Derrida in Correspondances: A Telephonic Umbilicus

“6 October 1978. I am writing you in a taxi. I avoid the subway, here too, precisely because I like it [parce que je l’aime]. And because I get lost [je m’égare] in the correspondances, although the system is much simpler than in Paris” (PC, 166/179). This passage from Jacques Derrida’s “En-vois” in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond in which he writes from a New York City taxi seems relatively mundane. Perhaps it is. Yet, I’d like to linger within this unex-ceptionable scene for the paths it might already be leading us down. Derrida’s avoidance of the subway precisely because he loves it (parce que je l’aime) betrays a logic of pleasure deferral as well as something of the postal principle: “relays, delay, antici-pation, destination, telecommunicating network, and therefore the fatal necessity of going astray, etc.” (PC, 66/74). The taxi al-lows Derrida to minimize the spatio-temporal4 catastrophe of destinerrance programmed by the postal principles that might lead him astray in the sprawling subway correspondances. There is something else, too, that draws me to this passage: something to do with dancing underground beneath the city, with sexual difference in politics (and the politics of sexual difference), with telephones, umbilical cords, and navels. Here it is pirouetting off the page: due to an astonishing line break in the English trans-lation, correspondances becomes correspon-dances.5 I follow (je suis...) these correspon-dances that Derrida lovingly avoids in dancing a movement through flickering subterranean passage-ways hidden from the light of day.