Love in the Post: From Plato to Derrida: The Screenplay and Commentary

by Martin McQuillan, Joanna Callaghan

Love in the Post (2013) is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s book The Post Card. Like the book, the film plays with fact and fiction, weaving together the stories of a scholar of literature and a film director, alongside insights from critics and philosophers.

Theo Marks works in a university department that is soon to be closed. His wife Sophie, enigmatic and distant, is in analysis. Filmmaker Joanna struggles to make a film about The Post Card. These people are set on a collision course prompted by a series of letters that will change their lives.

The film features a never before seen interview with Derrida, alongside contributions from Geoff Bennington, Ellen Burt, Catherin Malabou, J. Hillis Miller and Samuel Weber.

Alongside the original screenplay, Martin McQuillan provides an extended commentary on Derrida’s original text, the film and its making. Joanna Callaghan reflects on her practice as a filmmaker and her engagement with philosophy as a director. The volume concludes with interviews between McQuillan and five leading Derrida scholars.

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A companion to a film inspired by Jacques Derrida's 'The Postcard: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond'. The JD book uses the motif of the postcard's trajectory from sender to addressee - or not - and the vicissitudes thereof - and not just the trajectory but other features of postcards and the post (secrecy, openness, and others) as a delivery system for JD's ideas. Or a non-delivery non-system of course; this is the way things go, or don't go, in Derridaworld.

It contains the screenplay, several interviews, a a fair few stills from the film and a couple of other essays.
The film also uses post and letters as key devices, in a tale of academics, infidelity and betrayal, uncertain paternity, and... so on.
I enjoyed reading the screenplay and a couple of the interviews, especially that with Geoff Bennington, one of Derrida's best expositors. Some of the others fell into that distinctive obscurity that besets Derrida scholars.
A mixed mailbag, and I won't say it has something for everyone, but a worthy, interesting and somewhat entertaining venture at least for people like me with an interest in JD's thought and its endless wanderings.
(If I had more time I'd try for some 'post-structuralism' gag, but other duties call.)