Another Life 1976–1977 293
to keep after the event a logbook, with the forgotten, frag-
mentary, rudimentary instruments of a prehistoric language
and literature. Tries to understand what has happened, and to
explain it with pebbles, pieces of wood, the gestures of someone
deaf and dumb before there was anyone to teach the deaf and
dumb, the fumblings of a blind man before Braille... And
they’re going to have to piece things together with that. If they
knew, they’d be afraid and they wouldn’t even try.^15On 3 January 1977, after a ‘terrible day’ of which he refused to
say any more than that ‘it is in itself more than a world’, the notes
started to become less frequent. They ceased completely at the end
of February, when some drama occurred about which he remained
silent, because ‘you should never say anything about a secret’, but
which we can assume had to do with his love life.
For the fi rst fi ve months of 1977, the letters I have managed to fi nd
are really much more infrequent than usual. And on 21 February,
Derrida wrote to Paul de Man that, if he had been late sending him
the programme for the seminar he was scheduled to give in Yale the
following autumn, this was because he had ‘for rather longer than
usual been thinking of stopping’.^16 Evidently, Derrida was ensuring
a minimal service, writing little and travelling even less.^17
His time in Oxford at the beginning of June was the basis for
those ‘Envois’ that would fi ll half of The Post Card. This strange
and superb correspondence would attain a very complex and almost
undecidable status – to which I return later – when it was published,
but everything suggests that the original version, which was as yet
not linked to any planned book, was written for Sylviane Agacinski.
The fi rst fragment is dated 3 June 1977:
Yes, you were right, henceforth, today, now, at every moment,
on this point of the carte, we are but a minuscule residue ‘left
unclaimed’: a residue of what we have said to one another,
of what, do not forget, we have made of one another, of
what we have written one another. Yes, this ‘correspondence’,
you’re right, immediately got beyond us, which is why it all
should have been burned, all of it, including the cinders of the
unconscious – and ‘they’ will never know anything about it.^18The second ‘Envoi’, dated the same day, is even more lyrical.
The form of the letter takes over from the private notebooks while
allowing for a form of address, a sort of soliloquy:
and when I call you my love, my love, is it you I am calling or
my love? You, my love, is it you I thereby name, is it to you
that I address myself? I don’t know if the question is well put, it