294 Derrida 1963–1983
frightens me. But I am sure that the answer, if it gets to me one
day, will have come to me from you. You alone, my love, you
alone will have known it.^19It was on 2 June that Derrida came across the famous postcard
representing Socrates and Plato that would be at the heart of the
volume. Extracted from a thirteenth-century fortune-telling book,
this paradoxical image seemed to address him directly, as if to
re kindle his long-standing meditation on the relation between
speech and writing:
Have you seen this card, the image on the back [dos] of this
card? I stumbled across it yesterday, in the Bodleian (the
famous Oxford library), I’ll tell you about it. I stopped dead,
with a feeling of hallucination (is he crazy or what? he has
the names mixed up!) and of revelation at the same time, an
apocalyptic revelation: Socrates writing, writing in front of
Plato, I always knew it, it had remained like the negative of a
photograph to be developed for twenty-fi ve centuries – in me,
of course. Suffi cient to write it in broad daylight. The revela-
tion is there, unless I can’t yet decipher anything in this picture,
which is most probable in eff ect. Socrates, the one who writes- seated, bent over, a scribe or docile copyist, Plato’s secretary,
no? He is in front of Plato, no, Plato is behind him, smaller
(why smaller?), but standing up. With his outstretched fi nger he
looks like he is indicating something, designating, showing the
way or giving an order – or dictating, authoritarian, masterly,
imperious. Almost wicked, don’t you think, and voluntarily. I
bought a whole supply of them.^20
His refl ections on this image continued through several letters, then
the correspondence broke off provisionally on his return home from
Britain on 11 June.
While Derrida felt somewhat better, he was still not completely
himself. Once freed from his obligations in the rue d’Ulm, he wrote
for the review Macula a very long text in dialogue form about Van
Gogh’s shoes, as discussed by Martin Heidegger and Meyer Shapiro.
This piece of work exhausted him, he wrote to Sarah Kofman: ‘I
couldn’t fi nd my way to the end of it and don’t know what they’ll
think about it. I feel tired and a bit discouraged by what I’ll need to
do this summer, especially the Yale classes.’ Sarah was depressed
too, as often. Derrida advised her to take some rest – advice he was
also giving himself, even though he found it very diffi cult to follow:
‘We need a pause, a slow rumination, a time for “repair”. The ideal
would even be to stop teaching for a while.’ He wondered whether he
might not fi nd some way of suspending his seminar for a year. For