Derrida in the Archive. Genetic Spectres1
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CzasKultury/EnglishCzasKultur 2/2013 y/English Abstract Hauntology is a trend in music, and, more generally, in culture, first defined by Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and Adam Harper. It in- cludes artists interested in the exploration of memory in strict re- Derridalation to media broadcasts (hence in the frequentthe references to radio and television). The alphabet of hauntology is an attempt to review the phenomenon in the form of an alphabetical compilation that in- Archive.cludes both its most significant representativesGenetic and profiles of those who initiated the trend. Spectres.Bio Olga Drenda (b. 1984) – a journalist and graduate in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Jagiellonian University. She has pub- Jakublished in a number Momro of Polish cultural periodicals and is the author of the blog duchologia.tumblr.com, dedicated to hauntology in Poland. translated by Joanna Maciulewicz 2/2013 62 Derrida in the Archive. Genetic Spectres1 Jakub Momro In dreams we see but we do not hear Sigmund Freud Writing as sweet nourishment or as excrement, the trace as seed or mortal germ, wealth or weapon, de- tritus and/or penis” Jacques Derrida Words are treated in dreams as though they were things, and for that reason they are apt to be com- bined in just the same way as are presentation of things Sigmund Freud Can one imagine an archive without foundation, with- out substrate, without substance? Jacques Derrida 1 This research has been funded by the National Centre of Science from resources dedicated to fund the internships of scholars who have recently obtained their doctoral degree (decision number DEC-2012/04/S/HS2/00315). 63 CzasKultury/English 2/2013 Before Derrida began looking for the spectres of Marx in the 1990s, a few decades earlier he entered the archives. The texts he wrote under the auspices of Freud during a critical stage of deconstruction anticipate his later philo- sophical-political-theological interpretation of the concept, theme or aporia known by the term “spectre”. Freud appears on the antipodes of his discourse about Marx, paradoxical- ly as a radical materialist, who, Derrida argues, alongside the concept of the unconscious, also developed the concept of the stage [scéne], unparalleled in modernity. The concept encompasses both a new approach to representation as well as a new outline for a philosophy of mediation and of the medium itself, comprehended as that which transcends the order of presence and absence. While for the author of Writing and Difference Marx is an example of a dispersed and spectral materialism, and hence eventually dematerialised, Freud touches upon the question of origin itself: what can emerge in the space of writing, what creates the inscrip- tion of language understood as a system of differences, and, finally, what is connected with the possibility or potenti- ality of memory itself and the primordiality of experience. Derrida’s early texts anticipate what the philosopher – nearly parallel to his own Marxian project – will do with the already self-contained concept of the archive. “Mal d’archive”, the text in question, turns out to be the comple- ment to what the French philosopher in the 1960s referred to as the “scene of writing” in relation to Freud’s texts. Years later, Derrida described his approach more precisely, introducing the term “archive fever” or “archive disease”, but his reasoning remains nearly the same. Let us go back 64 Jakub Momro, Derrida in the Archive. Genetic Spectres. then to the latter half of the twentieth century and look at the process by which this unique genetic plot was con- structed, and then return briefly to a period closer to ours, in which the archive becomes a trope in psychoanalytical critical theory. The spectre as a trace In Freud and the Scene of Writing Derrida develops a basic thesis which states that deconstruction is not a psychoanal- ysis of philosophy. What then are the stakes in the process of deconstructing the Freudian scene? The French philos- opher responds in the following way: what occupies centre stage in psychoanalytical research is repression. It can be argued that it is a kind of psychical mechanism that main- tains two elements in a state of dialectical tension. On the one hand, by means of repression, subjectivity strives to cut itself off from undesired images, thoughts, memories; on the other, this subjective action is related to the libidi- nal aspect: it is the libido, operating in silence, that relin- quishes subjectivity, which is incapable of offering proper defences against that which is unpleasant. We encounter a fundamental paradox here. The satisfaction of the libido, which is pleasant by itself, may lead to what is unpleasant – repression is created by means of subjectivity, while the unconscious constitutes its own repression. In other words, the active subject is confronted by the unconscious, which is engendered by means of repressed images. In this way, the repression is not directed at the libido, or affect, but at the very principle of the unconscious, that is, as Lacan would have it, at the structure of thoughts themselves. 65 CzasKultury/English 2/2013 In this context, Derrida puts forward two propositions. Firstly, the central position of repression makes philos- ophy conceive of itself as episteme, that is, as knowledge in which the experience of subjectivity is accumulated in the form of a concept. Philosophy as a holistic, purpose- ful, consolidated narration, or as ontoteleology, needs to repress whatever threatens its stability, whatever entails a dismantling of permanent symbolical forms – and, thus, writing. Secondly, Derrida endeavours to overturn such an understanding of the mechanism of repression, claim- ing that it is not something general, but constitutes a his- torical dimension of particular actions within writing it- self, of its “work”. In other words, what he is interested in is not what results from the “complete repression” of writ- ing as an element rejected by the conscious dimension of an individual’s being, but its status as a symptom which negates the possibility of presence as such. In the end, from the point of view of deconstruction – in accordance with Freud’s idea – it is not so much the success of the repression that matters, but the return of the repressed (des Verdrängten), or that which disrupts the dialectical association of presence and absence. If it is thus a question of excluding the trace that disrupts this dialectic, then what kind of trace does Derrida have in mind? In order to answer this question, the philosopher constructs a kind of imaginarium of what belongs to the trace: it is a vestige, understood as an remnant of a certain Idea (for instance, of a presence, subject, thing, substance, representation), a material residue that disrupts the order 66 Jakub Momro, Derrida in the Archive. Genetic Spectres. of the conscious; it is “excrement” from the point of view of metaphysics, that which is excreted, negated and re- pressed; and, finally, it is a spectre, that which haunts the order of permanent presence. This aspect of haunting is essential because the trace understood as a return of the repressed is the very structure of the temporal rift within the limits of the operating consciousness, a lack in which the spectral structure of time is manifested, intersect- ing a perfectly stable subject. But how can we conceive of such a time of spectral appearance? How to conceive of a presence which is not a pure and simple presence? We find the answer in the deconstruction of the libidinal economy. Although Derrida faithfully accompanies Freud on his philosophical journey, he criticises on principle his psychoanalytical economy based on its dualist way of thinking. The point is to disentangle oneself from the or- der of binary opposition between what is conscious and what is unconscious; to conceive the trace not as a prod- uct of this economy, but as an irreducible element of the materiality of writing. This is because materiality does not constitute a straightforward opposition to incorporeal consciousness, but is a sign of such an element in a psychic system which precedes any kind of possible calculation of presence and absence, life and experience. Derrida thus reads the principle of the dialectical tension between the pleasure and reality principle in defiance of Freud himself. Death becomes radically temporal and exists thanks to a movement of deferral that precedes the dialectic, and which cannot be reduced to metaphysical oppositions. 67 CzasKultury/English 2/2013 This pre-established movement of alienating that which is primal may be described according to the logic of the structure of afterwardsness, based on the fact that some- thing takes place without taking place, and that the pri- mal scene that establishes the trajectory of trauma inval- idates the equivalent calculation of life and death, placing death at the very centre of life. In other words, death does not constitute “the exterior” of life, but is always already a part of its economy. The trace does not only deconstruct presence but it also anticipates the spectral structure of the unconscious, which – like a broken record – repeats what it produces, thereby announcing the deferred death of the sense, of the language of concepts, of the subject. “In the beginning” there is thus the archive, a synonym for memory, as well as a collection of material forms-in- carnations of the primal repetition. Derrida says: The unconscious text is already woven of pure trac- es, differences in which meaning and force are united; a text nowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions. Originary prints. Everything begins with reproduction.2 Derrida explains this mechanism for reproduction by moving from metaphor to metonymy. Metonymy disrupts the metaphorical order of the verticality of representa- tion (metaphor functions on the principle that the famil- iar constitutes an allusion to the unfamiliar) and becomes a sequence of words, images, dreams which disrupts the 2 Jacques Derrida and Jeffrey Mehlman.