In 1980, Jacques Derrida published La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà. At the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the English translation, Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida revisits this seminal work in Derrida’s oeuvre. Derrida himself described The Post Card in his preface as “the remainders of a destroyed correspondence,” stretching from 1977 to 1979. A cryptic text, it is riddled with gaps, word plays, and a meandering analysis of the interface between philosophy and psychoanalysis.The contributors who offered the fourteen essays gathered in Going Postcard were each provided with a deceptively simple task: to write a gloss to a fragment from the first part of The Post Card, “Envois.” The result is a prismatic array of commentaries, excursions, and interpretations that take Derrida “to the letter.” The different glosses on lemmas such as genre, erasure, telepathy, philately, and sperm transport The Post Card into the twenty-first century and offer a “correspondence,” if fragmentary, with Derrida’s work and the work to come.ContentsJ. Hillis Miller – Glossing the Gloss of “Envois” in The Post CardMichael Naas – Drawing BlanksRick Elmore – Troubling Lines: The Process of Address in Derrida’s The Post CardNicholas Royle – Postcard TelepathyWan-Chuan Kao – Post by a Thousand CutsEszter Timár – Ateleia/AutoimmunityHannah Markley – Reading, Touching, Loving the “Envois”Éamonn Dunne – Entre NousZach Rivers – Derrida in Correspondances: A Telephonic UmbilicusKamillea Aghtan – Glossing Errors: Notes on Reading the “Envois” NoisilyPeggy Kamuf – Coming UngluedJames E. Burt – Running with DerridaJulian Wolfreys – Perception–Framing–LoveDragan Kujundzic – Envoiles. Post It.Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei – PostfaceABOUT THE EDITORVincent W.J. van Gerven Oei is a philologist, publisher, and co-director of independent open-access publishing platform punctum books. He is a specialist of the Old Nubian language and co-editor-in-chief of Dotawo, the imprint of the Union for Nubian Studies. He also directs project bureau for the arts and humanities The Department of Eagles and is editor of the New World Summit. His recent publications include Cross-Examinations (MER. Paper Kunsthalle, 2015), and the edited volumes Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida (punctum, 2017) and with Mihnea Mircan, Allegory of the Cave Painting (Mousse, 2015). His three-volume work Lapidari (punctum, 2015) provides the first complete overview of socialist monumentality in Albania. As a translator, Van Gerven Oei works mostly with anonymous Medieval Nubian scribes and more recent authors such as Jean Daive, Hervé Guibert, Dick Raaijmakers, Avital Ronell, and Nachoem M. Wijnberg. His scholarly work has appeared in ArtPapers, Polish Archeology in the Mediterranean, postmedieval, Theory & Event, and tripwire, among other venues.

This book is included in DOAB.