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Pursuing themes of love and infidelity, this performative, post-critical essay demonstrates the "postal effect," theorized and practiced in Jacques Derrida's The Post Card, and exhibits how the epistolary genre-its lost love letters and perfidious postcards, always already errant, straying-foregrounds Derrida's approaches to the writings of James Joyce.
I love very much everything that I deconstruct in my own manner; the texts I want to read from the deconstructive point of view are texts I love, with that impulse of identification which is indispensable for reading. They are texts whose future, I think, will not be exhausted for a long time. [...] My relation to these texts is characterized by loving jealousy.
-Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other
Exordium ("I have nothing to say about love")
"There is no destination, my sweet destiny" (Derrida, Post 29), and when I write to you, je t'aime, "I love you," in my own manner, this is my first and greatest, most comprehensive and irretrievable disaster: that I love you, and that my love letters, perfidious postcards, cannot reach you. This is how I begin, writing: "I write for, I write from, I start writing from: Love. I write out of love. Writing, loving: inseparable. Writing is a gesture of love" (Cixous 42). I write to you, and I write you, because "at every moment the order to write you is given, no matter what, but to write you, and I love, and this is how I recognise that I love" (Post 10). The words do not fit neatly on a postcard-they overflow its edges. I recognize that I love, that I love you, that I only know love because I will have dared loved you. . .-and everything follows from this first principle. This is a portrait, a structural portrait, of you, which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, facing the other, you, absent, silent, who do not speak. "So it is a lover," your lover, "who speaks," who writes to you and speaks to you, writing and loving, "and who says" (Barthes, Lover's 9):
-I have nothing to say about love. I am exhausted. We will have "loved according to every genre" (Post 109), and by the end I...