Postface

This collection of essays is an example par excellence of the post-card effect so extensively treated in Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. None of these essays was ever meant to end up in my hands, being now the presumed “editor” of this volume. As if in an actual enactment of, or per-haps, better, faithfulness to the project of this publication, its original addressee returned the mail, which, poste restante on the west coast of the United States, in a locale not far away from the Jacques Derrida Papers housed at the Special Collections and Archives of UC Irvine, was forwarded to my inbox.My own encounter with Derrida’s work started with a simi-lar form of destinerrance, when I stumbled across Of Gramma-tology in the philosophy of language section of the W.E.B. Du Bois library at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. A graduate student in linguistics, I was convinced that the book was addressing me. It spoke of the origins of language, took on Saussure, and developed the notion of “trace.” Freshly trained in Chomskyan linguistics, all of these seemed so familiar to me, yet I understood nothing — as if it was written in another English, an English I could pronounce but not read.