Fort:Da, Can T You See I M Burning?

Richard Burt

Read After Burning:

The Sur-vivance of Derrida’s Post . . . to Be Published . . . to Be Continued . . . Posthumously (with love, without such limits)[1]

Bio-Politics ö ü ß ä

Peter Szendy (Listen: A History of Our Ears Charlotte Mandell (Translator), Jean-Luc Nancy (Foreword)

Fort:Da, Can’t You See I’m Burning?

“The time has not come for me either. Some men are born posthumously. . . .; perhaps there will be endowed chairs dedicated to Zarathrustra interpretation.” Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings Ed. Aaron Ridle Trans Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 100.

And just because yu follow a norm does not mena that the way you follow cannot be srange, as is Frued’s practice of cross-referencing his own works and his additions of notes to successive editions of his works. Derrida is careful to note when Freud does not mention a name when he gives a citation form a text, like Nietzsche’s.

Limp 269

Repeats the repetition of repetition 301

the spectrality of the ‘material’ support takes the book’s future from the opposition of life and death that orients biopolitics to the way a text lives on, or ‘survives’, to use Derrida’s word: ‘Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death’.

Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2, op cit., pp130-31. Derrida also links the ‘book’ and ‘bios’ through the phantasm in The Beast and Sovereign 2, op. cit., p129-133, p148-49.

In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe. . . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated, filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. (130)

The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the living and the dead. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130)

Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Körper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)

in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or the State, of the so-called dead boy, what we call a corpse.,. . . not just in the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . .deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)

Jacques Derrida, “Preface to the 1990 Edition” in The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy trans. Marian Hobson University of Chicago Press, 2003, xiii-iv.

Was it necessary to publish this writing dating from 1953-54? In truth I must say that even today, though it is over and done with, I am not sure. . . .

In rereading this work, along with the worries, the reservations, even the objections which multiplied in me, along with the bouts of ill-ease that I felt then, I was most disturbed by the listening to myself, in the experience that consists of hardly hearing myself, with difficulty, as on tape or screen, and of recognizing without recognizing, I mean without accepting, within even tolerating, through the memory of shifts in philosophy, in rhetoric, in strategy, in a way of speaking, hardly changed perhaps, an ancient and almost fatal position of a voice, or rather a tone. This tone can no longer be disassociated from a gesture that is uncontrollable even in self-control: it is like a movement of the body, in the end always the same, to let itself into the landscape of a problem, however speculative it may seem. And yes, all that seems like an old roll of film, the film is almost silent, above all one can hear the noise of the machine, one picks out old and familiar silhouettes. One can no longer listen to oneself at such a distance, or rather, if one can, on the other hand alas, begin to hear a bit better, it is also because one has the most trouble in doing it: pain in front of a screen, allergy at the authoritarian presence of an image of oneself, in sound and in sight, about which one says to oneself in the end, perhaps, one never liked it, nor really known it hardly run across it. That was me, that is me, that?

I had not reread this student essay for more than thirty years. The idea of publishing it had never crossed my mind.

xiii-iv.

Compare this to Derrida on Freud talking about Freud publishing BPP in The Post Card, 385

“If so, it may be asked why I have embarked upon efforts such as those consigned to this chapter, and why they are delivered for publication. Well—I cannot deny that some of the analogies, correlations, and connections which it contains seemed to me to deserve consideration” (60; mod.). Period, the end. This is the final point, the last words of the chapter. The Post Card, 385.

The ellipsis of memory 373

lacunae 373

Give myself tonight 372

Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears Trans Charlotte Mandell; Foreword, Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/ Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1981)

Talk to the Hand

Ring Tones of Philosophy

Dial Tones and Tin Ears

Freud specifies between dashes 279

Beyond the Pleasure Principle: I will propose a selective, filtrating, discriminating reading. 261

But a certain reading of his text, which I am attempting here, cannot fail to come across its work, 277

The very surface of the “overlap” 283

But the “hypothesis” with which I read his text and several others 285

No Weg withoutt UWumweg 284

What is given s first filtered, selected, actively dilmited. This discrimination is in part declarted at the border. 299

I would like to attempt a partial and naïve reading 298

Writing affects the very surface of its support. And this nonbelonging unleashes speculation 283

Here I m asking quesitons in the dark. Or in a penumbra, rather, the penumbra in which we keep ourselves when Frued’s unanalyzed reaches out its phospherescenet attanae. 278

He writes himself, he sends himselfd. 282

Is this not a free zone . . 281 IS there a duty (resosnsbility, tax holiday, travel) fre zone? Nthing to declar at the border to custms?

Here it seems to me, we must pay the greatest attention to Freud’s rhetoric. And by the same tokemn, to the scene, the gestures, the movements, the filtrating strategy, the busy selectivity. 279

As concernsreferrng Being and Time to The Genealogy of Morals in the question of Schuldigsein—I will attempt it elsewhere. 264

Note. Derrida translates “Schuld” in this note, but not the latter word, nmeaning being guilty”

I will attempt the beginning of this bok then, will attempt to draw it toward me for the third ring. But is it a ring? 260

This is what would impose a limit on the translation. 268

Nietzscvhe’s name is not mentioned, but small matter. The expersison “perpetual recurrence of the same thing” appears , between quotation marks, in the third chapter.

“Seblstdarstellung” not translated on p. 265; 272 meaning self-staging

This first chapter will have been contorted in its brevity” 279

I am going right to the end of this chapter, toward the site of our first pause whww . . . 278

These questions are not asked by Freud, not here, and not in these terms. 281

In sum, Freud could have stopped there (and in a certain way he does, I think that everything is played out in these first pages, in other words that everything wil nly repeatt his arrest, his pas de marche, but it is repetiiton, recisely, that is in quesiton here.) 283

This Freud does not say, does nto say it presently, here, nor even elsewhere in this form. 285

How does death await at the end, at all the ends (the three interlaced ends that only make up one divided end) of this strucutre at every step of this peculation? 285

Life death 285

Until now, but we have only just begun 287

This is the conclusion of the chapter. We have not advanced one step 296

InitallyIremakr this: this is the first time in this book that

Family vactioncy 300

But can also be read, according to the supplemntary necessity of a parergon, as an autobiogrphy of Freud. Not simply an autobiography confiding his life this own more or less testamentary writing, buta more or less living description of his own writing, of his way of writing what he writes, most notably Beyond . . . . The autobiography of the writing posits and deposits simultaneously 303

I have attemtpted to eplain myself on this question elsewhere. 304

The notion of the repeition “en abyme”of Freud’s writing has a structural mimesis with the reation between the PP and its death drive. The lalatter, once again, s not opposed opposed to the former, but hollows it out with a testamentary writing, “en abyme” orginally, at the origin of the origin. 304

I myself will not oepen this curtain—I leave this to you--… 308

I am not syaing the grandfather’s intervention 310

I am not commenting on what Freud says, I am not syaing that Freud is saying:” 31`0

There is nothing hypotehtical or audacious about sayng this; it is an analytical reading of what Freud’s text says explcitly. 312

Telecommunicated 313

A call for a footntote that I will read presently. 313

This how we fall on the first of the two footnotes. 318

Telephonic or tellescripted 319

Let us make a pause after this first footnote 320

Detour of the tele 320

But nothing has been said yet 321

I have just said: “Already at the moment when the scene, if this can be said, took place.” And I add a fortiori at the moment of desiring to write about it, or of sending oneself a letter about it, sothat the letter makes its return after having institutted its postal relay , which is the very thing that makes it possible for a letter not to arrive at its destination, and that makes this posisibility-of-never-arriving deivide the strucutre of the letter from the outset Because (for example) there would be neither postal relay nor analytc movement if the place of the letter were not divisible and it a letter always arrived at its destination. I am adding a a fortiori, but let it be understood that the a fortiorii was presribed in the supplementary graphics of the ovcerlapped taking place of twhat too hastily would be called the primary scene. 324

The a fortiori of the a priori makes itslef ( a bit more) legible in the second note of which I spoke above. It was written afterward, and recalls that Sophie is dead: the daughter (rmother) recakked by the child died soon after. . . . It follows the first note only by a page, but in the inenterval a page as been turned. 324

This is the sentenece htat callss for a ntoe on Sophie’s death 325

Calls for a ntote 326\

Call for a ntoe on Sophie’s death 326

For us, hter is no question of accrediitng such an empirico-biographical connection between the “speculation” of Beyond . . . and the death of Sophie. No quesiton of accrediitng even the hypothesis of sychthis conneciton. 328

La séance continue. This is ltierally, and in French in the text, what he writes . . . “ 329

Third “overlapping” caracterisitc 330

In 1923, the first operation on the mouth. 333

Heterography 333

An overlap wthout equivalaence: fort:da. 321 (“foirt / da” up through p. 320)

The formal strucutre yields itself to reading 31

(Mor e than ten years ago in its very last lines, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” gave a step of Freued’s to be continued. This—coming back as a deferred supplement---is to be continued.) p. 337, last senteneces of “Freud’s Legacy”

And assign it to an auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphic scene of writing This scene of writing does not recount something, the content of an event that would becalled the fort:da. This remains unrepresentable, but produces, then producing itself, the scene of writing. 336

I am suposing t reread 339

Transference operates as a resistance, 339

It is the strucutre of the PP as overlapping . . 342

Seal, 343

The last free-willl in person (the signger of the will) no longer has naything to do with it or with anyone. You cary his name. 345

Why have I called this place of defeat for the master a front? 345

Froom this point on .. Freud’s discourse becomes more and more obscure an ellipitcal. 347

Amortize them small doses, 347