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Concept
The Post Card
Summary
The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà) is a 1980 book by the 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 Derrida's Writing and Difference (1967).
The first half of the book, titled Envois (sendings), contains a series of love letters addressed by a travelling "salesman" to an unnamed loved one. The latter remembers, for example, "the day we bought that bed (the complications with the credit and the punch card in the store, and then one of those awful scenes between us)". He writes his love letters on the back of countless copies of a postcard and continually fantasizes about the relationship between Socrates and Plato. Added to this couple are also those between Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger, Derrida's two grandparents, but also between Heidegger and Being, "beings" and Being, the Subject and the Object, the author himself and "you", his "tender love". 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 Matthew Paris' medieval depiction of Socrates (held by Oxford Bodleian Library) 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 behind 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 .
Official source
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