Passages from Derrida's "Envois"

quoted by Steve Rodgers

9 June 1977

Plato wants to emit. Seed, artificially, technically. That devil of a Socrates holds the syringe. To sow the entire earth, to send the same fertile card to everyone. A pancarte, a pan-card, a billboard we all have on our backs and to which we can never really turn round. For example, poor Freud, Plato, via Socrates, via all the addresses on the Western way, the relays, the porters, the readers, the copyists, the archivists, the guardians, the professors, the writers, the facteurs, right?, Plato sticks him with his pancarte and Freud has it on his back, can no longer get rid of it. Result, result, for it is not so simple as-I-show-in-my-book it is then Plato who is the inheritor for Freud. Who pulls the same trick on Plato that Plato pulls on Socrates. This is what I call a catastrophe.

[. . . .]

Example: if one morning Socrates had spoken for Plato, if to Plato his addressee he had addressed some message, it is also that p. would had to be able to receive, to wait, to desire, in a words to have called in a certain way what S. will have sent to him; and therefore what S., taking dictation, pretends to invent--writes, right? p. has sent himself a post card (caption + picture), he has sent it back to himself from himself, or he has even "sent" himself S. And we find ourselves, my beloved angel, on he itinerary. Incalculable consequences. Go figure out then if you, at this very moment, in your name

this is the catastrophe: when he writes, when he sends, when he makes his (a)way, S is p, finally is no longer totally other than p (finally I donUt think so at all, S will have been totally other, but if only he had been totally other, truly totally other, nothing would have happened between them, and we would not be at this pass, sending ourselves their names and their ghosts like ping-pong balls). pp, pS, Sp, SS, the predicate speculates in order to send itself the subject (489-90)