My presentation proposes to redefine the letter as an ancient and key form of telepresence, a term coined in 1980 and now used both in the professional world and the academia, in order to refer to the experience of feeling present in distant spaces and/or with distant people, through technology, mostly computers and VR tools. Analysts of such tools would certainly consider the letter as “low-tech”. But it has long offered a vast array of presence resources. Based on the remarkable progress of epistolary history in the last 40 years, this paper will compare epistolary telepresences with contemporary ones, focusing on four themes: 1. Materiality. As physical objects, letters have unique affordances: personal handwriting and signature, physical transmission, unique tactile and olfactive sensory qualities (including addition of perfumes). 2. Embodiment: in letters, the body has long been incarnated through detailed verbal description (ekphrasis), with the addition of images (drawings embedded into the text, portraits, analogue photographs). Voice conversation (with or without recording), and the use of digital “conversational” images offer different, but not necessarily more advanced resources. 3. Rhythms: the promise of speed, if not of “real time”, is shared by epistolary and digital cultures. Modernity may go faster, but only in a world which provided a new sense of measurement of time and space, although it also failed to fulfil the reiterated promise, since the telegraph, of the “death of distance”. 4. Publicity: while there is much hype about a digital blurring of borders between the public and the private, there has never been a rigid separation between confidential, dyadic letters and fully public, disseminated messages; however, the way we appreciate this contrast has changed.
