Drawing Blanks

The reader of The Post Card is surely to be excused for drawing a blank from time to time. It’s not easy going — a Derrida text rarely is — and “To Speculate — on ‘Freud’” and “Le facteur de la vérité” are among Derrida’s most challenging works. But pa-tience and rereading almost always have their rewards when it comes to Derrida. However difficult these essays may be at first glance or at a first reading, they are not impenetrable, as some have wanted to pretend, and multiple readings almost always yield a coherent if not convincing reading of Freud or Lacan on themes such as repetition, legacy, language, the unconscious, or the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Even if the reader winds up drawing a blank now and again, the goal nonetheless remains and should remain to interpret and to understand, in a word, to gloss — the argument as well as the rhetoric, the organization as well as the themes, everything from the theses that are put forward to the language and terms used to support them. To arrive at a reading of these works — that should remain the goal of every reader who enters the ring or the arena of interpretation, every reader who agrees to going postcard.