"The Post Card From Socrates to Freud and Beyond" by Jacques Derrida,1972

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Jacques Derrida titles:

Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I
Dissemination
Gift of Death
Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret
Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money
Jacques Derrida
Margins of Philosophy
Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question
Positions
Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy
Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche
Truth in Painting
Work of Mourning
Writing and Difference
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Derrida's works are complex because they explore the ultimate
complexity (intellectual, ethical, cultural, and political) of our world.
One might even argue that a refusal to engage seriously with his thought
and writing is often a refusal to confront this ultimate complexity,
perhaps in particular insofar as this complexity is also that of the
world that has moved from modernity to postmodernity and is defined by
this transition. I would argue that, although extraordinary in many other
respects, Derrida's thought reflects, and reflects on, this movement
wherever it occurs in our culture. "What has seemed necessary and urgent
to me, in the historical situation which is our own," Derrida said in
1971, in describing his earlier work, "is a general determination of the
conditions for the emergence and the limits of philosophy, of
metaphysics, of everything that carries it on and that it carries on"
(Positions 51; emphasis added). Derrida's concerns and domains of
investigation change and extend to literature, ethics, politics, and
elsewhere, although Derrida continued the philosophical project just
described as well, a project that already involves many of these concerns
and domains. The sense of what is "necessary and urgent . . . in the
historical situation which is our own" was, however, to define the nature
of all of his work for decades to come, decades we now see as the era of
postmodernity.
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You were reading a somewhat retro loveletter, the last in history. But you have not yet received it. Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably.

What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are. At the very instant when from its address it interpellates, you, uniquely you, instead of reaching you it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you. And you love and you do not love, it makes of you what you wish, it takes you, it leaves you, it gives you.

On the other side of the card, look, a proposition is made to you, S and p, Socrates and plato. For once the former seems to write, and with his other hand he is even scratching. But what is Plato doing with his outstretched finger in his back? While you occupy yourself with turning it around in every direction, it is the picture that turns you around like a letter, in advance it deciphers you, it preoccupies space, it procures your words and gestures, all the bodies that you believe you invent in order to determine its outline. You find yourself, you, yourself, on its path.

The thick support of the card, a book heavy and light, is also the specter of this scene, the analysis between Socrates and Plato, on the program of several others. Like the soothsayer, a "fortune-telling book" watches over and speculates on that-which-must-happen, on what it indeed might mean to happen, to arrive, to have to happen or arrive, to let or to make happen or arrive, to destine, to address, to send, to legate, to inherit, etc., if it all still signifies, between here and there, the near and the far, da und fort, the one or the other.

You situate the subject of the book: between the posts and the analytic movement, the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the post card and the purloined letter, in a word the transference from Socrates to Freud, and beyond. This satire of epistolary literature had to be farci, stuffed with addresses, postal codes, crypted missives, anonymous letters, all of it confided to so many modes, genres, and tones. In it I also abuse dates, signatures, titles or references, language itself.

J. D.

"With The Post Card, as with Glas, Derrida appears more as writer than as philosopher. Or we could say that here, in what is in part a mock epistolary novel (the long section is called "Envois," roughly, "dispatches" ), he stages his writing more overtly than in the scholarly works. . . . The Post Card also contains a series of self-reflective essays, largely focused on Freud, in which Derrida is beautifully lucid and direct."—Alexander Gelley, Library Journal