Philately on the Telephone: Reading, Touching, Loving the "Envois"

In this essay, I read a phone conversation that Jacques Der-rida alludes to in the “Envois,” but never directly transcribes. The content of the phone call remains secret. However, I want to retrace the significance of the conversation and its organiz-ing figure, “philately,” but even before I begin, I acknowledge that the aims of this essay are paradoxically at odds: I am both on the phone and in a text, writing about love, but always at a distance from explicit emotional content. The entanglements of telephone and post, of emotion and its suppression, necessarily entail some detours that also perform philately on the telephone with Jacques Derrida. What is essential, then, is not the content of the phone conversation between Derrida and his lover, or my conversation with Derrida’s text. Rather, this essay foregrounds the relays of telephone, postcard, voice, and emotion in effort to think through love itself as an envois. That is, I foreground the ways that Derrida’s text recasts love as always already in the post.