A Note on a Post Card: Derrida, Deronda, Deguy

Abstract

In this essay I am concerned with pursuing an ‘amateur reading’ of a post card. Or two. This is not so much a reading; rather it should be considered more as an extended amatory note, un ècrit naïf, a naive writing (JD 1993, 8/4),¹ for reasons which will reveal themselves. A note on a postcard then, and a note about a note on a post card. There is also a concern here, albeit a concern approached obliquely, with that desire we all know too well, the desire to ‘know’ Jacques Derrida, to know who he is, to comprehend his identity, through those texts that are signed in his name, as though the signature and identity were the same; and the desire to search out identity through the academic-doxical game of seeking out those seemingly ‘autobiographical’ post cards and fragments which some of us would like to believe Derrida is sending in his texts. Did I call this desire? Obsession is a better term. And, lastly, I am concerned with love: sending love, addressing love, naming love, thinking about love as that which undoes both the promise of, and obsession with, a stable identity. Love, which Derrida — or someone called Derrida — sends and discusses often enough in The Post Card, and frustrates identity itself. The frustration of identity is often marked by the play with identity that is set in motion by the proper name and the ‘figure’, the event of love, which figure or event, as Nicholas Royle suggests, is a ‘condition of any deconstructive reading’ (Royle 1995, 56).

We recognise the alphabet; we are not sure of the language

(George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 145–6)

— It is not false to see something of major importance in the proper name

— Il n’est pas erroné de voir dans le nom propre un enjeu majeur

(Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 105/101)

… car chacun est celui qui vient de perdre la face en l’autre … oublier l’unité

… for everyone is the one who has just lost face in the other … forget unity

(Michel Deguy, ‘Le fard’ Given Giving, 170/171)