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

Abstract

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, p. 367).