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Article Excerpt
Remember: no memory or testimony is possible without the archive! Remember: memory and testimony are possible only without the archive! Any reflection on testimony, memory, the archive and archivization has to disarm itself before such an impossible injunction. And this command orders all our thinking, ethics, writing, tradition, religion and culture.
Archive of the Past, Archive of the Future
Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever starts precisely by drawing attention to this aporia of the archive. The word arkhe, he recalls at the beginning of his book, names at the same time the command to remember, to archive and keep, and the commencement of an institution of archivization. From the outset, therefore, this aporia splits the commemorative gesture into two irreconcilable tasks, the symptoms in fact, to which Derrida gives the name of Archive Fever (Mal d'archive). Like the task of the translator envisioned by Walter Benjamin (and, as we shall see, translation and archivization go hand in hand as two members of the re-membering, archiving agency), the task here marks both the demand to archive, and the need to give up the task (Aufgabe, Aufgeben), to face up to an impossible pressure to forget the archive in order to remember.
This impossible pressure consists of the fact that any archiving practice has to announce its own desire for the unique, singular, indivisible space and memory, the archivization of, as we would say in English, "the one and only." That "one" is the archival jealousy of its own memory, its command and injunction to remember its name, its place and its law. There is no archive without this jealous and self-preserving order. It is its first (but the order of things is here uncertain), primordial impulse. We could say, in the language of psychoanalysis, that it is its primal drive, not without violence, and not without its death-drive. It may be the death drive itself: an injunction to remember, to file and archive, only the one, the one and only. Only one. Derrida gives three qualifications for this archival drive: it is an-archic, anarchivic and archiviolitic. In a very economic condensation which is a trademark of his writing, Derrida draws attention to the possibility that this primordial jealousy of the archive has, from the very start, all capacities to erase any archival trace, even the trace of its own archivization.
The memory, in that sense, is made impossible by the very imperative of archivization.
Derrida will bring the consequences of this aspect of the archive to its aporetic and terrible limit, by saying that "the archive fever," in its most violent consequences and possibilities, "verges on radical evil" (20).
One may be justified in wondering why should such an impossible aporia be the first impulse of any archivization and why would it be tied to what Freud famously called the death drive? Because without this injunction of the one, the first inscription of the singular event and its passing, no archive, no memory traces, no traces would have been possible. But what makes the tracing and archivization possible also threatens the archive at the very origin. This drive, in Derrida's words, "works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view of effacing its own 'proper' traces--which consequently cannot be called proper" (10). To speak in Freud's terms ("A Freudian Impression" is the subtitle of Derrida's book), the archive would not be possible without this originary re-pression, the Verdraengung, at the site of its own induction or production. The archival principle serves the death drive.
And yet, on the other hand, one can justly argue in a very empirical fashion: we do have existing archives, archives are made, bequeathed, opened and inaugurated every day, and archives do succeed in surviving. We even have the Jacques Derrida Archive at the University of California at Irvine, which is the university where I work, and I, who am writing this essay, have in the past on occasions served as the archon, the keeper of this archive. So I can attest that the archive, even of someone who deconstructs the logic of the archive, such as Jacques Derrida, is possible, thriving, alive and well. The Jacques Derrida Archive keeps surviving even the deconstruction of the archive by Jacques Derrida. It is a permanent deconstruction site.
This survival of the archive, the relationship between archivization and survival may be equally essential to the functioning of the archive. Not unlike, again, Benjamin's notion of translation, the archive may be seen as a site of its own survival, existing in a mode of a delayed survival of itself. This is made possible by a counter-pressure exerted by the archive. Let us recall, no archive would exist without the originary injunction to remember, the repression that is archiviolitic and anarchivic. And yet, the archival drive simultaneously impresses, makes an impression or suppression (Freud's Unterdrueckung) on the material substrate of the archive, on its topos, domicile, psyche or culture. In its very archiviolation, it leaves a trace of itself, it is "suppressed and displaced onto another affect" (28). And this impression, the trace that finds a support on the welcoming site or substrate, on the topos which is conducive to the inscription, vouches for the repetition, the survival, and the translation of the archive. In a word: it opens the archive to the future. The memory generated by the suppression is possible on the condition of forgetting and in turn repressing or displacing the archive. By the very fact that the suppressed traces do not belong to the initial, jealous memory of the one, but are the markers of alterity (they are other-than-archive), they do not belong to the archive "proper." Rather, they may be seen as the traces or symptoms of the originary repression which they leave "behind." That impressed inscription on the substrate (we could call it the forgotten memory of the archive, recalling the second chiasmatic injunction that opened this essay) informs the wager and the incalculable opening towards the future: the very idea of the archive depends on it. Derrida elsewhere calls this opening not "the future" (which would imply the future of presence, therefore a metaphysical conception of temporality), but the to-come, a-venir, an opening through which an archive can receive the unexpected, the unprogrammable, the unpredictable, the un-presentable and the un-representable. An opening of the unknown is thus produced, which no archival knowledge prepares us to receive. This opening orients the archive towards actualizations and inscriptions to come. Over this structural, infinite and in principle interminable possibility of the archive to receive new contextualizations, receptions or inscriptions, no archive, no law, and no father or keeper of the archive has any power or control.
We have thus two mutually exclusive forces that constitute an archiving impression. One that belongs to what Freud called repression, a record of passing and death, the recording of death itself, and on the other hand, the opening that is a promise of, and to the future, and which, as a trace of its own survival requires, demands or commands transmission and translation. "At the same time [...] the conditions of archivization implicate [...] all the aporias which make it into a movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past" (29).
Moses and the Trauma of the Archive
Archive Fever was written as the keynote address at the conference on "Memory: the Question of Archives," held in the Freud Archive in London in 1995, and is therefore also a reflection on the very site of the archivization of psychoanalysis. It is also one of Derrida's great polemical essays about psychoanalysis, one that should be read in the context of his polemical encounters with Michel Foucault or Jacques Lacan. This time, the polemics takes a form of contestation of Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable by Yosef Haim Yerushalmi (to whom Derrida dedicates Archive Fever), and over Freud's last book, Moses and Monotheism. And, above all it is a polemics about the archive that is tied to the idea of monotheistic religion.
What is the relevance of the death of Moses for the concept of archivization and why should precisely that essay by Freud, among so many possible others, serve as the exemplary case on which to build a polemics around the archive and archivization? The answer, if one is possible, revolves around naming, the name of god, and of the name of psychoanalysis itself.
The argument of Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, is well-known but worth repeating, particularly...
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