The Work of Art in the Post Age

Abstract

In 1980, Derrida published a book entitled La Carte Postale, the first part of which, ‘Envois’, was in the form of a series of texts ostensibly on the back of picture postcards, sent by someone, maybe Derrida, to an unnamed correspondent, who seems at least to be a lover. The sender of the cards warns his anonymous correspondent that ‘[Y]ou understand, within every sign already, every mark or every trait, there is distancing, the post, what there has to be so that it is legible for another, another than you or me, and everything is messed up in advance, cards on the table’.¹ ‘As soon as there is, there is différance (and this does not await language, especially human language, and the language of Being, only the mark and the divisible trait), and there is postal maneuvering, relays, delay, anticipation, destination, telecommunicating network, the possibility, and therefore the fatal necessity of going astray etc …’² J. Hillis Miller suggests that:

One of Derrida’s main points in The Post Card is that it is a feature of the new regime of telecommunications to break down the inside/outside dichotomies that presided over the old print culture. The new regime is ironically allegorized in The Post Card in somewhat obsolete forms, that is, not only in the many telephone conversations the protagonist (or protagonists) have with their beloved or beloveds but also in an old-fashioned remnant of the rapidly disappearing culture of handwriting, print, and the postal system: the postcard.