I want to watch Badlands with you, the scene where the house burns, where Kit Carruthers sets fire to the house.

Where ghosts live … it's in writing: I must talk to you about this. How they sit waiting at the depths, the depth of the petrol, the level where the text burns, where you give everything up, to hell with it, burn it all, start a fire to burn away everything that looks like an answer, including what you love, language, and the wish to be intelligible and convincing, let that burn too, and all the things that ‘correspondence’ says – the papers, delete all those indestructible bloody emails, but also put under attack the more general phenomenon of telecommunication, of responding with or to someone at a distance – destroy the evidence so that there is no sign of relation, no sign of attachment left but also perhaps no interruption or impediment or betrayal of desire by a language always too everyday, too universal, too capable of signifying. And I have to talk to you about how even the fire burns, sublimates itself, ceasing to be only flames, becoming unrecognisable; as Derrida wrote thirty-two years ago on Monday, the seventh of September 1977, the correspondence preceding and constituting ‘Envois’ is destroyed by ‘fire or that which figuratively takes its place’, as if a figurative substitution were already burning inside anything one might recognise as fire – or as a word, burning to supersede the destructiveness and blazing transformation of fire – or of language, so as to be, I resume quoting him: ‘more certain of leaving nothing out of the reach of what I like to call langue de feu, the tongue of fire’ (‘Envois’, p. 3). Fire stays very close to what it burns, so close, as close as kisses.

All this can be recollected: once more made subject to mourning, language and work. Perhaps it's common knowledge by now, I haven't kept up with the scholarship. But I am still planning to talk to you about what ‘Envois’ calls the ‘singular one’ who perhaps escapes all that (p. 4).