economy of literal and metaphorical, of essential and contingent. It does not even make sense on the horizon of being. [CM, 144]
JD: From the open interior of a corpus, of a system, of a language, or a culture, Chora would situate the abstract spacing, place itself, the place of absolute exteriority.
Q: Would JD have been able to think this without Mallarme?
Nothing therefore derives from khora. There is no starting out from khora. Nothing proceeds from it for it conceals itself from what it situates, from the possibility of going somewhere, of leaving and returning, in a word of travelling.
What responds to the immemorial seniority of the Greek-speaking khora – without this response echoing the teleology of a sending – is the radical novelty of a destitution of the arkhe, the possibility that emerged only in the 20th century of a total destruction of the world by means of nuclear catastrophe.
[…] between the absolute exteriority that opens wide its womb or matrix to the dawn of philosophy, and the risk of the total destruction of every possible matrix in a nuclear conflict, there passes, but in an aporetic way which means that it impasses, some sort of strange alliance, like that linking fellow travellers. [CM, 148]
This complicity comes from the fact of their both pointing in the direction of the archive. The possibility of every archive being destroyed leads back to the khora as the very possibility of the an-archivable.Conversely, the nuclear threat invites us to reread the Timaeus. Khora takes place in the precipitate manner of a catastrophe, and every catastrophe carries the memory of khora. Therefore today’s traveller is destined, in every place travelled, to have the joint experience of two non-places. [CM, 148]
metaphor
A trope (Gk. tropos, turn, direction, and trepein, to turn) is a figure of speech by which a word or expression is diverted, turned away from its proper sense. Rhetoric as a whole presents itself in this way as a theory of travel [CM, 206]:
Tropes are tours, changes of plac, from somewhere to somewhere else: displacement, voyage, transfer or transposition, metonymy or metaphor, translation or transhumance. [JD ‘Faxitecture’]
Metaphor is the most familiar tropic instance, inscribing detour and transport within its very name (in fact, in Greek, ‘metaphor’ literally means ‘transport’), and inaugurating the condition of travel within language, at the level of language. [CM, 206]
[Metaphor] is a very old subject. It occupies the West, inhabits or lets itself be inhabited. [JD ‘Retrait’]
to be clear, the west has been determined by its own metaphor (of the sunset – occident, etc), which has coincided with its metaphysical history. which is why the deconstruction, distruction, etc. of metaphor is the key ‘event’ of globalisation as the great day of history comes to its end. which is why it is central to the hyperdream.
We are […] passengers, not drivers of the metaphoric vehicle.
This statement inverses the order of priority that normally governs the relation between literal and metaphorical sense, where the latter is a simple derivation of the former. The reversal of this relation is indeed a ‘metaphoric catastrophe’, in all senses of the term. If metaphoricity is originary, it becomes precisely impossible to ‘master completely’, wihtout remainder, the metaphoric ‘drift’, to give back to literal sense, to bring to a halt its infinite voyage. [CM, 209]
The impossibility of mastering metaphoric drift means that metaphor is impossible to derive, that is to say for the vehicle to be driven back to the garage of literal sense, for it to be moored to the shore of a circular Odyssey. The metaphoric catastrophe is precisely that, the failure of any anchor. [CM, 210]
In ‘old age is the evening of life’, evening is the vehicle of metaphor. Diverted from its familiar and current sense, it displaces its crepuscular value, effacing itself for an instant before the phenomenon it sheds light on, namely old age. The signs are exchanged and the literal sense of the thing is thereby taken over, for the term of a detour by something foreign.
Maphor thus appears as a transport company that has sense travel with itself, using interchanges and organising stopovers in various ‘borrowed dwellings’.
According to this conception of metaphor the vacation or detour through foreigness will not affect the circulation of sense. The latter will alwyas be capable of returning home intact. [CM, 213]
JD: the turning of the sun alwyas will have been the trajectory of metaphor… Metaphor means heliotrope, both a movement toward the sun and the turning movement of the sun.
In philosophy – notably in Plato – the sun has alwyas been the sensible signifier of the intelligible, the privileged figure of good or of truth. Philosophical discourse turns around the sun; it makes use of the sun as figure in order to orient itself toward the proper sense, as figure of ‘philosophical metaphor as a detour within (in sight of) reappropriation, parousia, the self-presence of the idea in its own light. the metaphoric trajectory from the Platonic eidos to the Hegelian idea.’
Such a history describes the ‘history of ‘proper’ meaning… whose detour and return are to be followed’.
From Orient to Occident, between rising and setting of the sun, wakening and decline of revelation, the movement of sense is accomplished metaphorically. The sun thus ‘structures the metaphorical space of philosophy.’ [CM, 214]
The point of emergence of light, inscribed by metaphor, is the point of departure of a metaphysical Odyssey within which ‘literal sense’ always ends by arriving, by returning to itself at the conclusion of its driftings.
until it doesn’t
In order to draw a definite borderline between literal sense and its tropic excursions, it would be necessary – as derivative logic presupposes – to be able to situate oneself outside of metaphorical play. But that is purely and simply impossible. Let us remeber that ‘even if I had decided to no longer speak metaphorically about metaphor, I would not achieve it’. That is the catastrophe, the ‘drama, for this is a drama’: literal sense is always already transported, diverted from itself. A metaphor is always pushing in the back of another, without there being any possibility of following back to the origin of the sequence. On has to accept it: ‘Our great tropics: to turn the ‘dos’ in every sense, on all sides’.
JD: Clasical rhetoric, then, cannot dominate, being enmeshed within it, the mass out of which the philosophical text takes shape. Metaphor is less in the philosophical text (and in the rhetorical text coordinated with it) than the philosophical text is within metaphor. [‘White Mythology’]
The ‘graphics of this differant detour’ is what opens language to itself and gets inscribed in it as originary spatiality.
If the delocalisation of sense – what Derrida calls writing – is originary, if there is an irreducible spatiality to language such that meaning is alwyas placed outside of itself, then metaphor loses the status of an accident occuring to literality. The metaphoric catastrophe is also an accident that doesn’t occur, or, whcih is the same thing, occurs originarily.
It is therefore important to ‘explode the reassuring opposition of the metaphoric and the proper’, which amounts to situating tropic movement beyond the effects of property and non-property. Another rhetoric would then become possible, a rthetoric of contamination, of the virus, and the voyage conceived of as a derivation would come up against the figure of a displacement by contagen. Derrida calls this ‘telethetoric’, or even ‘metatelerhetoric’. [CM, 217]
derrida / heidegger on metaphor, etc.
It is common to consider […] that the reversal effected by Derrida’s work simply radicalises a gesture that was already contained in Heidegger’s thought, as though it were a continuous derivation from it. Without going into the details of this unacceptable interpretation, it remains necessary to clarify certain points that contradict it, and which relate directly to the question of travel. In fact, it is perhpas that question – the sense that one will give to travel, to the way or path, ot viability in general – which constitutes the site of the most serious confrontation between Heidegger and Derrida. [CM, 126]
It is indeed Heidegger who was first to show that the concept of metaphor only made sense within the field of a traditional metaphysics. In The Principle of Reason he declares that ‘the metaphorical exists only within metaphysics’.
JD comments: ‘ ‘metaphysics’ would not only be the enclosure in which the concept of metaphore itself would be produced and enclosed.’
It is indeed Heidegger again who is first to apply himself to the task of a ‘destruction’ of the metaphysical tradition and hence to a Destruktion of the concept of metaphor circumscribed by it. And this Destruktion, finally, proceeds from a clarification of the question of Being, a question that henceforth cannot be dissociated from a thinking of the path or way [Weg]. In this sense, Heidegger would be the first thinker of an originary voyage (away from itself) of the origin.
retreat of metaphor
Retrait: The word, analysed fully in ‘The Retrait of Metaphor’, is, if one wishes, a portmanteau word. One has to understand retrait in the sense of a noun taken from the verb retirer (pull back, take back, withdraw), as well as – following the ‘violence to’ or ‘abuse of’ the word that Derrida admits to – a noun based on to ‘retrace’ […] [CM, 127]
following the retrait in Heidegger
Metaphysics (the philosphical tradition that extends from the Pre-socratics to Husserl) is deployed, according to Heidegger, from the basis of a retrait of Being.
‘Being proffers itself to us, but in such a way that at the same time it, in its essence, already withdraws.’
Metaphysics involves a forgetting of being, or a retreat from the withdrawal of Being, since it conceives of Being as something that can present itself, hence as a being. [CM, 128]
Metaphor withdraws, granted. But what remains, says Derrida, is the metaphoricity of Heidegger’s text, beginning with the word retrait and formulaitons such as ‘withdrawal of Being’ or ‘withdrawal of metaphor’ themselves.
Derrida declares that it is necessary to take into account Heidegger’s writing […] one has to explore ‘the apparently metaphoric power of a text, whose author no longer wishes that what happens in that text and what claims to get along without metaphor there be understood precisely as ‘metaphoric’, nor even under any concept of metalinguistics or rhetoric.’ Derrida’s proposal is that we think the retrait at the level of Heidegger’s text, thinking through this re-trait (return) of metaphor liberated by the (suspensive) retrait of metaphor-metaphysics. [CM, 132] The mechanism of this liberation is the sunset.
Derrida follows Heidegger, but distinguishes himself as he follows and retraces. By proposing that Heidegger’s text be read on the basis of the retrait, something that Heidegger himself never configured or organised in the same way, he is already displacing it. [CM, 133]
He displaces it toward a thinking of the dissemination of the trait that wrenches the path – Weg or Tao – from what still has to be called its destinal unity, from whatever, within it, resists traveling.
Derrida will in fact show that the Geschick or envoi of being remains dependent on a traditional logic of destination. That sense of Being never gets lost along the road and always ends up arriving at or being moored in truth. In the same manner, it will always be possible for poetry and thinking to recollect themselves or reassemble in the unity of this envoi which becomes a putting into operation of their truth. With Heidegger, the originary trait does not end up by being effaced. In this sense the dispensation of being still obeys, in its own way, the derivitive schema of metaphysics. [CM, 133]
Given that, the Be-Wegung doesn’t travel far enough. Derrida remains therefore very suspicious of the path, of everything with respect to it that still depends on a methodical derivation. This explains why he never characterises his project as a path or as pathmaking. In borrowing a formul from The Post Card, I would propose calling this non-pathmaking project his envoyage. Envoyage has us understand at the same time a being-away [l’etre en voyage] without pause or stopover, and the cutting of a path or a sending along the way without that leading back to its own truth or proper sense. [CM, 133]
I have tried to retrace a path opened on a thinking of the envoi which…
from ‘the retrait of metaphor’ (JD):
- What Heidegger calls metaphysics itself corresponds to a withdrawal of Being. Therefore metaphor, a so-called metaphysical concept, corresponds to a withdrawal of Being. Metaphysical discourse, producing and containing the concept of metaphor, is itself quasi-metaphoric with respect to Being: therefore it is a metaphor englobing the narrow-restrained-strict concept of metaphor which itself therefore has only stictly metaphoric sense.
- The so-called metaphysical discourse can only be exceeded insofar as it corresponds to a withdrawal of Being, according to a withdrawal of metaphor as a metaphysical concept, according to a withdrawal of metaphysics, a withdrawal of the withdrawal of Being. But as this withdrawal of the metaphoric leaves no place free for a discourse of the proper or the literal, it will have at the same time the sense of a re-fold (re-pli), of what retreats like a wave on the shoreline, and of a re-turn (re-tour) , of the overarching repetition of the supplementary trait, of yet another metaphor, of a double traiiit (re-trait) of metaphor, a discourse whose rhetorical border is no longer determinable according to a simple and indivisible line, according to a linear and indecomposable trait. This trait has the internal multiplicity, the folded-re-folded structure of a double trait (re-trat). The withdrawal of metaphor gives place to an abyssal generalisation of the metaphoric – metaphor of metaphor in two senses – whcih splays the borders, or rather, invaginates them.
I draw […] two conclusions:
- […] The withdrawal of Being, in its being-with-drawn, gives place to metaphysics as onto-theology producing the concept of metaphor, coming forth and naming itself in a quasi-metaphoric manner. In order to think Being in its withdrawal it would be necessary to allow a withdrawal of metaphor to come forth or to vanish away which however (leaving room for nothing whcih might be opposed, opposable to the metaphoric) will spread out without limit and will charge any metaphoric trait with supplementary surplus value. […]
- […] Far from proceeding by way of a word or a known or determinate meaning (the withdrawal) to think where the question of Being or metaphor stands, I will come to comprehend, understand, read, think, allow the withdrawal in general to manifest itself, only from the withdrawal of Being as a withdrawal of metaphor in all the polysemic and disseminal potential of withdrawal. […] Habitually, usually, a metaphor claims to procure access to the unknown and to the indeterminate by the detour of something recognisably familiar. ‘The evening’ [interesting example!], a common experience, helps us to think ‘old age’, something more difficult to think or to live, as ‘the evening of life’, etc. According to this common schema, we would know in a familiar way what withdrawal means, and we would try to think the withdrawal of Being or of metaphor by way of it. Now what arises here is that for once we can think of the trait of re-trait only from the thought of this ontic-ontological difference on whose withdrawal would have been traced – with the borders of metaphysics – the current structure of metaphoric usage.
Such a catastrophe inverts therefore the metaphoric passage at the moment when, having become excessive, metaphoricity no longer allows itself to becontained in its so-called ‘metaphysical’ concept …
generalising catastrophe
This movement is no longer simply metaphoric. 1. It bears on language in general and on a particular language as an element of the metaphoric. 2. It bears on being which is nothing and which one must think according to ontological difference which, with the withdrawal of Being, makes possible both its metaphoricity and its withdrawal. 3. Consequently there is no term whcih may be proper, usual, and literal in the seperation without divergence of this phrasing.
the postal system
Heidegger perhaops never wnet to the very end of his expedition and never managed to think the envoi as ‘postal principle’. But that is the dominant motif haunting The Post Card, a text whose ‘Envois’ play on the possibility of creating a departure between the current understanding of the formula ‘postal principle’ – post(office) as institution, technique, telecommunication centre, etc. – and its wider sense ‘arche-post’, in othe words, mode of dispensation of the trait and of the cutting of a path. [CM,152]
Derrida shows quite precisely that one cannot point to the post as ‘ontological’ (‘the post without support [in the usual and strict sense], the post without post, without ‘document’, and even without wires, without cables’), without also pointing to postal technics, what is ordinarily understood by the word ‘post’.
What relates to the machine and what relates to destiny have become inseperable and travel together in adestination. [CM, 152-3]
JD from The Post Card (notes, etc. here):
If […] I think the postal and the post card on the basis of the destinal of Being, as I think the house (of Being) on the basis of Being, of language, and not the inverse, etc., then the post is no longer a simple metaphor, and is even, as the site of all transferrences and all correspondences, the ‘proper’ possibility of every rhetoric.
Would this satisfy Martin? Yes and no. No, because he doubtless would see in the postal determination a premature(?) imposition of tekhne and therefore of metaphysics (he would accuse me, you can see it from here, of constructing a metaphysics of the posts or of postality); and above all an imposition of the position precisley, of determining the envoi of Being as position, posture, thesis or theme (Setzung, thesis, etc.), a gesture that he alleges to situate, as well as technology, within the history of metaphysics and within which would be given to think a dissimulation and a retreat [retrait] of Being in its envoi.
This is where things are most difficult: because the very idea of retreat (proper to destination), the idea of the halt, and the idea of the epoch in which Being holds itself back, suspends, withdraws, etc., all these ideas are immediately homogenous with postal discourse. To post is to send by ‘counting’ with a halt, a relay, or a suspensive delay, the place of a mailman, the possibility of going astray and of forgetting (not of repression, which is a moment of keeping, but of forgetting). […]
In the beginning, in principle, was the post, and I will never get over it. But in the end I know it, I become aware of it as our death sentence […].
Within every sign already, every mark or every trait, there is distancing, the post, what there has to be so that it is legible for another, another than you or me, and everything is messed up in advance, cards on the table […] [JD ends]
Whereas: In Heidegger the envoi retains the ense of a sending of the self and is no exposed to divisibility. [CM, 254]
JD: ‘I have tried to retrace a path opened on a thought of the envoi which, while (like the Geschick des Seins of which Heidegger speaks) of a structure yet foreign to representaiton, did not as yet gather itself to itself as an envoi of being through Anwesenheit, presence and then representation. This as it were pre-ontological envoi does not gather itself together. It gathers itself only in dividing itself, in differing itself. It is neither originary nor origniarily a sending-from [envo-de] (the envoi of a being or of a present which would precede it, still less of a subject, or aof an object by and for a subject). It is not one and does not begin with itself although nothing present precedes it; and it issues forth only in already sending back, it only issues forth starting from the other, the other in itself without itself. Everything begins by sending or referring back [par le renvoi], that is to say, does not begin…
postal epochs
In a word, as soon as there is, there is differance (and this does not await language, especially human language, and the language of Being, only the mark and the divisible trait), and there is postal maneuvering, relays, delay, anticipation, destination, telecommunicating network, the possibility, and therefore the fatal necessity of going astray, etc. There is strophe (there is strophe in every sense, apostrophe and catastrophe, address in turning the address (always woward you, my love], and my post card is strophes). But this point of clarification gives one the possibility of assimilating none of the differences, the (technical, eco-political, phantasmtic etc.) differentiation of the telecommunicative powers.
so the necessity of a history.
By no longer treating the posts as a metaphor of the envoi of Being, one can account for what essentially and decisively occurs, everywhere, and including in language, thought, science, and everything that conditoons them, when the postal structure makes a shift, Satz if you will, and posits or posts itself otherwise.
This is why the history of the posts, which I would like to write and dedicate to you, cannot be a history of the posts: primarily because it concerns the very possibility of history, of all the concepts, too, of history, of tradition, of transmission or interruptions, going astray, etc.
And then because such a ‘history of posts’ would be but a miniscule envoi in the network that it allegedly would analyse (there is no metapostal), just a card lost in a bag, that a strike, or even a sorting accident, can alwyas delay indefinitely, lose without return.
This is why I will not write it, but I dedicate to you this imossible project. The (eschatological, apocalyptic) desire for the history of the posts worldwide is perhaps only a way, a very infantile way, of crying over the coming end of our ‘correspondence’.
the poetic
The ‘poetic’ is the very experience of the envoyage (‘experience, another word for voyage‘) to the extent that it gives itself, or dictates, like ‘the aleatory rambling of a trek, the strophe that turns but never leads back to discourse, or back home, at least is never reduced to poetry – written, spoken, even sung’.
The poem is what one desires to learn from the other, thanks to the other, who learns it by (way of the heart). But is it precisely in the course of this traverse that it exposes itself and so risks catastrophe. [CM, 262]
the postcard
A whole supply of one and the same card, the one discovered in Oxford, whose image is precisely the revelation of reversability itself: Socrates writing while Plato dictates, providing a graphic inversion of the traditional order of derivation obtaining between speaking and writing. [CM, 185]
This about-face, explicitly called ‘the initial catastrophe’, motivates all the voyages undertaken by the card’s sender.
The reversal represented on the card emblematises a certaion path of thinking and of the letter whose convultions are revealed while Derrida travels abroad.
‘Envois’ stages the startling collision between ‘lived’ and ‘theoretical’ voyage, a collision that makes the sense of destination vacillate and, agains this epistolary background, upsets derivative logic, that of a continuous passage from one shore to another, from one country or continent to another, from a sender to an addressee. [CM, 185]
In a way ‘the Oxford scene’ repeats ‘the Writing Lesson’ by reversing it.
The encounter with the card is indeed an accident, a revealing incident, and once again it provokes a catastrophe by unveiling it. [CM, 185]
JD: Have you seen this card, the image on the back of this card? I stumbled across it yesterday , in the Bodleian (the famous Oxford library), I’ll tell you about it. I stopped dead, with a feeling of hallucination (is he crazy or what? he has mixed the names up!) and of revelation at the same time, an apocalyptic revelation: Socrates writing, writing in front of Plato, I always knew it, it had remained like the negative of a photograph waiting to be developed for twenty-five centuries – in me of course. It just needed to be written in broad daylight. […]
I have not yet recovered from the revelatory catastrophe: Plato behind Socrates.
This is what makes all the difference with respect to the ‘Writing Lesson’: accident and discovery intervene not in order to affect or harm a state of affairs, but in order to confirm a generalised accidentality […] [188]
Writing pushes speaking in the back, and everything happens as if the postcard were sent even before the voyage took place, preceding it always, from the start.
JD: What I prefer, about post cards, is that one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far, the Plato or the Socrates, recto or verso. Nor what is the most important, the picture or the text, and in the text, the message or the caption, or the address. Here, in my post card apocalypse, there are proper names, S and P., above the picture, and reversability unleashes itself, goes mad.
The fantasy of a whole metaphysics consists in wanting – without even knowing it – to counter the travel drive (the ec-static structure of the postcard that leaves ahead of every departure), to bring order to the race: knowing from whence one has left, whither one is going, writing after having spoken, seen, traversed, explored; just as the father precedes his son in time, de facto and de jure, so the voyage should precede its consequence, and indiginous innocence every technical procedure. This would be precisely the reassuring methodological order of derivation: lineage, filiation, genealogy.
If the post is primary, whatever is sent can never return to itself, it cannot let itself be deduced or demonstrated, the circle can never be closed, instead being repeated, diffused in its very impossibility; what can happen or arrive is situated in the irreducible opening that at once separates and unites what can be guessed or forseen.
which explains Mallarme’s problems with the sunset.
For the day that there will be a reading of the Oxford card, the one true reading, will be the end of history.
The catastrophe or dangerous reversal results from a collisoion – which is at the same time by chance and of necessity – between the desire for an absolute intimacy with the other and the very impossibility of ever joining together. The other can be the loved one, the foreigner, the far-off lanfd, a language, an island or a city. ‘Envois’ expresses the shock of this collision between desire and the impossible by multiplying places, means of transport and correspondence, by sowing doubt on the gender and identity of the addressee or addressees.