Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida

In 1980, Jacques Derrida published La carte postale: De Socrate a Freud et au-dela. At the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the English translation, Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida revisits this seminal work in Derrida’s oeuvre. Derrida himself described The Post Card in his preface as “the remainders of a destroyed correspondence,” stretching from 1977 to 1979. A cryptic text, it is riddled with gaps, word plays, and a meandering analysis of the interface between philosophy and psychoanalysis.The contributors who offered the fourteen essays gathered in Going Postcard were each provided with a deceptively simple task: to write a gloss to a fragment from the first part of The Post Card, “Envois.” The result is a prismatic array of commentaries, excursions, and interpretations that take Derrida “to the letter.” The different glosses on lemmas such as genre, erasure, telepathy, philately, and sperm transport The Post Card into the twenty-first century and offer a “correspondence,” if fragmentary, with Derrida’s work and the work to come.ContentsJ. Hillis Miller – Glossing the Gloss of “Envois” in The Post CardMichael Naas – Drawing BlanksRick Elmore – Troubling Lines: The Process of Address in Derrida’s The Post CardNicholas Royle – Postcard TelepathyWan-Chuan Kao – Post by a Thousand CutsEszter Timar – Ateleia/AutoimmunityHannah Markley – Reading, Touching, Loving the “Envois”Eamonn Dunne – Entre NousZach Rivers – Derrida in Correspondances: A Telephonic UmbilicusKamillea Aghtan – Glossing Errors: Notes on Reading the “Envois” NoisilyPeggy Kamuf – Coming UngluedJames E. Burt – Running with DerridaJulian Wolfreys – Perception–Framing–LoveDragan Kujundzic – Envoiles. Post It.Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei – Postface

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei is a philologist and publisher at independent open access humanities publisher punctum books, where he also manages Dotawo, the imprint of the Union for Nubian Studies. At home he directs project bureau for the arts and humanities The Department of Eagles, organizing cultural projects in Tirana, Albania. His recent publications include Cross-Examinations (Gent: MER. Paper Kunsthalle, 2015), and the edited volumes Going Postcard: The Letters(s) of Jacques Derrida (Earth: punctum books, expected 2017), Allegory of the Cave Painting (Milan: Mousse, 2015; co-edited with Mihnea Mircan), and Lapidari, 3 vols. (Brooklyn: punctum books, 2015). As a translator, Van Gerven Oei works with mostly anonymous Medieval Nubian scribes and more recent authors such as Jean Daive, Alessandro De Francesco, Herve Guibert, Dick Raaijmakers, Avital Ronell, and Nachoem M. Wijnberg. His writings have appeared in ArtPapers, continent., nY, postmedieval, and Theory & Event, among other venues.