Archive Fever

The scene: lecture, original title: "Memory: The Question of Archives."

Auspices, The Freud Museum in London and the French, International Society for the History
of Psychiatry and of Psychoanalysis.

What is at issue: the physical archives of Freud,

the archives of memory, i.e., the whole notion of the unconscious as the archive of repressed,
childhood experiences, memories
The archives of society, of their role in defining the state, in state power. How does the
control of memory figure into state power.

As Derrida notes, the notion of archive (from ???) involves two principles, commencement and
commandment.

It is the place where original documents are kept and also the archons’ (rulers) place. “The archons are first
of all the documents’ guardians.” ... They have to power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such
archons, these documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on us to impose the law.”

The concept involves originality [original presence, original experience, etc.], and the law, the
commandment, that follows from this.

It, thus, becomes a metaphysical notion, one where original presence determines correspondence with
itself, validity (truth) of claims, lawfulness, etc. It has a special relation to self-identity insofar as this
involves both the past and the future in the form of identity be grounded on memory and on promise
keeping (on pledging myself for the future). My memories remind me of my pledges, they remind me of
who I am and who I pledge myself (in the future) to be.

The difficulty here is that this establishing of one identity is as much a matter of exclusion of the other as it
is inclusion of what is my own. The affirmation of the “this is proper” involves the exclusion of the
improper. The exclusion is a forgetting, a violence to the other.

The archives, then, are essential to state power in its effort to maintain the identity of the state—keep it on
course. But this assertion of identity is also an assertion of denial of the other—the other who is actually in
me. I consign to the other, those aspect of myself that I cannot tolerate in my attempt to fashion an identity.
So does the state.

With this we have the death instinct. “It works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also
with a view to effacing its own “proper” traces--which consequently cannot properly be called ‘proper.”
(10). It hides itself by repressing its action in myself and also by projecting this action on to the other. As
an example of such projection, Derrida notes the advantage of the Devil for the hypothesis of God (who is
supremely One and Unique). Apparently “irreconcilable with God, we see now that it can also exculpate
God: evil for evil’s sake, diabolical evil, the existence of the Devil can serve as an excuse for God, because
exterior to him ...” (13).
Archive Fever, pp. 13-23

The question of the archive, that of an aid to memory. We write down what we cannot
remember. Why do we forget?

If we did not forget, if pure presence, if the trace without any erasure, ruled, then there would
not be any need for an archive.

The question: the origin of the forgetting. The claim, it is inherent in the notion of the archive
itself. Its goal, the establishment of identity for the sake of rule—the archive is where the
Archons live and pronounce the law. But the identity excludes what inherent any being—this
being the other.
What we have here is 1st the notion that differance is prior to identity, and 2nd that every
identity can be made to “tremble”—i.e., be deconstructed by showing that to assert it as some
definite “this” is to exclude the “that” which is also part of it.

As Alan Bates put this in his introduction to Derrida’s Writing and Difference: “Every
totality, he shows, can be totally shaken, that is, can be shown to be founded on that which it
excludes, that which would be in excess for a reductive analysis of any kind.” (xvi).

This is why Derrida is a “post-structuralist.” As Bates says, “He sees structuralism as a form
of philosophical totalitarianism, i.e., as an attempt to account of the totality of a phenomenon
by reduction of it to a formula that governs it totally” (ibid.). Derrida’s reaction to this is to
show that the formula cannot account for the excess, this being its opposite.

Bates continues: “this excess is often posed as an aporia, the Greek word of a seemingly
insoluble logical difficulty: once a system has been ‘shaken’ by following its totalizing logic
to its final consequences, one finds an excess which cannot be construed within the rules of
logic, for the can only be conceived as neither this nor that, or both at the same time—a
departure from the rules of logic” (ibid.).

The point: The thing and its excess are both there, this because difference is prior to identity.

Back to the archive and to memory.

Derrida mentions the “mystic pad” that Freud sees as analogy of our mental apparatus. In his
“Note on the Mystic Writing-Pad,” (Standard ed., 1925, XIX, 227-233), Freud attempts to
solve the problem of how we remember—a problem he earlier worked on in the “Project”
(Standard ed., 1905, I, 295-300).

The problem is that two separate things are required for memory. The perceptual, receptive
part of the mind must be permanently open to new sensations. But what is received must
change the mind. So, it seems that “the neurons must be both influenced and also unaltered,
unprejudiced” (I, 299). As Derrida puts it, “what makes such an apparatus almost
unimaginable is the necessity of accounting simultaneously … for the permanence of the trace
and for the virginity of the receiving substance” (“Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Writing
and Difference, p. 300).

The mystic pad does this since it consists of a sheet of clear plastic, coated on the bottom with
a film of wax, and then a wax tablet. You write on the tablet, the writing appears, you then
lift the plastic sheet and the writing disappears, but a trace of the writing is left on the wax
tablet below.

Here remembering also involves erasure. In Freud’s words, “If we imagine one hand writing
upon the surface of the Mystic Writing-Pat while another periodically raises its covering sheet
from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way in which I tried to
picture the function of the perceptual apparatus of our mind” (XIX, 232). As Derrida
comments, “Traces thus produce the space of their inscription by acceding to the period of
their erasure” ” (ibid., Writing and Difference, p.326). The pad must lift off, for the trace to
be there.

Derrida is not interested this mechanical metaphor as such, but rather what it points to: The
fact that the permanence of memory requires the opposite, the erasure of the impression. His
claim is that “if there were only pure perception”—the pure openness to one perception after
another—nothing would be recorded; no writing would be produced, retained, repeated as
legibility.
But pure perception does not exist”--there is also the laying down of the memories. “We are
written only as we write.” What gets written is laid down as a trace, once the paper is lifted
up. Thus “writing is unthinkable without repression. The condition for writing is that there
be neither a permanent contact nor an absolute break between strata: the vigilance and the
failure of censorship” (The plastic must be in contact with the wax, but not permanently or
else the writing will completely cover it. And the plastic must not be lifted off permanently,
or else nothing more will be written). ” (Writing and Difference, p. 226).

What happens is that with the lifting off of the plastic sheet, the writing gets put into the
unconscious. “The wax slab, in fact, represents the unconscious” ” (Writing and Difference,
p.224-5, Freud, XIX, 230-31).

As for writing. It is not that first there is perception, then there is writing. As Freud notes,
“The layer which receives the stimuli—the system of perceptual consciousness—forms no
permanent traces; the foundations of memory come about in other, supplementary systems”
(XIX, 230). The traces must be recorded in other systems, for us to be conscious of them.
This recording is their “writing”. If we don’t write them down in our memories, then we
don’t perceive in any self-conscious way.

As Derrida puts this, “writing supplements perception before perception even appears to itself
[is conscious of itself]. ‘Memory’ or writing is the opening of that process of appearance
itself. The ‘perceived’ may be read only in the past, beneath perception and after it.” ”
(Writing and Difference, p.224).

If my selfhood relies on my memory, then as Derrida says, “The ‘subject’ of writing does not
exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a
system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the world” ” (Writing
and Difference, p.226-7).

The claim: what we call our identity is based on memory, but memory is a form of writing,
the writing can be social or global. And it always involves some form of repression. There is
not just the openness of perception, there is also the lifting off of the plastic sheet so that the
space can be cleared for new writing. What is thereby repressed is thrown into the
unconscious.

Every society has its means of repression, its means of archiving. What is the mystic-pad
today? Is it email? Derrida claims: “The technical structure of the archiving archive also
determines the structure of the archivable content, even its in its very coming into existence
and in its relation to the future. The achivization produces as much as it records the event.
This is also our political experience of the so called news media” (Archive Fever, p. 17).

The questions: What is the lifting off of the plastic today? What is repressed? How does
technology determine this? What is the nature of the selfhood that is currently being created?

Derrida writes, “The archive has always been a pledge and like every pledge, a token of the
future” (p. 18). The question is, what sort of promises, pledges are being made today, what
sort of a future is under consideration.

Derrida writes: The model of this singular ‘mystic pad” also incorporates what may seem in
the form of a destructive drive, to contradict the conservation drive. … There would indeed
be nor archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness,
which does not limit itself to repression” (p. 19).

The question is how does our technology, our “writing” or memory structure this possibility
of forgetfulness today? Where is the destructive drive, what form does it take?
Freud, Archive Fever, pp. 23-36

The preamble opens with the question: “what is the moment proper to the archive, … the
instant of archivization …?” Is it when I push “save” on my computer, thus leaving a lasting
“impression” on the hard drive? “Does it change anything that Freud did know about the
computer? (Archive Fever, p. 26).

It then moves on to what we mean by impression and more importantly how this meaning has
been shaped by Freud.

There are three meanings in the word “impression.”

The first is “scriptural or typographic” — it is that of an inscription that leaves a
mark at the surface or in the thickness of a substrate.

• The Freudian question here is where is the substrate: in the conscious, the
preconscious, the unconscious?
• Freud distinguishes between memory and the archive by the posing of “several
psychological systems” and the notion of “depth psychology”—the retrieval and
examination of unconscious memories.
• He notes that such divisions are not yet identifiable with locations in the brain.
The hypotheses of several psychological systems set out to be no more than
“graphic illustrations (XIV, 175) (Archive Fever, p. 27).

Here Derrida raises the question of the relation between repression and suppression,
Verdrängung and Unterdrückung. Repression remains unconscious in its operation
and result, while suppression concerns what “can never be repressed in the
unconscious, but only suppressed and displaced in another affect.” It is a form of
censorship where one affect (one response) is replaced by another. How does this
effect the archive?

The second meaning is that of the place of the impressions, the archive? Do we have
a stable concept of this? Derrida claims that the concept is always divided,
disjointed between two forces: the drive to conserve and the drive to destroy. As
Derrida notes, “Freudian psychoanalysis proposed a new theory of the archive” It
takes account of “a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire
or any possibility for the archive” (Archive Fever, p. 29).

There is a double reference here:

1. The notion of the mystic pad, the lifting up of its plastic coversheet and the
consequent erasure is necessary if we are to keep on writing. The lifting up is
the openness of the future.
2. The notion of repression—the lifting up of the pad is the necessary work of the
death drive, it pushes under, represses the writing.

Here, one can apply this to the notion of the archive itself. Its very concept can be
repressed. At this point, we have no stable concept of the archive. It only designates
a notion, one open to the future writing of the concept. Thus, Derrida writes, “I
consider it to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very
concept of the future” (ibid.). In other words, right now with our new technologies,
we are lifting the mystic pad, we are repressing and writing anew the notion of the
archive.

The third meaning of impression is that of impression Freud’s works have made on
our thoughts, including those of archive and impression. In whatever discipline, we
are all “marked in advance” by the “Freudian impression” (Archive Fever, p. 30).
 The Forward takes up these themes by asking whether the archive of Freud’s own
writings should be subjected to his notions or whether there is an independent way of
dealing with them.

Derrida will take the former course. He will use Freudian terms to analyzes Freud’s
own legacy.

Note: this use of self-reference is essential to the Derridian notion of

deconstruction. It uncovers the “excess” the irreconcilable in any
discipline’s foundations. The model here is Gödel’s method. Here
Derrida’s leitmotif will be the question often asked of psychoanalysis—how
far is it a Jewish science, i.e., tied to a specific, culture, tradition, and race.

Archive Fever, 37-49

The project, the application to Freud and the Freudian Archive the very process of Freudian
analysis.

The test of self-reference. Will the theory, when applied to itself produce a contradiction?
Will the result be something undecidable—as in Gödel's theorem?

The point: if difference is prior to identity, then making the thing apply to itself ought to tease
out the difference. The difference will show in the part that has been suppressed showing
itself.

What has Freud's theory suppressed?

For one thing, its Jewish origins
For another, the feminine

How are they related?

Judaism is patriarchal
The role of the father in middle eastern societies
The role of the patriarchs
The forgetting of women, of surprise that women could speak in their own right?

Freud's theory is patriarchal

It is oriented about the Oedipus complex, the fear of castration of the child, the ritual
murder, overcoming of the father, etc.
What is important here is the male sex organ
Yet most of Freud's patients were women.
What is going on?

Judaism has the injunction to keep the law and remember it—bind it to the head and the
forearm, inscribe it in ones heart, mark it (through circumcision) on one's body.

Freud's theory is a theory of the archive, of the memories that, repressed, must be recalled, of
the rule of the past (of the childhood experience archived in the unconscious)

Judaism is monotheistic, a religion of the one, jealous god, who is the father

Freud's theory is a theory of the repression of the other, of what does not fit.
Here, the establishment of the archive as a source of self-identity and the repression of what
does not fit with this go together.

Thus, there is a contradictory impulse in the archive

The injunction to remember
The injunction to keep one's identity

The difficulty here is that this establishing of one identity is as much a matter of
exclusion of the other as it is inclusion of what is my own.

The affirmation of the “this is proper” involves the exclusion of the improper. The
exclusion is a forgetting, a violence to the other.

In Derrida’s words [which echo Levinas’s], “... the question of exemplarity ... here
situates the place of all violences. Because if it just to remember the future and the
injunction to remember, namely the archontic injunction to guard and gather the
archive, it is no less just to remember the others, the other others and the other in
oneself , and that the other peoples could say the same thing--in another way.” (77).
Such remembering the other is, however, suppressed in the whole point of
establishing the archive, which is distinguish a people (or individually, a self) as one
people, (as one-self).

The point is to constitute oneself as “one and unique” But this involves the
violence, the injustice, of forgetting, repressing the other, including “the other in
oneself

Thus, we justly need the archive for self identity. But the archives is not simply
remembering but also involves the injustice (the violence) of forgetting the other in
oneself

The parallel with Judaism: the suppression by the Jews of the other inhabitants of Canaan.
Yet, the constant temptation, often yield to, to intermarry with them.

The modern parallel. Who is a Jew? What does a Jew look like? Israel, has black, blond,
Chinese Jews—all the result of intermarriage.

These are the broad issues:

Back to the text:

where Derrida to work his deconstruction turns to a reading of Yoself Yerushalmi's book,
Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

His interest is in the Monologue that take up the last 30 pages.

In it, Yruschalmi wants to know if psychoanalysis is a Jewish science, i.e., has been
shaped by concepts and experiences inherent in the Jewish experience. Freud’s
daughter, Anna, affirms that it is. The monologue ends, “When your daughter
conveyed those words to the congress in Jerusalem, was she speaking in your name?
Please tell me, Professor. I promise I won’t reveal your answer to anyone.” (44).

Derrida makes several points here:

First, the asymmetrical nature of the covenant binding the Jews. The covenant is not one of
mutual agreement. In their seventh day, the Jewish child is circumscribed. Freud's father, the
arch-patriarch re-circumcises Freud with the gift of the Bible with its second skin. Yerushalmi
does it again with the use of the "we": "in speaking of the Jew I shall not say 'they.' I shall say
'we.' The distinction is familiar to you.' (41)

Is it? Hasn't in fact Freud spent his life (like those of the other assimilated Jews of his time,
denying his Jewishness).

Isn't this suppression part of the archive fever of the Freudian Archives.

Freud wants to found a science. But a science should not be Jewish but universal. In
Derrida's words, the sciences should be "intrinsically independent of the singular archive of
their history. We know well that these things (science, philosophy, theory, etc.) have a
history … but the structure of the theoretical … does not have an intrinsic and essential need
for the archive.” To claim that it does transforms the science (45).

But this is precisely what Freud does not want.

The second point concerns the question of whether Anna Freud spoke in Freud’s name “as if
he doubted that a daughter, above all the daughter of Freud, couls speak in her own name,
almost thirty years after the father’s death” (44).

What is at work here? According to Derrida, it si the surprise that a woman has anything to
say.

Freud associates rationality with maleness. We cannot doubt the identity of the mother of the
child (and the Jews have matrilineal descent), but the identity of the father is depends on
"rational inference." From this comes a "phallogocentric conclusion: because of this
presumed call to reason in the assignation of paternity, beyond the witness of the sense, the
passage to patriarchy marked the civilizing triumph of reason over sensibility, of science over
perception."

What do we have here? What is inscribed in psychoanalysis from its Jewish origins?
According to Derrida, it is the thought: "we the fathers, we the archons, we the patriarchs,
guardians of the archive and of the law" (48). But in this, there is a suppression and
forgetting, an archive fever.

Derrida, Archive Fever, pp. 49-67

The curious nature of Yerushalmi’s question: is psychoanalysis a Jewish science?

In a private letter, Freud has already said, that he wasn’t sure that it was, but that if it is,
he “wouldn’t be ashamed” (50)

Why isn’t that good enough? (50). What else does Yerushalmi want? Yerushalmi
writes: “I only want to know whether you ultimately came to believe it to be so”
(ibid.).
Can this question be answered? Who would answer it? Freud on his deathbed, the
ghost of Freud?

In Derrida’s words, “If he ask it of him again, if he asks for more, if he seems to ask
a new confirmation of him, it is as if he wanted the last word, the last will, the
ultimate signature of a dying father—and to be even more sure, of an already dead
father” (51)

The ghost should answer.

What does this do to the notion of the archive? to the archive as something already
given in the past, done with?

Here, the determining word is that of a ghost—a word that has no public presence.

As Derrida notes, “at this point, he changes registers and times entirely. …The very
order of knowledge, at least of classical knowledge, is suspended” (52)

How would we know that the ghost answered? How would we know if what it said
was Freud’s real view?

We face the same problem that Hamlet does in trying to judge the value of the
specter that claims to be Marx’s ghost.

What are we facing here? An aporia, something undecidable that points to the
differance at the heart of the notion of the archive.

Can Freud’s private thoughts in their unique singularity be represented? What are
we looking for. What is the premise of our search?

Insofar as the premise is the unique presence of Freud to himself, his inner thoughts on questions
like the Jewish character of psychoanalysis, the nonpresence at its heart destabilizes it.
The very notion that I can be present to myself in a fixed and unchanging manner contradicts the
fluidity of mental life. The fluidity is there because this presence is based on difference, on a
nonpresence that allows detachment and motion.
Such non-presence, in its inability to be fixed, need continual supplements, continuous attempts to
supplement the fluidity with a fixed position.

Yruschalmi’s book is one such supplement. The book “can only illuminate, read, interpret,
establish its object, namely a given inheritance, by inscribing itself into it, ... by enriching it ...
Yruschalmi’s book, including its fictive monologue, henceforth belongs to the corpus of Freud ...
whose name it also carries.” (67-8).

Here, the very sense of the archive is reversed. The original presence has not to do with the past,
with the corpus of Freud’s work. It has to do with the future, with the supplements that are
continually trying to fix it.

Another paradoxical element in Yerushalmi quest—that of self-reference. Is it to be allowed or

not.

In the ideal of science, including the science of history there is no self-reference. Derrida writes:
“The historian … does not present himself either as a Jew or as a psychoanalyst, as such. He
treats the psychoanalytic archive as data, the right of access to which ... are not properly the affair
either of the Jew or of the psychoanalyst” (53)

But Yerushalmi violates this when in the Monologue he says, “we Jews.”

He also violates it in using psychoanalytic terms to describe Freud’s relation to his father—i.e., in
describe Freud’s writing of the book “Moses and Monotheism” as a “deferred obedience” to his
father Jacob, who had advised him to read the Bible (the Torah, the 5 books of Moses).

Deferred obedience is imposed on by the dead father whose influence gets stronger and
stronger. (59)
 As Derrida remarks, “Yerushalmi knows that he cannot have this exteriority” (55). It would be
like trying to do the history of science without any knowledge of science, i.e., “lie claiming to
right to speak without knowing what one’s speaking about”

But this self-reference is both denied and affirmed in Yerushalmi’s book. He wants to approach
Freud externally, but knows that he can’t.

Thus, he gives a psychoanalytic reading of Freud’s relation to his father, and yet he writes, “In
what follows I neither presume to dignify my reconstruction as psychoanalytic …” (56)

The reading, however, is psychoanalytic: Yerushalmi writes, “In writing Moses and Monotheism
he [Freud] belatedly obeys the father and fulfills his mandate by returning to the intensive study of
the Bible …” (60) We have here an example of “deferred obedience.”

But, then, once we admit this, i.e., admit this analysis to the interior of the historians work, we
then can apply to Yerushalmi himself. As Derrida remarks, “All these signs remind us that
Yerushalmi also ‘belatedly obeys the father,’ whether he wants to or not. He identifies with him
while interiorizing him like a phantom who speaks in him before him” (61).

But this lack of exteriority puts in question the objectivity of Yerushalmi’s own work as a
historian.

The aporia: without self-reference, without admitting psychoanalysis into his analysis, his
work is empty. Admitting it, however, he undermines its objectivity.

A third aporia

Concerning Moses and Monotheism that treats of the fact that in Numbers 14:10, the Israelites,
having heard that the land Moses is leading them to is filled with numerous and gigantic soldiers
(in comparison with which, the Israelite scouts felt they themselves were like “grasshoppers”),
stone Moses and Arron. God has to intervene “as a cloud of glory” to stop the stoning.

Yerushalmi claims, that Moses could not have been killed by the Israelites, because “the murder
would not have been repressed, but on the contrary it would have been remembered and recorded”
(64)

Derrida replies how can we know. The intention was actual “and in truth accomplished. There
was acting out, the stones were thrown in fact” (65).

Why couldn’t the fact that stones did kill Moses be repressed. Why couldn’t be in the
unconscious and only show itself through symptoms?

The unconscious cannot appear. All appearances are supplements. Couldn’t it be the case that
Freud’s book, and Yerushalmi’s book are supplements. What we have here is a repetition where
the “interpretation of the archive (here, for example, Yerushalmi’s book) can only illuminate, read,
establish its object … by inscribing itself into it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it
enough to have a rightful place in it. Thee is no meta-archive” (67). “One will never be able to
objectivize it with no remainder. The archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive
is never closed. It opens out of the future” (68).

So the aporia is: we think we are uncovering an original “past” fixed presence, but we are actually
endlessly creating it.
Freud, Archive Fever, pp. 67-81

The main claim of the book comes p. 67: “the interpretation of the archive … can only
illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object by inscribing itself into it, that is to say by
opening it and enriching it enough to have a rightful place in it. There is not meta-archive”
That is to say there is no original. The original is in the future.

“By incorporating the knowledge deployed in reference to itself, the archive augments itself,
… it gains in auctoritas. But in the same stroke it loses the absolute authority it might claim
to have. One will never be able to objectivize it with no remainder. The archivist produces
more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future” (68).

The point is that for an archive to function as such, i.e., to have authority, to act as an author,
it must grow. It must take on the authority of the commentators on the original text. This is
the work of the humanities. It is also the work of the identity of the state. The identity is not
original it is an opening to the future.

How does this opening play itself out in the case of the Jews? in the case of psychoanalysis

There are three opening (doors) to the future here.

The first is the promise to keep secret Freud’s reply to the question whether psychoanalysis is
a Jewish science. Kept secret, the question will remain open. (69)

The second door is the claim that we can know the answer to this question only in terms of the
future. As Yerushalmi writes: “whether psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science that we shall
know, if it is at all knowable, only when much future work has been done. much will depend
on how the very terms ‘Jewish’ and ‘science’ are to be defined” (70-71).

This opening to the future contains an aporia: “Only the future of science, in particular that of
psychoanalysis, will say whether this science is Jewish, because it will tell us what science is
and what Jewishness is. But only the future of Judaism will be able to guide and precede a
science of Judaism, indeed, a Jewish science”

Which determines which in this opening to the future, psychoanalysis determining Judaism or
Judaism determining psychoanalysis?

Yerushalmi recognizes this aporia, that is why he says “if at all knowable.”

This is the second door of the future. The future is not knowable. It is “the not knowable as
such” (What is known only repeats the past that is known). (72)

The third door into the future is contained Yerushalmi’s claim that Jewishness (as opposed to
Judaism, the religion) is openness to the future. “Jewishness … is precisely waiting for the
future” (72).

Its ground is the expectation of the Messiah who might come at “any second”
The Messiah who will make things totally different. Who will bring what exceeds our
knowledge—i.e., the real future.

As an example: there will be a resolution of the Oedipal conflict of fathers and sons: “He shall
reconcile the hearts of the fathers with sons and the hearts of sons with their fathers” (Malachi
3:14).

The claim here is that being Jewish and being open to the future are the same thing. This is a
unique characteristic. (74)
But then there is also another unique trait claimed for the Jews. “the obligation of memory …
the obligation of the archive”

Yerushalmi: “God is known only insofar as he reveals himself ‘historically’ [to the Jews].”
(75)

Derrida: “the injunction to memory falls to Israel and to Israel alone”

What we have here are two “exclusivities, two exclusions, two solitudes, two responsibilities”
linking the past and the future.

It is “as if God had inscribed only one thing into the memory of one single people and of an
entire people: in the future remember to remember the future” (76)

Or as Yerushalmi puts it: “only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt
as a religious imperative to an entire people” (76)

Back to the original question:

Derrida asserted, for an archive to function as such, i.e., to have authority, to act as an author,
it must grow. It must engross the authority of the commentators on the original text. This is
the work of the identity of the state. The identity is not original it is an opening to the future.

The question was: How does this opening play itself out in the case of the Jews? in the case of
psychoanalysis?

Yerushalmi has just reserved “for Israel both the future and the past as such, both hope and
the duty to memory”

The future is based on the memory, which it alone guards.

There is here the violence of exclusion

Derrida writes: “... the question of exemplarity ... here situates the place of all violences. Because if it just
to remember the future and the injunction to remember, namely the archontic injunction to guard and gather
the archive, it is no less just to remember the others, the other others and the other in oneself , and that the
other peoples could say the same thing--in another way.” (77).

Such remembering is, however, suppressed in the whole point of establishing the archive, which is
distinguish a people (or individually, a self) as one people, (as one-self). The point is to constitute oneself
as “one and unique”

But this involves the violence, the injustice, of forgetting, repressing the other, including “the other in
oneself.” [Think, here, of the phenomena of projection on to the other of what one does not want to affirm
about oneself.]

Thus, we justly need the archive for self identity. But the archives is not simply remembering but also
involves the injustice (the violence) of forgetting the other in oneself “because the injustice of the this
justice can [and in fact does] concentrate its violence in the very constitution of the One and of the
Unique.” (77).

The result is “the One in the figure of totalizing assemblages (‘to an entire people’). The gathering into
itself of the One is never without violence, nor is the self-affirmation of the Unique, the law of the
archontic, the law of consignation which orders the archive.”
The violence involves “repression and suppression.” (78).

Thus, you have the suppression of the other peoples inhabiting Canaan, when the Jews invade
it. You have the repression of their alterity.

What is at work here: differance. Difference as prior to identity, the other in oneself which
stands as a permanent obstacle against the One.

Derrida writes: “As soon as there is the One, there is murder, wounding, traumatism. L’Un se
garde de l’autre. The one guards against/keeps some of the other. It protects itself from the
other, but in this very self protection, it comprises in itself, thus guarding it, the self otherness
or self difference (the difference from with oneself) which makes it One. The One differing,
deferring from itself. The one as the Other” (78).

Since difference is prior to identity, the more you guard your identity you guard the difference
on which it is founded. This means you expel the other and maintain it at the same time. The
result is that “the one does violence to itself, but it also institutes itself as that very violence.
(79)

With this we have the tie of the injunction to remember with the future. The one is
condemned “to repeat and recall this instituting violence. It only affirm itself and engage
itself in this repetition. This is even what ties in depth the injunction to remember with the
anticipation of the future to come” (79)

Why: because, the remembering is a forgetting that opens up the future. The repetition
“imports the death drive, the violence of forgetting, suppression”

It is the lifting up of the cover of the magic pad

Concretely, We do not leave Oedipal conflict behind, we just forget it. We suppress the fact
that the Israelites tried to kill Moses by stoning him and Aaron. (killing the “father”).

At bottom, however, the Jews are no different from every other people. According to Derrida,
w can call “by the unique name Israel all the places and all the people who would be ready to
recognize themselves in this anticipation [of the future] and this injunction” [to remember].

For example, not just the Jews but the Palestinians. They too remember, they too demand the
right of return. Their future is also based on memory and its suppression.

In Derrida’s words, “there is no future without the specter of the oedipal violence that
inscribes the superrrepresssion into the archontic institution of the archive in the position of
the one and the unique” (80-81). I am one and unique by suppressing, repressing my inner
alterity (my identity as a Palestinian with the Jew, and vice versa).

The final word: A question. “Does one base one’s thinking on the basis of an archived
event—e.g., the messianic covenant. Or can an existence only archive such an event to the
extent that the structure of this existence and of its temporization make this archivization
possible”

In other words, does one need a first archive in order to conceive of originary archivability?
Or vice versa? (80).

How could we answer this?

Is it not true that the phenomenon of “after the fact” of deferred obedience “turns out to
disrupt the two terms of this alternative, as between the past and the future” (80).
The point is: if we cannot trust the archive, then there is no way of knowing. After the fact,
we may have added to it. But if this is the case, then how can we know what the original, e.g.,
the messianic covenant, is?

Freud, Archive Fever, pp. 83-101

The claim of the final section: “all the Freudian theses are cleft, divided, contradictory, as are the
concepts, beginning with that of the archive.” (84).

What divides them is that they both posit and deny the notion of original presence (the original
document, experience, event).

They posit it through the work of psychoanalysis, which is an archeological uncovering of originally
experienced material
They deny it because this material is in the unconscious, having been repressed. As such is
unavailable to consciousness. It can only appear in the form of symptoms, i.e., in the clothing of pre-
conscious material.

The only thing that can satisfy this contradictory demand is, in fact, a ghost, a specter. Something that
is itself a symptom.

To illustrate this Derrida brings in a book Freud has commented on: Jensen’s Gradiva. In the tale,
Norbert Hanold, the archeologist, purchases a plaster cast of a relief depicting a woman, Gradiva, who
died in Pompeii. He goes on to Pompeii and dreams of recovering some traces of her, traces of her
footsteps in the ash of Pompeii.

In Derrida’s words: “He dreams of bringing back to life. He dreams rather of reliving. But of reliving
the other. Of reliving the singular pressure or impression which Gradiva’ step, the step itself, the step
of Gradiva herself, that very day, at that time, on that date, in what was inimitable about it, must have
left in the ashes” (98-99).

The ghost of Gradiva comes to visit him at noonday. His desire is satisfied by this “mid-day ghost”.

What is going on here?

There is as both Freud and Derrida recognize a close parallel between archeology and psychoanalysis.
Both aim at uncovering the past. As Freud writes of the archeologist, “If his work is crowned with
success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a
treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions …
reveal an alphabet and a language and … yield undreamed of information” (93).

Similarly, when analysis is successful, the patient’s past, his repressed memories, are all there open to
him. The ruins (the symptoms) now become intelligible. The original presence is there, self-
explanatory. It does not need to be explained by something else as a symptom does.

Both then aim at original presence. The difficulty for the archeologist is that the past is past. All we
have are the present ruins which we have to reconstruct. The original event—Gradiva footsteps on the
ash—is unique. It is unrepeatable. To bring it into the archive, to make it part of a public record,
transforms it into something that can be present again and again.

In Derrida’s words, “The uniqueness does not resist. Its price is infinite. But infinite in the immense,
incommensurable extent to which it remains unfindable. The possibility of the archiving trace [the
actual footprint in the ash], this simple possibility can only divide the uniqueness. Separating the
impression from the imprint” (100). The imprint remains as the trace, something that can be returned
to, but the impressing of it has vanished. It cannot be recovered except as a ghost.

The same holds for trying to get back to original in the mental archive. The original has vanished
leaving behind only symptoms. It cannot, in its uniqueness, be recovered any more than the original
can in archeology.

But this is precisely Freud’s aim. In Derrida’s words, “… Freud claims again to bring to light a more
originary origin than that of the specter. In the outbidding, he wants to be an archivist who is more of
an archaeologists than the archaeologist. … He wants to exhume a more archaic impression, he wants
to exhibit a more archaic imprint … an imprint that is singular each time, an impression that is almost
no longer an archive but almost confuses itself with the pressure of the footstep that leaves its still-
living mark …” (97).

But this would be to make the past present, which can only happen in the form of a ghost of a dead
person suddenly reappearing.

Thus, the division in Freud that makes all his concepts “cleft, divided, contradictory” is that on the one
hand he posits the unconscious as a place of the archive and on the other he wants to overcome it.

Thus, in Derrida’s words, “Freud made possible the idea of a [mental] archive … which cannot be
reduced to memory, neither to memory as conscious reserve, nor memory as rememoriation” (this is
the pre-conscious material that is easily recalled) (91)

The idea is that of the unconscious.

Yet at the same time, Freud “invariably maintains a primacy of live memory and anamnesis
[recollection] in their originary temporalization. … psychoanalysis always attempts to return to the
live origin of that which the archive loses while keeping it in a number of places” (ibid.).

The point of analysis is to get back this live origin. But the point of the positing of the unconscious (as
distinct from the pre-conscious or the conscious) is that this is impossible. This is the division.

Thus, Freud both asserts that the point of analysis is to go from the symptom to the original event and
asserts that the unconscious impulses (instinctual desires) cannot appear as themselves but only as
clothed in pre-conscious materials.