Infinite Archives

Jacques Derrida's 1995 Mal d'archive is an essay with multiple resonances. One can speculate that after nearly a decade and a half of a trend that saw the development in French historical circles of critical thought and writing on the notions of memory and archive, represented most notably and emblematically by Pierre Nora's massive project, Lieux de mémoire, originally published in seven volumes between 1984 and 1992, a certain fetishism of the archive needed to be analyzed. Deconstruction had supposedly shut the door on an old style philology as a viable manner for getting at the truth in its origins, but now another strategy seemed to have reared its head, suggesting that the truth of history could be found in documents, symbols, and objects, many of which were circumscribed in collections, repositories of knowledge about deep-seated belief systems. The Éditions Gallimard internet catalogue describes the project of Lieux de mémoire as follows:

Today the rapid disappearance of our national memory cries out for an inventory of the places where it was selectively incarnated: celebrations, emblems, monuments, and commemorations, but also speeches, archives, dictionaries, and museums. . . . More than an impossible exhaustiveness, what counts here are the types of subjects chosen, how they are exploited, the richness and variety of approaches, and, finally, the broad equilibrium of a vast corpus on which more than a hundred of the most qualified historians have agreed to collaborate. France as a subject is inexhaustible. Taken together, [this is] a history of France, not in the habitual sense of the term, but—between memory and history—the selective and scholarly exploration of our collective legacy.

(My translation here and elsewhere unless otherwise noted.)

The expression "héritage collectif," used in Gallimard's marketing blurb and rendered here as "collective legacy," might just as easily be translated "inherited collections," that is, inherited archives. The trope of lost memory becomes a lieu commun: if one's history cannot be remembered, the only recourse is to be immersed in the invigorating reservoir of accumulated texts and objects. Although a teleological historical narrative of progress is no longer available, remnants and vestiges can rejuvenate the frustrated historian, or so it would seem. The Lieux de mémoire project can be analyzed as a re-inscription of the discipline of history in a postmodern, poststructuralist phase, at a moment when all possibility of narrative closure seems remote indeed ("France as a subject is inexhaustible," that is, infinite, without end.). Mal d'archive might well find one of its sources of inspiration in an attempt to analyze critically this fetishism of collecting, which results from something like a moment of crisis. Although he makes no reference to Nora and the Lieux de mémoire project, Derrida nonetheless wonders about the fear of loss motivating projects like the one Nora imagined, as well as all the emulations to which Nora's work gave rise (one is tempted to characterize the historical and critical endeavors spawned by Lieux de mémoire as a veritable cottage industry). Why had the question of the archive come to the fore? In fact, Derrida had already taken a decidedly less euphoric view of how the past comes back when he lectured and wrote about the specters of Marx only shortly before he gave his lecture on the Freud archive. Far from constituting a source from which one might recover a certain plenitude of memory, the vestiges of the past return to haunt the present—both as reminders of the past and as announcements of the future.

Mal d'archive, originally an occasional piece that grew out of reflections on the notion of the archive in the history of Freud's foundational work in psychoanalysis and thus out of Derrida's earlier analysis of the scene of writing in Freud ("Freud et la scène de l'écriture"), also finds the motivation for its argument in the damage done to archives by political repression and in the counter attempts to get at what...