"No archive will restore you"
by Julietta Singh

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is "knowing thyself" as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory... Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory". Antonio Gramsci

Opening

I had learned (by then) to trust nothing that came from news channels.

You cannot uphold the usual fantasy of being a self-governing body; you are palpaby exposed.

P.15

P.17

You cannot uphold the usual fantasy of being a self-governing body; you are palpaby exposed.

P.23

You cannot uphold the usual fantasy of being a self-governing body; you are palpaby exposed.

"Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word "archive", writes Jacques Derrida, who begins his meditations on the archive (and its particular relation to psychoanalysis) by turning us the arkhe, the linguistic root of the word. Arkhe, Derrida explains, articulates both commencement and commandment. In the first iteration, arkhe is the place from which everything emerges, the location from which the thoughts and things of the world spring forth. In the second, it is the place of authoritative law, from where authority is exercised and externalized. How the philosopher asks, can we hold these two meanings together? What is the place - the archive - where the beginning of things and the authority to govern over them both emerge? For Derrida, the archive is troubling; it marks a series of secrets between the public and the private, but also and most intimately, "between oneself and oneself".

Early in his famous fook Archive Fever, Derrida worries over the novelty and value of his meditation on the archive, pausing to confess from the outset that

--in the end I have nothing new to say. Why detain you with this worn-out stories? Why this wasted time? Why archive this? Why these investmentes in paper, in ink, in characters? Why mobilize so much space and so much work, so much typographical composition? Does this merit printing? Arent these stories to be had everywhere?--

(...)

To be sure, I have never understood how to constitute usefulness.

P.24 - 25

[Regarding -cliché- meaning: the reproduction of a printers sound]

Just as our archival chase seems to reproduce a structure of knowledge over and over and over again.

P.29

Why this desire for a body archive, for an assembly of history´s traces deposited in me? (...) The body archive is an attunement, a hopeful gathering, an act of love against the foreclosures of reason.It is a way of knowing the body-self as a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter, of turning toward rather than against oneself. And vitally, it is a way of thinking-feeling the body´s unbounded relation to other bodies.