The “friendly contract” which “should serve above all as an invitation to others... [though] not at all with the aim of... having the last word” under writes the precise protocols of response currently exercised as the “last word” of the “Letters” sections of the dominant post-al publishing industry. Through (anti)theoretical theoretical strategies such as the ones that Derrida advances, the status of these various periodicals as private enterprises aimed at producing profit (private property) is erased in representation and momentarily reportrayed as a coalitional undertaking aimed at genuine (collective) social ends. These “Letters” segments, which rehearse the possibility of an unmediated and de-classed correspondence—both in the literal and the figural sense—have consistently provided the guarantee for their readerships that these publications are indeed “texts-for-the-people” rather than “texts for-profit."

The “closure” of conversation which is opposed by ethicalizing readers such as Graff and Derrida, is above all an opposition to the notion of (social) “totality." Closure is rendered as both the trope of mastery and totalization as well as the mark of an abrupt and crude inattentiveness to the inclusionary project of ludic (post)modern liberalism which advances its radical democratic inclusivity under the heading of “conversation” and “discussion." Conversation and discussion—as opposed to the more burdensome and outmoded “representational” mode of classical democracy—recertify the viability of “free speech” democracy in the (post)modern moment. By insuring the impossibility of any discursive fixations, the protocols of the dominant “Letters” sections contribute to resecuring the “uncertain” and “open-ended” relationship between inside and outside; text and class; owner and worker; exploiter and exploited; dominator and dominated; publisher and reader; teacher and student.

In these strategies of publication, the “Letters to the Editor” section becomes a moment in which the weight of ownership and the responsibilities to the reigning margin of profit are deferred from the minds of readers and writers alike. It is in this moment that these publications restore the contemporary ideals of (post)modern bourgeois democracy—the inclusion of all interests regardless of class—to the minds of readers, writers and citizens, alike.

These prevailing ideals are the ones so vehemently defended in the “Letters” sections of popular contemporary publications such as Sports Illustrated. Sports Illustrated has traditionally reprinted the text of letters and canceled subscriptions in response to its annual swimsuit issue. In reprinting these texts, Sports Illustrated not only reinforces its openness to the founding tenets of bourgeois democracy, but participates, along with the dominant figures of the academy, such as Derrida and Graff, in the production of a post-al (post-political, post-class, post-patriarchal) “radical democracy."

The publication of these letters mark out Sports Illustrated as a moment of supreme and absolute reversibility, the textual site of unfixed meaning-effects and self-difference that place its own authority—and more importantly, the very notion of any political or state authority—in “radical” question. After all, as the dominant argument runs, when the vast multi-national firms that back the publication of magazines such as Sports Illustrated are able to accommodate its most “radical” opponents (those that cancel their subscriptions and, therefore, refuse to support it as a profitable venture) by reprinting their “Letters to the Editor”, the viability of the New World Order is restored—along with its pretenses to global democracy. In other words, a space is made for the various differences of culture (in representation) and the state media-apparatuses of capitalism are reaffirmed as that regime capable and even “eager” to accommodate the countervailing interests of all subjects: feminist critique is (re)legitimated as a cultural undertaking that does not interfere with the business of profiteering and Sports Illustrated is re stored as a “friendly” and non-patriarchal undertaking that, through invoking the parodic incertitude of its own self-difference, recertifies its democratic legitimacy and therefore, its very readability. Sports Illustrated, in other words, refuses totalization—the exclusion of the interpretations of its political opponents. Rather, it performs a “conversation” with these opponents with the sole intent of demonstrating that “domination” can never be conclusively termed “domination” if it is first rendered as an open-ended invitation to others” (the “dominated” included!).

We find these prevailing protocols of response to be limiting ones. To insist that one participate (whether it be in. the classroom, in ones living arrangements, in the workplace, or in ones relation ships to knowledges) as merely an apolitical and ahistorical “conversationalist"—as the post-al publishing regime insists—is to demand that one participate as an “interpreter” rather than an actual “producer” of these relationships. Such an idealist project entails emptying the conventions of conversation of their historicity and renders Derrida's open and inclusive “friendly contract” as the prevailing and exclusive meta-protocol of response. To do so, is to (re)submit the “Letters to the Editor” section, this one included, to the dominant and monolithic intelligibilities of the ruling class, the hegemonic race and the dominant gender.