Life Supports: “Paperless” People, the New Media Archive ...
File under Life: “Paperless” People, the New Media Archive, and the Hold of Reading
It is possible that I now know something that he did fear. Let me say how I arrived at this assumption. Well inside his wallet was a sheet of paper, folded long since, brittle and broken along the creases. I read it before I burned it. It was written in his finest hand, firmly and evenly; but I perceived right away that it was only a copy. ‘Three hours before his death,’ it began. It was about Christian IV. I read it several times before I burned it. … I now understand very well, by the way, that a man will carry, for many a year, deep inside his wallet, the account of a dying hour. … Can we not imagine someone copying out, let us say, the manner of Felix Arver’s death? … He became perfectly lucid, and explained to her that the word was ‘corridor’ not ‘collidor’. Then he died.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs
Half-read books once replaced among the splendid rows of books in our library will never be read to the end. Indeed, it is enough for some sensitive souls to buy a book whose beginning they like, and then never pick it up again.
Robert Musil, “Monuments,” in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
My dear reader . . . I pronounce the matchless prophecy that two-thirds of the book’s few readers will quit before they are halfway through, which can also be expressed in this way—out of boredom they will stop reading and throw the book away. . . . My dear reader--but to whom am I speaking? Perhaps no one is left at all. . . . Alas, alas, alas! How fortunate that there is no reader who reads all the way through, and if there were any, the harm from being allowed to shift for oneself when it is the only thing he wishes, is, after all, like the punishment of the men of Molbo who threw the eel into the water. Dixt [I have spoken].
Soren Kierkegaard, "Letter to the Reader from frater Taciturnus” in Stages on Life's Way
In Jacques Derrida’s later work one frequently encounters notable semantic shifts in terminology with regard to writing, storage devices, the archive, and paper as he addressed the effects of the shift from the era of paper to multimedia technologies of writing.[1] In Archive Fever, Derrida returned to his essay on Sigmund Freud’s “Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” to ask what difference it would make to psychoanalysis had Freud sent faxes and email rather postal letters, and in Paper Machine, Derrida returns to his rereading of Freud in Archive Fever to ask what difference the shift from paper as a material support to virtual “paper” might make.[2] Moreover, in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” Derrida returned to his account of archive fever he had formulated “elsewhere” in Archive Fever.[3] The writing machine and typewriter ribbons, the answering machine, word processor, tape recorder, and other storage devices, photography cameras, and the subjectile, the material support or “technical substrate,” all came to matter increasingly to Derrida in ways they did not in his earlier accounts of non-phenomenal arche-writing, the trace, and the supplement to which he contrasted phenomenal “writing in the general sense” (hieroglyphs, ideograms, alphabets, and so on).[4]
The “paperless” person is an outlaw, a nonsubject legally, a noncitizen or the citizen of a foreign country refused the right conferred, on paper, by a temporary or permanent visa, a rubber stamp. The literal reference to the word papers, in the sense of legal justification certainly depends on the language and uses of particular national cultures (in France and Germany, for instance). But when in the United States, for example, the word undocumented is used to designate analogous cases, or undesireables, with similar problems involved, it is the same axioms that carry authority; the law is guaranteed by the holding of a “paper” or document, an identity card (ID), by the bearing or carrying [port] of a driving permit or a passport that you keep on your person, that can be shown and that guarantees the self, the juridical personality of “here I am.” We shouldn’t be dealing with these problems without asking what is happening today under international law, with the subject of “human rights and the citizen’s rights,” with the future or decline of nation-states.[5]
I will focus on one particular phrase Derrida introduced in “Paper or Me, You Know,” namely, “‘paperless’ persons,” to ask what it means and what happens to people when they are referred to as papers inside of the “earthquake” of new media, when the archive is no longer founded on paper supports, when files go virtual, when the state and paper are decoupled.[6] I open a critique of Agamben’s notion of bare life and biopolitics in favor of an alternative notion of biobibliopolitics that shifts the camp to the archive, life and death. Paper versus paperless bare life versus life; documented / undocumented; document and work of art[7] or literature; preservation versus destruction; paper versus parchment; letters versus postcards; materiality and spectrality; biological life and death; waking and dreaming. absolutely intelligible nor indecipherable by writing, or graphology; inscription and erasure.
I read “paperless” people in light of the impact Derrida thought new media had on the archive with regard to its “archive fever,” or “anarchivity” that produces secrets, ashes, that can never be archived.[8] Under the heading of the archive, I open up a critique of biopoltiics on two fronts. One of the problems with Agamben is that he has no account of media and no account of materiality either. One of the problems of new media is that it does not ask what a medium is, it assumes material and immaterial, or spectral; waking and dreaming; delirium and drug free delivery. First front: he paradigmatic, modern space of biopolitics according to Agamben, a space constituted by a permanent state of exception to the rule of law and that gradually expands to include all human life. The question of sovereignty over what counts as life cannot rightly be reduced to the distinction Foucault and Agamben draw between human life and bare life, or life that can be left to die but not killed or sacrificed.[9] 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) [10]
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).
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.[11] 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.[12] 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.[13]
I reconceptualize Agamben’s virtualized bare life, or “biopolitics” as biobibliopolitics: in modernity, persons are defined by their relation to paper. Entry into concentration camps and all other zones of exception alway archive includes the camp s involves identity papers and paperwork; similarly, preserving memory always bears on media of archiving, including film, photography, and print. 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 planet[14] 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. And it not just travel that is the issue—there is transmission and translation as well, even when in the camp: 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, transit--or bio-biblio-processing.[15]
The second front: I enlist Derrida in a critique of attempts to positivize or literalize of grammatology by introducing a seeming stable opposition between material and virtual kinds of media. capturing paper (as opposed to textuality) by materialists and new media theorist of paper such as Markus Paper Machines (MIT) and the Foucault and Kittler default model of German media theory, which takes both as read, the problem of Foucault and life as read and the evasion of literature, the send off of Rilke as epigraph to this essay as my point of departure.[16] Ditto for Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces
by Maurizio Ferraris (Author), Richard Davies (Translator); an ontology that reduces traces to those that can be retrieved.[17] Confront having defaulted to a filing and classification of kinds of paper. Paper as that which can be historicized, reduced to its materials, as ontology rather than hauntology, as document versus work of art. Mistake of Spieker is to think that art comes after the archive, that work of art is not already internal to bureaucracy.
The material support, or survivance comes into focus, as a quasi-materiality, quasi-spectrality.[18] Bare life and life. Cite or biopolitics in biobibliopolitics. Not the camp, but the archive (even the camp is an archive).[19] To Derrida’s paperless people, we are all virtually bare life, in Agamben the relation between media and life is left unthought. Facsimile as another kind of hanutogrammatology.
Work of art also in Files—last chapter on sculpture / book of Anselm Kiefer.
Papers not reducible to paper. not reducible to technology as external to life, but complicate the boundary between the human and the machine, the quasi-mechanical of the human and machine. Hence no such thing as being entirely paperless or papered.
1. Biopolitics of virtuality. Virtualmente in the Italian original. materiality and immateriality—quasi-mechanical; media not a gadget, instrumental, refer to actu-virtuality, for Derrida, potential versus virtual. Cite Agamben Potentialities.
2. Biopolitics archive, not the camp; subject to anarchivity (Foucault; Agamben; Shoah; Mr. Death—fiction and testimony; Didi-Huberman; Code 46; Counterfeiters) The Post Card “envois” (Burn everything preserve everthing)
3. Life and death versus death certificate and survivance.
4. No post-hermeneutics, as Kittler, and the failed promise of close reading; radical empiricism is also a radial hermeneutics, a hermeneutics of unreadability, not merely the illegible or erased, object as palimpsest.
5. Skeuomorphs. Kindle paper white, but no pagination.
6. 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.
Enables a deconstructive pressure put on seemingly unquestionable, within a Foucault / Foucault account of new media is thought to be paper versus paperless, or undocumented persons, of life and bare life, of bare life and virtual bare life, of the document and the work of art, files as literature, of secret and public. either hard drive or software -- app, as it were.
Notions of and biobliopolitics (Agamben and Derrida)
Not life versus bare life, live that the sovereign may detain and leave to die in any space that become a camp, even the hospital room of a patient on life support, that would match up with paperless and papered.[20] At the risk of being misunderstood, I will move hastily through some controversial points about materiality, textuality, and life, or biopolitics. Becomes a relation of book to archive, after the passport or support. Book as life support, that is a support for what is called living (on). The example of the book as archive—the facsimile and the diplomatic transition. Walter Benjamin Archive.
Bare life, sovereignty, permanent sate of exception, virtually all bare life. Only question is recognizing what is a camp.
I will then be able to elaborate and examine what I call various kinds of filing operations in which reading both takes hold through them and held off by them: the passport both as identification papers and as a kind of book; Alain Resnais’s parallel film documentaries Nuit et broulliard (Night and Fog, 1955), devoted to the Holocaust, and Toute la memoire du monde (All the Memory of the World, 1956), devoted to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France); and autobiographical essays by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno about shelving and shipping their books. (Note also Sebald on Bibliotheque. This will reorient FOcualt away from discipline, technologies of the self, governmentality, and toward the archive as a dlivery system, a heavilivy dependency on literature to provide the hit of so-called real materiality. And on dreams.
I
Let me return to Derrida’s comments on the “paperless” person I quoted at length above.
At the end of the long passage I quoted above Derrida concludes “we are all, already, ‘paperless’ people.”[21] By saying that we are all “paperless” persons, Derrida means, I take it, that the substitution of a material paper support by a paperless electronic support has entailed a global network in which even those with papers are effectively reduced to those without them. It might be tempting to appeal to Michel Foucault for the explanation of what Derrida is looking at the epiphenomena of, namely, paperlessness as a technology of surveillance.[22] Derrida describes a “‘paperless’ setup” that that both covers the entire earth and extends beyond it:
new powers delete or blur the frontier in unprecedented conditions, and at an unprecedented pace… . These new threats on the frontiers are…phenomenal; they border on phenomenality itself, tending to phenomenalize, to render perceptible visible, or audible; to expose everything on the outside. They do not only affect the limit between the public and the private – between the political or cultural life of its citizens and their innermost secrets and indeed, secrets in general; they touch on actual frontiers – on frontiers in the narrow sense of the word: between the national and the global, and even between the earth and the extraterrestrial, the world and the universe – since satellites are part of this “paperless” setup.[23]
To these threatened frontiers, Derrida might have added life and death.[24] Yet for Derrida, paperlessness is not only a moment of danger and a source of anxiety but also a moment in which certain kinds of things become possible. Elsewhere in Paper Machine, Derrida defines philosophy as paperless, undocumented in the more literal sense. To an interviewer asking “What does it mean to a French philosopher today?” Derrida responds that “in principle, a philosopher should be without a passport, even undocumented [sans-papier]; he should never be asked for his visa. He should not represent a nationality, or even a national language.”[25] Derrida transvalues the condition of being without papers in the literal sense from the negative meaning of being undesirable to the positive meaning of a principle of philosophical cosmopolitanism: philosophy today is defined by its being outside geopolitical laws, if not an outlaw. I think it would be a mistake to dismiss this transvaluation as a kind of weak exceptionalism Derrida claims for philosophy.
II
How is a “paperless” person, someone whose support takes the form of identification papers, caught up in new kinds of virtual biometrics and bioprocessing? What kind of virtual life supports might international law offer to replace paper supports? I want to address these questions by turning to Derrida’s account of the thing that holds papers together, namely, the portefeuille, or wallet. Taking this turn means that we begin to grasp what I call the “hold” of reading, or in this case the holdover of readings to be continued. Derrida’s account of the wallet is textually deferred and placed in the storage unit of an endnote.[26] However, this endnote does not follow Derrida’s first mention of the wallet at the end of a very long parenthetical comment regarding paper: “(Indeed a reflection on paper ought in the first place to be a reflection on the sheet or leaf [feuille] … We should also, if we don’t forget to later, speak about the semantics of the portefeuille, at least in French).”[27] Derrida’s endnote begins as if taking up where his parenteheical remarks left off: “I had forgotten to come back to the French word portefueille [wallet].” A note does follow the parenthesis that defines the meaning of Portefeuille.[28] Yet this note has been added by the translator, who seems to forget that Derrida remembers he forgot in endnote 29.[29] (Dear reader: please hold on while I hold up my essay by attending to the holds in Derrida’s interview. The translator’s arguably unnecessary note is not merely an uncaught error; rather, it echoes perhaps even mimics Derrida’s own textual repetitions. For example, the phrase “we are all, already, undocumented, paperless” occurs in the first chapter of Paper Machine and Derrida rewrites it almost verbatim, dropping “undocumented in “Paper or Me, You Know.”[30] Similarly, Derrida has an endnote on endnote “biblion” in “Paper or Me, You Know,” that similarly repeats much a passage in the body of the of “The Book to Come.”[31] Endnoting allows for Derrida to put certain issues into storage or take them out, often marking his discussion in the body of the text as a lapse: for example, in “Typewriter Ribbon, Limited Ink”, he says “I don’t know why I am telling you this” in the middle of an rhetorically unmarked digression on the amber vampire insects and then ends the three page digression by apparently recalling his purpose: “I didn’t know, a moment ago, why I was telling you these stories of an archive: archives of a vampire insect.”[32] Yet a clear distinction between an unmarked lapse and a lapse rhetorically marked as a “hold on” moment of interruption is very difficult, probably impossible, to draw in Derrida’s work. Moreover, these “hold on” both “hold up” moments may mean both delay or stopping and support, as in holding a place. Derrida’s many returns to Freud’s “Notes on the Mystic Writing Pad” mentioned above may be construed as placeholders that enabled him to hold up reading by folding it up, unfolding it, and refolding. In Archive Fever, Derrida writes: “an exergue serves to stock in anticipation and prearchives a lexicon, which . . . out to lay down the law and give the order. . . . In this way, the exergue has at once an institutive and conservative function. . . It is thus the first figure of an archive.”[33] The “exergue,” “preamble,” “foreword,” and “postscript” of Archive Fever paratexutally mark a series of hold ups that auto-immunize the already auto-infected archive fever Derrida has already caught. Derrida’s thought remains unfinished not just because he died but because the hold of reading means that no reading can ever be finished or complete: reading is always unfolding, leaving on as living-on, or survivance).[34]
Let me now cite Derrida’s endnote on the wallet so we may understand how actuvirtual life supports in variously virtual and material forms relate to the “hold of reading” more concretely:
I had forgotten to come back to the French word portefeuille [wallet]. Which says just about everything on what is invested in paper, in the leaf or the feuille of paper. Current usage: when its “figure” does not designate a set of documents authenticating an official power, a force of law (the ministerial portfolio), portefeuille names this pocket within a pocket, the invisible pocket you carry [porte] as close as possible to yourself, carry on your person, almost against the body itself. Clothing under clothing, an effect among other effects. This pocket is often made of leather, like the skin of a parchment or the binding of a book. More masculine than feminine . . . a wallet gathers together all the “papers,” the most precious papers, keeping them safe, hidden as close as possible to oneself. They attest to our goods and our property. We protect them because they protect us (the closest possible protection: ‘This is my body, my papers, it’s me…’)”[35]
Derrida proceeds to account for the partially paperless contents of wallets.
They take the place, they are the place, of that on which everything else, law and force, force of law, seems to depend: our “papers,” in cards or notebooks: the identity card, the driving permit, the business or address book; then paper money – banknotes – if one has any. Nowadays, those who can also put credit or debit cards in there. These do fulfill a function analogous to that of other papers, maintaining the comparable dimensions of a card – something that can be handled, stored away, and carried on the person – but they also signal the end of paper or the sheet of paper, its withdrawal or reduction, in a wallet whose future is metaphorical. … One effect among others: the majority of the “rich” often have less cash, less paper money, in their wallets, than some of the poor.
Wallets traverse both papered and paperless, or “pauperized” people.[36] Is the wallet an archive, then, regardless of the materiality of the papers it holds? Is it a “biological archive?”[37] To be sure, Derrida lays out, in the first pages of Archive Fever, certain conditions on which he says any archive depends: there can be no archive “without substrate nor without residence,” no archive without archons as guardians and interpreters of the law, “no archive without outside,” no archive without psychoanalysis.[38] Yet as Derrida engages questions of the difference new media make to the archive, he begins questioning the limits of the archive: “is not the copy of an impression already a kind of archive? … Can one imagine an archive without foundation, without substrate, without subjectile?” and begins to talk of “virtual archives” and “ an archive of the virtual.”[39] In several essays including in the French edition of Paper Machine, Derrida refers to storage devices as different as two editions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and a piece of amber containing fossils of vampire insects, and he refers elsewhere in Paper Machine to “computer archives” having been “locked up”.[40]
If we grant that the wallet too is a kind of archive, even an archive that may contain other archives in the form of copies, it follows that the archive may be portable, even transportable. Near the end of his endnote on the wallet, Derrida relates an autobiographical anecdote about his home having been burgled twice over the previous two years; the thieves took his laptop the first time and his “portefeuille the second time.”[41] “So what was taken away,” Derrida writes, “was what was included or condensed – virtually, more in less – less time, space, and weight. What was carried away [emporté] was what could most easily be carried [porté] on the person and with the person: oneself as an other, the portefeuille and the “portable.”[42] If the wallet is an archive, the archive itself becomes potentially portable, both nomological and virtualized. “We are all, already ‘paperless’ people” may be read broadly as follows: the biological and virtual archive offers various kinds of life support even when material supports are lacking. Portable, virtualized archives may become virtual life support systems in the form of trans/portable reading materials, materials that go unnoticed and unread.
The material support, or survivance comes into focus, as a quasi-materiality, quasi-spectrality. Bare life and life. Cite or biopolitics in biobibliopolitics.
Inoperability versus unreadability. Agamben defaults to a philological more of commentary, line by line, which takes the text as given, as if it had never been edited in order to be rendered readable.
Carry through anarchivity thread and relate it to biopolitics?
III
With this account of the way the displacement of biopolitics by biobibliopolitics follows from Derrida’s deconstruction of paperless persons and the archive, we may now turn now an example of an material object, an archive in the form of a passport, that resists becoming phenomenal, that resists or defers reading. State of emergency. (Passports go back to the 16th century, however.) Biometric information is at the core of the of the passport document: it certifies some physical connection of the documented identity to the body of possessing it. Before the widespread use of photography, applicants were obliged to describe their facial features, faircolor, eye color, heigh, and “any visible distinguishing marks or peculiarities.“ These descriptions were supplemented by the photograph, and as photographs became more reliable as a technology, biometric information that was visible on the photograph ceased to be duplicated. (94). The Passport Office and the passport itself were temporary, pragmatic solutions to a governmental problem of movement. Once institutionalized, the “emergency” was normalized, and passports became “necessary“ even in peacetime. Mark B. Salter, Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations, Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner, 2003. (92)
„Machine readable identity“ pp. 93-95.
I will look at a Youtube video on the U.S. passport, as it effectively raises borderline questions about borders and border crossing. As Derrida writes,
the crossing of borders always announces itself according to the movement of a certain step [pas] – and of the step that crosses a line. An indivisible line. And one always assumes the institution of such an indivisibility. Customs, police, visa or passport, passenger identification – all of that is established upon this institution of the indivisible, the institution therefore of the step that is related to it, whether the step crosses it or not.”[43]
The passport figures a problem of form related to materiality, a problem of determining the form of the object / thing. The passport as “book” offers resistance to a narrative, especially a genetic narrative of its construction and assemblage; the passport is a hybrid, both a printed book and yet also a kind of e-book, a Kindle that doesn’t function (you can’t read the digital data or subtract from it, add to it / alter it). It is first a “thing,” then a “book” with fine print and microprint, first made of a foreign, imported cover (thing) with three blank but formatted memory chips, then becomes American (book) when assembled (the paper covering over the foreign chips, which are loaded and locked), and finally a “personalized” book (sort of like on demand publishing). Only machines “read” the passports (officers “skim” them). This narrative of passport production reveals and hides its own double Un/American construction (the side of the inside (chip) being covered by the paper laminated onto the plastic cover): the made in America for Americans book metaphor of assemblage beginning and ending in America (printing, stitching, lamination) competes with a global industrial model of assemblage in which non-American digital parts and cover get imported and data then gets “loaded on” to the imports and covered up without Americans even knowing (unless they watch this video). Like any (transnational) commodity, American passports alienate American citizens from their own identity papers, covering up the foreign, protective cover, literally secreting the chips that fully functionalize the identity papers from their “owners.”[44] The printed pages of the passport as book become a cover, literally and metaphorically, for the storage of citizens as data, their reduction to microchips. And the question of “reading” and “skimming” the book is all the more bizarre since there is no narrative to read, just a profile reduced to one’s life span and home.
The YouTube video does not say what is stored on the chips (the word “information” is not used), whether it is the same as the information on the passport or in excess of it. It is information about us, however. That much is clear. But we are alienated through our data processing; we are booked by the State even, just into persons through personalization. But we are only informed by changes in how U.S. passports are made. Their making would usually seem to fall under state secrets, so the effect of the ideas that we are learning is like seeing something that we are not supposed to see. The video is itself a threat because it gives forgers information they could use to forge. But the issue is that persons are stored as data when they are turned from persons into citizens. Citizenship passes though the person in enabling him or her to pass through customs, instituting distinctions between guest and host, alien and host, and the inhuman outside citizenship (equated with aliens as animals, vermin, threats, viruses, flus, and so on), hostage and hostage taker. Citizenship not as securing of human rights but as Host-age taking.
IV
Paperless / the passport/ new media and biopolitics of the camp as an archive by turning to film as archival material of the camp. 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).[45] 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).[46] Along parallel lines, Agamben linearizes the “extratemporality” of the camp by making biopolitics and thanatopolitics 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).[47] 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 Jean-Luc 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 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 by Didi-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.
Like so many of Alain Renais’s films, Nuit et broulliard (Night and Fog, 1955) and Toute la memoire du monde (All the Memory of the World, 1957) are concerned with memory, media, and the archive. Whereas Night and Fog shows archival material about bioprocessing – passports stripped of prisoners or records kept by prisoners with the names of the recently dead crossed out – All the Memory of the World addresses an almost inverse kind of biblioprocessing of books as prisoners.
Much as the Nazis tattooed numbers on the arms to be used to identify the victim’s corpse, sewed symbols of different colors and shapes on their prison clothing (figure 1) and stripped prisoners of their passports and identification cards (figure 2) in Night and Fog, so books enter the national library as prisoners and are immediately issued identification cards, then subject to inspection, labeling, “inoculation,” classification, card catalogued, and shelving in All the Memory of the World. (figures 3 and 4). In an extended high angle tracking shot, we see an inspector walking up and down between the reading tables. One of the first overheads shows a man who pushes a cart with book requests stop at a desk and then give them to a woman librarian who gets up to check them out. After she sits back down, the film cuts to a second overhead shot of the man pushing the cart as the narrator refers to the books passing into circulation as going through the looking glass. A kind of biblio-border control operates here, paper check for the books, which are given identification cards and those shelved on a cart readied for the reading room to have their request slips in them (figures 5 and 6).
Both films amp up the constructed aspects of what make up the paper world that auto-archives people: the obliteration of the concentration camps poses a threat of loss (of the camps) in Night and Fog and the obliteration of books by readers who “crunch them like insects” poses a threat of loss (of the books and yet to be archived materials) in All the Memory of the World.[48] (Figure 6) All the Memory of the World is arguably haunted by Night and Fog, particularly by the way it eventalizes the archive as an unreadable place. What were then contemporary shots of the ruins of Nazi concentration camps are haunted by the absence of archivists in particular and of humans in general. The camps are always shot totally lacking in humans. There are no guides, no tourists, no schoolchildren: only the camera visits the blocks now (Figure 7).
[Yes, in that case you might group together]
The camp has erased itself as a potential archive, so to speak, and this erasure is in turn being “archived” in Resnais’s film as a resistance to reading. Resnais advances this erasure of the archive and its recording on film – in All the Memory of the World by drawing a series of provocative parallels between the “fortress” of the national library (figure 1) and the camps in Night and Fog. Just as there are no people in the camps in Night and Fog, so there are next to no readers in All the Memory of the World. We see one person in a reading room at one point, but again he is still. Otherwise, all the reading rooms are empty, as are the storage rooms. Those few people we do see work in the library, and readers seen in a long, overhead tracking shot in the cathedral-like space of the reading room near the end of the film resemble the sequence alternating the close up shots of the faces of statues with close up shots of people, seen in looking up at various objects or books in the library but never taking them down from the shelf (figure 5). For example, one shot begins with a close up of a book shelf, and then dollies in, dollies right and before cutting abruptly to a stationary shot of a Bibliothèque nationale inspector standing motionless in the shadow behind a large sculptural ornament attached to a column (figure 5). The inspector wearing a cap with the initials “BN” (for Bibliothèque nationale) discloses the archon, guardian function of the archive. That function is increasingly spectral and yet also increasingly graphic, as we see a book “inoculated’ with a shot, before it goes through the “looking glass” into the reading room.
Archiving is inseparable in All the Memory of the World from personified technical supports. The film begins in the basement, with a microphone dropping down into the center of the shot. Like the camera that is the only visitor of the concentration camp in Night and Fog (figure 1), the microphone is the only visitor in the library, as if the microphone itself were delivering voice-over narration. The erasure of the archive suspends the decision about the value of its contents, unlike the Nazi officer shown in Night and Fog deciding which prisoners go in the forced labor line and which go in the line for the gas chambers. The value of the catalogued materials shown in the BN’s basement have an unclear status. Are they waiting to be catalogued or unworthy of being catalogued? Like a box that cannot be opened until 1974, the value of the library’s various materials is subject to a future consisting of non-reading, a future that deprives the archivist of sovereignty. The film’s final high overhead shot, lasting more than ten seconds, makes the check out desk and the people using it resemble a portrait painted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (figure 6). The work of reading as abstraction returns as a pattern to be recognized, a happy face of memory which is not a human face yet can be recognized only by humans capable of reading it, translating into a metaphor, a figure, face, personification of memory. The best hope for an imprisoned book is to remain unread, perhaps misfiled, mishelved, even lost in the archive.
V
We may understand further how the archive serves as a shelving of life that places a hold on reading if we turn to Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Books by the Mentally Ill: From My Library.” Benjamin concludes his essay with a cryptic reference to a “manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever,” despite these enlightened times, “to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house, even though it is as least the equal of [Doctor Daniel] Schreber’s in both human and literary terms.” In the course of his championing of this un-named manuscript, Benjamin links publication with obtaining a passport:
The mere existence of such works has something disconcerting about it, so long as we habitually regard writing as – despite everything – part of a higher, safer realm, the appearance of insanity, especially when it enters less noisily form elsewhere, is all the more terrifying. How could this happen? How did it manage to slip past the passport control of the city of books, this Thebes with a hundred doors? The publishing history of such works must often be as bizarre as their contents. Nowadays, one would like to think, the situation is different. Interest in the manifestations of madness is as universal as ever, but it has become more fruitful and legitimate. The writings of the insane, so we might suppose, would have no trouble obtaining a valid passport today. Yet I know of a manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house, even though it is the equal of Schreber’s in both human and literary form, and far superior in intelligibility.[49]
Some books get left behind in manuscript, even if passports become less restrictive. Benjamin records the loss by failing to give the author or title of the unpublished manuscript that is not yet a book, instead tabling its contents as if he were hoping it and others like it might thereby slip by passport controls of the biblio-polis.[50]
Obviously, Benjamin’s semi-serious, semi-jocular reach for the passport (“your papers please!”) in order to make apparent the ideological underpinnings of the biblio-polis anticipates, desperately, heart-wrenchingly, the fate of so many Europeans, himself included, who found themselves, stateless, niche-less, slot-less, without papers, literally “fatherless,” or “apatrides,” as they fled the Nazis in 1940. While the passport analogy might play differently now than it did in the today of Benjamin’s essay, it indicates that Benjamin’s neurotic re-shelving become “motley order” recovers what, in “The Book to Come,” Derrida elaborates as the status of the book or biblion as backing, the material support or guarantee which, in purely physical terms permits portability, linearity, enables a manuscript or a person to travel into the hands of readers, find a slot or niche in the physical and ideological or semiotic world of its today, having passed muster at border control.[51] For biblion we may also read person, the “book” now the backing of a particular way of configuring an identity, a mode of citizenship, belonging, and the privileges it affords.
As Derrida observes, “the Greek word biblion…has not always meant ‘book’ or even ‘work’,” instead biblion could designate a support for ‘writing’ (so derived from biblios, which in Greek names the internal bark of the papyrus and thus of paper, like the Latin word liber, which first designated the living part of the bark before it meant ‘book’). Biblion, then, would only mean ‘writing paper,’ and not book, nor oeuvre or opus, only the substance of a particular support – bark. But biblion can also, by metonymy, mean any writing support, tablets for instance or even letters: post.[52] The extension of biblion as book, then, represents the development of one particular metonymy, that equates the backing of writing, the underpinning of writing by a physical substance with the figure of the “book,” collating, if you like, writing and book, text and material support and linearizing the biblion as book. For Derrida, the “book to come” signals not something new, so much as something held in abeyance by the repetition and so adoption of one particular metonymy. That repetition made a world. Likewise, as Benjamin’s re-shelving discovers, other infra-worlds, other forms of writing, a whole “library of pathology,” for example, inhere within the order provided by the book.
As Derrida turns to the figure of the library – he is giving this lecture at the Bibliothèque nationale de France – he arrives at the question of the slot or niche, the shelf, as it were, “already in Greek, bibliothèque means the slot for a book, book’s place of deposit, the place where books are put (poser), deposited, laid down (reposer), the entrepôt, where they are stored.”.[53] And such places of deposit constitute for Derrida a “[s]etting down, laying down, depositing, storing, warehousing – this is also receiving, collecting together, gathering together, consigning (like baggage), binding together, collecting, totalizing, electing, and reading by binding.”[54] “So the idea of gathering together, as much as that of the immobility of the statutory and even state deposit,” he writes, “seems as essential to the idea of the book as to that of the library.” Within this question of gathering, depositing, and so of sorting by gathering, of generating the polis via or in relation to the biblio-polis, he arrives at the “question of the title.” “Can we imagine a book,” asks Derrida, “without a title?” “We can,” he answers, “but only up to the point when we will have to name it and thus also to classify it, deposit it in an order, put it into a catalog, or a series, or a taxonomy.” He ends this thinking of the title with the contention that “it is difficult to imagine, or at any rate to deal with, with a book that is neither placed nor collected together under a title bearing its name, an identity, the condition of its legitimacy and of its copyright.” “Sure,” we may say, “yes it is” – for such books, which exist, and which are not properly speaking books at all, or not books quite yet, sit uneasily on their shelves, as Benjamin might tell him, until, of course, the day when those books without titles, such as the manuscript whose title Benjamin withholds from us, reveal their own encrypted infra-titles to us.
VI
Need to advance the argument about biobibliopolitics in this section –to set up the conclusion about the camp / library as archive to book as archive. Set up the ending—the kinds of books one retrieves, the supports, but also the exierence of reading as a delivery system, retrieval producing an affect, as well as survivance of the book, the flipping of preserving and damaging by Adorno.
In “Bibliographical Musings,” Theodor Adorno offers his own version of books as archives in relation to the hold of reading, in this case damaged books. He tells an anecdote in which he correlates a distinction between real and fake books with a distinction between damaged and undamaged books: damaged books are the real books, and fakery extends not to only reproductions of books but even to the presentation of new books as old:
[The] Potemkinian library I found in the house of an old American family on the grounds of a hotel in Maine…displayed every conceivable title to me; when I succumbed to the temptation and reached for one, the whole splendid mass fell apart with a slight clatter – it was all fake. Damaged books, books that have been knocked about and have had to suffer, are the real books. Hopefully vandals will not discover this and treat their brand new stocks the way crafty restaurateurs do, putting an artificial layer of dust on bottles of adulterated red wine from Algeria. Books that have been lifelong companions resist the order imposed by assigned places and insist on finding their own; the person who grants them disorder is not being unloving to them but rather obeying their whims. He is often punished for it, for these are the books that are most likely to run off.[55]
Against the degraded collection he finds in Maine, that nevertheless, because of the verisimilitude or efficacy of the “backing” and the replete order of titles seemingly on offer, “tempts” him, Adorno pitches the authentically damaged book. Not a stunt book that falls apart on contact – there only to advertise the importance of books which are in fact not there – the damaged book acquires a life all its own, a life, or liveliness. The damaged book, then, the used or mangled book is the book that resists its owner’s impulse to order it.
Adorno goes on to describe his own damaged books, their ruination and repair, taking a theological cast that makes Providence sound like a life and death selector or military officer deciding which books will be preserved and which will be disappeared:
Emigration, the damaged life, disfigured my books, which had accompanied me, or, if you like, been dragged, to London, New York, Los Angeles, and back to Germany, beyond measure. Routed out of other peaceful bookcases, shaken up, locked up in crates, put into temporary housing, many of them fell apart. The bindings came loose, often taking chunks of text with them. They had been badly manufactured in the first place; high quality German workmanship has long been as questionable as the world market began to think it was in the era of posterity. The disintegration of German liberalism lurked in it emblematically; one push and it fell to pieces. But I can’t get rid of the ruined books; they keep getting repaired. Many of these tattered volumes are finding their second childhood as paperbacks. Less threatens them: they are not real property in the same sense. Now the fragile ones are documents of the unity of life that clings to them and of its discontinuities as well, with all the fortuitousness of its rescue as well as the marks of an intangible Providence embodied in the fact that one was preserved while another was never seen again. None of the Kafka published during his lifetime returned with me to Germany in good condition.[56]
It is as impossible as it would be undesirable to separate the story of these damaged books, books broken in and by transit, from the damage inflicted on their owner in and by his own eviction or emigration. Indeed, it is tempting to say that here Adorno embarks on a rhetorical inflection of the pathetic fallacy, to construct the “bare life” of books which follow in the wake of their human reader. And so it is perhaps that despite their damage, despite the damage they reflect back at him, Adorno cannot bear to throw out these books and they remain, in stark relation to the reduction of books to mass culture delivery mechanisms for “stimuli”.
Beyond the folding of books into a biographical regime as backing or prop for the self, Adorno goes on to write that “the life of a book is not coterminous with the person who imagines it to be at his command. What gets lost in a book that is loaned out,” he continues,
and what settles into a book that is sheltered are drastic proof of that. But the life of a book also stands in oblique relation to what the possessor imagines he possesses in his knowledge of the book’s dispositio or so-called train of thought. Time and again the life of books mocks him in his errors. Quotations that are not checked in the text are seldom accurate. Hence the proper relationship to books would be one of spontaneity, acquiescing in what the second and apocryphal life of books wants, instead of insisting on that first life, which is usually only an arbitrary construction on the reader’s part.[57]
Forget immobility. Forget the established or satisfactory order (dispositio) of “first lives.” Give yourself over to the order that books produce by and in their juxtapositions, use, misuse, and damage. The trick is how to do it without doing violence to the relation that develops between biblion and bios – how might we come to accede or allow ourselves to be the beneficiaries of this form of life support without installing that aid as another order or system. Best to keep everything – however damaged. Best not to know why exactly and trust to luck, to what seems like chance, a pure exposure to the aleatory figure that cohabits with fictions of order.
One might as well attempt to herd cats – which is of course the Derridean animôt or anti-metaphor to which Adorno turns:
The private life of books can be compared to the life that is a widespread and emotionally charged belief, common among women, ascribed to cats. These undomesticated domesticated animals exhibited a property, visible and at one’s disposal, they like to withdraw. If their master refuses to organize his books into a library – and anyone who has proper contact with books is unlikely to feel comfortable in libraries, even his own – those he most needs will repudiate his sovereignty time and time again, will hide and return only by chance. Some will vanish like spirits, usually at moments when they have special meaning. Still worse is the resistance books put up to the moment one looks for something in them: as though they were seeking revenge for the lexical gaze that paws through them looking for individual passages and thereby doing violence to their own autonomous course, which does not wish to adjust to anyone’s wishes. An aloofness toward anyone who wants to quote from them is in fact a defining characteristic of certain authors, especially in Marx, in whom one need only rummage around for a passage that has made a special impression to be reminded of the proverbial needle in the haystack.[58]
Moody, aloof, resistant, apt to punish, the book is a strange animal, an animal dressed in an anthropomorphic “coat,” for to itself it lacks no skin. It joys to punish the “pawing” of the “lexical” gaze of the reading animal that seeks after particular passages rather than accepting what is given freely if capriciously, and subject to loss. It is worth noting further that properly speaking the book is not an animal at all, so much as a form of life that unfolds in the circuit that unfolds between women and cats – the book, this book, like this cat, is always a thoroughly historical, singular being which resists attempts to confine it to this or that species, this or that slot on the shelf. It wanders.
For Adorno, then, life, life worth living, might be said to consist in a bio/biblio life support project that we might call ‘living together with or through books,’ that is by attending to the second-ness of books, to the apocryphal, tacked on life, that books make possible, to the backing and bucking of writing, to recall Derrida’s modeling of the biblion, that they effect.[59] Reading the book’s paratext is for Adorno a matter of attending to the book’s graphic design.
The book has figured among the emblems of melancholy for centuries . . . there is something emblematic in the imago of all books, waiting for the profound gaze into their external aspect that will awaken its language, a language other than the internal, printed one. Only in the eccentric features of what is to be read does that resemblance survive, as in Proust’s stubborn and abyssal passion for writing without paragraphs. The eye, following the path of the lines of print, looks for such resemblances everywhere. While no one of them is conclusive, every graphic element, every characteristic of binding, paper, and print – anything, in other words, in which the reader stimulates the mimetic impulses in the book itself – can become the bearer of resemblance.[60]
By reading mimetically, Adorno becomes revelatory, finds a way into reading the history of the book and of historicizing the book: “What is revealed in this history” is a totality, the implosive dialectical tensions of which may be detected in Adorno’s adoption of metaphors or literal book damage to route the book’s “material components” through the formal “irregularities, rips, holes, and footholds that history has made in the smooth walls of the graphic design system . . . and its peripheral features.”[61]
Adorno’s essay ends with a series of breakdowns in mimetic reading until reading itself becomes impossible. First, a distinction between inside and outside gets collapsed as a consequence of Adorno having made “anything” in a book an occasion for mimetic reading:
The power history wields both over the appearance of the binding and its fate and over what has been written is much greater than any difference between what is inside and what is outside, between spirit and material, that it threatens to outstrip the work’s spirituality. This is the ultimate secret of the sadness of older books, and it follows how one should relate to them and, following their model, to books in general.[62]
Reading a book through its graphic design and paratext, the vertical printing on the spine, the removal of the place and date of publication of the title page, the book’s cover is to encounter the book’s resistance to reading. Adorno’s metaphors for reading a book focus on the paratext of the book. This focus on the book’s “most eccentric features” transmutes from print to the book as image, “imago,” “graphic image.”[63]
Although Adorno refers throughout the essay to the book’s external and internal form, his account of the true book as the damaged book does not yield an analysis based on resemblance: he defines damage both as external and literal (what happens to books when they are shipped around the globe, when they are read and reread over time, when they are produced more cheaply) and also as external and metaphorical (the way external coercion and pressure gets interiorized as damage internal to books (“The book[’s] … own form … is attacked within the book itself”).[64] The resistance to reading may penetrate the writing of the book so far as to verge on altering its form. As Adorno writes of Karl Marx’s writings:
At many points Marx’ [sic] texts read as though they had been written hastily on the margins of the texts he was studying and in his theories of surplus value this becomes almost a literary form. Clearly his highly spontaneous mode of production resisted putting ideas where they belong in neat and tidy fashion – an expression of the anti-systematic tendency in an author whose system is a critique of the existing one; ultimately, Marx was thereby practicing a conspiratorial technique unrecognized as such even by itself. The fact that for all the canonization of Marx there is no Marx lexicon available is fitting; the author, a number of whose statements are spouted like quotations form the Bible, defends himself against what is done to him by hiding anything that does not fall into that stock of quotations. . . . The relief the lexica afford is invaluable, but often the most important formulations fall through the cracks because they do not fit under any keyword or because the appropriate word occurs so infrequently that lexical logic would not consider it worth including: ‘”Progress” does not appear in the Hegel lexicon.[65]
In Adorno’s account, the process of writing and printing involving a secret that is hidden even from the author himself, already described by Adorno earlier as estranged form his text when he reads the page proofs (“the authors look at them with a stranger’s eyes” “unrecognized as such even by itself.”[66] Yet what is hidden by the violence of reading for the pullable quotation is not reducible either to a secular Marxist account (book as commodity, reified by the means of production) nor to an actual agency (the book continues to be personified) nor to a particular theology but is detected through a series of metaphors, the last of which is “fall through the cracks.”[67]
Adorno finishes his essay off by calling up an “ideal reader” rather than an existing one. In speaking of “the work’s spirituality” and “the ultimate secret,” Adorno ends by (re)tuning into a theological wavelength, a call from beyond the grave of the book’s life, as it were, but there is no religious identification. Karl Marx’s marginal notes are analogous to musical notes, which may be heard by a reader:
Someone in whom the mimetic and the musical senses have become deeply enough interpenetrated will . . . be capable of judging a piece of music by the image formed by its notes, even before he completely transposed it into an auditory idea. Books resist this. But the ideal reader, whom the books do not tolerate, would know something of what is inside when he felt the cover in his hand and saw the layout of the title page and the overall quality of the pages, and would sense the book’s value without needing to read it first.[68]
What kind of life do damaged books resistant to reading offer Adorno? On the one hand, a kind of Jewish mysticism may be heard in Adorno’s metaphors of hiding (even the act of hiding is hidden from the one who hides), a mysticism that stops short of Christian messianism as a book becomes a work of art through suffering: “Damaged books, books that have been made to suffer, are the real books.”[69] “The bibliophile expects from books beauty without suffering . . . Suffering is the true beauty in books; without it, beauty is corrupt, a mere performance”.[70] The books’ suffering is redeemed in aesthetic terms, as the books’ true beauty. And yet, on the other hand, Adorno’s account of suffering is clearly not messianic nor eschatological in that he is not using the metaphors of the “wound” or “bleeding” for suffering or narrating a linear history (of more and more degradation of books due to changes in the book publishing industry). Nor does Adorno single out one book in particular. His concern with damaged books is rather with the conditions of book publication and how those conditions make books both more accessible and more resistant. Adorno speaks at the end of “Bibliographical Musings” both of a singular type of books (older books) and of books in the plural, putting even more pressure on his personification of books by highlighting even more clearly the differences between the non “coterminus” (24) if analogous lives and deaths of books and the lives and deaths of writers and readers. Books preserve and defend their value by becoming inhuman. Reading a book whose value you cannot determine without reading it effectively reduces reading to information processing. Opening up the possibility of life supports in the form of suffering bio-books without equating suffering with sacrifice, Adorno redeems the archive as a hidden refuge or holding area for refugees of reading and personified book. Adorno does not hold out, that is, for an undamaged life support, repaired and rendered readable by a visible “Passion of the Book” to be detained in a camp for inspection and inoculation.
COnlsio on th archive as heading for the camp, echologies of the self. 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. 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).[71] 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. [72] 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 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.[73] 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 Conclusion a technonics of literariness, of philosophy and literature, and of literature, not as read, as in the case of citations or quick radings as in Markus and Vismann or eve more tradtional readings historicizing paper, or disitnctionbetween paperless office and paper office, but in literature of resistance, of archiving, of posthumous frames, of to be read, storage units.a technology (de Man—or Ronell on de Man in Stupidity) that subjects the subject to interference, lapses, irony, etc.
The final section closely “un-readings” of Jacque Derrida’s references to papers in Demeure and “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” and also connect reshelving in Derrida’s essay “Fichus” to addressing and corresponding in terms of Derrida’s not reading a dream dreamt and recorded in two letters by Walter Benjamin in Derrida’s rendering, Benjamin becomes as a papered person. But Derrida “reads” Benjamin’s letters, the dreams and letters in letters, in relation to a dream of a book he won’t write and in which he encrypts or represses the echo of his own statement that he no longer has time to write the book with seven chapters but can only deliver as a TV guide to the chapters of the virtual books he won’t write and Benjamin’s last letter in French is not addressed to Adorno but readdressed by the editor of the Correspondence in which Walter Benjamin says he no longer has time to write the letters he would have loved to write. In “Fichus,” Derrida refuses to play either the librarian, to say that the text belongs here and is a property, a set of papers—the editor calls the letters “papers” and says they are part of the “Walter Benjamin Papers” in the Bibliothèque Nationale, or the editor, or the philologist for that matter. He refuses to paper over Benjamin. Derrida reads Benjamin’s letters as disseminated, as letters, but unaddressed or readdressed. He doesn’t go as far with his non-reading non-writing of the book as he could in terms of reading the correspondence as a question of rendering Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno papered or paperless persons, the transformation of the letters into papers in order to be rendered readable (or unreadable in our terms) or even thematize them the way he does at the start (this will be about paperless persons). Derrida is reading the letter in the letter as his waking dream of writing and reading.[74]
Jacques Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” in Paper Machine, trans.
Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). I am dreaming. I am sleepwalking” (169)
In endnote 17 (202-203), Derrida lists all the names of those people he wishes to thank and ends saying “I apologize to whose who names I have omitted here.” This note follows from an odd moment in the essay when he begins over again, addressing the Mayor and audience directly and thanking everyone (he has moved the customary place for such remarks and gestures to the middle of the essay and into a “summary note” which he does not read that ceremony. “I haven’t yet begun to touch my debt to you . . .—to all those, both in Frankfurt and elsewhere in Germany, who must forgive me for not mentioning them by name other than in an a summary note” (173). The endnote is just a list of names with the first names being the first initial of he first name in all cases except for Bernard Stiegler and Peter Szoondi. (203). It’s kind of like a monument ot the dead, names becomes abstract by virtue of having been listed in alphabetical order and made therefore serial, anonymous, nameless, as it were, the two exceptions being exceptions because their first names are given in full.
Hélène Cixous. Hyperdream Polity (2009) is a book of mourning, but also of morning, a
tragedy-with-comedy and a universal family romance in which it
transpires that the narrator is the veritable offspring of a “treasure
of literature” in the form of a bed, purchased by her mother from a
certain W. Benjamin in 1934, slept on for 40 years by her brother and
dreamt of by her friend “J.D.” To whom donate an inestimable bed, whose springs are tired to death, discontinued model, not worth a penny. Which was, for having been sold lost forgotten shipped, at the untold origin of sumptuous and sinister nights on straw and of pages, in color, of dreams among the loveliest of the century that we’ve left behind us, allowing it at the age of a hundred, to sink slowly under time along with its inhabitants, with no final resting place other than the flimsy shelter of a volume of letters. When I am no longer here who will take in the bed? Had I only known earlier, it might, entrusted to my friend J.D., have been incorporated into is book Fichus alongside its former master and have had a share of immortaility along with the straw, the hat, the blue-trimmed sail, all those minima that make the principal Fichu of this brilliant tender delicate memorial of a funeral cortege of small secondary lost objects such as are found in Egyptian tombs.
Helene Cixous, Hyperdream, 71-72
If I’d only known I’d have asked my friend whether in his opinion the bed as reproducible object was just a bed without a soul or whether a bed owing to tis fate its solitude its misery its history to the thinker of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” simultaneously with the German refugee ceaselessly dislodged dislodging with whom my mother had done business just before the poor lad set out for death, it might have inherited, in his opinion, an auratic emanation, despite its flesh being metal. Is metal less apt to receive the signature, to emit the aura, than wood or cloth? Another paregonic question: am I perhaps writing a book in order to ask my friend all these questions that I hadn’t had time to ask on the telephone? Helene Cixous, Hyperdream, 74
End with Foucault’s pharmacy versus Derrida’s –what kind of media deliver the hit of the archive, the fever or delirium of reading the more or less unreadable. [75]
Hélène Cixous. Dream I Tell You. Trans. Beverley Bie Brahic Columbia University Press (2007) “her dreams are her archives”
Maybe TA’s dream of a passport-a dream that the passport cane be examined, rendered historical, that TA can pass over the passport by historicizing it. Then Fichus on dream. So I also dream of living paperless—and sometimes that sounds to me like a definition of “real life,” of the living part of life. The walls of the house grow thicker, not with wallpaper but with shelving. Soon we won’t be able to put our feet on the ground: paper on paper. “Paper or Me, You Know . . .” 65
Fichus is a separate publication in French. A stand alone book. It is not included in Papier Machine. Translation of Derrida into English (among 39 other languages) is a kind of dissemination that in philological terms recollects the writings and rebinds them into new “cuts.” Essays not in the French book are cut form the English, translated in two different collections (Typewriter Ribbon); essays not in it are added Editors and translators reshelve Derrida.
Jacques Derrida. Fichus: discours de Francfort Paris : Galilée, c2002. The note in the English translation about adding 9/11 is in the French edition. The note is unsigned. And there is no named editor of the book. The French edition also has a “prier d’inserer” that is not translated in Paper Machine. In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes then up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a store-room, and it is hard in any case to part from left-overs. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of the intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier state have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed with any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [ is not] above life, like something sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-“ is without superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-called as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)
File the file under literature as archive.
-----------------------
[1] This essay is deeply debted to Julian Yates, whose fingerprints, handprints, footprints, voice-prints, and answering machine may be traced everywhere in this essay. I would like also to thank John Archer for his many conversations, his trenchant comments on many drafts of the introductory section, and “John Archer’s answering machine” too.
[2] Sigmund Freud, “Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, William Strachey (ed. and trans.), London. Hogarth Press, 1961, Vol. 6, pp226-32; Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, Yale French Studies 48, (1972), pp74-117, republished in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Alan Bass (trans.) Chicago University Press, 1978, pp196-231; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp13-19; and Paper Machine, Rachel Bowlby (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, pp48-50. See also Derrida’s parallel comments on bank notes, checks, and credit cards in “Priceless,” Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001, Elizabeth Rottenberg (ed. and trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp326-328.
[3] “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits,’)” in Tom Cohen et al (eds), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 302-03, p359n11. This essay was published in Paper Machine, Paris: Galilée, 2001, 35-150 but was not included in Paper Machine, op cit. “Fichus” was originally published as a book but is included as a chapter of Paper Machine, op cit.
[4] On the “technical substrate,” see Archive Fever, op cit., p25; on the subjetctile, see Artaud le MOMA; on arche-writing and writing in the general sense, see Of Grammatology: Corrected Edition, Gayatri Spivak (trans), Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1997, pp6-26.
[5] Jacques Derrida, 'Paper or Me, You Know… (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)' in Paper Machine, Rachel Bowlby (trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005, pp60-1. See also Derrida, 'Machines and the Undocumented Person', ibid, pp1-3; Derrida, 'Derelictions of the Right to Justice: (But What Are the "Sans Papier" Lacking?)' in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001, Elizabeth Rottenberg (ed. and trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp133-46; and Jacques Derrida H.C for Life, That Is to Say . . . Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p137 and p171n123.
[6] Derrida’s descriptions of papers as “literal” derives from a legal understanding of human rights in which papers have an officially approved and authentic and recognizable material support that authorized bearers carry on their persons. Derrida presumably puts “paper” in scare quotes in order to indicate that the literal referent is materialized in various kinds of identification documents.
After having insisted that he and other supporters of the “paperless” people are not “calling for the disqualification of identity papers or of the link between documentation and legality” and having pointed out that “when we support them [paperless people] today in their struggle, we still demand that they be issued papers”, Derrida adds that what he metaphorically calls “the earthquake” of virtual, paperless media “touches nothing less than the essence of politics and its link with the culture of paper. The history of politics is a history of paper, if not a paper history.”[7] Op cit., pp60-1.Clarifying the force of the final subordinate clause qualifying the meaning of a “history of paper” (not the same thing as “a paper history”), Derrida restates his earlier point that “although the authentication and identification of selves and others increasingly escapes the culture of paper . . . the ultimate juridical resource still remains the signature done with the person’s ‘own hand’ on an irreplaceable paper support.[8] Ibid., p57.
[9] Jacques Derrida, Artaud le MOMA (Paris: Galilée 2002); Michel Lisse, Jacques Derrida Ministère des affaires étrangères Paris, 2005—facsimile; drafts (Yale French Studies, Number 89: Drafts Michel Contat, ed. 1996); Jacques Derrida
Returns as literature or the work of art—Artaud’s burned pages. Jacques Derrida, “To Unsense the Subjectile,” The Secret of Antonin Artaud, Jacques Derrida and Paule Thevènin (Trans) Mary Ann Caws MIT, 1998, 59-148.
[10] Op cit., p6 and pp10; 19.
[11]
[12] 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.”[13]
[14] 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. 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). 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 operational time renders inoperative. Inoperativity (111) and impotential as opposed to operationability and potential.
[15] The camp in Agamben’s account is a political space indifferent to its various phenomenalizations, materializations, localizations, places, and its virtualization. Agamben is a legal historical absolutist and philologist. He is not concerned with the physics, the 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 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).
[16] 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 German body “through the elimination of the mentally ill and the bearers of hereditary diseases” (1980).
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.
[17] On Rilke’s notebooks he kept while writing the Notebooks of , see Rainer Maria Rilke and Maurice Betz, Rilke in Paris Will Stone (trans) London Hesperus Press, 2012, pp21-26; 39-44; 71-78; 107-111. Vismann Files—returns to literature, even if literature is reduced to citations. Files, Paper Machines. Sven Spieker, The Big Archive. Lothar Müller, Weisse Magie: Die Epoche des Papiers (Carl Hanser Verlag 2012) deals with canonical European literature throughout, including Don Quixote; Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2003) “To say farewell to paper, today, would be rather like deciding on one fine day to stop speaking because you had learned to write. Or to stop looking in the mirror because the road is in front of us. We drive with both hands and both feet, looking both in front and behind, speeding up at some points and slowing down at others. Presumably it is not possible at the same time, in one single, indivisible instant, to look behind and in front; but if you drive well you dart in the blink of an eye from the windshield to the mirror. Otherwise, you’re blind or you have an accident. You see what I’m getting at: the end of paper isn’t going to happen in a hurry.
Jacques Derrida, “Paper or Me, You Know . . . (New Speculations on the Luxury of the Poor).” In Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford UP, 2005), 64-65.
[18] For a simplistic reduction of hauntology—and the death certificate--to “social ontology” and the “law object” as “written act,” Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Trans. Richard Davies (Fordham UP, 2012).
[19] The letter versus the postcard, the letter and the dead letter, The Post Card—preservation and destruction. Richard Burt, “Read After Burning: Delivering Derrida’s Post . . . Posthumously (with Love and without such Limits)” in Glossator, special issue entitled "Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida" ed. Michael O'Rouke, Volume 7 (Fall 2012)
see
[20] See Did-Huberman and Lanzmann, Shoah, his willingness to destroy any snuff film. Mr. Death—also the archivist against the denier. For Derrida’s critique of Agamben, see The Beast and the Sovereign 1 Archive of papers of dead persons. Arlette Farge.
[21] See Code 46 film. And The Counterfeiters.
[22] Ibid., p61.
[23] Demon of Writing, reduces discipline and paperwork is a psychology of impotence. La Bastille ou : A travers les archives de la Bastille
Danielle Muzerelle and Elise Dutray-Lecoin, eds; Bruno Racine (Préface). See contributions by Arlette Farge.
Selections from Arlette Farge's Subversive Words. Giorgio Agamben "The Birth of the Camp," in Means Without Ends and "Archive and
Testimony" in Remnants of AuschwitzErrol Morris, dir. Mr. Death Jacques Rançiere chapter on Braudel, "The Dead King," in The Names of History Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge.
[24] Ibid., p57.
[25] See the wallet as tomb in Rilke’s example. Similar examples in Farge Le bracelet de parchemin is all about autopsies—papers found on cadavers that helped identify them. These are people who drowned or froze to death. She uses the word “inscribes” in a Foucauldian manner enonce par l’inscription sur papier, tablettes ou parchemins. 77. But survivance is not reducible to life and death. Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130).
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment on, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, a bookstore, in cellars, in urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web.
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 131
A tout le moin peut-on preciser qu’il y a de minuscule carnets, des missives ou tablettes, des dessin, et ce que tout cela est inscrit sure des fueilles de papier aux formats mutliples, aux bords dechieres, aux forms incertaines parce que uses par le temps, griffes aussi par l’enfouissement sans precaution dans les poches. Bien entendu se reconnaissent vite les imprimes (certificats, passeports, extraits de bapteme, etc.) ainsi ceux supportant une ectriture manuscrite. 37
5. Archives nationals, Z2 41333 “Registre de levee de cadavres, 17 avirl 1783.
Tous ce ecrits minuscule forment sans doute un livre, un livre unique ou se dirait par ecrit ce qui—de fait—ne pouvait jamais etre ecrit par ceux qui les portaient, puisqu’ils ne possedaient aucune des forms de la culture tradiotnelle. Ces papiers ne sont pas lies au monde savant et, pourtant, ils s’y rattachent forcement. Ce bruit peu audilble, ce livre difficile a dechiffrer eminent bien en partie du monde savant: quleques comptes sur un papier dechire font etat d’un unives marchand, meme s’il est pratique pratique sans emphase ou de facon embryonnaire: une adresse mal orthgrahiee or des mots de pei Les objets, les vetements, les petit billets sur soi aident a l’identification du corps. 31
ne ecrits de crayon et de phonetique emprutent a la culture savant. 35
[26] “What Does It Mean to Be a French Philosopher Today?”, in Paper Machine, op. cit, p112.
[27] Ibid., 188-9n29.
[28] Ibid., 14
[29] Op cit., p186n14.
[30] Op cit.
[31] Op cit., p61.
[32] Op cit., pp6-8 and pp187-8n27.
[33] “Typewriter Ribbon,” op cit., p331, p333.
[34] Op cit., p7.
[35] Parages, Beast and the Sovreign 2
[36] Op cit., p188n29.
[37] Op cit., p187n25.
[38] Op cit., p340.
[39] Op cit, pp3-4; p11.
[40] Op cit., p28; pp26-7; p64; p66.
[41] “Typewriter Ribbon,” op cit., p286, p289; p331; “Machines and the ‘Undocumented Person,” in, Paper Machine, op cit., p2 and “The Word Processor”, ibid., p29.
[42]Ibid., p189n29.
[43] Ibid., p189n29.
[44] Jacques Derrida, Aporias, Thomas Dutoit (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, p11.
[45] “Paper, or Me,” op cit.
[46] 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 concentration camp. Agamben 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.
[47] 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.
[48] 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 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.”
[49] Since All the Memory of the World has received almost no critical attention, I will focus primarily on it as I put it into dialogue with Night and Fog. None of the essays in a recent, quite comprehensive discussion of Night and Fog mentions All the Memories of the World: See Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, (eds.), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics As Political Resistance in Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, Oxford. Berghahn Books, 2012.
[50] Ibid., p130.
[51] This loss of the mss in order to make it possible to find it later in published form would, in any case, only be a temporary solution since Benjamin sees the collector as an endangered species about to go extinct: “Unpacking my Library,” ibid, p493.
[52] Paper Machine, op cit., p.27.
[53] Ibid, p5-6.
[54] Ibid, p6.
[55] Ibid, p7.
[56] Theodor Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings” in Notes to Literature Vol 2 Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), pp20-31; p24
[57] Ibid., p24.
[58] Ibid., pp24-5.
[59] Ibid., p25.
[60] Paper Machine, op cit., p6.
[61] Op cit., p27.
[62] Ibid., p30.
[63] Ibid., p31.
[64] Ibid., p30.
[65] Ibid., p21.
[66] Ibid., p26.
[67] Ibid., p23.
[68] Ibid., p42.
[69] Ibid., p31.
[70] Ibid., p24.
[71] Ibid., p29.
[72] 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 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 bio-political 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 paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes bio-politics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen.” No media because no mediation. “virtually confused”
[73] In the State of Exception, for example, Agamben notes that “the analogy with language is illuminating” and describes 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…
[74] enlist Althusser’s ISAs here
[75] These things happened to me in 1938. . . . If I have written books, it has been in the hope that they would put an end to it all. . . . But now I hope to be done with it soon. . . . Still, I must not forget that I once managed to put these things into writing. It was in 1940, during the last weeks of July or the first weeks of August. Inactive, in a state of lethargy, I wrote this story. But once it was written I reread it and destroyed the manuscript. Today I cannot even remember how long it was.
Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, 1
I have kept “living” proof of these events. But without me, this proof can prove nothing, and I hope no one will go near it in my lifetime. Once I am dead, it will represent only the shell of an enigma, and I hope to those who love me will have the courage to destroy it, without trying to learn what it means. I will give more details about this later. If these details are not there, I beg them not to plunge into my few secrets, or read my letters if any are found, or look at my photographs if any turn up, or above all open what is closed; I ask them to destroy everything without knowing what they are destroying, in the ignorance and spontaneity of true affection.
Death Sentence, 3
The principal dates should be found in a little notebook locked in my desk. The only date I can be sure of is the 13th of October—Wednesday, the 13thof October. (3-4
Death Sentence.
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