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Glossing the Gloss of "Envois" in The Post Card

  • J. Hillis Miller (author)
Chapter of: Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida(pp. 11–41)

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Metadata
TitleGlossing the Gloss of "Envois" in The Post Card
ContributorJ. Hillis Miller (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0171.1.02
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/going-postcard-the-letters-of-jacques-derrida/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightMiller, J. Hillis
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2017-05-15
Long abstractThe Post Card invites glossing of all sorts. It is an immensely complex and rich text, one of Derrida’s most fascinating and challenging. La carte postale is full of specific historical and personal references that will puzzle many readers. Many formu-lations and allusions are enigmatic or counter-intuitive. They need explanatory glossing. Derrida uses just about every rhe-torical device and figure of speech in the book. You name it, it is there (il y a là): puns (calembours), metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, catachresis, apostrophe, prosopopoeia, hyperbole, prolepsis, analepsis, ellipsis, paradox, aporia, and of course a constant pervasive destabilizing irony. How can you tell when this joker is telling the truth or speaking straight, if ever? “Envois,” moreover, is full of complex wordplay that is not exactly “figurative” in the usual sense. This wordplay is often not easily translatable from French to English. One tiny example: In the last entry for February 1979, Derrida writes: “La séance continue, tu analyse ça comment? Je parle grammaire, comme toujours, c’est un verbe ou un adjectif ?” (“La séance continue, how do you analyze that? I’m talking grammar, as always, is it a verb or an adjective?” [PC, 178/193]) Derrida here plays on an untranslatable ambiguity on whether “continue” in the French is verb or an adjective. In the first case, the locution would mean: “The session continues.” In the second, “The continued session.” It makes a lot of difference which way you read it, as a duck or as a rabbit, as in the famous Gestaltist diagram that oscillates un-predictably before the viewer’s eyes between those two animals. The reader (you! [singular]) will note the second person singu-lar pronoun in “tu analyse ça comment?” This is an example of the endless play on the difference between “tu” and “vous” that pervades the “Envois.”
Page rangepp. 11–41
Print length31 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

J. Hillis Miller

(author)