J’accepte: Jacques Derrida’s Cryptic Love by Unsealed Writing

• Authors: Michał Krzykawski
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article focuses on the autobiographical ghost that dwells in “Envois” and the multiple ways he/she/it interferes in Derrida’s concept of écriture. Read through love letters sent as postcards with the image representing Socrates writing in front of Plato, Derrida’s writing, I argue, definitely becomes a cryptic writing (écriture cryptique) both in the sense of kryptô (Gr. coded) and secerno (Lat. set apart). I endeavor to show that “Envois”-largely autobiographical and entangled in his life events-is a harbinger of the secret that Derrida takes for a fundamental feature of democracy in his later works. And yet the secret is of his own, as he notes when writing “Envois”: “Nobody will never know what the secret I write along with is. And that I say this will not change anything” (Peeters 2010: 367).

Keywords

EN

Derrida; autobiography; love; crypt; secret; writing

• Publisher: Ośrodek Badań Filozoficznych - Centre for Philosophical Research
• Journal: Avant
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 8
• Issue: 2

Dates

published

2017

online

2018-06-08

Contributors

author

Michał Krzykawski