Archives and Feelings

Mal d’arkhe, or the Trouble with Archives

Megha Baikadi

September 17, 2013

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Mal d’Arkhe, or The Trouble of Archive Fever

Derrida’s Intro and Three Theses from Archive Fever

Ten Questions About Derrida

1. What do we think about Derrida? Feelings, reactions?

2. How about those archives? How do we view them, how do we understand them?

“It is thus, in this domicilium, in this house arrest, that the archive takes place. The dwelling…marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret “(2)

“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory” (4 footnote)

“Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”. And not only because of the two orders of the arkhe which we distinguished at the beginning. Nothing is more troubled or more troubling.” 90

“The trouble d’archive stems from a mal d’archive. We are en mal d’archive, in need of archives. Listening to the French idiom…[it] can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness… it is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away…. no mal-de can arise for a person who is not, already, en mal d’archive.” (91)

3. Why Freud? What does psychoanalysis have to say on the subject of archives, or archives to say about Freud?

“Psychoanalysis is not without responsibility in this trouble….If we no longer know very well what we are saying when we are saying “archive”, undoubtedly Freud is not without responsibility” (91)

4. What do we make of the haunting of Freud? How does this theme reinforce, or refute, the idea of archives? Why is it so recurrent in the reading?

“In his reading of Jensen’s Gradiva, Freud avows himself being haunted. He denies it without denying it, he defends himself without defending himself. He fends himself, if you will, at the moment he wants to account for…the haunted insanity of someone else – and someone else as a character in fiction….putting it in quotation marks, Freud speaks of a “real” ghost” (85)

“On the contrary, there is a grain of truth concealed in every delusion, there is something in it that really deserves belief, and that is the source of the patient’s conviction” (87)

“Having thus accounted for the part of truth, the seed of truth in the hallucination…Freud means to confirm this truth of revisitation. He wants to demonstrate while illustrating. He tells us, in turn, a story… not the case of a patient, but the case of a doctor.” (88)

“And he does not fail to draw a conclusion: he is in a good position not to deny Harold the clinical possibility of a brief delusion, but also the right to a furtive hallucination” (89)

5. Then there are three theses on Freud. What do you think these are, where do they come from, why are they here? Or, what do we do with them?

“I dream no of having the time to submit for your discussion more than one thesis, three at least. This time will never be given to me. Above all, I will never have the right to take your time so as to impose on you, rapid-fire, these three + n essays. Submitted to the test of your discussion, these theses thus remain, for the time being, hypotheses.” (5)

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6. What do we have to say about each of the three theses themselves? What do they mean, what stands out? And, how to they overlap each other, contradict each other, what lies between them?

“A moment and not a process, this instant does not belong to the laborious deciphering of the archive. It is the nearly ecstatic instant Freud dreams of, when the very success of the dig must sign the effacement of the archivist: the origin then speaks by itself. The arkhe appears in the nude, without archive. It presents itself and comments on itself by itself….the archaeologist has suceeded in making the archive no longer serve any function.” (92)

“He wants to explain and reduce the belief in the phantom. He wants to think through the grain of truth in this belief, but he believes that one cannot believe in them and that one ought not to believe in them.” (94)

“Freud repeated the patriarchal logic…. he even added to it in a patriarchic higher bid…To the point that certain people can wonder if, decades after his death, his sons, so many brothers, can yet speak in their own name. Or if his daughter ever came to life, was ever anything other than a phantasm or specter, a Gradiva rediviva

7. The question of languages. Derrida uses language to complicate a lot in his work. We may take into account that it was originally written in French, and that the translator had to adapt or resist adapting a number of terms, but even so he draws a lot of attention to language and origins, including greek and latin. Why? What do you think it mean? What do you think we should do with the idea?

“Let us not begin at the beginning, or even at the archive. But rather with the word, “archive”, and the archive of so familiar a word. Arkhe, we recall, names at once both the commencement and the commandment. The name apparently coordinates two principles in one…” (1)

“As is the case for the Latin archivium, or archium…the meaning of “archive”, its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address” (2)

“The trouble d’archive stems from a mal d’archive. We are en mal d’archive, in need of archives. Listening to the French idiom…[it] can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness… it is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away…. no mal-de can arise for a person who is not, already, en mal d’archive.” (90)

8. How do we read the postscript, what Freud wants (or doesn’t), his contradictions, or our understanding? What do we do with Derrida’s interpretation?

“When he wants to explain the haunting of an archaeologist with the logic of repression, at the very moment he specifies that he wants to recognize in it a germ or a parcel of truth, Freud claims again to bring to light a more ordinary origin than that of the specter. He wants to be an archivist who is more of an archaeologist than the archaeologist… a better etiologist than his novelist.” (97-98)

“We will always wonder what Freud (for example) what every “careful concealer” wanted to keep secret. We will wonder what he might have kept of his unconditional right to secrecy, while at the same time burning with the desire to know, to make known, to archive the very thing he concealed forever….we will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he may have burned.” 101

9. One of the niggling questions I had, as I read the first thesis, was that interesting little paragraph at the end, with the employer digging up ruins, the (dare I say fantasy? Maybe story?) of the archaeologist. In view of Taylor’s view of “promoting certain views while vanishing others” (p 29, Acts of Transfer), how else might we read this little narrative? Is Freud, or Derrida, committing “percepticide”? Do we even want to go there? Is it useful in reading this work at all?

“Imagine that an employer arrives in a little know reigon, where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins… he may content himself with [what lies on the surface], with questioning the inhabitants – perhaps semi-barbaric people – …about what tradition tells them…. But he may react differently. He may have brought picks, shovels, and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements…if his work is crowned with success, the results are self-explanitory.” (93)

10. So, what do you think? What else would you like to talk about, in Freud, or in Derrida? What is your final articulation of these archives, of the archive, of the arkhe and the mal d’archive?

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