The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

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The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
The Post Card, French edition.jpg
Cover of the first edition
Author Jacques Derrida
Original titleLa carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà
TranslatorAlan Bass
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench
Subject Epistolary literature
Published
  • 1980 (Flammarion, in French)
  • 1987 (University of Chicago Press, in English)
Media typePrint
Pages521 (University of Chicago Press edition)
ISBN 0-226-14322-8 (University of Chicago Press edition)

The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (French : La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà) is a 1980 book by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It is a "satire of epistolary literature." [1] After Glas (1974), it is sometimes considered Derrida's most "literary" book, and continues the critical engagement with psychoanalysis first signaled in "Freud and the Scene of Writing" from Derrida's Writing and Difference (1967).

French language Romance language

French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien) has largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the (Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to France's past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French.

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

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Contents

Summary

The first half of the book, titled Envois (sendings), contains a series of love letters addressed by Derrida to an unnamed loved one. In one of the letters, dated 6 June 1977, Derrida tells about his time spent in London with Jonathan Culler and Cynthia Chase, who had recently married. They showed Derrida an exposition of hundreds of card reproductions, among which was the medieval depiction of Socrates taking dictation from Plato, which seized Derrida's attention by its reversal of the historical relationship between the two figures (since Socrates himself left behind no written texts). After describing Plato's posture in the picture, and speculating about what he may have been doing behind Socrates's back (riding a skateboard, conducting a tram), Derrida says [2]

Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University; his published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and criticism.

Socrates classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Socrates was a classical Greek (Athenian) philosopher credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, and as being the first moral philosopher, of the Western ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, he made no writings, and is known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers writing after his lifetime, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. Other sources include the contemporaneous Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos. Aristophanes, a playwright, is the only source to have written during his lifetime.

Plato Classical Greek philosopher

Plato was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece and the founder of the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

...The card immediately seemed to me, how to put it, obscene. [...] For the moment, myself, I tell you that I see Plato getting an erection in Socrates' back and see the insane hubris of his prick, an interminable, disproportionate erection ... slowly sliding, still warm, under Socrates' right leg [...] Imagine the day, when we will be able to send sperm by post card. [... and finally, Plato] wants to emit ... to sow the entire earth, to send the same fertile card to everyone.

Envois is followed by:

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Jacques Lacan French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

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In 2014 a feature film based on the book was released. Love in the Post is directed by Joanna Callaghan and co-written by Martin McQuillan and produced by Heraclitus Pictures. The film features an unseen interview with Derrida and contributions from Geoffrey Bennington, J. Hillis Miller, Sam Weber, Ellen Burt and Catherine Malabou.

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References

  1. ↑ Derrida, back cover of the English edition.
  2. ↑ pp. 17–28


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