Materialising the Other: Pregnancy &amp; Deconstruction

Joanna Callaghan

doi:10.16995/sim.284

Abstract

In the ‘Envois’ section of Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card (1980), pregnancy and ‘the child’ keep coming back. As early as page five, there is an allusion to a child of sorts; ‘To the devil with the child, the only thing we ever will have discussed, the child, the child, the child’ (1980: 25). This unborn child is central to the emotional drama of the ‘Envois’. It is cause and consequence of the correspondence between the unnamed narrator and his pregnant lover. Nevertheless, the topic of pregnancy in ‘Envois’ has been relatively ignored by Derrida scholars. In 2014, I produced a feature film inspired by The Post Card and chose to emphasise the aspect of pregnancy. I included a five-year-old child, Byron, whose genealogy remains open. I also featured a number of characters who are or want to be pregnant. In this video essay, I discuss how Love in the Post: From Plato to Derrida reads Derrida’s ‘Envois’ in relation to pregnancy, reproduction and infidelity.

Highlights

Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of S tudies in the Maternal, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
Derrida must have known what he was doing in introducing the theme of pregnancy in ‘Envois’ and the ‘risky behaviour’ he was undertaking (Callaghan & McQuillan, 2014: 150)

Summary

Introduction

Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of S tudies in the Maternal, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. In the ‘Envois’ section of Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card (1980), pregnancy and ‘the child’ keep coming back. The topic of pregnancy in ‘Envois’ has been relatively ignored by Derrida scholars.

Results

Conclusion