The Thanatographical Force of the Archive, Representation,

I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on, life is survival [la vie est survie]. To survive in the usual sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death [emphasis in the original]. (Derrida, Learning to Live Finally 26)

All the concepts that have helped me in my work, and notably that of the trace or of the spectral, were related to this “surviving” as a structural and rigorously originary dimension. It is not derived from either living or dying. No more than what I call “originary mourning”, that is, a mourning that does not wait for the so-called “actual” death. (Derrida, Learning to Live Finally 26)

While the archive and signature have normally been thought of as forms contributing to the preservation and authentication of presence, for Derrida they are driven by the force of death and mourning, and therefore, are not the proof of life but hauntological practices that are closely associated with the dead and the specter. To understand the thanatographical nature of the archive and signature one needs to take into account Derrida’s remarks on the notion of survival and living on; in documenting the authentic presence of a singular event with possible representational forms, one is always already participating in a movement of death and mourning, for the preserved presence, whether in the form of writing, painting, photographing, or filming, can never be the singular presence itself by only the witness, and thus the survivor, of the death of the presence that it represents. The archived can only be the monument that mourns for what is eternally and irretrievably lost. By turning the singular event into the iterable form of representation, the archive and signature, living on with the absence of what they represent, survive the loss of the singular and are in the place of eternal mourning. Such is the thanatographical force with which Derrida endows the notion of the archive and signature. In order to elaborate on this point, for the moment we should first look at how Derrida sees the force of death as the attribute of the archive.

In Archive Fever Derrida points out that “the archive . . . will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes

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place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory” (Derrida, AF 11). Because of the working of “archi-writing” inherent in all forms of representation, as discussed in the last section, the archive can never “be” that which it documents but is only the corpse of the latter. Derrida goes on asserting that “[t]here is no archive without a place

of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority, No

archive without outside” [emphasis in the original] (Derrida, AF 11). The archived presence is

always already haunted by the traces, or the traces of the traces, in the process of

representation; it resorts to an exteriority in which the pure presence is contaminated by its own specters. A further elaboration of this point can be seen in Kas Saghafi’s suggestion that

“each thing or mark is double, dividing or doubling itself in order to relate to itself; bearing its specter within itself, it can only be itself if it is divided by ‘the phantom of its double;’ . . . there is revenance and survivance, ghostly return and spectral sur-vival in life, . . . a life that does not go without death” [emphasis in the original] (Saghafi 82).

The existence of the archive relies on the destruction and contamination of the pure presence; “if there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression, then we must also remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains . . . indissociable from death drive. And thus from destruction” (Derrida, AF 12). And again Derrida claims that “right on that which permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction, introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. . . . The archive always works, and a priori, against itself” (Derrida, AF 12).

What is captured in the archive is “[a] difference without reference, or rather a reference without referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is phantom of no flesh . . . ” (Derrida, DM 206). It is a “spectral trace – the appearing in disappearing – of the nonpresent other” (Saghafi 69). However, the original presence and its archive are not to be put in a

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hierarchical order in which the presence is considered to be the primary and thus the precedent, whereas the archive is its secondary clone. According to Derrida’s assertion, the so-called original presence is not as original as it may seem; in fact, it is always already pre-inscribed by the process of archiving in one way or another. The archive, therefore, can be seen as constitutive of what we come to call presence in the first place.

Writing, which in the Derridean philosophy indicates the “archi-writing” inherent in all forms of representation, is thus itself a work of death and mourning. It is death that “gives the simulacrum its force” (Saghafi 70). In contemplating Louis Marin’s accounts on image, Derrida points out that the simulacrum is inherently “being-to-death;” he elaborates on this Heideggerian point by arguing that the “being-to-death” of an image “has the force, that is

nothing other than the force, to resist, to consist, and to exist in death, precisely there where it

does not insist in being or in the presence of being.” And this is also this “being-to-death” that renders the archived or the product of representation as not just “the weakened reproduction of what it would imitate, . . . but as the increase of power, the author, the origin,” in that “it finds its paradigm, which is also its enargeia, in the image of the dead.” It is through death,

“or rather mourning, which takes its place in advance,” that simulacrum “can open up this space of absolute dynamis” [emphasis in the original] (Derrida, WM 146-7).

For Derrida the archive, representation, and the signature are all the “presentification of the absent,” they make “appear the disappeared, the departed, or making it reappear . . . .”

This is precisely the point why they are seen as hauntological practices, for they “[obey] no simple temporality” by “mak[ing] the absent present” (qtd. in Saghafi 72-3). Derrida considers this strange temporal ambiguity to be “an acute thought of mourning and of the phantom that returns, of haunting and spectrality: beyond the alternative of presence and absence . . . ” (Derrida, WM 153). Hence their force resides in, or comes with, the death of the presence. Citing Louis Marin, Derrida extends this point and notes that the “efficacy” of representation lies in its “signifying the death from which it draws all its power:” “It is this

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(‘the absence of the founding body’) that will constantly require throughout the ages that the body be covered over, buried, and in a way monumentalized by and in its representations.

Such would be the first effect of representation in general” [emphasis added] (qtd. in Derrida, WM 152). This notion of monumentalization is precisely what I call the thanatographicality of the archive and representation.

The signature, which assumes the uniqueness of the singular, also has this impossible archival desire to preserve the singular presence. Yet for Derrida, the signature is “always already compromised, divided, haunted,” and thus cannot be appropriated as one’s own (Royle 120). Structurally it is always already resided by a certain alterity that deprives it of the singularity it assumes as its property. The signature, just as the archive, is thus not the proof of presence and identity but is predicated upon the work of death and mourning. Here this spectral nature of the signature should be further pursued through Derrida’s

contemplation on two related issues, namely, autobiography and proper name, which also serve to be the important themes in the Derridean hauntology and thus will be playing a highly crucial role in the following analysis of the present study.

Derrida’s transformative treatment of autobiography and name adds further complexity to his philosophical elaboration on the work of mourning and death, and hence to that on hauntology. The attempt to tread neatly the theoretical path(s) of Derrida’s complex formulation of autobiography and name would be an enormous task, for not only do they often appear here and there in Derrida’s corpus in different forms, but these forms are also not always systematically articulated. However, there is one philosophical concern that might be seen to underpin Derrida’s subversive rethinking of autobiography and name: it is the

contention that every signature is always already pre-inscribed by the effect of death which brings alterity into singularity. The privileged singularity of signature is always already undermined by a sort of absolute alterity as the effect of spectrality that makes such a

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signature possible only by denying it its singularity. Autobiography and proper name, therefore, become ideas concerning not self/life but other/death, bearing witness to the originary mourning at work. Derrida’s deconstructive move here can justifiably be seen as one of his theoretical gestures attempting to unsettle the pure and immediate self-presence that is transcendentally presumed by the notion of autobiography and proper name. However, a question apparently lurks behind the assertion here. Why is the self-presence presupposed by autobiography and name always already contaminated by death, and thus becoming something “not itself”? In the Derridean sense this is a consequence of the impossibility to escape from, or to be freed of, signs and representation. The spectrality, the haunting effect that upsets the purity of signature, is a radical inevitability as long as that signature itself belongs to the realm of language that paradoxically makes it possible and impossible at the same time. This point should be further pursued by marking the trajectory of Derrida’s respective discussions of autobiography and name.

In his complication of the notion of autobiography, Derrida challenges the pure self-presence that is often granted to the autobiographical writing. As discussed previously, given that the working of the originary spectrality brought about by archi-writing is ways already opens up a “crypt” or spacing within presence, autobiographical writing is also, for Derrida, not the work of self and singular life but is inherently driven by the politics of death and mourning. Kai-su Wu elucidates this point convincingly in his discussion of Derrida’s complication of the notion of autobiography by noting that for Derrida, autobiography is the

“writing with the other, for the other, and by the other;” the self-identity in autobiographical discourse “is preempted by the writing of the other’s death under the other’s name” (Wu 92).

Hence instead of conforming to the tendency of traditional autobiographical theories that put much significant weight on the “auto” and the “bio” of autobiography, Derrida focuses intently on the “graphy” that potentially disturbs the authenticity of autobiography and introduces into autobiographical writing the work of death and mourning. It is the dimension

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of “graphy” that renders autobiography a haunted and spectral site. Derrida thus proposes to understand autobiography subversively as “hetero-thanato-graphy” (Wu 103). a neologism that marks the spectral nature of such writing. That the autobiography is deconstructively considered to be “a writing of one’s life with regards to the death of the other” also directs our attention towards Derrida’s ethical concern that puts into question “sufficiency of the self.”

Egoism and the “representation of the self” has been rendered problematic due to factors such as “the instability of memory,” “the intervention of imagination,” and “the unconscious”

introduced by Freudian psychology (Wu 94-6).

Derrida’s argument that autobiographical writing is spectral and always heterogeneous to itself has at least two levels: First, the past always hides something from view, which is irretrievably lost and will never be accessible again to the writing subject. Such is “the catastrophe of memory” that Derrida sees as a sort of experience of death (Dooley and Kavanagh 3). The past in the case is disintegrated and is never possible to be recollected by mental content; an autobiography is always marked by such eternal loss, the death of the parts of the past, which always leaves a gap in the present. The death here does not necessarily means the literal death, but a break in presence, the shattering-from-within of the

self-presence and identity. Hence writing one’s life always presupposes death.

The second level of Derrida’s thinking of autobiography can be seen as to some degree indebted to the influence of Paul de Man. Autobiography has been traditionally understood as a form of consolidation of subjectivity, a ground for complete self-knowledge that through autobiographical writing one exhibits an immediate and authentic grasp of one’s own life.

However, such an understanding is called into question when autobiography is treated as a form of writing, a literary production which cannot be freed of certain performative elements when language is its necessary mediation. Such fictional status of autobiographical writing prevents it from being factual, which it is supposed to be. Further complexity can be added to this notion by the fact that most of the time the individual life in the autobiography cannot be

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separated from that of other. It is an account of the life of the self which inevitably has to take account of the lives of the other people. The exteriority of the individual life is already a constituting part of the interiority of one’s own life story. And to other people one’s autobiography is always the “autobiography of the other.” Hence there is no such thing as one’s “own” autobiography. In discussing how autobiographical writing always involves “an intervention on the part of the other,” Wu suggests that in Derrida “[t]he re-direction of auto to hetero and bio to thanato essentially defines how Derrida sees the working of writing itself in the process of ‘writing-with’” [emphasis in the original] (Wu 102).

The point also directs us towards Derrida’s understanding of the spectral nature of subjectivity. Derrida is always concerned with the problem of “who” that writes “I” in the autobiographical discourse. And as Wu points out, the “ ‘who’ here does not refer to the subject who in reality writes; rather, it concerns what is really this who which writes”

[emphasis in the original] (Wu 102). This “phantom structure of subjectivity” (Castricano 19) makes the problem of autobiography even more complicated. In fact, the “who” which writes the “I” is always already “spectrally determined” (Castricano 18). To write one’s life is thus to “write with ghosts” (Castricano 22), to write a life that “comes always after mourning”

(Wu 102). By quoting Derrida’s assertion, Castricano indicates that the “I” can arise “only through experience of the other, and of the other as other who can die, leaving in me or in us this memory of the other” (qtd. in Castricano 23). Subjectivity, therefore, is itself always a site of haunting and mourning. Due to these two levels of consideration, autobiography in the Derridean sense is always already predetermined by this thanatographical nature embedded in the thematization of hauntology.

Derrida’s contemplation of proper name shares the similar logic. Metaphysical thinking is always characterized by a desire for the “idiom,” the absolutely pure singularity (Royle 120). The status of proper name can be seen to bear witness to this desire. However, what is

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absolutely singular cannot be understood or read unless it participates in a larger context of generality, and such generality which renders the singular understandable paradoxically compromises the uniqueness of the singularity. The name always has its inscription in language that gives it meaning and at the same time deprives it of its singularity. And in a more Hegelian (and perhaps Blanchotian) sense naming is also less an act of creation than an

“annihilation and suppression of what is named” (Gasché 51). In one way or another naming suppresses what is named and deprives the latter of its particularity. The name subjects the named to language. And language has this fatal force with regards to the named subject. As Maurice Blanchot writes in “Literature and the Right to Death”:

real death has been announced and is already present in my language; my language means that this person, who is here right now, can be detached from herself, removed from her existence and her presence, and suddenly plugged into a nothingness in which there is no existence or presence; my language essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction . . . . (323)

Blanchot sees naming the person as a sort of “deferred assassination” made possible through language (Blanchot, The Work 323). In his reading of Blanchot’s notion here Rodolphe Gasché further points out that “it is real death, the inevitable possibility of real destruction, that makes language possible as an idealizing and universal medium of signification.”

Corresponding to what Derrida asserts that the singularity must be compromised by generality (which paradoxically deprives it uniqueness) in order to make sense, Gasché’s notion here also brings out the fact that “mortality is the condition under which language can proceed to that idealizing destruction of a singular reality in the flesh, thus making it ideal and . . . the object of a possible address.” There should be the “prior annihilation of

immediate existence” through naming so that the “latter [can be] separated from itself, made other than itself in its singular and unique existence” and become “an Other for me to address”

(Gasché 52). Such is the thanatographical logic embedded in the problem of nomination that anticipates Derrida’s account on proper name.

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Given that the establishment of the proper name, like that of the monument, depends on the death and destruction of the named, it is now clear that for Derrida there is a “distinction between the name and the bearer of the name,” which is “the distinction between death and life” (Royle 6-7). The name is always the other’s name, something other to itself. It is always already “a priori a dead man’s name, a name of death” (Derrida, EO 7). In this case the proper name bears witness to death and mourning, and to the “structural possibility that the one who gives, receives, or bears the name will be absent from it” (Brault & Naas 13).

Derrida believes that the law of the name is always related to death because it is destined to outlive its bearer. “It precedes death” and announces itself in advance as “the name of a dead person” (Derrida, WM 130). When one dies the name persists as the monument. The act of calling one’s name is always haunted by the understanding that this name will survive the bearer and can be active even when the bearer is absent. The name announces death even

“while the bearer is still living”; The work of mourning then begins already at the initial stage of nomination (Brault & Naas 13-4). The proper name as the monument is thus also “a site of haunting” which is inscribed by “an altogether Other” as “a phantom . . . or “a living-dead in place of the subject” (Castricano 19-20).

The philosophical frameworks of the central themes in Derrida’s thematization of hauntology are delineated here in detail for that in one way or another they come to form a

The philosophical frameworks of the central themes in Derrida’s thematization of hauntology are delineated here in detail for that in one way or another they come to form a

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