Envois / En Soi / Encore: Derrida's Little Letter

In response to a short letter from Derrida received by the author several years ago, this essay focuses on Derrida's engagement with the postal, the signature, and the paper substrate. Derrida's letter serves as the emblem of an argument that foregrounds his emphasis on the materiality of and the importance of this strain of thought to contemporary studies in material culture. ********** My letters are too knowing (stuffed epistles) but this is in order to banalize them, to cipher them somewhat better. And then in any event, I no longer know whom I wrote this to one day, letters are always post cards: neither legible nor illegible, open and radically unintelligible. --Jacques Derrida, The Post Card At the limit of the text, of the world, there would remain nothing more than an enormous signature, big with everything it will have engulfed in advance, but pregnant with itself alone.--Jacques Derrida, Glas It saddens me to think that the only real contact I enjoyed with one of the great thinkers of our time, and the one whom I hold in the highest regard, was an all-too brief letter of rejection. Although I've been reading the work of Jacques Derrida for some twenty years now, since my days as an intellectually bewildered yet theoretically bewitched undergraduate student, and teaching others and about his work for half that time, I never did have the opportunity to meet the man. I did not participate in any of his famous seminars in Paris or New Haven or Irvine; I did not attend one of his heady lectures on Heidegger's hand or Freud's museum; I did not serve as one of his trusted translators or esteemed confidants. I simply read him, consistently, voraciously at times, and came to parse out a world underwritten by the poetry of his thoughts, drenched in assumptions I, perhaps vainly, imagined we might share. And so, unlike some of the other contributors to this collection, I was unfortunately neither friend nor colleague to Professor Derrida, but rather a far-flung admirer, brought closer only by a caring engagement with his oeuvre. I hope, then, that in this instance I might stand in for the legion of readers who share that distant intimacy that is still palpable today, and will remain so for a long time to come, perhaps in a future to come. It was with real excitement on an Edmonton summer day several years ago that I discovered in my office mailbox an envelope stamped with the return address of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. This was the dispatch I had been waiting for, all the way from Paris, a response to an invitation to speak at a conference called Archiving Modernism that I had been co-organizing with Professor Ted Bishop and at which we hoped (beyond hope) that Derrida would serve as our honoured guest. The letter itself was handwritten in blue ink, ten lines--two sentences not counting salutation, signature, name, and date--of almost indecipherable script, hastily scrawled, or so I've imagined, on a blank sheet of white paper that might otherwise have found itself imprinted by one of Derrida's oft-remarked writing machines. I knew immediately, simply by intuition or by estimation of its form, that the answer the letter contained was negative. Yet it took me the better part of a morning just to determine the words on the page in order to arrive at a rough translation that I would only later refine with the help of a colleague: Cher Professeur O'Driscoll, J'aurais accepte de grand coeur l'invitation dont vous m'honorez, si malheureusement le temps et les forces, sans parler de la competence, ne me faisaient aussi cruellement defaut. Avec mes regrets, ma bienveillance et mes voeux les plus cordiaux, J. Derrida le 25.07.02 Malheureusement, Derrida would not be joining us--no surprise given the fact that he must surely have received countless such invitations during the course of any given academic year. …

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