Archive Fever

Archive Fever, by Jacques Derrida (1995)

Quick Summary
Archive Fever describes a type of compulsive, repetitive desire to return to the origin by saving traces, "hypomnema" which are different from actual memories--they are material "prosthetics." The archive, then, in its consigning, is violent because as it marks or imprints it forgets others, and it is always produced and managed by a higher power which dictates what is consigned. Archive Fever = death drive in its compulsion, its repetition. It verges on radical evil. "suffering of memory among others: enlisting the in-finite, archive fever verges on radical evil." Its "aporetic and terrible limit."

The aporia of the archive: the word arkhe is at once the command to remember/archive/keep, and the commencement of an institute of archivization. So the task both says you need to remember, and also the need to give it up, "to face up to an impossible pressure to forget the archive in order to remember."

That impossible pressure is because any archiving practice has to "announce" its own desire for the unique, singular space and memory--the "archival jealousy of its own memory"--its command to remember its own name and place. There is no archive without this jealous and self-preserving order.

'It may be the death drive itself: an injunction to remember, to file and archive, only the one, the one and only. Only one.'***

The memory is made impossible by the very imperative of archivization!

Why should such an aporia be the first impulse of any archivization? 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 its 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."

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.  

Note
For Derrida, “archive” starts with the word Arkhe, that “names at once commencement and the commandment.” Commencement according to nature or according to history, and commanding, ie., gods, history, authority, social order exercised. Then, archive comes from the Greek arkheion: a house or domicile of those who commanded. “They do not only esure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives.”

The dwelling is where archives take place, marks this institutional passage from the private to the public (which doesn’t always mean from what secret to the nonsecret). Kept by virtue of a privileged topology. “They inhabit this uncommon place, this place of election where law and singularity intersect in privilege. At the intersection of the topological and the nomological, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the authority, a scene of domiciliation becomes at once visible and invisible.”

Archic, patriarchic, function—to shelter itself and, sheltered, to conceal itself. ''The nature of the archive is to be both authoritarianly transparent and authoritatively concealed.''

The “archontic power, which also gathers the fucntion of unification, of identification, of classification, must be paired with what we will call the power of consignation. –not only the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs.”

Cosignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system of synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there shuold not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together.

“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratiszatio can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constituion, and its interpretation.”

Exergue
“the exergue plays with citation. To cite before beginning is to give the tone through the resonance of a few words, the meaning or form of which ought to set the stage. ''In other words, the exergue consists in capitalizing on an ellipsis. In acumulating capital in advance and in preparing the surplus value of an archive''.”

serves to stock in anticipation and to prearchive a lexicon which ought to lay down the law and give the order

Institutive and a conservative fuction: the violence of power which at once posits and conserves the law

What is at issue here, starting with the exergue, is the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence. It is thus the first figure of an arhive, because every archive is at once institutive and conservative.

Two Citations will exercise such a function of archival economy. Two places of inscription: ''printing and circumcision. ''

1. (Printing)
Typographical. The archive conforms better to its concept, because it is entrusted to the outside, to an external substrate (as opposed to as the sign of the covenant in circumcision, to an intimate mark, right on the so-called body proper.)

Freud does a theatricalizing of archivization. “Why archive this? Why these investments in paper, ink?”

Diabolical death drive, an aggression or a destruction drive: a drive, thus, of loss.

Death drive, aggression drive, destruction drive. Is mute. It is at work, but since it always operates in silence, it never leaves any archives of its own. It destroys in advance its own archive, as if that were in truth the very motivation of its most proper movement. It works ''to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own “proper” traces. ''

This drive, from then on, seems not only to be anarchic, anarchontic: the death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic. It will always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation.

Hypomneme—reminder, raw material (trace)

“The archiviolithic drive is never present in person, neither in itself nor in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own. As inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its pseudonym in painting, its sexual idols, its masks of seduction: lovely impressions. These impressions are perhaps the very origin of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. As memories of death. “

Leaves nothing of its own behind. It not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, but also commands the radical effacement, eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mneme or anamnesis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary, ''the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory''.

'There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside. '

mneme/anamnesis vs. hypomnema

The archive is hypomnemic.

''If there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression, then we must also remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus destruction.''

(because archives are always bound by an external sign, and that sign is what makes it possible to remember, to repeat, to reproduce, etc., then we need to remember that repetition itself is no different than the death drive, and thus destruction)

“Consequence: right on that which permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction, introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. Into the “by heart” itself. The archive always works, and a priori, against itself.”

The death drive tends thus to destroy the hypomnesic archive, except if it can be disguised, made up, painted, printed, represented as the idol of its truth in painting. Another economy is thus at work, the transaction between this death drive and the pleasure principle (the death drive is not a principle, it threatens every principality). ''ARCHIVE FEVER. ''

“Such is the scene, at once within and beyond all staging: Freud can only justify the apparently useless expenditure of paper, ink, and typographic printing, in other words, the laborious investment in the archive, by putting forward the noelty of discoveryàthe very one which provokes so much resistance, and first of all in himself, and precisely because its silent vocation is to burn the archive and to incite amnesia, thus refuting the economic principle of the archive, aiming to ruin the archive as accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place.”

The radical destruction can again be reinvested in another logic, in the inexhaustible economistic resource of an archive which capitalizes everything, even that which ruins it or radically contests its power: ''radical evil can be of service, infinite destruction can be reinvested in a theodicy, the deveil can also serve to justify—such is the destination of the Jew in the Aryan ideal''. (the devil can also exculpate God, the existence of the Devil can serve as an excuse for God, because exterior to him, anarchic angel and dissident, in rebellion against him, just as, and this is the polemical trait of analogy, the Jew can play the analogous role of economic relief or exoneration assigned to him by the world of the Aryan ideal.

Mystic Pad: the technical model of the machine tool, intended, in Freud’s eyes, to represent on the outside memory as internal archivization—

thinking about the printer? Computer?

(“Freudian concept of the hereditary mnemic trace”—Writing and Difference, Derrida)

The Mystic pad still participates in Cartesian space. Freud does not explicitly examine the status of the “materialized” supplement which is necessary to the alleged spontaneity of memory, even if that spontaneity were differentiated in itself, thwarted by a censorship or repression which, moreover, could not act on a perfectly spontaneous memory.

Far from the machine being a pure absence of spontaneity, its resemblance to the physical apparatus, its existence and its necessity bear witness to the finitude of the mnemic spontaneity which is thus supplemented. The machine—and consequently, representation—is death and finitude within the psyche.

Nor does Freud examine the possibility of this machine, which, in the world, has at least begun to resemble memory, and increasingly resembles it more closely. Its resemblance to memory is closer than that of the innocent Mystic Pad: the latter is no doubt infinitely more complex than slate or paper, less archaic than a palimpsest; but, compared to other machines for storing archives, it is a child’s toy.

Techno-science, in its very movement, can only consist in a transformation of the techniques of archivization, of printing, of inscription, of reproduction, of formalization, of ciphering, and of translating marks.

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