Introduction:1

From Bare Life to Shelf-Life:

Close/d Reading the Archive2

Storage Unit and BLack box ROnell on phone as black box (state of emergency ) versus Stengers, Latour et al  Also the black box (scinece data) and the art box (Cornell, Duchamp),and hte sotrage box (warhol) and hte file cabinet as art

(spieker). The book as a work of art, like a boc,x, the

briefcase as box, suitcase as box.

Portability of the box.

Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book:

The Black Box: After the Crash: The Click: The Survual Guide 350-52.

The Bio, 302-308

The lines to which the insensible ear reconnects us are consternating, broken up,

severely cracking the surface of the region we have come to hold as a Book.

Even so, the telephone book boldly answers as the other book of books, a site

which registers all the names of history, if only to attend the refusal of the proper

name. A partial archivization of the names of he living, the telephone binds the

living and the dead in an unarticulated thematics of destination. Who writes the

telephone book, assumes it peculiar idiom or makes its referential assignments?

P. 5

The call as death sentence 6

Terrorism(8)

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A state casts a net of connectedness around itself from which h the deadly flower

of unity can grown under the sun of constant surveillance. In contrast, we have

tried to locate telephones that disconnect, those that teach you to hang up and

dial again. (8)

Hediegger failed democracy

It is Heidegger who poses the greatest challenge to those of us who want to

shatter the iron collar of fascism’s continued grip on he world. . Heidegger saw

the danger, and he called it. And yet, Heidegger experienced the danger too late,

which is why we have to route his thinking on the essence of technology –this

has everything to do with death machines—through a delay-call forwarding

system (8)

But the telephone, as a storage tank of reserve otherness, takes on an

increasingly ironic function as it assumes an order of alternative consciousness

or secondary personality “with a separate consciousness of its own” (DP,156).

127

Derrida and democracy issue of Diacritcs 2008.

Derrida and Ornell do not put enough pressureon democracy or onhte opposition

between deomcarcy and fascism. They playinto Fukyama’s end of history and

the last man’s hands.

And Ronell places negativity, does nto fully take irony into account, the parabasis

that interrpts the callall along the line (use de Man’s metaphor differently).

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Hamletas a play about irony insofar as it is about telephonics—hence is it s

already anticipating its parodies,revisions, and even isitselfa parododic repetiion

of the Ur-Hamlet. But irony is not comedy, as de Manknows. It is about delay,

madness, error andstupidity.

Shelf-Life:The Biopolitics of the Archive

In the introduction to my book, I maintain that the archive is the paradigmatic space of modernity. I address Giorgio Agamben‘s influential study, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, in which modernity is defined by a paradox: the temporary “state of exception” to the rule of law has become the permanent political norm. Any space can be turned into a detention center in which persons are stripped indefinitely of their rights as citizens and returned to the category of what Agamben calls “bare life,“ life that may not be murdered or sacrificed. The concentration camp is thus “the hidden paradigm of political space of modernity” (123). I widen Agamben’s narrow focus on the law to include a wide range of texts and media related to the archivalization of bare life: manuscripts, books, paintings, and film. I show that the history of biopolitics cannot properly be understood apart from the history of the archive. Whereas Agamben wants to recognize potential reconfigurations of the camp (the hospital room with a comatose patient on life-support, for example), I maintain that the universalization of sacred life [homo sacer] would not be possible without the virtualization, or mediatization of the archive and that allow for need kinds of storage space, from memory sticks to self-storage units.   Not just the self-sotrage unit—it has uses owners may not recognize. Other storage devices like memory sticks or external harddrives. Walter Benjamin already living his bare life virtually—postal relay—storing his archive at different places—ordering different kinds of paper, trying to get a passport, reshelving his books. The publication of facsimile book of his archive on a continuum or virtual as pothumographic. My theoretical model of the archive draws on Cornelia Vismann’s Files: Law and Media Technology (2007), Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995) and Paper Machine (2005), Sven Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (2008), and Andre Nusselder’s Interface Fantasy (2009).In first chapter go back to Agamben’s redaing of Foucault in Remnants of Auschwitz and the starting point of Homo Sacer being Foucault not having discussed the camp. Go to Agamben’s Potentialities and his reading of Aristotle and Heidegger on potentilaity (Interface Fantasy mentions Aristotle but does not mention any title by name and says that virtual is Latin, not anicent Greek. Homo Sacer as an underground salvaging of Heidegger—the note on Heidegger; versus Derrida’s chapter on a foonote in Being and Time. Also Agamben’s Man without Content. For Heideggerianism of Agamben, plus sphilologist (Stanzas). He does a philological, structuralist philological reading of homosacer rarther than a Heideggerian reading of Greek (as Derrida does) in Homo Sacer, but he does so in Potentialities.

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Begin with storage unit to open up biopolitics as the archive rather htan thecamp, to considervirtual bare life rather than legally declared bare life. A history of filing nad htearchiveresolves, not through positivism, a contradiciotn and bind that Agmben remains in between anhistorical and ahistorical model thatallows for only belated paternrecognition. Archive is not a problem of constructing the past through documents and materials, preserved or ruins, or their hallucinationated impression but of reading to come (Derrida, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthes) and the boundareis of publication. So the virutal archive is about posthumography, not reducible to Vismann’s positivist history or to Derrida’s arche-writing and media trnasformations of the archive. Rather a problem of unreadability of the published / unpublished / archived / stored papers, the haunotlogy of the archive’s materials, supoprts, biblions, subjctiles, supports, impressions. By the same token, no topgraphy that allows for Spieker’s art from bureaucracy. The question of living bare life virtutally forces us to recongize that the camp is an archvie.

In the first chapter, I reconceptualize Agamben’s virutalized 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 always involves identity papers and paperwork; similarly, preserving memory always bears on media of archiving, including film, photography, and print. As Vismann points out, the archived document may have an ambiguous material status: a calligraphic style make become obsolete under different regimes and stored as a work of art. If all life is now virtually “bare life,” as Agamben maintains, it follows that we must attend archival practices including surveilliance, data strorage, retention, retrieval and documents that allow people tp be processed as the cross various kinds of national and international borders. I historicize the increasingly virtualized passport (from written description to photograph to embedded memory chip) and reread Michel Foucault’s account of biopolitics as an account of the archive, comparing Foucault’s central works on power to Arlette Farge’s Subversive Words and Jacques Rançiere’s The Names of History. They imagine the archive as a problem of reading, as a scene of annotation, of Philip II as a microhistorian in Braudel’s case. The future is not a disaster that could happen, a then and now, or immediate consequence (hisotircla and ahistorical) but the Hiedeggerian temporality of the late which is actually earlier, of reading the future withoutht a nationalism attached. See Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe on Heidegger. Derrida sidestepping the politics of f the archive—mentioning them in a ntoe that tis a tip of he hat to Foucualt—but he limits the archive to ash, to the limits of the archivabale in relation ot the impression. Once we connect life and death (bare liefe and bare death) of the archive to virtuality-media changes Derrida notes in the archive, hten the archiveis no longer reducibe to a crypt or ash or cinders but must be analyzed in lreation to posthumography (which subsumes autobiography, as in Blanchot)

In the second chapter, I examine the ways in which Alain Resnais’ Statues Also Die (1953), Night and Fog (1955), All the Memories of the World (1956), and Hiroshima, Mon Amour concern people as paper and paper as people and illustrate the ways in which bare life not confined to the space of the camp. In addition to discussing Resnais’ interest

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in reconstructing the past through various kinds of archives, I examine the forging of papers, paintings, and related criminal activities in the paintings by attending not only to the artist’s signature but to the provenance of paintings established on their reverse sides. I discuss a forgery case related in Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer and the Nazis and in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts as well as a recent German museum exhibition that made both sides of paintings visible entitled Spectres of Provenance. The art work of the archive involves a paradoxical and endless play of concealing and revealing by reading in reverse rather than a belated recognition of the newest “hidden” camp Agamben urges us to find. Or on the backings, behind as in Lost Leonardo—see also the different Lost Leonardo’s and the forensics reading of Nightwatching and related kinds of positivism. debate on the signature engaged by Jacques Derrida in The Truth of Painting; Meyer Shapiro in "The Still Life as Personal Object--A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh"; and Martin Heidegger in "The Origin of the Work of Art." 

In the third chapter, I discuss a number of autobiographical essays on the boundaries of posthumous publication by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and Derrida “Fichus” and postscript to Archive Fever as well as theory of autothanatobiography in Lacoue-labarhe. to show that the archive paradoxically becomes readable insofar as it is resistant or “closed”: reading is more about various kinds of reshelving, refiling, and storage of persons on paper, the passport being perhaps the best example of the paper person. Walter Benjamin concludes his essay, “Books by the Mentally Ill,” 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.” In the course of his championing of this un-named manuscript, Benjamin equates 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 writings of the insane 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. (Selected Writing 2: 1, 13)

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 the passport controls of the biblio-polis. The archive allows for self-storage (reading yourself in what you and how you store and are stored): reading as refiling / reshelving becomes a way of living bare life virtually.

In the fourth chapter I connect the biopolitical archive to a number of films related to WWII and concentration camps The Train (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1964), Mr. Klein (dir. Joseph Losey, 1976), Lifeboat (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1944), Lucien Lacombe (dir. Louis Malle, 1974), Army of Shadows (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969), and The Counterfeiters (dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007). I show how biopolitics is lived through

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various kinds of filing and archivalization by putting these films in dialogue with Derrida’s commentary on Maurice Blanchot’s autobiographical short story “The Instant of My Death” (set during WWII) in Demeures: Fiction and Testimony. I elaborate on Derrida’s insight that “no truthful testimony would be possible” were it not for the “fragmentation of truth” and the “spectral virtuality of life.” What odes it mean to recognize that he camp is an archive? The archive resists reading not because it is incomplete, but because it is in some crucial ways yet to be read. Archiving involves philosophical questions about the book, the work of art, and visual media that tend to get bypassed in linear, historicist narratives of a book’s or film’s storage, publication, and republication. Instead of recognizing hidden variations of concentration camps after the fact, as Agamben does, I show that the camps themselves are biopolitical archives: the history of biopolitics constitues a problem not only of reading the past in the archive but of future possible readings yet to come.

Posthumography puts pressure on what is already in play with any editing—the law kicks in sometimes in new ways with regard to executors control over the manuscript or over paratexts when it is published (length of introductions, and so on). Question of the last hand and without interpretation in Heidegger, becoming a dead hand. Family speaking in Heidegger’s name. Heidegger’s fear that what happened to Hegel after his death might happen to Heidegger after his.See Theodore Kisiel, “An International Scandal,” Radical Philosophy (1995)

Heidegger discusses his own title “The Nature of Language” and rewriting it as “The Nature? Of Language?” and later discussing the title of George’s poem in On the Way to Language. see p. 53, 70, 73.

It’s a kind of Derridean moment, but you can only see it after having read Derrida. Heidegger sometimes stop to summarize what’s he said (he does this all time) but also repeats / restates his introductory sentences to “The Nature of Language.”

In Dialogue on language, MH refers to transcripts of his lectures, his delays in publishing one (after 11 eleven years), the film Rashomon (16), film and photography (17) Mentions Schilermacher, posthumous publction, philology )10) a photograph of a grave, in On the Way to Language. 49Recalling it 21No theater, reading it (18)Also how he abandoned the hermeneutic circle51, 29. 11.

First drafts of Ebeing and Time

“I believe that I have learned a little more, so that now I can ask questions better than several decades ago.” (8)

6

“house is a shelter erected earlier somewhere or other, like a portable object, can be stored away.” “which is why you kept silent for twelve years” (6)book, gift, inscription (7)transcripts (5-6)“lectures came out as a book” (2)photograph of Kuki’s grave (1)(26)

Lacoue-Labarthe chapter on Niezstche in The Subject of philolosphy aobut how you have to read Nietzsche via Heidegger. See also Otobiogrpahies by Derrida. And that means reading FN against the posthumously published Will to Power (MH’s critique of it).

What Gaston Bachelard calls a “bibliomenon.” Derrida Intro to Origin of Geometry, p. 91Cites in note 94, L’activite de la physique contemporaine. 6-7.Discussion of Husserl on the book, pp. 90-91.

Peter Krapps’ hysterical account of the horrifying misreading of his comments that led to the cancellation of a conference he was organizing to be held at Cornell on the 25th anniversary of Glas—says Derrida does not appreciate the difference between website and email. Krapp says he could not control the listserv. The cancellation was precipitated by a “prank.” Someone said JD had died. Culler and Klein thought he was in on the joke and cancelled the conference indefinitely.

How to read Derrida (reading Derridas) reading x rading y, etc.

See Leavey’s Coda to Intro to Hussler’s Origin of Geometry and three periods or punctuations, one in 1967 with Positions. Second is Joyce Gramophone essay of 1982 and third is Deerida’s thesis, which he cites in reverse order of Eyes of the University as “The Time of a thesis: Punctuations” published in Philosophy in France Today ed. Alan Montefiore Cambridge UP, 1983). And then Leavey says Derrida punctuates relative tot the thesis 1968-74, from 1974-79-89 and 3, 1980.

“Prior to the punctuation of the thesis other punctuations abound. Form 1963 to 1968 . . . (pp. 185-86)I enjoyed the contrapuntal (contrapunctual?) tension between these two sentences in your Coda to Derrida's intro to Husserl's Origin of Geometry :

As of 1988 the corpus of Derrida is de facto incomplete, which would disrupt any move to unity. (184-85)As always already there, on the horizon, punctuation, the signature of a corpus incomplete . . . (192)

This is exactly the kind of tension I am trying to analyze in my book _Shelf-Life_.

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I also wanted to let you know that I found your dedication to be quite moving.

I am reading your afterword to The Origin of Geometry and finding thatthe problem of punctuating Derrida's corpus is exactly what I wastrying to get at when I talked to you about the various ways one couldread Derrida (un)reading Derrida (un/reading (______fill in the blank)reading ______(fill in the blank).  I'm thinking of these differentkinds of punctuation as different reshelvings.

I am especially interested in the notion of a complete corpus(Derrida's, Shakespeare's, etc) and the kinds of differences betweentranslations and editions that do not get registered in bibliographiesand translator's notes (or read at all).   I have attached the CordozaLaw Review version of "Force of Law" as well as one page from the Actsof Religion version so you can see the sorts of differences I wastalking about at the Department party.  A kind of comparativephilology could be extended to attend to what I call inaudible andinvisible interferences (of a Ronellian Telephone Book, Derridean PostCard sort) that only appear through accidental static (when two peoplehave read two versions and find differences between them as comparethem).  At the same time, I think these kinds of interference are notassimilable to philology, textual criticism (even open texts and"unediting") but have to be read philosophically under the (be)headingof what I call "posthumography."  That is what I ended up doing withDerrida's essay on Sarah Kofman, "entitled ". . . ." in The WOrk ofMourning and "Introduction" in Sarah Kofman: Selected Writings (at theend of my "Posthumography" essay).  The former version is anincomplete translation (not announced as such) but gives a full noteto the French edition and posthumous publication history; it alsoreferences the forthcoming SK book.  The intro to the SK book does notreference The Work of Mourning, however, and gives the full version ofthe essay but replaces "(. . . .)" with "Introduction" without comment(no note on the original title).  My reading of the first translationfocuses on what turned out to be the editors' interpolated "(. . . )"swhich I thought were put there by Derrida. These variations do notrise to the kind of resistance one associates with the symptomaticreading, but they can be (not)read "like" the the way Derrida readsvariants in de Man's essay in Memoires for Paul de Man and variants ofRousseau in Typewriter Ribbon, Ink.I think of posthumography as constituting the limits of what Derridacalls "unreadabilty" in Living on: Borderlines, the difference beingthat I don't equate unreadability with the crypt  (or encryption) asDerrida does.  Posthumography is not a necrology.

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See Punctuations Time of a Thesis in Eyes of the University 2, talks about the past twenty gfive years in relation to his thesis (chaning the topic, ecidinghe won’t write it, then writing it). But the weirdest thing is that he keeps talking about books he ublished which he has notincluded in the corpus to be judeged so he can get his thesis. His publication history is crucial. 1967 (three works in one year) in relation to 1963-68 (p. 118) 1967, p 121, 1967 and may 68 , p. 122, only it’s just 1968 “that eventthat one still does not how how to name other than by its date” (122) goes back to 1949, the year he arrived in France to autumn of 1968 (123) Period form 1968 to 1974 (125) 1975 (125)1974 (126)death of Hippolyte in 1968 (122) 1972 (124)

“pushing it toward textual configurations that were less and less linear, logical, and topical forms, even typographical forms that were more daring, the intersection of corpora, mixtures of genres or modes, Weschel der Tone [changes of tone], satire, rerouting, grafting on so on” (124)

SO he presents his story not as a personal story but historicizes it as a trajectory or sequence largely through periods and publication dates over twenty five years (114( 1966 colloquium (115)

1957, registered his first dissertation topic

Reads Origin of Geometry teleologically “all of the problems worked on in the Intro to O of F have continued to organize the work I have subsequently attempted” (116) 1958-68 period of de Gaullism.

Title without title, 120 Not a system but a strategic device (18) and 1972.And here I can only indicate them in an algebraic manner. (119)

Strategy without any goal (128)

After.Life [Blu-ray] Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, (2009). See your own death certificate scene. That is the first piece of proof offered Ricci. Mentioned by the director in an interview with her on the extras.

Thereafter Jaspers began an intensive study of Heidegger with the aim of writing a critique of the philosopher and the man, but again, without reading Being and Time. In 1955 he prepared a chapter on Heidegger for his Philosophische Autobiographie, but it appeared only in the second, posthumous edition (1977). It recounts in some detail the nature of their relationship.551here is little enough sustained engagement with Heidegger's thought, however, and one ends up wondering whether Jaspers would have been capable of that at all. Not only did he dismiss Being and Time (pp. 142, 163, etc.), but even his seemingly thorough reading

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of the Nietzsche volumes makes me doubt, from what I read in these notes, that Jaspers grasped the core of Heidegger's philosophy. 551Finally one must ask what motivated all this scribbling. Perhaps Jaspers reveals the sadness of it all in a note written the day after Christmas, 1953 (p. 97): "In my dreams Heidegger never appears, yet tonight I dreamt of him. I was together with some people who attacked Heidegger in a way which made me angry. Heidegger came by. We spoke to each other in the familiar form, and I went away with him."?552

T. J. S. Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Mar., 1979), pp. 550-552.

Humanist philology, in short, eminently deserves the attention that it has received from modern classicists and historians. Its proponents not only filled in the gaps and cleaned off the stains of the classical corpus, but rethought the nature of reading itself. At the same time, a second group of scholars-mostly literary- have shed new light on the methods by which some humanists made their texts yield a meaning directly useful to modern readers. The great surveys by Seznec and Allen vividly portray generations of Renaissance scholars building around their texts a vast wedding cake of interpretation, with ancient, medieval and modern ingredients richly mingled in the hope of disguising the awkward pagan features and apparent errors of the texts. P. 627Most scholars seem to find the current of thought that Garin emphasizes easier to accept as novel and important. He and other critics and historians offer a vision far more gripping than the mock- Raphael I described before: a group of heroic humanists energetically wipe the fog from a vast window, behind which appears the ancient world as it really was-or at least as Mantegna portrayed it, with me- ticulous attention to archeological detail and perspective. Yet dif- ficulties arise when we test this vision against the sources. In the first place, few of the humanists actually reveal on closep. 629Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries Author(s): Anthony Grafton Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), pp. 615-649

Swift Tale of a Tub / battle of the Books fake posthumography (Oxford edition, 1984)

the author, I believe, is dead, and it is probable that it was writ in the Year 1697, when it is said to have been written . . . (191) Plato was by chance on the next shelf (110)windows / shelves (113)

The following Discoure came into my hands perfect and entire [it is called A Fragment]. . .Concerning the auuhtor I am wholly ignorant, neither can I conjecture whether it be the same withthat of thetwo foregoing pieces, the original having sent me at a different time, and in a different hand. (all italics, 126)

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but whether the author designed to have gone through such a work himself, or intended these papers only for hints to somebody else that desire them, is not known. After which the rest was to follow, written in his own hand, as before (all italics, 176)

Appendix A “Chapter 28 Of the Philological Learning of the Moderns” (167)

in the magazine they call libraries (107)

In these books is wonderfully instilled and preserved the spirit of each warrior, while he is alive; and after his death his soul transmigrates there to inform them. This at least is the common opinion; but I believe it is with libraries as with cemeteries, where some philosophers affirm that a certain spirit . . . hovers over the monument till the dead body is corrupted and turns to dust or to worms, but then vanishes or dissolves. (107)

Huanted books in the St James library of Books of Controversy. (108)

Books not persons or others “I must warn the reader to beware of applying to persons what his here meant only of books, in the most literal sense. So, when Virgil is mentioned, we are not to understand the person of a famous person called by that name, but only certain sheets of paper, bound up in leather, containing in print the works of the said poet” (All italics, p. 104) Battle of the Books

More posthumography:

El tercer Reich (Vintage Espanol) (Spanish Edition) [Paperback]Roberto Bolano (Author)Found in Bolano’s papers after his death.

Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, a Match Made in Heaven trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard UP, 1992. Revised and augmented 2009.

Ernest Renan’s time travel fantasy—he really did travel His granddaughter said: “As for individuals, Renan deliberately assumed that they were identical to those who lived in the past. When he saw one woman on her way to the fountain and another in her doorway, eighteen centuries evaporated, and he beheld Martha and Mary and Mary Magdalene, barefoot and veiled. “ (Olender, 72)

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Pictet’s readers were not wrong to see his Origins as a kind of Aryan ethnology, As he journeys through the land of the first Indo-Europeans, Pictet communicates his enthusiasm by abolishing all distance between himself and his remote ancestors, , , , Renan . . . was powerfully moved, to the point where they believed that they had a better idea of this resurrected prehistoric society “than of many contemporary societies.” Pictet’s admirers felt comfortingly close to the pre-diaspora Aryas. . . (Olender, 99)

Moses would have found there no “archives of Paradise.” Herder therefore advised his contemporaries not to hold out for an archaeology of the impossible, not to play “saviors of the history of Eden.” . . . For Herder, then, the Hebrew Bible was poetry of an exemplary kind. Renan (1823-1892) preferred to see the Bible as the archives of humanity: “The primitive archives of this [Semitic race, which by a remarkable twist of fate became the archives of the human race, have come down to us in Hebrew.” (4)The inaccessible archives of Paradise evolved into the scince of linguistics, which dmeditated upon language as a faithful witness to history that transceneds the generations of humanity. In a 1759 dissertation enetitled “On the Influence of Opinions on Language and Language on Opinions” J. D> Micahelis (11717-1791) wrote: “Language is therefore a kind of archive in which human discoveries are protected against the most harmful accidents, archives htat flames cannot destroy and that cannot perish unless an entire nation is ruined.”(5)Thanks to the new history of language, a study in which philology and lingusitcs made common cause, scholars now believed that they were ina position to make accurate portrayal of prehistoric society. By comparative analysis of Indo-European linguisticroots, some scholars even hoped to uncover the words and deeds of mankind’s earliest ancestors. Linguistic paleontology was the science of hteir dreams. (7-8)In his origins of the Aryans . . ., Reinarch analyzed the works of scholars who, along with Pictet, produced “endless vraitions” on the theme of the Aryan’s’ primitive state. “It seemed that a new Eden had been discovered beneath the fossil layers of language.(8)Familiarity with the Bible had made it possible to conceive of human existence as an uninterrupted expanse of time stretching from the Garden of Eden onward; now, as nineteenth-century philologists filled in the Indo-European archives, other texts with an air of eternity about them came to supplant the Bible. (9)

Quoting Georges Dumezil:The goal of comparativists in linguistics asin other disciplines is thus a modest one, for they kknow it is impsossible to reconstruct the living drama of a common ancestral language or civilization because nothing can replace documents, and there are no documents. (13)“”Archives of Paradise,” 1-20/“The Bible continued to haunt the new indo-European archives throughout the nineteenth century.” 126

Hand from beyond the drive dictating what is (not) to be done to the bodies of his legatees, heirs (second and third generation), and so on—several semantic registers

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legacy and estate (property) get condensed and conflated), but it all goes back to a pragmatic notion of editing and readability—a precritical philology. It ignores an author’s reshelving of his own works.

Heidegger case—planning hisown posthumous edition; didn’t want any; didn’t want to be like Hegel aferdeath. But he resigned ot it in two last years of hils slife.

Family business ran it likea paramilitary effort and produced bad critical editions without interpretaion, without an editorial apparatus and with mistakes uncorrected.The book does double doubletime work Grafton's book:  it takes a double form and a doublenarrative, one story being the narrative and the other story, in thenotes, of the book's production and "materials."  Page layout andgraphic design variations are accidental.  What matters is that thetwo narratives are coherent. (his word).

The book is redoubled yet again a compilation of information, a "sort"or "virtual"  archive that cannot be used.

When [Otto] Ranke used account books, ambassadorial dispatches, and papal

diaries to characterize the austere willful, and determined Pope Sixtus V, and

rebuilt the city of Rome into a magnificent stage for Catholic festivals and

triumphal processions, he made his book into a sort of archive” (57)

Angelo Frabroni . . . insisted that distinction of his work [Laurentii Medicis

Magnifici vita (Paris, 1784] lay not in its solutions to disputed problems of

historical interpretation but in its massive presentation of archival documents,

which made the book itself a sort of virtual archive. (82)

Frabroni told his reader that “you will think you are actually seeing” the Florentine Archive, actually known as that of the Medici, where many of the “incorrupt records” are “preserved” and “presented” in “many “volumes” of the book. He admitted that he could not publish all the relevant sources, or all those he had used. “Nobody would want to publish whole archives” (51)Anthony Grafton, The Footnote, A Curious History

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Scholar: Philosophers have always tread I place.Guide: All of them even in the selfsame place.Scientist: and I am grateful to you for admitting this.Guide: But, without myself being a philosopher, I have just admitted much more to you. Philosophers not only don’t go forwards, they don’t just read in place either; rather, they go backwards. For there is what you referred to as the “selfsame place.”Scientist: But where is “backwards,” and what is in back?Guide: The backwardness of the essence and what it is—in other words, the essentiality of the essence—appears to greatly unsettle you. That is good.Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations. Trans. Bret W. Davis, 2010, 14.

Whereas Grafton wants to go back in an unbroken manner from one cittion to another, a simple blushing history of dates of publication,

It also skips over the moment of emptying the storage unit(s) in which the papers have been found. Kierkegaard’s desk gets emptied and the papers get archived. But the desk remains. It is a/voided.

Next museological art installation. K’s desk with a lap top on it giving you access to each desk and its contents as left by K with simulacra of each page. The desk remains closed, its contents restored virtually. They could also be linked to their actual place in the archives-though that would mean noting that the shelves are always shifting.

Problem with the Berlin Bibliotek book burning installation is that it assumes that libraries are full-it has a simple binary of full and empty. But shelves maybe overfilled, unfilled, reshelved. Books do not have permanent addresses, domiciles, places of residence even if they permanent call numbers. They may sometimes be retrieved and re-placed in different places. The library is not necessarily full. Real libraries have to adjust the call numbers on shelf rows as they acquire more books, often lagging behind the books such that the shelf numbers are no longer current. No clear if there is a systematic procedure librarians use to update their shelf row numbers. Or if it is just ad hoc. A kind of lazy eye that notices belatedly the need for an update. Bibliotek book burning installation also odes not take into account the way people do dump their books over time—or they get sold at an estate auction. Moving shelves allow for more space but more difficult access. They only work if you are the only person using the library.

Next musuological art Prehistoricism—New and Old Historicisms

“Living On / Borderlines”My desire to take charge of the Translator’s Note myself. Let them also read this band as a telegram or a film developing (a film “to be processed,” in English?): a procession underneath the other one, and going past it in silence, as if it did not see it, as it it had

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nothing to do with it, a double band, and a blindly jealous double. . . a “double blind.” . . . . This would be a good place for a translator’s note, for example, about everything that has been said elsewhere on the subject of the double bind, the double bind, the double procession, and so forth (a quotation in extenso, among others of Glas, which itself . . . and so forth: this, as a measure of the impossible. How can one text, assuming its unity, give or present another to be read, without touching it, without saying anything about it, practically without referring to it?pp. 64; 65, lower band

I shall perhaps endeavor to create an effect of superimposing, of superimprinting one text on the other. Now, each of the two “triumphs” wrotes (on [sur]) textual superimprinting. What about this ”on,” this “sur,” and its surface? An effect of superimposing: one procession on the other, accompanying it without accompanying it (Blanchot, Celui qui ne m’accompaginait pas). This operation would never be considered legitimate on the part of a teacher, who must give his references and tell what he’s talking about, giving it its recognizable title. You can’t give a course on Shelley without ever mentioning him, pretending to deal with Blanchot, and more than a few others. And your transitions have to be readable, that is in, in accordance with criteria of readability very firmly established and long since.pp. 68-69, lower band

At the beginning of L’arret du mort, the superimposing of the two “images,” the image of Christ and, “behind the figure of Christ,” Veronica, “the features of a woman’s face—extremely beautiful, even magnificent”—this superimposing is readable “on the wall of [a doctor’s] office” and on a “photograph.” Inscription and reimprinting, reimpression of light in both texts. La folie du jour. pp. 69-70, lower band

See also pp. 119, 137

The violent truth of “reading.” p. 124, upper band

The absolute crypt, unreadability itself p. 123, lower bandHow are yu going to trnslate that?p. 118, lower band

pp. 118-19, lower band

Reread in extenso

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What must not be said today, if we are to follow the dominant system of norms of this domain? I do not say it; I say what must not be said: for example, that a text can stand in a relationship of transference (primarily in the psychoanalytic sense) to another text! And, Freud reminds us that the relationship of transference is a “love” relationship, stress the point: one text loves another (for example The Triumph of Life loves, transferentially, La folie du jour, which in turn . . . ) It is enough to make a philologist laugh (or scream) and Freud himself, did speak of transference as a “new edition”(in the metaphorical sense, of course, of Ubertragung!). On what conditions is this transferential magnetization possible between what are called textual bodies? This strange question has perhaps, long engaged (r long committed) me. Engaged me in what must not be. . . . [Dans ce qu’il ne faut pas.] How are you going to translate that? What must not be dome, in the realms of translation, transference, or the aforementioned comparative literature. . . This is what would not be serious sober, even if effects of homonymic transference are at play already and of necessity within Shelley’s poem. Which is, moreover, full of colors and embroidered flowers.p. 116-19 lower band

Note to the translators: How are you going to translate that, réci, for example? Not as nouvelle, “novella,” nor as “short story.” Perhaps it will be better to leave the “French” word récit. It is already hard enough to understand, in Blanchot’s text, in French.p. 70, lower band

it forces the translator to transform the language into which he is translating or the “receiver medium,” t deform the initial contract, itself in constant deformation, in the language of the other. I anticipated this difficulty of translation, if only up to a certain point, but I did not calculate it or deliberately increase it. I just did nothing to avoid it. On the contrary, I shall try here in this short steno-graphic band, for the greatest translatability possible. Such will be the proposed contract.p. 2, lower bandThe maximum translatability of this band: impoverishment by univocality. Economy and formalization, but in the opposite sense to that of what takes place in the upper band: there too are economy and formalization, but by semantic accumulation and overloading, until the point when the logic of the undecidable arret du mort brings and opens polysemia (and its economy) in the direction of dissemination,pp. 73-74, lower band

The page layout of Derrida’s essay present a practical problem of reading (even though the norms for book design of the book’s margins remain in place, as they do in The Telephone Book). How do you read the upper and lower part? The text’s “readability” is immediately put in question.The text is not unified, nor clearly split. One band is narrower than the other, but you have to read both. No instructions on how to do so. First the top, then the bottom, then turn the page? Etc. The page mimes the discussion of the internal divisions in Blanchot. A synchronous reading—is Derrida the author of both.

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So the division presents a certain inference with “normal” reading, with what is usually allow to publish and with what page layout and font sizes usually signify tacitly.

The aporias eventually get thematized, made explicit in the text, but are also repeated; passages are quoted twice; comments in the notes / diary band are picked up in the text.

The text is about self-quotation.The note is a supplement.

Certain metaphors kick in quickly. Telephone, telegraphics. Teleo-graphy.Metaphor of transference, superimposition, photograph—used in the lower band, then in the upper much later.

Freud on mourning—transference (telephone exchange) as madness of one text reading another--One text reads another—first Shelley and Madness of the Death; then the two parts of Death Sentence. Both Blanchot texts have two versions; but each is internally divided.

All this has taken place in non-reading, with no work on what was thus being demonstrated, with no realization that it was never our wish to extend the reassuring notion of a text to a whole extra-textual realm and to transform the world into a library by doing away with all boundaries, all framework, all sharp edges (arets: this is the word I am speaking of tonight), but we sought rather to work out the theoretical and practical system of those margins, these borders, once more, form the ground up. I shall not go into detail. Documentation of all this is radily available to anyone committed to breaking down the various structures of resistance, his own resistance as such as primarily the ramparts that bolster a system (be it theoretical, cultural, institutional, political, or whatever). What are the borderlines of a text? How do they come about?70, upper band

Notable that Derrida turns his writings metaphorically into documents of his assertion—he does not go into detail, does not do the bibliographic work of documentation but asserts that what he has said can be document if you read the documents even while talking about unreadability.“(I note parenthetically The Triumph of Life, which it is not my intention to discuss here, belongs in many ways ot the category of the recit)” 70

Is the word “medium” as used by Husserl when Derrida quotes him in Margins of Phil using the word to mean “middle” in its Latin sense? Derridas seems to think it is medium (paper) ina telecommunications sense.

Superimposed like a photographic image. P. 137, upper band

Yet the two bands cannot be superimposed over each other—one is not a translation of the other.

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The translator’s note is a set of instructions to the translator and also a series of questions and a series of diary entries.

Derrida often omits key bibliographic information when he cites a text by himself or in one case by Blanchot, making so that the question of self-reference and self-quotation is not reducible to recognizable and (fully) operational citations / references. (p. 132—Derird mentions Cartouche but does not name itp. 134, lower band, Derrida mentions Lapart du fue but does not give Blanchot’s name as author. He also says “elsewhere” at points, sometimes giving no bibliographic information at all.

Narrator says elsewhere” (133, upper band)

Derrida says he will read Triumph of Life with Madness of the Day but then just talks about Madness of the Day.

Gives examples of transferential reading in the lower band—“rose” in Death Sentence” and variations of rose and arose in Shelley; as well as “rose” in Bataille’s Laure.

Insists this is not word play.

He often repeats (recites / refer to/ quotes / references) himself in the text without calling attention to doing so

Derrida does not read a long passage (123) but then he does (124)

Dates in lower band p. 62, 114, 122, 130 (just October 12); he also talks about dates in Blanchot 1936, 1938.

“proof” in lower band p. 133 and upper band p. 139)

Asynchronous reading demanded.

Practice of reading unreadability is typographic. “teleo-graphy”Also figured as atopic and hypertopia. A place-less place.

Figure of “unreadability” is the crypt-“form the bottom; from the ground up.

Derrida does not read the Triumpfh of Life

Question about the violence of quoting the text one reads.

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The Coming of the Book—title is so messianic without being messianic.Very French orientation. By the end, it gets very focused on how to do it (on method). He ends up taking about how its huge in scope but is narrower reorientation is toward French printing.Graphic unconscious—equivalent of W Benjamin’s optical unconscious, an altered relation to writing.But Tom Conley doesn’t do Benjaminian, or are his readings psychoanalytic (just

decoding rebuses).

Has anything been written on the executors constraints on editing and translating

Heidegger? I hadn't realized that some of the seminar volumes resembled

Lacan's (transcriptions plus notes, in H's case).

One way I find editing very interesting is that it defaults to vulgar time, to

biographical realism, and organic life (living and postuhumous [often hitherto

unpublished] publications).

It would appear that MH's works gets organized around a twin telos (if that is

possible).

First, we have Becoming Heidegger (1910-27), on the trail

then we have

Being Heidegger (1927) Being and Time. This is the first telos, taking the path

(the right right way).

then

Still Being Heidegger (1927-35) Off the beaten track

(Heidegger's reshelving of Sein und Zeit in relation to the Intro to Metaphysics

(1929 and 1935)

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then

After Being Heidegger

Beitrage (Vom Ereignis) (1936-1938). This is the second telos. Off the unbeaten

track

And then we get something like

Still Being Heidegger After Being Heidegger until his death. More and more

detours, regatherings, and recirclings. On and Off the unbeaten track

This briogrhical, chronological, bibliographical schema gets simplified into the

commonly drawn distinction between Heidegger and Late Heidegger with the

attendant debates over the meaning of their relation.

But these kinds of reductions of Heidegger's Gesamtasugabe (which I notice has

been divided into three divisions) into the vulgar time of biography and

bibliography are complicated by the paratexts of the editions (in German and in

English translation) as well as by Heidegger's own reeditions of his work, his

marginalia, his citations of his own works, in short, by his discontinuous relation

to his own works. I love H's preface to Kant and Metaphysics a reading of Kant's

two editions. Here H presents the second edition of his own book as unedited,

unrevised. But H and his executors, in seeking to publish the most complete

edition, actually fail to present a transparent, definitive edition. Kisiel notes all

kinds of static and interference that makes any claim to an "edition without

interpretation" deeply ironic. Yes, without interpretation in some cases, but those

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cases have no interpretation because they resist interpretation as editions: they

have either lots of missing connections (the text is a ruin, leaving only fragments)

or improperly made connections (repair jobs that hide the stitching together of

notes and transcripts).

In any case, I think the publishing history of MH and its conflicting temporalities

(vulgar time and the uncanny time / occurrence of self-reshelving) deserves

critical attention if it has not already received it.

Of course. No normal category of readability, then, could give credence to the

mad hypothesis according to which the double invagination that attracts us in this

reçit could make it possible to read [donner a lire] the unreadable hymen

between the two women: one with(out) the other. . . And yet something like X-ray

analysis or “blood” [sang] analysis can make readable [donner a lire] that which

is unreadable in this narrative body. . . the readability of unreadability is as

improbable as an arrêt du mort. No law of (normal) reading can guarantee its

legitimacy. By normal reading I mean every reading that insures knowledge

transmittable in its own language, in a language, in a school or academy,

knowledge constructed and insured in institutional constructions, in accordance

with which the arrêt du mort troubles so many conceptual oppositions,

boundaries, borders. The arrêt de mort brings about the arrrêt of the law.

(“Living On / Borderlines,” Third edition, 2004), 138, upper hand

The truth beyond truth of living on: in the “middle” of the recit, its element, its

ridge, its backbone [aret]. There is only one blank space in the typography of the

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book, between the two recits. Before, in the first version, there were two. By

erasing, by doing away with the second blank space, in the second version—the

blank space that separated the two recits from the sort of epilogue that was in

danger of being meta-narrative and pretending to gather together the two recits—

by making this change, Blanchot has given the middle space an even more

remarkable singularity. This is not the only effect of this change, but it counts.

p. 117, upper band

This unreadability will have taken place, as unreadable, will have become

unreadable [se sera donné a lire] right here, as unreadable, from the very bottom

of the crypt in which it remains. It will have taken place where it remains: that’s

the proof. From here on in it’s up to you to think what will have taken place, to

work out both the conditions for its possibility and its consequences. As for me, I

must break off here, interrupt all this, close the parenthesis, and let the

movement continue without me, take off again, or stop, arrest itself, after I simply

note this: in everything that happens, it’s as if. . .

Living On 139, upper band

The translators will quote Glas, including this passage that begins on page 220

—“After developing the X-ray, negative of testamentary chrisms and

graveclothes. . “

Living On, p. 99, lower band

By the same way, linked to what is untranslatable in a language, this decision

becomes unreadable. I maintain that this title is unreadable. If reading makes

accessible a meaning that can be transmitted as such, in its own unequivocal,

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translatable identity, then the title is unreadable. But this unreadability does not

arrest reading, does not leave it paralyzed in the face of an opaque surface;

rather, it starts reading and writing and translation moving again. The unreadable

is no the readable but rather the ridge [arête] that also gives it momentum, sets it

in motion “The impossibility of reading should not be taken too lightly” (Paul de

Man). If we say that the unreadable gives, presents, permits, yields something to

be read [l’illisible donné a lire], this is not a compromise formula. Unreadability is

no less radical and irreducible for all that—absolute, yes, you read me.

Living On, pp. 95-6, upper band

Everything that, in the text above, goes back to the dissemination of sand . . p.

97, lower band

I slice things up somewhat barbarously and illegitimately, as we always do,

counting on an implicit contract, the impossible contract: that you read

“everything” and that at all moments you know the “whole” “corpus” by heart, with

a living heart that beats unceasingly [sans aarret], without even a pulsation. . . .

p. 96, upper band

Maurice Blanchot, “Translated from . . .” in The Work of Fire

It is perhaps unsuitable to recognize in translated works, from the fact of their translation, merits that might be lacking in similar works written in an original language. But first, we do not see why the act of the translator should not be appreciated as the quintessential literary act, one which proposes that the reader remain ignorant of the text it reveals to him, and from which his ignorance will not distance him. Instead, it will bring him closer by becoming active, by representing to him the great interval that separates him from it. It is true that these merits are perhaps only apparent; they have the value of a mirage; they vanish if we are too attentive to them. Even more, one can evaluate such dangerous qualities. Too good a bargain, a translated text mimics the effort of

23

creation that, starting from everyday language in which we live and are immersed, seeks to make another language be born, same in appearance and yet, with regard to this language, like its absence, its difference perpetually acquired and constantly hidden. If foreign works encourage and stimulate imitation more than our own works, it is because imitation, in this case, seems to reserve for us a greater personal role, especially because the imitator, fascinated, in the translated text, by the strangeness that the passage from one language to another provokes, thinks that it can take the place of the originality he seeks. Unfortunately, even if he borrows from his model only what he has the right to borrow, he will forget to be in his turn a translator and he will renounce making his language undergo the transmutation that from one single language must draw out two, one that is read and understood without deviation, while the other remains ignored, silent, and accessible. Its absence (the shadow of which Tolstoy speaks) is all that we grasp of it.(pp. 189-90)

Rebound

I had not reread Valéry for a long time. And even long ago, I was far from having read all of Valéry. This is still true today. But in going back to the texts that I thought I knew, and in discovering others, especially in the Notebooks, naturally I asked myself in what ways a certain relationship had changed. Where had the displacement, which in a way prevented me from taking my bearings, been effected? Where does this signify here, now? A banal question, arising once more in the form of the return to the sources which always afflicts the rhetoric of the anniversaries of a birth: Valéry one hundred years later, Valrey for us, Valéry now, Valéry today, Valéry alive, Valéry dead—always the same code. What laws do these rebirths, rediscoveries, and occultations too, obey, the distancing or reevaluation of a text that one naively would like to believe, having put one’s faith in a signature or an institution, always remains the same, constantly identical to itself? In sum a “corpus,” and one whose self-identity would be even less threatened than one’s own body [corps proper]? What must a text be if it can, by itself in a way, turn itself in order to shine again, after an eclipse, with a different light, in a time that is no longer that of its productive source (and was it ever contemporaneous with it?), and then again repeat this resurgence after several deaths, counting, among several others, those of the author, and the simulacrum of a multiple extinctions?--Jacques Derrida, ”Qual Quelle: Valéry’s Sources” in The Margins of

Philosophy, 278

No normal category of readability; then, could give credence to the mad

hypothesis according to which

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Derrida talks about genes and DNA as forms of writing in Of Gramatology. What he;s

doing in Paper Machine in some ways he was already doing as early as that book.

Essay on a footnote from Band T in Margins of Philosophy. No other early Heidegger

until later Derrida Of Spirit, then Aporias.

Derrida's Living On / Borderlines essay is a non-reading ofShelley's "Triumph of Life" with a reading of Blanchot's Madness ofthe Day and Death Sentence.   He puns onbandaged and banded.   He also puns on "de-lire[to read]-ium."  It'sall the folding edges of the never possible to finish text,unreadability, translation (untranslatability), recit and re-citation,and the technics of transmission.  The text is divided horizontallyinto two "bands, the lower and narrower one in a smaller font, like along footnote that runs the entire length of the text above it.  Butit's a translator's note, or a note to Derrida's translators, not afootnote.

By the way, "Living On" is in Deconstruction and Criticism, HaroldBloom et al.

"Living On" is similar to "Before the Law" in some respects and to _OfSpirit_ in others (especially attention to typography, a singleletter, a change in punctuation, a change of title, invisiblequotation marks, and so on).  Everything in the text is renderedreadable, but "everything" can never be read.  Derrida puts"everything"  in quotation marks below. He not only deconstructs anopposition between versions but the unity of any singular version aswell (so Macbeth would be a perfect example--you don't need to go toHamlet or Lear).

The temptation here, of an exhaustive reading, both of The Triumph and of everything else, beginning with all of Shelley’s glas [death knells] . . . The same temptation with Blanchot: beginng in with L’arrêt de mort, a starting point chosen by chance and of necessity, to recognize a “logic” that would enable us to read everything, in L’arrêt de mort and elsewhere, down to the smallest element, the grain of sand, the letter, the space . . . (96, lower band)

"Telegraphics and telephonics, that's my theme." (63, lower band)

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But in the same way, linked to what is untranslatable, this decisionbecomes unreadable.  I maintain that this title is unreadable.   Ifsuch, in its own unequivocal, translatable identity, then this titleis unreadable. But this unreadability does not arrest reading, doesnot leave it paralyzed in the face of an opaque surface:  rather, itstarts reading and writing and translation moving again.  Theunreadable is not the opposite of the readable but rather the ridge[arete] that also gives it momentum, movement, sets it in motion. "Theimpossibility of reading should not be "taken too lightly" [sic] (Paulde Man). If we have to say that the unreadable gives, presets,permits, yields something to be read [l'illisible donne a lire], thisis not a  compromise formula.  Unreadability is no less radical andirreducible for all that--absolute, yes, you read me. (95-96, upper band)

I slice things up somewhat barbarously and illegitimately as we alwaysdo, counting on an implicit contract, the impossible contract: thatyou will read "everything" and that at every moment you know the"whole" "corpus" by heart, with a living heart that beats unceasingly[sans arret], without even a pulsation. . . . (96, upper band)

Coming of the book

Note words like “a reasonably accurate impression” and “impressed’ on the first page.

An entirely instrumentalist, rationalist account of the market and needs based, basic

requirement of new markets following form new organizations.

Michel Zink. “Nerval in the Library, or The Archives of the Soul.” Representations, No.

56, Special Issue: The New Erudition (Autumn, 1996), pp. 96-105.

Now all that remains is for Nerval to make a gift to the Bibliotheque imperiale of the book that was

so expensive and is now, he discovers, of no use to him.8 It is crucial-as we all know-not to find

what one is looking for in the library in order to prolong a studious and dreamy quest, so that time

lost has time to become transmuted into lost time, and so that one might suddenly find oneself in

Chalis long ago. In Sylvie, it is "an evening at the theater" and the sudden superimposition of the

face of the forgotten girl onto that of the beloved actress that sets the journey in motion toward

Valois and toward the past. In Angelique it is wandering through the libraries, the conversation

with the curators, the opening of archival files, the reading of catalogs that has the same effect.

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Perhaps this effect will soon be all that libraries are good for--I mean real libraries in the literal

sense of the word: places where books are stored. The book is less and less the bearer of the

text. Access to all documents will soon be convenient, instantaneous, and certain. Soon there will

be no more need to visit a library, to give a card to someone working in the stacks and wait with

bated breath for someone not to bring you the book you requested. Just when libraries as they

have existed for so many centuries and as we have visited them through the long years of our

short lives are on the verge of disappearing, let us hope that at least a few will remain, preserved

for the services they do not render. Imagine, if Nerval had had no difficulty finding the Histoire de

l’abbe de Bucquoy, there would be no Angelique. Let us fear the day when we shall be confident

of finding the obscure and coveted book to read on that hopelessly familiar screen. (103)

Boris Groys, “What Carries the Archive—and for How Long?” in Information Is Alive:

Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data. Ed. Joke Brower and Arjen Mulder. A

V2_/NAI, 2003, 178-83.

The “materials” of reading, the “material” supports are not material, they are “material.”

They are nto things, transparent, but “things” that have to be read.” Especially the

biblion as backing. So any writing is double—it ahs a support.

So my version of Textual Culture includes but displaces cultural studies. Word culture

not a default.

How this support (paper machine) bears on the archive (bibliopolis) and

posthumographic publication is the issue.

Textual transgressions : essays toward the construction of a biobibliographyDavid C. Greetham

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Biobiblio about the impasses of philology and philosophy

/ and literature.

About the spectrality of materiality. A questioning of

conventional historicism.

I've begun to see more clearly the logic / structure of

Shelf-Life--from the archive as container resistant to reading to

posthumous publication to the relic / work of art, linking up bibbliogrpahy to

biobibliopolis.

the metaphors of "close/d read ing"--side to side, upside down, inside

out--will kick in accordingly as variations on “reading around.” The self-storage unit is a

figure of the archive that resists various hermeneutic defaults—the file or desk drawer,

the inside of a book, a secret hiding place where a mss is found that went missing, a

fort /da hermeneutic, from abesnece to presence. Paralinear reading is not only side to

side, but turning over the other side of the underneath-not topographically three

dimensional—posthumography—no addressee at all—so error not just in destination; and

not chronological or sequential but also pre / post temporality of writing, publication and

retrieval; writing is not reducible to orinary, empirical writing. So I link up the archive,

paratextuality, and posthumography n rlation to rading and the future / destiny—

hediegger and Derrida.

Writ/e of Habeas Corpus

de Man's brilliant essay on Heidegger on Hoelderlin (second edition

of Blindness and Insight) recently because I remember thinking it odd

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that de Man does not cite a particular Hiedegger text.  I wanted to

doublecheck to see if he did, so I did and found that he doesn't.  But

he does mention an essay in a 1959 issue of a journal (which I then

got of UF's storage published in 1959 as part of a special issue on

Hoelderlin.  I thought de Man was refering to an essay he had written

(I checked the posthumous Critical Writings collection and didn't see

it there).  Anyway, it turns out to be a translation of Heidegger's

"Essence of Poetry" by de Man, along with six endnotes by de Man (and

a translation of Hoelderdlin's "Bread and WIne,"  a poem de Man

discusses in his Task of the Translator essay.  No big deal, to be

sure.  Still, for someone so interested in philology and translation,

it seems strange that de Man ghosts his own translation of Heidegger

(on Hoelderlin).

DENIS HOLLIER, Notes (on the Index Card) October 112 (2005)

There is also the fact that, as a genre, autobiography is structurally condemnedto incompleteness and that, conversely, incompleteness tends to induce an autobiographicaleffect. (39)

Leiris’s interest in Duchamp’s box comes at a time when, having just completedthe manuscript of L’Age d’homme, having also irreversibly decathected from themirages of automatic writing, he was searching, in the aftermath of the revelationof Roussel’s ars poetica, for a protocol that would ensure that the autobiographicalself would never lose what Sartre called its transcendence, that the I would keepits linguistic status as an empty sign. The 1931–33 Dakar-Djibouti anthropological

29

expedition had been for him an intensive training ground for the systematic techniqueof note-card filing. While in the process of becoming a professionalethnographer and of setting the stage for the dual exploration of autobiographyand ethnography that will inform his further work for more than fifty years, thisalmost-manual (artisanal) aspect of his professional training will soon lead him toopen a sort of autobiographical account, a kind of safe into which he will depositentries cut out (i.e., copied out) from his diary, before drawing from this frequentlyreshuffled and augmented portfolio of memories, anecdotes, ideas, and feelings,small and big, to feed his continuous self-portrait.13 The result is a secondary, indirectautobiography, originating not from the subject’s innermost self, but from thestack of index cards (the autobiographical shards) in the little box on the author’sdesk. A self built on stilts, on “pilotis,” relying not on direct, live memories (as inProust’s involuntary memory), but on archival documentation, on paper work, aself that relates to himself indirectly, by means of quotation, of self-

compilation. (39)

5. The Roussel-Mallarmé-Duchamp triangle, already in place in 1935 (seeRoussel & Co.), was spectacularly revived (at the same time, if one may say so, as Leirishimself was) in 1957. In the hospital, Leiris had at his bedside, like some sort of bible,Mallarmé’s notes for the Le Livre (which had just been edited for the first time byJacques Scherer). An important chapter of Scherer’s introduction is devoted toNotes (on the Index Card) 3912. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and OtherModernists Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 196–209.13. See Richard Sieburth, “Leiris/Nerval: A Few File Cards,” this issue, pp. 51–62.the theme of the container in Mallarmé’s poetics and his symbolist universe,

30

specifically to the affinities and differences between the book, the casket, the safe,the chest or chest of drawers, and the coffin.14 But there were for Leiris earlierassociations of Mallarmé’s work with more literal containers. In his preface to his1925 first edition of Igitur, a text to which Leiris refers on a variety of occasions,Dr. Bonniot, the son-in-law of the poet, had written: “Mallarmé, as we know, usedto jot down his first ideas, the first outlines of his work on eighths of half-sheets ofschool notebook size—notes he would keep in big wooden boxes of China tea.”15Here the box, a coffin for the literary unborn, is thus associated with the definitivelyunfinished: it is the resting place for notes that didn’t make it, didn’t reachthe stage of the book.The index card file, however, is not doomed to be tied to this funeral model.It is also the best support for the opera aperta, whose desire was pervasive in the1950s and 1960s. Not unlike Duchamp’s door that is both open and closed at thesame time, the card file resists the syntagmatic closure of the sentence by sustainingthe openness of the paradigm. It doesn’t allow the phrase to gel, to takeshape. A filing system is indefinitely expandable, rhizomatic (at any point of timeor space, one can always insert a new card); in contradistinction with the sequentialirreversibility of the pages of the notebook and of the book, its interiormobility allows for permanent reordering (for, even if there is no narrative conclusionof a diary, there is a last page of the notebook on which it is written: its pagesare numbered, like days on a calendar). (39-40)

As it is also known, some twenty yearslater, Barthes was to return to this book series, as both author and subject, bothauthor and title: Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. This time, the index cards werealready there. One of the pages of illustrations of the volume

31

reproduces three ofthem in facsimile. The text doesn’t comment on them, doesn’t even allude tothem. There is just a caption: “Reversal: of scholarly origin, the index card endsup following the twists and turns of the drive.” (40)

Very early on, he fought for an aestheticsand an ethics of the discontinuous (which the structuralist activity of cuttingand editing, the gestures of montage, the practice of analysis will epitomize) as adefense against the endoxal stickiness of continuity. He defended it in short texts;but that was not the point. The small dimension of his own output was never foregrounded,never thematized. There was no hint of a possible self-referentialconnotation, of the possibly pro domo dimension of such an adamant and eloquentdiscourse in favor of the discontinuous. Discontinuity, then, was on the side of theobject, its concentration on the referent and the signified leaving no space for afeedback on the textual performance itself. At least not before the preface ofCritical Essays, where Barthes identifies it as the formal feature of critical writing:“the very discontinuity which marks all critical discourse.” (42)

Hollier edition of Michel Leiris' La Règle du jeu : Biffures - Fourbis - Fibrilles - Frêle

bruit.  The words Biffures  and  Fibrilles are not in any French / English dictionaries

online.

the posthumous publication of

two sets of index c cards by Barthes.  I noticed that his last seminar

"Preparation for the Novel" is coming out in an English translation

this November.

32

  ↑ Éric Aeschimann, « Désaccords autour des notes posthumes de Roland Barthes,

François Wahl, son ex-éditeur et ami, conteste la parution de certains de ses écrits

intimes », Libération, 21 janvier 2009 [lire en ligne [archive] ]

  ↑ Chantal Guy, « Les inédits de Roland Barthes : la littérature en héritage »,

Cyberpresse, 5 avril 2009 [lire en ligne [archive]]

The Greetham essay I was thinking of is collected in his Textual Transgressions-entitled

"Textual Imperialism." He's probably commented on the MLA elsewhere. I saw a rather

acerbic review of the electronic editing collection from MLA in Textual Cultures (2007).

David Greetham. "Uncoupled: OR, How I Lost My Author(s)." Textual Cultures:

Texts, Contexts, Interpretation 3, no. 1 (2008): 44-55.

Peter Sloterdijk, in Terror from the Air, (MIT 2009) invokes the storage model:

We are condemned to being-in, even if the containers and atmospheres in which we are

forced to surround ourselves can no longer be taken for granted as being in good in

nature. (108)

He moves above from “being-in-the-air “to “being-in”

His metaphors become enclosures: greenhouse, arcades, bell jar, gas palace, following by

counter dwelling of reconstructed “home.” “natural air-envelope” (60).

“storage and transport” 35)

33

The “greenhouse effect” as a metaphor for global overheating implies that the earth itself

is in a container. Sloterdijk links the greenhouse to the arcades—and Walter Benjamin

(95-96).

Critique of Heidegger—being unto death—versus “breathing-unto-death”(42); airing

versus clearing (borrowed form Irigaray The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (The

Constructs Series) - Paperback (1999) by Luce Irigaray and Mary Beth Mader

If, in his post-1945 writings, Martin Heidegger makes use of the them Heimatlosigkeit, or

absence of homeland to signify the human being’s existential orientation in the era of Ge-

Stell, then we would be wrong to imagine that he is merely talking about the bygone

naivety of dwelling in rural houses and the moving of existence into urban habitation

machines. More profoundly, The term “homeless” also suggests a denaturalization in the

snese of the human being’s natural air-envelope and re-settlement in climate-controlled

spaces; more radically still, the discourse of homelessness can be read as symbolizing the

change of epoch implied by the exodus out of all the remaining proetective niches and

into latency. (60)

My disagreements with Heidegger . . . the conditions for Gegend and natal-earth type

situations cannot be construed as donations of Being . . ; for they are actually dependent

on sustained efforts of formal design, technical production, legal trusteeship, and political

design. (62-63)

34

Declaring war against an enemy this gets replaced with the issuing of an arrest warrant

(66)

“media of existence” (50)

The idea according to which life insists less in its being-there, by its participation in the

whole, but instead by its stabilization through self-closure and the selective refusal of

participation. (110)

From these sources of various kinds of perceptible, microclimatic alterations, we moved

—from the 18th and 20th centuries—to the very design-precipitated “discovery of the

obvious” by which people , in the age of explication, were motivated—a second time

around—to take hold of what lay at hand. These were the fields in which the concrete

atmo-technologies were developed, . . . the artificial adjustment of temperature and

humidity in living spaces and storage spaces; the installing of refrigerators in apartments

and the construction of fixed or mobile cooling rooms for storing and transporting food

stuffs” (92)

Also becomes a question of formal “air design” (94)

“psychoactive designer air (95)

“the principle of interior architecture is extended to an otherwise imperceptible milieu of

everyday life; that of a breather’s gaseous and aromatic environment. (95)

Comments that people versus population is “ a trifling matter” (p. 69). Discusses

35

“persons’ instead (85). Also people versus residents

Air/Conditions of modernity as biowar and bioterrorism, assault on the conditions that

make life of the enemy possible, especially the air he breathes. The victim participates in

his own destruction by breathing in the poisoned gas (cynanide).

“Life is a side effect of having been climatically spoiled.” (91)

Heidegger’s homelessness

Key dates April 22, 1915 gas warfare at Ypres Germans on British

1918 German Pest Control using same gas

1921-27 first aero-chemical air war (Spain).

1924 gas chamber in Nevada

1941 Final Solution

1945 Dresden firebombing

1945 nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima

1960s U.s. Naplam in VietNam

Sarin gas attack in Tokyo 1995

“tele-destruction” (51)

36

Terrorism can only be understood when grasped as a form of exloration of the

environment from the perspective of its destructibility. It exploits the fact that ordinary

inhabitants have a user relationship to their environment, that they instinctively and

exclusively consume it was a silent condition of their existence. . . it is crucial to insist on

identifying terrorism as a child of modernity, insofar as its exact definition was forged

only after the principle of attacking an organism’s, or a life-form’s, environment and

immune defenses was shown in its perfect technical explication [explication means

making explicit, exposing] pp. 28; 29

“media for life’ (25)

In this movement of exlication the principle of design is implicated from the start (23)

Terroris, from an enviromnetal perspective, voids the distinction between violence

against people and violence against things: it comprises a formof violence agasint he very

human-ambient “things” without which people cannot remain eople. (26)

The enemybecame an object in the environment whose removeal was vital to the

system’s survival. (27)

“atmoterrorism” means atmosphere terrorism—atem as in breathe.

Warfare becomes “rational exterminism” (41)

37

In the last years of World War I, the international community for poison gas and

atmosphere deign experts was porous enough, on both sides of the Atlantic, to be able to

react to technical innovations and fluctuations in the climate of applied morality. (38)

Peacetime research efforts continued wartime research efforts.

And P Sloterdik comes back to a Heideggerian mood default of anxiety

The American way of war includes in advance its enemy’s punishment. . . Warfare thus

indissociable from an extra-judicial trial. The victor’s anticipated justice comes to pass in

the form of weapons research against the enemies of tomorrow and of the day after. (66)

What then proves particularly dangerous are the climatic toxins emitted from people

themselves, since, desperately agitated, they stand sealed together under a

communication bell jar: in the pathogenic air conditions of agitated and subjugated

politics, inhabitants are constantly re-inhaling their own exhalate. (101)

Life in the media state resembles a stay in a gas palace of high-spirited adventures. (102)

Duchamps’ glass readymade of air of paris (actually from a pharmacy in Le havre);

broken and replaced with same Le havre air (106)

With the press’ Gleishalthung [Nazi word for total extermination of Hitler’s enemies]

during the World War, civilian communication was attacked from the ground up: signs

themselves became sullied and compromised by their involvement in warmongering

deliria and psychosemantic arms races; the critiques of religion, ofideology, and of

38

language have declared vast parts of our semantic environments to be intellectually

unbreathable zones—from hereon in, the only responsible thing to do seems to be to

dwell in places that analysis has evacuated , re-constructed, and re-approved for

habitation. (109)

Air-design is the technological response to the phenomenological insight that human

being-in-the-world is always and without exception present as a modification of “being-

in-the-air.” (93)

Who are turned into inner aborigines, regionalists, and the voluntary curators of their own

untimeliness—try, on their reservations to maintain the benefits of having a fact-free

concept of a world that is symbolically immune to the age of latency. 70)

Knowing Machines

Technical Change

Making Parents has the naïve “change” narrative. Democracy reduced to a social support

system htat levels inequities in terms of access but otherwise levaes the means of

production in place. Marx not even named inrelation to the means of production.

Latour Comsopolitics has to be thought through the biobibliopolis.

Blackbox necessitates paralinear reading.

39

Science research wiritng—scribbles, scribs, but notebooks, note cards (unbound) to

codex. To computer file document.

In culturlmaterialsim / textual amterialism, or in Vismann on ifling, reading goes missing

as it isreplaced by retrival and recall. The archive is assumed to be a more or less quickly

acesed storage unit. It is a delivery system. The contaier is a blackbox, a sort of tool kit

of established fact, that can be opened, (closed bok, unfiled0 or unblackboxed.

Book and the bookshelving—as opposed to Bok and bookshelf.

Reshelving and refilling as repetitions that make resitance to rading asreading more

visible and refine it furthr. Draws our aattention t the ashests of the archive, to the

peripheries, to the interference that runs in the text as well as in the paratext.

When the dead go paperless; death certificates, passports for the dead (Lost episodes);

posthumous publication

Papers as different kinds of support—the passport as papers but also as a book with a

book cover.

Archives in formation: privileged spaces, popular archives and paper trails

Michael LynchHistory of the Human Sciences, May 1999; vol. 12: pp. 65 - 87.

Can counter Rabinow’s postmetaphysical account of Foucault and biopower.

the root scrib/scrip, which means write in Latin. ROOT-WORDS are SCRIB & SCRIP

which come from the Latin scribere & scriptus which mean to WRITE. Here again there

are two spellings, because the Latin ...

40

Latour “Drawing things together” essay. The need for the illustration, as in Agamben’s

facsimile of Agamben.

Scrips and Scribbles

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

MLN, Vol. 118, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 2003), pp. 622-636

I am also taking on materiality in general—science studies—and its notion of technology

And scribs and scrips—science working with paper in experiments—and also notebooks

(like in Splice , also in Lost (season two—record everything and then roll up the

notebook in the airtube (used at drive through banks and CVS) that sucks it up.

From biopolitics to biotechnics

bioethics—scientific experimentation—through the posthumographeme—the living

posthumous rather than postvital living or autobiography and autothanatography.’’ As

well as heternoramtiivty—repetition as habitus, practice—without freud—just techniques

or technologies of normalizaiton (Charis Thompson). The ashsets of the archive—the

value of the ash of the archive that cannot be calculated since it is not archivable but is

not simply priceless either since it is not exactly buried treasure but nevertheless remains

as abjected asset--hence "ashset"-- to be read. This is even better as it's an intralingual

pun "achetes de l'archive" "ashets of the archive"--technically a translingual pun?

Darnton is his progressive model of book publishing does not allow for typos, errors, etc.

leaving them as Goethe did.

Expanding on Genette in increasing the filed of partextual anomalies. Only dysfunction

he allows for is self-consciousness, cleverness of the author—too literary. But there are

41

all kinds of textual and paratextual interference that are other kinds of dysfunctions, from

typos to bibliographies, to ghost entries (books cited that were never written). This

interference is not simply a matter of errors to be overlooked. The abjected areas of the

text have to be read.

Means I will taking on science studies (blackbox)and media materialism (hard drive) and

textual materialism (Bill Brown) and history of the Book (Le Febvre).

"Facts become unblack-boxed when they are contested and when people question the

conditions and assumptions under which the data were obtained."

Charis Thompson. Making Parents: the Ontological Choreography of Reproductive

Technologies. (MIT, 2005) p. 279, n. 34

Science studies caught in an older debates in social of knowledge over empiricism and

anti-foundationalism. They assume the black box can be opened and read back

ethnographically. I am assuming that that here is an irreducible blackboxing that defines

reading as resistance.

Thompson on biomedical citizen. No holocaust movie about Megenel’s experiments in

the camp, just afterwards (Boys from Brazil).

Films about Quarantine, disease control—film Quarantine and also the one abut the train

that gets stopped in Europe. Also State of Siege. Military and science disease / crowd

control. Perhaps the one about the lsoss of eyesight. Outbreak.

Naïve politics of democracy of Latour’s parliament of things, or Making Thing Public

collection or Charis Thomspson Making Parents. She mentions Nazi science in passing

but does not look at ways in which U.S. scientists worked similarly.

42

Let it be versus let it bleed—is there necessarily a acrificial economy?

It is therefore a special reading

which exculpates itself as a

reading by posing every guilty

1 How to read Derrida.

Proper name defaults to an author-function, especially when the author is dead, bteven before.

So we have X and late X

We already have late Derrida

But we have Derrida, then more difficult Derrida of Glas and Cinders (one review in Criticism) and Robert Ray listing a series of more typographically challenging books he says begins with Signes Ponge in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts.

So Derrida’s style (book design / page layout) would be another way of organizing his works chronologically, using the author-function default.

These are pragmatic but also conceptual ways of “reading” Derrida.

But they are not Derridean ways of reading “derrida”; they are philological rather than philosophical readings.

Or one could try to do a Derrida/re/de/ec/centric reading of “Derrida” derived form Derrida’s accounts of writing

Three areas ralted to Derrida on (arche)writing:1. grammatology: Derrida on writing as arche-writing, the trace, writing before the

letter2. Writing machines: Margins of Philosophy, Paper Machine—the machine is a

metaphor and a device (Freud’s mystic writing pad; manual printing press in Tympan; stick on ground in Levi-Strauss chapter in Grammatology; typewriter ribbon in Typewriter Ribbon, Inc; the computer in Cicumfession, Paper Machine, Archive Fever)

3. writing as support, backing, subjectile. Material is always “material.”

In all of these cases, writing is not reducible to a given writing system (alphabetic, ideogrammatic, hieroglyphic are all equivalent) nor to a given mode of publication

43

reading the very question that

unmasks its innocence, the mere

question of its innocence: what is

it to read?

--Louis Althusser, Lire le

capital, (15)3]

(paper; letter; book; computer). There is a history (vulgar time) of these media and materials, but that arche-writing is not historical (is never present, not subject to vulgar time).

Reading Derrida reading to understand reading “Derrida” ina Derridean manner: he close reads, he deconstructs, by assuming or defaulting to a philologist. His close reading s of Death Sentence in Living On, of two versions of a de Man essay in Memoires for Paul de Man, of two editions of Rousseau in “Typewriter Ribbon, Inc” of de Man’s ciations of Rousseau the same essay, Heidegger’s use of quotation marks and italics in Of Spirit; a footnote by Heidegger in “Ousia and Gramme” in Margins; prefaces by Hegel in dissemination, of page layout and printing in Mallarme’s “Un Coup de des” and “Livre” in The Double Session,” all depend on a very traditional notion of the printed book—its design, page layout, spacing breaks, quotation marks, italics, and footnotes, and editing / editions.

Here is the question: can Derrida do philosophical readings without also being a philologist? Do his readings depend on the repression of philology? And of the paratext? Of did Derrida just by accident happen never to think this question through ? (like it never occurred to him?

In any case, it would appear that any Derridean reading of “Derrida” would be irreducibly hetergenous, a mix of a philology and a philosophy of writing that are totally irreconciable. “derridean” would thus not mean one thing, a method , or a program, but a working by not working through notion of reading.

The other option is to read Derrida foresencically. One can read his practices of self-citation as “clues” to the to his work, or as resistnaces—labyrinthine trials leading to dead ends—to reading his work by coross referencing it, making a Derrida lexicon and even a hypertext apparatus inadequate.

2 'Topography Of Terror': A New View Onto The Third Reich 'Center Of Evil'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/03/topography-of-terror-a-

44

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

ne_n_560652.htmlVERENA SCHMITT-ROSCHMANN | 05/ 3/10 06:35 AM |

BERLIN — A knee-high wall, a rusty gate, the brick foundations of razed buildings – such are crumbling remnants of the Nazi empire in the heart of Berlin known by historians as the "center of evil."

Sixty-five years after the end of World War II, a new exhibition center is opening this week on the site where the feared Gestapo, SS and other Nazi agencies ran Adolf Hitler's police state from 1933 to 1945.

The center adds a museum and a library to the previously Spartan exhibit known as the "Topography of Terror," which has attracted as many as 500,000 annual visitors for the last two decades to the former Prinz Albrecht Strasse. New exhibits document how Hitler's Reich operated and how Germans dealt with the dark chapter of history in the aftermath of World War II.

The area – adjacent to the Martin-Gropius-Bau arts museum – once housed not only Hitler's secret police Gestapo and its prison, but also the leadership of the SS, the Nazi party's paramilitary unit, and the Reich Security Main Office, which combined and coordinated all different police agencies.

Nazi leaders such as Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann all had offices on the street.

The authenticity of the site is what draws people's interest, from the casual visitor to the detailed academic, said the center's director Andrea Nachama.

"People coming to Berlin still want to know 'Where were the agencies of terror? Where was the capital of the Third Reich?'" Nachama told The Associated

45

on the language and uses of particular national cultures (in

France and Germany, for instance). But when 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

Press.

In addition to the new buildings, the new exhibit opens up the entire site, he said.

"Now, they can see the whole area for the first time, all 4.5 hectares (about 11 acres) not just one-eighth of it. They can see the layers of history on the site and they can come in and learn where the terror against millions was initiated and planned," he said.

Story continues below

The Nazis could have located all the agencies in more convenient locations at the edge of town, but chose to put them into the heart of their capital for a reason, Nachama said.

"Repression was used for political purposes," the historian said. "Fuehrer, Gestapo, and concentration camp were the key words of the Third Reich."

All citizens were to see clearly what would happen if they resisted – they would end up at Wilhelmstrasse or Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the street addresses of the complex that housed the offices.

The buildings were damaged during the war and leveled afterward, and the whole area, right next to the Communist-era Berlin Wall, was more or less forgotten.

Over the decades, it housed construction companies and a so-called autodrome where West Berliners could practice their driving skills before seeking a license, and much of the site remained covered by rubble, grass and trees.

"It was the attempt to let grass grow over history in the true sense of the word," said Nachama, a former leader of Berlin's Jewish community.

It was not before the 1980s that interest in the Nazi-era significance of the

46

authority; the law is guranteed 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

site budded again and historians made part of the area accessible to the public.

While the city of Berlin and Germany's federal government came up with plans for a museum-like documentation center in the late 1980s, planning errors and cost overruns held up the project for more than 20 years before it was finally completed.

Nachama said it cost euro12 million to raze part of a building that was started in the 1990s but proved unusable. The new documentation center – a simple, but elegant single-story pavilion – cost some euro25 million and stayed within budget, he said.

"We are, of course, relieved to finally see it open," Nachama said.

He said Germans had little interest in dealing with the memory of the Third Reich and its crimes in the 1950s and 1960s, but have since then carefully addressed the issue.

"It would be unfair to say German historians have failed," he said.

The site is a few minutes' walk from the capital's Holocaust memorial, which opened in 2005, and the Jewish Museum. Many tourists take a walk from one site to the next also passing by the former East German border Checkpoint Charlie, Nachama said.

The new center opens May 7.

___

On the Net:

http://www.tophographie-des-terrors.de3 Althusser’s deconstructive impulse in the ISA essay in Lenin and Philosophy

and Other Essays, the “continuous reading process” as the repressed part of the

essay no one ever acknowledges.

47

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. 60-61.

--Jacques Derrida, “Paper or Me, you Know. . .” Paper

Machine,

“For me, the interwar years fall

naturally into two periods, before

and after 1933.” "Curriculum

Vitae (VI):  Dr. Walter Benjamin"

Selected Writings, Vol 4, 381-85,

to 382.

“In the final analysis, it is a matter,

for both of us (tell me if I am

mistaken), of thinking the

1930s . . .at the heart of which is an

attempt to think Nazism as a

politics . . . .”

--Alan Badiou, Letter to Philippe

Lacoue-Labarthe, cited in the

“Postscript” to Philippe Lacoue-

48

Labarthe, Heidegger and the

Politics of Poetry, 81

Does September 11 mark a

symbolic rupture in our history? . .

. . September 11 did not mark any

rupture in the symbolic order. . . .

If a symbolic rupture occurred, it

had already been accomplished.

To want to date it on September 11

is ultimately a way of eliminating

all political reflection on the

practices of Western states and

reinforcing the scenario of

civilization’s infinite war against

terrorism, of Good against Evil.

Jacques Rançiere, “September 11

and Afterwards: A Rupture in the

Symbolic Order?” Dissensus: On

Politics and Aesthetics 2010, 97;

104

To show how Agamben’s critique of Foucault (not getting to the camp ) is weak, turn to

49

the “Afterword to the Second Printing” of Discourse Networks in which Kittler maintains

that Foucault’s historical research did not get much past 1850 because he equated with

the archive with the library and thus was bound by a certain discourse network.

But Kittler misses how the archive is also biopolitical for Foucault, but also what

Foucault would have called technologies of reading.

The term discourse network . . . can designate the network of technologies and

institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data.

Technologies like that of book printing and the institutions coupled to it, such as

literature and the university, thus constituted a historically very powerful formation,

which in the Europe of Goethe became the condition of possibility for literary criticism.

In order to describe such systems, that is, to describe them from the outside and not

merely from a position of interpretive immanence, Foucault developed discourse analysis

as a reconstruction of the rules by which the actual discourses of an epoch would have to

have been organized in order not to be excluded as was, for example, insanity. His

concept of the archive—synonymous with the library in Foucault’s research methods, if

not in his theory—designates a historical a priori of written sentences. Hence discourse-

analytic studies had trouble only with periods whose data-processing methods destroyed

the alphabetic storage and transmission monopoly, that old-European basis of power.

Foucault’s historical research did not progress much beyond 1850. All libraries are

discourse networks, but all discourse networks are not books. . . . Archaeologies of the

present must also take into account data storage, transmission, and calculation in

technological media.

“Afterword to the Second Printing” of Discourse Networks 369-72; to p. 369

50

There is no end to the writing of books, wrote the preacher. Even books written to bring

about the end of books and of their ordering submit to this pronouncement.

“Afterword to the Second Printing” of Discourse Networks 372

(Also cite Nicolas Luhman on dcostruction and information theory).

Put stills from Max Payne storage unit and of Foucault boxes from Return to Normandy

in the intro-take out my photos of the self-storage unit.

The problem with Kittler is that his analysis of technological media is post-hermeneutic.

Reading is displaced by data-processing and literary criticism is subordinated to

information theory.

I won’t be looking at the art of the insane in relation to WB’s essay ,even though WB

reproduces pages form the books as images. Seeing Insane Sander Gilman; Beyond

rason: Art and Pyshcosis heory itself has to be and has been thought through Naziism

(Ronell, Rickels, Kittler), Vismann). Therefore won’t be doing I, Pierre Riviere or

Bresson’s L’Argent (counerfeitng, crime)

Also transfer in de Man’’s Anthropmoprhism and lyric is a telechnlogy of reading 9the

lyric) that shows that failure itself the reshelving a failure of reading as a linear

succession. So reshelving can take the form of boxing things up, misrecognition. Ronell

has an interesting passage in The Test Drive

"The relation of testing to the question of place is essential.  The test site, as protoreal,

marks out a primary atopos, producing a "place" where the real awaits confirmation.

Until now the test site has not been constructed as a home . . .  Linked to a kind of

51

ghostless futurity, the site offers no present shelter. . .  Nietzsche wants to know if he can

build a new home without the foundations that Heidegger and others will lay. Will it be

possible to establish residence without the grave ideologies of ground and dwelling

weighing him down?" p. 171

I was also thinking that we could counterpose the Steel Homes film (a

misnomer, really, since they are not homes; I do know a woman who dated

a guy who lived in one--illegally, I would guess--another kind of

"pass(tele)port"ing?), who claims to be historical, with the sci-fi

film, if we can track it down, in which the self-storage unit is

ahistorical as twin readings of the bizarre space and temporality of

the (divisible) unit (here the passport-al).4

Add at the end that the book has a Germanic / WWII thread in part because the story of

WWII is not over—the currency of Bush as Hitler or Obamaa as Hilter, Saddam Hussein

as Hitler, appeasement (Munich) and films like Nglorious Basterds, Downfall, and s oon

show that tstory is still alive for Americans (in a way the war in the Pacific is not—

failure at box office of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters form Iwo Jima). And also that I

am talking about theory as an institutionalization of German philosophy and French

philosophy in English, French, a Greman, and Comp Lit Departments.

Also the German WWII frame [provides a container of sorts—thread of archive and art

could be expanded—Ray Johnson and Maria Abromivic. But won’t go ther,e or

counterfeit stories—Baudelaire and Bresson’s L’Argent. Or even Nazi art. Same with

museum installations, The Big Archive. I will engage more with how the archive comes

52

up in these areas—the library too. Not a history but an analysis of the conditions of

reading the archive.

Der Zeitungsausschnitt: Ein

Papierobjekt der Moderne - Anke te Heesen

Sort of like Visman and Spieker, but focused on practice of collecting by cutting and

pasting exceprpts from newspapers and magazines.

4

http://www.amazon.com/Archive-Documents-Contemporary-Art/dp/0262633388/

ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252074586&sr=8-1

The archive

* *

        edited by Charles Merewether.

*Published:*     London : Whitechapel ; Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2006.

*Description:*   207 p. ; 21 cm.

*Series note:*   Documents of contemporary art

*Series:*        Documents of contemporary art series.

<http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?

Ntt=+Documents+of+contemporary+art+series.&N=20&Submit=Find&S=108125

2074685330&Ntk=Series+index&Nty=1>

*Notes:*         Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-201) and index.

*Contents:*      A note upon the mystic writing-pad, 1925 / Sigmund Freud --

Research and presentation of all that remains of my childhood 1944-1950,

53

Die Papier-Persona, 285-87

Sich lessen uaf Papier , 287-291

Sich sammeln, 291—94

Becomesa question of selfportrait for artists , Raoul Hausmann,’s Gurk (198-19

The Frst World War is her focus.

She also discuusses bacnksas archives. Connct counterfeit money in chpter 4.

1969 / Christian Boltanski -- The historical a priori and the archive,

1969 / Michel Foucault -- The philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and

back again), 1975 / Andy Warhol -- The man who never threw anything

away, c. 1977 / Ilya Kabakov -- The archive and testimony, 1989 /

Giorgio Agamben -- Working through objects, 1994 / Susan Hiller --

Survival : ruminations on archival lacunae, 2002 / Renée Green -- A

short history of photography, 1931 / Walter Benjamin -- Archives,

documents, traces, 1978 / Paul Ricoeur -- The body and the archive, 1986

/ Allan Sekula -- Archive fever, 1995 / Jacques Derrida -- Interview

with Jürgen Harten and Katharina Schmidt, 1972 / Marcel Broodthaers --

Gerhard Richter's Atlas : the anomic archive, 1993 / Benjamin H. D.

Buchloh -- Against the camera, for the photographic archive, 1994 /

Margarita Tupitsyn -- The model of the sciences, 1997 / Anne

Moeglin-Delcroix -- Politics of cultural heritage, 1999 / subREAL (Cãlin

Dan and Josif Kiraly) -- Interview with Okwui Enwezor, 2000 / Thomas

Hirschhorn -- A language to come : Japanese photography after the event,

2002 / Charles Merewether -- "The camera made me do it" : Nicole

Jolicoeur, female identity and troubling archives, 2004 / Patricia Levin

54

Das durcheinander der Seite 274-77

Schwitters collage another example.

Archiverung in Ersten Welt Krieg245-47

BuShe is looking at paper objects: Die Materialitat von Exzerpt und Zitat: Bescriebenes,

geschnittenes and geklebtes Papier, 25-45

and Jeanne Perrault -- An archival impulse, 2004 / Hal Foster -- From

enthusiasm to the creative commons : interview with Anthony Spira, 2005

/ Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska -- A triptych (abc), 1976-80 /

Eugenio Dittborn -- Archives of the fallen, 1997 / Charles Merewether --

The Rani of Sirmur : an essay in reading the archives, 1985, 1999 /

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -- First information report, 2003 / Raqs

Media Collective -- Archigraphia : on the future of testimony and the

archive to come, 2002 / Dragan Kujundzic -- The secrets file, 2002 / the

Atlas Group Archive --

         The operator # 17 file, 2000 / the Atlas Group Archive -- Let's be

honest, the rain helped, 2004 / the Atlas Group -- Photographic

documents : excavation as art, 2006 / Akram Zaatari -- Sans

titre/untitled : the video installation as an active archive, 2006 /

Jayce Salloum.

*ISBN:*  0262633388 (pbk. : alk. paper)

         0854881484 (pbk.)

         9780262633383 (pbk. : alk. paper)

         9780854881482 (pbk.)

55

But it is not just a matter of cutting and pasting and paper as materials; paper ahs to be

recognized, recycled

Also failure of the installation in which the archive is exteriorized (last chapter of

Speiker); the failure of the installation is its unrecognized success.

Thrtr’d no room for irony in the concept—it’s a purely different kind of functionality that

they want—subversion is a redistribution, not a negation. Same with Abromvic Moma

*Subjects, general:*     Archival resources

<http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?

N=20+4294442857&Submit=Find&S=1081252074685330&Nty=1>

         Archives

<http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?

N=20+4294924960&Submit=Find&S=1081252074685330&Nty=1>

         Archives artistiques

<http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?

N=20+4286014273&Submit=Find&S=1081252074685330&Nty=1>

         Art archives

<http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?

N=20+4293611704&Submit=Find&S=1081252074685330&Nty=1>

         Fonds d'archives

<http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?

56

collection—supposed to be on good behavior when interacting wit the exhibit.

Interactivity is already the disciplined, docile body.

First,

biopolitics is the archive; second, the archive is not there but has

to be read; once we understand that the materiality of the archive is

not reducible to a fixed architecture, to already stored records

N=20+4286014275&Submit=Find&S=1081252074685330&Nty=1>

         Museums -- Collection management

<http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?

N=20+4288019715&Submit=Find&S=1081252074685330&Nty=1>

         Musées -- Gestion des collections

<http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?

N=20+4286014276&Submit=Find&S=1081252074685330&Nty=1>

*Other author(s),etc:*   Merewether, Charles

<http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?

N=20+4284470038&Submit=Find&S=1081252074685330&Nty=1>

*Format:*        Book

I really liked your characterization of Haraway on the cyborgs.

I look forward to reading The Animal that Therefore I am.

57

(intact or in the process of degrading over time, going missing etc

and hence in need of recovery), we see that biopolitics is not

reducible to bare life and the camp (state of exception equals the norm,

homor sacer is therefore universal) but is a question of spare life; if everyone

is now homo sacer, then the consequence is not that the camp has to

be recognized (always as the same space, but always in different forms) but

that life is lived as reading one's (auto)archivalization, reading

necessarily being a practice of close/d reading because reading is

about opening a box that one wants to assume has been sealed, its

contents there, organized, etc and waiting to be turned into a linear

narrative) but is in fact surrounded, as it were, by the unarchivable

He has an interesting discussion of "follows"--de Man also talks about

following in R of R in terms of before and after--for to Derrida to

follow is about coming after.

Agamben The Open notes

Source of allusions to Marvell’s "The Garden" in Weber:

“green scents” have less compelling connotations than “green thoughts” or

“green shades.” (R of R, 248).

Talk about a selective forgetter.

Weber wants to turn de Man into fertilizer / fossilizer for Derrida so he can "shade" de Man's ghost in the greening of deconstructive thought?

58

ash of the archive and hence necessarily involves a kind of

delinearization as the condition of unreading.  We might even want to

replace Agamben's paradoxes with our own:  closed reading is possible

only because the archive is not there, only because the archive has to

be reshelved, delinearized, disorganized, even, in order to rendered

readable.  Spare life makes reading necessary. But reading we speak of is unreading

because it is not revealing the hidden contents of the archive (which aren’t there, or are

very frequently fantasized as being missing).

And can we connect this question about Homo Sacer (the victim) to the conclusion, the

fossil and the arche-trace, from the sacred man to the last (sacred) man? I think we need

to return to Agamben in the conclusion since we will have started with him. I was also

thinking about the boundaries of publication being an issue for us (something I have been

building a file on) as well as the defense of deconstruction—or the self-defense, that

ranges from Derrida’s more hyperbolic, frazzled accusations (about his critics not having

read him) to his much more careful, patiently thought out formulations about reading.

Deconstruction has no auto-immunity—perhaps that’s what we could think of in relation

to sacrifice—inoculation (like the book getting a shot in Toute la Memoire) and an

anthropomorphism of things—deconstruction does not prevent abjection, especially not

its abjection by others but instead “sacrifices” itself(while sticking around like a sore

thumb) in order to make exposure (as good and as bad thing the necessary risk of reading.

the difference between spare life and bare life

is that the archive is the nomos and domos of the biopolitical and hence has to

be read (it has no architecture, no geological history; it cannot be

59

referred back to blueprints and forward to remnants) in historically in relation to

WWII (we have any more grounds for making 1933 important) and in relation to

deconstruction (Agamben’s structuralism and fusion limit what he can do with the camp;

his account requires that deconstruction be sidelined; to see that the camp is the archive is

to see that we are talking cultural graphology). Hence, we have to foreground storage,

boxes, but do so as a topos, figure, as a metaphorlogy that is neither just an empirical

thing (physical materials) nor media (understood as technical devices, again empirically)

with its own archive fevers. In chapter two, we reconceive / redescribe the history of the

book, in which materiality is taken for granted and storage ignored, as a question of

reshelving, refiling, and the auobiographeme, the dream of sleeptalking; (chapter three,

we show that the default of reading subsumes the crime scene (the detective genre, to

which we return in the conclusion when we get to Perec) but that the missing body /

corpus has to be rethought (via WB; and we could also footnote Vismann on the Stai—

fantasy that there are parts of the file that are missing and also footnote The Lives of

Others)) as a living out your death as a kind of declassification (or however I put it an

earlier time); Chapter four, Lifeboat et al, we show that the archive becomes something to

be read after the fact, on the surface again WWII, post war, archive and camp haunting

each other in Night and Fog and Toute la memoire); in chapter five, we show that what is

archived is not one thing but many things that may not only resist classification but that

may be recognized as different things (a file may or may not look like a book; a

document may be recognized as a work of art; the archive may resemble a de/portable

museum; the work of art is the return of the theological), the pay of off this chapter being

that we show that the camp as an archive, returning to the passport and counterfeiting,

60

and also the question of homo sacer and the (Jewish) victim?

Zettelwirtschaft: Die Geburt der

Kartei aus dem Geiste der Bibliothek

Is the problem in part, that if we follow Agamben then the structural function of Homer

Sacer re the collective moves from polis to the figure of the person citizen, for him, post

WW2. So that all those persons named “human” are literally split or (d)riven by a

rupture between “the people” and “the citizen” that means that shares of “bare life” are

parceled out—those persons who are refugees, asylum seekers or who share the same

status as those persons so subjected in WW2, but now without the sense of occasion that

a world war provided, are intensified versions of the normalized citizens of the West or

East who act as if they did not lead bare lives…in other words, post ww2 there’s a

qualitative shift in the processing of persons that takes bare life as a starting point and

then borrow back (redeems???) other forms of life as temporary “benefits” (as opposed to

natural rights)…does this make any kind of sense? If you like, this would be the

explanation for why self-storage units exist in the first place—they are a materialization

of the relation of the “as if” that bare life in the West lives….

I began this intro with the storage unit, in what seem like a detour, rather htan announcing

the argument of the book as I am now doing, in order not only to concede the materiality

of the archive but to render the archive as a question of reading(n theory). Just as the

archive ais taken as given, as read, something to be reassembled, so theory has come to

be understood as given, as having been read. To return to the archive, then, is a return to

61

the thing theory, not thing theory. It is to engage biopolitics by return to deconstruction,

particularly Derrida but also de Man. Trope of the archive gets into easiest and fastest

gear when the archive is said to contain something missing or that was lost and may have

eebn stored. Also add from Agamben’s zone, with always fixed borders is a contact zone

(DidHuberman). a black box trope

Vismann makes it clear (inadvertently) why storage is so important as a master figure of

the archive as well as the way a dynamic of divisibility determines our metaphorology

(and metonymology) of reading as unread –ability.

That is not a calculable experience. It is beyond calculation. It is not exactly blocked

mourning either since you are given time (or assume you have time) to return to it.

Unreading is about rereading, repetition but not redundancy (closer to the uncanny). Or

as Perec does, you can (re)write yourself to death (but again as a kind of implicit

apostrophizing). Ray Johnson How to Draw a Bunny is another example.

Inscription / recording is not reducible to visible / invisible, writing and erasure (see

Chartier’s book). The metaphor is a contact zone, itself a metaphor for a space that may

have an architecture but which is discursively available only through a nomotopological

similes (see Freud on the psyche as dossier in vol 2 standard edition, Studies in Hysteria

or the end of the mystic pad essay were the similes all break down, he says; our version

of psychoanalysis is about a problem of modeling the psyche, a dynamic that has no

62

coherent topology), that calls forth a dream of interpretation that gets immediately

resisted since it proceeds as a metaphorlogy.

Move from Night and Fog to Ben on passport and books—bibliopolis—and Susan Buck

Morss on the postcard as thing, as material. But to read is also to read writing in

hteridnary sense, as Derrida puts it, rather than as aa trace—resistance to reading takes

different concrete, henomelal forms. Font, graphic design, paratext. Missing title in

Work of Mourning and in chapter two (Derrida ont eht tiel) and could go to Demure and

the lapse as not recognized—but instead an eccentric move—so why the post-script—we

canmake snese of it as a the Defense of Deconstruction, as a response to a kind of

persecution , prosecution. So I can go perhaps from Work of Mourning to Demeures to

de Man on irony—again the lapse as not recognized—passed off as a joke—that

displaces and does nto read, reads by not reading. Cemetery hten like a library—the

graverobbing fantasy like the missing manuscript fantasy.

Coould break this up into two chapters—the fourth chapter being about the posthumous

and title and the unrecognized lapse.

Examples of the archive as the to be read or the to be visited—as problems Mr Death

regarded as anti-Semtiic, so he had to add interviews with Jewish group representatives to

make it clear he was not a Holocaust denier; and Lanza=mann askig hIlberg about the

63

document. But these are not exceptional cases; they are allegories or discussions of the

resstance of the archive as the condition of access to it.

End of chapter three then would be about variations of homo sacer—the musselman

versus the survivor—the zombie Muslim orhter of thwho survives versus the surivivor

who lives past the instant of his own death (Blacnhot) and hten Agamben Remnants of

Auschwitz versus the Marrano of Derrida Aprorias and Ghostlier Demarcations, xenos

(stranger, foreinger) versu shomo sacer as figures of the threshold, of persons. Foreigner

versus barbarian.

Port Bou in Aporias.

Also, add to archive as a trope the fact that it is ften imagined as a container missing its

contents—or thedepository of something that has gone missing. WB’s manuscript

briefcase—the film archive with a Nazi snuff filmimagined both by Lanzmann and

Godard. The archive arrives as a figure of loss (not just mssishelved documents, stolen

items, or degraded materials), or dust gathering.

The question of the archive—what is it—it is the to be read—it is in question.

Historicism boxes it up. So reading is exposure. Thinking biopolitics in terms of paper

machines means not taking the materiality of the book or of files as givens, nor to see the

archive as a haunted space. It is a problem of reading, as we can see Derrida perform in

Archive fever. It is a retracing. So this means that reading is exposure; not simply a

return to deconstruction but a rereading of its resistance to reading as reading, including

the lapse, even the staged lapse. Not idealization or defensive commemoration, “For

Derrida” but “Force Derrida”

64

Intro—from storage to where did reading go to the need to read—the passport, as a way

into reading the archive.

Chapter one—

Not going to do the rereading of Foucault one could do but advance through Agamben

(who has positioned himself as the heir to Foucault). Agamben has to read in relation to

the sidelining of Derrida.

Derrida too does not read biopolitics of the archive but has a kind of Foucauldian take,

placed in a footnote. The issue is not one reducible to control. Biopoltiics of the archive

is about reading, the archive including the camp (footnote Mr. Death and Shoah Raul

Hilberg scene. Footnote Hilberg on Arendt

At the the end of the intro I go from the nomos of the modernity poiltiical space of the

camp, epitomized by Agamben by Nazi concetration camps, and the linear history of

Agamben to the atopological and achronic Nomos and Domos of the biopolitical archive

eventalized exceeds the law but becomes a question of medaitized persons, of paperless

persons. This takes us in chapter three to the question of the victim which Agamben

sidelines by descarlizing homo scarer. Point is not get out of a sacrificial econmy but to

see that Agambenhas a theological hermenutic, that he dismisses deconstruciton as a

thwarted Messianism even as he tries to superimpose Roman law on to Greek and Jewish

law in The Time that Remains. It’s not about the different spaces of the archive—not

parallel problem to agamben’s different spaces of the camp—instead of maintaining that

65

the concentration camps are only an extreme case, and in including care as well as

extermination as operations that happen in camps (camps did have hospitals), it’s about

how the archive makes certain kinds of reading operable., including readings of persons

as already papered.

Spell out the double reading of the archive and biopolitics. Agamben Homo Sacer and

Derrida, but mostly, the key is virtualization—of the archive for Derrida and of homo

sacer for Agamben. The archive as storage unit is not just about political space, but the

duration of storage, returns of rereading, the theorizing of historicism’s abjection of

reading in favor of using. Virtualization means ethics of close/d reading. Chapter One

spells out virtualization. By turning to the self-storage as the exemplar of the archive, we

are asking what it means to live a bare life virtually, what it means for biopolitics to be

mediatized.5 For Derrida, the default is paper: “(at the center of this book, we will hear

echoing, for instance, in more than one register, literal and figurative, of the question of

the person with no papers, crushed by so many machines, ‘when we are all, already,

undocumented, ‘paperless’”) (2). For agamben it is the virtuality and universality of “we

are all homines sacrii.”

To understand the virtuality of the virtual homo sacer is to understand, in our view, both

the endless mediation of politics and the irreducibility to life as a biology of organic

matter, death signally the body’s transformation into inorganic matter.6 I take the self-

5 Agamben does use the word “medium” (64) once when discussing Walter

Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.” Agamben does not engage Benjamin’s work

on media or consider how it might bear on his account of divine violence and his

dissatisfaction with liberal democracy.

66

storage unit as a way of framing reading as a question in relation to what happens to bare

life when the archive becomes the nomos and domos, the political space of modernity.

My concern is not to trace the history of the self-storage unit as it would be conceived in

the conventional terms of what is understand as material culture studies.7 I am using the

self-storage unit as a figure for the archive, which subsumes the structure of the camp, in

order to think biopolitics through the virtuality of bare life.8

7 For an example, see the Big Archive by Sven Spieker. He wants to make an

historical argumentabout the archive and art but leaves oppoisitn between

origanic and inorganic matter unquestioned: art becomes that which the archive

cannot regulate—control, discipline. Derrid’a anarchihological death drive is not

engaged as such. All the more reason to engage Derrida’s account fo the

archive and its impossible toplogical (as opposed the house (domos) or office

(domicle) or installation space in a museum.

8 The archive has to be theorized.

Even more important is the meditization of the archive, the archive fever.

we mean to extend and radicalize Agamben’s Foucauldian insight about biopolitics and the virtualization of bare life and the camp.6 Agamben discusses thanatopolitics only in relation to transplants and life

support technologies of the 1960s, in the chapter “Politicizing Death,” 160-65.

Agamben forgets that the determination of death was never clear (his example is

a breath not fogging up a mirror held close to a person’s mouth being evidence

that that person is dead), as the panic over premature burial in the nineteenth

century testifies.

67

1. Welcome to your Box

Perhaps you have one.9 Certainly, you’ve seen them as you drive your car from place to

place. I refer to self-storage units that now litter our roads, around airports, or in the

9 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html

March 16, 2010

Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit

By PATRICIA COHEN

Salman Rushdie at Emory University in Atlanta, which is currently

exhibiting his personal archive, including personal papers, and

electronically produced drafts of his novels.

Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display

at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten

journals and for Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The

18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers

and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized

and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.

But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set

of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering,

“born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form

68

peripheral transit zones that constitute the spaces between cities. Some of you may have

seen them from the bus or the train, but I do not advise visiting them using these modes

of transport (assuming that there’s even a stop). Access to a truck or moving van is

advised and it will be the pleasure of the staff at the higher end facilities to aid you in

renting the vehicle that best suits your storage needs.

— are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments,

sIated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors,

are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on

floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster

than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do

survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older

equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s

simply don’t exist anymore.

Imagine having a record but no record player.

All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to

fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling

through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make

that material accessible.

69

These uncanny spaces, faceless, nameless, but awaiting your personal,

anonymous, or at least encrypted imprint, offer their users a neurotic compromise in the

form of additional room to supplement their full up, no vacancy home and office spaces.

You can use them to store things you don’t need or use anymore but that you just can’t

sell, throwaway, or arrange to have whisked away by those who specialize in removal.

This heavily secured compromise space is located in an indeterminate or yet to be

“It’s certainly one of those issues that keeps a lot of people awake

at night,” said Anne Van Camp, the director of the Smithsonian

Institution Archives and a member of a task force on the economics of

digital preservation formed by the National Science Foundation, among

others.

Though computers have been commonly used for more than two decades,

archives from writers who used them are just beginning to make their

way into collections. Last Iek, for instance, the Harry Ransom Center

at the University of Texas, Ametin, announced that it had bought the

archive of David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008. Emory

opened an exhibition of its Rushdie collection in February, and last

year, not long before his death, John Updike sent 50 5 ¼-inch floppy

disks to the Houghton Library at Harvard.

Leslie Morris, a curator at the Houghton Library, said, “I don’t

really have any methodology as of yet” to process born-digital

material. “I just store the disks in my climate-controlled stacks,

70

determined zone between home and office, offering a halfway-house or loading zone

between a home (residence) and office cubicle (work station). That said, these uneasy

supplements, which seem to offer steady state storage, send you in the direction of home-

lessness since they are rentals, and their contents subject to seizure in the event that you

fail to meet your monthly obligation and void the contract you have signed to secure my

stuff.10

and I’re hoping for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines,” she

added.

Among the challenges facing libraries: hiring computer-savvy

archivists to catalog material; acquiring the equipment and expertise

to decipher, transfer and gain access to data stored on obsolete

technologies like floppy disks; guarding against accidental

alterations or deletions of digital files; and figuring out how to

organize access in a way that’s useful.

At Emory, Mr. Rushdie’s outdated computers presented archivists with a

choice: simply save the contents of files or try to also salvage the

look and organization of those early files. Because of Emory’s

particular interest in the impact of technology on the creative

process, Naomi Nelson, the university’s interim director of

Manmecript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, said that the archivists

decided to try to recreate Mr. Rushdie’s writing experience and the

original computer environment.

71

Mr. Rushdie started using a computer only when the Ayatollah

Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa drove him underground. “My writing has got

tighter and more concise because I no longer have to perform the

mechanical act of re-typing endlessly,” he explained during an

interview while in hiding. “And all the time that was taken up by that

mechanical act is freed to think.”

He added: “I had this kind of fetish about presenting clean copy. I

don’t like presenting my publisher with pages with lots of

crossings-out and scribbling. So I would be manic at the end of typing

a page where actually I didn’t want to change anything, not at all.”

Some of the early files chronicle Mr. Rushdie’s self-consciome

analysis of how computers affected his work. In an imaginary dialogue

with himself that he composed in 1992 when he was writing “The Moor’s

Last Sigh,” he wrote about choosing formatting, fonts and spacing: “I

am doing this so that I can see how a whole page looks when it’s typed

72

Understandably, these units come in many different styles with sizes to fit the most

modest or exorbitant of storage needs—appealing to consumers with any number of

slogans drawn from the established scripts. “You deserve Extra Space,” opine the

sympathetic folks at ExtraSpace.com.11 While PublicStorage.com offers you the certainty

of “Another perfect fit”—their Ibsite pictures a rolling series of images of cut outs of

everyday objects silhouetted against their units, this teletopical figure enabling you

at this size and spacing.

“Oh, my God, suppose it looks terrible?”

“Oh, my God, yeah. And doesn’t this look wrong?”

“Where’s the paragraph indent thing?”

“I don’t know. I will look.”

“How about this? Is this good for you?”

“A lot better. How about fixing the part above?”

At the Emory exhibition, visitors can log onto a computer and see the

screen that Mr. Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and

find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies Ire a favorite.)

They can call up an early draft of Mr. Rushdie’s 1999 novel, “The

73

already to project your stuff into their otherwise faceless units, mentally freeing up space

in your overcrowded home or office. And ecstasy of ecstasies, the instant you roll down

that door on the unit, turn the key in the padlock or enter your code on the key pad, that

mental cut out that you pictured on their screen will dissolve into the figure of a

corrugated metal door and your stuff will be out of here but securely there—a post script

Ground Beneath Her Feet,” and edit a sentence or post an editorial

comment.

“I know of no other place in the world that is providing access

through emulation to a born-digital archive,” said Erika Farr, the

director of born-digital initiatives at the Robert W. Woodruff Library

at Emory. (The original draft is preserved.)

To the Emory team, simulating the author’s electronic universe is

equivalent to making a reproduction of the desk, chair, fountain pen

and paper that, say, Charles Dickens used, and then allowing visitors

to sit and scribble notes on a copy of an early version of “Bleak

House.”

“If you’re interested in primary materials, you’re interested in the

context as Ill as the content, the authentic artifact,” Ms. Farr

said. “Fifty years from now, people may be researching how the impact

of word processing affected literary output,” she added, which would

74

to your busy life as the self-abbreviating folks at “PS” (the corporate logo of

“PublicStorage.com,”) will simply box it all up.12

Aside from the security self-storage units offer and the democratization of

warehousing space (live globally, store locally), the designers of the high end models,

seem to have drunk deeply at the font of anthropologist Mary Douglas, mid-tIntieth-

century phenomenology, and taken as a rule of design that any indication of the presence

require seeing the original computer images.

It may even be possible in the future to examine literary influences

by matching which Ib sites a writer visited on a particular day with

the manmecript he or she was working on at the time.

Michael Olson, the digital collections project manager at Stanford

University, said that the only people who really had experience with

excavating digital information Ire in law enforcement. “There aren’t

a lot of archives out there capturing born-digital material,” he said,

referring to the process of extracting all data accurately from a

device.

Located in Silicon Valley, Stanford has received a lot of born-digital

collections, which has pmehed it to become a pioneer in the field.

This past summer the library opened a digital forensics laboratory —

the first in the nation.

75

of another, of dirt, or “matter out of place,” is simply unacceptable, unthinkable.13 This

space is for you, their units say, for your stuff and for no one else’s. Indeed, the self

storage unit offers itself as an overdeterminedly featureless box, an entirely forgettable

container, or series of concentric boundaries (the unit, the corridor, the facility) each so

secure, so anonymome, so unavailable to public access—no one will happen by your unit

—so fundamentally boring, that you can forget about the permeability of boundaries, sink

The heart of the lab is the Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device,

nicknamed FRED, which enables archivists to dig out data, bit by bit,

from current and antiquated floppies, CDs, DVDs, hard drives, computer

tapes and flash memories, while protecting the files from corruption.

(Emory is giving the Woodruff library $500,000 to create a computer

forensics lab like the one at Stanford, Ms. Farr said.)

With the new archive from David Foster Wallace, the Ransom Center now

has 40 collections with born-digital material, including Norman

Mailer’s. Gabriela Redwine, an archivist at Ransom, is impressed by

Emory’s digital emulation, but said the center was not pursuing that

kind of reproduction at the moment.

“My focme is preservation and storage now,” she said. “Over the last

couple of years, I’ve been learning about computer forensics.”

The center is trying to raise endowment money to hire a digital

collections coordinator while Ms. Redwine works on preservation and

76

back in your arm or office chair, and get to work or doze off knowing that your stuff is

secure.

Smaller and smaller technical devices that promise to store more and more data.

Self-storage offers the same lure in brute low-tech, drive-to, box it up mode. Indeed, it is

almost predictable that an online animated advertisement for a computer storage software

processing. In the meantime, most of the digital material is off

limits to researchers.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 24, 2010

An article on March 16 about digital archives from Salman Rushdie on

display at Emory University misstated part of the name of the Emory

library that has the archives. It is the Manmecript, Archives, and

Rare Book Library — not the Manmecript, Archives and Rare Book

Collection.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html

10 David Streitfeld, “Losing a Home, Then Losing All Out of Storage” May 11,

2008 New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/business/11storage.html

77

program should take a hybrid image self-storage units, columbaria, filing boxes, and

hotels as its model.

Take charge. Get your move on. Be proactive. “Calculate your storage savings.” You are,

like most subjects, a “capital fellow.” 14 Why not then prosecute your advantage and

embark on a feel-good Foucauldian regime of self-optimizing rationality that will make

11 http://www.ExtraSpace.com

12 http://www.PublicStorage.com

13 See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London and New York: Routledge,

1966), and also Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1958).

78

possible more use values.15 You will be happy. You will have more funTM. The promise

of self-storage is always a phantasmatic sort of extended shelf-life as self-archivalization:

there will always be enough space to store your stuff, enough time to tidy everything up,

even wrap it up. “Life” will go on—and your life in particular.

It’s easy to read this promise of calculation and optimization as a call to a

Freudian death drive impulse, offering the user little more than an overcoat of protection

against an anxiety disorder which is less about keeping your things from being stolen

than whether or not there will exist a search engine sufficient to finding and retrieving the

nearly useless things and data you cannot delete and that never reach an expiration date.16

And so, your home comes to be directed by a future outside it, life redefined or made

readable as what I call “shelf-life,” as the ongoing process of sorting, categorizing,

making cuts, decisions, holloId out in advance, in anticipation of a future that may or may

not come but for which it would be irresponsible not to prepare. So you must ask

yourself: ‘Are you prepared?’

Renting a self-storage unit then, is like preparing for your death, the unit a

placeholder for a vault, pyramid, crypt, or time capsule. The self-storage unit resembles

other kinds of storage spaces, libraries and pawnshops, but differs from them in that,

because the mail system no longer works as a relay because there is no address to deliver

14 For this formulation see Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money,

trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992),

101.

15 History of Sexulaity, Technologies of Self + ANT on feel good Foucault…

79

the mail, the renter selects the contents to be stored and exercises a kind of sovereignty

over the contents, deciding what has value (sentimental, cash or both) and hence stored,

and what can be thrown away, donated, or sold. The migratory aspects of self-storage

add to its singularity in that decisions about its contents are not permanent. Unlike a

library, the contents of which are at least imagined to endure forever, if eventually only in

digital form, and to be replaced when lost, if possible, the duration of the lives of the

things stored has no fixed or predetermined duration, no fixed “shelf-life.” New things

may be taken out, new things may be added; a storage unit may be exhameted and closed

or additional units may be rented. It all depends on how much stuff it takes to free your

“life” from the stuff that threatens arrest.

That’s the theory anyway. But how exactly should I categorize the appearance of

these uncanny boxes, which have sprung up like so many de-accessorized motels waiting

neither for persons nor their pets but for their stuff? How should I understand or better yet

model the “event” that “self-storage” constitutes within the infrastructure of home, work,

and play, or the doling out of somatic and psychic “events” such as birth, aging, dying,

death? In a world in which the citizen-people-consumers of the Ist are induced to accrete

more and more stuff, the appearance of self-storage units in the post-World War Two

landscape may be judged an inevitable result of the confusion or cross-cutting of

boundaries that results from late Capitalist or always Capitalist stop and flow

mechanisms.17 Surely then these units merely represent a bit of extra space, a bit of

respite for those of me who are doing my level best to get “Ill” in the world (input equals

output) and so “reduce, re-use, recycle,” but who nevertheless remain on the grid.

Surely, self-storage manifests merely as a hub on the way to the landfill, enabling you to

80

place your various “things” in purgatory; some of them will be redeemed, some damned.

It all depends on whose prayers get sung longest or loudest in your inner chantry or the

chantry that is your family unit.

Renting a self-storage unit then, is like preparing for your death, the unit being a

placeholder for a vault, pyramid, crypt, or time capsule.18 The self-storage unit resembles

16 Endnote to self—tie this point to The Counterfieters and Given Time—the

subject as accumulation, as capitalized, versme divested, ash. The importance of

the notion of resistance as I use it—Derridean—is the resistance and reading as

a way of managing resistance offers no guarantees. It will not free you from the

continuome necessity of reading—there’s no exit, you can’t get no clean—it’s a

condition of living, that is life, and you will have paid your money. It’s not about

capitalization, or a calculme of the subject—see Given Time and Gift of Death—

the subject as a capital seller—its a pure expenditure—that’s what living is—you

don’t get their life back, you don’t get a refund.

Materialists want to feel done, but they want to have the hallucinogenic

experience of the real that it is actually phenomenalized in the facsimile.

You cannot be done with reading—when you think you’re done, you’re a

consumer, or in ideology—you just bought something without knowing what

you’ve ought or done.

Unconsciome likes to rest, it doesn’t want to be put into play.

81

other kinds of storage spaces libraries and pawnshops, but differs from them in that,

because the mail system no longer works as a relay because there is no address to deliver

the mail, the renter selects the contents to be stored and exercises a kind of sovereignty

over the contents, deciding what has value (sentimental, cash or both) and hence stored,

and what can be thrown away, donated, or sold. The migratory aspects of self-storage

add to its singularity in that decisions about its contents are not permanent. Unlike a

library, the contents of which are at least imagined to endure forever, if eventually only in

digital form, and to be replaced when lost, if possible, the duration of the lives of the

things stored has no fixed or predetermined duration, no fixed shelf-life. New things may

be taken out, new things may be added; a storage unit may be exhausted and closed or

additional units may be rented. It all depends on how much stuff it takes to free your

“life” and locate your death-arrest. The pawnshop shares with self-storage units a kind of

homelessness, an uncanny space and time when the thing as revenant returns, or fails to

return, or returns in altered but apparently unaltered form, but only things with cash value

to others determined by the broker may be pawned.

As our deployment of various narratives and vocabularies thus far signals, the

emergence and proliferation of self-storage units in the later twentieth century and their

17 Deleuze and Guattari, Virilio, Augé

18 Sentimentalization of the self-storage unit is the evacuation of its

potentiality (as a new technology (as WB says) by existing mechanisms

of capture. Think about critique of sentimentality of Stallybrass et al versus the

pastoral and Schiller’s naive and sentimental—the pastoral as always a postcard,

an idyll.

82

recent representation in documentary and mainstreams films generate the central

concerns and questions of the present book with regard to the philosophy of political

thought and what, a while ago.19 More precisely, we are concerned with what the event

that is “self-storage” may have to teach us about the problem identified by Nazi theorist

Carl Schmitt, namely, 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.20 As the subtitle to this section signals, we seek to know

the relation between “bare life” and “shelf life,” to understand the relation between the

articulation of human persons as citizen-subjects, the auto-archiving of their lives by the

19 The self-storage unit now becomes the dossier that doesn't know it is a work of

art or is becoming a work of art, but after the artist's death; the guest and

host that don't know each other, the broken hospitality, and we could

expand on this as the problem of the foreign (language) and foreigner,

of biocitizenship in the U.S. (if you're born here, you are a

citizen).  So it's about the relation between citizenship, mobility,

migration, and transport (as in concentration camp). Here is where we could

make shelf-help a response to bare life and biopower and use Derrida's Paper

Machine--people turned into paper (of a political sort). And we could come to

processing as in due process, the law, Kafka's Das Process (The Trial), and

Derrida's reading of Before the Law. So there’s also a political theology in play

here (sovereign violence as unrecognizable divine violence) we will want to

develop to explain our title, last things.

20 Political theology and the Concept of the Political, See the Challenge of Carl

Schmitt.

83

state, and the advent of self-storage as supplement to this articulation, as a writing while

being written, or a “putting into reserve,” to borrow Derrida’s phrasing from Of

Grammatology.

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben responds to

Schmitt’s challenge, and taking the Nazi concentration camps to be an aberrant but

hidden figure of modernity. Sovereignty in the modern state is defined not by its care-

taking role over the lives of its populace, when politics becomes 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 biopolitics (or the

revelation that politics was always a biopolitics) 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).21

Moreover, as Agamben points out, biopolitics becomes thanatopolitics, as death, along

with life, are politicized: the sovereign decides not only who lives and who dies but what

84

counts as homo sacer, the bare life that does not deserve to live yet that may not be

sacrificed or executed.

As a resistance to encroachments of biopower, a universal human rights discourse

remains of value, to be sure, but its adequacy as a response to the challenge of

bio/thanato/politics is always severely compromised both because the rule of law in

parliamentary democracies already depends on a supplement of (hidden and forgotten

revolutionary) violence from the start and because a Rights discourse takes for granted

the definition of the human.22 [we need more Agamben here—quotation wise?]

Bio/thanatopolitics puts the ontology of the human into question, replacing the citizen

with a subject. The same problem occurs when extending a human rights discourse to an

animal rights discourse since homo sacer is defined not only in relation to sacred life

(bios) but to animal life (zoë).23 The promise of “more life,” even after death in the form

of cyrogenics, is similarly limited.24 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. [When time permits I think I

21 The central part of the book is a concrete, if brief, discussion of Carl Schmitt

and Walter Benjmain as thinkiker of the same stripe. See pp. 63-67. For a

contrasting reading of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence, see Derrida Force of

Law. The similarities between Benjamin and Schmitt have been discussed by

Victoria Kahn Representations and Samuel Weber, “Taking Exception”.

85

do want to come back to this paragraph and reread the Agamben looking for

nuggets to unbox].

We take World War II as our point of departure not only because of the central

role the concentration camp plays in Agamben’s work but, more crucially, because what

now remains of the camps, razed by the Nazis when they abandoned them in 1945, has

since become above all a question of the camps’ archivalization, preservation of

documents, reconstruction or ruination of the remnants, and exhibition.25 Is self-storage,

we ask a supplementary technique or prosthetic for the experience of bare life, for the

modeling of all spaces, finally, as potential camps, or camps in abeyance? While it may

22 On Human Rights, see Agamben, “Biopolitics and the Rights of Man,” in Homo

Sacer, 119-25 and on animal rights, see Derrida The Animal that Therefore I Am,

87-89

23 On animals, see Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am (Fordham

UP, 2008) and The Beast and Sovereignty (2009); see also Agamben, The

Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, 2004).

24 On cyrogenics, see Wetwares We already tip our hand here, in letting the

reader see that we think Agamben’s work, his reading of Schmitt, has to be read

with Derrida and with(out) de Man. We lay down our cards in the conclusion.

25 See especially Agamben’s discussion of the archive and the camp in

Remnants of Auschwitz and of the camps in “The Camp as ‘Nomos’ of the

Modern,” Homo Sacer, 168-80. On the controversy over the camps and the

problem of archiving what happened, see James Young, The Texture of Memory

and Geoffrey Hartman, Archive. See also the Errol Morris documentary Mr.

Death (200?).

86

appear jarring, upsetting, or worse still to ask readers to entertain a comparison between

two such apparently different objects, the self-storage unit and the concentration camp,

we do so, because we wish to understand better the relationship between “bare life” and

archivalization and render visible the ways in which questions of “life” and “sovereignty”

play out or are determined by the protocols of archiving. 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). 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

87

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 biopolitical 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 biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen.”

Elsewhere, 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

underwriting the adumbrated networks constituted by global exchange, work, home, and

play, take as a given what Jack Derrida, a while ago, now, named “arche-writing” or the

general or generative text. 26 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 is a set of

translations otherwise and elsewhere deemed impossible or unthinkable. By a series of

26 In the State of Exception, for example, at the end of his reading of the “Force of

Law,” Agamben notes that “once again. The analogy with language is

illuminating” going on to to describe 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…

88

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 divine 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 as 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.27

For Agamben, this way of modeling the camp provides an important rubric for

future work on the holocaust. As he writes, “The correct question to pose concerning the

horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how crimes of

atrocity could be committed against human beings. It would be more honest and, above

all, more useful to investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of

power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and

prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime”

(171). Setting aside the rhetoric of use and prescriptive adjectives at work in these lines,

which seem to wish to inoculate the text against misreading, we wish to note that the

items Agamben outlines as the topics for further study represent those relays in the

writing machine by which the modern state processes its citizens, according papers and

rights to some and not to others. This is all to say that the project of a cultural

graphology, of grammatology as a positive science, is complimentary to Agamben’s

27 enlist Althusser’s ISAs here

89

deconstruction of the state of exception or emergency. We take this methodological

congruence as a sign also of the fact that the processing of persons as bare life is enacted

through and by their archiving, by their processing with regard to what we have begun to

call “shelf-life.”

In this sense, the camp figures as the systematic undoing of the nation state’s most

important rental to its citizen subjects, the passport, reducing the guarantee of self-

sameness and the privileges and costs that come with this guarantee to an indexical

marking of the body: a horrific and degraded form of the tattoo.28 Where the passport

functions as the enabling device for the double articulation of sovereignty and citizen’s or

perhaps even “human” rights discourse, demanding that other nation states recognize its

sovereignty by according the same rights and privileges it gives to its citizens when

“abroad,” the tattoo, in this case, merely records the facticity of a body’s presence and its

sorting. Given the flimsiness of the bearer’s ownership or right to a passport, as our

opening discussion of the status of that coveted object, the US passport (one of us has

one; one of us does not), established, it seems reasonable to suggest that human rights

discourse exists merely as an epi-phenomenon or disposable, if enduring, other to the

mechanisms of the passport—a recognition of what is at stake in having oneself

appropriately archived, shelved, accounted for. We take it as implied by Agamben that

one corollary of his modeling of the camp would be an inquiry into which instantiations

of the writing machine, which modes of archiving, foster rights discourse and which

prove lethal to it. “What are the good and the bad [forms]” we ask, the “good and the bad

90

[media / archives]” replaying Foucault’s late optative discussions of drugs and

governmentality.29

That said, it seems important also to note that in its current iteration, the passport

of today, more than ever, subordinates the viability of a rights discourse to the production

of a self-declared, mobile biometric archive, which remains unavailable to the bearer,

who may not access the technology necessary to “read” it. The population of archived-

person-paper-subjects that, if all is in order, participate in the international stop and go

routines we name the travel system constitute quite literally an archive on the move, in

flux, an archive that may be rendered immobile or theoretically rendered immobile and so

available to the surveilling sovereignty of a state which creates one more fiction of an

Archimedian point. Indeed, it may be ventured, that modern passport technologies deploy

the passport-icon as a technical installation of a possible camp, a camp that may be

phenomenalized any time, anywhere, but now on the scale of the individual citizen-

person, the fracture between bios and zoë now delivered at the level of the individual

subject.

We are working hard, obviously, to persuade you to the notion that, the

question of the camp and of “bare life” will tend to play out in our historical moment as a

series of questions about pieces of paper, or the encoding of information and the ability of

citizen subjects to participate in their auto-archiving. For us, the “self storage” event

represents an uncertain signal in this economy of archiving. What order of tropological

intervention might it be said to house or make possible? Is it merely a supplement or

28 For a reading of the tattoo as a mode of writing not yet identified with the

Holocaust, see Fleming, Graffiti, 79-112.

29 Foucault on drugs

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degraded mimetic doubling of the activity of the state or does it offer a meaningful

counter? While “self storage,” like any phenomenon, will be subject to modes of

ideological capture allied to the mode of production (police procedurals etc), its uptake

could, given the correct juxtapositions, yield a dialectical image of other possible

relations—indeed of “bare life” not as a single unit of being but as a zone of possible

configurations of beings, of multiple forms of living, life, and liveliness. We turn to the

figure of the self-storage unit, then, in order to pose the archive as a question of reading

things and / as texts.

2. Self-Life as Closed Reading

What is it about the prosaic phenomenon of the storage unit that demands attention? It

allows me to reconceptualize the archive, on the one hand, as that which is to be bread

rather than given as readable, on the other hand, and to show that biopolitics, as

formulated by Michel Foucualt and expanded by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer, is a

question of the archive, while thinking biopolitics in relation to Derrida’s archvihology.

Near the opening, expand on Agamben a bit to make clear what bare life is and what the

problem of biopolitics is—the camp.

The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the

rule. In the camp, the state of emergency, which was essentially a temporary suspension

of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent

spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order. (168-

69)

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The camp was also the most absolute space biopolitical space ever to have been realized,

in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation. This is why the

camp is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes

biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen. (171)

The self-storage unit is not just an empirical thing, a collection of things to be inventoried

and catalogued, but an archive. The archive is an irreducible condition of biopolitics,

biopolitics entailing an ethics of reading, a condition that demands I conceptualize

reading not only as the resistance to reading “the text” that will tend to reach certain

impasses, (the answering message keeps playing after the person who recorded it has

died, just keeps repeating) but as a question of filing, boxing, storing, (re)calling error,

and (mis)recognition (again none of this is reducible to the mechanics of retrieval and

information processing). By turning from bare life to shelf-life, I mean to redefine bare

life as life that is lived virtually, as paradoxical practices of reading and writing to death

as a way of (bare) life, of reorganizing and reshelving as practices of resistant to reading

and archiving, or what I call “closed reading.”30 For what concerns me in this book about

the biopolitical archive is reading, the fate of reading, and of reading especially as a

30 Following out the logic of Agamben’s deconstruction of citizen and stateless

person that follows from the virtualization of homo sacer, I maintain the political

space is not the camp but the storage unit; I maintain further that the one who

lives a more or less bare life cannot properly be reduced to the refugee, the exile,

the detainee, the prisoner, the soldier, and so on. I will contrast Agamben’s

figure of bare life—the Muselmann, in Remnants of Amechwitz and Homo Sacer

—to Derrida’s figure of death—the Maranno, in Aporias. I will also consider

academics I the humanities as ronin or picaro figures.

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response to the resistance of texts and things to meaning production. I am eager to

discover what kinds of resistance to the established scripts that “self-storage” may offer,

for reading or being read, having one’s biometrics auto-read off a chip in your passport,

is increasingly the experience of citizen-subjects as well as immigrants, legal and illegal,

foreigners in the west and in relation to the state's always operational auto-archiving of

persons inside and at the borders of the state).

In positing the biopoltiical archive as the to be read rather than immediately readable,

Shelf-Life departs from is about how I read and don’t read material things like the storage

unit, books, files, and so on. The self-storage unit is a site specific installation, as it were,

which I figure as a topos, a topos that requires a metaphorology to be read, and which I

figure primarily as a box. In foregrounding reading rather than things in the archive, I

depart from material culture studies and thing theory. Consider the case of the book as

thing. As the New Historicism took an archival turn in 1990s that made books things to

be looked at and treated as personal items whose owners had left traces in their margins,

the act of reading was displaced by the matter of reading. Genre has come to the fore in a

kind of sociology of texts and cultural that traces circulation and distribution of books

rather than their interpretation or reception: how books are used matters now, not how

they are read or were read. An acquisition of a book is made equivalent to its reception.

Given these critical developments, my question about reading might be posed as follows:

When we were doing all this archival research in the 1990s and since to find new

“things” to talk about, where did reading go? The kind of panic narratives that one finds

in various debates about whether cultural studies should be stopped or I should return to

formalism forget to take into account that reading always goes missing, not something

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that goes away and then may return. Whereas materialist culture critics tend to skip over

the box, the storage unit, in order to get immediately to the physical, empirical thing that

is for them the thing, my interest in things lies elsewhere. I read things tropologically by

first staging them topologically in a relation dynamic between inside and outside, a desire

to open what is closed, and that generates what I call paralinear reading, a practice of

flipping the box over, looking at it from side to side, accepting that the box can never be

opened, that all I have to read are surfaces.31 Reading as the resistance to reading does

not close off or close down reading but pushes reading off in new direction, failure

thereby becoming a productive practice of parareading, or reading around, moving from

quotations serving as links between texts and that necessitate not only treating texts as

things in storage units but storage units as archive without a recognizable form and as

under (de)construction rather than finished, complete, architectural structures.

Closed reading is re-turning to texts you already read and now reread, but not

necessarily with a deeper understanding (as if reading could be narrated in linear,

progressive form) but as a returning of the screw of interpretation, to paraphrase

Shoshana Feldman, a returning yet again that may seem to be as much a renewal and

reopening of the text as it does a belated return to what you missed in your earlier

(re)reading(s).32 I am interested in how the phenomenon of “self-storage” might signal

an orientation to reading the archive, and specifically to reading as necessarily haunted or

31 I could also use the Wunderblock turned toy building block or Bildung block as

a reversal of the box metaphor. It’s unpackable box that can be nevertheless

boxed, put in a toy box. But the block offers resistance in a way that box seems

not to do. I just opened Ronell’s Stupidity and see she refers to Schlegel’s

fragments as “writing blocs” [sic], p.149.

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shot through by other reading positions, readers, and readings. Closed reading designates

a way of reading that is alive to the angles, to the mediation that is s/h/elf-help.33

32 See, for example, the reproduction of part of the preface from The Rhetoric of

Romanticism as the epigraph to the Bibliography in The Resistance to Theory

(121),

33 Paul de Man’s return is itself a bit nostalgic when read against E.r. Curtime’s

lament about the decadence of philogy: “Perhaps this decadence cannot be

halted. Since the sixteenth century philology has stood on firm ground. It exhibits

many stars of the first magnitude; and even the lesser stars have their function in

a constellation. In this discipline the emendation, restoration, and interpretation

of texts are rigorome skills. Without sound grammatical training and extensive

reading nothing can be accomplished. Germanic studies, Romantic studies,

English studies are without a tradition. Hence they are easy prey for the fashions

and aberrations of the “Zeitgeist.” They could improve their situation only if they

would resolve to go to school to the older philology. But to do that, one must

learn Greek and Latin—a demand which no sensible man would even dare to

express. . . . The controversies over methods in the last decade and the windmill

battle against so-called “Positivism” . . . merely show that there was a wish to

evade philology—on grounds which will not discmes.”

E.R. Curtime, “Retrospective” (chapter 18 of European Literature and the Late Middle Ages), 382; 383 [link this passage to Paul de Man’s return to philology—

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Spare Life

I hope it is clear by now that I am doing a cultural graphology of the archive as self-

storage, not a cultural studies of the bare life of things in storage units or a conventional

history of the storage-unit in linear, chronological time.34 I am concerned rather with a

home(lessness) fever, a sense of belongings that are out of place, in which the space of

already, in the heyday of “old” philology,” a philologist says philology is being evaded, that is a decadent phase. Curtime even mentions “great teachers” including his own 382, kind of the way de Man focuses on Harvard pedagogy]34 Things have to be described in order to be presented but I wonder that the

default genre for description remains biography. Anthropomorphism haunts

cultural history of the “lives” of things much as it does work on animals. See

Lorraine Dawson, ed. Things that Talk and ed. The Social Life of Things.The

Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5.Christopher Pinney, “Things

Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does that Object Come?” in Materiality, ed.

Daniel Miller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 257.Re Thing theory and

the fetish and desire for more and different—cite Pietz re the end of Border

Fetishisms. Brown re wanting to escape the consumerist narrative Cite Charis

Thompson on “ontological choreography” re the shifting ontological statme of

beings / things as they are performed. And as I have observed, the auto-

archiving protocols of the state bear close relation to those of cultural studies.

Part of the explanation I think, at least within cultural studies and the movement

loosely known as “thing theory” derives from the dissemination of the word

“biography” as a virtual synonym for what Arjun Appadurai calls the “social life of

things,” which proceeds according to a strategic or methodological fetishism.

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the home itself is at its maximal uncanniness. Beyond questions of physical storage and

the sociology or demographics of place, these units make available a language of

shelving or re-shelving, of storage and retrieval, whose tropic or tropologogical

operations—as the folks at “PS” or PublicStorage.com make clear—play with the

linearity and so temporality of things as they are successively used, stored, in motion, left

to rest.

Appadurai, it must be said, is a little uneasy about the agentive division of labor

between person and thing that results. Seek after the meanings of culture, and

writes Appadurai “for that I have to follow the things themselves, for their

meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories.” But quite

soon, almost immediately, he’s worried about accmeations of real fetishism and

so continues to say that, “thus even though from a theoretical point of view

human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of

view, it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.”? By

this doubling or decoupling of theory and method, Appadurai adopts a particular

mode of description or staging for things but avoids any rethinking of the relations

between the physical, material, semiotic, or rhetorical dimensions of the relations

between things and persons. People render matter lively. Matter renders

historians lively. The constitutive “as if” of Appadurai’s method renders biography

the zone of emergence for the agency of things, for their part that is in the

process of making and manufacture, of the “history of the grammè.”

The effect of such a mode of description cannot fail to linearize the

phenomenon and as anthropologist of visual culture Christopher Pinney puts it,

the key point might instead be that “any engagement with materiality must surely

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The appearance of “self-storage” constitutes an event with the possibility of altering

or introducing variables into the programs. I make no claim about the newness or

radicality of “self-storage” but begin instead by remarking the fact that it’s being

constitutes the arrival of an as yet unrecognized “material-semiotic” and “rhetorical”

actor, which may, by turns, induce yawns, horror, surprise, outrage, humor, and hope.

What interests me about “self-storage” is the way this archiving that does not yet know

supercede the question of culture.”? If, in other words, you inquire into the nature

of “things” and how they come to exist, how they are made and work or fail to

work, there ought to be something so profoundly disturbing or distracting about

the account you provide that my meual categories of understanding are thrown

into disarray. The lines by which I demarcate who or what has agency should

become unfixed. Indeed, for Pinney, the condition of “materiality [the irreducible

this-ness of say this book, this briefcase, this note pad] might be conceptualized

as a figural excess that can never be encompassed” by all the various historically

bound codes I typically use to make sense of “things”—that is to make them

speak to and of myselves. Things resist. Reading is the story of this resistance.

In Pinney’s terms, I might say that Appadurai’s “methodological fetishism”

essentially voids the instability that a conversation about matter entails and

instead transforms “things” into an emblem of the poIr of human culture to recode

matter endlessly. This is all to say that, for Appadurai, there is nothing inhuman

about “things”—nothing terrifying, strange, lethal or slimy. The figural excess that

is materiality appears only to disappear, locked down more tightly than ever, but

now corralled into funding the spectacular readings that the collection includes,

as I move by way of “things.” It is vital to note, hoIver, that “The Cultural

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that it produces an archive can produce patterns or rhythms within or between the lines of

conventional reading and writing, and so make visible to its readers orders of sense other

than those authorized by the usual scripts. To the extent that these patterns produce

meanings without reference to a human subject or that they are remarked by a person

only after the fact, they constitute a set of phenomena I call “shelf life” and on occasion

offer their human beneficiaries a form of what I will come to call “s/h/elf-help.”

4. The Cultural Graphology of Shelf-Life

Biography of Things,” the lead essay to the collection, as advocated by Igor

Kopytoff, takes as its founding unit of analysis the enslaved human person who is

processed as a commodity. Koptyoff then abstracts this reading protocol to serve

for all objects, all forms of existence, treating them, as it Ire, as so much “bare

life.” I find this significant because Koptyoff’s strategy of description responds

directly to the non-archiving or writing of enslaved human persons by offering

description as the first step in a mode of commutative justice. How could I not

agree? For what Koptyoff’s careful analysis demonstrates is that the turn to

things in cultural studies occurs precisely as a move to supplement the

experiences and the consequences of the processing of human persons as “bare

life.”?

Against this generic impulse to biography, I propose to read things instead as

“bio/biblio/graphies,” or things in situ, as books-cum-archives, subject to the

conditions and manipulations, the flexible and shifting ontological performances,

of “shelf life.”?

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Even before Jacques Derrida announced “archvilology” in Archive Fever and then

elaborated on the questions of new media raised there in Of Hospitality and Paper

Machine , Derrida undertook a cultural graphology of life. In Of Grammatology,

Derrida’s notion of arche-writing is itself a notion of life: called “the history of writing

[that] is erected on the base of the history of the grammè” that takes the form of “an

adventure of relationships between the face and the hand.”35 “the history of life—of

what,” he writes in “I have called differance—[is] the history of the grammè” aims to

make visible modes of cognition, historical consciousness, and forms of personhood that

do not respect the ratio of the line or the linearization of the world that occurs in a

phonetic writing system. For Derrida, “life” begins with the writing event of “‘genetic

inscription’ and ‘short programmatic chains’ regulating the behavior of the amoeba or the

annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a

certain homo sapiens” (Of Grammatology, 84). The project of metaphysics has been to

construct a shelter from the technologizing of being as writing and being written by

boxing up this program or inscription as an untranslatable origin—call it Nature—

forgetting, if you like, or holding at bay the insight that there exists a history of

technology, of the machine and the animal, that is simultaneously, necessarily a history of

human life.

Against this installed forgetting, Derrida offers what he calls “cultural

graphology” as an alternate historical practice that aims to think the “pluri-

dimensionality” of other “level[s] of historical experience” precisely by thinking the

35 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 84.

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“problems of the articulation of graphic forms and of diverse substances, of the diverse

forms of graphic substances (materials: wood, wax, skin, stone, ink, metal, vegetable) or

instruments (point, brush, etc, etc)” (87)—to which I add archive figured as boxes.

Staged within the larger project of a “cultural graphology,” “self-storage” augurs in more

ways than as a bit of extra space—making visible the process of arrangement and

ordering, and of a retrieval that “permits,” as Derrida observes, “a different organization

of space” (86) than that which is premised on linearity. On the one hand, these

performances of “self-storage” subordinate the units to existing species of space,

domesticating them, trading on the newness generated by their shock value in order to

recycle stories as old as sin. It is tempting then simply to suggest that such

representations of “self-storage” constitute the semiotic fine edge of the way the existing

modes of production at a given historical moment scramble or interrupt a technological

innovation or “event” by rerouting it to ensure that nothing “new” or unscripted occurs by

installing existing social hierarchies, scripts, and labor relations.36 On the other, the

cultural texts generated by “self-storage” constitute also a set of meaningful symptomatic

responses that disclose the imaginative or phantasmatic lure of the box as an object which

is never content with being merely a container and that often functions as a container

most concretely when its contents have gone or are thought to have disappeared. As a

practice of archivalization, self-storage interferes with the linearity of time, meaning, and

so also with the linearization of beings that passes as human “life.”

I grant that the archive exerts a referential pull, that the self-storage unit is an

empirical thing, that re-shelving involves physical books and other storage media (film

36 Benjamin, Buck-Morss, Eagleton’s book on Benjamin

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reels, DVDs, videocassettes) on physical bookshelves, or packed in boxes; refilling also

amount to the same thing. But the archive is also a topos, a space of mediation, a virtual

and metaphorical theater in which things have to be staged, taken off a shelf, as it Ire, in

order to be read rather than an organized space where things are placed in a classificatory

order to be retrieved when called up. The archive is a trope, as in using the archives,”

which are either named but not specified, just assumed to exist—t”the archives” is

rhetorical shorthand. It is this mobility or the kinematics of the shelf that I wish to

valorize, finding in the movement of items in inventories, archives, in and out of files and

boxes, briefcases, attachments, a constant exposure to or experience of the extrinsic or the

inhuman, that makes it possible to register the pluri-“dimensionality” of being. For me

then, the archive serves as topos and theme. Shelving, the production of “shelf-life,”

discloses the presence of poeisis, of reading and performance, as the wild cards or jokers

in the deck, some thing that pro-jects (throws forward not quite knowing the destination

or result),37 not finally reducible, though it may be black boxed in such terms, to a

signature of an artist or the mark of an artisan, but which precisely exceeds human

figurations of making. I plan to show that self-storage and s(h)elf-help involve

interpretive operation on texts, even if shelf-life cannot be assimilated to existing models

of neurosis and psychosis (and repetition compulsion, reanimation, the crypt, the death

drive, prosthetic extension, etc) and media (virtual versus material).38 Self-storage units,

especially those with temperature settings, are like archives in that the contents may not

only include things but also recordings that themselves constitute practices of virtual self-

archivalization: videos or digital discs of family celebrations or trips that pile up and yet

may rarely if ever be watched afterwards. Take the self-storage unit as the model archive

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from which to marshal another or occluded history of shelf-life and what stories will we

discover?

As my deployment of various narratives and vocabularies thus far signals, the

emergence and proliferation of self-storage units in the later twentieth century and their

recent representation in documentary and mainstreams films generate the central

concerns and questions about the biopolitics of the archive at the heart of the present

book. A series of broad questions follows: What is the relation between bio-politics and

the kinds of archivalization I call shelf-life? How might shelf-life provide me with

s(h)elf-help to manage the continued crisis of liberal democracy, help me to think

Agamben’s homo sacer, or “bare life” not as the virtual universalization of the victim, of

homo sacer into homines sacri, but in broader and more nuanced terms as bare lives that

include the refugee, the alien, the resident alien? What does it means to live bare life and

37 Aramis

38 In the cmyse of the present book, I turn to many of the later works by Jacques

Derrida and Paul De Man, Freud’s early writings, the work of Bruno Latmy on

things, some lesser known essays by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin on

books, and Georges Bataille on prehistoric art and speculative realist

philosophers Quentin Meillasoux and Ray Brisseur on the arche-fossil, Ray

Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave, 2007) and

Quentin Meillassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

Trans. Ray Brassier (London:Continuum, 2008).

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what kinds of bare lives are worth living? To what extent can shelf-life help us to think

about what forms resistance might take to the homo sacralization of populations, the

transformations of citizens into Foucault’s docile bodies? What are the consequences of

archivalization of one’s things and even one’s recordings of them (photographs, home

videos) for thinking about reading not only texts and films but things as themselves

media and mediated, for thinking about data retrieval, memory, forgetting, and value? Is

self-storage, I ask, a supplementary technique or prosthetic for the experience of bare life,

for the modeling of all spaces, finally, as potential camps, or camps in abeyance? What is

stake in my shift from camp to storage unit and archivalization?39 And what would it

mean to figure the camp as a box containing buried boxes materials, making sense of it in

terms of reading reshelving (as resistance to reading) rather than refilling and

reclassifying? And how might Derrida’s notion of the archive as oriented to the future, as

an imperative to remember not to forget the victims of injustice overtaken by the erasure

of the anarchivic death drive of the archive, as a future yet to be read, might be thought

not as a repetition compulsion but as a reading that repeats a past lapse?

Let me close with the following tentative conclusion: the ethics of close/d reading

follows from the self-exposure of reading, about paper and persons, and a biblio-oplis. I

am concretizing my model of the not yet read is the autobiographical anecdote about a

lapse that perform or stage lapses in reading, speaking. A not yet read text is one you

return to after having failed to understand it, not knowing if you will understand it less or

more when you do return to it. As a recursive learning curve, s/h/elf-help thus always

exceeds self-help and the assumptions about developmental ego psychology and

cognitive behavior that go with it.40 Beyond the figure of the human / reader / collector,

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s/h/elf-help admits to the possibility of unanticipated futures, indeed to the existence of a

“pluri-dimensionality” of worlds or orders of worlds that exist already, and which seek

refuge when remarked but not admitted to the biblio-polis in the form of publication41

At the end of the chapter,

World War II because 1933-45 he point at which biopolitics and the archive overlap and

make possible, even require a double reading.

Could get at failure and the archive in chapter one. Then the autobiographeme and

writing machine in chapter two—the self—is already a bio-machine. Automaticity of

39 “The Camp as ‘Nomos’ of the Modern,” Homo Sacer, 168-80. a universal

Marrano as the figure for the "aporia" of aporias that is death for Dasein (74) and

"the finished forms of Marrano culture." (74)  The Marrano returns on p. 77 and p.

81 (the last page of the book).

“Marrano (of the crypto-Judaic, and of the crypto-X in general).” p. 77 

it’s interesting here in which Judaism gets universalized or generalized insofar as

it same a secret, encrypted.  Derrida mentions that law passed in Spain in 1955

“finished” off the Marranos. So they are a dead minority.

By contrast, Agamben refers to the camps as the “hidden matrix” about “sacred

veils.” Agamben is kind of a Catholic and secular critic, who thinks it’s his job to

reveal the hidden and bring it into visibility. For Derrida there is no simple

movement from veiled (scared) truth to unveiled (secular truth as Catholic

revealed truth). There is a secret that cannot be secreted.

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reading, filing.

Chapter Three extends life and death politics beyond organic and inorganic and gets at

technology, the body, and the work of art. In relation to the detective genre—publication

form the archive. Microscript—readability.

Threshold of publication and national border—passports and papers now about Marrano

and Heidegger—Lacoue La Barthe and Heidegger.

Chapter Four pursues decamping to the archive via transport in film. Framed by Derrida

the Truth in Painting and Heidegger and Shapiro on thework of art as attached.

Chapter Five—paralinear reading and close/d reading. The archivoclasm of the opening

sequence.

Conclusion

By linking the camp to the archive, my central concern necessarily

41 (expand on Benjamins remarks about manuscripts better than the one on Schreber that go unpublished. Then return n chapter three to WB via the unpublished—he is the figure of the unpublished and posthumously published) In performing the troping of the storage thing turned topos we could also demonstrate explicitly that the more materialist one tries to be, the more one tries to give a positivist history of filing and storage, the more historical one tries to be (Vismann is the perfect case; Spieker's not so well done "art history" is another), the more metaphorical the "material" becomes. It is precisely by metaphorizing the archive a certain way that renders it readable, or readable with protocols for reading attached, in various ways: historians can read the files as historical documents but also construct that history so that older documents are viewed as works of art; artist historians can read the entire archive as a work of art in "deep storage" in order to write a history of "art" that opposes artistic filing systems to bureaucratic ones and wants to reverse their functionality (art would really be subversive it is worked; bureaucracy would lose power if it didn't function) and the possibility of access to legal files may preserve liberal democracy. ? [even Visman cannot sustain her initial opposition between file and book.  Unlike historians of the book who want to deal with this kind of problem by talking about the "concept" of the book, we could go with Derrida and talk about the "book" or File" or "archive" as notions rather than concepts to resist their being treated as part of a system through which one can not read the "materials" of the book or other paper machine.]

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becomes rereading. Once we realize the Homo Sacer is always already

virtual / or has been virtualized in modernity (1930s), then we

necessarily have to see bios and biopolitics as a question of unread

-ability, of reading as what remains.  We think of reading primarily

as the resistance to reading, reading as the not yet read, reading as

comfort through destruction (WB on book burning of the storyteller);

on the read as a medium (not reducible to physical materials).  But

all of these ways of thinking about reading have to routing for

us through the archive--reading as refiling, and even more crucially

as reshelving.  Reading as refiling / reshelving becomes a way of

living biopolitics virtually, a biobiblioprocessing and thanatobiblioprocessing.  The

archive, storage unit, as a temporary space for damaged life, not only of preservation and

safe-guarding--like a museum--or destruction--like a crematorium), but of bare life lived

virtually.  When and where you begin and where and when you stop reading become

instances where the reader becomes sovereign--moments of decision, moments of danger

(especially to the reader, who may have completely miss something). In this sense,

sovereignty and homo sacer collapse into each other in new ways (in ways other than the

Schmitt or WB had thought, since homo sacer becomes sovereign only over his own

homo sacerness by decamping to the archive). I am talking about reading as question of

biobiblio(thanatos) processing not reducible to chronological time and possible

irreducible to any chronometry (as in Demeure) but as achronic, not as

40 What many scholars of the history of the book take to be its materiality is here

inseparable from what those same scholars dismiss as psychic immateriality.

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a autobiography but as a question of autobiographicity (the conditions

of writing an autobiographicity).  

Bioprocessing: U-My-Tropias

Bioprocessing is the process, as it were, both of the dissolution of democracy and the

possibility of its reconstruction “hidden from the eyes of justice” (Agamben, Homo

Sacer, ) in the isolated yet there to be found archipelagos of “u-my-topias” of self-storage

units. Bio-processing involves reading and itself resistance (bio-processing by the state)

in which storage units are figured as "u-my-topias," places of file-sharing that are non-

places, always in transit sic mundi (bad Latin pun) where the temp work of metaphorical

reshelving operations may occur in a paralegal zone both beyond the state's view and also

beyond what Agamben calls "the eyes of justice." Processing is both anti-democratic and

the possibility of democracy (defined as a reshelving operation of the already / yet to be

read.

As we move form  "physical" storage unit to box to close/d reading I am in effect

turning the storage unit as thing into a topos and trope.  In other words we could perform

the argument we are making about cultural graphology and topos-ography and trop-

ography.  A "thing" like the storage unit becomes operational or inoperative in terms of

their unread -ability, in relation to paper machines that construct bare life as shelf life and

that render biobibliopolitics resistant to reading because they are not things but things

rendered readable by becoming topoi that then have be troped, con-figured. This

resistance to reading rendering the archive readable is the condition of access to the

archive, the condition historians have to forget or repress.42  

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The importance of the notion of resistance as I use it—Derridean—is the resistance and

reading as a way of managing resistance offers no guarantees. It will not free you from

the continuous necessity of reading—there’s no exit, you can’t get no clean—it’s a

condition of living, that is life, and you will have paid your money. It’s not about

capitalization, or a calculus of the subject—see Given Time and Gift of Death—the

subject as a capital seller—its a pure expenditure—that’s what living is—you don’t get

their life back, you don’t get a refund.

Materialists want to feel done, but they want to have the hallucinogenic experience of the

real that it is actually phenomenalized in the facsimile.

You cannot be done with reading—when you think you’re done, you’re a consumer, or in

ideology—you just bought something without knowing what you’ve ought or done.

Unconscious likes to rest, it doesn’t want to be put into play. People are fractured—read

negatively as the fragmentation of the subject into pieces, it’s part of a discourse about

reading people. Potentialities for living come out of this reading / resistantly.

NOTES

42 a Visman and a Spieker

110