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  • Spectres of Freud: The Figure of the Archive in Derrida and Foucault
  • Adina Arvatu (bio)

The figure of the archive has immense cultural and methodological significance in what we, in our posthuman(ist) age, still call “humanities.” Foucault and Derrida —whether considered independently of each other, or together, as I am trying to do here—contributed largely to this significance. They thematized the “archive” (in the singular) and endowed it with an unmistakable (yet often misunderstood) figurality. Granted, their “archives” do not quite cut the same figure. Nor would that be interesting, if that were the case. In what follows, I am not interested in synthesizing their views, nor in dispelling the legend of their differend: after all, it is a good legend (good reading material). Instead, my modest goal is to mark the instance of a rare accord between these two thinkers, which has to do with the status and functions of the archive as a figure of thought (Gedankenbild) and of psychoanalysis as a “science” thereof. To that purpose, I proceed in two steps: first, I offer a brief consideration of the larger cultural and philosophical import of this figure in their work; second, by examining a particular—generally underemphasized—passage from Archive Fever, in [End Page 141] which Derrida comments on the peculiar figurality of the archive, as well as the status Foucault accorded psychoanalysis in The Order of Things, I try to establish this figure’s methodological significance. Following along this methodological grain, I argue that the peculiar figurality of the archive is markedly ideal–typical (in Max Weber’s sense) and, hence, less ad hoc than many readers assume it to be.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the long and winding list of tropisms in the social and human sciences was enriched by yet another: the “archival turn.” However, this twist was not just an academic affair. Writing in the early 1980s, for instance, Pierre Nora—in his general editor’s introduction1 to the monumental multivolume project Les lieux de mémoire, whose publication he supervised at Gallimard between 1984 and 1992—noted that “the obsession of the archive is a mark of our times [l’obsession de l’archive [. . .] marque le contemporain]” (xxvi), and not just in history as a discipline, but in society at large: “Now that historians have put an end to their cult of the document, society as a whole recites the credo of conservation and archival productivism” (xxvi).2 In fact, it seems that the “professionals of the archive”—historians and archivists—have been mostly taken aback by the sudden vogue that archival practices began to enjoy outside the walls of their institutions. Nora himself had a rather conservative response to this social phenomenon, in which he saw a “strange reversal” (xxvii): if, formerly, it was the professionals of the archive who were suffering from a “conservation mania,” “nowadays it is the private enterprises and public administrations who mandate archivists with the recommendation to keep everything, when professionals have learned that the secret of this trade is the art of controlled destruction” (xxvii, emph. mine). (Indeed, this aspect of professional mastery will not have been left untouched by the pensée de l’archive that we are discussing here.)

Succinctly put, Nora’s point is that at the same time that history as a discipline became more critical of its archival practices, society as a whole was seized by an archival frenzy bordering on compulsive hoarding. (Incidentally, the publication trends in psychiatry and psychology seem to corroborate, albeit in a delayed manner, Nora’s point: prior to 1996, less than a dozen studies had been published on compulsive hoarding; since 1996, which is the year of the hallmark publication of R.O. Frost and T.L. Hartl’s “A Cognitive–Behavioral Model of Compulsive Hoarding,” the number of dedicated studies has grown exponentially. A graph illustrating this growth can be found in David Mataix–Cols et al. [566]; this paper also advocates that a separate diagnostic category—under the proposed moniker “hoarding disorder”—be created and included in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM–V], contra DSM–IV, which...

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