Postcards and Proofs 1979–1981 311
In another context, with other protagonists, things could
have turned into a soap opera. With Derrida I zigzagged
between the two poles of private, family life and intellectual
life. Our relation was very fraught and sometimes very com-
plicated. Often, I was there to make him laugh, like a jester. So
I had the right to tell the king the truth. Curiously, in spite of
this family closeness, we continued to address each other with
the formal vous. To my mind, this was the vous discussed by
Levinas, which marks an even more authentic intimacy.^8Derrida fi nished The Post Card at the beginning of summer 1979,
before leaving for the United States. It was so that he could fi nish
the ‘Envois’ that he bought an electric typewriter. In this long series
of love letters, Derrida was going back to his fi rst desire, which
led him ‘toward something that literature makes room for better
than philosophy’, this ‘idiomatic writing whose purity, I realize, is
inaccessible, but about which I continue to dream’.^9 The letters on
which he based The Post Card have disappeared or are inaccessible,
so all suppositions are permitted and even encouraged: ‘You might
consider them, if you really wish to, as the remainders of a recently
destroyed correspondence,’ Derrida announces in the prologue.^10
Even if the text regularly states how it has been constructed, it
enjoys throwing the reader off the scent. It is a question of taking
the letters away in advance ‘from every centre of, as they say, genetic
criticism. Not a sketch will remain to uncover the traces.’^11
Everything is stated in the ‘Envois’, but in a way strewn with
carefully laid booby traps, which renders forever undecidable the
frontier between the private and the public, between self-disclosure
and fi ction. This does not stop Derrida leaving in the text ‘all kinds
of references, names of persons and of places, identifi able dates,
identifi able events, they will rush in with eyes closed, fi nally believ-
ing to be there and to fi nd us there and to fi nd us there when by
means of a switch point I will send them elsewhere to see if we are
there’.^12 Of the immense original correspondence, only fragments
remain, since one of the rules Derrida imposed on himself was to
retain only what could be ‘combined’ with the three other texts in the
volume – ‘To speculate – on “Freud” ’, ‘Le facteur de la vérité’, and
‘Du tout’ – as if the ‘Envois’ comprised merely an exorbitantly long
preface. And there is nothing to prove, of course, that some of the
letters were not written after the event, specially for publication.
Jean-Luc Nancy was the fi rst to react to the almost complete
manuscript of The Post Card when Derrida sent it to him. He
received it at the same time as Sarah Kofman and Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, as one would expect, since the work was to be published
in their series. In spite of its length, he read it very quickly, especially