Abstract
This essay is not an account of Jacques Derrida’s position on, or delineation of, the archive. That would be to repeat the mistake of those who attempt to define postmodernism or deconstruction or Derridean thinking. Ultimately it is impossible to say what these things are. They are what they are becoming. They open out of the future. We can, at best, mark their movements and engage their energies. So the essay offers a shaft of darkness in all the harsh light of positivist discourse, a shaft aimed at Derrida in the archive. In taking aim I strive to be as open as possible to Derrida aiming at me.
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References
In Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1978), for instance, Derrida engages Husserl and Joyce. In Glas (1986) he engages Hegel and Genet. The Gift of Death (1995) is a conversation with Kierkegaard and Jan Patocka. In Politics of Friendship (1997) he tackles the Western canonical discourse on friendship.
Jacques Derrida, in John Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 9.
John Caputo describes ‘archi-text’ as ‘various networks — social, historical, linguistic, political, sexual networks (the list goes on nowadays to include electronic networks, worldwide webs) — various horizons or presuppositions...’ Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, pp. 79–80.
This is a reading, a re-writing, of Derrida’s possibly most misunderstood, most abused, statement: ‘there is nothing outside of the text’. (Of Grammatology, 1974).
See, for instance, Memoirs of the Blind (1993), Circumfession (1993), Passions (1993), The Gift of Death (1995), ‘Foi et savoir: les deux sources de la “religion” aux limites de la simple raison’ (1996), and Monolingualism of the Other (1998).
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 100.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 53.
Ibid., p. 47.
John Caputo offers an extended exploration of this question in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 90.
Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 11.
Ibid., p. 66.
Ibid., p. 91.
Caputo, Prayers and Tears, p. 274.
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Ibid., p.12.
From the song ‘Please Don’t Pass Me By (A Disgrace)’, on the album Live Songs (1972).
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (Toronto: M and S, 1996), p. 17.
Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 126.
Quoted in Ibid., p. 128.
In sacrifice there is a double blindness, the blindness that enables sacrifice (see pp. 98–100 of Memoirs of the Blind) and the blindness (of tears) that accompanies comprehension of sacrifice. For an exhaustive account of sacrifice, see Derrida’s The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947–1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 151.
From the album Highway 61 Revisited (1965).
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Harris, V. (2002). A Shaft of Darkness: Derrida in the Archive. In: Hamilton, C., Harris, V., Taylor, J., Pickover, M., Reid, G., Saleh, R. (eds) Refiguring the Archive. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_6
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