Richard Burt

1^ Although it is not customary to give citations with page numbers in epigraphs in academic publications, I will give them in footnotes. See Jacques Derrida, Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 36.

2^ Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, 466.

3^ James Joyce, Ulysses Ed. Hans Gabler (Random House, 1986), 264.

4^ Edgar Allan Poe, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1850) , in Edgar Allan Poe , Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 466.

5^ Jacques Derrida, “Living On [Survivance],” Parages trans. John Leavey , Tom Conley and James Hulbert (Stanford , CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 178.

6^ Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege] trans. Julian Young, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 200-241; to 229

7^ The Post Card, 249.

8^ The footnote (“8”)reads as follwos: “L’édition définitive du Coup de Dés, alors en préparation chez Didot, ne parut qu’en 1914 chez Gallimard.” Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, complète : 1862 - 1871. suivi de Lettres sur la poésie : 1872 - 1898; avec des lettres inédites. Éd. Bertrand Marchal. (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 642.

9^ Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, complète : 1862 - 1871. suivi de Lettres sur la poésie : 1872 - 1898; avec des lettres inédites. Éd. Bertrand Marchal. (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 642

10^ Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets,” in Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege] trans. Julian Young, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002) 200-241; to 241.

11^ Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 2 trans. Geoffrey Bennington

(Chaicgo: University of Chicago Press, 147 (215).

12^ Helene Cixous, Or, les lettres de mon pere, 25; cited by Derrida, H.C. for Life, 125, n. 113, p. 170.

13^ The Postcard, 196

14^ Jacques Derrida, Cinders, Trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 74-75; quoted from The Post Card, 196, from a letter dated 31 May, 1979 but quoteded without the date in the letter on The Post Card, 196.This is the last citation in Cinders, which is a composite translation of both the 1982 and 1987 versions of Feu la cindre. (note 77, p. 77. This quotation frm the Postcard has the sources of the citations in Cinders listed below it on p. 76.

15^ http://www.afterlifethefilm.com/site.html#/home

16^ On the death certificate, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International trans Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994): “In short, it is often a matter of pretending to certify death there where the death certificate is still the performative of an act of war or the impotent gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution” (48). See also Derrida’s comment: “The response echoes, always, like a response that can be identified neither as a living present nor as the pure and simply absence of someone dead,” in Jacques Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 213.

17^ For a comic version, see the scene in The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) in which the coroner declares that the Wicked Witch of the East is dead: "As coroner I must aver, I thoroughly examined her. And she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead." On the death of the actor who played the coroner, see Bill Blankenship, “Oz coroner most sincerely dead Raabe appointed a Shawnee County coroner to ink Wicked Witch's 'official' Kansas death certificate http://cjonline.com/life/2010-04-10/oz_coroner_most_sincerely_dead For a fine, Derrida-friendly analysis of American and British nineteenth-century literature and paperwork, see Kevin McLaughlin, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

18^ “Dead” Hospital Patient Woke Up As Doctors

Prepared to Remove Organs

(http://gawker.com/dead-hospital-patientwoke-

up-as-doctors-prepared-to-724808296) n October 2009, the St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse ruled a woman

dead and, with the permission of the woman's family, prepared to remove

her organs for donation. Then, as she was on the operating table,

surrounded by doctors and hospital staff, the woman opened her eyes. She was alive.

Colleen Burns had overdosed from a combination of Xanax, Benadryl, and

muscle relaxers several days before. . . . When Burns awoke in the operating rooms, doctors realized she had been

in a deep coma, and had not suffered “cardiac death,” as they initially

determined. . . . Tragically, Burns committed suicide 16 months after the incident.

19^ Derrida alludes here to his earlier discussion of Blanchot’s quotation from Paul Celan’s poem Strette, the first word of which, Derrida notes at the end of a sentence linking cremation to Nazi concentration camps and to Blanchot, is “ASCHENGLORIE [ASHGLORY]” (capital letters in the original): “as for cremation, and the ashes that from now on, in modern and uneffaceable history of humanity, the crematoria of the camps, let us forget nothing,” Beast and Sovereign 2, op cit, 179.

20^ On Derrida’s account of a material archival support related to Pascal’s doublet, namely, the wallet, see Richard Burt, "Life Supports,” op cit.

21^ At the very end of “Why Poets?,” an essay from which I take an epigraph on Pascal and the heart, Heidegger consigns or co-signs the future to remains that has no. I cite the line again:

What has merely passed away is already, in advance of its passing away, without destiny. What has been in an essential way, by contrast, is he destining. In what we suppose is eternity, something merely transitory [Vergängliches] has been concealed, but away into the void of a now without duration.

See Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege] trans. Julian Young, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002) 200-241; to 240-41.

22^ Not just this paratext insolation, but as a prier d’sinder, as one different form others, as a prayer, as precarious, or preycarious or praycarious. Can you pray without preying upon? Does prayer reinscribe enemy and frned?

The 1999 Galilée edition of Donner la mort was accompanied by the following text in the form of a flysheet (Prière d'insérer)” in which Derrida begins by explaining that despite appearances, Donner la mort is not a sequel to Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money.” viii-ix; to viii.

A four page insert accompainies the book—“please (I pray you) insert”: prière d'insérer (is that a command? a law? an invitation? a prayer?) links Sauf le nom with Passions and Khôra as a triptych on “the question of the name: (Sauf, Prière d'insérer 1/ON, xiv), thre texts that were subsequently gathered together in one volume only in the English translation On the Name (ON). John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida‬:

Jacques Derrida Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices Derrida and Negative Theology Trans. John P. Leavey,

Ed Harold G. Coward, Foshay, Toby Avard (SUNY Press, 1992) 283-

Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation trans. Jane E. Lewin Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Chapter five, “The please-insert”, 104-116 The please-insert [le prière d'insérer] is definitely, at least in France, one of the most typical elements of the modern paratext. It is also one of the most difficult to consider in historical detail for in some stages of its evolution it takes a particularly fragile form; thus, to my knowledge, no public collection has been able to accumulate these PIS for purposes of research. 105
“Another uncertainty has to do with the meaning of the verb inset: it is sometimes—wrongly—related to the fact of inserting a losse sheet ointo a volume; actually , it has to do with inserting the text of the plese-insert into the bewspapers . . . Note 1, 104.
In the first stage of what Genette says are four stages n the history,, the PIs were written to editors, critics, and published and resembled “today’s ‘just published’ notices” (108)

In the second stage, “these inserts are no longer reserved for the presses’ copies but are made available to all buyers. That, it seems to me, is a phenomenon of remanance(rem·a·nence  (r

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

138

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

1^ Walter Benjamin Kafka

Kafka did not always evade the temptations of a modish mysticism. . . . His ways with his own writings certainly does not exclude this possibility. Kafka had a rare capacity for creating parables of himself. Yet his parables are never exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings. One has to find one’s way in them circumspectly, cautiously, and warily. One must keep in mind Kafka’s way of reading, as exemplified in in his interpretation of the above mentioned parable [“Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer”; “The Great Wall of China”]. The text of his will is another case in point. Given its background, the directive in which Kafka ordered the destruction of his literary remains is just as unfathomable, to be weighed just as carefully as the answers to the doorkeeper in “Vor dem Gestz” [“Before the Law”]. Perhaps Kafka, whose every day on earth brought him up against insoluble modes of behavior and imprecise communications, in death wished to his contemporaries a taste of their own medicine.

“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Selected Writings Vol 2 1931-1934, Harvard, 794-818; to 804.
It is easier to draw speculative conclusions from Kafka’s posthumous collection of notes than to explore even one of the motifs that appear in histories and novels. “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Selected Writings Vol 2 1931-1934, Harvard, 794-818; to 807.
Brod’s inability to do justice to the subject itself becomes particularly distasteful when he deals with Kafka’s famous testamentary instructions prescribing the destruction of his posthumous papers. This, if anywhere, would have been the place to review the fundamental aspects of Kafka’s life. (Kafka was clearly unwilling to take responsibility before posterity for a body of work whose greatness he nevertheless recognized.) This question s has been exhaustively discussed since Kafka’s death; it offered a fitting point to pause for thought. That, however, would have entailed some self-reflection on the biographer’s part. Kafka presumably had to entrust his literary remains to someone who would not comply with his last request. And neither the testator nor the biographer would be damaged by such a view of the matter. But this view presupposes an ability to grasp the tensions which riddled Kafka’s life.

Walter Benjamin, “Letter to Gershom Scholem,” in Selected Writings Vol 3 1935-1938, Harvard, 323-29; to p. 323.

Who Owns Kafka?

Judith Butler

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-kafka

Vol. 33 No. 5 · 3 March 2011
pages 3-8

ELIF BATUMAN

• 
  Published: September 22, 2010 Kafka’s Last Trial
  
• 
  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/magazine/26kafka-t.html
  

2^ Martin Heidegger, “On Preserving What is Attempted,” in Mindfulness (Besinnung). trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, Continuum, 2006, 270-78, to 277. The editor notes: “However, in the course of planning the publication of his literary Gesamtausgabe Heidegger made a different decision. The general contract drawn up between him and the publisher Vittorio Klostermann in 1974 assigns “Briefe” [“The Letters”] to the fourth division of the Gesamtausgabe. Hence Ausgewählte Briefe will appear in volumes 92 and 93.” “Editor’s Epilogue,” “On Preserving What is Attempted,” in Mindfulness (Besinnung). trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, Continuum, 2006, 385. S Volome of Hediegger’s letters have been published and translated into English., including Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters: 1925-1975 trans. Ursula Ludz and Andrew Shields (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003); Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols - Conversations - Letters trans. Franz Mayr (Northwestern University Press, 2001); Martin Heidegger, Letters to His Wife (Polity Press, 2008). For an open letter Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’ (1946),” in Pathmarks (Wegmarken), trans. William McNeill(Cambridge UP, 1998), 239-76.

3^ For this lectern, no less than the ego, is dependent on the signifier, namely on the word, which—generalizing its function compared to the pulpit of quarrelsome memory and to the Tronchin table of a noble pedigree—is responsible for that fact that it is not merely a tree that has been felled, cut down to size and glued back together by a cabinet maker, for reasons of commerce tied to need-creating fashions that maintains its exchange value, assuming it is not led too quickly to satisfy the least superfluous of those needs by the final use to which wear and tear will eventually reduce it: namely, fuel for the fire.

--Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing,” Écrits, 351

4^ Blanchot’s essay is devoted to the publication of Kafka’s Complete Works. See also Blanchot’s related essays “The Very Last Word,” in the same volume Friendship Trans. Elizabeth Rotteberg (Stanford UP), 252-92, and “Kafka and the Work’s Demand” in The Space of Literature Trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NB: Nebraska UP, 1982), 49-50.

5^ Non cesse de nous tourner la tete a donner a entendre la phrase “Maurice Blanchot est mort”? D’ailleurs, pour ma part, je pourrais raconteur, sans voulour en dire davantage ici, que ce fut en deux temps, dont le premier fut celui d’une fausse nouvelle ou d’une nouvelle seulement anticipe de quinze jours, que j’ai appris que “Maurice Blanchot etait mort”. Je dis “etait” et non “est”, ce qui nous donnerait a penser cette autre tentation, au fond, de Maurice Blanchot: nous avons tous, a commencer sans doute par lui, endure la terrible tentation (c’est de tentation que je voudrais le aujourd’hui) de penser que la vraie position, ce que, depuis toujours, “Maurice Blanchot etait mort.” --Jacques Derrida, “Maurice Blanchot est morte” in Parages, revised and augmented edition, 2003, 270. This chapter, which Derrida added to the second edition of Parages, is oddly (and inexplicably) not included in the translation of Parages edited by John Leavey. A shorter version of it has appeared in The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2. See editors’ note.

6^ For Derrida’s comments on Martin Heidegger and the posterous in relation to reversibility (“umgekehrt,” turned things around, past participale of the infinitive umkerhren) and a distinction between fact and principle, see Beast and S, 2 194. “it incidicates an order of presuppositions, the order of what comes before and what comes after in statements, an order of what follows, posterous, and of what is posterior in the logical series of valid statements.

7^ Chresmatics

related: buzzwordbingo, economy