Entre Nous

Love is the obvious word in the “Envois” to The Post Card and maybe the most difficult to say anything about. How can one speak intelligibly about it? One falls hopelessly into cliché when speaking of love, as Derrida does in the Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s film. “I have an empty head on love in gen-eral,” says Derrida. “And as for the reason philosophy has often spoken of love, I either have nothing to say, or I’d just be recit-ing clichés.”3 And yet, love is certainly the guiding principle, be-yond pleasure, behind and before Derrida’s corpus, behind and before everything he says about adestination, destinerrancy, arrival, the gift, the messianic, the secret, others, and also the promise; behind and in front of which is a double affirmation, a yes, yes to an unknown future, a oui oui that haunts language as the memory of an ad-venture, an other a-venir, each time a new beginning. Each time beginning; anew. Every time I open my mouth I am promising something, even when I am lying I am promising, opening myself up to a possible future, to a future anterior about which I can truthfully know nothing for certain.4Speaking opens me up to the world, to the love of the world, to the promise of an other world. Who could deny that?