Postcard of the Month — Postcard of drawing of Plato and Socrates by Matthew Paris of St Albans (d. 1259) Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ref. C.191 (ND)
I first purchased copies of this postcard in the Bodleian Library gift shop, Oxford, on Wednesday, 8th November, 1995. Quite apart from any personal interest in its quirky composition, the card holds broader significance as the focus of Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, University of Chicago Press, 1987. Derrida encountered it when he was a visiting professor at Oxford in the late 1970s, and in “Envois”, the opening section of his book, assembles over 200 texts purporting to be “love letters” written on multiple copies of the card and sent to an unnamed woman residing in Paris – probably Sylviane Agacinski, rather than Derrida’s wife Marguerite. The letters are of various lengths and were, it seems, mailed several at a time in sealed envelopes rather than as single, openly-accessible postcards. The individual texts, fragmentary, playful and obscure, discuss a wide range of thoughts, topics, and observations as Derrida wanders about Oxford pondering the writings of Plato, Socrates, Heidegger and Freud. Gaps in the correspondence are indicated, suggesting that the sequence is incomplete, and the reader is told nothing about the addressee’s replies, presuming such responses even existed. The text consciously crosses the boundary between philosophy and fiction, autobiography and invention, reportage and provocation, and the postcard as medium is also recognised as a highly ambivalent form: is it private or public, serious or trivial, primarily an image or a text? “I have so much to tell you and it all will have to hold on snapshot postcards”, Derrida writes, “Letters in small pieces, torn in advance, cut out, recut…a postcard supports it well” (p. 22). Benoit Peeters notes that “The letters on which [Derrida] based The Post Card have disappeared or are inaccessible, so all suppositions are permitted and even encouraged” (Jacques Derrida, Polity Press, 2013, p, 311). The reader must concede to the challenge of this openness if he or she is to enable the work to work.
The image on the card is reproduced in black and white at the end of the book in such a way that it can be folded out, remaining visible no matter which part of the text is being read. It is also displayed on the front cover which, together with remarks on the back signed “J.D.”, turns the volume itself into a kind of super-dense postcard-object, as if to suggest that between the recto and verso of a conventional postal note lies a potentially immense accumulation of information, recalling those fictitious musical Tarot cards described in the sixth chapter of Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914), eventually revealed to be concealing beautifully intricate, miniscule machines.
The postcard itself shows the frontispiece, drawn by Matthew Paris of St Albans (d.1259), of a thirteenth century fortune-telling tract, The Prognostics of Socrates. Famous as the inventor of Deconstruction, a rigorous textual method highlighting inherent contradictions within western thought, Derrida’s controversial claims appear to be confirmed, if not predicted by the image on the card. It depicts two figures, clearly labelled Socrates and plato (note the lower-case p), showing the former writing whilst his companion appears to act as a (perhaps tyrannical) teacher or guide. This is to completely reverse the received wisdom, according to which the master Socrates’ verbal pronouncements were assiduously recorded in writing by Plato, his scribe. Derrida is keen to open up this cryptic picture to a range of provocative readings: is “plato” scratching Socrates’ back or inflicting pain? Are we witness to a shabbily-disguised homosexual act? And is Socrates merely propped up at a medieval desk, or smugly ensconced at the controls of a fantastical machine?
Text © Peter Suchin, 2020
