‘The Abnormal Day of This World’: Journal Fragment

Abstract

Invited to speak in Iceland on the topic of ‘psychoanalysis and the university’, at a conference entitled ‘Psychoanalysis on Ice’, on 9 October 2014, I had to say yes. Ten years to the day after his death: I can hear him already. . . As he says of Paul de Man, at the end of ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’: ‘I am so sad that Paul de Man is not here himself to answer me and to object. But I can hear him already—and sooner or later his text will answer for him’. Such is the effect, as he goes on to remark, of the text as ‘spectral machine’. What is this madness?—But I hear him already [Mais je l’entends deja] (WA, 160). I accept the invitation because of the date and chance. There is also something beautiful about this title, ‘Psychoanalysis on Ice’. As for ‘psychoanalysis and the university’, what will he not have said! (Cf. ‘For the Love of Lacan’.) I would like to recall the extraordinary text he wrote, originally published in English in the pages of OLR (vol. 12, 1990), ‘Let us Not Forget—Psychoanalysis’. I imagine amending this title to: ‘Let us Not Forget— Jacques Derrida’. I had to say yes, above all, because this letter of invitation recalled another, the first and only other text I have ever received from someone in Iceland. This was in September 1993, a letter from Derrida in the form of a card with a picture of ‘John the Apostle with his attribute, a book in his hand’. It is a reproduction of an image from the Sagas of the Apostles. ‘From Codex Scardensis’, it states on the back, ‘supposed to be written in the monastery at Helgafell shortly after 1350.’ I wasn’t expecting a letter from him, and certainly not from Iceland. He was on his way to New York (he gives NYU, 19 University Place, as the address on the back of the envelope), where he would deliver