312 Derrida 1963–1983
the ‘Envois’, so greatly was he ‘enthralled, captivated, and some-
times moved’. ‘Independently of any decision on publication, this
text touches me, I feel like saying, parodying the way you use
words, it touches, it does nothing but that, touching (and reaching
its destination, too), it’s a text of tact and skin.’ Nancy admitted to
feeling ‘almost a kind of regret that “Envois” isn’t a separate book’,
even though he knew that, by itself, this text would have a diff erent
status, leaving philosophy for literature.^13 He would not be the only
one to nurse this fantasy.
The Post Card is in fact a cunningly composed work, just as
powerfully divided into two as Glas, even if the cut is not as clearly
demarcated visually. A same set of problems circulates through
the whole volume, ‘between the posts and the analytic movement,
the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the
postcard and the purloined letter, in a word the transference from
Socrates to Freud, and beyond’.^14 But between the ‘Envois’, which
occupy the fi rst half of the volume, and the three following texts,
the style of writing and the mode of exposition are almost entirely
diff erent. ‘To Speculate’ comes out of a seminar given at the École
Normale Supérieure with the title ‘Life death’; this is a detailed,
fascinating analysis of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but
we also meet Socrates and Plato. As for ‘Le facteur de la vérité’, the
methodical re-reading of the ‘Seminar on The Purloined Letter by
Lacan’, we have already discussed it, but this fundamental text also
resonates with the rest of the work. The Post Card ends with ‘Du
tout’, the fake-improvised encounter with René Major published for
the fi rst time in the review Confrontation. The reader who can really
read these four texts, then link them together, is a rare if not utopian
one.
The translation of the ‘Envois’ was to be of an even more fear-
some diffi culty than Derrida’s other texts, apart from Glas. When he
read the text for the fi rst time, Alan Bass, who was far from being
a novice, had the impression that it would be as complicated as
trying to translate Joyce into French. Derrida acknowledged that
the ‘Envois’ were very encrypted and agreed to provide Bass with
explanations, comments, and suggestions whenever required. ‘Most
of this work was done by letter,’ Alan Bass recalls.
He would send me my pages back with many annotations. But
we had at least one long session together in a railway station
buff et, while he was between trains. There were many details
that would have escaped my notice if he hadn’t drawn my
attention to them. For example, in the sentence ‘Est-ce taire un
nom?’ [‘Is this to keep silence about a name?’], you also have to
read ‘Esther’, which is one of the forenames of his mother, but
also a biblical name that plays a very active part in the book. In