While the form of the “book” is now going through a period of general upheaval, and while that form now appears less natural, and its history less transparent, than ever, and while one cannot tamper with it without disturbing everything else, the book form alone can no longer settle—here for example—the case of those writing processes which, in praaically questioning that form, must also dismantle it. Hence the necessity, today, of working out at every turn, with redoubled effort, the question of the preservation of names: of paleonymy. Why should an old name, for a determinate time, be retained? Why should the effects of a new meaning, concept, or object be damped by memory? (Derrida)
There is no such thing as a “metaphysical-concept.” There is no such thing as a “metaphysical-name.” The “metaphysical” is a certain determination or direction taken by a sequence or “chain.” It cannot as such be opposed by a concept but rather by a process of textual labor and a different SOrt of articulation. This being the case, the development of this problematic will inevitably involve the movement of differance as it has been discussed elsewhere: a “productive,” conflictual’ movement which cannot be preceded by any identity, any unity, or any original simplicity; which cannot be “relieved” resolved appeased by any pholosophical dialectic; and which disorganizes “historically,” “practically,” textually, the opposition or the difference (the static distinction) between opposing terms. (Derrida)
Prefaces, along with forewords, introductions, preludes, preliminaries, preambles, prologues, and prolegomena, have always been written, it seems, in view of their own self-effacement. Upon reaching the end of the pre- (which presents and precedes, or rather forestalls, the presentative production, and, in order to put before the reader’s eyes what is not yet visible, is obliged to speak, predict, and predicate), the route which has been covered must cancel itself out. But this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it. Such an operation thus appears contradictory, and the same is true of the interest one takes in it. (Derrida)
I asked myself what is the momentproper to the archive, if there is such a thing, the instant of archivization strictly speaking, which is not, and I will come back to this, so-called live or spontaneous memory (mneme or anamnesis), but rather a certain hypomnesic and prosthetic experience of the technical substrate. Was it not at this very instant that, having written something or other on the screen, the letters remaining as if suspended and floating yet at the surface of a liquid element, I pushed a certain key to “save” a text undamaged, in a hard and lasting way, to protect marks from being erased, so as thus to ensure salvation and indemnity, to stock, to accumulate, and, in what is at once the same thing and something else, to make the sentence thus available for printing and for reprinting, for reproduction? Does it change anything that Freud did not know about the computer? And where should the moment of suppression or of repression be situated in these new models of recording and impression, or printing. (Derrida)
This condensation of three meanings of the word “impression” was only able to imprint itself in me in a single stroke, apparently in an instant of no duration, after much work, discontinuous though it may have been, with Freud’s texts, with certain of his writings, but also with themes, with figures, with conceptual schemes which are familiar to me to the point of obsession and yet remain no less secret, young and still to come for me: thus writing, the trace, inscription, on an exterior substrate or on the so-called body proper, as for example, and this is not just any example for me, that singular and immemorial archive called circumcision, and which, though never leaving you, nonethe- less has come about, and is no less exterior, exterior right on your body proper.
(Derrida)
It is undoubtedly because I had already privileged it, in many other texts, that this typographic figure of the press, of printing, or of the imprint imposed itself so quickly on me over the telephone with the word “impression.” This word capitalizes on a double advantage, above all in a country of English-speaking culture. In the first place, it reawakens the code of English empiricism: the concepts of sensible “impression” and of copy play a major role there in the genealogy of ideas; and is not the copy of an impression already a sort of archive? In the second place the word “impression” reminds us that no tunnel in history will ever align the two translations of “Verdrdngung”: “repression” in English, as in Spanish, a word that belongs to the same family as “impression” (the Verdrangung always represses an impression), and “refoulement” in French, a word that is not allied to the semantic family of the “impression,” as is the word “repression, ” which we reserve in French for the translation of “Unterdriickung,” most often translated in English, as in Spanish and Portuguese, by “suppression. (Derrida)
Well, concerning the archive, Freud never managed to form anything that deserves to be called a concept. Neither have we, by the way. We have no concept, only an impression, a series of impressions associated with a word. To the rigor of the concept, I am opposing here the vagueness or the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion. “Archive” is only a notion, an impression associated with a word and for which, together with Freud, we do not have a concept. We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process. Unlike what a classical philosopher or scholar would be tempted to do, I do not consider this impression, or the notion of this impression, to be a subconcept, the feebleness of a blurred and subjective preknowledge, destined for I know not what sin of nominalism, but to the contrary, I will explain myself later, I consider it to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very concept of the future, if there is such a thing and if, as I believe, the idea of the archive depends on it. This is one of the theses: there are essential reasons for which a concept in the process of being formed always remains inadequate relative to what it ought to be, divided, disjointed between two forces. And this disjointedness has a necessary relationship with the structure of archivization. (Derrida)
It is thus our impression that we can no longer ask the question of the concept, of the history of the concept, and notably of the concept of the archive. No longer, at least, in a temporal or historical modality dominated by the present or by the past. We no longer feel we have the right to ask questions whose form, grammar, and lexicon nonetheless seem so legitimate, sometimes so neutral. We no longer find assured meaning in questions such as these: do we already have at our disposition a concept of the archive? a concept of the archive which deserves this name? which is one and whose unity is assured? Have we ever been assured of the homogeneity, of the consistency, of the univocal relationship of any concept to a term or to such a word as “archive”? (Derrida)
In an enigmatic sense which will clarify itself perhaps (perhaps, because nothing should be sure here, for essential reasons), the question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. This is not the question of a concept dealing with the past which might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in the times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise. (Derrida)
In any case, there would be no future without repetition. And thus, as Freud perhaps would say (this would be his thesis), there is no future without the specter of the oedipal violence which inscribes the superrepression in the archontic institution of the archive, in the position, the auto-position or the hetero-position of the One and of the Unique, in the nomological arkhe. And the death drive … (Derrida)
On the one hand, the archive is made possible by the death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation. But beyond finitude as limit, there is, as we said above, this properly in-finite movement of radical destruction without which no archive desire or fever would happen. All the texts in the family and of the period of Beyond the Pleasure Principle explain in the end why there is archivization and why anarchiving destruction belongs to the process of archivization and produces the very thing it reduces, on occasion to ashes, and beyond. (Derrida)
But on the other hand, in the same moment, as classical metaphysician and as positivist Aufklarer, as critical scientist of a past epoch, as a “scholar” who does not want to speak with ghosts, Freud claims not to believe in death and above all in the virtual existence of the spectral space which he nonetheless takes into account. He takes it into account so as to account for it, and he intends to account for it or prove it right only while reducing it to something other than himself, that is to say, to something other than the other. He wants to explain and reduce the belief in ghosts. He wants to think through the grain of truth of this belief, but he believes that one cannot not believe in them and that one ought not to believe in them. Belief, the radical phenomenon of believing, the only relationship possible to the other as other, does not in the end have any possible place, any irreducible status in Freudian psychoanalysis. Which it nonetheless makes possible. From which we have the archaeological outbidding of a return to the reality, here to the originary effectivity of a base of immediate perception. A more profound and safer base than that of Hanold the archaeologist. Even more archaeological. The paradox takes on a striking, properly hallucinatory, form at the moment Freud sees himself obliged to let the phantoms speak for the duration of the archaeological digs but finishes by exorcising them in the moment he at last says, the work having been terminated (or supposed to have been), “Stones talk!” He believes he has exorcised them in the instant he lets them talk, provided that these specters talk, he believes, in the figurative. Like stones, nothing but that… (Derrida)
The adventurous excess of a writing that is no longer directed by any knowledge does not abandon itself to improvisation. The accident or throw of dice that “opens” such a text does not contradict the rigorous necessity of its formal assemblage. The game here is the unity of chance and rule, of the program and its leftovers or extras. This play will still be called literature or book only when it exhibits its negative, atheistic face (the insufficient but indispensable phase of reversal), the final clause of that age-old project, which is henceforth located along the edge of the closed book: the achievement dreamed of, the conflagration achieved. (Derrida)
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[releve1,8 resolved, or appeased by any philosophical
6. On the concepts of ;nltnJtlll;on and paltonYnly, and on the conceptual operation of reversaUdisplacement (the withdrawal of a predicate, the adherence of a name, the processes of grafting, extending, and reorganizing), cf. “Positions,” in Pt’01I/lJJt No. 30-31, p. 37. [Reprinted in POJ;I;om (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972). Translated as POJ;I;om by Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, (981).] 7. “La differance,” pp. 46 ff. 8. Allfgehoben (concerning this translation of “aufheben” [to sublate] by “relever” [to relieve], cf. “I.e puitset la pyramide,” in Hegel ella ptnseemodmtdParis: P.U.F., (971)). The movement by which Hegel determines difference as contradiction (“Der Unterschied iiberhaupt ist schon der WiderspruchanJ;,h,” The Science of Log;, II, I, chap. 2, C) is designed precisely to make possible the ultimate (onto-theo-teleo-Iogical) sublation [la releve] of difference. D;.fferance–which is thus by no means dialectical contradiction in this Hegelian sense-marks the critical limit ofthe idealizing powers of relief [la releve] wherever they are able, directly or indirectly, to operate. Differance ;nJCr;!JeJ contradiction, or rather, since it remains irreducibly differentiating and disseminating, contradictioru. In marking the “productive” (in the sense of general economy and in accordance with the loss of presence) and differentiating movement, the economic “concept” of differance does not reduce all
OUTWORK 7
dialectic; and whi
mark forshee 