Dé-lire de l’Amour, or the Deconstruction of Philosophy: Jacques Derrida between “Posology” and “Desastrology” in The Post-Card
Rosanna Chiafari
What happens when thought, tradition, and philosophy share their heredity with the writing of an erotic postcard? Perhaps a disaster: yes, the section of a dis-aster is, in fact, the story of Envois’s desire, a textual place where Derridean deconstruction inscribes itself in an amorous correspondence. A postcard, therefore, that Jacques Derrida finds fortuitously in an Oxford bookshop, on whose frontispiece there is a 13th century miniature by Matthew Paris, which portrays “Plato” intent on dictating threateningly to “Socrates”, who, sitting at the scriptorium, at the same time writes and annuls his inscription. In this way, philosophy would confess – perhaps in the back-store of a Pharmacy – to be the protagonist of the staging of writing through which it has always been recited the dé-lire – a delusional reading – of his phil(osoph)ia. That is the framework of an ongoing deconstruction that twists the question of logos: what will remain of a metaphysics of presence – that is, of philosophy itself – if the latter is described as a postal effect of writing, which always it earmarks to another, and, elsewhere, as the reading of its text? And what if the love story offered by The Post-Card, was a metaphor of our philosophical tradition’s history? What if the love narrated through that postcard, without sender and without recipient, told of love-delirium between “Writing” and “Philosophy”? From these distances, you would like to let’s travel to cross Envois’s journeys (en-voyage), maybe in the company of psychoanalysis, stopping between the deconstructive hostels of différance, trace, dissemination, rest, sending a postcard in which – between the lines – philosophy becomes a ritual of love and where its corpus burns on the fire-stake of deconstruction: all that remains is Envois, or “les reste d’une correspondence recemment detruite.”
Keywords: Writing, Dissemination, Eros, Sending, Rest