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Is the archivist a “radical atheist” now? Deconstruction, its new wave, and archival activism

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Abstract

Hägglund’s “radical atheism”—innovative thinking within the philosophical current of “speculative materialism”—revitalizes deconstruction and provides an important basis to define parameters for the archivist’s role as activist for social justice. This paper argues postmodern archival theory gets deconstruction wrong by misreading Derrida’s “Archive fever” as a theory of “archontic power”; this misleads archivists on the call for justice. Properly understanding that justice is undecidable, radical atheism explodes the tension between postmodernists’ appreciation of all views and perspectives and their commitment to right unjust relations of power. This paper first advances the negative argument that “Archive fever” is not about power and injustice. It then advances the positive argument that “Archive fever” is Derrida’s effort to look at actual archives to resolve Freud’s problematic theorizing of a “death drive.” In a close and comprehensive reading of “Archive fever,” this paper explores the notion of “archive fever” as a death drive and suggests Derrida’s efforts are inconclusive. Viewed through the lens of radical atheism, the archive’s “traces”—the material of actual archives writ large in the manner of Derrida’s thinking about a universal archive—serve to mark the flow of time. Understanding the structure of the trace reveals the source of internal contradictions, discontinuities, and instabilities in the meaning of all things. It explains why justice is undecidable. In face of the unconditional condition of this undecidability, we as archivists and humans are compelled to make decisions and to act. Deconstruction politicizes our actions and evokes a responsibility that cannot be absolved.

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Notes

  1. Hägglund is a Swedish-born Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. See Wikipedia (n.d.) Martin Hägglund. In addition to my presentation of his thought, see Hägglund’s own short and penetrating summary of radical atheism in the interview, Hägglund and King (2011), currently available at http://www.martinhagglund.se/files/InterviewHagglund.pdf.

  2. Seeking new wave perspectives on these matters of praxis was suggested by an anonymous reviewer of this paper, whom I thank for this valuable input. An extended exploration of archival concepts is beyond the scope of this paper.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Professor Donald Force and Professor Thomas Walker of the UW–Milwaukee, School of Information Studies, for their help and support in writing this paper. Thanks also go to both anonymous reviewers for their many insights that helped to improve this paper. Any error in the text is mine.

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    Richard J. Matthews

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Matthews, R.J. Is the archivist a “radical atheist” now? Deconstruction, its new wave, and archival activism. Arch Sci 16, 213–260 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9248-2

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