On the Future of the Archive

Archigraphia: On the Future ofTestimony and the Archive to Come

Dragan Kujundzic

Remember: no memory or testimony is possible without the ar-chive! Remember: memory and testimony are possible only with-out the archive! Any reflection on testimony, memory, the archiveand archivization has to disarm itself before such an impossibleinjunction. And this command orders all our thinking, ethics, writ-ing, tradition, religion and culture.

Archive of the Past, Archive of the Future

Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever starts precisely by drawing atten-tion to this aporia of the archive. The word arkhe, he recalls at thebeginning of his book, names at the same time the command toremember, to archive and keep, and the commencement of aninstitution of archivization. From the outset, therefore, this aporiasplits the commemorative gesture into two irreconcilable tasks, thesymptoms in fact, to which Derrida gives the name of Archive Fever(Mal d’archive). Like the task of the translator envisioned by WalterBenjamin (and, as we shall see, translation and archivization gohand in hand as two members of the re-membering, archivingagency), the task here marks both the demand to archive, and theneed to give up the task (Aufgabe, Aufgeben), to face up to an impos-sible pressure to forget the archive in order to remember.

Discourse, 25.1 & 2, Winter and Spring, pp. 166–188.Copyright � 2004 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

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167Winter and Spring 2003

This impossible pressure consists of the fact that any archivingpractice has to announce its own desire for the unique, singular,indivisible space and memory, the archivization of, as we would sayin English, ‘‘the one and only.’’ That ‘‘one’’ is the archival jealousyof its own memory, its command and injunction to remember itsname, its place and its law. There is no archive without this jealousand self-preserving order. It is its first (but the order of things ishere uncertain), primordial impulse. We could say, in the lan-guage of psychoanalysis, that it is its primal drive, not without vio-lence, and not without its death-drive. It may be the death driveitself: an injunction to remember, to file and archive, only the one,the one and only. Only one. Derrida gives three qualifications forthis archival drive: it is an-archic, anarchivic and archiviolitic. In avery economic condensation which is a trademark of his writing,Derrida draws attention to the possibility that this primordial jeal-ousy of the archive has, from the very start, all capacities to eraseany archival trace, even the trace of its own archivization.

The memory, in that sense, is made impossible by the veryimperative of archivization.

Derrida will bring the consequences of this aspect of the ar-chive to its aporetic and terrible limit, by saying that ‘‘the archivefever,’’ in its most violent consequences and possibilities, ‘‘vergeson radical evil’’ (20).

One may be justified in wondering why should such an impos-sible aporia be the first impulse of any archivization and why wouldit be tied to what Freud famously called the death drive? Becausewithout this injunction of the one, the first inscription of the singu-lar event and its passing, no archive, no memory traces, no traceswould have been possible. But what makes the tracing and archivi-zation possible also threatens the archive at the very origin. Thisdrive, in Derrida’s words, ‘‘works to destroy the archive: on the condi-tion of effacing but also with a view of effacing its own ‘proper’traces—which consequently cannot be called proper’’ (10). Tospeak in Freud’s terms (‘‘A Freudian Impression’’ is the subtitle ofDerrida’s book), the archive would not be possible without thisoriginary re-pression, the Verdraengung, at the site of its own induc-tion or production. The archival principle serves the death drive.

And yet, on the other hand, one can justly argue in a veryempirical fashion: we do have existing archives, archives are made,bequeathed, opened and inaugurated every day, and archives dosucceed in surviving. We even have the Jacques Derrida Archive atthe University of California at Irvine, which is the university whereI work, and I, who am writing this essay, have in the past on occa-sions served as the archon, the keeper of this archive. So I can attest

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168 Discourse 25.1 & 2

that the archive, even of someone who deconstructs the logic ofthe archive, such as Jacques Derrida, is possible, thriving, alive andwell. The Jacques Derrida Archive keeps surviving even the decon-struction of the archive by Jacques Derrida. It is a permanent de-construction site.

This survival of the archive, the relationship between archiviza-tion and survival may be equally essential to the functioning of thearchive. Not unlike, again, Benjamin’s notion of translation, thearchive may be seen as a site of its own survival, existing in a modeof a delayed survival of itself. This is made possible by a counter-pressure exerted by the archive. Let us recall, no archive wouldexist without the originary injunction to remember, the repressionthat is archiviolitic and anarchivic. And yet, the archival drive simul-taneously impresses, makes an impression or suppression (Freud’sUnterdrueckung) on the material substrate of the archive, on itstopos, domicile, psyche or culture. In its very archiviolation, it leavesa trace of itself, it is ‘‘suppressed and displaced onto another af-fect’’ (28). And this impression, the trace that finds a support onthe welcoming site or substrate, on the topos which is conducive tothe inscription, vouches for the repetition, the survival, and thetranslation of the archive. In a word: it opens the archive to thefuture. The memory generated by the suppression is possible onthe condition of forgetting and in turn repressing or displacingthe archive. By the very fact that the suppressed traces do not be-long to the initial, jealous memory of the one, but are the markersof alterity (they are other-than-archive), they do not belong to thearchive ‘‘proper.’’ Rather, they may be seen as the traces or symp-toms of the originary repression which they leave ‘‘behind.’’ Thatimpressed inscription on the substrate (we could call it the forgot-ten memory of the archive, recalling the second chiasmatic injunc-tion that opened this essay) informs the wager and the incalculableopening towards the future: the very idea of the archive dependson it. Derrida elsewhere calls this opening not ‘‘the future’’ (whichwould imply the future of presence, therefore a metaphysical con-ception of temporality), but the to-come, a-venir: an openingthrough which an archive can receive the unexpected, the unpro-grammable, the unpredictable, the un-presentable and the un-rep-resentable. An opening of the unknown is thus produced, whichno archival knowledge prepares us to receive. This opening orientsthe archive towards actualizations and inscriptions to come. Overthis structural, infinite and in principle interminable possibility ofthe archive to receive new contextualizations, receptions or in-scriptions, no archive, no law, and no father or keeper of the ar-chive has any power or control.

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We have thus two mutually exclusive forces that constitute anarchiving impression. One that belongs to what Freud called re-pression, a record of passing and death, the recording of deathitself, and on the other hand, the opening that is a promise of, andto the future, and which, as a trace of its own survival requires,demands or commands transmission and translation. ‘‘At the sametime [. . .] the conditions of archivization implicate [. . .] all theaporias which make it into a movement of the promise and of thefuture no less than of recording the past’’ (29).

Moses and the Trauma of the Archive

Archive Fever was written as the keynote address at the confer-ence on ‘‘Memory: the Question of Archives,’’ held in the FreudArchive in London in 1995, and is therefore also a reflection onthe very site of the archivization of psychoanalysis. It is also oneof Derrida’s great polemical essays about psychoanalysis, one thatshould be read in the context of his polemical encounters withMichel Foucault or Jacques Lacan . This time, the polemics takes aform of contestation of Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Inter-minable by Yosef Haim Yerushalmi (to whom Derrida dedicates Ar-chive Fever), and over Freud’s last book, Moses and Monotheism. And,above all it is a polemics about the archive that is tied to the ideaof monotheistic religion.

What is the relevance of the death of Moses for the concept ofarchivization and why should precisely that essay by Freud, amongso many possible others, serve as the exemplary case on which tobuild a polemics around the archive and archivization? The an-swer, if one is possible, revolves around naming, the name of god,and of the name of psychoanalysis itself.

The argument of Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, iswell-known but worth repeating, particularly in the context of thedebate about the archive. The founder of Jewish monotheism andthe giver of the Mosaic laws, Moses was an Egyptian who led theJews out of bondage and imposed on them the monotheistic reli-gion of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV. The leader of the Jewish tribeturned out to be too strict in imposing the new religion, includingthe custom of circumcision, and was therefore killed by his newlychosen brethren. The memory of the crime underwent a periodof latency, during which another god was sought by the Jewishtribe. It was found in the kindred Semitic tribe in Midian and thevolcanic deity called Yahveh. Over a period of years the initial, ori-ginary monotheistic god prevailed, and the two deities were

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merged, as was the Mosaic giving of the laws projected on anotherpriest, also called Moses. What has been kept and preserved, ar-chived therefore, under the name of Jewish monotheism, is thisrepressed memory of the originary patricide, inscribing itself asthe trauma of chosenness and survival. And that repressed memorycan be described by the already established contradictory mecha-nism of archivization.

The initial impulse to keep the memory of the one and onlyGod, of the monotheistic tradition, accumulates its energy pre-cisely from this initial anarchivic and archiviolitic trauma: thedeath of the primal father and the injunction to repeat his laws.That injunction, according to the well-known Freudian schema,having come from the now dead father, has a much more powerfulbond and commands a much more forceful obligation than thatof any father alive. But that memory is what, precisely, needs to beforgotten or rather repressed in order for the law, the Mosaicnomos, to be perpetuated throughout history. It has ‘‘suffered thefate of repression, the state of being unconscious, before it couldproduce such mighty effects on its return, and force the massesunder its spell [. . .] in religious tradition’’ (130).

The traumatic separation from the tribal father creates yet an-other element essential for the functioning of monotheism, ac-cording to Freud. It commands the return, a belated attempt, toregain the moment before the murder. It is this moment beforethe murder, that of chosenness, that allows the survival of the tradi-tion in the repressed memory of the initial catastrophe.

The monotheistic experience of the Jewish people is thereforetied to the archivic survival: their existence in history, what returnsas monotheism, comes from the fact, noted by Cathy Caruth, thatthe Jews were violently separated from Moses and survived.

In a way, the entire people have become the substrate or thesubjectile on which this initial archiving repression left its impres-sion. Caruth gives a cogent description of this condition: ‘‘Mono-theism for Freud is [. . .] not simply a return of the past, but of thefact of having survived it, a survival that, in the figure of the newJewish god, appears not as an act of being chosen by the Jews, butas the incomprehensible fact of being chosen for a future that re-mains, in its promise, yet to be understood’’ (71).

What are the consequences of this archiviolitic survival? Thesituation described as the return of the repressed father of mono-theism challenges the capacity of historical, referential descrip-tion. We know that the catastrophe has happened, but onlybecause of the traces and impressions that cover, veil or repress theoriginary crime. To the very moment of the archivic catastrophe

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belongs a delay, to which Freud will give the name of Nachtraeglich-keit: ‘‘How far the accounts of former times are based on earliersources or on oral tradition, and what interval elapsed between anevent and its fixation by writing, we are unable to know’’ (51). Thetext (the one that tells or archives the story of the monotheistictradition), Freud continues, tells us ‘‘enough about its own his-tory,’’ and is formed by ‘‘two distinct forces, diametrically opposed toeach other, that have left their traces on it’’ (my emphasis). One forcewould be the one of repressing the originary moment, or crime,keeping the originary moment mute, encrypted or secret, ‘‘thetext in accord with secret tendencies.’’ The other, ‘‘diametricallyopposite’’ tendency, would be the one which wanted to record ev-erything, ‘‘anxious to keep everything as it stood.’’ Thus, Freudsays in one of his most memorable formulas, ‘‘the distortion of thetext is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the executionof the deed but in doing away with the traces’’ (52).

In accord with the already established analysis of the archive,we could say that any archivization, and in this case, the particulararchivization of monotheism (and that is hardly just ‘‘any’’ ar-chive), obeys the same logic. It wavers between the repressed im-perative to archive the singular, one and only, but also dead(father), and the imperative to perpetuate the law of this inauguralinjunction into the future. Freud in effect gives here somethinglike both the deconstruction of the Judaic, monotheistic origins,and the deconstruction of a programmed, certain, predictable,given futurity. The laws given to us come from an uncertain, di-vided, and contradictory origin, jealous of itself yet always in needof future translations. And by the very fact that the traces left bythis archiviolation remain forever detached from the originaryevent (the effect of delay), they will be open to future inscriptions,interpretations and receptions, over which, we should repeat, noarchon, gatekeeper, priest, the guardian of the law and maybe noteven God himself, has any power. ‘‘No longer is [thus an event]given in a temporal or historical modality dominated by the past’’(Derrida 33). Precisely because monotheism stems from this trau-matic experience, by the fact that it is inscribed on the life of theentire nation and therefore dispersed, or detached from the ori-gin, the meaning of this experience of survival is given over to theheterogeneous multiplicity of topoi, to the incalculable future andto the to-come, avenir. If the project that we know as psychoanalysisand that we ascribe to its first archon Sigmund Freud has any fu-ture, it is precisely in this capacity to wrench itself out of and awayfrom the monotheistic bond which serves as its impetus, but with-out repeating yet another monotheistic or Oedipal crime. It is a

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project of being the son otherwise, of both belonging, and detach-ing itself from the identitary bond, a perpetual unraveling of its a-filiation.

The Name of the Father

To Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses belongs an innova-tive and original discovery in Freud’s archive: that for his 35th birth-day Freud received from his father a Bible with the Hebraicinscription reminding him of his circumcision and, in effect, thusreiterating the inaugural event of the filial submission to the fatherand the receiving of the law. The Bible itself, ‘‘the PhillipsohnBible,’’ that Sigmund Freud had studied in his youth, was re-boundin new leather, thus reinforcing the impression that what in effecttook place in this receiving of a gift was a renewed circumcision ofFreud who thus for his 35th birthday also receives again, and as akind of double affirmation, the law of the fathers from the handof the father.

It is in conjunction with this event which serves as its initiatorypivot, that Yerushalmi launches his analysis of Moses and Monothe-ism in a book that, itself, has as its subtitle the question of Jewishidentity: ‘‘Judaism Terminable and Interminable.’’ Several motiva-tions or tactics guide Yerushalmi’s analysis. The first is an attemptby the historian to re-assess the myth about Moses, and erase, ortake away from Freud’s analysis, the insight about the primalcrime. The second, to interpret Freud’s work and life in the lightof the filial re-inscription symbolized by the gift of his 35th birthdayand prove that Freud, in effect, was not an atheist but a believingJew, or at least a Jew who kept close to his origins, albeit maybein secret. From this, Yerushalmi draws the final conclusion thatpsychoanalysis itself may be perceived as a ‘‘Jewish science.’’ Whilewell cognizant of the terrible resonance that such a label has hadin another historical configuration, (psychoanalysis was in effectaccused by anti-Semites of being a Jewish science), Yerushalmiwants to give a new skin, so to speak, to this label and re-direct ittowards another, more affirmative possibility: ‘‘what had been sostrenuously denied, to turn Balaam’s curse [the anti-Semitic accu-sations about psychoanalysis being a Jewish science] into a bless-ing,’’ (Yerushalmi 1991, 100). This interpretation would re-affirmboth Freud and psychoanalysis as structurally bonded to the iden-tity of the Jewish people. After such an analysis, Freud himselfwould appear as ‘‘the Psychological Jew’’ (the capital letters areYerushalmi’s) in whose guise Jewishness has become ‘‘almost pure

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subjectivity’’ (Yerushalmi 1991, 10). It is an attempt, as Derridasays, on the part of Yerushalmi, ‘‘to circumcise Freud, to re-circum-cise him by figure while reconfirming the covenant’’ (42).

It was almost imperative that an argument which wants to re-inscribe or appropriate Freud in and for the Judaic tradition insuch an essentialist manner would have to counter, head on, thevery book in which Freud, at the end of his life, cast such a doubtabout the purity of Jewish origins (Moses was an Egyptian and waskilled by the Jews). Yerushalmi’s argument is impeccable, as far asthe historical analysis goes. He engages an enormous and impres-sive knowledge of both the psychoanalytic movement, the biblicalinterpretation, and historical data in order to prove that, in effect,neither was Moses’ crime committed, nor did the Bible recordsuch an event, and one can only direct the reader to this impres-sive and important volume. But this scholarship seems to fail pre-cisely at the point which it would claim as its success, that is, at thevery site of the archive.

We have seen why Freud’s notion of the archive and psycho-analysis itself creates an insurmountable challenge to the historicalanalysis which constructs itself as an uninterrupted genealogy, orhas a referential frame as the guiding principle. Such an analysis,like the one attempted by Yerushalmi, will not be able to performsuccessfully such an appropriative gesture on psychoanalysis. Ifanything, psychoanalysis is the science which put into question thepossibility of writing ‘‘subject’’ with capital letters (Jewish or not,let alone ‘‘psychological’’) and assuming its indivisibility or purity(‘‘pure subject’’). Equally problematic is the attempt to reclaim(Jewish) history by proving that the events that Freud writes aboutdid not in effect happen. Freud’s colossal insight resides in hisanalysis of the archival logic of the historic event. The historian’stask always comes after the fact, and the event can be read only inthe traces that cover the originary trauma. The historian’s work isalways that of deciphering the ashes left after the catastrophe ofhistory. It is actually in the insistence of the ashes to speak, testifyand tell the story, precisely in the absence of the discernible refer-ent, that history returns as a ghost and speaks most forcefully. ThusFreud’s analysis of the narrative about Moses, while fully cognizantof its limitations, is more probable in its assessment of ‘‘how theJews could survive until this day as an entity’’ (176) precisely be-cause it reads into this event the effects of the traumatic survival.These effects cannot be read in a strictly referential or testimonialmanner but constantly require interminable analysis and the an-swer, forever delayed, is promised only in and to the always delayedfuture.

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Freud’s concept of historical analysis (Freud was also a histo-rian, analyzing ‘‘case histories’’) will show its advantage mostclearly over any historicizing discourse when confronted with theevent for which Freud’s whole life and work prepared him, and ofwhich Moses and Monotheism, to this day, represents probably themost profound analysis. Freud is in many ways the most vigilantproleptic analyst of the event that he had not lived long enough tolive through, to which to testify or in which to die.

It is the last chapter of the book, ‘‘Monologue With Freud,’’that makes Freud’s Moses truly unique in its appropriative attempt.It is the moment when the historian abandons the meticulous taskof archivization and working in the archive and turns directly toFreud for explicit answers about his Jewishness. In that moment,the meticulous archival work collapses under the phantasmaticerasure of the archive and under the attempt of the historian tospeak directly to Freud and ask him ‘‘directly whether, geneticallyor structurally, psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science’’ (Yerus-halmi, Freud’s 100). Derrida does not fail to perceive this changeof register, from the ‘‘scientific’’ book immersed in the archive, to‘‘fiction,’’ the change which ‘‘suspends all axiomatic assurances,norms and rules [. . .] and in particular its relationship to theknown and unknown archive’’ (52).

Archiviolation, Testimony and Translation

Every archive has something of a jealous God. It imposes thekeeping of the idiom, the name or the singular event, close to itselfand one with itself. But, at the same time, the archival impulserequires inscriptions, writing, graphic traces and translation, inorder to launch itself into historical and material existence. In thatsense, the conditions of archivization correspond closely to the ori-ginary command to translate that precedes even the Mosaic laws,that of the tower of Babel. The command to translate is actuallydouble and contradictory (elsewhere, Derrida says that God alwayscontradicts himself). God forbids the building of the tower ofBabel, but at the same time commands the translation of his namein the multitude of languages. He jealously keeps to himself thename while ordering its transmission by means of translation:translate me, translate me not. (The same holds for the testimoniallogic: testify to me, testify not). That is why by structural necessitythe archive corresponds or stands in the closest proximity to themonotheistic tradition. Or it is that tradition itself. (‘‘Monoto-notheism!’’ Nietzsche would protest). Derrida says as much in Ar-chive Fever, when he writes that ‘‘the archive always holds a problem

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of translation. With the irreplaceable singularity of a document tointerpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its originaluniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at onceoffered and unavailable for translation, open and shielded fromtechnical iteration and reproduction’’ (90). Archive fever wouldalso be the name of the jealous God, commanding the repetitionand translation of its name (of the idiomaticity of the archive),and forbidding and restricting its iteration. To let the translator ofArchive Fever into English speak: ‘‘So even the documented originof the archive cannot cleanse it of such corruption; an archive mayalways be in the process of translating itself and from itself, by it-self ’’ (Prenowitz 108).

Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses repeats precisely these gestures ofviolent archivization and actualization of the archivic violence, inthe divided strategy by means of which the book approaches, orreproaches, or encroaches on the work of Sigmund Freud. Oneappropriative gesture is that attempt of finding a final proof inthe archives that Freud and his work—indeed, contrary to the verynature of the psychoanalytic project and its essential premises—belonged to the Jewish people in a way that would be bereft of anycapacity for dissent or difference from itself. That would be the‘‘primary repression’’ repeated by Yerushalmi. The other appro-priative move would be to keep this archive jealously for itself butalso, as attempted in the monologue with Freud, to shield it fromtranslation and appropriate the future receptions of the psycho-analytic project. It appropriates Freud and psychoanalysis for theteleological purity of the one, for the logic that the entire psycho-analytic project, in the founding moment of its own archivization,attempts to displace, psychoanalyze, dismantle and deconstruct.

Derrida keeps the strongest, most forceful protest of his po-lemics with Yerushalmi for the moment when this appropriationof both the inaugural moment of the archive (the past, the mem-ory), and its disseminative, unrestrained capacity for the to-come,become appropriated by Yerushalmi for the unique, singular andtotalizing topos of ‘‘Israel.’’ The two strategic appropriations areworth quoting. One pertains to Yerushalmi’s admonition thatFreud, by means of his stubborn adherence to the Oedipal, betrays‘‘what is most Jewish,’’ the openness to the future (Yerushalmi,Freud’s 95). The future therefore, in Yerushalmi’s interpretation,belongs in an essential way to the people of Israel. The other ap-propriation comes from his other equally celebrated book, Zakhor:Jewish History and Jewish Memory, where Yerushalmi writes that‘‘Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to rememberfelt as a religious imperative to an entire people’’ (9).

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This sentence, Derrida says, makes him ‘‘tremble’’ and wonder‘‘whether it is just’’ (Archive 76). The allocation of the archive to atopographic locale which in a totalizing manner would be the onlyplace for the memory of the future is precisely what psychoanalysis,as a project, sets from the start to challenge. The repressed toposof the archive can make its effect felt because the repressed mate-rial, made unconscious, becomes dispersed in the multiplicity ofpsychic, material or geopolitical topographies. While their originresides in the archiviolitic event, traces have a capacity for disper-sion beyond its unifying control. And every actualization of thearchive is also an intervention into the archive, and may be also acreative or critical contestation of its originary violence, and there-fore not one and the same with it. That dispersion is the very struc-tural possibility for the archive to appear in history. If an analogywith the Jewish people is sought regarding Freud and psychoanaly-sis, we could say that the repressed traces of the Mosaic archivedispersed themselves and created something like the unconsciousof Europe, the European Jewry itself, located in a heterogeneityboth in relation to their place of origin and in relation to the multi-plicity of the new topographies. Psychoanalysis represents both themost cogent formalization and the most productive outcomeof this dissemination. We said productive: psychoanalysis worksthrough the traumatic experience of its origin. The diaspora of thearchival impressions is the very condition of the archive and canbe reduced and returned to a unique topos, a return in effectstructurally impossible, only with a considerable amount of vio-lence.

The authentication of the archive attempted by Yerushalmigoes in the opposite direction of the psychoanalytic project andcarries with itself all the familiar and predictable violence of theone: ‘‘As soon as there is the One, there is murder, wounding,traumatism. L’un se garde de l’autre. The One guards against/keepssome of the other [. . .]. At once, at the same time, the One forgetsto remember itself to itself, it keeps and erases the archive of thisinjustice’’ (78). Derrida’s argument at this point not only themati-cally challenges the univocity of the one, but also, in a rhetoricalmanner, and in a condensed economy noted earlier, displays theimpossibility of the archivic certainty as soon as the impression isdeposited to writing. The very violence that splits the archive hereis condensed into the trace that is forever divided, more than oneand less than one, in a formula that needs to be translated, at leasttwice: L’un se garde de l’autre. That archivic ambivalence and origin-ary ambiviolence which Yerushalmi wants to appropriate to the One,belongs, Derrida notes, to the very discovery by psychoanalysis that

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goes by the name of Nachtraeglichkeit, the originary delay. The logicof after-the-fact ‘‘turns out to disrupt, disturb, entangle forever thereassuring distinction between the two terms of the alternative, asbetween the past and the future’’ (80). In a word, the appropria-tive gesture by Yerushalmi fails, while reiterating the archiviolence,since this appropriation runs counter to the very heart of the psy-choanalytic project and the archive of the work that we know bythe name of Sigmund Freud.

Ashes, Memory and Testimony

In the concluding chapter of Archive Fever, Derrida’s bookturns on itself and, as it were, begins anew. It should be noted thatthe book itself is organized by chapters called ‘‘Exergue,’’ ‘‘Pream-ble,’’ ‘‘Foreword,’’ ‘‘Theses’’ and ‘‘Postscript.’’ It demarcates itselfagainst any authentic moment of archivization of itself; it is an im-possible archive which only begins, or comes too late, but never isas such. This should be understood as a rhetorical and syntagmaticillustration of the anasemic, heterogeneous and multiple logic atwork in Freud’s and Derrida’s understanding of archivization.There, at the end of the book, which in a sense becomes its begin-ning, Derrida brings us to Pompeii and Freud’s analysis of Jensen’sGradiva. It is at this site that the young archeologist talks to theghost of a woman, and wakes over the imprint left in the ashes bythis midday ghost (Mittagsgespenst). It is in this moment when thearcheologist reflects on the inscription and the writing directlymade on the ashes by the ghost, that the archive of the future andthe future of the archive thrust themselves forth and make theirimpression with utmost urgency.

At the end of Moses and Monotheism and at the eve of theShoah, Freud reminds us that the archiviolence that pertains toJewish monotheism has the capacity to replicate itself throughouthistory, and on the body of the people chosen by this archivization.The Jewish people murdered god but did not admit to it.‘‘Through this they have, so to speak, shouldered a tragic guilt.They have been made to suffer severely for it’’ (Freud 176). And,a bit earlier, talking about Christianity undergoing a similar resis-tance by those who are ‘‘badly christened,’’ he says: ‘‘The hatredfor Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity, and it is not sur-prising that in the German Nationalist Socialist revolution thisclose connection of the two monotheistic religions finds such aclear expression in the hostile treatment of both’’ (117). (ThatYerushalmi at the end of his book could still write that Freud—in

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1939!—‘‘could not have anticipated the full horror of the war’’and ‘‘the devastation of a third of a Jewish people’’ [Yerushalmi,Freud’s 98] testifies to Yerushalmi’s lack of understanding of theanticipatory force of psychoanalysis and its most outstandingachievements and insights. If Moses and Monotheism has any mean-ing, it is in its attempt to understand, interpret and against all hopediffuse what Freud saw coming better than anyone. This book alsoallows us, better than any historical assessment to this day, to re-flect on and work through the violent consequences of this cata-strophic event and its devastating archive. Of this one and of somany others).

Jacques Derrida formalizes this line of Freud’s thought in hisArchive Fever by pointing out that if Freud suffered from archivefever, it was precisely because he or his discovery had a capacity to‘‘partake in the archive fever or disorder we are experiencingtoday, concerning its lightest symptoms or the great holocaustic trage-dies of our modern history and historiography’’ (90, my emphasis).And a bit further on, in Derrida’s interpretation, psychoanalysisprobably produced its most profound insight by allowing us to ex-plain ‘‘why anarchiving destruction belongs to the process of archi-vization and produces the very thing it reduces, on occasion toashes, and beyond’’ (94).

Freud’s insights into the nature of archive allow us to compre-hend something that has happened as the most catastrophic eventin Jewish history. Psychoanalysis was always already a thought of thatcatastrophic event. That event is eminently tied to modernity, thatbegins with monotheism, the technological capacity of archiviza-tion which gave this history its technical reproducibility and thelogic of sacrifice activated by the Nationalist Socialist regime.(Freud’s work initiated after the first world war works through thetrauma, death, artificial and phantom limbs, the death drive, massdestruction, but also anticipates the ultimate writing on ashes andthe archiviolence of the following war). Freud’s insights into thenature of the archive belong to the thought of modernity compara-ble to that of Walter Benjamin. It thinks the possibility of infinitemultiplication and technical reproducibility of repression and de-struction at work in the modern archive, like in the striking exam-ple of the most sophisticated machine of archivization, thecomputer. As is well-known, the first computer, the IBM-ownedHollerith machine, was first put to use on a grand scale for thesystematic archivization of the European Jewry in rounding it upfor the concentration camps. And Freud understood, perhaps bet-ter than anyone, why such an event, while multiplying an archive,could at the same time produce, in an equally infinite capacity, its

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complete erasure. Leaving only the ashes to speak in the absenceof the catastrophic event. The catastrophe that produced them re-mains, but as ashes, gone up in smoke and forever erased.

Sarajevo: the Gaze of Testimony and the Archive of the Other

Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze (1996) narrates how a mod-ern day Ulysses (Harvey Keitel) seeks to find three undevelopedreels by the Manakis brothers whose first movie, which does exist,and is one of the first ever, depicts women weaving, somewhere inthe Balkans. (That movie is actually shown at the beginning ofUlysses’ Gaze.) The quest for knowledge leads Ulysses through manyscenes repeating the violence of history that constitutes the spaceknown as the Balkans: in Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Romania,then Belgrade and Sarajevo. (A scene in the movie shows an insig-nificant village, Janina, filmed by the Manakis brothers in Macedo-nia—insignificant but exemplary—as the voice over narrates: ‘‘AllEuropean armies have marched through it.’’) It is to the Sarajevoof the last war that the teleology of his will to know takes him, andfinding the reels, it finds its destination, its end. The undevelopedreels are kept by a Jewish curator, to be killed with his entire familysoon after he hands the movie over to Keitel. The last scenes depictSarajevo in the fog, the only time when the city is at peace. And inthat moment of peace is the time to bury the dead. And it is inthis moment of suspended shared danger that the youth orchestra(‘‘the young Serbs, Croats, Muslims, playing together,’’ the Jewishcurator explains to Keitel) can perform in the open. A communal-ity appears in the face of a catastrophe, during the fog, which re-orients Ulysses’ heading, to the possibility of another Bosnia, an-other Europe.

Ulysses’ Gaze subverts the entire Greek, and therefore exem-plary European notion of the ontology of gaze and space, startingat least with Plato’s cave, and proposes another ‘‘dislocation of theGreek logos,’’ a certain Greco-Jewish contamination, as JacquesDerrida has it in ‘‘Violence and Metaphysics’’: ‘‘a dislocation ofour identity, and perhaps of identity in general; it summons us todepart from the Greek site and perhaps from the very site in gen-eral’’ (82). These are Derrida’s words about another patient Jew,Emmanuel Levinas (‘‘Jewgreek, greekjew’’ is how Joyce calls hisUlysses, and how Derrida calls Levinas [‘‘Violence’’ 153]). This dif-ferent site and sight will be motivated not by the will to know, seeor name, which can only testify to the already programmed catas-trophe of history. (This ‘‘will to know’’ is in itself complicitous in

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many ways with the violence taking place, as exemplified by a cyni-cal anecdote spun in Sarajevo during the siege; one neighbor toanother, as a curse, says a Serb to a Muslim: ‘‘May your house ap-pear tonight on CNN!’’ CNN is therefore not where war and de-struction are, war and destruction are where there is CNN. Thecitizens of Sarajevo understood that better than the ‘‘liberal West’’or ‘‘Europe’’). Rather, this alternative sight will be motivated, orimagined, by an utmost passivity: weaving, keeping, the patientcommemoration of danger which wards off exactly that kind ofophtalmo-phallocratic gaze of war under which the European his-tory unravels or ruins itself. It is in weaving and keeping, in danger,that, as Levinas says, ‘‘the face of the other, in this nudity, exposedunto death [. . .] reminds one of the very mortality of the otherperson’’ (107). The responsibility to the other will always have pre-ceded the certainty of the name, the testimonial sight or gaze.

In one of the last scenes of the movie, the blank frames flickerin front of Ulysses’ gaze. On the blank screen he sees, maybe, thecatastrophe of history: the face of every person who died in theBosnian war; the end of a site and of a sight, a sight/site of Europe.But in the blank flickering of the frames, an opening: the blank,undeveloped film, an unseen, untestifiable memory of the unpro-grammed other, patience, passivity, a promise, a future. For exam-ple, an example. An example? In the meantime, Sarajevo is in fog.The world is blind.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Milosevic in the Hague:Testimony, Memory, Justice

In the amended indictment of Slobodan Milosevic—a docu-ment available on the website of the International Criminal Tribu-nal for the Former Yugoslavia, on page 31, there is a list called‘‘Schedule G, Persons killed in Djakovica/Gjakove—2 April 1999.’’This is just a tiny part of the list of persons killed and enumeratedby the indictment of Milosevic, and four other members of thegovernment. It is lodged between several dozens of pages listingthe victims of the atrocities. But this one succeeds in drawing theattention of the reader whose concentration may be dulled by theendless litany of victims. The twenty persons on Schedule G withthe exception of Vejsa Arlind, who was five, are all women. Orshould we say female, since a large number of them is of age 2 to14. Here is the list, the Schedule G, as it is presented in the‘‘Amended Indictment’’:

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Schedule G

Persons Killed at Dakovica / Gjakove—2 April 1999

Name Approximate Age Sex

CAKA, Dalina 14 FemaleCAKA, Delvina 6 FemaleCAKA, Diona 2 FemaleCAKA, Valbona 34 FemaleGASHI, Hysen 50 Not indicatedHAXHIAVDIJA, Doruntina 8 FemaleHAXHIAVDIJA, Egzon 5 Not indicatedHAXHIAVDIJA, Rina 4 FemaleHAXHIAVDIJA, Valbona 38 FemaleHOXHA, Flaka 15 FemaleHOXHA, Shahindere 55 FemaleNUCI, Manushe 50 FemaleNUC I, Shirine 70 FemaleVEJSA, Arlind 5 MaleVEJSA, Fetije 60 FemaleVEJSA, Marigona 8 FemaleVEJSA, Rita 2 FemaleVEJSA, Sihana 8 FemaleVEJSA, Tringa 30 Female

What happened to them? Why were they killed? What is the possi-ble military, or any other reason for exterminating Caka Diaona,age 2, for what political advantage? These questions without an-swer have been haunting me ever since I ran into the list andprinted it out. During the war in Bosnia and Kosovo, many reasonsin the official Belgrade press were given for fighting in Sarajevo orin Kosovo: reasons of territorial integrity, protection of the Serbianpeople of the real or imagined menace from the other, Muslim orKosovar side, self-protection of the Yugoslav military or paramili-tary troops, protection of sovereignty. Some were victims, it wassaid, of collateral damage. I, together with a large number of Ser-bian intellectuals, or members of the opposition, who have beenopposing the Milosevic regime from the very beginning, never be-lieved or accepted these rationalizations. We feared, as we pro-tested the atrocities done by the regime, but never enough, forevernever enough, that the civilians were killed. Just as Serbian civilianswere killed in Bosnia, and in Kosovo, and in Croatia. It is alwayscivilians, civility, taken hostage by the military, or, to jump to theconclusion, by the goals or telos of sovereignty, that are caught as

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victims. And all we are now left with is this somber, ascetic list, andthe question why. And if I say that such lists are possible on all sidesof this conflict, I am not in any way trying to relativize anyone’sresponsibility, only to underscore that situation of civilians beingtaken hostage.

If one looks at the indictments, one finds precious little to goon, to explain what happened there. This is how the indictmentdescribes the events of these atrocities:

a. Dakovica/Gjakove: On or about 2 April 1999, forces of the FRY andSerbia began forcing residents of the town of Dakovica/Gjakove to leave.Forces of the FRY and Serbia spread out through the town and wenthouse to house ordering Kosovo Albanians from their homes. In someinstances, people were killed, and most persons were threatened withdeath. Many of the houses and shops belonging to Kosovo Albanianswere set on fire, while those belonging to Serbs were protected. Duringthe period from 2 to 4 April 1999, thousands of Kosovo Albanians livingin Dakovica/Gjakove and neighboring villages joined a large convoy, ei-ther on foot or driving in cars, trucks and tractors, and moved to theborder with Albania. Forces of the FRY and Serbia directed those fleeingalong pre-arranged routes, and at police checkpoints along the way mostKosovo Albanians had their identification papers and license platesseized. In some instances, Yugoslav army trucks were used to transportpersons to the border with Albania.

As I am reading this document (and my reading it, today, as itwas from the very first time, proceeds from a sense of profoundmourning: what could we have done to prevent it), it occurs to methat it proceeds along two different regimes, familiar from otherhistorical events that have known systematic loss of life, taken outin large numbers, as life as such. For example, the Holocaust. Thetwo events remain singular and different, in many ways, and I donot want to suggest that the atrocities performed by the Milosevicregime have either the same scope, or systemic dimension, as theHolocaust. The war in Kosovo for which Milosevic is tried in thisindictment (and other indictments have followed, and Carla delPonte has raised another one, for the war crimes in Croatia) didnot have as its goal the total destruction of the Kosovars, and hasnot known concentration death camps that resembled those ofNazi Germany. I belong to those who believe in the singular histor-ical specificity of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, in the catastrophicepisode that I am bringing to your attention, there are traits of anytechnologically enhanced mass genocide that may, in principle,resemble the experience of mass death of which the Shoah re-mains the impossible model, a model without a model. Havinginserted this word of caution, let me again make an attempt at an

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analogy, and draw your attention to two features of these docu-ments that resemble a possible narrative about the Holocaust. Oneis the mere listing of bare life interrupted by the systemic killing,killing possible only, as Benjamin would say, in the age of technicalreproducibility. In this case, probably by mass executions, bymeans of firearms or maybe grenades. The listing of the deceasedin any case betrays a certain technical, systemic approach. What-ever the killers, the paramilitary were doing on April 2, 1999, theywere killing not individuals, but, in some way, only a bare life thatneeded to be eliminated or exterminated. Of this experience, onthe side of the victim, Walter Benjamin wrote on Kafka many yearsago that it is the experience of ‘‘an individual, and not accessibleto the masses until such time as they are being done away with.’’That is, Kafka’s experience is an impossible experience of the indi-vidual death (what other experience is more profound, and whichone belongs more to each being, than one’s own death); rather,the death of Kafka’s characters, that which is the most proper, isthe one which is singular but experienced in masses, en masse, de-prived exactly of that singularity, that experience of dying as a sub-ject, person, who has the right to die as some kind of minimalidentity. Those listed here died a death that is worse than death,since, in some ways, it was not death at all. It was death deprivedof its human possibility. Giorgio Agamben has recently thematizedsuch an experience, an impossible experience, as that of homo sacer,hovering between the sovereign power and bare life. In the chap-ter ‘‘Camp as Paradigm’’ in his book Homo Sacer (and elsewhere,in the related volume Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and theArchive), Agamben writes that ‘‘those who are sentenced to death[in camps]’’ were ‘‘forced into an extraterritorial threshold inwhich the human body is separated from its normal political statusand abandoned, in a state of exception, to the most extreme mis-fortunes.’’ Such a threshold experience Agamben qualifies as anexperience of those who are ‘‘killed without the commission ofhomicide.’’ This aporia should be understood in light of Benja-min’s interpretation of Kafka. Not that there was no war crime,that no atrocity took place, but that it took place in a realm wherethe human beings killed were deprived, by the very means of theirexecutions, of their proper deaths. Which is what makes it, amongother things, very difficult to prosecute the crimes of mass destruc-tion, at least by the existing laws, laws written for everyday ‘‘life’’and for murders, homicides, commissions against individuals, andnot masses.

In Sarah Kofman’s Smothered Words, in which she attempts to

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tell the story of her father’s demise in Auschwitz, Kofman also re-produces the list of those deported to Drancy, among whom washer father. This list is enveloped by two propositions. One, preced-ing the list, claims that after Auschwitz, ‘‘all men, Jewish or non-Jewish, die differently: they do not really die, because what tookplace, down there, death in Auschwitz [or Djakovica, we couldsay], without taking place, was worse than death’’ (21). This para-graph is followed by the fragment of the list of those deported toDrancy on July 16, 1942. Always lists, dates, names, which do notmean anything, an endless litany of victims, and that at the sametime mean so much, that mean everything. The paragraph follow-ing the list states the following: ‘‘On Auschwitz and after Ausch-witz, no narrative is possible, if by a narrative one understandstelling a history of events, making sense’’ (25).

The document which transcribes the event that took place inDjakovica on April 2, 1999, tells very little about the senselesscrime, a crime without a sense, in the originary sense of the wordsense. For what can be told about the killing of Rina Haxiavdija,age four, even as the narrative tries to recover her death in theface of justice, as the indictment attempts to recover the memoryof this event and preserve it from complete oblivion? But as thedocument tries to create a testimony, it faces us with yet anotheraporia of the mass murder, well known from the experience of theHolocaust. Even if the crime had been witnessed (and there is,in this case, no indication that it happened, no witnesses are yetproduced), it would be almost an impossible scene of testimony.Because such crimes of mass annihilation leave no witnesses butonly lists, no sense or narrative with meaning, but a dry and officialrecounting without compassion or possible space of mourning. Asit is narrated, the official document leaves no space for mourning,just like the death marked by lists, by serial numbers, technicalreproducibility, creates an impossible scene of mourning, mourn-ing for a death that cannot be testified about, of which there is notestimony, and which, in the strictest sense, it is not death at all.

The Testimony and the Impossibility of Speaking

In the 1997 documentary movie about Eichmann’s trial, TheTrial of Adolf Eichmann, there is a scene in which a writer, YehielDenur, appears before the judges. He did it reluctantly, and priorto the trial refused to testify for a long time. The prosecutors par-ticularly wanted his testimony, since he was, for them, an especiallyvaluable and reliable witness, having actually seen Eichmann in a

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concentration camp. He would provide the first hand testimony.Such hopes met with the structural limit of any ‘‘live,’’ ‘‘first hand’’testimony, of the genocide. Once on the stand, the witness, whocalled himself ‘‘katzetnik,’’ the one recognized by number only,showed the number tattooed on his arm, and proceeded to tellhow in the concentration camp they were all reduced to numbers.To the insistence of the prosecutor to tell more, to tell what hesaw, the ‘‘katzetnik’’ could only respond, reiterate, that they wereall numbers, that ‘‘in Auschwitz there are no names, their nameswere their numbers.’’ After repeated insistence by the prosecutorto tell what he saw, the ‘‘katzetnik,’’ who was not particularly old,or ill, fell prostrate on the ground and almost died of stroke in thecourt. His inability to testify actually testified, better than anywords, to the Holocaust, particularly in the very inability to testify,to produce a narrative which would have meaning. To the re-peated questions by the prosecutor, the ‘‘katzetnik’’ could onlyshow the number and go numb, offering his bare life, in a momentof second death, as a testimony of what was taken from those killedby numbers and as numbers in the Holocaust. Again Agamben:‘‘The political system of the holocaust corresponds to a localiza-tion without order (the camp as a permanent state of exception).The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridicalrules in a determinate space but instead contains at its very centera dislocating localization that exceeds it and into which every formof life and every rule can be virtually taken’’ (Homo 175).

From this perspective, continues Agamben, ‘‘the camps have,in a certain sense, in an even more extreme form reappeared inthe territories of the former Yugoslavia. At issue in the former Yu-goslavia is, rather, an incurable rupture of the old nomos and adislocation of the population and human lives along entirely newlines of flight. Hence the decisive importance of ethnic rapecamps’’ (Homo 176). And the importance, I add, to commemoratethe nineteen women and female children exterminated on April4, 1999, in Djakovica. While the Hague may not be the properhorizon for mourning, it will open a space for justice, maybe, toappear.

The Hague marks an innovation in international politics, par-ticularly as it pertains to the issue of sovereignty. ‘‘What appearssingular and new today is the project of making States, or at leasthead of states in title (Pinochet), and even of current head of state(Milosevic), appear before universal authorities. It has to do onlywith projects or hypotheses, but this possibility suffices to an-nounce a transformation: it constitutes in itself a major event. Thesovereignty of the State, the immunity of the head of state are no

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longer, in principle, in law, untouchable,’’ writes Jacques Derridain his book on On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (57).

The dry enumeration of the indictment, and the dry, objectiveofficial narrative that tells so little about the crime of extermina-tion, without witnesses and testimony and with no possible mean-ingful narrative about it, speaks, as Agamben would say in hisRemnants of Auschwitz, The Witness and the Archive, ‘‘only on the basisof an impossibility of speaking,’’ and it is in that impossibility oftestifying that the ‘‘testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitz—thatto which it is impossible to bear witness—by that very means isabsolutely and irrefutably proven’’ (164). In the Hague, before thejudges, the rereading of the indictment, this witnessing withouttestimony, may at least for a moment reopen the space in whichthese bare lives will again receive their dignity, their individuation,their death. That horizon in which the face of the other reappearsin its individuation and in its mortality, which holds us hostage is,maybe, the slim and minimal, but nevertheless bare hope, for theappearance of justice.

The Future of Testimony, of the Archive to Come . . .

. . . And yet, and yet, there is a future for the archive, perhaps,and there is, perhaps, an archive for the future. And that hopewould belong, equally, to Freud’s notion of the archive which,while producing the erasure of itself in the name of the one andthe same, also delegates itself to the traces that carry the promiseof the future. Those archigraphic traces open the archive to theOther, to the memory of the other and to every other other. Thathope may also, paradoxically, belong to the archiving machineknown as the computer. To the capacity to produce the worst alsobelongs the capacity of the promise and a future. A reviewer ofArchive Fever noted that ‘‘the substrate of ash is not remote fromcomputer technology. What causes ash is fire, a spark, like electric-ity, which ‘burns’ right through the silicon.’’ That electronic ca-pacity, writing right on the ashes, works faster than any othermedium. ‘‘Pulsing like a heartbeat, it can communicate that evil isimminent, that a person is in danger, that a life needs to be saved.Electronic mail elects’’ (Lawlor 798). Using the computer chip,the silicon chip, returns us back to Egypt, to the desert, every timewe testify to something or deposit something into memory. Everyact of computerized archivization is also an ethical act, a racingagainst catastrophe, an act of crossing the desert where no assur-ance is given. Archivization is an act where the desert comes to

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haunt us. What is to-come, the a-venir of archivization, will havebeen marked by this passage and will have led through the SiliconValley, through Egypt and through the desert.

Such a division between the two possibilities of archivization(we could call this the exemplary space of political and ethical decisionbetween devastation and preservation), Derrida says, ‘‘haunts the ar-chive from its origin’’ (Archive 100). The trace left on the ash inPompeii observed by the archeologist, or the trace left on theflickering silicon screen burnt by the fire, belong and testify to theorder of the spectral. These traces, divided at the origin, hauntthe archive and archivization, from the very beginning to the end.Without end, infinitely, they open the archive to the to-come, theygive hope and promise to return.

Save. Print.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive.Trans. Daniel Heller-Rozen. New York: Zone Books, 1999.

———. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Rozen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

Angelopoulos, Theo. Ulysses’ Gaze. New York: Fox Lorber Studio, VideoRelease Date 1997.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Balti-more: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. New York: Routledge,2001.

———. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago:Chicago UP, 1995.

———. ‘‘Violence and Metaphysics.’’ Writing and Difference. Trans. AlanBass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine Jones. New York:Vintage Books, 1967.

Kofman, Sarah. Smothered Words. Trans. Madeleine Dobie. Chicago: North-western UP, 1998.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Case No. It-99–37-I, The Prosecutor Of The Tribunal Against Slobodan Milosevic, MilanMilutinovic, Nikola Sainovic, Dragoljub Ojdanic, Vlajko Stojiljkovic. Avail-able at http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/mil-ii990524e.htm

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Lawlor, Leonard. ‘‘Memory Becomes Electra.’’ Review of Jacques Derrida,Archive Fever. The Review of Politics 60 (Fall 1998): 796–798.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pitts-burgh: Duquesne UP, 1987.

Polin B. Daniel and Kenneth Mandel, Producers. The Trial of Adolf Eich-mann. New York: PBS Home Video, Video Release Date 1997.

Prenowitz, Eric. ‘‘Translators Note. Right on [a meme].’’ Archive Fever: AFreudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: Chicago UP,1995. 103–112.

Yerushalmi, Yosef Haim. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable.New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

———. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. New York: Shocken, 1989.

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twentieth-century Latin American and 17th-century Hispanic ba-roque literature.

Gillian Harkins is an assistant professor of English at the Universityof Washington, where she teaches late twentieth century UnitedStates literature and culture. Her research explores the intersec-tions of gender, sexuality and violence in narratives of nationalbelonging at the end of the twentieth century, focusing on thepolitical relation between legal and literary representations ofincest.

Dragan Kujundzic teaches Russian and Comparative Literature atthe University of California at Irvine. His publications include Criti-cal Exercises (1983), The Returns of History: Russian Nietzscheans AfterModernity (1997), Tongue in Heat (2003) and essays on deconstruc-tion, psychoanalysis and film.

Susanna Lee is an assistant professor of French at Georgetown Uni-versity, where she teaches nineteenth-century narrative and literarytheory. She has published diverse articles on religion and narrativeand on twentieth-century French and American hardboiled crimefiction. She is currently at work on a book project entitled ‘‘AWorld Abandoned by God: Narrative and the Move to Secularism.’’

Brett Levinson is an associate professor of Comparative Literatureat the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the au-thor of Secondary Moderns (Bucknell University Press, 1996), TheEnds of Literature (Stanford University Press, 2001), and Market andThought (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

Claire Nouvet is an associate professor in the French and Italiandepartment at Emory University where she teaches MedievalFrench Literature. She is also a research fellow at the Emory Uni-versity Psychoanalytic Institute. The text presented in this issue ispart of her new research, sponsored by the Institute, on the inartic-ulate affect in analytic treatment and in analytic writing.

Dominic Rainsford is an associate professor and head of the De-partment of English at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, wherehe teaches literature and critical theory. His publications includeAuthorship, Ethics and the Reader: Blake, Dickens, Joyce (1997); Litera-ture, Identity and the English Channel: Narrow Seas Expanded (2002);The Ethics of Literature (1999) and, as co-editor, Critical Ethics: Text,Theory and Responsibility (1999), all published by Palgrave. He iscurrently writing a book on literature, ethics and inanimate ob-jects, and another on literature, ethics and quantification.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Documents

On the Future of the Archive