"In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the passing, we have arrived." — Knut Hamsun "But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter." — Romans 7:6 Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans inaugurates a Western tradition that heralds a coming messianic time, a joining of its community, and a circumscribing of a universality that continues to haunt our collective history, our pursuit of justice, and even our sense of lack and hope. Charged with a calling, an address, and the irruptive signature of “Paul,” this single letter, like the endless stream of letters to come, burns itself into Western memory, digs itself into the cannon, and erupts with a repressive force. Whether it is Goethe’s nauseating romanticism in Werther doubling as suicide note, Freud’s erotic writings to Fliess at the core of psychoanalysis, Derrida’s satirical (even blasphemous) deconstruction of the epistolary in The Post Card, or Else Lasker-Schüler’s bohemian, nomad correspondences, we cannot escape the letter, but perhaps, we can lean into its punch. In risking exactly this, we might just divine the messianic character of the letter whether in law or spirit, and reckon with what is to come. Oriented in this fashion, there is no doubt that one can find all sorts of Schatzkästlein, if not outright spiritual nourishment, in becoming epistolary ourselves as philologians of the letter and inheritors of a its accumulated past. In our calling and address to you, our conference seeks to be acommemorable conventicle of philologians of the letter who do not hesitate being transfigured by reading and working on ‘correspondence.’ Attuning our minds to the secret of letters, as Hamsun did, we will ultimately be, ‘like a batch of letters’ arriving on the scene of something uncannily ours. We might even experience ‘Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit’ for the sake of which Walter Benjamin never stopped writing letters in messianic vein of his very own.
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