“You,” the first and last word of “Envois”

In Bass’s translation of “Envois,” the first and last word is “you.”[1] The first sentence suggests that “you might read these envois as the preface to a book that I have not written” (1), while the last sentence demands that “you will burn it, you, it has to be you” (256). “Envois” thus opens with a necessity (one must, after all, start somewhere) framed as a possibility, and closes with a possibility framed as a necessity – a prediction that “it” will end in fire – “you will burn it.”

We, or “you,” presume that the “it” here is the text itself – but, if correct, then “you” know with full certainty that Derrida has not burnt it, because in that case “it” could not be read. Derrida knew in the past that this would be true in the future, because the logical necessity that he has not burnt the text is embedded in its mode of address – to “you.” At least at the moment when it is read, it is necessarily true that the text survives. On this logic, the grammatical could be said to function prophetically. But who are “you,” and why burn the text?

At the crossroads of chance and necessity

The philosopher Genevieve Lloyd has written of Derrida’s “recurring fascination with the points of convergence between issues arising from the philosophy of time, and the themes of possibility and impossibility, chance and necessity.”[2] Necessity is an important theme throughout Derrida’s work but, I would suggest, has a special prominence within “Envois” – as evinced by the forty-four instances of the word “necessity” in “Envois” (not counting the many appearances of “necessary,” “necessitates,” and so on).

Lloyd focuses on Derrida’s phrase “the crossroads of chance and necessity” from the 1997 book The Politics of Friendship[3] to discuss how through moves like this one Derrida shows how chance “flips over into necessity.”[4] This accords with what Lloyd calls Derrida’s “elusive notion of the singularity of the event”[5] – the notion that every event that happens is not simply one occurrence among many in a succession of similar “present” moments, but rather an irreducibly, profoundly new thing at every instant. Lloyd illustrates this with another quotation from The Politics of Friendship: “That which occurs, and thereby occurs only once, for the first and last time, is always something more or less than its possibility. One can talk endlessly about its possibility without ever coming close to the thing itself in its coming.”[6]

Of that which “occurs only once,” Lloyd writes that if it “is indeed as singular as all that, it cannot but be what it is.”[7] Necessity might be imagined as the inherent structure of a universal chain of causes and effects. However, instead of then reducing the cosmic picture to a transcendent unity, when we think of it as Lloyd does, we instead see that each moment in the totality of becoming is irreducibly unique; necessity lies not in where this totality must go – which remains a surprise – but in the chaotic circulation of factors that have brought the cosmos to where it is. At each instant, we find a unique arrangement of the furniture of the universe, like a vast kaleidoscope – but with an important difference: Since the outcome of each new arrangement will itself be a completely new arrangement, it necessarily cannot be predicted – at least, it cannot be predicted perfectly. There remains an element of chance. This view must reconfigure our sense of the temporal unfolding of necessity in order to, in Lloyd’s words, “make singularity visible.”[8]

The necessity that “you” will burn it

Perhaps in response to the question of the nature of singularity, Derrida might ask us to “understand,” as he writes in “Envois,” that “when I write, right here, on these innumerable post cards, I annihilate not only what I am saying but also the unique addressee that I constitute, and therefore every possible addressee, and every destination” (33). The “unique addressee” is, presumably, the beloved for whom the postcard is intended, and whom Derrida constitutes by addressing her as such; in the same moment, however, this beloved is annihilated, subsumed in the general address to “you,” who could be anyone. This annihilation proves in fact to be an eschatological theme – for Derrida writes, of course, that “I annihilate not only…the unique addressee,” but “every possible addressee,” rendering the annihilation itself general.

This is not to say that we know exactly what kind of annihilation could be meant here. However, simply by writing, Derrida is bound to annihilate the unique addressee – since in never naming his addressee, he leaves open the possibility that I as reader may be the addressee.

On the name and responsibility

In “Envois,” the question of the addressee is often inescapable. “Who is writing,” Derrida asks in the preface, and “to whom?” He immediately answers, “I owe it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally that I do not know” (5). Nonetheless, without any attempt at finality, I can speculate.

As we have observed, the first and last word in “Envois” in English is “you.” However, in the original French, the “you” who will carry out the burning at the end of the text is tu – the informal, personal “you” – while the preface begins by addressing vous, the formal “you” that can refer to a stranger, a social superior, or a crowd. In fact, it is not until we get to the footnote with which the preface concludes that tu is introduced as the mode of address – the mode which is then used throughout “Envois” (with a notable exception: another footnote – one about a mysterious phone call from Heidegger). So: What should we make of these contrasting modes of address? Why are they situated as they are with respect to the structure of the text?

Regarding the familiar tu, we should consider that, as Peeters writes, “everything suggests that the original version [of “Envois”] was written for Sylviane Agacinski,”[9] and that it is the residue of “the long love affair between Derrida and…Agacinski that started in 1972”[10] and lasted until 1984. The year 1972 is reportedly also when the lovers first considered “the question of having a child.”[11]

Significant in this connection is that “Envois” is haunted by the question: “Si puer vivet” (218): Does the boy live?[12] This question appears in the thirteenth-century Fortune-Telling Book (194) that Derrida consults in the Bodleian Library and informs what Peeters calls the “theme of the child” that “runs obsessively”[13] through “Envois.” Witness, for example, “the child, the child, the child” (25) – a cry that may just bear upon the fact that, as Peeters writes, in 1978, “Sylviane resorted to an abortion.”[14] This was one child who, finally, did not live.

And yet, in a curious doubling, the child does live. For when Sylviane became pregnant again in 1983, she decided to keep the child. Daniel Agacinski was born June 18, 1984, and, although Derrida would participate neither in the decision nor in the boy’s upbringing, it was the case, according to Peeters, that “Jacques chose his first name.”[15] Derrida once spoke of the impossibility of “signing” a child – “one can sign neither a child nor a work”[16] – so why did he choose Daniel’s name, and why Daniel?

No child is known when he or she first receives a name. When Derrida named his child Daniel, who was he naming? What was he naming in the name? In the introduction to Derrida’s 1993 book On the Name, translator Thomas Dutoit describes an “unbound, four-page insert, called in French the prière d'insérer”[17] that was included in each of the three separate books that would later comprise On the Name. In this insert, Derrida presents an overview of Passions (the French stand-alone book which was later to become the first section of On the Name), where he writes, “The name: What does one call thus? What does one understand under the name of name? And what occurs when one gives a name? What does one give then? One does not offer a thing, one delivers nothing, and still something comes to be which comes down to giving that which one does not have.”[18] One answer to this series of questions is that when one gives a name, one gives responsibility – not only because a named person is one to whom acts can be attributed, but also because when a person is called by name it is an invitation to respond. For Derrida, though, an invitation entails a paradox, in that it would be impolite not to respond and yet also impolite to respond only out of politeness. Responsibility too, it seems, entails paradox – and is thus a kind of problem. Indeed, as Derrida writes,

Responsibility would be problematic to the further extent that it could sometimes, perhaps even always, be what one takes, not for oneself, in one’s own name and before the other (the most classically metaphysical definition of responsibility) but what one must take for another, in his place, in the name of the other or of oneself as other, [and indeed] before another other.[19]

How much further does this responsibility extend? Derrida writes of “the degree to which responsibility not only fails to weaken but on the contrary arises in a structure which is itself supplementary.”[20] According to a theory of responsibility that has in view the simple univocity of a responsible subject, answerable to their one and only name, responsibility is a straightforward matter – debits and credits, and all accounts closed once balanced. Derrida, though, here complicates our notion of responsibility by demonstrating that it occurs within a network of address – self and other; other as self; self as other; and indeed, the other other. And in “Envois” it is here, as the “other other,” or other “you,” that “I” come in.

Finding in Daniel a thread, and the son as the thread

This very open-endedness prompts Derrida not only to write “Envois” but to publish it: “I would not,” he writes, “have had the slightest interest in this correspondence and this cross-section, I mean in their publication, if some certainty on this matter [of who is writing to whom] had satisfied me” (5). To give a name to one’s addressee is, as we have seen, to enter a bewildering labyrinth; nevertheless, through the very act of publication, Derrida signals that he wants us to attempt to meet him there. I will, therefore, speculate on the meaning of Derrida’s choice of the name Daniel for his child with Sylviane, and I shall speculate upon this choice through the prism of “Envois,” because so much of this text attempts to address (the question of) the child, “the impossible message between us” (25).

That Daniel and his name should raise questions about responsibility is entirely fitting, given that the responsibility both for Daniel and to him, are, as we shall see, precisely what Derrida will refuse. But can responsibility really be so easily avoided?

The name Daniel means “God is my Judge.” And if God is my judge, then others are not. Others may judge me, Derrida seems to say, for carrying on this long love affair, and for fathering this child born out of wedlock, and for the way I refuse to parent or support this child; however, they have no right to judge me. Only God has that right.

Fils, the French for “son,” is a homonym of fil, “thread,” and the two are tied together just as “filiation” (the same word in English and French) is to “filament.” And the thread at which I clutch (as if at a straw) is the name of this particular son of Derrida’s – in part because it is also my own name, or at least, my middle, my secret name as it were. Moreover, like Daniel Agacinski, I too live with the stigma of illegitimacy, am the child of an estranged father, and live with a surname that is not my father’s. It is true that our lives have been very different in many ways; however, there are parallels: For example, we were both born on the eighteenth day of the month (June 18, 1984, and February 18, 1982), and we both went from studying philosophy to working in theatre. Coincidence or necessity? How to decide?

By a truly exorbitant speculation, I choose to read the vous that Derrida addresses in the preface to “Envois” as Daniel, the child-to-come of the love at the heart of this text. This speculative, or specular, addressee is distinct from the tu addressed in the rest of “Envois,” for as vous, he is an over-hearer, rather than hearer; by analogy he is, if you will, the over-reader. And his name, or the name I give him, is Daniel. To clarify: This Daniel is both (and neither) Daniel Agacinksi, the possible-impossible child (or name) prefigured by “Envois,” and myself, Daniel the (dream-)reader.

A book instead of a child

Grounding my speculation are two explicit mentions of the name Daniel in “Envois.” The first is a reference to Daniel Deronda, the eponymous crypto-Jewish hero of George Eliot’s 1876 novel, which is cited because it is being researched by Cynthia Chase – at that point, studying in Oxford. Derrida refers to it as “a story of circumcision and double-reading” (15).

The second reference to Daniel in “Envois” comes in a passage quoted from the 1964 edition of The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, in which the Book of Esther is compared with the Book of Daniel: “[V]ictory seems to depend,” we read, “not so much on loyalty to Judaism (cf. the book of Daniel), as on the use of political maneuver and appeal to self-interest” (qtd. in “Envois” 74). I will return to the second of these references to Daniel, but there is another, more deeply hidden Daniel to whom I first will turn.

In the preface to “Envois,” Derrida writes of the desire that initiated the book: “before all else,” he writes, “I wanted…to make a book” (5).[21] The odd expression “to make a book” is Bass’s translation of faire un livre,[22] which is equally odd and non-idiomatic in French; perhaps Derrida uses it because he wants us to think of making a book in a particular way, as though “to make a book” could parallel making, say, a child. Derrida goes on to tell us that he wanted to make a book “in part for reasons that remain obscure and that always will, I believe, and in part for other reasons that I must silence” (5). Derrida follows his confession of a desire to “make a book” with two rhetorical questions: “a book instead of what? Or of whom?” (5).

One possible answer to the first question is obvious: a book instead of a half-burnt stack of postcards. Publication is far from inevitable for a “destroyed correspondence” (4), and further, we should not pass over how the process of writing is shaped by the intention – the desire – to create a book “before all else” (5). So, how might a correspondence destined for publication differ from one that was always intended to remain private? Derrida writes that he “had first thought of preserving the figures and the dates, in other words the places of signature,” but “gave it up” (5); so it seems that making a book has come at the cost of effacing or hiding the private or the personal to some degree. The private, or personal, is necessarily “silenced,” since the sender of a book (or of a postcard) cannot help but know that their words may be read by all and sundry.

A child instead of a book

Let us move now to Derrida’s second question, that is: “a book instead of…whom?” (5). Derrida himself leaves this question hanging, moving abruptly on to his description of the process by which he encrypted the blanked-out sections of “Envois.” He thus registers an interruption in place of an answer to his question, a silence where he might have given reasons. In the absence of those reasons, my answer to the question is: a book instead of a child. Derrida desires a book for “reasons” that he “must silence” (5), because, I believe, they are regrettable reasons, and intensely private. To cut to the chase: The Post Card arrives, I suggest, in place of Derrida’s impossible child, the child that Sylviane Agacinski aborted in 1978.

According to Peeters, Derrida had “dreamed” of a child with Agacinski “as an event both desirable and impossible.”[23] It was impossible, first of all, because of the practicalities. According to Peeters, Derrida’s “bond with Marguerite” – his wife, and the mother of his two sons – “was, in his view, indestructible,” and besides, Derrida “could not support two family homes.”[24],[25] Furthermore, Derrida felt, writes Peeters, that “paternity was a matter of too much significance for him to agree to it in a half-hearted way.”23 In practical terms, he can, therefore, be said to have supported the decision not to have a child but not the decision to have a child:

I couldn't answer you on the phone just now, it was too painful. The “decision” you asked me for once again is impossible, you know it. It comes back to you, I send it back to you. Whatever you do I will approve, and I will do so from the day that it was clear that between us never will any contract, any debt, any official custody, any memory even, hold us back – any child even. (25–26)

The date of this post card, June 8, 1977, is not quite right for the “decision” in question to refer to the abortion that Agacinski would later disclose to Peeters. It is, however, impossible not to hear in it an echo of Peeters’ claim that Derrida“let Sylviane decide for herself but assured her that he would accept whatever decision she came to.”[26] After all, Derrida makes very clear, on the back cover of The Post Card, that he “abuse[s] dates.” Moreover, the reader can never forget Derrida’s violent exclamation: “to the devil with the child, the only thing we ever will have discussed, the child, the child, the child” (25).

Near the beginning of “Envois,” in the postcard of June 6, 1977 Derrida, addressing his beloved, first introduces the child: “[Y]our letter mandated, commanded, made arrive at its destination everything that we feared. And what has betrayed us, is that you wanted generality: which is what I call a child” (23). To call generality “a child” is peculiar, even by Derrida’s standards. One way to understand this, though, is to see the child as the generality that is reproduction, or life, or the next generation – a generality that would “betray” the exclusive particularity of the couple.

Later, Derrida would recall this missive, the one in which he first mentions the child, asking his beloved to “remember what I reproached you for one day: for having chosen over us generality, in other words, the law, the children, etc.” (133). Here, “the law” seems to be that of marriage – the law that governs reproduction, or children – the general rule to which the lovers could, if childless, have been an exception. The exception to the rule is a transgression of the law of the general, but the lovers, it seems, have their own law outside the law of reproduction, adherence to which requires them to be faithful, set apart from generality.

In this same first child-bearing postcard of June 6, 1977, Derrida enigmatically writes of a “fidelity to the secret demand [that] you wanted to preserve” (24). This “secret demand” is best decoded, I suggest, as the demand for secrecy. A child cannot, generally, be kept secret, and the appearance of a child would effectively broadcast the news of an affair. A child would make public Derrida’s secret, adulterous relationship; in short, as general knowledge, the illegitimate child would be the violation of that secret.

So, to recap: The book that is The Post Card is, I suggest, the book that Derrida makes instead of a child. Recall that The Post Card is also, though merely, “the preface to a book that I have not written” (3). And this book is unwritten, I suggest, because it is replaced by the child that was Daniel Agacinski. I propose to read “Envois,” then, as the preface to the unwritten book that is (the Book of) Daniel.

“cf the Book of Daniel”

How, then, might I read “Envois” as a Daniel? Unlike Derrida, I shall follow the lead, or thread, given by The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, and will “cf. the book of Daniel” (74). “Cf.” is of course an abbreviation for the Latin confer, that is, “to compare,” and is derived from the older Latin conferre, which can also mean to bring together, collect, gather, contribute, connect, and join perhaps as one might collect threads.[27] As you will recall, this reference to the Book of Daniel appears in connection with the biblical Book of Esther; there is at least one other place in which Esther appears next to Daniel, and that is in the Jewish Tanakh, where Daniel follows Esther among the Ketuvim (“Writings”).

Ex eventu prophecy

The scholarly consensus is that, like Esther, the Book of Daniel was completed in the Second Temple period. Within that period, in the second century BCE, Daniel appears after Esther, although a conservative minority opinion holds that it was written in the same period in which its narrative takes place, that is, the sixth century BCE. Daniel contains many examples of ex eventu prophecy, which John J. Collins describes as “the prediction of events which have already taken place.”[28] Part of the modern strategy of dating Daniel authorship, then, is to trace the historically-verifiable events described in the text – among them, the succession of Seleucid kings – and thus to establish from around what year Daniel’s “predictions” go from being correct to being incorrect. One incorrect prediction concerns the death date of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Greek ruler of the Jews in that time. As Pamela J. Milne observes, Daniel is on firm footing describing “Antiochus’s persecution of the Jews, which began with the desecration of the temple in 167 BCE,”[29] but “the inaccurate description of the end of Antiochus’s reign and of his death indicates that the book was finished before these took place in 164 BCE.”[30] Milne here works on the assumption that ex eventu prophecies are included in order to lend credence to predictions of events that have not yet occurred at the time of writing. And such prophecies are common in ancient apocalypses – which is the genre of the Book of Daniel.

Daniel’s genre as an apocalypse

Milne also writes that “the book [of Daniel] as a whole is usually described as an apocalypse, a genre in which revelation is mediated in a narrative framework to a human recipient through otherworldly beings.”[31] Collins speaks of the apocalyptic genre as “disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world”;[32] however, the apocalypse genre is hardly uniform in its formal features. And this is especially true of early apocalypses, such as Daniel, which are generally “composite in character and have affinities with more than one genre.”[33] Indeed, there is considerable debate as to how and when Daniel became one narrative, composed as it is of two genres – court tales and visions – and in two languages: Hebrew and Aramaic. Most of the text is, of course, narrated in the third person, and it has been argued that the splits in genre, language, and narration, being asymmetric, suggest that the sections were composed at different times and by different people. As Milne writes, “the book appearing under the name of Daniel is actually by an unknown author.”[34] And much of the book’s interpretation hangs by this thread; Collins writes that “the authenticity of Daniel is a sensitive theological question over which heated battles have been waged…Much of the debate has centered…on the a priori possibility of predictive prophecy.”[35]

It should be noted that Daniel was not considered a prophet by his original readership, and today is not regarded as a prophet within Judaism (hence the text’s position within the Ketuvim rather than with the Nevi’im, that is, “Prophets”). However, the status of the biblical Daniel escalates with the onset of the Christian dispensation: In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus emphatically does describe Daniel as a prophet (Mat. 24:15).[36] In doing so, Jesus, we might say, legitimises Daniel after the fact. Jesus, himself famously lacking the legitimation of an earthly father until after the fact, will in time become the filial authority that legitimises Daniel after the fact.

Picking up once again the thread of prediction and fortune-telling, we remember the necessarily true prediction that closes “Envois:” that “you will burn it, you, it has to be you” (256). Reading backwards and forwards from this eschaton, this end in fire, we could say that “Envois” anticipates a Danieline reading – a reading of “Envois” as an apocalypse.

The word apocalypse means, of course, revelation.[37] It arrives in both English and French by way of the Latin apocalypsis, in turn by way of the ancient Greek word apokálupsis, which means “to uncover” or “to disclose.” And “Apocalypse” is an important word in “Envois” – enough for Bass to include it in his translator’s glossary: “apocalypse,” he writes, “in French and English has the sense of prophetic revelation of imminent cataclysm” (xv).

Is it not, though, extravagant of Bass to provide a glossary entry for an untranslated word? Admittedly, he remarks that “the purpose of this entry is to alert you to the theme of foretelling catastrophic fate, whether in the Bible, fortune-telling books, metaphysics, or psychoanalysis” (xvi). The difficulty, though, that will not be overcome by Bass’ brief account is that the apocalyptic and revelation appear to be entangled with eschatology – and yet why would an unveiling or foretelling necessarily be of an “imminent cataclysm” (xv), of an end to (all) things?

In approaching this question, perhaps the moment has come for my disclosure, my revelation, my apocalypse: the dream-text that takes us to Los Angeles, and which makes reading me as Daniel a necessity, ex eventu.

Enter Daniel

In the twenty-third year of my life, I, “Daniel had a dream and visions of [my] head as [I] lay in bed. Then [I] wrote down the dream” (Dan. 7:1). It was just days after I completed my undergraduate degree, for, like Daniel, I had been “taught [both] literature and language” – not “of the Chaldeans” (Dan. 1:4), but rather what was required for a Bachelor of Arts in English. It should be added that I was “educated” not “for three years” (Dan. 1:5), like Daniel and his companions, but rather for five. By this time, I had dreamt many dreams, and I had written down many dreams, but this dream was like no other dream I had ever dreamt. I dreamt that God was speaking to me.

In an entry in my journal dated June 10, 2005, I recorded this dream in which God was speaking to me. I was sitting at my desk. I could hear God’s words, and I could almost – but not quite – see God out of the corner of my eye, although I could not (or simply did not) look at God. Instead, I looked at the wall of my room, on which, “as I watched” (Dan. 7:6), blue letters appeared, mirroring the words God spoke. When I woke up from this dream, the only words I could remember were “anti-racist,” “theologian,” and the name “Matthew Barnett.” I awoke with a calm, still, beautiful feeling like the one I had felt while dreaming. In my journal entry, I write “I heard!” but like Daniel, “I heard but could not understand” (Dan. 11:8).

On June 22, 2005, I record in my journal that “Matthew Barnett is a real person.” I had discovered this by searching Google, using various combinations of his name and the words “anti-racist” and “theologian.” I learned that he was the Pastor of Angelus Temple, located in Echo Park, Los Angeles, and that he was one of the founders of a ministry called the Dream Center, a programme housed in an old Catholic hospital building that had been turned into a resource and residency programme for people who wanted to leave street-involved lifestyles.

Upon learning these things about Barnett, I felt both confirmed but also anxious. Thus: “as for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me” (Dan. 7:15). I was surrounded by questions. What, I wondered, did the dream mean? Why would I dream about this person? What were the forgotten words of the dream? What did God want to tell me? In short, what was “the truth concerning all this” (Dan. 7:16)?

I wanted to go to the Dream Center, but I was not sure how to go about it. As a working musician, I did not have the financial or practical means to go. More than logistical challenges, what kept me from going was not being completely sure that I had been asked to go. I could not recall any part of my dream in which there was such a request. I had a vague sense that perhaps I should go, but it wasn’t definite. Faced with the practicalities, I did not make plans to go to the Dream Center, and life carried on – “but I kept the matter in my mind” (Dan. 7:28).

Almost five years later, on May 2, 2010, my wife Erin and I were driving across town to attend a birthday party. Driving past a church, we saw on its sign that Matthew Barnett would be speaking there that same night. We were surprised, since Los Angeles is a long way from Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, where we then lived, and which is moreover a small city and very remote. We drove to the birthday party and stayed for a little while, explaining to those present why we would have to leave; we did so in time to drive back downtown to hear Barnett speak.

That night, Matthew Barnett spoke about the work the Dream Center was doing in Echo Park: housing people who wanted to get off the street, feeding the hungry with mobile food trucks, offering free basic dental care with a mobile dental van, and various other, related ministries. After Barnett spoke, members of the crowd lined up at the front of the hall to meet and pray with him. I wanted to tell him about my dream, so I took my place in the queue. When it was my turn, I introduced myself, shook Barnett’s hand, and told him about my dream. “I’m not sure what to make of this, or what you might make of it, but five years ago, I dreamt that God told me your name,” I said, continuing with an abbreviated version of the whole story. “That is really strange,” he said. “I can’t say I’ve heard of anything like that before. It’s amazing, but I have no idea what it means.”

Though I still lacked a clear reason to go to Los Angeles, my desire to do so remained strong. But, as the angel tells Daniel, “happy are those who persevere” (Dan. 11:12), and so it came to pass that, after more than a “thousand three hundred thirty-five days” (Dan. 11:12), finding that I had vacation time coming up and the financial means available, I booked airplane tickets for myself, my wife, and our son. Our itinerary included many typical tourist activities, such as visiting Disneyland, as well as a few more unusual plans, including visiting Angelus Temple and the Dream Center.

On July 10, we toured the Dream Center, and on Sunday July 12 we attended a service at Angelus Temple. We parked in the church’s attached parking garage with the confidence of regular attenders. Matthew Barnett was there that day. He gave a sermon about which I remember very little. I do remember that he concluded it with an exhortation to the effect that if there was anything God was calling us to do, to create, to build, to write, we should go and do it. I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly, and I leaned over to Erin and asked, “Did he say ‘to write?’” but I don’t think she heard me, and then the musicians started playing again, and it seemed moments later that we were walking up the stairs to the upper room where I would meet Matthew Barnett for a second time.

There were perhaps a dozen people in the room where the pastor met newcomers every week. He didn’t keep the group waiting more than a few minutes. I was reluctant to put myself forward, feeling unsure about drawing attention to myself, wishing not to skip my place in the queue, but Barnett came right over to us, along with an assistant.

He said he remembered me – I had jogged his memory. He thanked us for visiting. I told him that we had enjoyed our tour of the Dream Center, and that I couldn’t help but think about the possibility of perhaps developing a ministry like it in Prince George. He seemed immediately very excited about that idea, and gave me his card, asking if we could make a time to meet to discuss it right away. I apologised that we were soon to return to Prince George, but that I would call him after we got home. He gave me a copy of his second book, God’s Dream For You. On Monday July 13 we returned to Canada.

I read God’s Dream for You. It is mainly Barnett’s first-person account of founding the Dream Center, but also features testimonies of profound personal change from people who had been housed in the Dream Center, and how they overcame poverty, abuse, and addiction. It is structured around a series of spiritual exhortations and instructions.

On July 25, 2015, I record in my journal the following thoughts: “God, why did you tell me about Matthew Barnett and lead me to the Dream Center? At the least, so I can write about it. And that is not a small thing.”

Later that summer – I’m not sure when – I did call Matthew Barnett. I was sitting in my office at the Prince George Symphony Orchestra. I had barely the outlines of an agenda, but I knew I wanted to tell him about the book I wanted to write about my testimony. I reached his secretary, but then I could not commit to an appointment time because of my work schedule. I promised to call back. I did not call back.

Sometimes I ask myself, should I call Matthew Barnett now? What should I say to him? In thinking through these questions, it has become impossible for me not to notice that what I did not do this whole time, and what I have still not done, perhaps until now, is to seriously attempt to interpret my dream. Perhaps I was so overwhelmed by God’s presence and voice, or so blocked by the wall on which His words appeared, that I did not give my attention to His writing. Or, maybe, just maybe, it is because I am a Daniel that I do not interpret my own dream.

The biblical Daniel, you see, has immense difficulty in interpreting his own dreams. After his first dream, he writes that “as for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me” (Dan. 7:15). This, of course, is understandable, given that Daniel dreams of “an Ancient One” whose “throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and flowed out from his presence. A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him” (Dan. 7:9–10). Troubled and unable to interpret this terrifying, confounding vision on his own, Daniel writes that “I approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this. So he said that he would disclose to me the interpretation” (Dan. 7:16).

Following the second of his visions, Daniel writes that “when I, Daniel, had seen the vision, I tried to understand it. Then…I heard a human voice by the Ulai [River], calling, ‘Gabriel, help this man understand the vision’” (Dan. 8:15–16). The Gabriel in question does indeed give Daniel the interpretation. Now if I, Daniel, have been visited by Gabriel or any other angel, it remains a mystery to me, as does the interpretation of my dream. Since therefore I have only you, I will need you, my angel, to interpret the dream for me.

I note, you see, that in “Envois,” six times the addressee is identified as “my angel,” or “my beloved angel.” Therefore, I will pray for the interpretation in your name, or in the name of “you.” To put this another way: If I “seek an answer by prayer and supplication with fasting and sackcloth and ashes” (Dan. 9:3), perhaps you will be willing to “disclose to me the interpretation of the matter” (Dan. 7:16). In short: Will you be my angel?

Questioning You

Bass includes ange in his glossary, noting that it “means ‘angel,’ but recalling its derivation from the Greek angelos, meaning ‘messenger’” (xv). Despite all the questions I have asked, it would be difficult to determine in advance what exactly was or is the message that I await from you, my angel. It seems that part of the problem is that I cannot quite recognize any angel. From all the clues to be found in “Envois,” I am tempted to think that you, my angel, are Sylviane Agacinski. I do of course realise that “the worst mistake of our expert bloodhounds will consist in naming you” (185), and I fear I may now be such an “expert bloodhound.” Moreover, the risks of naming you, identifying “you,” are clear – after all, even “you yourself were getting lost by naming yourself” (185).

Nevertheless, we must also remember that if the addressee of these missives could be anyone, perverse though it may be, we are quite free to read them as though they are addressed to Sylviane Agacinski. Though it may be the worst mistake, I am reassured that Derrida issues this warning because, he writes, “I still like him” (4); that is, Derrida still cares about “the bad reader” (4) described in the preface. In the original French, this is je l'aime encore – which I translate “I still love (him or her).” Insofar as I am the bad reader, the mistaken limier, I am (thank God) still loved by Derrida. I will push this love to its limit, and perhaps beyond, demanding more and more in its name, as I make “the worst mistake” over and over, as though determined to do so. Such is my belief that “you” must know the meaning of my dream, that I still continue to question you doggedly, like a limier, a bloodhound or detective.

Talking of detectives, I wonder if you might be a detective angel, like one of Charlie’s Angels – I think of those “female private detectives” (246) of whom Derrida writes, from the 1970s television show. Charlie’s Angels are, of course, blessed with interpretive skills – how else would they manage to solve crimes?

I have just fallen asleep, as I do every day, watching Mysteries of the West and Charley’s Angels (four female private detectives, very beautiful, one is smart, their orders arrive on the telephone, from a boss who seems to be “sending himself” a fifth by speaking to them) and in passing I caught this: only the dead don’t talk. That’s what you think! They are the most talkative, especially if they remain alone. It’s rather a question of getting them to shut up. (246)

The temporal relation here between Derrida’s falling asleep, watching two television shows, and writing the postcard is not clear. Presumably, one can only fall asleep while watching one show, since the shift from waking to sleeping happens in an instant, and absorbs one’s entire attention, so to speak; it seems unlikely, then, that Derrida is describing two TVs playing different shows at the same time, but rather that he is indicating the sequence of shows he watches while falling asleep, apparently “every day”. That Derrida is watching Mysteries of the West is itself a mystery since this was not the actual title of any show; however, this seems to be an effect of Bass offering a literal or direct translation of the French title Les mystères de l’Ouest, the show known in the English-speaking world as The Wild Wild West, a 1960s cowboy series about Secret Service agents. Perhaps Bass chooses to keep Mysteries of the West because it is evocative (if only for Derrida) of the mysteries of the cultural heritage of the West. If, though, it is a mistake, it is one of two here, for Derrida appears to get the spelling of Charlie’s Angels wrong, but then he is, after all, falling asleep. Does Derrida then write this postcard in his sleep? Or he is only now recalling, after having woken up, the line “only the dead don’t talk” (246)? And does this line belong to Charley’s Angels or to Mysteries of the West? The words are, strictly speaking, apocryphal, being words without an author. Or, to put this another way, the two shows have become intertwined in Derrida’s sleep, and with these words, the angels attempt to solve the mysteries of the West.

Whatever the solution, I am intrigued to see that when Derrida answers the angels, he plays the role of “a boss who seems to be ‘sending himself’ a fifth by speaking to them” (246), that is to say, a boss who contradicts and overrules the investigators with a revelation – namely that indeed the dead do talk. This prompts me to ask what kind of boss, or Charley, might this sleepy Derrida make? The name Charles is “from a Germanic word, karl, meaning ‘free man.’”[38] We might now think of one German, notoriously obsessed with freedom, who also happens to be a talkative dead man, namely Martin Heidegger, who, like Charley, wants to issue “orders…on the telephone” (246) – at the very least, an order for Derrida to pay for the call: As Derrida writes, “while typing this page for the present publication, the telephone rings,” and the “American operator asks me if I accept a ‘collect call’ from Martin…Heidegger” (21). This call, by the way, comes “on the morning of 22 August 1979” (21), by which time Heidegger has been dead for over three years, and Derrida, who knows how to “get…[the dead] to shut up” (246), simply refuses to accept the call. He also does not accept the charges; Derrida refuses to owe a debt on account of Heidegger, although there is still a possible price to pay, which is that he will never know what Heidegger might have said from the beyond. But perhaps that does not matter in that Derrida adds that soon “we all will be lying on our backs, the voices will come from the screen, [and] one no longer will know who interprets what” (250) – in other words, we will all have fallen asleep in front of the television and no longer know the difference between, say, Jacques and Martin, or “Envois” and the Book of Daniel.

Angels of the West

In “Envois,” unlike in the television show, Charley has four (and not three) angels. Derrida’s encroaching sleep has, it seems, caused him to miscount them, to divide them, or to hallucinate a mysterious fourth figure. As John Schad writes in Someone Called Derrida, “the nodding philosopher must have dreamt a fourth into existence, a fourth and phantom angel.”[39][40] In this phantom angel, I cannot help but see another forwards-backwards look toward Daniel. For you see, my dear angel, in Daniel 3, Daniel’s three friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are all “thrown into a furnace of blazing fire” (Dan. 3:6), but when King Nebuchadnezzar looks to see what has happened to them, he asks “his counselors, ‘Was it not three men that we threw bound into the fire?’” (Dan. 3:24). They answer that this is true, and the King replies, “But I see four men unbound, walking in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the fourth has the appearance of a god” (Dan. 3:25) – in short, an angel. Daniel, though, is nowhere to be seen – certainly not in the fire. And, as a result, he misses this encounter with an angel.

I have an intuition that we are now closing in on one of the mysteries of the West: Will the angel who interprets my dream – Daniel’s dream – be one of Charley’s angels? I believe it is significant that Derrida’s call from Martin Heidegger was placed by an “American operator” (21) since, in the TV show, Charley calls his angels from Los Angeles, which is where many philosophers, artists, and intellectuals from Germany found themselves during and after the war. Heidegger was not among them, of course – he was on the other side (the other side of the War; the other side of the Atlantic; and, by the time Charlie’s Angels premiered in fall 1976, on the other side of death). If this sounds like a joke, perhaps it is – a serious one: Note that for Derrida, “Martin has the face of an old Jew” – not of an old Nazi; all of which makes Derrida “burst out laughing” (189). It is not always so easy to tell “who was who, who was allied with whom” (186).

All joking aside, in a postcard dated October 13, 1978, Derrida must be to the west of his beloved addressee when he writes that “It’s six o’clock in the morning, noon for you, I have just called you, you were not expecting it, visibly. I’ll never forget that burst of laughter in your voice…In two hours, flight to Cornell, day after tomorrow California. But now, the more I go west, the closer you get” (168). I presume that Derrida’s telephonic addressee laughed because of their surprise at hearing from him at that hour. If so, they must have known where Derrida was staying, which was New York City – in the same missive, he mentions “a walk on the border of Central Park” (167) – which also means that the person he surprised received his call in the same time zone that Paris is in. If it is true that the “more [he] go[es] west, the closer you get” (168), it is because in circling the globe, west and east change places. California is obviously not literally closer to Paris than is New York, but perhaps Derrida dreams of outrunning the time difference; indeed, he writes to his beloved that “we” – that is, the alliance that “we” form – “would have been, yes, impossible without…acceleration in the speed of angels” (44). Closing the distance between the lovers would require a miraculous speed, a relay run by “all angels, all the messengers we have provided ourselves” (44). I, Daniel, watch as they race “west, coming across the face of the whole earth without touching the ground” (Dan. 8:5). Please note that Derrida, teaching at the University of California, Irvine, spent much time in that city of angels, Los Angeles. Note too that he writes that “I resemble a messenger” (8).

I want to close the distance between myself and “you,” my angel, the angel who will interpret my dream of the name of a person who lives in Los Angeles; but perhaps I already have the answer – in “Envois”: “At the other end of the world, in the shaded area of my life, this is where I am already, there, in the west, and I await you” (163). The West is that “other end of the world,” just where I am now, here on Canada’s Pacific shore; there is no further west I could go to close the distance between us.

It has to be you

So: The Western extreme that is Los Angeles has brought us to the “end of the world” (163). In the Book of Daniel, we read that, at the time of the end, “many shall be running back and forth” (Dan. 12:4). These could be our messengers, bringing the apocalyptic revelation that would be the meaning of my dream – or even that of the coded message at the secret heart of “Envois.” To discover a hidden meaning of “Envois” as the key to the name Daniel, however speculatively, it will have been necessary for Daniel-the-interpreter to arrive. The angel tells Daniel that “you, Daniel, [must] keep the words secret and the book sealed until the time of the end” (Dan. 12:4). Here, at the end, the book is now coming unsealed, and its pages are spilling out like so many postcards. In this, perhaps there is also a clue as to why the apocalypse must give way to the eschaton – the prophetic has returned us to necessity: If the future can be known, it must be, in some way, “already…there,” and here it is, indeed, “in the west,” where Derrida “await[s] you” (163).

When Derrida names his son Daniel, he makes the Book of Daniel a cause of his child, retrospectively. We might consider now whether Derrida’s act of naming may amount to a prayer for a Daniel-to-come, and if so, in what ways such a prayer may be prophetic.[41] Neither the Book of Daniel nor “Envois” can, of course, predict the coming of Daniel Agacinski – nevertheless, he is prefigured in “Envois” through the figure of the biblical Daniel. It no longer matters whether this foreknowledge was an illusion, because the chance of the prophetic is that the imagined possibility of predicting a future, after that future has actually arrived, will have the retrospective effect of ratifying the prediction. If the text cannot know him in advance, it can call for what (and who) it does not yet know. What is more (or less), whether by an extraordinary chance or a prophetic necessity – and this, too, is perhaps undecidable – I too am prefigured: I, Daniel.