Chapter One:
Closed Reading, Media, and the Biopolitics of the Archive1
If today there is no longer any
one clear figure of the sacred
man, it is perhaps because we
are all virtually homines sacri.
--Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
(115) 2
“(at the center of this book, we
will hear echoing, for instance,
in more than one register,
literal and figurative, of the
question of the person with no
papers, crushed by so many
machines, ‘when we are all,
already, undocumented,
‘paperless’”) Derrida, Paper
Machine (2).
In the first chapter, I reconceptualize Agamben’s virutalized bare life, or “biopolitics” as
biobibliopolitics: in modernity, persons are defined by their relation to paper. Entry into
1
concentration camps and all other zones of exception always involves identity papers and
paperwork; similarly, preserving memory always bears on media of archiving, including
film, photography, and print. As Vismann points out, the archived document may have
an ambiguous material status: a calligraphic style make become obsolete under different
regimes and stored as a work of art. If all life is now virtually “bare life,” as Agamben
maintains, it follows that we must attend archival practices including surveilliance, data
strorage, retention, retrieval and documents that allow people tp be processed as the cross
various kinds of national and international borders. I historicize the increasingly
virtualized passport (from written description to photograph to embedded memory chip)
and reread Michel Foucault’s account of biopolitics as an account of the archive,
comparing Foucault’s central works on power to Arlette Farge’s Subversive Words and
Jacques Rançiere’s The Names of History. They imagine the archive as a problem of
reading, as a scene of annotation, of Philip II as a microhistorian in Braudel’s case. The
future is not a disaster that could happen, a then and now, or immediate consequence
(hisotircla and ahistorical) but the Hiedeggerian temporality of the late which is actually
earlier, of reading the future withoutht a nationalism attached. See Derrida,LacoueLabarthe on Heidegger.
Artlettee Lefarge does not cite ranciere’s Names of Hisotry in her Subversie Words, but The Names of Hisotry is
in many ways about the archive even htough the archive is an opertational figure. The scene of the death of the
kiing in Barudel becomes a wayof rading a shift in sovreigntyfrom the King to the historian. The king’s death no
longer calibrates time; theKing, a microreader, who never gets the big picture of geopgrhay, the Mediarrean, in
view—instead he is a conductor, a silent reader (who speaks only ina very low voice)..
He is a”paper king.”
Your power is only as good as your paper (your subjectile.
Paper has a double valence—both denigrating (paper tiger) and consisutitve. PII is a paper king, but there’sa
slippage in which paper corsses over nto speech 9writing and speech are the same). Ranciere is pointing out the
wayhistorians can only go so far indeconstructing speech and writing, paper and persons, in order to remain
soverign and write narratives. But Ranicere himself deconstructs the indeterminacy of narrative and symbolic in
braudel. He focuses on the scene of writing and and reading (in detail0 at thewriting ddesk, the worktable.
“Mass of papers” refers to what Pii reads, but also the speech of the people who are not allowed to sepeak.
As a reader and annotator (and corrector)of details, PII rules in silence and his life (ailence already death before
death) is not what biographical criticism actually sees, the mass of papers itself, their production, as with tAcitus
and Precinneiu, is the bibliobio of the sovereign, already subject to a strange temporality and restrictedvision
even though he is the only ne who sees the balance sheet (itselfa metaphor for braudel).not as
An excess of speech is language.
As tecnhcians of the new sovereignty (calibrating time), historians have to manage this excess.
Orgnaic death is less the issue than the silence of rading that begins before death, for Ranciere. So paper is like
Derrida’s pharmakon.
But Ranciere does not talk about where PII goes when he becomes readable as annotationson a massof papers,
namely, the archive or htelration between this closing quasihallucinegenic scene and Braudel’s “Sources.”.
Braudel does have a section called “Soruces” in which he does give an account of his visits to the archive and a
section before that on “Unpubblished Sources.”
An autobriography of the archive returns in the parartext as an appendix as assort of supplement to the symloic /
narrative ifnal scene with PII as his writing desk..
Ranicere’s question at the end of “Excess of Words” is how to igve the king a good, sinentific death.
But what does htat mean? Good deathis a moralcategory. Good funeral? A good killing off, or ex-ecution.
2
Reading these courses, especially when focusing on their unanswered
questions and the project cut short, it is difficult not to think of Foucault’s
approaching death and see clues of it everywhere. He apologizes, for
instance, at the opening of the 1984 course that illness forced him to delay
the first lecture for a month, and repeatedly during the Spring he asks forgiveness
for ending sessions early because of fatigue. He died on 25th June
1984, barely two months after the end of the course. Foucault concludes
that final lecture, which one suspects he knows is his last, simply, movingly,
without completing the written text he prepared: ‘But finally, it is too late.
So, thank you.’
Michael Hardt MILITANT LIFE new left review 64 july aug 2010 151-60;to p. 160.
Review of Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres, Cours au Collège de
France, 1982–1983 Gallimard/Seuil: Paris 2008 and Michel Foucault, Le courage de la
vérité: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres ii, Cours au Collège de France, 1983–1984
Gallimard/Seuil: Paris 2009.
Hardt totally misses the archive angle and engages in garden verity psychologistic
speculation to criticize Foucault for not answering Hardt’s questions before Foucault
died.
Jacques Derrida, in “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language,”
In The Margins of Philosophy, 155-73.
“Mirror Writing” and “The Limiting Power of Form” as subheading titles
If Husserl suspects all the predicates brought in the milieu of the logos, he never criticizes
the concept of the medium itself. The expressive stratum is a medium, an ether that both
accepts sense and is a means to bring it to conceptual form. The word “medium” appears
often on the pages [of the Logical Investigations] that follow. . . . “Since every science,
viewed from the side of its theoretical content, of all the constitutes its ‘doctrine’ (Lehre)
(theorem, proof, theory), is objectified in a specific “logical” medium, the medium of
expression, it follows that for philosophers and psychologists who are guided by general
logical interests the problems of expression and meaning (Bedeutung) lie nearest of all. .
.” Theory, therefore, is the name of that which can neither dispense with objectification
in the medium nor tolerate the slightest deformation in its subjection to the medium.
There is no scientific sense (Sinn) without meaning (bedeuten), but it belongs to the
essence of science to demand an unequivocality without shadow, the absolute
transparence of discourse. Science would need what it needs (discourse as pure meaning)
to be useless; it is only to preserve and to glance at the sense which science confers upon
it. Nowhere else can discourse simultaneously be more productive and more
unproductive than as an element of theory. (166; 167)
Medium of expression . . . erase itself 164
The preexpressive noema, the prelinguistic sense, must be imprinted in the expressive
noema, must find its conceptual mark in the content of a mean. . . . Expression then must
3
permit itself to be imprinted by sense at the same time as it expresses sense. The
expressive noema must offer itself, and this is the new image of its unproductivity, as a
blank page or virgin tablet; or at least a palimpsest given over to its pure receptivity.
Once the inscription of sense in it renders it legible, the logical order will be constituted
as such . . . this inauguration is the redoubling of a preexisting conceptuality, since it first
will have had to imprint itself on the naked page of meaning. Following the implacable
necessity of these two concepts, production and revelation are united in the impressionexpression of discourse. . . . the noematic sense of every expression, is something by
which nature already must be capable of imprinting itself in a meaning, leaving or
receiving its formal mark in a Bedeutung. Thus, sense would be a blank and mute writing
redoubling itself in meaning. The originality of the stratum of the Bedeutung, therefore,
would only be a kind of tabula rasa. . . . one could suppose that the temporal virginity in
illo tempore in some way would have had to impose ts sense upon sense, dictating the
form of sense, obliging it to imprint itself according to a given rule, syntactic or
otherwise. . . . This thematic is simultaneously, and quite precisely, the one which we are
following at the moment and that of a sedimented history of bedeuten. And even if one
considers only egological history, how is the perpetual restoration of meaning in its
virginity to be thought? 164-65.
Geological stratum versu stextual statum (160)
Weaving, woven, interlacing, of the texture of the text, not a parallelism between an
ovlerpapping linguistic stratum wihta anunderlying prelingusitic straum. Pp. 160-61
Problem of metaphor 160; 166.
The computer p. 108 Pit and Pyramid
(like Perec and Mathews discussion of the computer at the end of their short story).
Machine 105
Vibrates p. 97
Attachment, footnote p. 95
“So-called material part of language, lexicology” (94)
“virtually retained” 90
architecture 88
Here, an intuition is mandated to present, in its proper content, an entirely other content.
“The sign is some immediate intuition, representing a totally different import from what
naturally belongs to it, it is the pyramid [Hegel’s emphasis] into which a foreign soul
(eine fremde Seele) has been conveyed [transposed, transplanted, translated: versetzt;
versetzen is also to place on deposit; in Leihause versetzen: to place in the pawn-shop],
and where it is conveyed (aufbewahrt: consigned, stored, put in storage)” (ibid.).
“The Pit and the Pyramid,” 83-84.
“What is to be understood here by medium? By semiological medium?” 71
4
“Despite its cinematic point of departure, it already prevents Aristotle’s reflections from
identifying time with the gramme representing movement.. .
“Ousia and Gramme,” p. 57
The Cremator (Czech b&w film) Bosch’s Graden of Earthly Delights montage.
(On the Rue Ordener, when she [their mother] couldn’t get us to stop shouting, crying, or
quarreling, she would shut us up in a dark room1 that served as a storage space,
threatened us with “Maredewitchale”2 would come for us. I pictured that ghostly and
terrifying figure as a very old woman who would come to punish me by carrying me far
away from home.)
1. I later wrote a short book entitled Camera Obscura (Paris: Galilee, 1973).
2. In Comment s’en sortir?, Cauchemar (Paris: Galilee, 1983), I allude to this character
from Jewish folklore, whose name derives from the Indo European root mer, from which
came all sorts of evocative words for death, and more specifically for slow death—by
suffocation or being eaten alive.
--Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordoner Rue Labat. Trans. Ann Smock (Nebraska UP, 1994), 73
Kofman's mother often beat her with a strap as well.
The essay that references “Maredewitchale” is in Sarah Kofman: Selected Writings.
Camera Obscura has been translated into English. I have not read it.
With the notes, a reading of Korman's suicide note / autothanatography becomes readable
as a dark room storage space in which she is able to process her memories and her
sublimations of them. She killed herself eight months after she wrote Rue Ordener Rue
Labat. She wrote 20 books. She lived an amazing, often defiant biobibliography. The
title Rue Ordener Rue Labat says it all--talk about cruxes and crossroads.
5
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
British passport scene in Night Train to Munich
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/~burt/NightTraintoMunichpassport.html
6
7
The Glass Wall passport scene.
Jacques Ranciere, The Names of History, chapter on Braudel and the problem of
the hisotiran facing masses of paper and paperwork.
Where did reading go in the history of reading / the book?
Maybe it really is better to write without an addressee.
-- Jacques Ranicere, The Flesh of Words: the Politics of
Writing
(Stanford UP, 2004), 145
Ranciere's The Names of History has an incredibly fantastic chapter on a book
by Ferdinand Braudel about Philip II that turns on the book's conclusion and
preface. It's a close reading worthy of Derrida. In the preface and conclusion to
his book, Braudel imagines Philip in a tent at his writing desk annotating papers
as ambassadors approach him. For our purposes, the most interesting thing is
that Ranciere sees an allegory of the new history (substituting diplomatic papers
for the mass of papers constituting the missing people, themselves a paper
mass) in this scene. Braudel uses the present tense, so that the historian
(Braudel himself) "approaches" Philip along with the ambassadors. Ranicere
shows that Brudel's unprecedented introduction of the present tense creates two
meanings in Braudel's writing scene--one being hallucinogenic (my word) in that
it 's about the historian actually being present at Philip's writing desk, the other
allegorical, derived from metaphors (the ocean becomes the unthought of Philip,
the spreading of the plague by the masses), and by a "double mass of paper"
(Ranciere's own literal / figure of indiscernability, since the people are a "mass of
8
paper" that strictly speaking does not exist as such). The allegory (of the new
history of the people replacing the old diplomatic history of kings) is made
possible by what Ranciere calls the "indiscernability" between the two meanings
of "approach" (come closer to too and methodological perspective) .The allegory
turns out to have a quite complex structure in a way only Ranciere seems
capable of demonstrating (the argument of the book is that [the new] history is a
poetics of knowledge). I checked the two volume Braudel book out of UF
yesterday so I could read the conclusion and see more fully what Ranicere is
talking about. Nice to think of in relation to the postscript of Archive Fever.
I am tracing the history of the terms "virtuality" and "virtual" in posthuman / new
media theory especially as they bear on reading print on paper and decoding or
deciphering or processing digital print. Other than Hayles' How We became
Posthuman, are there any accounts of the meaning of virtuality you'd recommend I
read? In Hayles account, it either means disembodied (the sci-fi version) or a
cyborgian (comupter plus human, human plus computer) prothesis (her version).
Her account of virtuality is predicated on a history of informatics that begins in
the twentieth century (she does not define "computer," as far as I can see).
German media theorists tend to begin the history of the computer with Leibniz in
the 17th century. Thanks in advance for any advice you may have.
As long as the human subject is envisioned as an autonomous self with
unambiguous boundaries, the human–computer interface can only be parsed as
9
a division between the solidity of real life on one side and the illusion of virtual
reality on the other, thus obscuring far-reaching changes initiated by virtual
technologies. . . When the is seen as part of a distributed system, the full
expression of human capability can be seen precisely to depend on the plice
rather than being imperiled by it. . . . this vision is a potent antidote to the view
that parses virtuality as a division between an inert body that is left behind and a
disembodied subjectivity that inhabits a virtual realm. . . By contrast . . . human
functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system inhabits
expand. In this model, it is not a question of leaving the body behind but rather of
extending embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that
would be impossible without electronic prosthesis.
--N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (1995, 290-91)
“we have always been posthuman” (N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became
Posthuman (1995, 290-291)
“before the trains of thought it embodies have been laid down so firmly thatit wold
take dynamit to change htem” (291)
A mixed metaphor—she adopts a metaphors of virsuses, pathogiegenes,
paharmakon, in a way. The train metaphor doesn’t allow for accidents, train
wrecks. Her account is purely funcitonalist, pragmatic, and instrumental. She
wants a soft subject, but it is really no different from “the liberal humanist
10
subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control nature” (288) she deplores.
She just wants eco psychology.
Randomness is what exists out the box in which the system is located (286)
Data that can be generated and stored (287)
Email sorting (287)
The evolution of biological and artificial life” (286)
“the sedimented history incarnated within the body, as if the body were a rock
with geological strat.
She sidelines deconstruciton in one paragraphJustas the metaphysics of
presence required an originary plenitude to articulate a stable self, decostruciton
required a metaphysics of presence to articulate he destabilizaiton of the self. By
contrast, pattern / randomness is underlaid bya very different set of assumptions
. . Rather than proceeding aong a trajectory towar a known end, such systems
evolve toward an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability.
Meaning is not guaranteed bya coherent origin; rather it is made possible . . by
the blind force of evolution finding workable solutions within given parameters.
(285)
Bolidly practices have this power because they sediment into habitual actions
and movements. Sinking below conscious awareness” (204)
11
The reader is similarly constituted through a layered archaeology that moves
form listener to reader to decoder.. . . In contrast to the fixity of print, decoding
implies that there is no original text.. .. decoder as a cyborg (47)
“Functionality” is a term used by virtual reality technologiststo describe the
communication modes thatare active ina compuer-human interface. . . . The
computer modls the human even as the human builds the computer” (47)
She has a very narrow notion of the first computer (as opposed to Germans, who
see invented by Leibnizin the 17th).
She cites Kittler on p. 48 “medial ecology”: “When new media are introduced, the
changes transform the environment as a whole. This transformation affects the
niches that older media have carved for themselves, so they change also, even if
they are directly involved with the new media. Books wil not remain unaffected by
the emergence of new media. (48)
“Every living system thus constructs an environment through the “domain of
ineractions” made possible by its autopoietic organization. (137)
12
Ranciere’s vertical hermentuiic, surface depth, versus horizontaldistirbution of the
one-more (not mastery or hierarchy) both his the roadblack o fhet box, requiring
a side to side over and under mode of reading.
The history of the democratic
movement in the West had been
haunted by democracy’s
persistent self-doubt. This was
summed up in the opposition
between democracy on paper
and real democracy, a
metapolitical position often
internalized in the way political
conflict was conducted.
Democrats themselves have
always remained suspicious of
democracy. Those who have
fought hardest for democratic
rights have often been the first to
suspect that these rights were
only theoretical, still a mere
shadow of true democracy.
13
--Jacques Ranciere, Disargeement (1995, 96)
Quote Ranciere in Dis-argeement on democracy on paper versus democracy in
reality.
1. First point biopolitics as archive and the black box. All about democracy
versus liberal democracy, consensus versus dissensus; justice and victim.
Use Ranciere to get at life in the archive—Steadman’s biological allergy to
dust, the empty archive, versus Derrida’s archive Fever and Foucault /
Farge’s attempts to find traces of lives in the archive. Problem of reading
and retrieval related to storage. Democracy as a feel good word as
opposed to Ranicere’s take on it as consensus as the impossibility of the
possible, bogus ethical turn which merely institutes Bush’s infinite wrong.
Agamben’s paradoxes collapse—historical and historical; Ranciere’s
collapse into nihilistic politics of Conesus (a new permutation of cynical
knowledge).
2. Archive as paper machine, the lost, the excluded and paper. But not
material paper not just “real” paper. But paper as support, subjectile,
backing.
3. Archive as not only biopolitics and thanatopolitics, or human and
posthuman but interval of shelf-life. Biotechnics. No posthuman; rather,
after extinction; extermination. The Instant of My Death.
4. Requires a rethinking of publication and the archive: shelf-life as
posthumography. Philology and philosophy.
14
5. Requires a rethinking writing virtuality, technology, writing machines. Not
reducible to so-called materiality versus virtuality
6. Connection between paper machine and work of art. Not so much papers
in order versus sans papiers r global citizenship but forgery, what goes
missing, destination, ontology of politics. No getting past metaphysics.
7. ranciere—universal victim / Homo Sacer—critique of a therater of scarfice
(see Dis-agreement). Infinite wrong means infinite justice related to the
unending story of the Holocaust and the trope (Glenn Beck) of he Nazis.
But no way around the ntotheological uncanny, as Ranciere thinks. He
may be right about the way testimony and the archive plugs into infinite
wrong.
N. Katherine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodis in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics. Posthuman premised on evolutionary biology and a
naïve notion of materlaity nd the machine. Human as embodied; information as
disembo
Focus is on paper persons—perhaps even put that phrase in the title of the book.
Also get out posthumography—boundaries of publication—not just biography,
autobiography or thanatography. Beyond the confines of WWII partly because
the phenomenon is about literature and the work of art as well as philology and
philosophy. Multiple historicism. Creative thought experiment and linear
exposition of the argument. Two styles needed as well.
15
Harway blurb for Hayles How We Became Posthuman “fleshly mortal beings” are
an “endangered species” and information as the “alien-abduction” of the body in
the lust for information.”
Ranciere has a good critique of the turn to the ethics , or etho-logy, as a closure
of ppoltiics, but his argument depends on sidestepping metaphysics, political
philosophy being about properties with destinies (Heidegger) or the sacred
(Agamben). He is against a way of life or mdoe of life because he sees that
existence / bare life move as another way of constituting a vicious circle in which
Arendt’s paradox that Human rights belong to those who don’t have htem
becomes operative. Ranciere’s politics is negative—it sands in the terva
between policie (not the actual police0 and consensus. Politics is litigious,
dissensus, a paradox. A re-opening followed by plugging and patching.
Buthis niton of democracy seems inescapably to be a becoming consensus.
Even the example of Pylmpe de Gouge and women’s rights. Her critique was
based ona Rights dicourse htat was eventually extended to women.
Kind f like Latour’s parliament of things. There is a rational default in Ranciere’s
model of popular / demos dissensus/ enacting of inscription. People in power are
required to listen to those not in power, to hear their noise as discourse. But he
has no tune in or tune out model, no acccunt of media or technology or
acchivalization (he doesn’t theorize inscription). . Sidsteps technology and
16
question of what is called thinking along with political tehoogy by assuming an
essentially secular model of politics.
Ranicere uses the figure of paperless persons (sans papier) to contest model of
citizenship and its vicious circle (leading to consensus). But Rançiere’s critique
avoids the archive (he speaks of the unheard and unseen) and remains within a
the same hermeneutic of the hidden and the revealed), a different sort of pradox
from Arendt’s or Agamben’s that offers a different explanation for the same
outcome. He can hold onto demos only by ignoring biopolitics, substituting for
bios and zoe police and politics. First, inscription, then enact, make something,
stage a scene. He has no account of people processing.
His paradox is that democracy is the counting of the uncounted, the partaking of
those not allowed to partake. Human Rights to humanitarianism leads to sate
interference, invasion, war. So he seems to be working toward the model of
inclusion and communicative transparency he identifies with dissensus (everyone
is included) as we move form birth (blood) to wealth.
Slotjerdik prephilosophical account of terrorism and technology. In French DNA,
Rabinow writes” the anthropologist asks how does it operate?” Not how does it
fail to operate? How does it breakdown? What kind of accidents happen? How
can one stop it, render itinoperable. He ihas a purely Manichean notion of
capitalism. Norms , practices are assumedto be autoreproductive—discpline.
Teletechnics when speaking of biotechnics or philosophy and technology.
17
Also Derrida’s Faith and Knowledge on autoimmunity.
Print / Imprinting )(Splice)
Writing in parts : imitation and exchange in nineteenth-century literature
Kevin McLaughlin.
Author: McLaughlin, Kevin 1959Published: Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1995.
Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change … (Paperback)
by Donald MacKenzie
Writing Machine versus knowing machine.
Printing in a Smartphone Age
By ASHLEE VANCE
Hewlett-Packard will introduce a fleet of printers with Web access, their own email addresses and touch screens.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07printer.html?emc=eta1
Ranciere does not suspend the future as does Derirda, for a book to come. It already
came and went. The future is part of the con. See Names of History and Dissensus.
A Void / the Archive
Move from Agamben on sovereignty and democracy, sacrifice and victim to Foucault
on biopoltiics versus sovereignty and the problem of reading the archive to close down
the equation fo social history and democracy and voice as body. Then to Ranciere to
complicate the move from sovereign to sovereignty of the people —the archives are not
read but presented—history of he book of life (Christian and pagan), double mass of
paperwork as transition from sovereign.
Michelt as the archivist who writes history by not resenting the archive, not reading git
but showing it as a cabinet of wonders. Ranciere explains Farge’s delimena. There is no
attaching the word to the voice. She is post Michelt but still trying to do what Michelt
did by not doing—reading the archive. What does it mean for it the archive to empty to
not have a place? Steadman fogets the guards.
Boxed Up
So we confront not an open black box or a amise en abyme of Chiense boxes in boxes but
18
an irreducible box of the archive, storage which cannot be retrieved, recovered,
philogoically repaird, reanimated, resuccitated, recovered. For Ranciere, the archive is
not about dissensus, aobut reovering the voice for the victim, a place but showing that the
victim is manifested by becoming a mourning thing, dehumanized,
deanthrompomorphized.
Llove letters are not about love.
Deomocracy hten not rational or irrantional; it is linked to error. Go to Derrida on the
democrat as vagarant in Diesmination.
Stoage unti as about homeless as homeful. Virtual bookshelf, a Netflix quee, but best
revealed in meditations on strage of books.
Ranciere comes out at history as self-sacrficing and WB Concept of Histry (p. 102), like
Agamben, whom he misreads as scaralizing.
So what does it mean for archive to be the default of democracy, of bare life?
Paper persons. Irreduicible support being the passport.
But also heresy as neutralized, returning as htat which history canot recognize. Deat of
kings being the conditon of the history of mass of people.
Paper persons. Irreducible support being the passport. In-fans not only as child who
cannot speak, but child as who cannot read. Children of the book. History of the book is
thus central to the history of sovereignty and democracy.
Also, disennsus comes out at the same place as dessemination--writing
“The Space of the Book” chapter in The Names of History: “The intelligibility of science
and that of narrative have no place to be covered. The logos and the muthos will remain
separate, the book incomplete. The collection of books is doomed to remaining a
collection of materials for a book to come.” 87.
The form of posthumorgaphy—not just posthumous living instant of my death, but the
instant of my publication.
Go to Night and Fog to link processing of persons to paper, the flip side of Toute la
memoire..
Camps asvraible. Not the camp, as Agamben, not a close reader of Foucault,imagines,
but the archive. See Mr. Death.
Maybe it really is better to write without an addressee.
-- Jacques Ranicere, The Flesh of Words: the Politics of Writing (Stanford UP, 2004),
145
Arlette Farge Subversive Words–pre-proletarian sphere of traces that are not archived.
Eavesdroppers writings. She just repeats texts she is not prepared to read because they
are filtered. Le désordre des familles: lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille
19
au XVIIIe siècle.
Arlette Farge; Michel Foucault
Publisher:
[Paris] : Gallimard : Julliard, 1982.
Series:
Archives., Gallimard ;, 91.
Social historians of the popular do not take into account the division between the
people and the menu people—or they use that opposition uncritically to discuss
le menu people. But hey don’t talk about the division between people or persons
and populace (Agamben) and multiplicities (Ranciere).
Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault. Le desordre des families. Lettres de cachet
Paris: Gallimard.
Arlette Farge, Le goût de l'archive. Paris: Seuil, 1989.
Arlette Farge. Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France.
Trans. Rosemary Morris. Polity Press. 1994.
[M.] Lombard pits matters clearly. What can one not think? What should one
think of those who do not think? How can one believe that anyone’s thinking is
essentially subversive, threatening, or even influential, since it is so easily lost
among so many other thoughts? 192
These practices were not imaginary; to be clear about what was really happening
in society at the time, we need only look at the archives. The dossiers of crimes
of poisoning at this period are very revealing. They deserve to be studied for
themselves, purged of all the more or less sensational literature around them.
One her source is a “collection of original documents concerning the trials and
summary of secret interrogations destroyed in 1709” 210 n16
After citing excerpts from sixteen dossiers either short sentences or incomplete
sentences
Farge concludes the fourth chapter, about two thirds of the way into the book,
Farge with a section entitled “A Reader’s Impressions” (130-31). Here Farge
confronts in an open and honest manner the problem of reconstructing public
opinion before the public sphere when the archive itself is disordered.
A first cursory read through these cases fives an impression of monotony: the
dossiers seem to follow and repeat one another through one unchanging
structure, form and language. . . A more minute examination of the archives
dispels the first impression of monotonous repetition and starts to reveal a
disturbed and contrasting landscape, in which two directions are already visible
aling which relationships to the king and his politics articulated. . . The
20
chronology oof all this is not one of linear and progressive evolution; motifs
shaped themselves in sequence, some lodging in the memory while others were
forgotten. At the very least it muist be said that the critical mechanism was ina
state of unending development. There is a sentence form the archives, dated 27
April 1753, which aprtly sums up this many facted second attidue: ‘Your worthy
subjects deserve a kind who will surpass them.’ (13031)
The metaphor of the landscape , two directions, adnpaths , which “co-exist” and
“are inseparable” 930).
Like the opening two sources. She returns to a crossroads.
I will make use of two kinds of sources. The first is printed documents coming
from the higher echelons of early eighteenth-century society. . . . My second
source is unpublished, and is neither literary nor journalistic. It consists of
reports by police inspectors and observers who were paid by the. . .police. .
these reports, now in the Bastille Archives in the Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, cover
the years 1725 to 1740, and are of incomparable value, since it was exactly that
time that popular talk acquired a sudden importance. (11)
It now becomes obvious that we are dealing with a flagrant contradiction: the
people of Paris had opinions . . . whose pertinence, and existence . . . were
denied by a government which, at the same time, was observing them
continually, and moreover, through its policing system of spies, inspectors and
observers, was using them to help shape its policies of repression, or
demonstration (3)
They have spoken, I have written (196)
In light of the forgoing reflections we might suggest that, if we assume any
individual is competent to criticize, them by tracing the history of that competence
we may be able to determine the sphere within which that criticism can be active.
4
From the first to last we shall have voluntarily hitched our wagon to the wods of
others. At the end of the journey it may be possible to read, or discern, a
sustained discourse, a knowledge of everyday thing which hitherto we had
scarcely noticed because we believed them to be formless, or worse, deformed
from birth. (5)
The reader will have guessed that these newly expressed desires co-exist with
other, more complex formulas and political arguments anchored in social reality.
But it is interesting to study the ‘raw’ motif whose forms remain so similar over
time; in fact it relates to an archetypal scene which sometimes seems to have
come straight out of a popular tale. (136
See N Davis Fiction in the Archives
Versus Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony
21
There is no trace of any interrogation or materials for a case; the only annotation
is that ‘his seditious speaking made one shudder and one did not wish the words
which he had said against the king to be known by anyone.’ (137)
Even the record can’t record.
Secret versus revealed(137)
Collection of unsigned autograph letters . . . . They are in fact ephemeral,
unsigned news-sheets, and it is hard to tell for whom they are intended. 202n.9
As a comparison, readers 200 years from now may have trouble in
understanding the commentaries in the Résistance journal Libération!” 201n.13
On this point, Michel Foucault’s analysis of the popular literature concerning
criminals and thieves in Discipline and Punish) is most enlightening. 206n.40
Examination of the archives and more recent historical studies have dislodged
the revolt of 17775 from its former position and given it a face rather different
from the one earlier historians were fond of describing. It makes it difficult to
grasp, however. . . . This makes it difficult to discover from the transcripts
anything other than the meaning induced by the tenor of the questions asked.
117
The archive could not be read even by those who compiled it:
Failed murder of Louis XV
The machinery we discover in the procurator’s manuscripts has been swamped
by its own abundant output: the dossiers are incoherent, the proofs are lacking
the legal proceedings are not followed up, the correspondence files are fat—
more substantial than the case which fed them. . . no . . . network was there to be
dismantled, and no plot was discovered; the archive shows, amidst an
astonishing degree of disorder, the seriousness of governmental anxiety, but
cannot offer the curious eye even the beginning of an accurate ma of any
network of influences. (174)
The Fleury archive testifies to a general state of fear: the failure of the authorities
to find out what they sought, , , (174
The archive has played a neat trick on historians by providing them with a kind of
‘seditious talk’ which has to be read in the right way, not only in a long temporal
context, but also in the light of other sources with which it belongs, and,
especially, in the light of the circumstances which produced it And if it is read in
this way, it looks very different.
I now return to the Bastille and its prisoners. We have looked for would be points
of anchorage which smoothed over all the discontinuities and singularities of
time. I may be accused of having created overall disorder; but, reflecting on the
moves which triggered thoughts and actions, I think we have brought out several
points.
She lists eight points. She enumerates the archive, offering her reading a kind of
point-ing, a failure to index, to finger history and figure it out.
Archives which limpidly reflect that anxiety
22
(298-99)
The circulation of gossip did not follow a long, progressive and linear chain of
‘reasons’ leading up to a cut-off point in 1789; these ’reasons’ were themselves
fault lines discontinuities whose every sequence could produce some instant in
which people could plant the insistence of their speaking, and glimpse the future
course of a discourse which would deviate from what they were currently
hearing. Nor was there any necessary logical order in the enumeration of those
motifs; they are better described singly, in the disorder they wittingly or
unwittingly created, and in all the contradictions which opened on possible shifts,
however minimal, in the patterns of discourse. It was these microscopic variants
that could produce a moment of autonomous judgment or analysis. We must not
be reluctant to pay attention to short, apparently unimportant sequences. From
them cam reorganization, new practices, new thoughts. (78-79). The dossiers
are numerous, and in them I read yet another history,
Set up problem of historicism—Agamben makes an historical argument but an ahistorical
argument. Foucault makes an historical argument, but depends on the recourse to the
archives and even a theory of the archives.
Foucault says the biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another, as in
the evolutionism of the first sociologists, but are bound together in an increasingly
complex fashion accordance with the development of the modern technologies of power
that take life as their objective. Hence I do not envision a “history of mentalities” that
would take account of bodies only through the manner in which they have been perceived
and given meaning and value; but a a “history of bodies” and the manner in which what
is most material and vital in them has been invested. (152)
People are going to say that I am dealing in a historicism which is more careless than
radical. . . . (150)
I do not mean to say that the the law fades into the background or that institutions of
justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and
that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated intoa continuum of parratuses . . .
23
A noralizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centeredon life.
(144)
“transformation” (143)”still new in the nineteenth century” (144)
Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most naïve (and the former because of
the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary
power. A eugenic ordering of society, with all that implied in the way of extension and
intensification of micro-powers, in the guise of an unrestricted state control (etasiation),
was accompanied by the oeniric exaltation of a superior blood; the latter implied both the
systematic genocide of others ad the risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice. It is an
irony of history that the Hitlerite politics of sex remained an insignificant practice while
the blood myth was transformed into the greatest blood bath in recent memory.
Psychoanalysis was—in the main, with a few exceptions—in theoretical and practical
oppositon to fascism. 9150)
“this is the background that enables us to understand the importance assumed by sex as a
political issue. (145)
we should not be deceived by all the Constitutions framed throughout the world since the
French revolution, the Codes written and revised, . . : these were the forms that made an
essentially normalizing power acceptable. (144)
“It was life more than the law that became the issue of political struggles” (1450
The “right” to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness to the satisfction of needs. . .was
the political response to all these new proceduresof power that did not derive. . . from
thetraditional right of sovereignty. (145)
24
For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to
decide life and death. (135)
An anantomo-politics of the human body . . . a biopolitics of the population(139)
Bio-power (140)
The rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created I the eighteenth century as
techniques of power present at every level of the social body (141)
No wit is over life, throughout its enfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is
power’s limit, the moment that escapes it (138)
Foucault’s “new” “unprecedented” “for the first time” (142)
For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political
existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged
from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into
knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention. Power would no longer
be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but
with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to
be applied at the level of life of life itself it was the taking charge of life, more than the
threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. If one can apply the term biohistory to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history
interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what
brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life. It is not that life has been
totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes
them. (143)
25
Sometimes Focuault adopts an organic metaphor—brhtof the asylum, birth of the clinic
and sometimes uses “invention”
The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully
administration of bodies and the calculated management of life. (139-40)
Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, “Part Five: Right of Death and Power Over Life”
A zoology of subspecies and an ethnology of the civilizations of malefactors (253)
A ‘power of writing’ was constituted as essential part in the mechanisms of discipline.
On many points, it was modeled on the traditional methods of administrative
documentation, though with particular techniques and important innovations. Some
concerned methods of identification, signaling or description (189)
One must include the procedures of writing that made it possible to integrate individual
data into cumulative systems in such a way that they were not lost” (190)
These small techniques of notation, of registration, of constituting files, of arranging facts
in columns and tables that are so familiar to us now, were of decisive importance in the
epistemological ‘thaw’ of the sciences of the individual. . . . one should look into these
procedures of writing and registration , one should look into the mechanisms of a new
type of over bodies. Is this the birth of the sciences of man? It is probably to found in
those ‘ignoble’ archives, where the modern play of coercion over bodies, gestures and
behavior has its beginnings. (190-91)
This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions
as a procedure of objectification and subjection. The carefully collated life of mental
patients or delinquents belongs, as did the chronicle of kings or the adventures of the
great popular bandits, to a certain political function of writing; but in a quite different
26
technique of power. (192)
I'm wondering if Foucault's hyper-rationalist, functionalist account of power in D and P
isn't a kind of reaction formation to working in the archive than it is to a reworking of
Adorno and Horkhemier's Dialectic of Enlightenment as a story of a transition from
sovereignty to surveillance (with its accident and error free, evenly distributing and
homogenizing technologies, economies, and mechanisms of power)--see p. 217—“from
memorable man to calculable man” (p. 193)
Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of 'contagions', of
the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and
disappear, live and die in disorder. (198)
At this point I end a book that must serve as a background to various studies of the power
of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society. (30). Subordination
of the "psycho-" (p. 193); "without failure or interval" (218)
And this unceasing observation had to be accumulated in a series of reports and registers;
throughout the eighteenth century, an immense police text increasingly covered society
by means of a complex organization. . . .And unlike the methods of judicial and
administrative writing, what was registered in this way were forms of behavior, attitudes,
possibilities, suspicion--a permanent account of individuals' behavior. (214)
But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out
experiments, to alter behavior, to train or correct individuals, to experiment with
medicines and monitor their effects. (203)
linear time (160)
27
Its linear, progressive organization (161)
The [military] camp is the diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility.
(171)
Interesting that Foucault does have recourse to bio metaphors: "The Panoptocn functions
as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks to tis mechanisms of observation . . ". (204)
"political anatomy" (he puts it in scare quotes on p. 208
lettres de cachets(214))
capillary (198)
when a new technology of power and a new political anatomy were implemented. (193)
The hospitals of the eighteenth century, in particular, were great laboratories for
scriptuary and documentary methods. (190
The examination also introduces individuality into the field of documentation. (189)
quarantine (197)
The Panopticon . . . is the diagram of a mecahnism of power in its ideal form . . . it is in
fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.
(205)
Is not the supposed failure part of ht functioning of hte prison? (2710
psychoanalysis (194)
"the techno-medical model of cure and normalization. (248)
It is a biographical knowledge and a technique of correcting individual lives. . . . the
causes of his crimes. . . must be sought in the story of his life. . . this biographical
investigation is an essential part of the preliminary investigation for the classifications of
28
penalties. . . As the biography of the criminal duplicates in penal practice the analysis of
circumstances used in the gauging of crime, so one sees penal discourse and psychiatric
discourse crossing each other's frontiers. (252)
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Derrida Philosophy in a Time of Terror, n. 9, 188-8:
The evil of this traumatism has to do with the fact that aggression is not over. It’s not all
over and done with . . . It’s over because it’s archived, and anyone can visit the archive!
The archive effect reassures (the matter is closed! It’s all on record! It’s all been
recorded!), and we then do everything to monumentalize these recordings, thereby
reassuring ourselves that the dead are dead; it won’t happen again because it already took
place. . . . The only testimonies that escape archivization are those of the victims, not of
the dead or of the cadavers (there were so few) but of the missing, Be definition, the
missing resists the work of mourning, like the future, just like the most recalcitrant of
ghosts. The missing of the archive, the ghost, the phantom—that’s the future—JD.
Arlette Lafarge Subversive –pre-proletarian sphere of traces that are not archived.
Eavesdroppers writings. She just repeats texts she is not prepared to read because they
are filtered.
Last Man reference in The Road (film). Robert Duval says you’ll just know that you’re
the last man. Almost a last boy ending, but then a happy ending that saves the nuclear
family. Solo Dad first (who doesn’t look that different from the guy the Dad shoots and
kils, grazing his son’s forehead (William ell? Abraham and Issac?), then the warmer
Mom and kids (stalker family following the boy and Dad).
29
To being merely a development of paper, its virtual or implicit possibilities. Derrida,
“Paper or Me, you Know. . .” Paper Machine, 47
why not take into account unconscious, and more generally virtual archives?
If the murder did nto take place, if it remained virtual
Snf d to the problematic field of anarchive of the virtual
To keepa rigorous account of this virtuality
Archive Fever, 64; 65; 66; 67
Virtualizing and “dematerializing, spectral in Paper Machine56. “satellites are part
of this ‘paper less’ setup.” (57)
Sounds like he is describing a psapassport at the bottom of p/ 57.
His paper isabout the body too.
“Paper is me.” (560
Ppaer protects by exposing, alienating 59 Paper Machine
“Paper Or Me, You Know”
African sans-papiersundcomunted immigrants inFrance, and hteir struggle to get
identity papers likeeevryone else.
“Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Uber das Marionettentheater
Fall from personal grace anecdote
30
We can call remember personal versions of such a fall from grace, of such a loss
of innocence. (I for one remember trying to drive down a Swiss street after just
having read, in a local newspaper, that for every 100 meters one drives one has
at least thirty-six decisions to make. I have never been able to drive gracefully
since.)
277.
Chapter alternates an argument about biopolitics of the archive (Agamben,
Foucault, Derrida) as biobilioprocessing with close readings of de Certeau and
Foucault, then the end of Archive Fever, discussion of Renais Night and Fog and
Toute la memoire, then Fittkow. The end of biobiblioprocessing discussion—the
to be read—is Agamben, Derrida on Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe on Heidegger;
also Blacnhot—what can be read can’t be read no, only in the future, done as a
close reading as paratactical of the way de Man doesn’t get read by LL, after de
Man doesn’t read Adorno. Etc.
Start with reading as a failure, as lapse,
Get out how the storage unit is about closed reading, Unread –ability but also about
unarchiva –ability. Linking the camp to the archive (figured by the self-storage unit)
means that unread -ability as such becomes for us a question of the
not yet read. Just as the archive is orientated to the future, not the past,
according to Derrida, our notion of reading is oriented to a future, a return of
the repressed that is not simply a hallucination but the condition of
knowledge (WB on reshelving books of mentally ill). In Derrida's
31
terms, he not yet read is an overprinted instant where life and
machine intersect (the Macintosh anecdote about the phone and portable
Macintosh in California), a present present, a present past, and a
present future, not a past, present, and future.
The not yet read as book burning (WB in the Storyteller) a secret
that cannot be narrated (ash of the archive; Maranno in Aporia).
The not yet read as what goes missing, gets missed (TA on his
books as cats, as missing when you want to find them).
The not yet read as a lapse, an anecdote, an autobiographical
anecdote about breakdown, failure, lost mss.
Self-Storage Unit as Unarchiv -ability:
We can consider the question of the not yet read in terms of
Derrida's mediatized, virtualized archive; Derrida's central
distinction is between newborn and phantom (circumcision and
phylactery) as opposed to Agamben's more commonsensical distinction
between bios and thanatos (organic and inorganic) and between bios and
zoe.
For Derrida, the not yet read as a refusal to date himself, as a
constant reference to his own works and to the occasion of he
conference where he delivered the now published text, in ways hat are
32
not at all conventional. His philosophy is always becoming
literary as it confused oral delivery and written publication. The
Derrida archive as something to think. Derrida does various
rehselving operations of other texts-- as he does of he title
of Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses in Archive Fever.
Foucault discusses Kantorowcz in Discipline and punish—that is another way to
connect his work to Agamben’s.
State of exception not a coup d’etat but a coup d’archive.
Reading Remnants of Auschwitz. Kind of interesting in taking a
philological tack (as Agamben always does) in "The Witness." He
focuses on the gap between the law and ethics (conviction doesn't mean
justice of explanation).
Add Derrida on Of Hospitality, reading Kant On Perpetual Peace in relation to
telechnologies.
The bizarre description on the back cover of the book Of Hospitality Anne
Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, UP, 2000).
“’Hospitality’ is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial
surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone
is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning: Oedipus at Colonus is
33
read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is
brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of Francois Mitterrand.”
But there is no mention of the Mitterrand funeral in the book. I read it the book
over to find the discussion of the Mitterrand funeral, and then, after I didn’t find it,
did an Amazon search confirming my conclusion that there is no such discussion.
Of Hospitality Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond
(Stanford, UP, 2000).
Can add foreigner part of Derrida’s book to WB’s border crossing, also Aporias.
Homo Sacer zone does not allow for transport, transport, deportation is not part
of the story. It’ also about spaces, not about temporalities. Descarlized man has
no relation to papers, to paer machine, to writing machine of the human.
Conenct Derrida to Blanchot via Demeures, “Maurice Blachot est mort”and The
Bookto Come.
Reading the last chapter now, "The Archive and Testimony," and it
occurs to me that one way to get Derrida / grammatology in our intro
is, if only via sentence and then a longer footnote, on the need to
think bios in terms of birographemes--autobiographicity, autobiography
as defacement, and its relation to the archive.
34
Here is Agam on Foucualt's Lives of Infamous Men:
What momentarily shines through these laconic statements are not the
biographical events of personal histories, as suggested by the
pathos-laden emphasis of a certain oral history, bur rather the
luminous trail of a different history. What suddenly comes to light
is not the memory of an oppressed existence, but rather the
disjunction between the living being and the being that marks
its empty place. Here life subsists only in the infamy in which it
existed; here a name lives solely in the disgrace that covered it. And
something in this disgrace bears witness to life beyond all
biography."
143
Agamben curiously regards the archive as a structure, a set of
relations, not a place.
the archive seems to work as a recording device for Agamben. We could
open the question of storage media more broadly before getting to
Grammatology and maybe also connect that discussion to Archive Fever.
Just thinking of ways we can layer the intro a little (also go back to
Lyotard The Differend) on the phrase--again a problem of language-to
explain why one has to go to self-storage to understand the archive
35
and homo sacralization as both a biographization of things and people
as well as their mediatization (self storage as recording device
subject to failure, static, loss). Bios-graphyAgamben's Remnants seems both
brilliant and totally strange.
"The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak solely in the name
of an incapacity to speak--that is, in his or her being a subject. Testimony thus
guarantees not the factual truth of the statement safeguarded in the archive, but
rather its unarchivability, its exteriority with respect to the archive--that is, the
necessity by which, as the existence of language of both memory and forgetting."
(158)
"The fact that the subject of testimony--indeed, that all subjectivity, if to be a
subject and bear witness are in the final analysis one and the same--is a remnant
is not to be understood in the sense that the subject, according to one of the
meanings of the Greek term hypostasis, is a substratum, deposit, or sediment left
behind as a kind of background or foundation by historical processes of
subjectification and desubjectification, humanization and inhumanization." (158)
"they have not an end, but a remnant" (159)
36
"The case of a dead language is exemplary here." (159)
"to bear witness is to place oneself in one's own language in the position of those
who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language as if one were dead, or
in a dead language as if it were living--in any case outside both the archive and
the corpus of what has already been said." (161)
The archive is the disclosure of what writing is. The grammatology section is the
mode writing comes to do—reshelving of the pluri-dimensiosnality in the archive
as opposed to linear system of writing—they only attempt to retard their pluridimensionality.
In terms of Foucault I want to preserve the doubleness of the archive: it offers
potentialities even as even if it seems reduced to state’s auto-archiving.
Bioprocessing: U-My-Tropias
Bioprocessing is the process, as it were, both of the dissolution of democracy
37
and the possibility of its reconstruction “hidden from the eyes of justice”
(Agamben, Homo Sacer, ) in the isolated yet there to be found archipelagos of
“u-my-topias” of self-storage units. Bio-processing involves reading and itself
resistance (bio-processing by the state) in which storage units are figured as "umy-topias," places of file-sharing that are non-places, always in transit sic mundi
(bad Latin pun) where the temp work of metaphorical reshelving operations may
occur in a paralegal zone both beyond the state's view and also beyond what
Agamben calls "the eyes of justice." Processing is both anti-democratic and the
possibility of democracy (defined as a reshelving operation of the already / yet to
be read.
By subsuming the camp to the archive, our central concern necessarily
becomes reading. Once we realize the Homo Sacer is always already virtual / or
has been virtualized in modernity (1930s), then we necessarily have to see bios
and biopolitics as a question of unread -ability, of reading as what remains. We
think of reading primarily as the resistance to reading, reading as the not yet
read, reading as comfort through destruction (WB on book burning of the
storyteller); on the read as a medium (not reducible to physical materials). But all
of these ways of thinking about reading have to routing for us through the
archive--reading as refiling, and even more crucially as reshelving. Reading as
refiling / reshelving becomes a way of living biopolitics virtually, a
biobiblioprocessing and thanatobiblioprocessing. The archive, storage unit, as a
temporary space for damaged life, not only of preservation and safe-guarding-like a museum--or destruction--like a crematorium), but of bare life lived virtually.
38
When and where you begin and where and when you stop reading become
instances where the reader becomes sovereign--moments of decision, moments
of danger (especially to the reader, who may have completely miss something).
In this sense, sovereignty and homo sacer collapse into each other in new ways
(in ways other than the Schmitt or WB had thought, since homo sacer becomes
sovereign only over his own homo sacerness by decamping to the archive). We
go from bare life and the camp to the archive and bibiblioprocessing, paper
persons versus paperless persons. The virtualization of homines sacrii would not
be possible without the virtualization of the archive. It is through the virtualization
of the archive (understood as its mediatization in electronic form) that makes this
condition visible even in the so-called pre-histories of the archive and, say of the
law not yet virtualized or only virtualized in relation to a specific medium (tape
recorders, but not television; drawings, but not photographs).
First point. I think the Habeas Corpus part will be crucial not only because of the
history of the book (Chartier and Lefebvre) but because we could include the
move on Foucault and the archive there as well--We could go back to biopolitics
via Governmentality and Lives of Infamous Men and then show how Agamben
misses this dimension of Foucault entirely in Remnants of Auschwitz, how he
does not get the camp as an archive. From there we could go to the passport as
opposed to lettres de cachet perhaps).
So we would end up with habeas corpus--in effect, the missing body that has to
be presented, rather than the docile body subject to discipline and the passport
as "paper machine." Does the body have to missing before it can be disciplined,
39
interned.Maybe the Book that Never To-Came. the book as thing as something
also
to be read, not assumed, or capable of being quantified and narrated
chronology (Lefebvre's The Coming of the Book we might retitle for us as the
History of the Book (Yet) to Come since Levebvre implies that he has
delivered a history in his book. Blanchot’s The Book to Come (the end of the
book in Of Grammatology)
Living Virtual Bare Life through the Media of Shelf-Life3
Once thought in terms of storage media, reading also becomes
necessarily a question of the ontology of media, of technology
(Ronell) and substrate / subjectiles, contact zones) and the organization and
chaos of what Derrida notes is the confused nomo-topology of the archive. In
addition to the book, we necessarily have to take on other kinds of storage media
in addition to books once have moved to the archive. hence we are
reading texts about books, photographs, toys, films, as well as
reading films. So reading and media of what is read fall under the
general rubric of storage, the archive. We tie reading not only to
the media specificity of what gets stored while not treated media as
divisible into coherent units (books include photographs,facsimiles,
even DVDs; films include text; etc).
Given Time this week (finally) and noticed when I
got to the part about beggars (the homeless) that Derrida starts
sounding like a Marxist and like Foucault. And then I saw that Derrida
40
has a very long footnote to Foucault (p. 83, n. 135) which is made up
almost entirely of quotations quoted by Foucault in Madness and
Civilization (with lots of "quoted by Foucault"s the end of the
passages Derrida quotes from Foucault.)
Reading is always a form of historicism for us. But our historicism is not
reducible to inventories, itemizations that become the databases for
chronological, linear narratives (all very unself-consciously and unthinkingly).
Maybe the Book that Never To-Came. the book as thing as something also to be
read, not assumed, or capable of being quantified and narrated chronology
(Lefebvre's The Coming of the Book we might retitle for us as the History of the
Book (Yet) to Come since Levebvre implies that he has delivered a history in his
book. Blanchot’s The Book to Come (the end of the book in Of
Grammatology).Secret Files On Adolf Eichmann Ordered Released By German
Court BERLIN — A federal court has ordered the government to release secret
files kept by the German intelligence service on top Nazi Adolf Eichmann after
World War II.
The ruling announced Friday came after reporter Gabriele Weber sued to have
the BND release the 4,500 pages of files. She says they could fill in gaps about
Eichmann's postwar life and how he escaped to Argentina.
The BND had argued releasing the files could jeopardize the work of an
informant and harm relations with a "foreign intelligence service" that provided
some of the information.
But the Federal Administrative Court ruled that while the BND could withhold
some files for those reasons it could not keep them all secret.
It was not immediately clear when the files would be turned over.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/30/secret-files-on-adolfeic_n_558883.html
Chapter one—
Not going to do the rereading of Foucault one could do but advance through
Agamben (who has positioned himself as the heir to Foucault). Agamben has to
read in relation to the sidelining of Derrida.
Derrida too does not read biopolitics of the archive but has a kind of Foucauldian
take, placed in a footnote. The issue is not one reducible to control. Biopoltiics
41
of the archive is about reading, the archive including the camp (footnote Mr.
Death and Shoah Raul Hilberg scene. 92:36 Scene with Hilberg handling the
document about order for trains. HE does a brilliant reading of it until Lanzmann
concludes so, 16,000 dead Jews in one page.” Hilberg says he likes to handle to
he documents because he knows they passed through the bureaaucrats’ hands.
There is a surplus value in the archival document—the document itself—in a
way that is similar to the archivist touching the documents in Mr. Death. 90:05—
voice over of ex-Nazi member—he was director of the trains and stationed in
Warsaw and also in Krakow. His voice sounds different (scratchier) than other
voice-over voices and we see why when we see him on TV, in black and white,
like the other Nazi we see again two small TV sets, one smaller than the other,
and the one is hidden by the technician; the other, smaller one is visible, but the
image appears so faint that you can barely make it out. Lots of moments of
delayed identification in the film. Hilberg talks about the document for some time
(very impressively) before he is identified by a title as “Raul Hilberg, Historian.”
Happens all the time in the film. (The last interview with the Nazi shows
Lanzmann having taken the pointer and using it to point at the map (or blueprint)
of Treblinka. Problem with Spectral Evidence is that it assumes there was a
place and that then it could be a problem of representation—but assumes an
originary unity—whereas the return to the camp is already to a imaginary
topography—the issue in Mr Death is the crematorium, yet the archivist looks at
the blueprint for Birkenau. The crematoria were located just outside of the camp
(Birkenau). So the gas ans left the camp, turned left and went 50 kilometers to
42
the crematoria. There is already a fracture it eh the camp already a transition
before the transition from life to death, already an uncanny kind of traveling. Yes
you are going to Hildebreck—you are going on vacation—on resettlement—no
you are going to your death.
The last destination. It is advertised as a misdirection. The woman who learns
they are to be killed and tells the women first and then the men. No one believes
her. They are killed, she is kept back and tortured until she points t he guy who
told her. He is thrown a alive in the oven and everyone else is told that the same
thing will happen to them if they talk to any of the prisoners about to gassed and
creamted. So even the blueprints of the camp are not only a fetish fo the archive
but do not match the ruins that were once standing. Morris uses a documentary
convention but then does not deliver what the convention is upposed to deliver.
Notes on Shoah: Disc 3, 15:00 “extreme” German word used word but
translated as “extreme” only once –condition of the Sonderommando—to this
“hell.”
An instance of the “normality” of the death trains as uncanny: Raul Hilberg in
the Middle European travel Bureau handled the ticketing for the “Resettlement”
Trains. The Jews of the transport rode free. The Soldiers had to have tickets.
Jews wet to the same as any normal passenger—travel bureau sent some
people (Jews) to their deaths and vacationers to their resort. Had the same
currency conversion the same if transports, if they crossed a national border. The
43
Nazis sometimes went on credit, the train company never got paid.
Confiscations of Jewish property paid for the transports. “There was no budget
for destruction.”
Surplus of the archive
Archive Fever in the Archive Camp
Substrate becomes a kind of surplus for archivists—focus first on the archiving
scenes of paper and other documents and then of books in Renais
Then Archvist (raoul Hilberg answering Lanzmann’s question of going there in
person versus the document—right there 10,000 dead Jews.
And he is only slowly identified , after he hads been talking about he transport
order for some time.
At first, you think he is another surviror.
Then the archivist scene in Mr. Death—he had found a mission.
Also, in Lanzmann’s film, there is a way he does and does not repeat Renais,
alternating (in this case with train footage, with the same shots), so alternating
also becomes repetition, also long takes versus short takes in Resnais (8 hours
versus thirty minutes for Night and Fog). But where they are similar is that the
44
camp is empty. Renais goes around outside the camp in the opening shots, the
three shots. Mostly panoramic shots—or the shot from the guard tower.
Singer who returns to the camp—one shot as he walks—only ambient sound
(never any extragieidetic music, as there is only n Night and Fog,) and then cut to
the slow panoramic shot of the meadow and trees, then slowly the remains of the
foundation, all the way over to the left, but then cut back to the shot of the
survivor. Lots of continuity—interview of Hilberg is one motionless shot as
Hilberg speaks, only some close ups at the start of the document as red ink
underlines or circles certain parts. The long take creates a sense of continuity
and close up as well as breadth, but also allows for excess that feels like gap—
just silence that are usually cut by editors because they are not regarded as
significant. There is a constant retarding effect in Lanzmann—you haven’t seen
it yet—then you only see what is no longer there; you see people telling stories;
also bring in against Hilberg the interview with the Nazis. Why in black and
white?
He creates a version of Renais—black and white versus color. Also Film versus
TV. And in Godard film and video.
So the survivor never goes in; nor does Lanzann in the crematoria; onlyLeucter
goes inside.
So the actual archeologists committing sacrilege.
45
Subtitle of Godard Ishypourbook is Archeology of cinema.
Disc three:
Lanzmann on Corfu: Why did the Christians come?
Survivor answers: “parce que / pourquois le cinema?”
Also, I've been following up on Shoah, doing some research on Hitchcock
on the camps as well on footage of the camps (I ordered a documentary
first broadcast in 1985--Hitchcock edited some of the materials filmed
in 1945 and left in the Imperial War Museum because the film was never
completed). The whole discursive space is caught up by a massive case
of delirious archive fever (around 103 to 104 degrees). All kinds of
irrational claims are made about writing and photography / film, and
the claims are quite often contradictory (reclassify and re-expose /
exhibit, go back so as to prevent--looking as a prophylactic against a
repetition in the future, images tell the truth, at least in part, and
telling the story can be therapeutic, educational, on the one hand; on
the other, hide and even destroy; don't look because it's all porn;
record the present--as if it were outside the archive--read documents,
don't look at image; images lie; it's not over, you have to go back
again and again and again because you'll never have finished covering
the ground entirely; there's an uncanny pull--hence the final shot of
46
the train at dusk--a twilightenment). Lanzmann is at his best when he
asks historian Raul Hilberg why he likes the document he discusses
(ordering the death of 10,000 Jews) as opposed to going to Treblinka,
which Lanzmann had just visited; Lanzmann is at his worst when being
Jerry Springerish, badgering the survivors to keep going after they
break down in tears; he has a very inflated sense of the value of
recording the testimonies of survivors, as if there were no difference
between the moment of recording--the live record--and the film as a record, a file
to be archived.
In his case, filming is a resistance to the yet to be archived, filed,
classified, stacked., shelved.)
One other thought on Agamben's Muselmann. it's very interesting that
the word is not translated into English as "Muslim." Though Agamben
is very careful to trace the anti-Semitic eytmology of "holocaust" in
Remnants and to justify his having dispensed with it, he does not
confront the problem of anti-Arabism in the camps, the way soon to be
dead Jews, living dead, were classified by other Jews as Muslims. Nor
does Shoah deal with Jewish contempt (the contempt of Jews in the
camps) for the Sonderkommando, the "worst of the worst" (like the
Judenrat, only in the camps themselves) who helped ready the victims,
gas them and cremate them.
I was thinking all this makes Derrida's turn to the Marrano all the
more compelling as a figure of archivalization and self-storage (as
47
opposed to the Muselmann, who is beyond archiving). For this reason, gas
chambers (when in operation) have become a hot black box, regarded both as the
epicenter of the catastrophe, the heart of darkness, the dark room, the “eye of the cyclone,
the eye of history,” (106) but also the most inaccessible space, the reader / viewer locked
out by self-appointed guardians of the archives. Imagining the place and time of the gas
chambers in operation is paradoxically viewed as pornographic (not evidence but the
source of sadistic, perverse pleasure, so that Spielberg’s averted gas chamber turned
shower scene in Schindler’s List is regarded by all parties to the debate as porn) yet also
the most authentic, the best evidence and refutation of revisionists. In the 1980s,
filmmakers have split over the question of the use value of the archive. Whereas Alain
Renais’s Night and Fog (1955) alternates between color photography of Auschwitz in the
present and black and white archival footage of the camps and Marcel Ophüls’ The
Sorrow and the Pity (1969) confronted interviewees with documents from the archive
about their collaboration with the Nazis and inserting archival footage, Claude Lanzman
decided to film Shoah ( 198) without using any archival footage, just filming in color
interviews with survivors. By contrast, Jean-Luc Godard included archival footage in his
Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988), though the film is not a documentary about the holocaust
as is Shoah. Despite this split, the anti-archivist Claude Lanzmann and archivist JeanLuc Godard share a similarly phantasmatic view of the archive, both imagining the
existence of film footage of the camp in operation. Lanzmann says that if he had found a
Nazi snuff film of gas chambers in operation, he would have destroyed it:
Spielberg chose to reconstruct. To reconstruct, in a sense, means to
manufacture archives. And if I had found an existing film—a secret film
48
that showed how three thousand Jews, men, women, children, died
together in a gas chamber at a crematorium II at Auschwitz, if I had found
that, not would I have shown it, I would have destroyed it. I am unable to
say why. It is obvious. (95)
Godard says something similar about the actual existence of Nazi film footage of the
camp, arriving, however, the inverse conclusion that the footage should be shown
(destroying it does not occur to him): “We always discover archives a long time
afterward. [. . .] I have no proof whatsoever of what I am claiming, but I think that if I
worked with an investigative journalist on this, I would find the images of the gas
chambers after about twenty years. We would see the prisoners entering, and we would
see in what state they come out” (cited byDidi-Huberman, p. 216, n. 73). We perhaps
somewhat precipitously hazard from these two quotations the following generalization:
both the archivist and anti-archivist Lanzman creates a camp with a camp, the two camps
being early mirror opposites: the anti-archivist imagines the archive as the contents of
which are to be burned, a crematorium, as it were; the archivist imagines this
crematorium within the camp (for burning pornographic, “bad” images) while creating
another space, an unmarked urn, for not yet ashed remnants rendered readable. As DidiHuberman puts it, “Something—very little, a film—remains of a process of annihilation .
. . it is neither full presence or absolute silence. It is neither resurrection, nor death
without remains. It is death insofar as it makes remains. It is a world proliferating with
lacunae, with singular images which placed together in a montage, will encourage
readability, an effect of knowledge” (167).
Footnote Hilberg on Arendt
The question of the archive—what is it—it is the to be read—it is in question.
49
Historicism boxes it up. So reading is exposure. Thinking biopolitics in terms of paper
machines means not taking the materiality of the book or of files as givens, nor to see the
archive as a haunted space. It is a problem of reading, as we can see Derrida perform in
Archive fever. It is a retracing. So this means that reading is exposure; not simply a
return to deconstruction but a rereading of its resistance to reading as reading, including
the lapse, even the staged lapse. Not idealization or defensive commemoration, “For
Derrida” but “Force Derrida”
I've been following up Shoah, doing some research on Hitchcock on the camps
as well on footage of the camps (I ordered a documentary first broadcast in
1985--Hitchcock edited some of the materials filmed in 1945 and left in the
Imperial War Museum because the film was never completed). The whole
discursive space is caught up by a massive case of delirious archive fever
(around 103 to 104 degrees). All kinds of irrational claims are made about
writing and photography / film, and the claims are quite often contradictory
(reclassify and re-expose / exhibit, go back so as to prevent--looking as a
prophylactic against a repetition in the future, images tell the truth, at least in
part, and telling the story can be therapeutic, educational, on the one hand; on
the other, hide and even destroy; don't look because it's all porn; record the
present--as if it were outside the archive--read documents, don't look at image;
images lie; it's not over, you have to go back again and again and again because
you'll never have finished covering the ground entirely; there's an uncanny pull-hence the final shot of the train at dusk--a twilightenment). Lanzmann is at his
best when he asks historian Raul Hilberg why he likes the document he
discusses (ordering the death of 10,000 Jews) as opposed to going to Treblinka,
which Lanzmann had just visited; Lanzmann is at his worst when being Jerry
Springerish, badgering the survivors to keep going after they break down in
tears; he has a very inflated sense of the value of recording the testimonies of
50
survivors, as if there were no difference between the moment of recording--the
live record--and the film as a record, a file to be archived.
In his case, filming—especially the use of long takes, the circular narrative
structure, (everything that made Pauline Kael hate the film) is a resistance to the
yet to be archived, filed, classified, stacked, shelved.)
We might want to set a dialectic between archiving operations and reshelving as
nfra-archival—a dynamic of stasis, putting the docs “on the shelf” (as a metaphor
for forgetting about them) and the remobilization of docs through reshevling,
which in turns involves resistant reconstructions of the archive, a refusal of
narrative totality, of clarity, of all the categories by which the infrareading can be
and will be reshelved, rearchived—so the yet to be read shares a complicity with
the yet to be archived—even when archived, that is, the text is yet to be archived
insofar as it is yet to be read—there’s a dormancy that does not prevent or
cannot prevent later explosions (although some of the explosions are just merely
tabloid—so we want to talk about staging the archive too—setting up the blow
up, as it were, the blow up that never happens, or just alls out for more reading
when it does in the figurative sense, as in Antonioni’s Blow Up. The cropped
photos in Memoires des camps and Images in Spite of All work the same way—
the more they are blown up, the more uncanny they become, the more their
reproduction becomes a trigger way for polemic, the more they become
instances of archive fever that take the made form of wanting to cure archive evil.
51
(Maybe we can recall or activate the pun on Derrida’s “mal d’archive”). I also
think Renais’s metaphor of readers as insects at the end of Toute la memoire du
monde is really interesting in terms of the way it reverse the book as prisoner
(personifies the inanimate) by using a high angle long shot of the library to turn
humans into another, inhuman species. There is an implied but unspoken sense
of insects as destructive readers
One other thought on Agamben's “Muselmann.” It’s very interesting that the
word is not translated into English as "Muslim." Though Agamben is very careful
to trace the anti-Semitic etymology of "holocaust" in Remnants and to justify his
having dispensed with it, he does not confront the problem of anti-Arabism in the
camps, the way soon to be dead Jews, living dead, were classified by other Jews
as Muslims. Nor does Shoah deal with Jewish contempt (the contempt of Jews
in the camps) for the Sonderkommando, the "worst of the worst" (like the
Judenrat, only in the camps themselves) who helped ready the victims, gas them
and cremate them.
Agamben’s account of deconstruciton in The Time that Remains—in two
pages—even the arche-trace, origin of the origin is significant for Derrida,
according to Agamben.
Lacoue-Labrathe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry
I was thinking all this makes Derrida's turn to the Marrano all the more compelling
as a figure of archivalization and self-storage (as opposed to the Muselmann,
who is beyond archiving).
52
a . the nomo-topological container / storage unit
b. the graphic design of the contained (to extend reading beyond the
question of reading alphabetic writing). We are synthesizing work on
book editing (typography) and the unread of the book (paratext) with
work in art on graphic design (words as images) and even conceptual
art (Jennie Holzer; Derrida on Artaud's writings / drawings) and work
on film on title sequences.
We will have to connect unread -ability to the theology of storing
the image / text (Derrida and Freud--ash--versus Agamben's decentering
of the holocaust).
National ID Card Included In Democratic Immigration Bil
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/national-id-cardincluded_n_557721.html
The Democratic proposal includes increased money for border patrol and drug
war agents, equipment, helicopters and unmanned drones. It would create a
national ID -- which is dubbed a "biometric social security card." Though
Democrats insist that it is not an ID card and can only be used for employment
purposes.
The proposal would also include a crackdown on employers who hire
undocumented workers. It works to deport some immigrants who are not in the
country legally and creates a limited pathway to citizenship for others.
Democrats brought out their heavy hitters for the announcement: Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.); Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.); Sen. Charles
Schumer (D-N.Y.), who's been leading the push for immigration reform; Sen. Bob
Menendez (D-N.J.); Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and
Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).
The crackdown on employers relies on the creation of national identity cards.
"These cards will be fraud-resistant, tamper-resistant, wear resistant, and
machine-readable social security cards containing a photograph and an
electronically coded micro-processing chip which possesses a unique biometric
53
identifier for the authorized card-bearer," reads the bill summary.
For The Common Defense, Film extra with Van Johnson set in Chile (FBI print
out same as Chile one) on Mrs. Minerva DVD. Everyone has to be himself in
Chile. Story about counterfeit money.
1. Biopolitics of reading as Habeas Corpus
[We want to frame the reading of de Certeau as a double reading and then
extend that double reading to Foucault. In terms of Foucault we want to preserve
the doubleness of the archive, it offers potentialities even as even if it seems
reduced to state’s auto-archiving.]
Bring in de Certeau here as away of rethinking his notion of reading as
sovereignty in order to make our book intelligible to history of the book people.
+ Chartier + Agamben equals Biopolitics of reading
We should try to rediscover the movements of this reading within the body itself,
which seems to stay docile and silent but mines the reading in its own way: from
the nooks of all sorts of “reading rooms” (including lavatories) emerge
subconscious gestures, grumblings, tics, stretchings, rustlings, unexpected
noises, in short wild orchestrations of the body. But elsewhere, at its most
elementary level, reading has become, over the last three centuries, a visual
poem. It is no longer accompanied, as it used to be, by the murmur of a vocal
articulation nor by the movement of a muscular manducation. To read without
uttering the words aloud or at least mumbling them is a “modern” experience,
54
unknown for millennia. In earlier times, the reader interiorized the text; he made
his voice the body of the other; he was an actor. Today, the text no longer
imposes its own rhythm on the subject, it no longer manifests itself through the
reader’s voice. This withdrawal of the body, which is the condition of its
autonomy, is a distancing of the text. It is the reader’s habeas corpus (175-176).
By the way, also came up with this move on the History of the Book (in Theory).
Flatling the Book
Historians of the book already assume a theory of reading, which they reduce to
a functionalist pragmatics book use, and this unarticulated and untheorized
default of use (in place of reading) determines how these same historians “read"
the physicality of the physical / so-called material book. Putting the text apart
from the book, the paratextual "parts" of the book go missing as such. Book
production is subdivided into the books parts (as an assemblage process) but the
assumption is that (a) the text is whole (whether or not it contains fragments or
not is irrelevant; the form of the text becomes irrelevant--hence to the no need to
read practice). They operate like file clerks who did not read what they filed .
They offer up an anatomy lesson of the material text even as they misrecognize
the corpus (things like glue, for example, or seals), reducing all of its life functions
to a kind of EKG biobibliofeedback model. They (don't) read the book. They just
flatline it.
(Pun on flatline means that book history as a field reverts to what Vismann calls
the earliest model of filing, continuous recording, on automatic--a continuous loop
55
of a line.
Extracts (and some comments) from the General Introduction of The Practices of
Everyday Life
In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a
silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text
effected by the wandering eyes of the reader the improvisation and expectation
of meanings inferred from a few words leaps over written spaces in a n
ephemeral dance. But since he is incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or
records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while
reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the
object (book; image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of
moments “lost” in reading. (xxi)
Pierre Bayard takes this idea further (even if you buy the works, you still forget
the) in How to talk About Books You Haven’t Read. (The chapter on Montaigne is
the best one.)
The intellectual synthesis of these given elements takes the form, however, not
of a discourse, but of the decision itself, the act and the manner is which the
opportunity is “seized.” (xix)
56
Link de Certeau’s account of the decision here to Schmitt on sovereignty?
“trajectory” suggests a movement, but it also involves a plane projection, a
flattening out. It is a transcription. A graph (which the eye can master) is
substituted for an operation; a line which can be reversed (i.e. read in both
directions) does duty for an irreversible temporal series, a tracing for acts. (xviiixix)the “cultural activity of the non-[producers of culture, an activity that is
unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized remains the only possible for all those
who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a
productivist economy articulates itself. Marginality is becoming universal. A
marginal group has now become a silent majority.
Perhaps links the shift from minority to majority, from the marginal as peripheral
to the marginal as universal to the state of exception becoming the norm, put in a
kind of paradoxical form in the section title “The marginality of a majority” (xvi).
An investigation . . . must seek to restore to everyday practices their logical and
cultural legitimacy, at lest in the sectors, still very limited—in which we have at
our disposal the instruments necessary to account for them. The kind of
research is complicated by the fact that these practices themselves alternately
exacerbate and disrupt our logics. Its regrets are like those of the poet, and like
him, it struggles against oblivion” (xvi)
57
Can we pun on “restore” as in “re-store” reshelve the inventory as well as put he
inventory in place? Seems linked to the idea of preservation in Curtius—on he
first page he mentions the sack as a means of preserving the drafts. In
restoration lurks a fantasy of resurrection, of the corpus being restored, made
whole—a kind of last judgment habeas corpus.
Technical systems . . .technocratic expansion of these systems (xxii)
To rediscover, within an electronized and computerized megalopolis, the ‘art” of
the hunters and rural folk of earlier days. (xxiv)
Foucualt’s Pharmacy4
“within an electronized and computerized megalopolis” connects de Certeau to
new media. The point about “technics” here might be a way of getting from de
Certeau (history of the book) and Foucault in chapter one to Derrida and
Agamben. The jump from Foucault to Agamben is of course not a jump at all,
but we could say we need to discuss Derrida with Agamben, the political space
of the camp and the political space of the archive in relation to technics, not only
technologies of the self, but automaticity of the archive, of reader turning into a
machine, etc. This move would also get us away from being mistaken for a
Frankfurt school critique of instrumental reason: by connecting technics with
Derrida, virtualization, we are also engaging reading as a technology (de Man—
or Ronell on de Man in Stupidity) that subjects the subject to interference, lapses,
irony, etc.
58
I found de Certeau’s sociobiology odd (xx, top), but we could circle back to it (and
his prehistorical man analogy) in the conclusion. He needs total continuity.
I like the Freud friendliness of the intro (xxiv) and also the quotation form Musil’s
Man without qualities in the last paragraph. The example of “the same-time
official . . . or that ordinary man” (xxiv)
Reading thus introduces an “art” (xxii)
By going for the “’underside’ of scientific activity,” de Certeau seems to limit
reading to an instrumental “art,” going with a high and low culture model rather
uncritically, what he calls a “split structure” (xxiii). Wondering about his use of
quotation marks around “art.”
“the individual subject in political life” (xxiii). Is de Certeau already trying to think
bare life through an economic rather than legal perspective?
the "writing" section in Practice of Everyday Life
might also help get us to grammatology, the trace, etc in the intro.
Foucault on Drugs / Hitting the Archive5
Dominant reading is just like the Bibliomaniac. What does using mean? Spitzer
59
uses the word “user” in Linguistics and Literary History: drug use and
utilitarian—doesn’t understand its own addiction to the hit.
“I rather believe the idea came to me one day in the Bibliotheque Nationale when
I was reading an internment register drawn up at the very beginning of the
eighteenth century.” Foucault, "Lives of Infamous Men," (76)6
The essay has a dreamlike, hallucinogenic feel—like Greenblatt on acid. “I
wanted to be always a question of real existence. . . I insisted that these texts
should always be in a relationship or rather with the greatest number of
relationships with reality: not only that they refer to it, but that they perform in it;
that they should play a part in the dramaturgy of the real” (78) “Real lives have
been ”played out” in these few sentences. (79)
“that vibration I feel even when I happen to run across these lowly lives reduced
to ashes in the few phrases that have destroyed them. The dream would have
been to restore to their intensity in an analysis.” (77)
“I gave up this idea” (77) Not a systematic or order or comprehensive
compilation—“I distributed them win a way to preserve. . . the effect of each”
(77).
What is apprehended bas the political value of F’s work ends up being a
misunderstanding of what is really political about it, namely, allowing the archive
to model what you do with it. Foucault looks a lot more grammatological in terms
of what haunts him. He is actually a historian, not a philosopher. His job is
telling stories about the past as opposed to interrupting the past.
“This pure verbal existence which turns these wretched men or these scoundrels
60
into quasi-fictitious beings, is owed to them to their nearly exhaustive
disappearance and to that chance or mischance which has allowed the survival,
through the accident of rediscovered documents, of a few rare words which
speak of them or which they themselves have spoken. . . A dark legend, but
above all a gaunt legend, reduced to what was said one day and which certain
improbable encounters have preserved up until our time” (81)
“political sovereignty comes to insert itself at the most elementary level of the
social body” (85)
this was an administrative and no longer religious arrangement: a mechanism of
registration, and no longer of pardon. The objective aimed at was, however, the
same. . . But here the avowal does not play the same role that Christianity had
reserved for it. For the implosion of this grid, old, but previously localized
procedures were systematically utilized; the denunciation, the indictment, the
inquiry, the report, the use of informers, the interrogation. And everything thus
said is registered in writing, accumulates and constitutes dossiers and archives. .
. build themselves up through time as the endlessly growing memory of all the
wrongs of the world” (84)
Sounds like Raul Hilberg on the Nazis—they invented almost nothing when
putting the Final Solution into practice. And also sounds like the end of Toute la
memoire—a more idealized vision of the library as a Hall of Injustice.
Fouault and Natalie Davis took up the split in the people between the people and
the average people, le menu peuple Agamben discusses in Homo Sacer.
“All those things which make up the ordinary, the unimportant detail, the
61
obscurity, the days without glory, the common life, can and must be said, --better,
written. (84)
the documents I have gathered together here are homogenous; and they risk
appearing monotonous” (88))
Foucault begins and ending by rejecting the term “nouvelle” to describe the lives,
“This is an anthology of existences.” (76). It’s an anthology of bare lives.
“Singular lives those which have become . . . strange poems: --that is what I
wanted to gather together in a sort of herbarium. (76); see also p. 91.
Foucault holds open the progress of history to its other, to its pluridimensionality,
allows one to see the archive, to see the archive as about language, about
language touching itself, not touching the real. Grand narratives are different
constellations of texts launched form the archive, they are no more historical than
anything else. The anecdote is a technique that is fetishistic—it’s your refusal to
trade in the archive the document for an account of yourself in Freud’s terms.
Freud case with the guy who botches his maturation because he can’t give up
the object; the fetish of an economy through an overinvestment.
The intensity of the archive is another way of talking about in other casesg ets
routinized as the anecdote.
The archive is like ekphrasis—by the doubling of the representation it seems
more rea—so it’s about intensities.
Anti-historical impulse in Foucualt’s essay. There’s no regicide like Damiens to
turn into an anecdote like in the opening of Discipline and Punish. He’s talking
about the organization, the archeology of the archive, and how knowledge gets
62
produced form it, the rules –what he’s trying to deduce is a series of dietetic
rules for ingesting these texts—pull it toward a Derridean question of ingestion,
but Foucault is trying to come up with an ethical system for a positive and
political program. It would be an attempt to show the rules to do Genealogy
Nietzsche-it’s a cookbook—it’s a recipe for how to cook these texts. Whereas
New Historicism is always about giving you the prepacked ready He’s writing
about texts that disappeared but he is disappearing them. There is a kind of
uncanny composition. He too he is writing in the past tense about what he has
done without having done it
p. 91, note 1, “introduction of a work to appear. Specters of Foucault.
These are texts which look toward s Racine, or Bossuet, or Crebilllon’ but they
carry with them a whole popular agitation, a whole misery and a whole violence,
a whole “baseness,” as used to be said, which no literature of that era would
have been able to welcome. They cause beggars, poor folk, or simply the
mediocre to appear in a strange theatre where they dress up in bit of drapery
which are necessary for them if they want to be paid attention to on the stage of
power. Sometimes they remind one of a poor troupe of mountebanks, who would
rig themselves out after a fashion in a few tawdry pieces of finery that were
sumptuous once upon a time, in order to act before a well-off public which will
poke fun at them, except that In his case they enact their own life, and before the
high and mighty who can determine its course.” (88). Sounds somewhat like
Benjamin’s account of the German Mourning play.
Recalls the Ship of Fools in Madness and Civilization. Medieval and Early
63
Modern one of the moments to which Foucault returns, or from which he nearly
begins his career. “Las Meninas” in The Order of Things.
William M. West, Theaters and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe
We can see the split in terms of F’s split of the archive into accumulation and
knowledge (encyclopedia and use, into performance. Doubleness of acquisition
and performance is crucial and analogous to the question of waking and
sleeping, of living death, of dreaming as mourning, of deadening the part of you
that is outraged and that is in pain at the discovery that something is no longer
and can’t explain you to yourself. It’s a narcisstic.
When someone close to dies it’s one less person who can fill the lack from the
Lacanian question “Que vuoi?”
By the performance, they’re a genealogy , they are thinking of what the archive,
which may account for what we are reading as uncanny. Foucalt’s positive
histories are always haunted. They’re not haunted. Arch of Know the only
method book. The others are interested in method but producing positive
histories. For your consumption yummy thing. Nouvelle cuisine –you’ll leave
hungry but you’ll know how to it know.
Drug regime is a re-programming of the reader—where texts or stories should be
you get instead a kind of rubric for how one does it, a series of “a certain number
number of simple rules (it’s really about reconstituting—just add “hot” water).
Look we’ve gone and done it now.
How we did it, is Practicing New Historicism. It’s instant mash potato. Watch,
I’ve done. Look, Ma, I’ve done it.
64
So we can again we can motivate or make topical Adorno and Benjamin again.
Intensities is a regime, not an excessive use, but a technology of drugging the
self—last essays he writes are on governmentality and drugs. Optimization—
what are the good drugs and what are the bad drugs. lives of Infamous men is
that the History of Sexuality emerges out of the question of how to handle the
documents in the archive. Discipline and Punish performs an answer raised in
Archaeology of Knowledge, that slough off a number of problems which requires
another
Which is a book about the archive---proliferation of discourses—Victorian
moment not as a repression but as a discursive explosion. It’s allowing the
archive to model the phenomenon.
I, Pierre Rivierre dossier, it’s just publication of the archival documents, with an
intro. The hermaphrodite Hercule Barbin. New Historicist sort of book. The
Return of martin Guerre in a much stranger way.
Agamben and media studies link up but biopolitics and the archive are dual
partners in Foucault’s works.
Controlled injection, rationing, pacing as intensities.
Foucault's "Lives of Infamous Men," is another preface to a book never written
It reads really strangely because he keeps referring to "this book," starting with
the very first sentence "This is no way a history book." But he never put the
anthology to which his essay is supposed to be the introduction together. He
says it is not a book historians will like.”Therefore this book will not satisfy
historians, even less than did the others. Is this a whimsical and purely subjective
65
book? I would say rather–but this perhaps amounts to the same thing—that this
is a playful book, a book of convention, of a little idiosyncrasy which has found
itself . . . . It is in order to rediscover something like these lightning-existences,
like these life-poems, that I imposed on myself a certain number of simple rules”
(78)
The rules are:
“That it should be a question of personages having really existed;
That these existences should have been both obscure and unfortunate;
That their story should have been told I a few pages or better in a few sentences,
as briefly as possible;
That these narratives not simply constitute strange or pathetic anecdotes, but
that in one way or another (because these were complaints, denunciations,
orders or reports) they should have really taken part in the miniscule history of
these existences, of their misfortune, of theirrage or of their uncertain madness;
And that in the shock of these of these words and these lives hsuld be born again
for us a certain effect mixed with beauty and fright”
[Beauty and fright sounds a bit like the uncanny]
But on the subject of these rules which could appear arbitrary, I must explain
myself a little further.” (78)
The anecdote can be a way of interrupting grand narratives.
Invaluable feedback was provided by Derrida at every stage of our writing.
“These, in the style of a TV guide, are the provisional titles:” (177)
Derrida as Jesus—the lost Gospels.
66
Foucault treats the archive like a drug—he’s interested in intensities, but not in a
quantitative, measurable way. The archive has traces, not data-it part of a
theatrical script. Foucault is taking out Plato’s pharmacy and treating the archive
like a drugstore. He likes to take hits from the brief lives of infamous men, even
though they don’t get him very high (the frugal citation is about all he can do).
But in getting he high, he avoids the problem of the general intellectual without
becoming a specific intellectual. He talks about the voices of the people written
about, but he never really ventriloquizes them. Or he does so only in a couple of
cases he quotes. Moreover, he recasts the real as theater after banishing all
literature and fiction at the start (77) begins talking about the cases as legends
and returns to literature at the end, and Manon Lescaut specifically at the end.
2. Reading the Not Yet Read Out of the Box7
From the insight that habeas corpus in de Certeau poses the problem of
the archive as the problem of biopolitics it is logical to turn to Agamben’s Homo
Sacer as he situates his account of biopolitics directly in relation to Foucault and
maintains that he has radicalized Foucault. Agamben ‘s critique of liberal
democracy turns in part on habeas corpus:
The first recording of bare life as the new political subject is already implicit in the
document that is generally placed at the foundation of modern democracy: the
1679 writ of habeas corpus…Nothing allows one to measure the difference
67
between ancient and medieval freedom and the freedom at the basis of modern
democracy better than this formula. It is not the free man and his statutes and
prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the subject of
politics. And democracy is born precisely as the assertion and presentation of
this “body”: habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, “you will have to have the body to
show” (124-125).
Agamben’s account of biopolitics has been controversial because he
desacaralizes homo sacer while universalizing it at the same time. Agamben
extends the category of homo sacer so far that it includes “virtually” everyone
and can no longer be identified exclusively with victims of crimes (against
humanity) but include “neomorts” as well.8 According to Agamben, there is no
difference between a bare life “lived” in a hospital room, on death row, or in a
detention center, and a bare life “lived” in a Nazi concentration camp; no does it
matter to Agamben whether or not crimes are committed in a particular
morphology of the political space of the camp.9 The problem identified by Nazi
theorist Carl Schmitt, namely, that when “the state of exception” and “state of
emergency” that allows for the suspension of law in liberal democracies
paradoxically becomes the norm such that all life is thereby politicized.10
The Biobibliopolitics of the Archive: Un-Reading Agamben11
Given the challenge to liberal democracy Agamben’s extension of
Foucault’s work on biopolitics opposes, it is understandable that scholars such
68
as Rey Chow and Judith Butler have wanted to qualify or reverse Agamben by
keeping the “sacer” (as “sacred”) in homo sacer in order to protect the victim, to
equate or identify homo sacer and bare life with the victim.12 The problem lies
not in his desacralization, however. To preserve the victim by preserving the
sacred (the sanctity of life), as Chow and Butler wish to do, is to remain within an
anthropological account of the ambivalence of the sacred that cannot recognize
the more fundamental ambiguity of biopolitics and the extent to which both in
liberal democracies and totalitarian regimes, the state of exception became the
norm in the West during the twentieth century. Hence Rey and Chow can at best
labor for the extension of human rights discourse that, pragmatically speaking,
will probably never come close to being achieved, and, more importantly, even if
it were achieved would only reinforce, the grip of the State over the
biopoliticization of life if it succeeded, as Agamben says about the writ of habeas
corpus and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
The problem with Agamben’s account of homo scaer is the way he makes the
camp the political space of modernity, not the archive. He misses what is
political about Foucualt’s account of the archive. Also, bring in Visman: the office
as the political space of modernity (123), but rally the office is one
phemonealizaiton of htearchive—and Vismann can’t explain how Germany got
from the Chancery to the offce. She just asserts it in the first sentence of one of
her chapers. Still, we can link her notion of the office to her account of the Nazis.
We subsume the camp within the archive as the paradigm of modernity in part
because Agamben’s reading of Foucault misses the importance of the archive in
69
Foucault, something that Foucault tried to theorize in his own totally theoretical
book.13
In order to understand between what it means to say that the question of the
archive is the question of biopolitics we need to understand the archive, we need
to reread what is now generally regarded to have been read, namely, Derrida’s
work on grammatology, the archive, and what he called in one his last books,
“paper machine,” essays devoted, as he says, to papers and persons. 14 [Here
we can take up Agamben’s dismissal of deconstruction in The That rReamins as
well as Derrida’s comments in The Beast and the Sovereign and Agamben’s
essay on Friendshiplamenting Derrida’s failure to cite him Agamben’s account of
deconstruction in The Time that Remains—in two pages—even the arche-trace,
origin of the origin is significant for Derrida, according to Agamben.].
Self-Storage Unit as Unarchiv -ability:
The book is our default medium because the book is a body, a
corpus, because it already figures the relation between bios and
media. We are also taking the book to be a spectral medium. This
might be a weird move to some readers since the book is always
inorganic matter. The uncanny is about the inanimate coming to life,
or seeming to come to life, and--we can check this--Freud's examples
are of inorganic matter that was once organic--dancing feet, and so
on. But Derrida talks about film as a spectral medium, and he also
talks about the virtuality and spectrality; he equates the two in
70
Demeure.
We take the storage-unit as a central figure of the archive in order to think the
mediatization of biopolitics and the archive through deconstruction, particularly
Derrida’s attention to paperless persons Paper Machine.15 We would go further
in saying that bioprocessing is the process, as it were, both of the dissolution of
democracy and the possibility of its reconstruction “hidden from the eyes of
justice” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, ) in the isolated yet there to be found
archipelagos of “u-my-topias” of self-storage units.16
Before addressing Derrida’s account of the archive and electronic media, we
turn first to his notions of arche-writing and to his medium specific notion of the
“substrate” (Paper Machine), or writing as an “impression” (Archive Fever) that
does not leave a trace and that hence cannot be reconstructed or reconstituted
archeologically.17 At first glance, Derrida’s distinction between arche-writing (a
non-phenomenal trace) and “vulgar writing” may seem analogous to Agamben’s
distinction between the camp as space and the camp as place.18 One might
mistakenly think that Derrida is indifferent to the materiality of the substrate in the
same way Agamben is indifferent to the materializations of the camp’s essence
and to the camp as a crime scene. The important differences between Agamben
and Derrida are first that arche-writing is not a metaphysical essence and second
that the substrate of arche-writing is rather is medium specific, hence Derrida’s
continued interest in electronic and digital print media as well as his interest in
the other “writing” media of what he calls the “graphosphere” in Paper Machine:
71
painting, drawing, photography, television, and film. We then connect his
medium specific account of writing (not empirical sense of materiality, but of
formal materiality as in impression, a contact zone that can only be traced and
retraced) to the mediatization of the archive in Archive Fever, in turn putting
pressure on Derrida’s concept of the archive and media by posing the archive as
an uncanny space not only of living and dead, of bios and thanatos, of bios and
zoe, but of the human and inhuman, media capable of being figured, disfigured,
configured as human, and in turn capable of being humans figured, disfigured,
configured as a machines.19
Whereas Agamben’s concept of the camp takes the metaphysical form of an
“essential” structure and a theological hermeneutic that reveals, brings to light
the “veiled” (8), “secret tie” (6), “hidden point of intersection” (6), “hidden matrix”
(9), “concealed nucleus” (6) or paradigmatic (9) space of the camp, we regard
the camp as mediatized.20 By starting from the “essence of the camp,” Agamben
uncritically equates the materialization of the camp’s essence with its
virtualization:
If we admit that essence of the camp consists in the materialization
of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space
in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of
indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in
the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created,
independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and
72
whatever its denomination and specific topography” (174).
Similarly, Agamben conflates instances of homo sacer and instances of virtual
homo sacer, concluding that “we are all virtually homines sacri” (114), by
assigning the camp a metaphysical essence.21 By “virtually,” he seems to mean
potentially: we are all potentially homo sacri because it is possible we, even
citizens, could all be sent to Gitmo or we could all get in a car accident and
become “brain dead” like Karen Quinlan.22
By attending to the emphasis Agamben places on virtually rather than
desacralization, we can begin to see the limits of his structural thinking about the
camp and the impasse he necessarily arrives at when trying to decamp the
archive. 23
Agamben’s theological hermeneutic of the concealed camp appears
to have blinded him from taking into account the virtuality of living life “virtually”
(111, 114, 171, 174) as homo sacer.24 What is missing in his account in
Agamben’s account of bare life as the potential fate of any “human” life is the
global (not only Western) mediatization of biopolitics the processing of “virtually”
bare life (for citizens and for foreigners) through various biometrics and various
kinds of invasive auto-archiving technologies (data mining and stored for an
indeterminate period without a warrant, security cameras, and so on; these
technologies do not ask for permission to record).25 Agamben’s account of the
state of the exception becoming of the norm is also an account its “essential
function” (8), its becoming immediate in modernity. Politics becomes biopolitics,
classical politics becomes modern politics, when there is no longer any mediation
73
between politics and life: “The camp was also the most political space ever to be
realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation”
(171).26 By making the paradigm of modernity into a hidden essential structure,
Agamben’s conception of the camp remains “imprisoned within the paradox” (40)
of sovereignty, to use Agamben’s own words, confined within a Foucauldian
genealogy of internment. 27 The concept of the camp as the most political space
only has purchase when the essential, hidden structure of biopolitics / the camp
is (to be) recognized as such among its various metamorphoses and
transformations.28
Here we might grasp even more concretely the limitations of Agamben’s
structuralist thinking and argument by analogy (two analogous structures are
regularly said to “coincide” (9, 38), “correspond” (8; 9), “converge (9; 9)”, and so
on).29 Agamben’s metaphysical account of the camp’s absolute political space is
stuck in a rhetorical groove: he can only reveal again and again the essential
hidden structure / matrix / paradigm and “foundation” (9) of the space of the
camp, an effort that proves more and more futile given both that he tells a story
of the gradual “penetration” of politics over bios, of increasing “intimacy” (66) and
“complicity” (10,) and “secret complicity” (67) between a Rights or Humanitarian
discourse and biopolitics, the movement of the camp from the margins to the
center of the “political order” (9); the “steady dissolution” of “categories whose
opposition founded modern politics (right / left, private / public, absolutism /
democracy, etc.)” (8).30 Along parallel lines, Agamben linearizes the
“extratemporality” of the camp by making biopolitics and thanatopolitics
74
analogous (the camp, Agamben writes, only becomes operational when it
becomes a “lethal machine” [175] and that it then never ceases to be in
operation).31
By not taking the medium specificity of the camp and the mediatization of bare
life into account, Agamben’s call for a “new politics” (11), we may see quite
clearly, will necessarily be limited to a theological mission accomplished, to mere
pattern recognition of the latest hidden seemingly innocent materializations of the
space of camp (and perhaps even that will not be achieved since Agamben
repeatedly says “we must learn to recognize” (111, 123, 175) new forms of the
camp: the recursive task of recognition has yet to be undertaken much less
completed).32 And as Agamben dolefully concludes, “there is no return from the
camps to classical politics” (188).
2. From Bare Life to Shelf-Life: The Camp as Archive
Agamben unconcentrates the camp, as it were, his turning the camp into a
political space of which the Nazi concentration camp is only the most disquieting
instance. (The image of Auschwitz on the cover of the English translation is
highly misleading.) The concentration camps now exist virtually. What now
remains of the concentration camps, razed by the Nazis when they abandoned
them in 1945, has since become above all a question of the camps’
archivalization, preservation of documents, reconstruction or ruination of the
remnants, and exhibition.33 As the title to this section signals, we seek to know
75
the relation between “bare life” and “shelf life” through the archive, to understand
the relation between the articulation of human persons as citizen-subjects, the
auto-archiving of their lives by the state, and the advent of self-storage as a
supplement to this articulation, as a writing while being written, or a “putting into
reserve,” to borrow Derrida’s phrasing from Of Grammatology.
Here it is crucial to understand that, for Agamben, what characterizes the camp,
what constitutes its modus operandi is not any ideology or technics of
rationalization, but the production of a zone in which, as Hannah Arendt put it,
“’everything is possible” (HS 170).34 Agamben has, on occasion, been given to
making explicit his own structuralist leanings, by drawing analogies between the
systems of thought and legality which make possible the production of such
spaces as the camp, and so we think it useful here to make clear that his
modeling of the camp as an imminently achievable site takes as a given what
Jack Derrida named “arche-writing” or the general or generative text and an
archive fever. 35 We do so because we wish to make clear that such events as
the “camp” draw their power from the fact that what becomes possible within their
confines is a set of translations otherwise and elsewhere deemed impossible or
unthinkable. By a series of protocols, the camp subjects those deemed “bare life”
or merely living to transformations governed by no rule or law than that of total
possibility. In terms we have already used, the camp operates as a zone in which
your “present” is actualized by the futural desires and whims of those persons
who are constituted as bearers of state violence. If the world is constituted by a
series of routinized tropic operations that are housed in a variety of institutions or
76
sites (family, home, school, police, etc,) with rules governing their application,
access, and occasion, the camp phenomenalizes the figure of an included
exception, making physical the included but entailed away zone of total tropic,
which is to say material, physical, semiotic, and rhetorical conversions that the
state reserves to itself but does not ordinarily deploy.36
Yet to Be Read: Exhuming the Camp as the Arche-Archive to Come
We must continually remind ourselves
that some part of responsibility
insinuates itself wherever one demands
responsibility without sufficiently
conceptualizing and thematizing what
“responsibility” means.
--Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death 2526.
In our view, media are not reducible to electronic media any more than
bare life is reducible to the concentration camp.37 We are not narrating an
historical narrative of the imposition of technology on modern man, an imposition
parallel to the state of exception becoming the norm. Low-tech “old” media such
as paper are just as crucial to us as are high-tech media. Shelf-life is already
lived virtually, through specific media. What it means to bare live virtually as
77
shelf-life, then, requires that we engage media histories, and particularly the work
of a writer also of interest to Agamben, namely, Walter Benjamin. We are
redefining Agamben’s absolutized, stacked, and static paradoxes of sovereignty
and the “complex topology” (37) of bare life by turning to the manifold, diverse,
and dynamic paradoxes of living a virtual bare life tropologically and without a
final destination.38
we are not equating the virtual with media, or media with technology.
Virtual goes back to Ancient Rome—doesn’t mean simply alternate world—
already algorithms of processing, lists divorced from writing in Roman law—see
Viswann, Files: Media and Technology
See Derrida on virtuality p. 92, 72
Deader than Dead: Coming After the Archive and The Resistance to
Reading the Archive
For Agamben, this way of redefining and modeling the camp in the context of
modern biopolitics provides an important rubric for future work on the holocaust.
As he writes, “The correct question to pose concerning the horrors committed in
the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how crimes of atrocity could
be committed against human beings. It would be more honest and, above all,
more useful to investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of
power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights
and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as
a crime” (171). In framing the concept of bare life through a cultural graphology
of the storage unit and archive, however, we have indirectly called into question
Agamben’s claim that the camp is the matrix for the modern universalization of
78
homo sacralization—“we are all homines sacrii”—as the central figure for
modernity: “If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it
is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacrii” (115). We reframe
Agamben’s universalization of the camp (which leads him to make a
controversial equation between the victims of the holocaust and people killed in
car accidents) as a question of its “archive -ability.” Following Jacques Derrida in
Archive Fever, we regard the archive as both a literal and metaphorical contact
zone.39 Agamben views the archive as exterior to testimony, as a conceptual,
discursive space housing documents. Testimony thus guarantees not the factual
truth of the statement safeguarded in the archive, but rather its unarchivability, its
exteriority with respect to the archive” (158). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s
Archaeology of Knowledge, Agamben regards the archive as a recording device
for the unrecordable, defining the archive is "the system of relations between the
said and the unsaid" (145) located in opposition to langue as parole is opposed
to parole (144): between the obsessive memory of tradition, which knows only
what has been said, and the exaggerated thoughtlessness of oblivion, the
archive is the unsaid or sayable inscribed in everything that is always forgotten in
the act of saying" (140). 40
Agamben’s neoFoucauldian conception of the archive misses, however, the
way in which the camp is also a future archive / museum to be read but how the
musealization and archivalization of the camp also involves an archivology of
storage and shelving. Rather than being exterior, the archive
produces an exteriority within in which that which is to be read is continually
79
subject to redivisions between life and barelife, between bare and barer life. 41
a different conception of a contact zone, surface, and revelation in order to better
articulate debates over the theology of Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema (image as
resurrection or secular? Is the film Catholic? or not?) as well as Agamben's
secularization of the history of the camp, of history in general, and his turning its
potentially Jewish theology into a Catholic one: "We must cease to look toward .
. . historical processes as if they had an apocalyptic or profane telos in which the
living being and the speaking being, the human and the inhuman--or any terms of
a historical process--are joined in an established, completed humanity and
reconciled in a realized identity. This does not mean that, in lacking an end, they
are condemned to meaningless or the vanity of an infinite, disenchanted drifting.
They have not an end, but a remnant . . . The messianic Kingdom is neither the
future (the millennium) nor the past (the golden age): it is, instead a remaining
time"
Remnants, 159.
See the conflation of WB with Saint Paul in the last chapter of Agamben’s The
Time That Remains.
It’s all about reading the text as an image, overcoming the Jewish Bildverbot.
The secret is that WB was really a Catholic.
I'm also thinking about Derrida's
cinders and ash metaphors--are they metaphors not for leftovers of
already read books but for the entire book as unreadable, already
burned up remainder of a past that can only perhaps be read sometime
in the future? Are books always burning? e Derrida Of Spirit on spirit
80
a flame in Hiedegger)
Home(less), Home(less) on the (Free) Range of Bare Life
Agamben’s account of the camp as the political space that is opened when the
life becomes bare life and the state of exception becomes the norm , even
though it is a delocalization and covers the planet42 as well as invades the interior
of the city, it is still, in terns materialization a holding pen, a cage, temporary or
not. Agamben holds to an unnecessarily reductive confinement model of
biopolitics. By adding that the political space is the camp as archive, we retain
the cage aspect of Foucault carceral genealogical practice of historicism and the
camp of Agamben while saying that within the paradigm of the archive,
confinement is not primary: citizens and illegal immigrants live virtual bare lives
regardless of whether they live as “free range” people or in cages. Even if all life
is bare life and hence may be caged, bare life is still minimally “free” to range
(with papers or without them; with genuine papers or forged papers) within the
planetary space of the political as the archive, even when phenomenalized as
camp or cage. The camp is always manifested as an archival space, whether or
not crimes are committed, the rule of law is followed, and so on, and whether
archivalization is done officially, unofficially, or both, whether the archive is
accessible to the public or classified as top secret.43
Reading Room: the (a)Topology of Shelving
We want to clarify what unread ability means then in terms of a cultural
graphology of the archive and why things—the materials of material cultural
81
studies—constitute for us a figure of the resistance to reading, or historicism as
resistance (reduction of temporality) and space (reduction of space to
architecture as order) and foreclosing attention to written document—as work of
art, as file, as book, questions of calligraphy, microscript, and graphic layout.
We’ll need to turn here to Derrida’s Archive fever (electronic median dhte
archive, topology and various aporias in order to show what is gaining by thinking
through bare life as a question of the archive.
Archivology of Knowledge
The problem of the archive’s internal yet unarchivable exteriority is not that
certain documents become unreadable because invisible (having been lost,
stolen, defaced, faded, etc) but that they are endlessly divisible, subject to
becoming the ash of the archive. In our view, the archive is not about classifying
the world of things but about reshevling and (not) reading what has not yet been
classified or will be / may be reclassified and refiled.44 For us the archive as selfstorage unit produces an unarchivable archive of the stored (a non-organization,
non-classification of shelved materials roughly comparable to Derrida’s anarchic
death drive that can’t be heard or seen, hence cannot be archived) that more or
less temporarily stores what it archives but is also a relay station linked through
an impossible topography inside and outside of institutional organizations such
as the library and the museum (and electronically too).45
Bring in the epilogue of Archive Fever here as a way of showing that the archive
82
resists the reduction of life to organic matter, as a way in which writing performs
the problem.
For Derrida, the not yet read as a refusal to date himself, as a
constant reference to his own works and to the occasion of the conference where
he delivered the now published text, in ways hat are not at all conventional. His
philosophy is always becoming literary as it confused oral delivery and written
publication.46
We would go from Agamben to Derrida and start with the end of Archive Fever,
with the ash of the archive in order to resist some of the ways Derrida's concept
of the archive has been misread and routinzed as just another means of
excluding marginal voices (Bill Sherman's reading of the matriarchive) or the
means by which art can subvert—or fail to subvert--the presumed to be orderly
bureaucratic archive (Sven Spieker’s The Big Archive). In all of these accounts,
the archive is reduced to a Foucauldian subversion and containment model of
power. We could differentiate our understanding archivology from Agamben's
Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge by going straight to the way the
anararchivic repetition of the archive ends up by turning the archive into ash at
the end of Archive Fever and foreground the impression not only as a question of
media but as the retracing by doing the close reading we worked--largely you
worked out--of the ending. We would be arguing implicitly for the necessity of a
double reading, attending to the bizarre paratextual divisions of Archive Fever.
In elucidating the aporias what he calls the “testimonial condition” (Demeures,
41), Derrida notes that testimony in a legal sense has to be live: “For to testify . . .
the witness must be present at the stand himself, without technical interposition.
83
In the law, the testimonial tends, without being able to succeed in this altogether,
to exclude all technical agency. One cannot send a cassette to testify in one’s
place. One must be present, raise one’s hand, speak in the first person and in
the present, and one must do this to testify to a present, to an indivisible moment,
that is at a certain point to moment assembled at the tip of an instanteousness
which must resist division.” (32-33). Testimony excludes technical agency in
order to testify to a temporality of the present to a indivisible instant. Derrida
goes on to explain why this legal view of testimonial is unable able “to succeed in
this altogether.” Testimony requires the possibility of was possible by the Nazis,
but more crucially, by the victims themselves.
The camp is exemplary of the bioplitics of modernity as an archival self-storage
mechanism because it is defined by the unread –ability of documents—papers,
films, photographs, things--written stored and as yet to be read, not, as the is
defined for Agamben, by the witness who speaks paradoxically only of not being
able to speak and is exterior to the archive. Our conception of the “arche-archive
to come” is indebted to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
and Aporias, the latter concerned with Nazism turning to the Marrano, a legally
dead figure as of 1995, to figure the problem of owning one’s own death in the
wake of Nazism.47 Whereas Agamben defines the archive in Remnants of
Auschwitz as a secured place that opposes memory to forgetting, Derrida ends
Archive Fever by redividing the archive without spatializing it as a safeguarded
inside and an unsafe outside: what he calls the “ash of the archive” is a
remainder within the archive that is not archivable, but what has been burned.
84
What Derrida calls the “anarchivology” of archive fever is driven in part by the
necessity of burning and containing the unarchivable ash. We maintain that
archive fever is generated by this constitutive split that enables and disables the
archive, adding that the remaining ash remains always waiting to be stored in an
urn already under construction. The arche-archive sheds light on the sacrificial
economy required for the camp’s archivalization to work: what is destroyed has
to be boxed and locked in the box of the archive. Reconstructing the camp as a
storage archive in general necessarily means that a camp will have to be created
within the camp in order to establish a serviceable library and set of research and
exhibition practices differentiated as normal and pathological.
Yet the setting of norms requires endless selection of what needs to be
tr/ashed. Agamben attempts to make an end run around the archive by defining
remnants not in terms of media or records but negatively: “the remnants of
Auschwitz—the witnesses—are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the
drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them.” (164).48 Even
these negative remnants have to be archived, however, in order to become
readable: they have to filed, classified, labeled, organized. Given the
endlessness of the production of unarchivable ashes within the archive that are
nevertheless exterior to it precisely because they are unarchivable, the very drive
to classify and establish norms for archival use paradoxically makes the archival
fever of pathologization rise even higher as resistance among the resisters
multiplies.
85
hence of grammatology: even if an illiterate witness must nevertheless be
“capable of inscribing, tracing, repeating, remembering, performing the acts of
synthesis that writing is. Thus he needs some writing power, at the very least,
some possibility of tracing or imprinting in a given element . . . What I say for the
first time, if it is a testimony, is already a repetition, at least a repeatability; it is
already an iterability, more than once at once, more than an instant in one
instant; and that being the case the instant is always divide at this very point, at
the point of its writing. (40;41). Consequently, testimony admits techne even
before the invention of particular recording media:
The root of the testimonial problem of techne is to be found here.
The technical reproducibility is excluded form testimony, which
always calls for a presence of the live voice in the first person. But
from the moment that testimony must be able to be repeated,
techne is admitted; it is introduced where it is excluded. For this,
one not need wait for cameras, videos, typewriters, and computers.
As soon as the sentence is repeatable, that is, from its origin, the
instant it is pronounceable and intelligible, thus idealizable, it is
already instrumentalizable and affected by technology. And
virtuality. (42)
The temporality of testimony is thus similar to what Derrida calls, in Archive
Fever, “the moment of archivization strictly speaking” this moment “is not . . . [a]
so-called live or spontaneous memory but rather a certain hypomnesic and
prosthetic experience of the technical substrate” (25). Yet Derrida’s critique of
86
archeological hallucination of the moment of contact provides with another kind
of temporality, that which cannot be repeated. The “matter” of the substrate’s
techne is a surface, a contact sheet, like Gradiva’s footprint in the ash of
Vesuvius, the moment of its impression never capable of being retraced, only
hallucinated by the archivist turned archeologist.49
From the ash of the archive and the impression hallucinated by Norbert Hanold
the archeologist in Jensen's Gradiva and performed as such by Derrida, we could
extend his account of the media of the impression to the subjectile of citizenship,
the passport. In other words, we could read the passport with Derrida's paper
machine. So we come out with the archive as a question not just of biopolitics
and bare life, etc , but having shown the necessity and advantages of using the
archive rather than the camp as a way of showing that even in the camp,
biopolitics is always a question of biobibliopolitics, hence of the yet to be read,
re-stored, reshelved, retraced. Sovereignty then has to be thought in relation to
files, the book, calligraphy, documents, the work of art, etc--a different kind of
history of the book or files.
the book, like the archive is spectral, hence is never closed. But it isn’t open
either. Authority both increased and decreased by the addition and endless of
the archive. If the same holds true of the library (as one kind of archive), it may
hold true for the book as well.
Derrida discusses the text and the substrate or
subjectile (artaud book; Archive Fever; Paper machine) but never puts any
pressure on a distinction between the texts ands it protection or storage device.
87
Open is strictly a metaphor for the archive—never closed. Of the secret itself,
there can be no archive. The secret is the very ash of the archive, the place
where it no longer makes any sense to say “the very ash” . . . That is what this
literature attests. (100)
We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he [Freud] may have burned.
We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive fever, what may
have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or his ‘life.’ Burned
without him, without remains and without knowledge. With no possible response,
be it spectral or not short of or beyond a suppression, on the other edge of
repression, originary or secondary, without a name, without the least symptom,
and without even an ash. (101)
Derrida’s ash-hole of the archive as his “meta-phor-writing” of the arche-writing
that “precedes” speech and (empirical) writing.
“an incompleteness and a future that belong to the normal time of scientific
progress but a specifically Jewish archive is not of the order such a relative
incompleteness. It is no longer only the provisional indetermination that opens
the ordinary field of a scientific work in progress and always unfinished, in
particular because new archives can still be discovered, out of secrecy or the
private sphere, so as to undergo new interpretations. It is no longer a question of
the same time of the same field, and the relationship to the archive. (1994, 52)
88
The truth is spectral, and this is its part of truth which is irreducible by
explanation. (87)
The chain of substitutions (even the metaphor of chain) that allows
deconstruciton to create a non-binary structuring of binary structures and their
exclusions
Archive
“There is no metaarchive.” (67)
Archive fever, a be sick but to be in need of archives
Archive fever means “to burn with a passion. It is never put to rest, interminably,
from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the
archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something anarchives itself. It
is to have a compulsively repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an
irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the
return of the most archaic place of absolute commencement. (91)
There is an incessant tension . . . between the archive and archaeology. They
will always be close to the other, resembling each other, hardly discernible in
their co-implication , and yet radically incompatible, heterogeneous, than say,
different with regard to the origin, in divorce with regard to the arkhe/ (92)
In his essay on Jensen’s novel Gradiva, about an archeologist who hallucinates
the ghost of a young woman named Gradiva an ancient Roman who died when
Mt Vseussius erted in Pompeii, Freud wants “explain the haunting of the
archaeologist with a logic of repression . . . claims again to bring to light a more
originary origin that that of the specter. In the outbidding he wants to be an
89
archivist who is more of an archaeologist than the archaeologist . . . He wants to
exhume a more archaic impression, he wants to exhibit a more archaic imprint
than the one the other archaeologists of all kinds bustle around, those of
literature and those of classical objective science . . . an impression that is almost
no longer an archive but almost confuses itself with the pressure of the footstep
that leaves its still-living mark on a substrate, a surface, a place of origin. When
the step is still one with the subjectile. In the instant when the printed archive is
yet to be detached from the primary impression. . . . In its singular,
irreproducible, and archaic origin. In the instant when the imprint is to be left,
abandoned by the pressure of the impression. . . . An archive without archive,
where, suddenly indiscernible form the impression of hits imprint, Gradiva’s
footstep speaks by itself! (97-98)
The Not Yet Read (as the Not Yet Dead)
Linking the camp to the archive (figured by the self-storage unit) means that
unread -ability as such becomes for us a question of the not yet read. Just as the
archive is orientated to the future, not the past, according to Derrida, our notion
of reading is oriented to a future, a return of the repressed that is not simply a
hallucination but the condition of knowledge (WB on reshelving books of mentally
ill). In Derrida's terms, the not yet read is an overprinted instant where life and
machine intersect (the Macintosh anecdote about the phone and portable
Macintosh in California), a present present, a present past, and a present future,
not a past, present, and future.
90
The not yet read as book burning (WB in the Storyteller) a secret
that cannot be narrated (ash of the archive; Maranno in Aporias and on Marx as
a Maranno in Ghostlier Demarcations). 50
The not yet read as what goes missing, gets missed (Theodor Adorno on his
books as cats, as missing when you want to find them).51
The not yet read as a lapse, an anecdote, an autobiographical
anecdote about breakdown, failure, lost mss. We can consider the question of
the not yet read in terms of Derrida's mediatized, virtualized archive; Derrida's
central distinction is between newborn and phantom (circumcision and
phylactery) as opposed to Agamben's more commonsensical distinction
between bios and thanatos (organic and inorganic) and between bios and
zoe.
By subsuming the camp to the archive, our central concern necessarily becomes
reading. Once we realize the Homo Sacer is always already virtual / or has been
virtualized in modernity (1930s), then we necessarily have to see bios and biopolitics as a
question of unread -ability, of reading as what remains. We think of reading primarily as
the resistance to reading, reading as the not yet read, reading as comfort through
destruction (WB on book burning of the storyteller); on the read as a medium (not
reducible to physical materials). But all of these ways of thinking about reading have to
routing for us through the archive--reading as refiling, and even more crucially as
reshelving. Reading as refiling / reshelving becomes a way of living biopolitics virtually,
a biobiblioprocessing and thanatobiblioprocessing. The archive, storage unit, as a
91
temporary space for damaged life, not only of preservation and safe-guarding--like a
museum--or destruction--like a crematorium), but of bare life lived virtually. When and
where you begin and where and when you stop reading become instances where the
reader becomes sovereign--moments of decision, moments of danger (especially to the
reader, who may have completely miss something). In this sense, sovereignty and homo
sacer collapse into each other in new ways (in ways other than the Schmitt or WB had
thought, since homo sacer becomes sovereign only over his own homo sacerness by
decamping to the archive). We go from bare life and the camp to the archive and
bibiblioprocessing, paper persons versus paperless persons.
People are fractured—read negatively as the fragmentation of the subject into
pieces, it’s part of a discourse about reading people. Potentialities for living
come out of this reading / resistantly.
Biopolitical processing is good and bad, it’s like the pharmakon.
Track down newspaper story about use of written descriptions of what people
looked like before there were photographs.
Perhaps add brief discussion of Renais Night and Fog and Toute la memoire as
well as of the issue of archiving in Mr. Death and Shoah, as well as the photos of
passports and I.D. materials in Night and Fog.
Not yet read as a question of biopolitics, nationalism and
religion. the future anterior of the nation's past, readable only in
a future (archi-fascism of Heidegger, according to Lacoue-Labarthe)
In terms of the future anterior of reading and biopolitics (race,
nationalism, religion)), I think we can bring in the paratactics of
92
reading (Adorno's "Parataxis" essay), the need to (un)read from side
to side rather than to unpack (or think one can unpack) and
reopen--archiving assumed to be of documents that are all open, on the
table, nothing closed about them boxing a reading is equated with
state classification of a doc as secret.
Integrate Lanzmann’s repeated footage of the train in Shoah to the train in The
Train, Mr Klein and The Counterfeiters.
Nazis being reproduced as remote figures, on relay systems? What does it
mean to televise them in a documentary film made for television (or seemingly
made for television)?
93:30 “Letze ziel” translated as “last destination”
Paratactical Reading as Unreading?
Lacoue-Larbarthes’ Heidegger book is a very subtle critique of Heidegger “archifascist” thought and analysis the “infinitely reticent complicity” (47) of Adorno's
brutal critique of Heidegger (in Adorno's "Parataxis" essay and Jargon of
Authenticity). It’s clear that LL has to route his argument through Hoelderlin
because of MH’s take on German poetry, but it’s not clear to me why he needs
Badiou. (Moreover, he says “it is necessary to make an exception of Hoedlerlin”
30.)
I wondered why LL is invested in replacing poetry with mytheme (p. 40) and why
93
he reconciles so easily with Badiou, who wants to equate suture with mytheme in
the name of a non-violent reading of poetry and also in the name of philosophical
philosophy (the matheme) shorn of aesthetics / poetry (p. 81). The convergence
of suture and mytheme is not only possible (Badiou) but probable (-L).
In the postscript, which comes after the conference and a few days later in the
form of a letter—a strange kind of extension, or posting happening here—Badiou
seems to want to save philosophy from poetry and thereby get rid of Heidegger
and deconstruction too. Hence Meillasoux’s attack as apostle and prophet on
Derrida in After Finitude. Hence the suture is a kind of amputation, a privation of
philosophy that is the cost of its purification (set theory). So LL’s “mytheme” may
be doing a more subtle sort of operation, a wounding that is a separation and
opening—by saying that Heidegger is discussing the mytheme, not poetry, MH
saves poetry for philosophy, and German Romanticism from national
aestheticism (sur-facism and archi-fascism) and Wagner’s total work of art
oriented to the future and giving “the people the language and the figures in
which to speak itself and recognize itself, that is ism to identify (with) itself” 31) in
the exception of WB (“the single case,” 34), whose essay on FH precedes MH’s
book, and the MH echoes even if he never read it. So philosophy and poetry can
be reunited in WB and divorced in MH as a different kind of distancing from MH’s
or Ent-furing. Or, as LL puts it early on: “After two thousand years of
versification . . . poetry attempts to respond once again to this vocation that it is
more than political—I would say: archi-political. But perhaps it does so to its
own detriment and misfortune, if this vocation is definitively dictated to it by
94
philosophy.” (26).
So the dictamen is for LL perhaps a troping of definitive dictation—a synethis, as
he says, of Dichtung and Dictare—that lays out the Kantian precondition of
poetry, not poetry itself, as poetry’s inner form. This is the paradox that
Hoelderlin’s poems disclose in their poetry—the conditions of poetry that are
partly philosophical but not “definitively dictated” by philosophy. LL opens up a
dialogue between philosophy and poetry—suture as not a cutting of dialogue or a
return of philosophy to its origins (which only go back to Heidegger on the
Sprung, leap in Contributions to Philosophy and elsewhere) and Walter Benjamin
on the Ursprung. Hence the word “convergence” (81) in the postscript too to
describe the similarity between suture and mytheme.
The suture is not the
same as the mytheme, but almost the same (they may be sad to have an
uncanny relation—difference in their sameness). Because the repressed for both
writers is deconstruction (no mention of Derrida on Heidegger or WB; no mention
of de Man on MH on FH). LL does mention “deconstruciton” in quotation marks
(p. 78) but uses it to mean “unworks” and in relation to WB, whose comments at
the end of his essay on FH and “princieple of sobriety . . . as that which dictates
to poetry its proper task. At the end of his essay, B writes the following: its
political, and more than political, significance should be immediately apparent”
(78). What kind of deconstruction is this? “immediately apparent?” Totally
naïve. What does and more than political mean? What is the surplus her that
ispased over with reticence (so clear it need not be said)? Is LL doing what he
asks if Heidegger did to FH, namely, “refused to read” (31) WB, LL even refusing
95
to read WB’s refusal to read the second of the two versions of FH’s poem)? Is
keeping Heidegger in play at the end (p. 80) the cost for LL of keeping an
un(w)holy Jew as non-Jew (not theologico-political but theologico-poetic)? “There
is no way to attach any theological-politics to this failing theologico-poetics. No
historical mission of the Poem or the Hymn . . . [WB] will make Hoelderlin the
secret—eccentric—center of Romanticism” (79). I don’t think LL ever mentions
that WB was a German-Jew. And isn’t FH a case of poetry becoming literally
un/readable in its revisions, the late Hoedlerlin going unread by everyone
because it is regarded as ravings of a madman?
This law governing the Ent-furing or distance of myth . . . would permit us to
glimpse the appearance, in the greatest poems, of this nonmythological and non
mythic figure, since there is no Gestalt that is not by definition mythic or
mythological. Every great poem would thus tend toward a figure that is
absolutely paradoxical in that this figure would be sustained by nothing but the
very lack and default of that which ought to support it.” (52) Yet MH is a
necessary remainder, a kind of coffin (80), in which LL can incessantly s/lay to
rest WB on German soil and preserve poetry as the “archi-political”(26)— Or at
least in what LL calls the West (that is not geographical) and keeping WB out of
theology and keeping MH in the position of forever having to pay off a debt to
WB. MH becomes a weak power that enables WB’s weak power—but LL’s
weakening of MH, MH’s weakness once LL has divorced MH’s theologico-potiics
from theologico-poetics), also makes his power weaker and thus stronger than
WB’s weak messianism. Heidegger becomes a spectre, the uncanny
96
persistence of theological in the political.
Perhaps LL needs the postscript—the posted partial postscript that takes the
form of a reply to a post-script sent to him by AB, into another double the two
who think the 1930s together. For Badiou the suture is the detached; for LL, the
dictamen, not the mytheme, seems to be that which can “in no way attach” (79)
politics to poetics.
Mythological is about unity; mythic is about internal tensions within the unity 95152).
I ended up with the following series of undecidable (for me) questions about LL's
"paratactic" reading, his own paradoxical " reticent complicity" (47-49) with
Heidegger, his detour through Heidegger (via Adorno's essay on MH,
"Parataxis") to get to WB on F Hoedlerlin and the “dictamen” (“evokes kinship of
dichten and dictare” (51); the task of the duty “located somewhere between
rendering and abandoning, giving over and giving up” (51); inner form as material
content and material truth, precondition of poetry) after leaving MH behind in the
dust. Even the last sentence is devoted to WB, after a paragraph linking MH and
WB. Is LL doing what he says TA didn't do, going as far as TA should have done
and blowing Heidegger up (and saying what needs to be said by locating in MH's
thought a politics of archi-fascism rather than sur-fascism), but then only
apparently saving MH's thought from his politics by first condemn it all the more
powerfully (MH wants to speak the truth of fascism) after having seemed to
97
defend it from accusations of Nazism, etc., (in terms of what he did or didn’t do,
though condemning Heidegger for never speaking adequately about 1933-45 or
asking to be forgiven). By remaining within an aesthetic theory / negative
dialectics that equate poetry and philosophy with truth, TA remains caught up in
MH’s mythological (not mythic) political thought of the nation as the future to be
fulfilled, of theologico-political account of the poetry to think philosophy (in
theologico-poetic terms). (Heidegger’s “political preaching” [83]; “Heidegger’s
theologico-political preaching” (63); see also similar disparagements of
Heidegger’s “sermonizing”; yet see also the assertion followed by its negation,
and the opening of a withdrawal from politics to ontology (essence): “Heidegger’s
political preaching is encrypted: It is not a political preaching, and in order to
hear it, it is necessary to take a step beyond—or rather back from—the political”
[83]) LL can afford to end his book by align MH’s thought with WB’s in a kind of
meaningless gesture of generosity before ending with a tribute sentence to WB
because MH has already been eviscerated, so the MH and WB linkage has no
charge in it, no depth charge, no debt, no danger, just a bomb defused). Has LL
turned TA's "parataxis" essay into a paratactical reading of MH’s political thought
in order to finish the job TA started but didn’t finish? Is LL then only pretending to
be complicit, whether he knows he is pretending or not?
Or, is LL truly attempting to salvage Heidegger's by going around ("para") it via
Adorno, by conceding TA's critique while then extending it, acknowledging LL’s
own complicity, in order not to demolish MH but to read his tainted (archi-fascist)
political thought (inscribed in his writings, 66) as one gesture, a gesture others
98
have had to repeat, including TA and LL), of complicity and reticence (TA repeats
MH, in that case)? I tend to go with the former reading, especially given that he
repeats Agamben's move (or vice versa) in Homo Sacer almost word for word
when using WB to Klossowski on Bataille to condemn Bataille as a (sur-)fascist
(p. 66). If this is the case, there is no archi-ethical politics to be distinguished
from the archi-fascist politics. Yet the book's thought is so subtle and careful,
even temperate in tone and so patient, that I wonder if the book is better than LL
knows it is, that it opens up a paratactical reading of its own parataxis and
paratactical maneuvers in order to render itself unreadable (undecidable--to
make of paratatics a kind of de Manian resistance to reading as reading, a
reinscription of reticence about complicity). It does kind of shock me that he
does not address de Man's brilliant essay on Heidegger and Hoelderlin in
Blindness and Insight--perhaps that repression is necessary, that is LL's
reticence about complicity, a reticence and complicity not totally reducible to the
archi-ethical because it has no beginning and no ending but always depends for
its force on its paratactical mobility. The perhaps fatal weakness or strength of
the book is the thinking of the 1930s as an exception that needs to be explained
in "historico-philosophic" (83) terms. I think Agamben is much stronger in Homo
Sacer on his embrace and rejection of this kind of method.
The Time That Remains is both calmer, more accessible and yet also more
insane even than Homo Sacer. Everyone is Paul. Heidegger is Paul! WB is
Paul! Kafka is Paul! Marx is Paul! Deleuze is Paul! Agamben also caricatures
deconstruction while reproducing a very old -fashioned mode of Derridean
99
deconstruction--showing the supplement that is the condition of a binary
opposition that represses the supplement (defers it, delays it incessantly--p. 57;
70--the remnant being the supplement of non-coincidence). It's like all Agamben-a sober priest masquerading as an academic but channeling Artaud in The
Passion of Joan of Arc-- read was Signature, Event, Context and Of
Grammatology. Still, I really like what he does with the people (neither part nor
all, neither majority nor minority) . 57. There is something really refreshing about
his desire to move outside a victim discourse while still keeping the victims
central--just not one type of victim. yet making the remnant "the figure . . . , or the
substantially assumed by a people in a decisive moment, and as such the only
real political subject" (57) means that Agmaben effectively turns the remnant into
an aporia (space and time actually become substitutable variations of the same
structure--the same figure--of the "contracted" remnant) and hence all reading
can do is to "render inoperative" certain kinds of misreadings (misreadings which
have nevertheless clearly persisted, hence the need for him to write his book and
correct past mistakes).
There's also a way in which The Time That Remains reads as an ars moriendi, a
saving of a time forthe end, a fantasy that yo can prepare youself for your
death. “operational time” is the time you have to think the end in the present, not
think about the end (eschaton), and so is implicitly distinguished from what
opertationla time renders inoperative.
He distinguishes operational time from supplementary time on 71. Also a weird
line about the Maranos. Demeure and Aporias seem to me so much stronger.
100
Spare Life
Baidou on suturing Philosophy from four extra-philosophical concerns: politics,
science (positivism)—pure philosophy is the matheme for Badiou. Badiou’s
concern with the suture another kind of philosophical attachment disorder. See
rLacoue-Labarthe quoting Alain Badiou, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, p.
81: I have always conceived the suture as an operation carried out by
philosophy, in some ways grafted onto certain aspects that have been unilaterally
detached and isolated from the post-Romantic poem”
L-L says that “only a historico-philosophical interpretation is capable of providing
access to national Socialism in its essence, that is, to what gives it its singularity
in comparison to analogous phenomena in the first half of the twentieth century
(which for the sake of convenience we can call “totalitarianisms”) and to what
makes it an exception.”
LL,83.
This ishteexact oppositeof watAgamben says he isdoing—NS is not an
exceptionandAgambaen is getting a problem that is hisotircal but notan
ahistorico-hiloosphical argument.
Following Agamben’s concern witheh immedicacy of life as political, we are
saying that media are not immediately political either, pure instruments to
organize and capture bare life.
Hospital room is also an archive—medical records, testing. “Care” and “crime”
are on a continuum. What constitutes “care” and what constitutes “protection”
101
(arresting and detaining someone for his own protection or killing n the name of
protection, as in the Nazi extermination camps) may become undedidable. We
concede Chow and Butler’s critique of Agamben in saying that there is no
transcendental justice, that biopolitics makes any recourse to a transcendental
justice inoperable or ineffective—the paradox of sovereignty remains unresolved,
and to focus only on the victim (especially in sacrificial terms) is to evade the
problem of biopolitics, a problem that Agamben rightly puts front and center, by
thinking that you , who speak as general or specific intellectual in the name of the
victim, are not yourself virtually “bare life.” The archive as nomos then opens up
a much wider spectrum of life and death processing through media in which the
paradoxes of biopolitics may be redefined as paralegal practices which become
operative through a tropology of reshelving as classification, filing, but most
crucially reading.
Hediegger as the real beginning as homeless (uncanny) and violent. LacoueLabarthes, p. 7
LL repeats Agamben’s critiqueof Bataille via WB to Klossowski—doing the work
of fascism, p. 66 in speaking of Heidegger’s “archi-fascism”, which “has nothing
to do” with Breton’s 1934 “sur-fascism.” WB’s remark discloses MH’s “archifascism”: “Heidegger’s discourse against ‘real fascism’ had no other ambition
than to liberate the truth of fascism.” (66) Heidegger
“For thiis tetragic for us: that packed into some simple box[Behae;ter], wevery
quickly move away from the realm of he living, and not that—consumed in
102
flames—we expiate the flames which we could not tame” Hoelderlin cited by LL,
p. 54
Dis-figuration, pp. 54-55
Dis-figuration . . . is the very failure of the figure, which is to say the purest
affirmation of the il faut. Put another way, dis-figuration is the retreat or
withdrawal of the figure. . . . neither does dis-figuration signify the pure and
simple disappearance of the figure: It designates its becoming absent (because
henceforth impossible), and it does so by way of what this becoming absent
leaves as an ineffaceable trace. Dis-figuration affects everything within the order
of the transport, as Hoelderlin says in French, when he elaborates the so-called
formal or structural conception of tragedy and introduces the important notion of
the ‘caesura.’”(55)
Heidegger has a “mission” (66). He preaches, sermonizes. Hoelderlin does not.
Hoelderlin “had too great a sense of transcendence , even if the latter offered
only the faceless face of its withdrawal. And especially, ruining all the preaching,
there is the final disorganization of the work, the reworkings that reach the limits
of the readable, the prosaic literalization of the discourse, as well as the fierce
attack on the hymn and the desolation of the last poems. All of which Heidegger
refused to read or—who knows?—did not even see . . .” Lacoue-Labarthes, (31,
emphasis and ellipsis in the original).
103
The phrase “il faut” the title of LL’s second caper is used twice in the mass
murder / jail scene in Army f Shadows, as they walk down the hall.
See Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion of the dictamen in “The Courage of Poetry”as
the Kantian condition for WB of poetry, of inner form as material content and as
truth content68–80.
The dictamen is two concepts: first, the unity of task and testimony and, second,
the Gestalt, or figure, “the figure is for each poem the mode of presentation and
of articulation of its inner form or content.” (72).
Gestalt refers to myth, but not to the mythological (73; 74) “The mythic—which is
the dictamen, or which the dictamen is—is experienced itself in tis configuration
or in its figurability. This is why the poem is at bottom a gesture of existence—in
view of existence. The poem, to remain wihtBenjamin;s vocabulary, is a figure of
life. Which amounts ot saying that life is poetic.”
74.topos, 75
WB: The princniple of the dictamen as such is the supreme sovereignty of
relation” 77)—all based ona a read ong of WB’s early essay (Vol 1 of haravrd
UP) entitled “On Two Poems by Friedrich Hoelderlin”
WB deconstructs or “unworks” the mythological andtheological (78)
“In other words, there is no way to attach any theologico-politics to this failing
theologicao poetics.” (79)
104
dctamnis aboutan “archi-pethics of poeticizing”
ButLL ends by refusing to totally differntiaitng MH and WB, : “In reality , for both
Benjamin and Heidgeger [who is still caught up in mtythological and success
rahte rhtan failure of the mythic]—but certainly not in the same way—intransivitiy
an dtranssitivty do notcease to encroach upon one another. And it is a matter, in
both cases, of what poetry testifies to in attesting to itself as such, tat is, in
attesting to itself in its relation to truth, in saying the truth. Is it a (modern)
vocation to marytyrdom? Courage itself? Yes, but in the mode of failure.” (80)
Life and poem ,p. 72-73
Testimony of a truth or of the truth, p. 71
WB and Heidegger part of the same epoch (68), just as Adorno is complicit with
MH as well in suturing philosophy to poetry as mytheme (44-51)
Similarly, historians are bio-biblo-processers—they use fragments/ documents in
the archive in certain ways to tell their micro or macro histories. So are
anthropologists who use the raw data of their field notes.
Only a short chapter of Memoires des camp covers 1945-1999. See Spectral
Evidence for more in memorial / art about the camps.
Life and Death Certificates
By putting pressure on Agamben's account
virtual bare life as mediatized bare life, we could rethink the opposition
he too quickly draws between Nazi biopolitics and Heidegger’s Dasein as
105
an existential analytic by taking up the question of technology in
Heidegger that Derrida does not address at the end of Aporias. And connect it to
hiedegger saying the essence of technology is not technology, that techne has
nothing to od with technology but with the work of art.
In “Gesclecht: the Hand,” Derrida reads Heidegger as anti-technology, especially
modern technology; ditto his “Drugs” interview in Points—technology is an add
on for Heidegger, Derrida says). This is a common reading (see Hubert Dreyfus;
also J. Goldberg in, I think, Shakespeare’s Hand, or maybe Writing Matter). But
we could take up the frequent pairing of Benjamin and Heidegger (post-scriptum,
last page of “Force of Law,” end of Lacoue-Labarthe's Heidegger and the Politics
of Poetry and end of Arendt’s memoir on WB in the intro to Iluminations) in order
to arrive at a more nuanced reading of Heidegger and WB on mediatized, virtual
bare life, the standstill / gestus of epic theater as opposed to bios that departs
from or precedes bios, as in Agamben's account.
Home(less), Home(less) on the (Free) Range of Bare Life
Agamben’s account of the camp as the political space that is opened when the
life becomes bare life and the state of exception becomes the norm , even
though it is a delocalization and covers the planet52 as well as invades the interior
of the city, it is still, in terns materialization a holding pen, a cage, temporary or
not. Agamben holds to an unnecessarily reductive confinement model of
biopolitics. By adding that the political space is the camp as archive, we retain
the cage aspect of Foucault carceral genealogical practice of historicism and the
106
camp of Agamben while saying that within the paradigm of the archive,
confinement is not primary: citizens and illegal immigrants live virtual bare lives
regardless of whether they live as “free range” people or in cages. Even if all life
is bare life and hence may be caged, bare life is still minimally “free” to range
(with papers or without them; with genuine papers or forged papers) within the
planetary space of the political as the archive, even when phenomenalized as
camp or cage. The camp is always manifested as an archival space, whether or
not crimes are committed, the rule of law is followed, and so on, and whether
archivalization is done officially, unofficially, or both, whether the archive is
accessible to the public or classified as top secret. And it not just travel that is
the issue—there is transmission and translation as well, even when in the camp,
as Fittkow makes clear: newspapers, radio broadcasts, telephone calls,
telegrams, rumors inside about what is happening outside, and various kinds of
unworking. There is a homelessness and uncanniness that traverses the political
space of the archive, within and without its manifestations as cages and camps.
The archive is the nomos of the earth, not the camp. The political space of the
archive includes the camp within it. The archive, not the camp, is the nomos, the
paradigm of the political space opened up in modernity when the state of
exception becomes the norm and all life becomes virtually homines sacri. The
camp is always already an event of archivalization. Biopolitics is therefore not
abut confinement (only, or even primarily) but about various kinds of mediatized
transmission, translation, transiit--or bio-biblio-processing.53
The camp is an extension of the archive, or the bio-bioblio-porcessing of
107
virtually bare life. The real point of tension is in the state’s use of modern media
to auto-archive persons and the capacities the self-storage unit—which look like
camps—surrounded by wire, a series of barracks-- offers person to write their
own auto-bio-biblio-graphies—
Fittkow’s book is novel and a document and is composed of various documents
that generate narratives that can turn out well or badly. The book is written with
a discontinuous way that insists on the local links between papers and stories
and the heterogeneity of the stories she tells, often as transcriptions/ dictations.
She refuses to classify her story, subject it to archivalization, toorder. Instead
chronology is just one order among others. The “Case” she tells is only “based
on the reports of Varian Fry and ?” It’s a second hand account. She does not
include a facsimile of the document or a transcription of it as an appendix (as at
the end of Mark Bernhard’s Scrolls of Auschwitz. She does not list her sources—
she does not offer any documentary kinds of corroboration (that give her
testimony more evidentiary value—it is not written as a legal brief). She does not
giver her birth history. She is not really telling ”her” story but the story of her
experiences with problems attached to the state’s auto-archivalzation (forgery,
counterfeit, bribing, errors, bad paper quality, and so on) to delay to resist,
knowing always that a list can perilous in one case and life saving in another; that
an exit visa can be of value then of no value when the date of expiration is
reached. She navigates but does not control the process of her auto-archivo-biobiblio-graphization. There is no way to predict or to tell when is a good time or a
bad time. Even forms may be filled out with intended error to be read as
108
unintended error. Transportation, translation, language (expand on langue versus
parole in Agamben) as a medium (W Benjamin) and uncanny. There is a kind of
tracking system (chip passport; cell phones; dates on passports that are stamped
and scanned). The camp includes selection, processing, photography (initially)
tattooing, ordering, and so on. Fittkow offers various kinds of formal resistance
to being read as a coherent person, in terms of ego psychology or anthropology.
She refuses to be classified (like Arendt’s account of WB as unclassifiable),
processed, read. Her life is a series of fragments akin to Adorno’s aphorisms in
Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life that are not metynyms for a
whole but have the unlimited space (a fragment can be infinitely small and
infinitely large) Blanchot discuses in The Writing of the Disaster.
Still need to work back in your account of
hosting, perhaps of the "hostipality" of the archive as paradigm of
the political space of modernity.
These writings and many others I wanted to leave behind as an everlasting
testimonial for the days of peace in the future, so tha thte world may know what
is happening here. I buried the writings in ashes, assuming that would be the
safest place, where they could certainly dig, in order to find the traces of the
millions who were killed. But lately they have begun to obscure the facts, and the
ashes which were used to accumulate are beung finely ground and thrown into
the Vistula ,so that the stream will wash them away.”
--Zalman Gradowski, 6 September 1944, Letter 41 Scrolls of Auschwitz, 244
109
Even personal documents, which are extremely important in wartime, must be
handed over. Nothing must remain in your possession;not even a document
attesting to your identity and place of origin is necessary here.”
--Zalman Gradowski, 6 September 1944, Letter 40, undated, Scrolls of
Auschwitz, 197
Now, my friend, that I have given you your instructions for our journey, I will take
you on a tour of one of the infinite number of Polish camps. . . Come, my friend,
let us descend into the camp
--Zalman Gradowski, 6 September 1944, Letter 1, undated, Scrolls of Auschwitz,
176
In Polish, Russian, French, German, and English, the same sentence:
“Take interest in this document, which contains very important material for the
historian.” Scrolls of Auschwitz, (173)
We are talking about past, present, and future events,” a composition of forces
and discourse which seem to have been waging merciless war on each other (for
example from 1933) to our time. .. . Nazism was not born in the desert. (109)ism,
naturalism and racism except by reinscribing sprit in into an oppositional
determination (39)
“Even if all forms of complicity are not equivalent, they are irreducible” (40)
my map of unreading, or paratactical reading (for chapter one):
De Man doesn't read Adorno (Parataxis); de Man's essay reads like a defense of
Heidegger against Adorno when the two essays are read together.
110
LL reads Adorno but not Derrida or de Man; LL accuses Heidegger of not reading
Hoelderlin, but LL doesn't read Hoelderlin at all.
In Of Spirit, Derrida reads Heidegger's injunction against using the word spirit
(not reading it) and has a brilliant account of the way Heidegger's unthought is
not reducible to a kind of symptom one could run through a psychoanalytic
detection machine to find; Derrida reads de Man, but only Allegories of Reading,
not de Man's Heidegger essay.
Derrida's Of Spirit also helps make clear that Georg Trakl (H's attempt to
deChristianize him) is as crucial as late Hoelderlin in understanding Heidegger's
relation to Nazi racial biopolitics, Heidigger's spirtualization of Nazism.
“the ekklesia, the community messianic vocations, wishes to impart to
itself an organization distinct from the community while pretending to coincide
with it. . . .What happens to the as not in all of this? Doesn’t the messianic
vocation become reduced to a sort of mental reserve, or, in the best of cases, to
a kind of Marranism ante litteram?” Agamben The Time That Remains, 33
So we can also connect, as I said, Agamben's use of the Archaeology of
Knowledge in Remnants to his use of Discipline and Punish and History of
Sexuality in Homo Sacer. We can put this all in a sentence and footnote in the
intro after the section on the box when we get to the critique of Agamben on he
camp.
First Section is on the box, reading and biopolitics.
111
2. Second is the archive versus the camp as the nomos of modernity. Breaks
down into two moves: A. Addresses Agamben’s use of virtuality and gets at
media of the archive; second, it gets at a confusion in Homo Sacer about the
concentration camp and the camp and the racializing of biopolitics.
Criitque of liberal democracy lies less on Foucault than on Schmitt. Foucualt is
finally left behind because he didn’t understand how total biopoltiics are.
Put that in the first chapter, we Derrida’s Archive Fever is necessary to think
through the mediatization of the archive but that it also routes the archive through
a Freudian and Jewish path that allows us to rethink the biopolitics of the archive
in terms of 1933 and the 30s and the aftermath of WWII by reusing a salvific
account of the archive and of reading. Agamben wants to save Heidegger from
the Nazis. So we turn first to the Maranno in Aporia and oppose the reading of
Heidegger to the figure of the Musselman in Agamben. And we find in this
debate over Hiedegger a scene of unreading, of the future anterior of reading, of
reading the past only in the future, of the Germans becoming German the way
the Greeks became the Grees, not as an archi-fascist myth (another salvific
reading by LL, trades Adorno and all of German Romanticisim for WB) but a
scene of remittance to reading. LL reads Adorno , who he says does ot rad
Hiedegger well; LL does not read de Man, but de Man does not rad Adorno.
Derrida does not read LL but does read de Man, only Allegories of Reading, not
de Ma’s Heidegger essay. Of Spirit offers a model of reticence and complicit that
cannot be reduced to the archivable transcription. This amounts to a cultural
graphology of the archive—of unread –ability and the future anterior of a
112
theologico-poltiics that is always more or less attached to a theologico poetics.
Philosophy cannot be reduced to a matheme, but is hybrid, cannot be reduced to
poetry severed from mytheme.
Then we go to Demeures in order to trace the movies and media thread.
Then we go to back to Agamben and racial biopolitics via media--the debate over
the archiving of it concentration camp—the scrolls of Auschwitz as a mythological
future anterior reading—the archivist versus the kook in Dr. Death, then Night
and Fog and Toute la memoire du Monde and image versus text in Lanzmann.
Bring in the Derrida Cahiers du Cinema interview as well as Echographies. Then
to the post-script of Archive Fever. Or put then Night and Fog and Toute la
memoire du Monde at the end of chapter two. So throughout the book, here is a
theological thread linking Jews and Greeks, and Germans, reading the one with
he other, and coming up against the Roman reading of law in Agamben.
Hiedegger refers to the lecture hall versus the movie as a gathering in
Gesamtausgabe vol. 55 Heraklit / Der Anfang des Abendlandischen Denkens Logik. Heraklits Lehre Vom Logos.
Author: Heidegger, Martin 1889-1976
Published: Frankfurt am Main : Vittorio Klostermann, 1987, 1979, pp. 269, 397.
113
Three major points to make in the intro after we finish the first section and move
on virtuality and media in Agamben:
1. Utility of Agamben for bare life but the limits of his structuralist thinking in
relation to camp as a Foucaldian / Schmittian political space. (A die note
on Chow and others who misread Agamben or who want to retain sacred
victim. Point explicitly in relation to the Chowish article that the camp is not
the same thing s the concentration camp—it is a political space –the
concentration is the worst among many camps, but the camp is not
reducible to fascism (versus liberal democracy) but deconstructs Left and
Right).
1
I am finishing Given Time this week (finally) and noticed when I got to the part
about beggars (the homeless) that Derrida starts sounding like a Marxist and like
Foucault. And then I saw that Derrida has a very long footnote to Foucault (p. 83,
n. 135) which is made up almost entirely of quotations quoted by Foucault in
Madness and Civilization (with lots of "quoted by Foucault"s the end of the
passages Derrida quotes from Foucault.) After going on about beggars and
Baudelaire for another page a bit, Derrida cuts his discussion short: "But this is
114
not the place to go off into an endless discourse, however necessary it may be,
on alms and begging. Let us retain merely a formal trait." (137). The word
"endless" struck me as being a shorthand way of blunting the reception
(misunderstanding) of Foucault's use of the archive by sharpening the Borges in
Foucault (archive as labyrinth). Derrida then turns to the "circle," his chosen
metaphor (pp.6-8) for circulation. I had not noticed the note to Foucault--and I
think you're right, he's boxing him up--the note might even suggest that madness
and civ is being modeled by Derrida as a storage unit--turning MF into an
"endless" but necessary exposure to the archive as brute matter...I'm jealous of
you reading Given Time, I spent a year reading it once upon a time--check out
the FANTASTIC face off with Michel Serres on page 113.
2
Consider, for example, the continuing controversy of the place of photography and film
in archiving the holocaust: images of the dead victims or their exhibition are frequently
equated with pornography and Hell. For example, the title of the first section Images In
Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz is “Images Pieces of Film Snatched from
Hell.”2 The tendency to pathologize and demonize certain remaining images,
unintentionally echoes the topological construction “L’Enfer” (hell) section of the
Bibilotheque Nationale in Paris, reserved for pornographic books and images, or even
earlier, the restricted library reserved for pornographic images of the library for ancient
Roman from the remains of Pompeii in the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius’ eruption.2
3 [it would be good to get “media” in the title as well, or “technology” since we
also be moving from or through readability to media recording / archiving
devices]
[In the intro, we are effectively introducing the first chapter on WB as reader that
then sets up your WBian reading of the missing briefcase.] Echographies of
Television could clearly tie in to your Williams chapter.
115
Chapter Six is entitled "The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence" (82-99)
Chapter Three is entitled "Acts of Memory: Topopolitics and Teletechnology" (5667) Claudia Wegner, "Necessary Fabrications" in Lost in the Archives, ed.
Rebecca Comay, 217-33. Essay discusses the disintegrating of archive of art
historian Alois Riegel--Vienna, c. 1890.See also the first chapter of Echographies
of Television for --"Right of Inspection"--for the preface of our book. p. 38 ("the
moment of inscription") bears somewhat on your point Wednesday about the
penetration of archiving / recording devices.
John Hunter, "Minds, Archives, and the Domestication of Knowledge, " in Lost in
the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay, 199-216
"Renaissance storage arsenals and their assumptions"
I love "storage arsenal" ("arsenal" is a really interesting a metaphor here)
Ben Nicholson, "Secret Geometries: Beneath the floorboards of Michelangelo's
Laurentian Library," in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay, 41-62
Claudia Wegner, "Necessary Fabrications" in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca
omay, 217-33. Essay discusses the disintegrating of archive of art historian Alois
Riegel--Vienna, c. 1890.
We need to make a clear to our readers number of shifts in the book itself: from
Agamben to Meillassoux, from the yet to be read to reading after extinction, from
bare archive, from bare life to no life, from cultural graphology in general to
Derrida after Derrida after de Man in particular. Declaring from the book to be a
116
book about the archive at the start would, I think, make our turn or return to
cultural graphology would make more sense and recognizable for what it is and
is not (it’s not cultural studies, nor is it dated deconstruction); and we won’t feel
the need to engage in detail and in a boring way a host of work in other fields.
Our argument, and the way we thread strands of it through the book, will do the
work.
Bigger version of describing of the book is that it’s about biopolitics quotient of
media. Our book is a metaphorology, a topos question: what does it mean to
stage the archive from the point of view of the storage unit rather than the library.
That immediately puts in a more vernacular, less hallowed place.
Toys are not a thing narrative but a topos narrative—Fort / Da—a toys
are a repletion. Something interesting about the staging of things. Benjamin as
reader before we do the briefcase—his last words. Do a Benjaminian reading of
the briefcase. We move incrementally from the innocuous to the disaster.
So we can avoid a salvific narrative.
The problem is not that being were not being reverent enough the problem is that
your not being revenant enough.
Minimerror.
Up with tics is a minum.
R or an N –the difference is a minum of paleography.
117
I think we have skipped that step (I think we have skipped as well as the
steps need to make explicit our move from Agamben to Meillassoux from the yet
to be read to reading after extinction, from bare life to no life, from cultural
graphology in general to Derrida after Derrida after de Man in particular). In
addition to engaging Agamben on the camp as a paradigm by refiguring the
camp as an archive, we might also want to engage even more directly in the intro
what happens to thing theory / thing studies when they things are thought as
being archived, stored, specially to notions of life as in the social life of things, to
the everyday life of things, working through the relation between bare life and
more life (which seems to evade the question of sovereignty and bare life when it
comes to things: can we speak of things in terms res sacrii, the universalization
of res sacrii? Of the life and death of things instead of just the life of things?
Maybe we can work through this question in the preface through our pun on
“Spare Life” in the title—a spare as an extra (like a spare tire), a back up moving
in the direction of life, but as reduced, moving in the direction of bare life (though
not Spartan) and not yet death (by trashing, selling gifting / regifting, disposing of
in numerous ways). (Benjamin has a great line in “Unpacking My Library” where
he shifts from “day” to “night” on the next to last page).
4
5
Foucault on acid (LSD) misses orliteralizes the rug that is reading.
The book is our default medium because the book is a body, a
corpus, because it already figures the relation between bios and
media. We are also taking the book to be a spectral medium. This
118
might be a weird move to some readers since the book is always
inorganic matter. The uncanny is about the inanimate coming to life,
or seeming to come to life, and--we can check this--Freud's examples
are of inorganic matter that was once organic--dancing feet, and so
on. But Derrida talks about film as a spectral medium, and he also
talks about the virtuality and spectrality; he equates the two in
Demeure.
6
The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 by Michel
Foucault, Michel Senellart, Arnold I. Davidson, and Alessandro Fontana
(Hardcover - June 10, 2008)
7 We are synthesizing Agamben’s state of exception become norm as
virtualization of bare life and the opening of the space of the camp (“the camp is
thus the structure in which the state of exception . . . is realized normally” 170),
on the one hand, with Derrida’s arche-writing and Archive Fever, Demeures, and
Aporias, on the other.
8
The state of exception and reference to the concentration camps –112—in the
Time that Remains he gets to inoperatively, informulability of the law, this is
where he finds himself at the moment of deconstruction but does not
deconstruction. The Time That Remains is both calmer, more accessible and yet
also more insane even than Homo Sacer. Everyone is Paul. Heidegger is Paul!
WB is Paul! Kafka is Paul! Marx is Paul! Deleuze is Paul! Agamben also
caricatures deconstruction while reproducing a very old -fashioned mode of
Derridean deconstruction--showing the supplement that is the condition of a
binary opposition that represses the supplement (defers it, delays it incessantly-p. 57; 70--the remnant being the supplement of non-coincidence). It's like all
119
Agamben--a sober priest masquerading as an academic but channeling Artaud in
The Passion of Joan of Arc-- read was Signature, Event, Context and Of
Grammatology. Still, I really like what he does with the people (neither part nor
all, neither majority nor minority) . 57. There is something really refreshing about
his desire to move outside a victim discourse while still keeping the victims
central--just not one type of victim. yet making the remnant "the figure . . . , or the
substantially assumed by a people in a decisive moment, and as such the only
real political subject" (57) means that Agmaben effectively turns the remnant into
an aporia (space and time actually become substitutable variations of the same
structure--the same figure--of the "contracted" remnant) and hence all reading
can do is to "render inoperative" certain kinds of misreadings (misreadings which
have nevertheless clearly persisted, hence the need for him to write his book and
correct past mistakes).
There's also a way in which The Time That Remains reads as an ars moriendi, a
saving of a time for the end, a fantasy that you can prepare yourself for your
death. “operational time” is the time you have to think the end in the present, not
think about the end (eschaton), and so is implicitly distinguished from what
opertationla time renders inoperative.
He distinguishes operational time from supplementary time on 71. Also a weird
line about the Maranos. Demeure and Aporias seem to me so much stronger.
Inoperativity (111) and impotential
9 The camp in Agamben’s account is a political space indifferent to its various
phenomenalizations, materializations, localizations, places. Agamben is a legal
historical absolutist and philologist. He is not concerned with the physics, the
120
materiality of political space of the camp. Nor is he concerned with whether or
not crimes occur in a specific place of the camp. He is only concerned with the
way a political space opens when the state of exception becomes the norm.
According to Agamben, Albanian immigrants herded into a stadium in Bari, Italy
in 1991; Jews detained in a cycle-racing track in Vichy France, concentration
camps for foreigners built in 1923 by the German Socialist Democratic
government at Cottbus-Siewlo, and foreigners seeking refugee status held in
zone d’attentes of French international airports equally exemplify bare life and
the camp. “In all these cases,” Agamben writes: “an apparently innocuous space
. . . actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and
in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the
civility and the ethical sense of police who temporarily act as sovereign (for
example, in the four days during which foreigners can be held in the zone
d’attente before the intervention of the judicial authority). In this light, the birth of
the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political
space of modernity itself” (174). Similarly, Agamben decenters the Jewish
victims by desacralizing the camp: “the laws concerning the Jews can only be
understood if they are brought back to the general context of National Socialism’s
legislation and biopolitical praxis. This legislation and this praxis are not simply
reducible to the Nuremberg laws, to the deportations to the camps, or even to the
“Final Solution”: these decisive events of our century have their foundation in the
unconditional assumption of a biopolitical task in which life and politics become
one” (149).” (149). See his more controversial comments on Jews and the
121
holocaust p 114. See section 7.7 especially. He also extends what may seem
like an extreme choice of a “brief series of ‘lives’” to include “no less extreme and
still more familiar” (187).
10
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben
responds to Schmitt’s challenge, taking the Nazi concentration camps to be not
an “anomaly belonging to the past” (166) but the “hidden matrix” (166, 175) of
modernity. Sovereignty in the modern state is defined not by its care-taking role
over the lives of its populace, when politics becomes bio-politics, but by the
constant need to define what counts as life worthy of being cared for and what
does not, to decide, that is, what is the norm, sacred life, and what is the
exception, homo sacer (“bare life”) being life that may not be sacrificed by the
sovereign or murdered but may nevertheless be left to die or determined to be
dead. Furthermore, bare life does not mark a limit of the sovereign’s power but
actually expresses the totality of even sacred life’s subjection to a power over
death and life. Agamben arrives at a deeply troubling conclusion, namely, that
the transformation of classic politics into bio-politics (or the revelation that politics
was always a bio-politics) means that “traditional distinctions (such as between
Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity
and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction” (122). He adds that the
modern “democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poorer classes . . .
transforms the entire Third World population into bare life” in a way that is
“different yet still analogous” to the Nazis’ program of infinitely purifying the
122
German body “through the elimination of the mentally ill and the bearers of
hereditary diseases” (1980). The central part of the book is a concrete, if brief,
discussion of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin as thinker of the same stripe.
See pp. 63-67. For a contrasting reading of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence, see
Derrida “Force of Law,” in Acts of Religion (19 ), edited and translated Gil Ajindar.
The similarities between Benjamin and Schmitt have been discussed by Victoria
Kahn Representations and Samuel Weber, “Taking Exception”.
As a resistance to encroachments of biopower, a universal human rights
discourse remains of value, but its adequacy as a response to the challenge of
bio / thanato / politics is always severely compromised both because the rule of
law in parliamentary democracies already depends on a supplement of (hidden
and forgotten revolutionary) violence from the start and because a Rights
discourse takes for granted the definition of the human. On Human Rights, see
Agamben, “Biopolitics and the Rights of Man,” in Homo Sacer, 119-25 and on
animal rights, see Derrida The Animal that Therefore I Am, 87-89 Bio /
thanatopolitics puts the ontology of the human into question, replacing the citizen
with a subject. The same problem occurs when extending a human rights
discourse to include animal rights since homo sacer is defined not only in relation
to sacred life (bios) but to animal life (zoë). On animals, see Jacques Derrida,
The Animal that Therefore I Am (Fordham UP, 2008) and The Beast and
Sovereignty (2009); see also Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford,
2004). The promise of “more life,” even after death in the form of cyrogenics, is
similarly limited. On cyrogenics, see Wetwares We already tip our hand here, in
123
letting the reader see that we think Agamben’s work, his reading of Schmitt, has
to be read with Derrida and with(out) de Man. We lay down our cards in the
conclusion. On cyrogenics, see Wetwares We already tip our hand here, in
letting the reader see that we think Agamben’s work, his reading of Schmitt, has
to be read with Derrida and with(out) de Man. We lay down our cards in the
conclusion. Homo sacer represents an indeterminate zone in which the borders
between life and bare life, the human and the animal, the human and the
inhuman have to be continually drawn and redrawn. Carl Schmitt, Political
Theology and Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, See the Challenge of
Carl Schmitt.
11
One could easily show that Agamben rather carelessly reads Kafa’s “Before
the Law’ and Derrida’s essay on it of the same title, just as he carelessly reads
Being and Time. One could trace, as Derrida begins to do with Agamben’s use
of the word “first” differences in formulations that again seem careless. We take
Agamben’s rhetoric to be undecidable. Whether he is in control of his argument
or not cannot be determined: is he carelessly careful or carefully careless? Does
he give himself over to a delirium of writing? Or his writing sober, innocent, even
priestlike? We take the indeterminate andindeterminable questions to be the
critical consequences of Agamben’s being a strong un-reader. Agamben’s
tendency to use a historical anecdote, literary text, or legal text to open a chapter
without reading closely either that text or debates over its meaning evinces his
practice of a philosophical reading of history in which history turns into a series of
Kafkaesque parables that become the occasion for philosophical reflection.
124
Living le Livre Ivre:
Friendship and not reading, or writing not to be read (by anyone you know).
Batille as another kind of unreader--or a writer to his unreader. Friendship as a
practice of unreading, of a philosophical lapse or collapse:
For Bataille, friendship is part of “the sovereign operation” . . . But reading—the
unworking labor of the work—is not absent from it though it belongs at times to
the vertigo of drunkenness: “ . . . I had already imbibed much wine. I asked X to
read the book I was carrying around with me and he read aloud . . . . I was too
drunk and no longer remember the exact passage. He himself had drunk s much
as I had. It would be a mistake to think that such a reading given by men
intoxicated with drink is but a provocative paradox. . . . I believe we are united in
this, that we are both open, defenseless—through temptation—to forces of
destruction, but not like the reckless, rather like children whom a cowardly
naiveté never abandons.” This, Nietzsche would probably never have approved
of: he abandons himself—the collapse—only at the moment of madness, and
that abandonment prolongs itself by betraying itself through movements of
megalomaniac compensation. The scene Bataille describes to us, whose
participants are known to us (but that is of no importance) and which was not
destined to be published . . . is followed . . . by this statement: “A god does not
busy himself.” This not-doing is one of the aspects of the unworking and
friendship, and friendship, with the reading in drunkenness, is the very form of
the “unworking community” Jean-Luc Nancy has asked us to reflect upon, though
125
it is not permitted to us to stop there. I will however come back to it (some day or
other). But before that it is necessary to recall that the reader is not a simple
reader, free in regard to what he reads. He is desired, loved and perhaps
intolerable. He cannot know what he knows, and he knows more than he knows.
He is a companion who gives himself over to abandonment, who is himself lost
and who at the same time remains at the edge of the road the better to
disentangle what is happening and which therefore escapes him . . . “The one
for whom I wrote (to whom I say tu), out of compassion for what he has just read,
will need to well, then he will laugh, then he will have recognized himself.” . . .
And at the same time, in the pages of the same book [Guilty]: “These notes link
me like Ariadne’s thread to my fellow creatures and the rest seems vanity to me.
However I cannot give them to any of my friends to read.” For that would mean
personal reading by personal friends. Thus the anonymity of the book which does
not address anybody and which, through its relation with the unknown, initiates
what Georges Bataille (at least once) will call “the negative community: the
community of those who have no community.” –Maurice Blanchot, The
Unavowable Community, 23; 24
Course called “unworkable”
Reading as not working
126
Inoperative Community
Unavowable Community
Valrie Solanas
Kathy Acker
12
Rey Chow, “” Representations 2006; Judith Butler, Precarious Life ; Agamben
engages a precurors to Chow and Butler, namely, Emmanuel Levinas, on pp.
151-52 of Homo Sacer.
1.
13
The archive subsumes the camp since the camp is a political space of
biobiblioprocessing. Germans have to show their papers after capture in
1945 footage in The Memory of the Camp. The archive has a much more
complex topology than Agamben realizes and the pay off for us is less
repetition than Agamben (finding the same thing in a different form) that it
is in rereading as reshelving—reading and resistance have to be
theorized, again following Derrida and de Man around Freud, as
reshelving. So we are talking about the archive as a reread as retraced
mediatized contact zone, about formal materiality, not materiality as if it
were the same thing as physical, empirical, etc. We are following out
media specificity argument.Subsume the camp with the archive, the
political structure with the political deconstruction of writing (not equal to
language, langue and parole in Agamben). We need bring Derrida in to
127
theorize the archive and biopolitics (while using Agamben to unsettle right
and left and focus on biopolitics as mediatized rather than immediately
political) in order to engage more fully Agamben’s decentering of the
Jewish victim (also repeated in The Time That Remains). The controversy
over his book lies not only in secularizing homo sacer (so it is not scared
life) but in repeatedly using the Nazis as examples to then make them
parallel to other war crimes or problems(U.S.). Not moral equivalence, but
equivalence through structure. But he body disappears in his
virtualization—crimes committed or not don’t matter. To bring Derrida in is
to reengage the body of homo sacer and its ethnic inflection but in a way
that suspends it: Derrida deconstructs the existential analytic of Dasein in
Aprorias while Agamben opposes it to Nazi bioplitics to save Heidegger
(from Levinas’s critique of Heidegger as well). The Maranno is then the
key figure of hypersessentialism, not the Jew as homo sacer as in
Agamben (and the Muselmann). So we want to acknowledge the way that
Derrida acknowledges the archive specifically in terms of Freud and
Freud’s Jewishness—disagreeing with Yerashalmi. Derrida suspends the
question of Jewishness, unlike Yeralshami who wants Freud to be Jewish
explicitly, and psychoanalysis to be a Jewish science. The arhcie vei
enages as we 9as does Aporias) the Heideggerian question of reading as
the of its national identity as a destiny from the past that can only be read
in the future. It can only do what the Greeks did, their destiny by reading
their past at unspecified moment in the future. For Lacoue Labarthe, this
128
kind of temporality is archifascist form the start. He wants to save poetry
from Heidegger’s myth., even if that means giving up Adorno (sacrificing
him) in order to save Walter Benjamin. So we’re reading the archive as a
question of race and biopolitics , unread –ability as the not yet read as well
as the unread, but not in a salvific way. Agamben and Lacoue-Labarthes
are in very different ways engaged in salvific narratives for philosophy,
Agamben wanting to keep Hedidegger, LL wanting to give him up so he
can arrive at a defnitonof poetry that fails—that can’t be attached to
theologico-poltiics because it is poetry that is prose, or that fails to be
poetry as it becomes prose without ever becoming prose. This is archiethical discourse of the courage of poetry, of sobriety. Derrida four essay
in Geschlecht. Not so much the frame as the storage unit.
14
Moreover, we sort out a confusion in Agamben’s book between an historical account
of the concentration camp and a legal absolutist argument about the political space of the
camp. Agamben is certainly right not to equate the camp with the Nazi
concentration camp given that camps had already been built during the Weimar
Republic, though they were not designed for the purpose of exterminating
people. While Agamben says he is not make an historicio-philosophical
argument, we are making one, though our historicism is not reducible to linear,
sequential temporality, and
15
I think we should also frontload Paper Machine in the intro by connecting it to
our reading of Foucault and the archive (this paper, this fire, my body even, and
the debate over Descartes) but for Derrida thematized in Paper Machine as a
question of paper and person,
16
Resistance into processing--processing involves reading and itself resistance
(bioprocessing by the state) but storage units are "u-my-topias" (came up with that one
last night), in transit sic mundi (bad Latin pun) where metaphorical reshelving operations
may occur both beyond the state's view and also beyond what Agamben calls "the eyes of
129
justice." Processing is both anti-democratic and the possibility of democracy (defined as
a reshelving operation of the already / yet to be read in distinction to the state's always
operational auto-archiving of persons).
17
For Ronell (PMLA “Misery of Theory”), it is the refugee, not the citizen, and
sacred alien that allows for a hailing that is not a heiling (a polis that is not Greek,
but includes brown skinned women—from Holderlin’s “Andenken”), a departing
that doesn’t stay behind, a listening rather than an overwhelming stupefying
wonder.
18 Agamben distinguishes his “position . . . from that of deconstruction” (54) after
reductively characterizing deconstruction as follows: “The prestige of
deconstruction in our time lies precisely in having conceived the entire text of
tradition as being in force without significance, a being in force who strength lies
essentially in its decidability and in having shown that such a being in force is,
like the door of the Law in Kafka’s parable, absolutely impassable” (54). For
something like a rejoinder by Derrida, see Derrida’s comments on Agamben’s
repeated use of the word “first” in Homo Sacer in The Beast and Sovereign, Vol.
1 (U of Chicago P, 2009), 92-96. There are many more contradictory instances
of the use of “first” that Derrida notes. In a similar way, Agamben makes
contradictory claims about the originary structure of bare life and the invocations
and inauguration of new developments, such as the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and the third Reich: “Inaugurates a new . . . paradigm in which the norm
becomes indistinguishable from the exception” (170). See also Agamben’s
somewhat comical essay about Derrida’s refusal to cite Agamben in “The
Friend,” What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (2009), 25-37.
19
Agamben unreflectively adopts metaphors for technology to describe the
hidden space of the camp: “a link secretly governs”; “hidden mechanism”; ‘lethal
machine”; “hidden regulator; lethal machine.”
130
20
On mediatization, see Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism and the Logic of
Late Capitalism. Our view of media follows out a philosophical trajectory that
begins with Heidegger, Freud, and de Man as retraced by Friedrich Kittler,
Jacques Derrida, Avital Ronell and Laurence Rickels. Our account of media
does not divide media into media and “technical” (electronic, modern) media, nor
do we distinguish for theoretical purposes between visual media and print media
since print media (language) calls up images and ekphrasis renders them while
viusl media hasa soundtrack and often textual matter. See Guillory The Genesis
of the Medium and Gittelman. Our difference form either accounts of media and
”technical media” has to do with a relation of translation and media and error.
Guillory and Gitlelamn return, in what amounts to an exercise in cynical reason to
Jurgen Habermas lomng abandoned account of the Public Sphere in order to
justify, it would appear, the continuing existence of disciplinary divisions and
hence of jobs in English Departments. For a variety of critiques of Habermas,
see Richard Burt, ed. The Administration of Aesthetics (UMinn, 1994). See also
Jean-Luc Nancy The Inoperative Community on communication, community, and
writing.
21
“In the ‘politicization’ of bare life—the metaphysical task par excellence—the
humanity of living man is decided” (8). On the last page of Homo Sacer,
Agamben writes that “attention will have to be given to the analogies between
politics and the ephochal situation of metaphysics” (188), but his account of the
immediacy and hidden essence of modern biopolitics is metaphysical from the
start. See his mentions of the “ontological structure of sovereignty” (60) and the
131
“ontological structure of abandonment” (58) discussion differentiating Martin’s
Heidegger’s existential “Dasein” from Nazi biopolitics (150-53).
22
Agamben does use the word “virtualemente” in the original Italian edition of
Homo Sacer, 127, just before section three. The precise meaning of “virtual” in
Homo Sacer must remain unsettled since Agamben does not define it and even
uses it loosely, speaking both of the “virtual state of exception” (57) and “the
state of virtual exception” (65) as well as the “virtual exception” (55). He seems
to think of “virtual” as being different from potential in devoting a chapter to the
“Potentiality of the Law,” (39-48) following Aristotle in keeping in place an
ontological sense of potentiality as “autonomous existence” with its own
“consistency” and its failure to “disappear immediately into actuality” (45).
Potentiality both destroys and preserves (like the law in Ancient Greece that
destroys and preserves justice) and is for Agamben the “paradigm of
sovereignty” in “Western philosophy” (46): potentiality is a “suspension; it is
capable of the act in not realizing it . . . sovereign power as such can also
maintain itself indefinitely, without ever passing over into actuality” (45; 47). The
virtual and real would seem to be a parallel opposition, does not bother to say so.
23To
be sure, the self-storage unit as archive includes the victim, as the units may be used
by (displaced) persons, who have become homeless, victims of bad loans made during
the administration of President George W. Bush, for example. How, exactly, is shelf life
as a form of "resistance, one might ask"?
How is self storage resistant, as
opposed say to fired office workers carrying out their stuff in a box, which is not
resistant but compliant? One thinks of films like Up in the Air or Office Space as
132
examples of compliance (Fight Club might be a fantasy of an exception). Our
notion of “unread –ability” is precisely not the cultuiral studies sense of political
resistance or opposition to a state norm but is rather a parasitical process of
inhabiting an inhabita ble space that makes possible reading as a figurative
re(self-)shelving. Yet the storage unit also offers a shelter, even an illegal and temporary
one, for all kinds of refugees and internal exiles, the camp itself taking a wide variety of
forms, as Charlie Hailey has demonstrated. David Streitfeld, “Losing a Home, Then
Losing All Out of Storage” May 11, 2008 New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/business/11storage.html . See Charlie
Hailey, Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space (MIT, 2009). Hailey devotes only
two pages to Nazi concentration camps.
24
Agamben uses the word “virtuality” once in Homo Sacer (35) during a
discussion of Hobbes that has nothing to do with the meaning of “virutality” in
relation to digital media. Agamben’s inability to think through the meaning of
virtuality may also account in part for the confusing or seemingly contradictory
statements about the necessity of thinking politics in terms of ontology, (44)
abandonment as “the ontological root of every political power”; 48) and his
reverse conclusion “here the metaphysical shows its political nature” (48). With
this last line of the chapter, Agamben stops at the abyss of his own aporia. He
returns to in the last section of the book by engaging what he calls the destiny of
the West: “it may be that only if we are able to decipher the political meaning of
pure Being will we be able to master our subjection to political power, just as it
may be, inversely that only if we understand the theoretical implications of bare
133
life will we be able to solve the enigma of ontology. Brought to the limit of pure
Being, metaphysics (thought) passes over into politics(reality),just as on the
threshold of bare life, politics steps beyond itself into theory” (182).
25
Agamben comments on Jaques Rançiere’s notion of “processing” in
Rançiere’s book Dis-agreement: “if . . . the wrong for whom the people are not
the cipher is not ‘absolute’ (as t still was for Marx), but, by definition, can be
processed (Rançiere, 39), then the line between democracy and its consensual,
or postdemocratic, counterfeit (which Rançiere goes so far as to overtly critique)
tends to dissolve” The Time That Remains (58). There's a difference between
inoperative reading and inoperable reading. Agamben's conception of biopolitics
leave him unable to operate, leaving democracy effectively an overcomatose
patient he cannot declare living or dead. See his comments on Jean-Luc
Nancy’s Inoperative Community in Homo Sacer, 61-62.
26
Agamben uses “immediate” in the temporal sense of “instantaneous”
interchangeably with “immediate” in the philosophical sense of “unmediated”:
“the sovereign decision . . . refers immediately to the life . . . of the citizens” (109,
emphasis in the original); “immediate law” (142)“the biological given is as such
immediately political, and the political as such is immediately given” (148,
emphasis in the original); “this immediate unity of politics and bare life” (150);
“the camp was immediately entrusted to the SS” (169); “being ‘an immediate
effect’” (169); “immediate coincidence of fact and law” (172); “the immediate
production” (184); “the office of the Fuehrer is . . . something that springs forth
without mediation” (184); “immediately political character” (184); “immediately
134
into law” (187). Compounding this confusion of the meaning of “immediate,”
Agamben sometimes describes a convergence or coinciding of analogous
structures as a temporal process with a beginning (“starting to coincide,” 38;
“begin to become one,” 148) or that has almost happened and that has
happened gradually and analogous structures that are co-instantaneous.
Similarly, he describes an “originary” (110) problem of sovereignty but uses
temporal metaphors to describe the global extension of biopolitics:”the production
of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty” (83); “originally this sphere was
the one produced” (86); “more original” [than Schmitt’s friend and enemy] . .
.”more intimate” *110), “more internal . . and more external. . . (111); ”darker and
more uncertain” (36).
27
Agamben is much more Foucauldian than he knows. Even though Agamben
begins Homo Sacer by saying that the camp is not a space of “internment” (6), as
in Foucault’s history of the prison, when he describes the “complex topology” of
the camp (19), or when later describes the topology camp as a “dislocating
localization,” 175, emphasis in the original). See also his description of the state
of exception as “a complex topological figure” (37). It is not a coincidence that
Agamben makes almost the exact same critique of Foucault on p. 4 and p. 119,
nor is it a coincidence that Agamben ends his book by implicitly claiming to have
“out-Foucaulted,” as it were, Foucault (187) by situating the biopolitics of the
body in relation to the camp rather than sexuality. As early as the sixth page of
Homo Sacer, Agamben maps his account of the camp as the “concealed nucleus
of sovereign power” onto the “vanishing point” of Foucault’s work, namely, the
135
camp. Agamben presents his book as a kind of large footnote to Foucault’s
genealogical analysis of power.
28
Agamben actually invites the confusion of the concentration camp with camp by
beginning with Foucault and a model of incarceration—F should have done the
concentration camps. So Agamben will do this now. But then, Agamben uses Schmitt—
and 1930s –to deNazify the state of exception and desacralize the holocaust—
concentration camps only one manifestation of a political space of the camp. Agamben
keeps returning to the Nazis to show how they were not exceptional, just the worst. The
Jews are not the same thing as Homo Sacer. He makes a similar move in The Time That
Remains. He is and is not making a historical argument in which 1933 is the key year
(for the state of exception and the creation of he death camps).
29
Agamben's problem lies the way he constructs Foucault's work: Agamben sees
a line of thought about internment that should have ended with an account of the
camp-. Agambem then completes the line of thought. He does connect this
work to Foucualt's work on the archive in Remnants, but doesn't see a fissure
within Foucault's own work between Foucault's account of the archive (Lives of
Infamous Men; I, Pierre Riviere) and discipline through incarceration. Foucault
did not think through the connection between the prison and the archive, in short.
He was too invested in a politics that separated the body from biopolitics.
Agamben retains the same investment in what amounts to a Catholic notion of
sacred life to take its perverse limit (martyrdom, s and m, and so on) with
additional skepticism. Agamben hides his own Catholicism from n a theological
hermeneutic of revealing the hidden (revelation is a fake out move in which the
desacraization of life as bare life allows for a hidden sacralization of life to be put
back into political place).
30 Hence, Agamben can only imagine a “new politics” that would stop the
extension of the West’s conception of bare life in the Third World in a future to
come; his recourse to the future perfect tense: “only a politics that will have
learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West will be able to
stop this oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides peoples and
cites of the earth” (180). Agamben attaches no time to the accomplishment of
this task as his notion of the future here is implicitly messianic.
31
At this same moment, the camp takes on a Kafkaesque inflection, as Agamben
uses the metaphor of inscription twice, calling up “The Penal Colony” (see his
136
discussion of Franz Kakfa in Homo Sacer, pp. 49-58): “the camp is the new,
hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order—or rather, the sign of the
system’s inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine”
(175); “inscribed” (174), “inscription of life” (176). See also Agamben’s mention of
the scribe who is about to write but does not as a figure of sovereignty (45) and
his account of Kafka’s “Before the Law”: “Law that becomes indistinguishable
from life in a real state of exception is confronted by life that, in a symmetrical but
inverse gesture, is entirely transformed into law. The absolute intelligibility of a
life wholly resolved into writing corresponds to the impenetrability of a writing
that, having become indecipherable, now appears as life” (55). Agamben’s
account of absolute intelligibility and impenetrability of life resolved into law and
writing depends crucially on his uncritical use of the word “real” here to modify
“exception.” Our anti-absolute account of bioprocessing and “unread -ability” (life
is neither absolutely intelligible nor indecipherable by writing, or graphology)
takes into account the virtuality of the exception, bare life, and the camp. Reshelving is a paralegal operation that renders justice as a matter of
(mis)recognition that is beyond salvage ( “Erloesung” neither as redemption nor
“Endlosung” as final solution). [track down who makes the connection between
thse two German words—Derrida? In Aporias?] Agamben returns to Kafka in
The Time That Remains, (71; 108).
32
“The camp as “dislocating localization” (175) is “the hidden matrix of politics
which we are still living and it is the structure of the camp that we must learn to
recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d’attentes of our airports and
137
certain outskirts of our cities. . . . It is becoming increasingly impossible for [the
nation-state] to function, and we must now expect not only new camps but also
always new and more lunatic regulative definitions of inscription of life in the city.
The camp . . . is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet” (175; 176). Yet he
describes the state of exception early on in nearly the exact same terms: the
state of exception as the permanent structure of juridico-political de-localization
and dis-location . . . premonitory even . . . announcing the new nomos of the
earth, which (if its grounding principle is not called into question) will soon extend
itself over the entire planet” (38). He refers to a “continuous line of flight” to
describe the paradoxes of sovereignty but also implies a series of discontinuous
developments he calls “novelty” (168, 173), “new biopolitics” (145) and “new
politics” (145).
33
See especially Agamben’s discussion of the archive and the camp in
Remnants of Auschwitz and of the camps in “The Camp as ‘Nomos’ of the
Modern,” Homo Sacer, 168-80. On the controversy over the camps and the
problem of archiving what happened, see James Young, The Texture of Memory
and Geoffrey Hartman, Archive. See also the Errol Morris documentary Mr.
Death (200?).
34
In an extended discussion of “the paradoxical status of the camp,”
Agamben writes:
What is included in the camp according to the etymological sense of the
term “exception” (ex-capere), taken outside, included through its own
138
exclusion. But what is first of all taken into the juridical order is the state of
exception itself. Insofar as the state of exception is ‘willed,’ it inaugurates a
new juridico-political paradigm in which the norm becomes
indistinguishable from the exception. The camp is thus the structure in
which the state of exception—the possibility of deciding on which founds
sovereign power—is realized normally. The sovereign no longer limits
himself, as he did in the spirit of the Weimar constitution, to deciding on
the exception on the basis of recognizing a given factual situation (danger
to public safety): laying bare the inner structure of the ban that
characterizes his power, he now de facto produces the situation as a
consequence of his decision on the exception. This is why in the camp the
quaestio iuris is, if we look carefully, no longer strictly distinguishable from
the quaestio facti, and in this sense every question concerning the legality
or illegality of what happened there simply makes no sense. The camp is
a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become
indistinguishable (HS 170).
This confusion of fact and law is the mechanism that makes possible the
demonic fairy tale space that was and is the camp—a space in which quite
literally, as Arendt makes clear, “everything had truly become possible” (HS 171).
In this sense, as Agamben notes, the camp “was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but
pure life, without any mediation.” “This is why,” he adds, “the camp is the very
139
paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes bio-politics and
homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen.”
35
In the State of Exception, for example, at the end of his reading of the “Force
of Law,” Agamben notes that “once again. The analogy with language is
illuminating” going on to describe the instantiation of the system of law via the
langue / parole model of Ferdinand de Saussure as mediated by Emile
Benveniste [Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 39-40. See also Potentialities…
36
enlist Althusser’s ISAs here
37
On media we aare going through Ronell, Derrida, Steigert, Stiegler, Freud,
Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger (technology is not what is instrsumentalizable, a
prosthesis, external hard drive, exterior, inorganic as opposed to organic life,
secondary record keeping, recording machines).
38 Agamben piles one paradox on top of another until he reaches a “limit figure”
of “radical crisis.” (25), a kind of paradox of paradoxes. As he writes, “the
example is truly a paradigm . . . : it is what is shown beside, and a class can
contain everything except its own paradigm” (22). See his visual schematization
of bare life on p. 38
39
The archive is both in Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. See also Dragan
“Arkiv Fever”. For somewhat literal-minded response to Derrida, see Carol
Steadman, Dust.
40
Agamben wants to relocate Foucault's distinction in Archeology of
140
Knowledge between langue and acts of speech "in the difference between
language (langue) and archive: that is, not between discourse and its
taking place, between what is said and the enunciation that exerts
itself in it, but rather between langue and its taking place, between
a pure possibility of speaking and its existence as such. (144)
The Archaeology of Knowledge is Agamben on Foucualt's Lives of Infamous
Men:
What momentarily shines through these laconic statements are not the
biographical events of personal histories, as suggested by the
pathos-laden emphasis of a certain oral history, bur rather the
luminous trail of a different history. What suddenly comes to light
is not the memory of an oppressed existence, but rather the
disjunction between the living being and the being that marks
its empty place. Here life subsists only in the infamy in which it
existed; here a name lives solely in the disgrace that covered it. And
something in this disgrace bears witness to life beyond all
biography." 143 “On the Lives of infamous Men,”
41
Agamben wants to stop division within the camp in order to arrive at a core of
bare life, the barest of bare life, as it were: Agamben divides the victims of the
camp into increasingly fine distinctions until he reaches the limit case, the
Musselman or the witness who cannot witness, being the weakest of the weak,
hence representing the central paradox of homo sacer. According to Agamben,
141
“the empty space at the center of the camp that, in separating all life from itself,
marks the point at which the citizen passes into the Staatsangegehoringe of nonAryan descent, the on-Aryan into the Jew, the Jew into the deportee and, finally,
the deported Jew beyond himself into the Musselman, that is, into a “bare,
unassignable and unwitnessable life” (156-57), the barest of bare life, as it were.
The remnants of Auschwitz are a matter of testimonials to what cannot be
testified to: “The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak solely
in the name of an incapacity to speak—that is, in her or her being a subject. In
our perspective, bare life is defined in part by the endless divisibility of life and
bare life.
42
“the new nomos of the earth . . . which will soon extend itself over the entire
planet”; “The camp which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the
new biopolitical nomos of the planet”
43
And it not just travel that is the issue—there is transmission and translation as
well, even when in the camp, as Fittkow makes clear: newspapers, radio
broadcasts, telephone calls, telegrams, rumors inside about what is happening
outside, and various kinds of unworking. There is a homelessness and
uncanniness that traverses the political space of the archive, within and without
its manifestations as cages and camps. The archive is the nomos of the earth,
not the camp. The political space of the archive includes the camp within it. The
archive, not the camp, is the nomos, the paradigm of the political space opened
up in modernity when the state of exception becomes the norm and all life
becomes virtually homines sacri. The camp is always already an event of
142
archivalization. Biopolitics is therefore not about confinement (only, or even
primarily) but about various kinds of mediatized transmission, translation, transiit-or bio-biblio-processing.
The camp is an extension of the archive, or the bio-bioblio-porcessing of virtually bare
life. The real point of tension is in the state’s use of modern media to auto-archive
persons and the capacities the self-storage unit—which look like camps—surrounded by
wire, a series of barracks-- offers person to write their own auto-bio-biblio-graphies—
Agamben also occasionally lapses into the anthropological discourse on the
ambivalence of the sacred he critiques, claiming that every society has its homo
sacer, that “all societies” (51) divide the populace into two groups, such as
patricians and plebians, men and citizens that all fracture biological life into
human life and bare life. The most he can offer is the capacity to read some of
the “decisive pages of history” in “new ways” (182), a capacity he does not
however actualize since he “unreads” in order to philosophize. Agamben caught
in a circuit—we want to route and reroute, to be circuit breakers. (break ups and
breakthroughs).
Hospital room is also an archive—medical records, testing. “Care” and “crime”
are on a continuum. What constitutes “care” and what constitutes “protection”
(arresting and detaining someone for his own protection or killing n the name of
protection, as in the Nazi extermination camps) may become undedidable. We
concede Chow and Butler’s critique of Agamben in saying that there is no
transcendental justice, that biopolitics makes any recourse to a transcendental
justice inoperable or ineffective—the paradox of sovereignty remains unresolved,
143
and to focus only on the victim (especially in sacrificial terms) is to evade the
problem of biopolitics, a problem that Agamben rightly puts front and center, by
thinking that you , who speak as general or specific intellectual in the name of the
victim, are not yourself virtually “bare life.” The archive as nomos then opens up
a much wider spectrum of life and death processing through media in which the
paradoxes of biopolitics may be redefined as paralegal practices which become
operative through a tropology of reshelving as classification, filing, but most
crucially reading.
44
On files and the archive see Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from
Bureaucracy. And Vismann, Files: Law and Technology.
45
The archive especially as it concerns death, may have the structure of as the
aporia in Derrida’s account of Being and Time in Aporias and the impossible
topography of the aporia. What Derrida calls an “aporography” may be extended
to include the impasses of the archive as an aporarchivography, especially given
that death can only be figured, read through metaphor. “topological conditions
when the speed of the panopticization of the earth—seen, inspected, surveyed,
and transported by satellite images—even affects time, nearly annuls it, and
indeed affects the space of passage between certain borders . . . .” Derrida,
Aporias "strange topography of edges" Derrida, Aporias (80) Derrida takes up
“Insofar as they are ontical research, biology and anthropology have
already and always decided. They have decided without even asking the
question, . . this precipitation . . . leads to an apparently
144
empirical or technojuridical confusions about what the sate of death
is, confusions that are increasingly serious today. These questions
of legitimacy . . . are no longer only questions concerning the
philosophical order of de jure and de facto. They impinge upon legal
medicine, the politics of gerontology, the norms concerning the
surgical prolongation of life and euthanasia, and upon several
questions that will be addressed later." Aporias, pp. 28-29
"In short, across all these differences, the dominant feeling for everyone is that
death, you see, is no longer what it used to be. And who will deny it? And who
would not recognize here the crossing of borders? For if death figures this theme
or this fundamental concept, which guarantees the very possibility of the
existential analysis, it is also and first of all because death takes a figure." (58)
Hamlet as haunted book—Derrida’s ghost dance—film as haunted medium.
145
46
The Derrida archive as something to think. Derrida does various rehselving
operations of other texts-- as he does of the title of Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses
in Archive Fever.
47
“the ekklesia, the community messianic vocations, wishes to impart to itself an
organization distinct from the community while pretending to coincide with it. . .
.What happens to the as not in all of this? Doesn’t the messianic vocation
become reduced to a sort of mental reserve, or, in the best of cases, to a kind of
Marranism ante litteram?” Agamben The Time That Remains, 33
48
The suspension of messianism is a situational ethics that makes reading
necessary—dangerous reading is where everything happens, but the enactment
of a set of routines.
49
The bound book Derrida discusses Freud’s father gave to him from “an ark
with fragments” suggests that the book and its container, the ark, are two
different things. But, following Derrida, we know that the archivist sometimes
confuses herself with the archeologist, such that the archive is an “anarchive,”
the archivist’s desire to find the moment of impression prior to division leads him
to enact what she mistakenly thinks she is reenact (the instant the body or writing
machine made contact with the support, whether paper or volcanic ash, never
existed). But if being an archivist always means recovering even missing data,
then the archive begins to resemble the book.
all framed what I will call Derrida's dead metaphors that signal his never
articulated as such hauntology of the book: there's a tension in Derrida's writing
between articulating a concept that is not a concept (arche-writing) through
146
metaphors taken from "writing" that are nearly always taken from printed books.
The supplement becomes an appendix, for example. Sometimes he puts the
metaphor is scare quotes. The signature is not necessarily the name of the
artist, the name being outside language and outside print. Derrida never
thematized the relation between his metaphors from empirical kinds of writing for
his non-phenomenal writing. Deconstruction is indifferent to empirical differences
between writing systems since arche-writing in not reducible to any of them. Yet
the hauntology of Derrida's arche-writing can be read precisely in these dead
metaphors that mark the limit of his interest in the history of writing, even though
he says he wants to go there (at the end of “Freud and the Scene of Writing”).
The signature as image.49 Signature attached
See Derrida "restitutions"
piece of paper—Duchamp painting with paper clip
Jan van Huyns--signature etched on the table trompe l'oeil
He doesn't because the book has become spectral. He ends Freud's writing pad
to be empirical in order to trash Freud for failing to, not doing etc. Derrida is antiapparatus (mystic writing pad) even though he draws on metaphors for various
kinds of instrumental apparatuses. It's a weird very judgmental long paragraph
about Freud's failings near the end of “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” But
Derrida implicitly ties this desire for no detachment to Shaprio’s desire for total
attachment in “Restitutions.” But attention to books on their scenes of
(un)reading, figuration, like Annuciation of Master Flamelle—reading by heart—
fisting the text—open and closed window casements. Is the page covering her
147
fingers, protecting her, linking their mystery and placement to her other hand
over her heart—the inwardness of text and heart match. Or is are the fingers
penetrating the page, holding it between her fingers so that the page is hidden
behind her fingers, in which case penetration of reading, and heart is linked to
the mystery of concept. Mary not entirely covered or protected but has to
penetrate , do violence, as she too is “raped” by God through the word, the ear.
What is being opened and shut in this story of messianic announcement? What
kind of narrative is being told here? What is the relation between the holy spirit
and the book, reading the fold over?
Derrida talks about the way the metaphor of writing keeps returning in Plato (and
Rousseau and Saussure) at key moments to keep the outside outside and the
inside inside. “The scriptural ‘metaphor’ thus crops every time difference and
relation are irreducible” (163)
But the metaphor is not single—letters emerge in the quotation from Socrates on
p. 163 in relation to division (three classes) and affixing (that results in a unified
collection)
“in the end he found a number of the things, and affixed to the whole collection,
as to each single member of it, the name “letters.” It was because he realized
that none of s could get to know one of the collection all by itself, in isolation from
all the rest, that he conceived of the “letter” as a kind of bond of unity uniting as it
were all these sounds into one ad he gave utterance to the expression ‘art of
letters,’ implying that there was one art tat dealt with sounds.
148
So there are two moments of “writing” as metaphor, not only letters but affixing
(letters become names). Things become members. The collection establishes
property, boundaries of a physical space and a human body.
In a certain sense, one can see how this section could have been set apart as an
appendix, a superadded supplement. And despite all that calls for it in the
preceding steps, it is true that Plato offers it somewhat as am amusement a
superadded supplement. (73)
The entire hearing of the trial of writing should some day cease to appear as an
extraneous mythological fantasy, an appendix the organism could easily, with no
loss have done without. In truth, it is rigorously called for from one end of the
Phaedrus to the other. (67)
Spectral analysis
Overture as over-ture and overt-ure.
Hors-d’ourvre—Derida’s movement istypically one of exteriorization—separation,
framing, goinginbut coming backform what unseen outside? Like the lace in van
Goh’s shoes—back of the shoes or back of the painitng. The utside is what is
149
hidden.Interiroirzation is like minturization and magnification aat the same time—
a zoom effect.
Hover ture
Neither quite overt nor over.
Temporality, temporaization gets subordinated, erased by spatial metaphors. No
first or before, except under erasure.
Sous—rature.
But there is a fix here, a hit of deconstructive delivery that involves a
reattachment disorder, a skipping over repair, re-storation as re-storing—in the
archive.
Quand il ecrit: “A Guest + a host + a Ghost”, il nous parle strictement—et
dialectiquement—d’une operation visuelle, pusique recevoir plus etre recu
donnet en cette logigue apparaitre (tel un fantome). Cela pourrait etre une
defintion de l’aura. Mais Duchamp, comme on le sait, nommait l’apparaition un
moule, “natif,” et “negatif”: l’aphorisme nous parliat donc de la reversibilite et de
l’empreiente.
Les deux duchampiens sure le langage possodent une incontestable valeur
heuristique: ilsont le plus souvent des hypotheses topiques lancees en vue d’une
transformation perceptuelle du lieu and et du corps. Come si juer a “retourner”
les mots permettait de saisir quelque chose de la reversibiltie du lieu. Et, lorsque
150
Duchamp aborde cette reversibilite, c’est le motif du contact qui,
immanquablement, apparait: par exemple dans l’expression “haut-relief et basfonds, Inc” or semble posee la question de ‘l’entreprise d’incoporation” par quoi
l’artiste prend en charge la mise en reversibilite du haut et du bas, du relief et du
fond, come on le bot dans tant de ses propres ouevres.
Didi-Herman, La resemblance par contact, 255
Impressions of auras and of death masks.
Carlo Ginzburg ignores the singularity of impressions(318) see dicsusion of
Anemci Cinema, pp. 317
She never considers book as spirits in her model of power, which is just the
same old, Greenblattian colonialism—mastery—without even the writing
lesson—just the burning of the manuscript. Power is instrumental, the book is
instrumental (theatrical illusionism), and spirits are unrelated to texts. Vanished
into air thin air
Spirits as actors, but actors unrelated to texts
L’empreinte redouble.(239)
Mais on peut teneter un cheminement a travers quelques exexmples, qui nous
feront tres vite osciller entre diverses manieres, pour ’empreinte, de reproduire,
151
mais aussie d’alterer et de deconstuire tout ce qu’elle touché: par
dedoublement, pare redoublement, par renversementL’empreinte dedouble.
D’une part, elle cree un double, un semblable; d’autre part, elle cree un
dedoublement, un duplicity, un symmetrie dans la representation (pensons
seulement aux planches du test de Roschach, definies comme “formes
fortuites,”maid done le processus deformation, ces taches dupliquees par pliage
et part contact, cree la souveraine pregnance d’une symmetrie (230)
Derrida’s almost self-reference to The Factor of truth in restitutions (264)
linking divisibility of the letter to the pair of shoes, but he doesn’t explicitly give
the reference.
His inconsistent practice of self-citation, of not giving references in his
lectures to other texts, is a way of dealing with detachment, attachment in his
own oeuvre.
His tropological substitution of a term like arche-writing fails to cognize or
recognize the death of metaphor through which he arrives at a meta-phor-writing
exteriority as deconstructive deconstructor.
Derrida does not quite thematize this process whereby division and detachment
create layers that connect, dropping of top of each other (not necessarily in an
ordered manner, as if in a specular doubling or mirror stage but in a manner like
the bar of cinema which must exist between frames for the projected image to be
viewed). But Did-Humeberan has a very Catholic notion of the symmetrical, the
pregnancy, the aura, the scared, the tactile—the impression yokes the work of art
ot he sacred, even if htat work is modernist. Hence he frames Duchamp with
152
prehistoric cave paintings, hten Catholic Renaissance (Otalian) castings auras,
death masks, and so on.
He leaves out Batailles base materialism, anyreistance to form in formlessness.
Attachment becomes tactility of the unseen image—like having a missing limb
you still feel.
Note for Anemic Cinema shows the title written backwards.
Follow out Derrida’s call for a spectral analysis in Restitutions.”49 The restoration
of internal purity must thus reconstitute, recite . . . that to which which the
pharmakon should not have had to be [added and attached] like a literal parasite:
a letter installing itself inside a living organism to rob it of its nourishment and to
distort [like static, = bruit paratiste] the pure audibility of a voice. Such are the
relations between the writing supplement and the logos-zoon. In order to cure the
latter of the pharmakon and get rid of the parasite, it is thus necessary to put the
outside back in its place. To keep the outside out. This is the inaugural gesture
of logic itself, of ‘good sense’ insofar as it accords with the self-identity of that
which is: being what it its, the outside is outside and the inside. Writing must thus
returns being what should have ceased to be: an accessory, an accident, an
excess. (128)
And we might put related pressure on Derrida’s real and virtual (in Demeures) as
well as on subjectile as virtual in Paper Machine. He leaves the real too quickly.
A variety of attachment disorders that haunt the book’s physical materiality as
well as sits immateriality. So hauntology gets one into a bidding war with Derrida
153
and historians of the book—who can be more material and at the same most
able to theorize consequent issues of unread -ability.
What holds for the vanishing of the book holds as well for painting. Latour essay
on digital image—where is the painting? But that was already a question about
the real painting for Richard Wollheim.
Where is the book?
Discourse of discursive enclosure, subjectivity, intellectual property, copyright
and so on that emerges in the 18th century is accompanied by recoil effects—
forgery, new Shakespeares (Bacon), new family romances). Include
Shakespeare’s deaths as well as his lives.
The frame, ales a world of supplementary desoeurverement. It cuts out but also
sews back together. By an invisible lace which passes thorugh the canvass,
passes ouinto it and hten out of it. Hors-doeuvre in the oueuvre, as oeuvre (here
the deadmetpahor allows for the equation “as” and placement within—a mise-enabyme or Chinese boxes structure). The laces go through the eyelets [which also
go in pairs] and pass on to the insviisble side. And when they come back form it,
do they emerge from the other side of the leather or the other side of the
canvass? (304) Truth in Painting
“Restitutions”
A similar illogic at work in B Johnson’s addition and typographic miniature of
synoyms for Outwork: prefacing in her translation.
Extends to graphic design, graphic layout
Where shall we stop? What is it to stop?
154
Restitutions, 132
I should likke to have a spectral analysis made of the pair, and of its always
being detached . . . 360
Commenting on Shapiro’s title “The Still Life as Personal Object,” Derrida writes:
Here it would be visibly detached personal object (having to do with the ear), like
a picture of shoes, in an exhibiton, detached form the body of a dead subject.
But coming back [as a ghost]/ Coming back alive to the dead man, who from then
on is living, himself [a ghost] returning. Causing to come back. Here is this
“personal object,” detachable and coming back t the ghost. 360
But did this spectral analysis concern the real shoes or the shoes in the painting?
376
truth as reattachment (279) which takes one underneath, to the other side,
reversible side of the canvass as well as what is on its surface.
The “strange loop . . . of the undone lace. The loop is open, more so still than the
united shoes, but after a sort of sketched out knot—it forma a circle at ts end, an
open circle, as though provisionally, ready to close like pincers or a key ring. A
leash. In the bottom right-hand corner where it faces, symmetrically, the
signature “Vincent,” inread and underlined. It occupies there a place very
commonly reserved for the artist’s signature. As though, on the other side, n the
other corner, on the other edge, but symetrically, (almost) ona level with it, it
stood in place of the signature, as it took the (empty, open) place of it.
(277)
155
If , as Shapiro suggests, the signatory is the owner, or, in an important nuance,
the wearer of the shoes, shall we say that the half-open circle of the lace calls for
a reattachment: of the painting to the signature .. of the shoes to the owner, or
even of Vincent to Van Goh, in short a complement, a general reattachment as
truth in painting (279)
See my essay, Backing Up the Virtual Bayeux Tapestries:
Attachment Disorders, or Turning Over the Other Side of the Underneath
Detachment is intolerable. 283
If, as Shapiro suggests, the signatory is the owner, or, an important nuance, the
wearer of the shoes, shall we say that the half-open circle of the lace calls for a
reattachment: of the painting to the signature (to the sharpness, the pointure,
that the pierces the canvas), of the shoes to their owner, or even of Vincent to
Van Gogh, in short a complement, a general reattachment as truth in painting? . .
. . No more detachment: the shoes are no longer attached-to-Van-Gogh, they
are Vincent himself, who is undetachable from himself. They do not even figure
one of his parts but his whole presence gathered, pulled tight, contracted into
itself, with itself, in proximity with itself: a parousia. --Jacques Derrida,
“Restitutions,” The Truth in Painting, 279; 369
A kind of indivisibility remains in the concept of attachment—he assumes that the
lace is unbroken. But its overuse means that it will break, the knot cannot be
tied, the loop formed, the signature signed. The lace is divisible (potentially) like
156
the letter—but empirically—it breaks, has to be retied, eventually replaced. Bu
the broken lace acan be fixed—can break even several times before it becomes
too short to function. One could even not use all the eyelets.
So the attachment of the lace could be become, if one were really poor or cheap,
more and more fragile, at risk of breaking again.
We have remained in these uncanny halls, where they we try to transform their
profound emotion into artistic creation; not to find a solution to the puzzle of
human essence, but rather to a new formulation of the eternal question, why the
fate of creative men lies in the region of eternal, everlasting unrest, whether they
find their reflected image in Hell, Purgatory, or Paradise.
O (k)no(w)
50
From retracing, the footprint in the ash, etc, we could go to WB briefly in the
storyteller on living by burning the story up.
From ash of the archive to WB, “The Storyteller” --reading the novel as book
burning, getting warm.
through the deaths one reads about Section XV, p. 156, Selected
writings p. 156 Indeed, he destroys, swallows up the material as a fire devours
logs in the fireplace. The suspense which permeates the novel is very much like
the draft of he air which fans the flame in the fireplace and enlivens its play . . .
The novel is significant . . . because this stranger's fate, by virtue of the flame
which consumes it, yields to us the warmth which we may never draw from out
157
fate. What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life
with a death he reads about.
(p. 156)
Is this sacrificial reading? Libri sacrii?
The storytelller . . . is granted the ability to reach back through a whole lifetime ( a
life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience but of the
experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to what is
most his own). His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to
relate his entire life. The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his
life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis for
the incomparable aura that surrounds the storyteller. section XIX, p. 162. See
note 28, p. 166
"Aura" translates “Stimming" which also means atmosphere" [and mood].
In the French version of the essay "aura" is "ce halo":
If one keeps silent, it is not only to listen to [the storyteller] but also, in some
measure, because the aura [ce halo] is there." So one version is more secular
than the other, and the English translator ignores the distinction between the two.
See p. 153 salvation history and natural history religious view of history or a
worldly view.
51
Derrida Archive Fever
Freud on censorship through copying medieval book in Analysis terminable and
interminable, p. 236.
158
Agamben never takes up the question of justice (and in a sense his notion of the
camp transcends justice since the question of crimes is incidental to the camp),
but for Derrida, the archive is tied to memory and justice:
Because if it is just to remember the future and the injunction to remember,
namely the archontic injunction to guard and gather the archive, it is no less just
to remember the others, the other others and the others in onself, and that the
other people could say the same thing—in another way (77)
Derrida cites his Force of Law essay in note 14, page 76. So WB is on the line.
Freud includes to prefaces in Moses and Monotheism, one dated in Austria 1938,
the other in London 1938. So it’s a double preface marking his geographical
movement and exile.
If Freud suffered from mal d’archive, if his case stems from a trouble de l’archive,
he is not without his place simultaneously, in the archive fever or disorder we are
expierincing today, concerning its lightest symptoms or the great holocaustic
tragedies of our modern history and historiography: concerning all the detestable
revisionisms, aswellas the most legitimate, necessary, andcourageous rewritings
of history. (90)
With the irreplaceable singularityof a document to interpret,to repeat, to
reproduce, but eachtime in its original uniqueness, an archive ought tobe
idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to
andshielded from technical iteration and reproduction. (90)
Freud made possible the idea of an archive properly speaking, of a hypomnesis
or technical archive, of the substrate or the subjectile (material or virtual) which,
in what is already a psychic spacing, cannot be reduced to memory: neither to
memory as conscious reserve, not to memory as rememoration, as act of
recalling. The psyhic drive comes niehter under mneme nor under anamnesis.
(91-92)
A e have ntoed along, ther eis an incessant tension . . . between the archive and
achelogy. They will always be close the oeene to the other, resembling each
other, hardly aardly discernable in their co-implcation, and yet radcally
incompatible, heterogenous,thatis to say, different with rgard to the origin, in
divorce with regard to the arche. (92)
“Freudrepeated the patriarchal logic” (95)\To the point that certain people camn
wonder if, decades after his death, his osn,s so many brothers, can yet speak in
their own name. Or if his daughter ever came tolife (zoe), was ever anything
other than a phantasm or a specter, a Gradiva rediviva, a gradiva-Zoe-Bertgang
passing through at errgasse 19. (95)
So here the connection with Anan and Gradiva is made explicit at the eclsoe of
the book, just before the postscript. Can Anna speak? Does she speak in own
name or Freud’s Can gradiva speak?
159
Comes downtot he impression as a moment of undivided impression, of liveness
or theimpression as always already divided and hence mediated, translated,
technologized, spectral.
Freud
“wants to exhume a more archaic impression, he wants to exhibit a more archaic
imprint thanthe one the other arcaheologists of all kinds bustle around, those of
literature and those of classical objective sceience, an imprint that is singular
each time, ann impression that is almost nolonger an archive but almost
confuses itself with the pressre of the footstep that leaves its still leaiving mark
ona substrate, a surface, a place of irgin. When the step is still one with the
subjectile. In the insitant whenthe printed archive is yet to be detached form the
primacyry narcissim in its singular, irreproducible, and archaic origin. In the
instant when the imprint is yet to be left, abandoned by the pressure of the
impression. In the instant of pure auto-affection, in the indsitinction of the active
and the passive, of a touching and the touched. An archive which would in
sumconfuse itself with the arkhe, with the origin o f which it is onlya typos, the
typos, the iterable letter or character. An archive witout archive, where, suddenly
indisernable from the impression of its imprint, Gradiva’s footprint speaks by
itself! (98)
Hanold came to search f r the trace of Gradiva’s footprints “in the literal sense.
He dreams of bringing back to life. He dreams of reliving. But of reliving the
other. Of reliving the singular impression or impression which Gradiva’s step, the
step itself, the step of Gradiva herself, that very day, at that time, on htat date,
what was inimitable about it, must have left in the ashes. He dreams this
irreplaceable place, the very ash, where the singular imprint, like a signature,
barely distinguishes itself from the impression. . . it is the condition for the
uniqueness of the printer-printed, of the impression and the imprint, of the
pressure and the trace in the unique instant where they are not yet distinguished
the one form the other, forming in an instant a single body of Gradiva’s step, her
gait, of her pace (Gangart), and the ground which carries the,. The trace no
longer distinguishes itself from the substrate. No longer distinguishing between
themselves, this pressure and this imprint differ henceforth from all other
impressions, from all other imprints, and from all other archives. At least the
imprint (Abdruck), distinct from all the others, must be rediscovered—but this
presupposes both memory and the archive, the one and the other as the same,
righton the same subjectile in the field of excavations. It must be resuscitated
right where, in an absolutely safe location, in an irreplaceable place, it still holds,
right on the ash, not yet having detached itself, the pressure of Gradiva’s so
singular step. (99)
He hten quotes Freud on Hanold “he had come to Italy and traveled on to
Pomepii, without sstopping in Rome or Napes, in order to see whether hec ould
find any traces of her. And ‘traces’ in the literal sense; for with her peculiar gait
160
she must have left behind an imprint [Abdruck] of her toes in the ashes distinct
formall the rest” (99)
This unqueness “remains unfindadable. The possibiltiyt of the archiving trace,
this simple possibility, can only divide the uniqueness. Separating the
impression form the imprint. Because this uniqueness is not even a past present.
It one have been possible, one candream of it after te fact,only insofaras its
iterability, htat is to say, its immanent divisibility, the possibility of its fission,
haunted it foerm the the origin. The faithful memory of sucha singularity can only
be given over to the specter. (100)
Mentiosn au andMoses (88)
The ghsot appears in reading Gravida” appears for us in the experience of
rading” (86)
It is the nearlyecstatic moment Freud dreams of, when the very success of the
dig must sign the effeacement of the archivist: the origi then speaks by itsel.
The arkhe appears in the nude, without archive. It presets itself and comments
on itself by itself. “Stones talk!” In the present. Anamnesis without hypnomesis!
The archeaologist has succeeded in making the archive no longer serve any
function. It comes ti efface itself, it becomes transparent or unessential so to let
the orgin present itself in person. Live, without mediation and delay. Without
even the memory of a translation, once the intense work of translation has
succeeded. (93-93)
“radical evil” is a phrase from HannahArendt; in a letter to her, Heidegger he
didn’t understand wha she meant by those words.
How can one not, and why not, take into account unconscious, and more
generally virtual archives? . . . Freud’s intention to analyze, across he apparent
absence of memory or of archive, all kinds of symptoms, signs, and figures,
metaphors, and metonymies that at least, at least virtually, an archival
documentation where the “ordinary” historian” finds none” (64)
And to extend the problematic of field of an archive of the virtual in its greatest
generality, throughout and beyond psychoanalysis. The topology and nomology
we have analyzed up to now were able to necessitate, as an absolutely
indispensable condition the full and effective actuality of the taking-place, the
reality, as they say, of he archive event. What will; become of this when we will
have indeed have to remove the concept of virtuality from the couple that
opposes it to actuality, effectivity, or effectively, or to reality? Will we be obliged
to continue thinking that there is no thinkable archive for the virtual? For what
happens in virtual space and time? It is hardly probable, this mutation is in
progress, but it will be necessary, to keep a rigorous account of this other
virtuality, to abandon or restructure from top to bottom our inherited structure of
161
the archive. The moment has come to accept a great stirring in our conceptual
archive (66-67)
The transiton from Jacob and cirucmsion to FreudJensen Hanold nad Gradiva is
already prepared by the citation of Gradiva, p.42
Anna Antigone , 43, 48
Laiusand Oedpius cnncetd ot the Jew—the Jew and the Freek 48)
Freud’soth,p. 46, p. 50, andGradiva’s foot (print)
Which ledas to a mise neabymeofself-concealment within thearchive—of
whatfreudbruned witoutnecessarily havingknown, without an ash (101)
Derrida cites the same passage by Yeruslami twice (70)
“To be open toward the future would be to be Jewish” (74) There would be no
future without repetition And thus as Freud might say, there is no future without
the specter of he oeipdal violence that inscribes the superepression into the
archontic institution of the archive, . . (80)
Gets back to Derria’s points about transgenerational memory (the condition of
the archive) and about the grandson becoming the father to the father
the logic of the after the fact (Nachtraglichkeit), which is not only at the heart of
psychoanalysis, but even, literally the sinews of all “deferred” (nachtraglich)
obedience, turns out to disrupt, disturb, entangle forever the reassuring
distinction between the two terms of this alternative, as between the past and the
future, that is to say between the three actual presents which would be the past
present the present, and the future present?
Political (76)
Postscript to earlierto Zakhor, p. 76
Pathos of hope-less-nss (79)—jew and non Jew.
Could be linked to Mr. Klein—German / jew; French / geramn; Aermican (Charlie
Chaplin as Jew); French translation of Jud Suss. Le film “Juif Swiss.” Juif
magazin on the storefront. Lip synching of drag queen, thencHarlie chaplin
silent; then drag queen stays in the background as the dancers come on stage.
Derrida notes p. 77, n 14 that bennington says Derrida has “rsiekd repeating the
gesture I seemed to put into question in the jands of the other, namely, the
affirmation of the unique or of the idiom.
162
Return ts to his himself, hjid father andgrandfather (78)
Yerushalmi’s book has two calendrical dates, as Derrida observes. (70)
It opened to infinity the gaping of the future” (71)
Theses begin with a letter written by Freud “Vienna, 6 December 1896
I think or rather I dream of Walter Benjamin. (69) the Concept of History, “the
narrow door” for the passage of the Messiah at each second . . . what can we
understand in this remark or make it say, this remark about the door of a future to
come whose time would not be homogenous? (69)
At the moment Derrida talks about Yerushalmi crossing over from being an
historian to neither psycho nor historian of psycho, Derrida crosses over form
philosophy ( think0 to Freud (I dream), to post-Cartesian subject ( think I dream It
think therefore I am).
How could the person who promises a secret to a specter still dare to say he is a
historian? . . The historian speaks only of the past, Yerushalmi says this about
himself at the end of the first of his texts that I read, a text about the Marannos,
with whom I have always secretly identified (but don’t tell anyone) and whose
crypto-Judaic history greatly resembles that of psychoanalysis after all. (70-71)
Derrida's response (entitled Marx & Sons) in Ghostly Demarcations:
What if, to conclude, we floated the idea that not only Spinoza, but Marx himself,
Marx the liberated ontologist, was a Marrano? A sort of clandestine immigrant, a
Hispanic-Portuguese disguised as a German-Jew who, we will assume,
pretended to have converted to Protestantism, and even to be a shade antiSemitic? Now that would really be something! We might add that the sons of Karl
knew nothing of the affair . . . they would have been Marranos who were so well
disguised, so perfectly encrypted, that they themselves never suspected that
that's what they were--or else had forgotten the fact that they were Marranos,
repressed it, denied it, disavowed it. It is well known that 'real' Marranos as well.
to those who, though they are really, presently, currently, effectively, ontologially
Marranos, no longer even know it themselves. Claims have also been advanced
to the effect that the question of marranism was recently been closed for good. I
don't beleive it for a second. There are still sons--and daughters--who,
unbeknownst to themselves, incarnate or metempsychosize the ventriloquist
specters of ttheir ancestors.
p. 262
Probems of the archive:
163
1. Nomotopology (p.5, “order is no longer assured”); “this topo-logic thus
remains properly disorienting. One continually has the feeling of getting
lost while retracing one’s steps.[“ 69, anticipates discussion of Gradiva in
the postscript]
How to classify materials in the Freud archive?
2. Which Freud archive?
3. What is a substrate?
Archive attached to its apparatus—Derrida hooks up the reading or commentary
to the archive, which is actually an archived document that gets read (for the first
time by Yerushalmi). So reading brings the archive(d) into existence and
remains attached to it forever. “this document is henceforth accompanied,
indissociably, by an extraordinary exegetical or hermeneutic apparatus. (21)
The archive [of Freud’s father’s inscription] has been in the public domain for
years” (20)
Like the umbilical cord metaphor for yeushalmi.
shift from patriarchy (freud to freud) and circumcision (and binding) to Gradiva's
foot (not her toes). Given that Freud talks about toes and castration, seems odd,
as does the use of the umbilical cord metaphor to describe Y's book. The
footprint, becomes the figure of the impression Derrida can deconstruct; the
foreskin and (re)circumcision seem to vanish in his reading of Freud reading
Jensen.
Yersushalmi present the character, to his eyes properly inaugural, of the
discovery, of htereading, and of the establishment of this “cricual” archive of
which he is in sumthe first guardian, the first rader, the first docotor, indeed the
only legitimate archin. (22)
The fact that this corpusand this name also remain spectral is perhaps a general
structure of every archive. By incorporating the knowledge deployed in refrence
to it, the archive augments itself, engrosses itself, it gains in autoritas. But in the
same stroke it loses he absolute and meta-texuta authority it might claim to have.
One will never be able to objectivize it wih no remainder. Thearchivist produces
more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens putto the
future.
Sfor Derrida the problem then becomes how to have a future that is about a
repeition that is not the death drive? IS freud’saccount of the death drive
(repletion that ledads to a forgetting of violence) thena negation of Judiasm in
that Judiams is constituted by a belief in the future (74) ad involves the question
ofJewish election (74-76) and of justice(77-78).
164
So the death drive repeition , the evil of forgetting and erasing the archiving of
the violence andinjsutice that founds the the archive, involves a violence (the
violent re-psoitioning of the one) that calls the promise of he future promised by
Judaism into quesiotn, making psychonalaysis “unJewish.” “In ny case there
would e no future without repeition. . . And the death drive. Without this evil.,
which is also archive fever, the desire and disorder of the archive.” (80-81)
The price Derrida apys for his screted messianism (his fdream of WB), his
confessed secret about the maranno, is the demonizaiton of the archive, the
equation of he death drive with evil. He does not directly go to the demon or to
the angel in WB. He just refers to raical evil near the beginning (2)—“verges on
radical evil” and near the close of the book (81). He does address the devil,
Christianity and Judaism on p. 13. So his secret messianism is a kind of demonic
parody of the death drive, not a life drive, not an archive drive that separates life
out from a death drive.
Freud’s own intellectual autobiography (57)
The archive is not only about the past but about the future:
The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know it in
times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow, but in times to come, later on or perhaps
never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it,
like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the
promise. And we are never far from Freud in saying this. Messianicity does not
mean messianism. (36)
The future is not relative incompletion of the archive (54); “at issue is another
concept of the future to which we will return.” (52)
The question of the archive remains the same: What comes first? Even better:
Who comes first? And second? (37)
“biological archive” (34)
“bio-genetic techno science” (48)
“telephone,” 25, 27, 31; preamble—the words “Freudian impression” dictated
(31) “imprint itself on me” (26); “imprint imposed itself so quickly on me over the
telephone” (27)
In the body of this inscription [Jacob’s dedication], we must . . . underline all the
words that point, indeed, toward the institution and the tradition of the law, but
also, more directly, toward the logic and semantics of the archive . . . which put
into reserve (“sore”), accumulate, capitalize, stock a quasi-infinity of layers, of
archival strata that are at once superimposed, overprinted, and enveloped in
165
each other. To rd, in this case, requires working at geological or archeological
excavations, on substrates or under surfaces, old or new skins, the hypermnesic
51and hypnomnesis51 epidermises of books or penises—and the very first
sentence recalls, at least by figure, the circumcision of the father of
psychoanalysis.” (22)
To give the archive is to return it (the father returns it to the son and to recall him
by commanding him to read following God’s words to “the newborn”: “Go, read
my Book that I have written.” (38)
“when it is addressed first to a newborn or a phantom” (41)
Derrida sets up a very different opposition her from Agamben’s life and death.
The newborn cannot speak or understand the convenant but has to be recalled
to it later, when he can read, and so he is figuratively recircumscribed (there is
already a detachment disorder in the archive, in the binding—of the book—which
seems to call up the binding of Issac by Abraham, but Derrida does not mention
it. The violence of circumcision as binding versus the binding by infanticide
(suspended) it’s also a kind of total recall where the son has to be given back
his book by his father a second time for it to become readable.
“In the seventh in the days of the years of your life” (22)
“In the seventh in the days of the years of your life” (23)
“In the seventh in the days of the years of your life” (42)
Jacob Freud’s inscription has two calendrical dates (Jewish and Roman), p. 23.
The dating of the archive is always already uncanny.
“the very figure of the covenant . . .in the type of an incisive inscription, in its
character at once inaugural and recurring, regularly renewed” (n. 3,
We cannot reconstitute here the virtual exchange of questions and answers in
motion in such a Monologue on the subject of the very content of Moses. (63) p.
22)
Derrida implies here that circumcision is already a mark that doesn’t remember
it’s a mark, even the physical circumcision, is already a figure, already on the
exterior. Hence the phylacteries are forms of rebinding, storing, refiguring the
letter, renewing it, but by binding it, binding being itself a gathering in a material
sense, but also a violence, sewing, ordering, that calls up Abraham’s binding of
Issac (the Akadah).
“seven or eight days after his birth” ; “less than eight days ago.” (97); the math of
the less than eight days and the conference date on the very first page does
166
work—it’s nine days—May 29 would be eight days from June 5, the conference
date, , but Derrida gives May 22-28 as his dates
Umbilical cord metaphor for Yerushalmi’s book (37)
Questions: problem of classifying the Freud archive (4-5); which Freud archive?
What is the substrate?
Gradiva is first mentioned on p. 18
Was it not at this very instant that, having written something or other on the
screen, the letters remaining as if suspended and floating yet to the surface of a
liquid content [see “Typewriter Ribbon Inc”], I pushed a certain key to “save” a
text undamaged, in a hard and lasting way, to protect marks from being erased,
so as to ensure in this way salvation and indemnity, to stock, to accumulate, and,
in what is at once the same thing and something else, to make the sentence
available for printing and reprinting, for reproduction” (26)
A series of either or formulated questions run through the book with reference to
psychoanalysis: “A general archivology . . . would have either (1) to include . . . or
(2) on the contrary” (34) Must one . . ? Or rather, has one on the contrary . .?”
(36) Does one base one’s thinking? Or ? . . . does one need a first archive in
order to conceive of orginary archivability? Or vice versa?” (p. 80, twice)
Derrida reads Grdiva (Freud oN Dradiva) along with Freud on Moses *Misspleing
of Grvida onp. 87m Moses the first Messiah and Jesus his ressurection. –there s
acertain amount of truth for Freud n Hanodl’s delusion just as there is Pauls’
avvout of Vhrist’s reuccrection of Moses, the son put nteh place of the faterh (88)
Delusion or insanity, hauntedness is not only haunted by this or htatghost,
Gavida [sic], for example, but bytby the specter of the truth which has thus been
repressed, The truth ispsectral, and this is its part of truth which is irreducible tby
explanation. (87)
The sptralization of het achive isa way of thinking archivefever through Freud’s
jewishness, after Yerushalmi, but hten rerouting the question fo Jewishishness
not only thorugh circumssionand htefather’s recalling of theson to his
Jewisishness—read the book of God—by a binding thatis a recimusmcision, but
also related to the Germanarcheologist looking for gradiva, a double of Anna
Freud (who Yerushalmi can’tsee—asa writer inher own right, who in any case
repeats the wriing system by sending the letter rather htan going in person.
To speak in her name and or in herfatehr.s, Freudon Jensen’s novel hs ot be
read with Greud on moses on amontheismas a way of keeping the future open
while acknowledging that the future contains evil within because there is no
167
future withoutrepeition (hence the death drive that erases the injunction to
remember that you remember, hence subverts justice through a violence it
cannot recall, mch like liberaldemocrcy forgets the violence of its own founding..
Political in the footnotes also twice on p. 79, no 15 “This is where all the politics
comes in. . . “in another political gesture, my own right to irony”
Footnote responds to what Geoff Bennington said after Derrida gave the lecture.
Mentions Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence” (which Agamben also reads in
Homo Sacer and also in State of Exception) on p. 7, and then takes up the
violence of the archive and justice on pp. 77-78.
“the injustice of the this justice can concentrate its violence in the very
constitution of the One and of the Unique. Right where it can affect everyone
everyone and anyone, whoever.” (77)
“As soon as there is the One, there is murder, wounding, traumatism . . . The
One guards against / keeps some of it of the other. It protects itself from the
other, but, in the movement of this jealous violence, it comprises in itself, thus
guarding it, the self-otherness or self-difference (the difference from within
oneself which makes it One. The “One differing, deferring fro itself.”The One as
the Other. At once, and at the same time, but in a same time that is out of joint,
the One forgets to remember itself to itself, it keeps and erases the archive of this
injustice that it is. The One makes itself violence. It violates and does violence
to itself but also institutes itself as violence. It becomes what it is, the very
violence—that it does to itself. Self-determination as violence.” (78)” (78)
“Dead person can be put to death again” (63).
It is the perfect book to put in dialogue with Homo Sacer because it engages a
problem of the more than one and more or less than two origin of the
nomological order of the archive—it gets at what Agamben cannot because he
links legal immediacy with historical immediacy.
So Derrida gets at a forgetting at the beginning
Shelter (3; 44)
Speaking the law is not the same thing as archiving –the law depends on
substrate and residence, a domicile.
The intersection of the topological and the nomological, a scene of domiciliation
at once invisible and visible (3)
Sounds Heideggerian when talking about the consigation of he archive as a
gathering (3); mentions Heidegger being like Freud on the uncanny (46)
In a footnote note p. 4, he he says “Of course, the question of a politics of the
archive is our permanent orientation here, even if the time of a lecture does not
permit us to treat this and with examples. This question will never be determined
as one political question among others. It runs through the whole of he field and
168
in truth determines politics from top to bottom as res republica. There is no
political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.
Thus one can say that that the entire book is in advance contained . . . engulfed
by the abysmal element of the “Monologue,” for which it constitutes a kind of long
preface, an exergue, a preamble, or a foreword. The true tile of the book, its most
appropriate title, its truth, would indeed be Monologue with Freud.
Sidelining the question of the politics is a way of getting at it.
(40)
First is the problem of classification pp. 4-5
First geological metaphor.
In each of these cases, the limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been
shaken by an earthquake from which no classification concept and no
implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer is assured.
Earthquake metaphor first s used on p. 5, Vesuvius, p. 97 I would have liked to
devote my whole lecture to this retrospective science fiction. I would have liked
to imagine with you the scene of that other archive after the earthquake and after
the après coups of its after shocks (16) (unlimited upheaval under way in archival
technology, 18)
Archaeological digs, biblical philology (18)
What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way
(18)
Refers to the ethico-poltiical dimension of the problem (19))
Body comes in via a comparison between printing and circumsion p. 8,
The destination of the Jew in the Aryan ideal
(Earlier in the same text, Freud proposes an interesting critique of nationalisms
and of anti-Semitism on which we ought to meditate today but which we cannot
possibly enter into here. Brings in technical substrate “this archival earthquake
would not have limited its effects to the secondary recording, to the printing and
to conservation of the history of psychoanalysis. It would have transformed this
history form top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its
very events.
And this plays out of the archive as oriented to the future “This is also our political
experience of the so-called news media.” (17)
Transforming the entire public and private spaces of humanity, (17)
169
Comes back to the body via the father’s inscription on the substrate, a figurative
circumcision “Each layer seems to gape slightly, as the lips of a wound . . .
destined for archeological excavation. (20)
“arca is also the cupboard, the coffin, the prison cell, through the cistern, the
reservoir.
Inscription about the seventh in the days of the years of your life” (22) p. 41, p.
97
Archive as storage unit Arch-archive, the book was “stored” with the archpatriarch of psychoanalysis. It was stored there in the Ark of the convenant. (20)
Footnote 4: The ark stays with eh father of the father of psychoanalyss …
Shortly after the reminder of the Ark of the Convenant figures the order to
circumscribe the foreskin of the heart (23)
Preamble or Ramble
Like the postscript On a beautiful morning in California a few weeks ago, I asked
myself a certain question . . . this so-called live or spontaneous memory but
rather a certain hypomnesic and prosthetic experience of the technical substrate
Talks about talking on the phone to Rodesceau and giving the tile (25)
The opening text about the title is put entirely in the passive voice. No signature.
Save (26) possibility of a salvific archive
Freudian impression proceeds from his circumsion to the “new skin” of het
Biblehis father gives him.
(30)
This, then is perhaps what I hear without hearing, what I understood without
understanding, a what I wanted obscurely to overhear, allowing these words to
dictate to me over the telephone, in “Freudian impression.” (31)—goes back to
the beginning of the preamble p.25, telephone call with Rodisneceau about
sending her a “provisional title.”
Mirrors the delay he finds in the postal system, any teletechnology—determines
the archive, but always it seems, in new ways, always a past and a future to be
read.
The archive storage is what makes reading possible. The says that the shift is
“unprecedented” and singles out email.
170
“postal technology Everything has its scale”
Without waiting, I have spoken to you of my computer. Of the little portable
Macintosh on which I have begun to write. First it has not only been the first
substrate to support all of these words. “while tinkling away on my computer” (25)
Writing, the trace, inscription, on an exterior substrate or on the so-called body
proper, as for example, and this is not just any example for me, that singular and
immemorial archive called circumcision, and which though never leaving you,
nonetheless has come about, and is no less exterior, exterior right on your body
proper. (2)
The first impression is scriptural or typographic that of an inscription . . . which
leaves a mark at the surface or in the thickness of a substrate,
Mentions the postscript of Yerushalmi (55)
Arch-example—the first archivist, the first to discover the archive” (55)
“strange violence” Derrida’s injustice to yerushalmi (63)
“this means that without responding it disposes of a response, a bit like the
answering machine whose voice outlives its moment of recording: you call, the
other person is dead, now, whether you know it or not, and the voice responds to
you, in a very precise fashion, sometimes cheerfully, it instructs you, it can even
give you instructions, make declarations to you, address your requests, prayers,
promises, injunctions,. Supposing that a living being ever responds in an
absolutely living and infinitely well adjusted manner, without the least
automatism, . . . we know that a spectral response is possible
uncanny (36)” (62)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/phylactery
Etymology
Wikipedia has an article on:
Phylactery
Recorded since c.1380, Middle English, philaterie, either from Old French filatiere
171
(12c.), or via Mediaeval Latin philaterium, an alteration of Late Latin phylacterium
("reliquary"), from Greek (phylacterion) ("safeguard, amulet"), via adjective
phylakterios ("serving as a protection") from phylakter ("watcher, guard"), itself
from phylassein ("to guard or ward off") from phylax ("a guard"). [1]
A phylactery in a painting.
phylactery (plural phylacteries)
Any small object worn for its magical or supernatural power; an amulet or
charm.
2006, Don Skemer, Binding Words Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. Penn
State Press, 2006. p. 136n:[1]
"According to the decreta issued by the archbishop of Utrecht in 1372-75, the
word phylactery pertained either to amulets on separate sheets or
to entire books."
The small leather case, containing biblical scrolls, worn by Jewish men at
morning prayer; the tefilla.
2005, Edward Mack, Phylactery, Nextbible.[2]
"Every male, who at the age of 13 becomes a "son of the Law" (bar mitswah),
172
must wear the phylactery and perform the accompanying
ceremonial."
[edit]
Synonyms
(small leather case): tefilla
tefilla (countable and uncountable; plural tefillin)
(countable) The Jewish phylactery, consisting of small boxes containing
portions of the Torah worn by Orthodox Jewish men during prayer.
(uncountable) The Jewish concept of prayer
The memory of the memory without memory of a mark returns everywhere, about
which we ought to debate with freud, concerning his many rapid statements on
the subject: it is clearly the question of he singular archive named
“circumcision.”…. the enigma of circumcision, notably in the great war between
Judaism and Christianity, s quite often that of its literalness and of all that
depends on this. Although I believe this question to be irreducible, in particular to
the rereading of (42)
Freud, irreducibly notably to castration, I must put it aside here, not without some
regret, along with that of phylacteries, those archives of skin of parchment
covered with writing that Jewish men, here too, not Jewish women, carry close to
their body, on their arm and on their forehead: right on the body . . , like the sign
of a circumcision, but with being right on . . that this time does not exclude the
detachment and the untying of the ligature, of the substrate, and of the text
simultaneously. (42)
Written versus signed—Anna Freud—castration anxiety—detachment form
traditon, from father, from text, from signature, from name. Letter is posted, to be
read aloud. She is absent from her text. She does nto read it aloud. (43)
Circumcission as fossil note 6, 42.
SO the wound of circumcision is already exterior, and the tefflia stores the
parchment of prayers, and binds the box to the body for prayer. It’s ritualized..
173
liturgical and tied to speech as well. Writing is hidden, like the wound of
circumcision.
I am teaching Archive fever this week. Rereading it, I am really amazed at how
perfectly it can be made to engage Homo Sacer.
Nomological, prison cell, biological archive, storage, the nomotopology of the
archive, techne and technology, the substrate, death, the box (Ark), Judaism,
ash, the body (skin as parchment, book cover figured as "new skin"--it's all the
there.
The two texts already seem to be speaking to each other once you read them
together.
I am taking extensive notes. By the way, the Preamble anticipates the postscript-the autobiographical bit on the phone, being in California, etc.
And the less than eight days also echoes the repetion of the citation form Freud's
father in his dedication about the seventh day, which at one point Derrida refers
to as seven or eight days. The imprecision of dating and scattering of
autobiographical anecdotes and refrences (like the paragraph he takes to
dedicate Archive fever in both directions, to his father and to his sons, and its
opposition to the first page detailing the history of the title of the book all seem
to be working in a kind of silent way against Yerushalmi's monologue and his
necessary suspension to a future moment when Freud will answer, a future
Derrida points out is totally heterogeneous with the historical notion of time
Yerushalmi has assumed up to that point.
That is, Derrida's writes himself in and out of his text, repeats gestures, like
talking about the title of Yerushalmi's book (it should have been called
Monologue with Freud), his attention to Yerushalmsi's postscript and to the
subtitle of Y's book, as a way of performing his notion of messianicity (not
messianism), silently producing a counterpoint tempo to the repetition of the
inaudible death drive in order to keep open a future that is not reducible to
historical (homogenous) time. The earthquake metaphors (setting up Vesuvius
in the postscript perhaps) and Derrida's references to geopolitics also give us a
way of thinking about the (dis)location of the archive that is quite different from
Agamben's kind of empty paradoxical account of the camp as a dislocating
location.
I also find it interesting the way Derrida keeps engaging major issues by
sidelining them (like putting the sentence about the politics of the archive in the
first footnote, or saying he has top put aside the question of circumcision and
Freud, dealing with phylacteries (42).
174
52
“the new nomos of the earth . . . which will soon extend itself over the entire
planet”; “The camp which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the
new biopolitical nomos of the planet”
53
Agamben's problem lies the way he constructs Foucault's work: Agamben sees a
line of thought about internment that should have ended with an account of the
camp-. Agambem then completes the line of thought. He does connect this
work to Foucualt's work on the archive in Remnants, but doesn't see a fissure
within Foucault's own work between Foucault's account of the archive (Lives of
Infamous Men; I, Pierre Riviere) and discipline through incarceration. Foucault
did not think through the connection between the prison and the archive, in short.
He was too invested in a politics that separated the body from biopolitics.
Agamben retains the same investment in what amounts to a Catholic notion of
sacred life to take its perverse limit (martyrdom, s and m, and so on) with
additional skepticism. Agamben hides his own Catholicism from n a theological
hermeneutic of revealing the hidden (revelation is a fake out move in which the
desacraization of life as bare life allows for a hidden sacralization of life to be put
back into political place).
175