Chapter One:
Closed Reading, Media, and the Biopolitics of the Archive[1]
Understanding the objective conditions of his fate gave him the strength to rise above it; the strength permitted him, even in 1940 and doubtless thinking of his death, to formulate his theses on the concept of history. Only by sacrificing life did Benjamin become the spirit that lived the idea of a way of life without victims.
--Theodor Adorno, Benjamin the Letter Writer,” in Notes to Literature Vol. 2, (239)[2]
Every book of value plays with its readers.
--Theodor Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings,” Notes to Literature, vol. 2 (25)[3]
Chapter alternates an argument about biopolitics of the archive (Agamben, Foucault, Derrida) as biobilioprocessing with close readings of de Certeau and Foucault, then the end of Archive Fever, discussion of Renais Night and Fog and Toute la memoire, then Fittkow. The end of biobiblioprocessing discussion—the to be read—is Agamben, Derrida on Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe on Heidegger; also Blacnhot—what can be read can’t be read no, only in the future, done as a close reading as paratactical of the way de Man doesn’t get read by LL, afer de Man doesn’t read Adorno. Etc.
Start with reading as a failure, as lapse,
Get out how the storage unit is about closed reading, Unread –ability but also about unarchiva –ability. Linking the camp to the archive (figured by the self-storage unit)
means that unread -ability as such becomes for us a question of the
not yet read. Just as the archive is orientated to the future, not the past, according to Derrida, our notion of reading is oriented to a future, a return of
the repressed that is not simply a hallucination but the condition of
knowledge (WB on reshelving books of mentally ill). In Derrida's
terms, he not yet read is an overprinted instant where life and
machine intersect (the Macintosh anecdote about the phone and portable
Macintosh in California), a present present, a present past, and a
present future, not a past, present, and future.
The not yet read as book burning (WB in the Storyteller) a secret
that cannot be narrated (ash of the archive; Maranno in Aporia).
The not yet read as what goes missing, gets missed (TA on his
books as cats, as missing when you want to find them).
The not yet read as a lapse, an anecdote, an autobiographical
anecdote about breakdown, failure, lost mss.
Self-Storage Unit as Unarchiv -ability:
We can consider the question of the not yet read in terms of
Derrida's mediatized, virtualized archive; Derrida's central
distinction is between newborn and phantom (circumcision and
phylactery) as opposed to Agamben's more commonsensical distinction
between bios and thanatos (organic and inorganic) and between bios and
zoe.
For Derrida, the not yet read as a refusal to date himself, as a
constant reference to his own works and to the occasion of he
conference where he delivered the now published text, in ways hat are
not at all conventional. His philosophy is always becoming
literary as it confused oral delivery and written publication. The
Derrida archive as something to think. Derrida does various
rehselving operations of other texts-- as he does of he title
of Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses in Archive Fever.
Foucault discusses Kantorowcz in Discipline and punish—that is another way to connect his work to Agamben’s.
State of exception not a coup d’etat but a coup d’archive.
Reading Remnants of Auschwitz. Kind of interesting in taking a
philological tack (as Agamben always does) in "The Witness." He
focuses on the gap between the law and ethics (conviction doesn't mean
justice of explanation).
Add Derrida on Of Hospitality, reading Kant On Perpetual Peace in relation to telechnologies.
The bizarre description on the back cover of the book Of Hospitality Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, UP, 2000).
“’Hospitality’ is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning: Oedipus at Colonus is read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of Francois Mitterrand.”
But there is no mention of the Mitterrand funeral in the book. I read it the book over to find the discussion of the Mitterrand funeral, and then, after I didn’t find it, did an Amazon search confirming my conclusion that there is no such discussion.
Of Hospitality Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, UP, 2000).
Can add foreigner part of Derrida’s book to WB’s border crossing, also Aporias. Homo Sacer zone does not allow for transport, transport, deportation is not part of the story. It’ also about spaces, not about temporalities. Descarlized man has no relation to papers, to paer machine, to writing machine of the human.
Conenct Derrida to Blanchot via Demeures, “Maurice Blachot est mort”and The Bookto Come.
Reading the last chapter now, "The Archive and Testimony," and it
occurs to me that one way to get Derrida / grammatology in our intro
is, if only via sentence and then a longer footnote, on the need to
think bios in terms of birographemes--autobiographicity, autobiography
as defacement, and its relation to the archive.
Here is Agam on Foucualt's Lives of Infamous Men:
What momentarily shines through these laconic statements are not the
biographical events of personal histories, as suggested by the
pathos-laden emphasis of a certain oral history, bur rather the
luminous trail of a different history. What suddenly comes to light
is not the memory of an oppressed existence, but rather the
disjunction between the living being and the being that marks
its empty place. Here life subsists only in the infamy in which it
existed; here a name lives solely in the disgrace that covered it. And
something in this disgrace bears witness to life beyond all
biography."
143
Agamben curiously regards the archive as a structure, a set of
relations, not a place.
the archive seems to work as a recording device for Agamben. We could
open the question of storage media more broadly before getting to
Grammatology and maybe also connect that discussion to Archive Fever.
Just thinking of ways we can layer the intro a little (also go back to
Lyotard The Differend) on the phrase--again a problem of language-to
explain why one has to go to self-storage to understand the archive
and homo sacralization as both a biographization of things and people
as well as their mediatization (self storage as recording device
subject to failure, static, loss). Bios-graphyAgamben's Remnants seems both brilliant and totally strange.
"The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak solely in the name of an incapacity to speak--that is, in his or her being a subject. Testimony thus guarantees not the factual truth of the statement safeguarded in the archive, but rather its unarchivability, its exteriority with respect to the archive--that is, the necessity by which, as the existence of language of both memory and forgetting." (158)
"The fact that the subject of testimony--indeed, that all subjectivity, if to be a subject and bear witness are in the final analysis one and the same--is a remnant is not to be understood in the sense that the subject, according to one of the meanings of the Greek term hypostasis, is a substratum, deposit, or sediment left behind as a kind of background or foundation by historical processes of subjectification and desubjectification, humanization and inhumanization." (158)
"they have not an end, but a remnant" (159)
"The case of a dead language is exemplary here." (159)
"to bear witness is to place oneself in one's own language in the position of those who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language as if one were dead, or in a dead language as if it were living--in any case outside both the archive and the corpus of what has already been said." (161)
The archive is the disclosure of what writing is. The grammatology section is the mode writing comes to do—reshelving of the pluri-dimensiosnality in the archive as opposed to linear system of writing—they only attempt to retard their pluri-dimensionality.
In terms of Foucault I want to preserve the doubleness of the archive: it offers potentialities even as even if it seems reduced to state’s auto-archiving.
Bioprocessing: U-My-Tropias
Bioprocessing is the process, as it were, both of the dissolution of democracy and the possibility of its reconstruction “hidden from the eyes of justice” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, ) in the isolated yet there to be found archipelagos of “u-my-topias” of self-storage units. Bio-processing involves reading and itself resistance (bio-processing by the state) in which storage units are figured as "u-my-topias," places of file-sharing that are non-places, always in transit sic mundi (bad Latin pun) where the temp work of metaphorical reshelving operations may occur in a paralegal zone both beyond the state's view and also beyond what Agamben calls "the eyes of justice." Processing is both anti-democratic and the possibility of democracy (defined as a reshelving operation of the already / yet to be read.
By subsuming the camp to the archive, our central concern necessarily becomes reading. Once we realize the Homo Sacer is always already virtual / or has been virtualized in modernity (1930s), then we necessarily have to see bios and biopolitics as a question of unread -ability, of reading as what remains. We think of reading primarily as the resistance to reading, reading as the not yet read, reading as comfort through destruction (WB on book burning of the storyteller); on the read as a medium (not reducible to physical materials). But all of these ways of thinking about reading have to routing for us through the archive--reading as refiling, and even more crucially as reshelving. Reading as refiling / reshelving becomes a way of living biopolitics virtually, a biobiblioprocessing and thanatobiblioprocessing. The archive, storage unit, as a temporary space for damaged life, not only of preservation and safe-guarding--like a museum--or destruction--like a crematorium), but of bare life lived virtually. When and where you begin and where and when you stop reading become instances where the reader becomes sovereign--moments of decision, moments of danger (especially to the reader, who may have completely miss something). In this sense, sovereignty and homo sacer collapse into each other in new ways (in ways other than the Schmitt or WB had thought, since homo sacer becomes sovereign only over his own homo sacerness by decamping to the archive). We go from bare life and the camp to the archive and bibiblioprocessing, paper persons versus paperless persons. The virtualization of homines sacrii would not be possible without the virtualization of the archive. It is through the virtualization of the archive (understood as its mediatization in electronic form) that makes this condition visible even in the so-called pre-histories of the archive and, say of the law not yet virtualized or only virtualized in relation to a specific medium (tape recorders, but not television; drawings, but not photographs).
First point. I think the Habeas Corpus part will be crucial not only because of the history of the book (Chartier and Lefebvre) but because we could include the move on Foucault and the archive there as well--We could go back to biopolitics via Governmentality and Lives of Infamous Men and then show how Agamben misses this dimension of Foucault entirely in Remnants of Auschwitz, how he does not get the camp as an archive. From there we could go to the passport as opposed to lettres de cachet perhaps).
So we would end up with habeas corpus--in effect, the missing body that has to be presented, rather than the docile body subject to discipline and the passport as "paper machine." Does the body have to missing before it can be disciplined, interned.Maybe the Book that Never To-Came. the book as thing as something also
to be read, not assumed, or capable of being quantified and narrated
chronology (Lefebvre's The Coming of the Book we might retitle for us as the
History of the Book (Yet) to Come since Levebvre implies that he has
delivered a history in his book. Blanchot’s The Book to Come (the end of the book in Of Grammatology)
Living Virtual Bare Life through the Media of Shelf-Life[4]
Once thought in terms of storage media, reading also becomes
necessarily a question of the ontology of media, of technology
(Ronell) and substrate / subjectiles, contact zones) and the organization and chaos of what Derrida notes is the confused nomo-topology of the archive. In addition to the book, we necessarily have to take on other kinds of storage media
in addition to books once have moved to the archive. hence we are
reading texts about books, photographs, toys, films, as well as
reading films. So reading and media of what is read fall under the
general rubric of storage, the archive. We tie reading not only to
the media specificity of what gets stored while not treated media as
divisible into coherent units (books include photographs,facsimiles,
even DVDs; films include text; etc).
Given Time this week (finally) and noticed when I
got to the part about beggars (the homeless) that Derrida starts
sounding like a Marxist and like Foucault. And then I saw that Derrida
has a very long footnote to Foucault (p. 83, n. 135) which is made up
almost entirely of quotations quoted by Foucault in Madness and
Civilization (with lots of "quoted by Foucault"s the end of the
passages Derrida quotes from Foucault.)
Reading is always a form of historicism for us. But our historicism is not reducible to inventories, itemizations that become the databases for chronological, linear narratives (all very unself-consciously and unthinkingly). Maybe the Book that Never To-Came. the book as thing as something also to be read, not assumed, or capable of being quantified and narrated chronology (Lefebvre's The Coming of the Book we might retitle for us as the History of the Book (Yet) to Come since Levebvre implies that he has delivered a history in his book. Blanchot’s The Book to Come (the end of the book in Of Grammatology).Secret Files On Adolf Eichmann Ordered Released By German Court BERLIN — A federal court has ordered the government to release secret files kept by the German intelligence service on top Nazi Adolf Eichmann after World War II.
The ruling announced Friday came after reporter Gabriele Weber sued to have the BND release the 4,500 pages of files. She says they could fill in gaps about Eichmann's postwar life and how he escaped to Argentina.
The BND had argued releasing the files could jeopardize the work of an informant and harm relations with a "foreign intelligence service" that provided some of the information.
But the Federal Administrative Court ruled that while the BND could withhold some files for those reasons it could not keep them all secret.
It was not immediately clear when the files would be turned over.
Chapter one—
Not going to do the rereading of Foucault one could do but advance through Agamben (who has positioned himself as the heir to Foucault). Agamben has to read in relation to the sidelining of Derrida.
Derrida too does not read biopolitics of the archive but has a kind of Foucauldian take, placed in a footnote. The issue is not one reducible to control. Biopoltiics of the archive is about reading, the archive including the camp (footnote Mr. Death and Shoah Raul Hilberg scene. 92:36 Scene with Hilberg handling the document about order for trains. HE does a brilliant reading of it until Lanzmann concludes so, 16,000 dead Jews in one page.” Hilberg says he likes to handle to he documents because he knows they passed through the bureaaucrats’ hands. There is a surplus value in the archival document—the document itself—in a way that is similar to the archivist touching the documents in Mr. Death. 90:05—voice over of ex-Nazi member—he was director of the trains and stationed in Warsaw and also in Krakow. His voice sounds different (scratchier) than other voice-over voices and we see why when we see him on TV, in black and white, like the other Nazi we see again two small TV sets, one smaller than the other, and the one is hidden by the technician; the other, smaller one is visible, but the image appears so faint that you can barely make it out. Lots of moments of delayed identification in the film. Hilberg talks about the document for some time (very impressively) before he is identified by a title as “Raul Hilberg, Historian.” Happens all the time in the film. (The last interview with the Nazi shows Lanzmann having taken the pointer and using it to point at the map (or blueprint) of Treblinka. Problem with Spectral Evidence is that it assumes there was a place and that then it could be a problem of representation—but assumes an originary unity—whereas the return to the camp is already to a imaginary topography—the issue in Mr Death is the crematorium, yet the archivist looks at the blueprint for Birkenau. The crematoria were located just outside of the camp (Birkenau). So the gas ans left the camp, turned left and went 50 kilometers to the crematoria. There is already a fracture it eh the camp already a transition before the transition from life to death, already an uncanny kind of traveling. Yes you are going to Hildebreck—you are going on vacation—on resettlement—no you are going to your death.