attempt. Derrida discovered the postcard of his book’s title
in the Bodleian library at Oxford. It reproduces a thirteenth-
century picture of Plato and Socrates with the two sages rather
peculiarly positioned. The stately, poised figure labeled “Soc-
rates” sits at a desk, absorbed in writing. Behind him is an anx-
ious little man, “plato,” who is poking Socrates in the back with
his finger. The image reverses the well-known fact that
Socrates wrote nothing, whereas Plato’s works were volumi-
nous. Excited by his find, Derrida bought a stack of the
Socrates-Plato postcards and proceeded to write breathless,
fragmented love letters on them. The postcards were dated
from 1977 – 79 and sent from New Haven, New York, London,
Oxford, and the other familiar haunts of Derrida’s academic
career. The text of these letters became the nearly three-
hundred-page opening section ofThe Post Card,called Envois.
The Post Card,written more than a decade before the in-
ternet era, is, in effect, a blog avant la lettre.Derrida fills his
book with tightly veiled personal references that only the ad-
dressee of the postcards (presumably his wife, Marguerite)
could understand.The Post Cardis unusually frustrating, even
by Derrida’s standards. (Future generations will no doubt be
mystified by Richard Rorty’s judgment that in this book Der-
rida achieves an “incredible richness of texture” rivalling
Proust, Joyce, and Sterne.)^9 At one point in The Post Card,Der-
rida gives us a feckless image of impossible desire: “When I re-
ceive nothing from you I am like a dying tortoise, still alive, on
its back. You can see it erect its impotence toward the sky” (Post
109 ). The Derridean tortoise points its wilting, ineffectual
logos at the heavens inhabited by the immortal philosophers:
such is Derrida’s joke against himself. (He evidently has in
mind the tortoise that supports the world in Hindu and Stoic
cosmology.)
172 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud