ENVOIS
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You might read these envois as the preface to a book that I have not written.
It would have treated that which procedes from the postes, postes of every genre, to psychoanalysis.
Less in order to attempt a psychoanalysis of the postal effect than to start from a singular event, Freudian psychoanalysis, and to refer to a history and a technology of the courrier, to some general theory of the envoi and of everything which by means of some telecomunication allegedly destines itself.
Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? To what address? Without any desire to surprise, and thereby to grab attention by means of obscurity, I owe it to whatever remains of my honestry to say finally that I do not know. Above all, I would not have had the slightest interest in this correspondence and this cross-section, I mean in their publication, if some certainty on this matter had satisfied me.
3 June 1977
After the session, the discussions continued on the Balliol lawn. You can guess, above, in the back on the left, the small college apartment in which I slept, above a very narrow stone staircase […]
4 June 1977
Have you seen this card, the image on the back [dos] of this card? I stumbled across it yesterday, in the Bodleian (the famous Oxford library), I’ll tell you about it. I stopped dead, wiht a feeling of hallucination (is he crazy or what? he has the names mixed up!) and of revelation at the same time, an apocalyptic revelation: Socrates writing, writing in front of Plato […]
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’. Jacques Derrida, Envois