The Post Card
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"I see Plato getting an erection in Socrates’ back and see the insane hubris of his prick, an interminable, disproportionate erection traversing Paris’s head like a single idea and then the copyist’s chair, before slowly sliding, still warm, under Socrates’ right leg, in harmony or symphony with the movement of this phallus sheaf [ce faisceau de phallus/this bundle of phalluses], the points, plumes, pens, fingers, nails and grattoirs, the very pencil boxes which address themselves in the same direction."--The Post Card (1980) by Jacques Derrida, cited in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Rorty |
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The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980, La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà) is a 1980 book by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It is a "satire of epistolary literature." After Glas (1974), it is sometimes considered Derrida's most "literary" book, and continues the critical engagement with psychoanalysis first signaled in "Freud and the Scene of Writing" (from the 1967 Writing and Difference).
Content
The first half of the book, titled Envois, contains a series of love letters addressed by Derrida to an unnamed loved one. In one of the letters, dated 6 June 1977, Derrida tells about his time spent in London with Jonathan Culler and Cynthia Chase, who had recently married. They showed Derrida an exposition of hundreds of card reproductions, among which was the medieval depiction of Socrates taking dictation from Plato, which seized Derrida's attention by its reversal of the historical relationship between the two figures (since Socrates himself left behind no written texts). After describing Plato's posture in the picture, and speculating about what he may have been doing Socrates's back (riding a skateboard, conducting a tram), Derrida says
- ...The card immediately seemed to me, how to put it, obscene. [...] For the moment, myself, I tell you that I see Plato getting an erection in Socrates' back and see the insane hubris of his prick, an interminable, disproportionate erection ... slowly sliding, still warm, under Socrates' right leg [...] Imagine the day, when we will be able to send sperm by post card. [... and finally, Plato] wants to emit ... to sow the entire earth, to send the same fertile card to everyone.
"Envois" is followed by "To Speculate - On Freud", an extended commentary on Beyond the Pleasure Principle; "Le Facteur de la Verité", a critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis focusing on an analysis of Lacan's Edgar Allan Poe commentary, the "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'"; and "Du Tout", a response to questions posed by the psychoanalyst René Major concerning Glas and Derrida's general relation to psychoanalytic theory.
