Archigraphia: On the Future of Testimony and the Archive to Come

Dragan Kujundzic

Remember: no memory or testimony is possible without the archive! Remember: memory and testimony are possible only without the archive! Any reection on testimony, memory, the archive and archivization has to disarm itself before such an impossible injunction. And this command orders all our thinking, ethics, writing, tradition, religion and culture.

Archive of the Past, Archive of the Future Jacques Derridas Archive Fever starts precisely by drawing attention to this aporia of the archive. The word arkhe, he recalls at the beginning of his book, names at the same time the command to remember, to archive and keep, and the commencement of an institution of archivization. From the outset, therefore, this aporia splits the commemorative gesture into two irreconcilable tasks, the symptoms in fact, to which Derrida gives the name of Archive Fever (Mal darchive). Like the task of the translator envisioned by Walter Benjamin (and, as we shall see, translation and archivization go hand in hand as two members of the re-membering, archiving agency), the task here marks both the demand to archive, and the need to give up the task (Aufgabe, Aufgeben), to face up to an impossible pressure to forget the archive in order to remember.
Discourse, 25.1 & 2, Winter and Spring, pp. 166188. 2004 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

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This impossible pressure consists of the fact that any archiving practice has to announce its own desire for the unique, singular, indivisible space and memory, the archivization of, as we would say in English, the one and only. That one is the archival jealousy of its own memory, its command and injunction to remember its name, its place and its law. There is no archive without this jealous and self-preserving order. It is its rst (but the order of things is here uncertain), primordial impulse. We could say, in the language of psychoanalysis, that it is its primal drive, not without violence, and not without its death-drive. It may be the death drive itself: an injunction to remember, to le and archive, only the one, the one and only. Only one. Derrida gives three qualications for this archival drive: it is an-archic, anarchivic and archiviolitic. In a very economic condensation which is a trademark of his writing, Derrida draws attention to the possibility that this primordial jealousy of the archive has, from the very start, all capacities to erase any archival trace, even the trace of its own archivization. The memory, in that sense, is made impossible by the very imperative of archivization. Derrida will bring the consequences of this aspect of the archive to its aporetic and terrible limit, by saying that the archive fever, in its most violent consequences and possibilities, verges on radical evil (20). One may be justied in wondering why should such an impossible aporia be the rst impulse of any archivization and why would it be tied to what Freud famously called the death drive? Because without this injunction of the one, the rst inscription of the singular event and its passing, no archive, no memory traces, no traces would have been possible. But what makes the tracing and archivization possible also threatens the archive at the very origin. This drive, in Derridas words, works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view of effacing its own proper traceswhich consequently cannot be called proper (10). To speak in Freuds terms (A Freudian Impression is the subtitle of Derridas book), the archive would not be possible without this originary re-pression, the Verdraengung, at the site of its own induction or production. The archival principle serves the death drive. And yet, on the other hand, one can justly argue in a very empirical fashion: we do have existing archives, archives are made, bequeathed, opened and inaugurated every day, and archives do succeed in surviving. We even have the Jacques Derrida Archive at the University of California at Irvine, which is the university where I work, and I, who am writing this essay, have in the past on occasions served as the archon, the keeper of this archive. So I can attest

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that the archive, even of someone who deconstructs the logic of the archive, such as Jacques Derrida, is possible, thriving, alive and well. The Jacques Derrida Archive keeps surviving even the deconstruction of the archive by Jacques Derrida. It is a permanent deconstruction site. This survival of the archive, the relationship between archivization and survival may be equally essential to the functioning of the archive. Not unlike, again, Benjamins notion of translation, the archive may be seen as a site of its own survival, existing in a mode of a delayed survival of itself. This is made possible by a counterpressure exerted by the archive. Let us recall, no archive would exist without the originary injunction to remember, the repression that is archiviolitic and anarchivic. And yet, the archival drive simultaneously impresses, makes an impression or suppression (Freuds Unterdrueckung) on the material substrate of the archive, on its topos, domicile, psyche or culture. In its very archiviolation, it leaves a trace of itself, it is suppressed and displaced onto another affect (28). And this impression, the trace that nds a support on the welcoming site or substrate, on the topos which is conducive to the inscription, vouches for the repetition, the survival, and the translation of the archive. In a word: it opens the archive to the future. The memory generated by the suppression is possible on the condition of forgetting and in turn repressing or displacing the archive. By the very fact that the suppressed traces do not belong to the initial, jealous memory of the one, but are the markers of alterity (they are other-than-archive), they do not belong to the archive proper. Rather, they may be seen as the traces or symptoms of the originary repression which they leave behind. That impressed inscription on the substrate (we could call it the forgotten memory of the archive, recalling the second chiasmatic injunction that opened this essay) informs the wager and the incalculable opening towards the future: the very idea of the archive depends on it. Derrida elsewhere calls this opening not the future (which would imply the future of presence, therefore a metaphysical conception of temporality), but the to-come, a-venir: an opening through which an archive can receive the unexpected, the unprogrammable, the unpredictable, the un-presentable and the un-representable. An opening of the unknown is thus produced, which no archival knowledge prepares us to receive. This opening orients the archive towards actualizations and inscriptions to come. Over this structural, innite and in principle interminable possibility of the archive to receive new contextualizations, receptions or inscriptions, no archive, no law, and no father or keeper of the archive has any power or control.

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We have thus two mutually exclusive forces that constitute an archiving impression. One that belongs to what Freud called repression, a record of passing and death, the recording of death itself, and on the other hand, the opening that is a promise of, and to the future, and which, as a trace of its own survival requires, demands or commands transmission and translation. At the same time [. . .] the conditions of archivization implicate [. . .] all the aporias which make it into a movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past (29).

Moses and the Trauma of the Archive Archive Fever was written as the keynote address at the conference on Memory: the Question of Archives, held in the Freud Archive in London in 1995, and is therefore also a reection on the very site of the archivization of psychoanalysis. It is also one of Derridas great polemical essays about psychoanalysis, one that should be read in the context of his polemical encounters with Michel Foucault or Jacques Lacan . This time, the polemics takes a form of contestation of Freuds Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable by Yosef Haim Yerushalmi (to whom Derrida dedicates Archive Fever), and over Freuds last book, Moses and Monotheism. And, above all it is a polemics about the archive that is tied to the idea of monotheistic religion. What is the relevance of the death of Moses for the concept of archivization and why should precisely that essay by Freud, among so many possible others, serve as the exemplary case on which to build a polemics around the archive and archivization? The answer, if one is possible, revolves around naming, the name of god, and of the name of psychoanalysis itself. The argument of Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, is well-known but worth repeating, particularly in the context of the debate about the archive. The founder of Jewish monotheism and the giver of the Mosaic laws, Moses was an Egyptian who led the Jews out of bondage and imposed on them the monotheistic religion of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV. The leader of the Jewish tribe turned out to be too strict in imposing the new religion, including the custom of circumcision, and was therefore killed by his newly chosen brethren. The memory of the crime underwent a period of latency, during which another god was sought by the Jewish tribe. It was found in the kindred Semitic tribe in Midian and the volcanic deity called Yahveh. Over a period of years the initial, originary monotheistic god prevailed, and the two deities were

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merged, as was the Mosaic giving of the laws projected on another priest, also called Moses. What has been kept and preserved, archived therefore, under the name of Jewish monotheism, is this repressed memory of the originary patricide, inscribing itself as the trauma of chosenness and survival. And that repressed memory can be described by the already established contradictory mechanism of archivization. The initial impulse to keep the memory of the one and only God, of the monotheistic tradition, accumulates its energy precisely from this initial anarchivic and archiviolitic trauma: the death of the primal father and the injunction to repeat his laws. That injunction, according to the well-known Freudian schema, having come from the now dead father, has a much more powerful bond and commands a much more forceful obligation than that of any father alive. But that memory is what, precisely, needs to be forgotten or rather repressed in order for the law, the Mosaic nomos, to be perpetuated throughout history. It has suffered the fate of repression, the state of being unconscious, before it could produce such mighty effects on its return, and force the masses under its spell [. . .] in religious tradition (130). The traumatic separation from the tribal father creates yet another element essential for the functioning of monotheism, according to Freud. It commands the return, a belated attempt, to regain the moment before the murder. It is this moment before the murder, that of chosenness, that allows the survival of the tradition in the repressed memory of the initial catastrophe. The monotheistic experience of the Jewish people is therefore tied to the archivic survival: their existence in history, what returns as monotheism, comes from the fact, noted by Cathy Caruth, that the Jews were violently separated from Moses and survived. In a way, the entire people have become the substrate or the subjectile on which this initial archiving repression left its impression. Caruth gives a cogent description of this condition: Monotheism for Freud is [. . .] not simply a return of the past, but of the fact of having survived it, a survival that, in the gure of the new Jewish god, appears not as an act of being chosen by the Jews, but as the incomprehensible fact of being chosen for a future that remains, in its promise, yet to be understood (71). What are the consequences of this archiviolitic survival? The situation described as the return of the repressed father of monotheism challenges the capacity of historical, referential description. We know that the catastrophe has happened, but only because of the traces and impressions that cover, veil or repress the originary crime. To the very moment of the archivic catastrophe

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belongs a delay, to which Freud will give the name of Nachtraeglichkeit: How far the accounts of former times are based on earlier sources or on oral tradition, and what interval elapsed between an event and its xation by writing, we are unable to know (51). The text (the one that tells or archives the story of the monotheistic tradition), Freud continues, tells us enough about its own history, and is formed by two distinct forces, diametrically opposed to each other, that have left their traces on it (my emphasis). One force would be the one of repressing the originary moment, or crime, keeping the originary moment mute, encrypted or secret, the text in accord with secret tendencies. The other, diametrically opposite tendency, would be the one which wanted to record everything, anxious to keep everything as it stood. Thus, Freud says in one of his most memorable formulas, the distortion of the text is not unlike a murder. The difculty lies not in the execution of the deed but in doing away with the traces (52). In accord with the already established analysis of the archive, we could say that any archivization, and in this case, the particular archivization of monotheism (and that is hardly just any archive), obeys the same logic. It wavers between the repressed imperative to archive the singular, one and only, but also dead (father), and the imperative to perpetuate the law of this inaugural injunction into the future. Freud in effect gives here something like both the deconstruction of the Judaic, monotheistic origins, and the deconstruction of a programmed, certain, predictable, given futurity. The laws given to us come from an uncertain, divided, and contradictory origin, jealous of itself yet always in need of future translations. And by the very fact that the traces left by this archiviolation remain forever detached from the originary event (the effect of delay), they will be open to future inscriptions, interpretations and receptions, over which, we should repeat, no archon, gatekeeper, priest, the guardian of the law and maybe not even God himself, has any power. No longer is [thus an event] given in a temporal or historical modality dominated by the past (Derrida 33). Precisely because monotheism stems from this traumatic experience, by the fact that it is inscribed on the life of the entire nation and therefore dispersed, or detached from the origin, the meaning of this experience of survival is given over to the heterogeneous multiplicity of topoi, to the incalculable future and to the to-come, avenir. If the project that we know as psychoanalysis and that we ascribe to its rst archon Sigmund Freud has any future, it is precisely in this capacity to wrench itself out of and away from the monotheistic bond which serves as its impetus, but without repeating yet another monotheistic or Oedipal crime. It is a

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project of being the son otherwise, of both belonging, and detaching itself from the identitary bond, a perpetual unraveling of its aliation.

The Name of the Father To Yosef Hayim Yerushalmis Freuds Moses belongs an innovative and original discovery in Freuds archive: that for his 35th birthday Freud received from his father a Bible with the Hebraic inscription reminding him of his circumcision and, in effect, thus reiterating the inaugural event of the lial submission to the father and the receiving of the law. The Bible itself, the Phillipsohn Bible, that Sigmund Freud had studied in his youth, was re-bound in new leather, thus reinforcing the impression that what in effect took place in this receiving of a gift was a renewed circumcision of Freud who thus for his 35th birthday also receives again, and as a kind of double afrmation, the law of the fathers from the hand of the father. It is in conjunction with this event which serves as its initiatory pivot, that Yerushalmi launches his analysis of Moses and Monotheism in a book that, itself, has as its subtitle the question of Jewish identity: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Several motivations or tactics guide Yerushalmis analysis. The rst is an attempt by the historian to re-assess the myth about Moses, and erase, or take away from Freuds analysis, the insight about the primal crime. The second, to interpret Freuds work and life in the light of the lial re-inscription symbolized by the gift of his 35th birthday and prove that Freud, in effect, was not an atheist but a believing Jew, or at least a Jew who kept close to his origins, albeit maybe in secret. From this, Yerushalmi draws the nal conclusion that psychoanalysis itself may be perceived as a Jewish science. While well cognizant of the terrible resonance that such a label has had in another historical conguration, (psychoanalysis was in effect accused by anti-Semites of being a Jewish science), Yerushalmi wants to give a new skin, so to speak, to this label and re-direct it towards another, more afrmative possibility: what had been so strenuously denied, to turn Balaams curse [the anti-Semitic accusations about psychoanalysis being a Jewish science] into a blessing, (Yerushalmi 1991, 100). This interpretation would re-afrm both Freud and psychoanalysis as structurally bonded to the identity of the Jewish people. After such an analysis, Freud himself would appear as the Psychological Jew (the capital letters are Yerushalmis) in whose guise Jewishness has become almost pure

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subjectivity (Yerushalmi 1991, 10). It is an attempt, as Derrida says, on the part of Yerushalmi, to circumcise Freud, to re-circumcise him by gure while reconrming the covenant (42). It was almost imperative that an argument which wants to reinscribe or appropriate Freud in and for the Judaic tradition in such an essentialist manner would have to counter, head on, the very book in which Freud, at the end of his life, cast such a doubt about the purity of Jewish origins (Moses was an Egyptian and was killed by the Jews). Yerushalmis argument is impeccable, as far as the historical analysis goes. He engages an enormous and impressive knowledge of both the psychoanalytic movement, the biblical interpretation, and historical data in order to prove that, in effect, neither was Moses crime committed, nor did the Bible record such an event, and one can only direct the reader to this impressive and important volume. But this scholarship seems to fail precisely at the point which it would claim as its success, that is, at the very site of the archive. We have seen why Freuds notion of the archive and psychoanalysis itself creates an insurmountable challenge to the historical analysis which constructs itself as an uninterrupted genealogy, or has a referential frame as the guiding principle. Such an analysis, like the one attempted by Yerushalmi, will not be able to perform successfully such an appropriative gesture on psychoanalysis. If anything, psychoanalysis is the science which put into question the possibility of writing subject with capital letters (Jewish or not, let alone psychological) and assuming its indivisibility or purity (pure subject). Equally problematic is the attempt to reclaim (Jewish) history by proving that the events that Freud writes about did not in effect happen. Freuds colossal insight resides in his analysis of the archival logic of the historic event. The historians task always comes after the fact, and the event can be read only in the traces that cover the originary trauma. The historians work is always that of deciphering the ashes left after the catastrophe of history. It is actually in the insistence of the ashes to speak, testify and tell the story, precisely in the absence of the discernible referent, that history returns as a ghost and speaks most forcefully. Thus Freuds analysis of the narrative about Moses, while fully cognizant of its limitations, is more probable in its assessment of how the Jews could survive until this day as an entity (176) precisely because it reads into this event the effects of the traumatic survival. These effects cannot be read in a strictly referential or testimonial manner but constantly require interminable analysis and the answer, forever delayed, is promised only in and to the always delayed future.

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Freuds concept of historical analysis (Freud was also a historian, analyzing case histories) will show its advantage most clearly over any historicizing discourse when confronted with the event for which Freuds whole life and work prepared him, and of which Moses and Monotheism, to this day, represents probably the most profound analysis. Freud is in many ways the most vigilant proleptic analyst of the event that he had not lived long enough to live through, to which to testify or in which to die. It is the last chapter of the book, Monologue With Freud, that makes Freuds Moses truly unique in its appropriative attempt. It is the moment when the historian abandons the meticulous task of archivization and working in the archive and turns directly to Freud for explicit answers about his Jewishness. In that moment, the meticulous archival work collapses under the phantasmatic erasure of the archive and under the attempt of the historian to speak directly to Freud and ask him directly whether, genetically or structurally, psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science (Yerushalmi, Freuds 100). Derrida does not fail to perceive this change of register, from the scientic book immersed in the archive, to ction, the change which suspends all axiomatic assurances, norms and rules [. . .] and in particular its relationship to the known and unknown archive (52). Archiviolation, Testimony and Translation Every archive has something of a jealous God. It imposes the keeping of the idiom, the name or the singular event, close to itself and one with itself. But, at the same time, the archival impulse requires inscriptions, writing, graphic traces and translation, in order to launch itself into historical and material existence. In that sense, the conditions of archivization correspond closely to the originary command to translate that precedes even the Mosaic laws, that of the tower of Babel. The command to translate is actually double and contradictory (elsewhere, Derrida says that God always contradicts himself ). God forbids the building of the tower of Babel, but at the same time commands the translation of his name in the multitude of languages. He jealously keeps to himself the name while ordering its transmission by means of translation: translate me, translate me not. (The same holds for the testimonial logic: testify to me, testify not). That is why by structural necessity the archive corresponds or stands in the closest proximity to the monotheistic tradition. Or it is that tradition itself. (Monotonotheism! Nietzsche would protest). Derrida says as much in Archive Fever, when he writes that the archive always holds a problem

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of translation. With the irreplaceable singularity of a document to interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its original uniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for translation, open and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction (90). Archive fever would also be the name of the jealous God, commanding the repetition and translation of its name (of the idiomaticity of the archive), and forbidding and restricting its iteration. To let the translator of Archive Fever into English speak: So even the documented origin of the archive cannot cleanse it of such corruption; an archive may always be in the process of translating itself and from itself, by itself (Prenowitz 108). Yerushalmis Freuds Moses repeats precisely these gestures of violent archivization and actualization of the archivic violence, in the divided strategy by means of which the book approaches, or reproaches, or encroaches on the work of Sigmund Freud. One appropriative gesture is that attempt of nding a nal proof in the archives that Freud and his workindeed, contrary to the very nature of the psychoanalytic project and its essential premises belonged to the Jewish people in a way that would be bereft of any capacity for dissent or difference from itself. That would be the primary repression repeated by Yerushalmi. The other appropriative move would be to keep this archive jealously for itself but also, as attempted in the monologue with Freud, to shield it from translation and appropriate the future receptions of the psychoanalytic project. It appropriates Freud and psychoanalysis for the teleological purity of the one, for the logic that the entire psychoanalytic project, in the founding moment of its own archivization, attempts to displace, psychoanalyze, dismantle and deconstruct. Derrida keeps the strongest, most forceful protest of his polemics with Yerushalmi for the moment when this appropriation of both the inaugural moment of the archive (the past, the memory), and its disseminative, unrestrained capacity for the to-come, become appropriated by Yerushalmi for the unique, singular and totalizing topos of Israel. The two strategic appropriations are worth quoting. One pertains to Yerushalmis admonition that Freud, by means of his stubborn adherence to the Oedipal, betrays what is most Jewish, the openness to the future (Yerushalmi, Freuds 95). The future therefore, in Yerushalmis interpretation, belongs in an essential way to the people of Israel. The other appropriation comes from his other equally celebrated book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, where Yerushalmi writes that Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people (9).

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This sentence, Derrida says, makes him tremble and wonder whether it is just (Archive 76). The allocation of the archive to a topographic locale which in a totalizing manner would be the only place for the memory of the future is precisely what psychoanalysis, as a project, sets from the start to challenge. The repressed topos of the archive can make its effect felt because the repressed material, made unconscious, becomes dispersed in the multiplicity of psychic, material or geopolitical topographies. While their origin resides in the archiviolitic event, traces have a capacity for dispersion beyond its unifying control. And every actualization of the archive is also an intervention into the archive, and may be also a creative or critical contestation of its originary violence, and therefore not one and the same with it. That dispersion is the very structural possibility for the archive to appear in history. If an analogy with the Jewish people is sought regarding Freud and psychoanalysis, we could say that the repressed traces of the Mosaic archive dispersed themselves and created something like the unconscious of Europe, the European Jewry itself, located in a heterogeneity both in relation to their place of origin and in relation to the multiplicity of the new topographies. Psychoanalysis represents both the most cogent formalization and the most productive outcome of this dissemination. We said productive: psychoanalysis works through the traumatic experience of its origin. The diaspora of the archival impressions is the very condition of the archive and can be reduced and returned to a unique topos, a return in effect structurally impossible, only with a considerable amount of violence. The authentication of the archive attempted by Yerushalmi goes in the opposite direction of the psychoanalytic project and carries with itself all the familiar and predictable violence of the one: As soon as there is the One, there is murder, wounding, traumatism. Lun se garde de lautre. The One guards against/keeps some of the other [. . .]. At once, at the same time, the One forgets to remember itself to itself, it keeps and erases the archive of this injustice (78). Derridas argument at this point not only thematically challenges the univocity of the one, but also, in a rhetorical manner, and in a condensed economy noted earlier, displays the impossibility of the archivic certainty as soon as the impression is deposited to writing. The very violence that splits the archive here is condensed into the trace that is forever divided, more than one and less than one, in a formula that needs to be translated, at least twice: Lun se garde de lautre. That archivic ambivalence and originary ambiviolence which Yerushalmi wants to appropriate to the One, belongs, Derrida notes, to the very discovery by psychoanalysis that

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goes by the name of Nachtraeglichkeit, the originary delay. The logic of after-the-fact turns out to disrupt, disturb, entangle forever the reassuring distinction between the two terms of the alternative, as between the past and the future (80). In a word, the appropriative gesture by Yerushalmi fails, while reiterating the archiviolence, since this appropriation runs counter to the very heart of the psychoanalytic project and the archive of the work that we know by the name of Sigmund Freud.

Ashes, Memory and Testimony In the concluding chapter of Archive Fever, Derridas book turns on itself and, as it were, begins anew. It should be noted that the book itself is organized by chapters called Exergue, Preamble, Foreword, Theses and Postscript. It demarcates itself against any authentic moment of archivization of itself; it is an impossible archive which only begins, or comes too late, but never is as such. This should be understood as a rhetorical and syntagmatic illustration of the anasemic, heterogeneous and multiple logic at work in Freuds and Derridas understanding of archivization. There, at the end of the book, which in a sense becomes its beginning, Derrida brings us to Pompeii and Freuds analysis of Jensens Gradiva. It is at this site that the young archeologist talks to the ghost of a woman, and wakes over the imprint left in the ashes by this midday ghost (Mittagsgespenst). It is in this moment when the archeologist reects on the inscription and the writing directly made on the ashes by the ghost, that the archive of the future and the future of the archive thrust themselves forth and make their impression with utmost urgency. At the end of Moses and Monotheism and at the eve of the Shoah, Freud reminds us that the archiviolence that pertains to Jewish monotheism has the capacity to replicate itself throughout history, and on the body of the people chosen by this archivization. The Jewish people murdered god but did not admit to it. Through this they have, so to speak, shouldered a tragic guilt. They have been made to suffer severely for it (Freud 176). And, a bit earlier, talking about Christianity undergoing a similar resistance by those who are badly christened, he says: The hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity, and it is not surprising that in the German Nationalist Socialist revolution this close connection of the two monotheistic religions nds such a clear expression in the hostile treatment of both (117). (That Yerushalmi at the end of his book could still write that Freudin

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1939!could not have anticipated the full horror of the war and the devastation of a third of a Jewish people [Yerushalmi, Freuds 98] testies to Yerushalmis lack of understanding of the anticipatory force of psychoanalysis and its most outstanding achievements and insights. If Moses and Monotheism has any meaning, it is in its attempt to understand, interpret and against all hope diffuse what Freud saw coming better than anyone. This book also allows us, better than any historical assessment to this day, to reect on and work through the violent consequences of this catastrophic event and its devastating archive. Of this one and of so many others). Jacques Derrida formalizes this line of Freuds thought in his Archive Fever by pointing out that if Freud suffered from archive fever, it was precisely because he or his discovery had a capacity to partake in the archive fever or disorder we are experiencing today, concerning its lightest symptoms or the great holocaustic tragedies of our modern history and historiography (90, my emphasis). And a bit further on, in Derridas interpretation, psychoanalysis probably produced its most profound insight by allowing us to explain why anarchiving destruction belongs to the process of archivization and produces the very thing it reduces, on occasion to ashes, and beyond (94). Freuds insights into the nature of archive allow us to comprehend something that has happened as the most catastrophic event in Jewish history. Psychoanalysis was always already a thought of that catastrophic event. That event is eminently tied to modernity, that begins with monotheism, the technological capacity of archivization which gave this history its technical reproducibility and the logic of sacrice activated by the Nationalist Socialist regime. (Freuds work initiated after the rst world war works through the trauma, death, articial and phantom limbs, the death drive, mass destruction, but also anticipates the ultimate writing on ashes and the archiviolence of the following war). Freuds insights into the nature of the archive belong to the thought of modernity comparable to that of Walter Benjamin. It thinks the possibility of innite multiplication and technical reproducibility of repression and destruction at work in the modern archive, like in the striking example of the most sophisticated machine of archivization, the computer. As is well-known, the rst computer, the IBM-owned Hollerith machine, was rst put to use on a grand scale for the systematic archivization of the European Jewry in rounding it up for the concentration camps. And Freud understood, perhaps better than anyone, why such an event, while multiplying an archive, could at the same time produce, in an equally innite capacity, its

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complete erasure. Leaving only the ashes to speak in the absence of the catastrophic event. The catastrophe that produced them remains, but as ashes, gone up in smoke and forever erased.

Sarajevo: the Gaze of Testimony and the Archive of the Other Theo Angelopoulos Ulysses Gaze (1996) narrates how a modern day Ulysses (Harvey Keitel) seeks to nd three undeveloped reels by the Manakis brothers whose rst movie, which does exist, and is one of the rst ever, depicts women weaving, somewhere in the Balkans. (That movie is actually shown at the beginning of Ulysses Gaze.) The quest for knowledge leads Ulysses through many scenes repeating the violence of history that constitutes the space known as the Balkans: in Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Romania, then Belgrade and Sarajevo. (A scene in the movie shows an insignicant village, Janina, lmed by the Manakis brothers in Macedoniainsignicant but exemplaryas the voice over narrates: All European armies have marched through it.) It is to the Sarajevo of the last war that the teleology of his will to know takes him, and nding the reels, it nds its destination, its end. The undeveloped reels are kept by a Jewish curator, to be killed with his entire family soon after he hands the movie over to Keitel. The last scenes depict Sarajevo in the fog, the only time when the city is at peace. And in that moment of peace is the time to bury the dead. And it is in this moment of suspended shared danger that the youth orchestra (the young Serbs, Croats, Muslims, playing together, the Jewish curator explains to Keitel) can perform in the open. A communality appears in the face of a catastrophe, during the fog, which reorients Ulysses heading, to the possibility of another Bosnia, another Europe. Ulysses Gaze subverts the entire Greek, and therefore exemplary European notion of the ontology of gaze and space, starting at least with Platos cave, and proposes another dislocation of the Greek logos, a certain Greco-Jewish contamination, as Jacques Derrida has it in Violence and Metaphysics: a dislocation of our identity, and perhaps of identity in general; it summons us to depart from the Greek site and perhaps from the very site in general (82). These are Derridas words about another patient Jew, Emmanuel Levinas (Jewgreek, greekjew is how Joyce calls his Ulysses, and how Derrida calls Levinas [Violence 153]). This different site and sight will be motivated not by the will to know, see or name, which can only testify to the already programmed catastrophe of history. (This will to know is in itself complicitous in

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many ways with the violence taking place, as exemplied by a cynical anecdote spun in Sarajevo during the siege; one neighbor to another, as a curse, says a Serb to a Muslim: May your house appear tonight on CNN! CNN is therefore not where war and destruction are, war and destruction are where there is CNN. The citizens of Sarajevo understood that better than the liberal West or Europe). Rather, this alternative sight will be motivated, or imagined, by an utmost passivity: weaving, keeping, the patient commemoration of danger which wards off exactly that kind of ophtalmo-phallocratic gaze of war under which the European history unravels or ruins itself. It is in weaving and keeping, in danger, that, as Levinas says, the face of the other, in this nudity, exposed unto death [. . .] reminds one of the very mortality of the other person (107). The responsibility to the other will always have preceded the certainty of the name, the testimonial sight or gaze. In one of the last scenes of the movie, the blank frames icker in front of Ulysses gaze. On the blank screen he sees, maybe, the catastrophe of history: the face of every person who died in the Bosnian war; the end of a site and of a sight, a sight/site of Europe. But in the blank ickering of the frames, an opening: the blank, undeveloped lm, an unseen, untestiable memory of the unprogrammed other, patience, passivity, a promise, a future. For example, an example. An example? In the meantime, Sarajevo is in fog. The world is blind.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Milosevic in the Hague: Testimony, Memory, Justice In the amended indictment of Slobodan Milosevica document available on the website of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, on page 31, there is a list called Schedule G, Persons killed in Djakovica/Gjakove2 April 1999. This is just a tiny part of the list of persons killed and enumerated by the indictment of Milosevic, and four other members of the government. It is lodged between several dozens of pages listing the victims of the atrocities. But this one succeeds in drawing the attention of the reader whose concentration may be dulled by the endless litany of victims. The twenty persons on Schedule G with the exception of Vejsa Arlind, who was ve, are all women. Or should we say female, since a large number of them is of age 2 to 14. Here is the list, the Schedule G, as it is presented in the Amended Indictment:

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Schedule G Persons Killed at Dakovica / Gjakove2 April 1999 Name CAKA, Dalina CAKA, Delvina CAKA, Diona CAKA, Valbona GASHI, Hysen HAXHIAVDIJA, Doruntina HAXHIAVDIJA, Egzon HAXHIAVDIJA, Rina HAXHIAVDIJA, Valbona HOXHA, Flaka HOXHA, Shahindere NUCI, Manushe NUC I, Shirine VEJSA, Arlind VEJSA, Fetije VEJSA, Marigona VEJSA, Rita VEJSA, Sihana VEJSA, Tringa Approximate Age 14 6 2 34 50 8 5 4 38 15 55 50 70 5 60 8 2 8 30 Sex Female Female Female Female Not indicated Female Not indicated Female Female Female Female Female Female Male Female Female Female Female Female

What happened to them? Why were they killed? What is the possible military, or any other reason for exterminating Caka Diaona, age 2, for what political advantage? These questions without answer have been haunting me ever since I ran into the list and printed it out. During the war in Bosnia and Kosovo, many reasons in the ofcial Belgrade press were given for ghting in Sarajevo or in Kosovo: reasons of territorial integrity, protection of the Serbian people of the real or imagined menace from the other, Muslim or Kosovar side, self-protection of the Yugoslav military or paramilitary troops, protection of sovereignty. Some were victims, it was said, of collateral damage. I, together with a large number of Serbian intellectuals, or members of the opposition, who have been opposing the Milosevic regime from the very beginning, never believed or accepted these rationalizations. We feared, as we protested the atrocities done by the regime, but never enough, forever never enough, that the civilians were killed. Just as Serbian civilians were killed in Bosnia, and in Kosovo, and in Croatia. It is always civilians, civility, taken hostage by the military, or, to jump to the conclusion, by the goals or telos of sovereignty, that are caught as

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victims. And all we are now left with is this somber, ascetic list, and the question why. And if I say that such lists are possible on all sides of this conict, I am not in any way trying to relativize anyones responsibility, only to underscore that situation of civilians being taken hostage. If one looks at the indictments, one nds precious little to go on, to explain what happened there. This is how the indictment describes the events of these atrocities:
a. Dakovica/Gjakove: On or about 2 April 1999, forces of the FRY and Serbia began forcing residents of the town of Dakovica/Gjakove to leave. Forces of the FRY and Serbia spread out through the town and went house to house ordering Kosovo Albanians from their homes. In some instances, people were killed, and most persons were threatened with death. Many of the houses and shops belonging to Kosovo Albanians were set on re, while those belonging to Serbs were protected. During the period from 2 to 4 April 1999, thousands of Kosovo Albanians living in Dakovica/Gjakove and neighboring villages joined a large convoy, ei ther on foot or driving in cars, trucks and tractors, and moved to the border with Albania. Forces of the FRY and Serbia directed those eeing along pre-arranged routes, and at police checkpoints along the way most Kosovo Albanians had their identication papers and license plates seized. In some instances, Yugoslav army trucks were used to transport persons to the border with Albania.

As I am reading this document (and my reading it, today, as it was from the very rst time, proceeds from a sense of profound mourning: what could we have done to prevent it), it occurs to me that it proceeds along two different regimes, familiar from other historical events that have known systematic loss of life, taken out in large numbers, as life as such. For example, the Holocaust. The two events remain singular and different, in many ways, and I do not want to suggest that the atrocities performed by the Milosevic regime have either the same scope, or systemic dimension, as the Holocaust. The war in Kosovo for which Milosevic is tried in this indictment (and other indictments have followed, and Carla del Ponte has raised another one, for the war crimes in Croatia) did not have as its goal the total destruction of the Kosovars, and has not known concentration death camps that resembled those of Nazi Germany. I belong to those who believe in the singular historical specicity of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, in the catastrophic episode that I am bringing to your attention, there are traits of any technologically enhanced mass genocide that may, in principle, resemble the experience of mass death of which the Shoah remains the impossible model, a model without a model. Having inserted this word of caution, let me again make an attempt at an

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analogy, and draw your attention to two features of these documents that resemble a possible narrative about the Holocaust. One is the mere listing of bare life interrupted by the systemic killing, killing possible only, as Benjamin would say, in the age of technical reproducibility. In this case, probably by mass executions, by means of rearms or maybe grenades. The listing of the deceased in any case betrays a certain technical, systemic approach. Whatever the killers, the paramilitary were doing on April 2, 1999, they were killing not individuals, but, in some way, only a bare life that needed to be eliminated or exterminated. Of this experience, on the side of the victim, Walter Benjamin wrote on Kafka many years ago that it is the experience of an individual, and not accessible to the masses until such time as they are being done away with. That is, Kafkas experience is an impossible experience of the individual death (what other experience is more profound, and which one belongs more to each being, than ones own death); rather, the death of Kafkas characters, that which is the most proper, is the one which is singular but experienced in masses, en masse, deprived exactly of that singularity, that experience of dying as a subject, person, who has the right to die as some kind of minimal identity. Those listed here died a death that is worse than death, since, in some ways, it was not death at all. It was death deprived of its human possibility. Giorgio Agamben has recently thematized such an experience, an impossible experience, as that of homo sacer, hovering between the sovereign power and bare life. In the chapter Camp as Paradigm in his book Homo Sacer (and elsewhere, in the related volume Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive), Agamben writes that those who are sentenced to death [in camps] were forced into an extraterritorial threshold in which the human body is separated from its normal political status and abandoned, in a state of exception, to the most extreme misfortunes. Such a threshold experience Agamben qualies as an experience of those who are killed without the commission of homicide. This aporia should be understood in light of Benjamins interpretation of Kafka. Not that there was no war crime, that no atrocity took place, but that it took place in a realm where the human beings killed were deprived, by the very means of their executions, of their proper deaths. Which is what makes it, among other things, very difcult to prosecute the crimes of mass destruction, at least by the existing laws, laws written for everyday life and for murders, homicides, commissions against individuals, and not masses. In Sarah Kofmans Smothered Words, in which she attempts to

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tell the story of her fathers demise in Auschwitz, Kofman also reproduces the list of those deported to Drancy, among whom was her father. This list is enveloped by two propositions. One, preceding the list, claims that after Auschwitz, all men, Jewish or nonJewish, die differently: they do not really die, because what took place, down there, death in Auschwitz [or Djakovica, we could say], without taking place, was worse than death (21). This paragraph is followed by the fragment of the list of those deported to Drancy on July 16, 1942. Always lists, dates, names, which do not mean anything, an endless litany of victims, and that at the same time mean so much, that mean everything. The paragraph following the list states the following: On Auschwitz and after Auschwitz, no narrative is possible, if by a narrative one understands telling a history of events, making sense (25). The document which transcribes the event that took place in Djakovica on April 2, 1999, tells very little about the senseless crime, a crime without a sense, in the originary sense of the word sense. For what can be told about the killing of Rina Haxiavdija, age four, even as the narrative tries to recover her death in the face of justice, as the indictment attempts to recover the memory of this event and preserve it from complete oblivion? But as the document tries to create a testimony, it faces us with yet another aporia of the mass murder, well known from the experience of the Holocaust. Even if the crime had been witnessed (and there is, in this case, no indication that it happened, no witnesses are yet produced), it would be almost an impossible scene of testimony. Because such crimes of mass annihilation leave no witnesses but only lists, no sense or narrative with meaning, but a dry and ofcial recounting without compassion or possible space of mourning. As it is narrated, the ofcial document leaves no space for mourning, just like the death marked by lists, by serial numbers, technical reproducibility, creates an impossible scene of mourning, mourning for a death that cannot be testied about, of which there is no testimony, and which, in the strictest sense, it is not death at all.

The Testimony and the Impossibility of Speaking In the 1997 documentary movie about Eichmanns trial, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, there is a scene in which a writer, Yehiel Denur, appears before the judges. He did it reluctantly, and prior to the trial refused to testify for a long time. The prosecutors particularly wanted his testimony, since he was, for them, an especially valuable and reliable witness, having actually seen Eichmann in a

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concentration camp. He would provide the rst hand testimony. Such hopes met with the structural limit of any live, rst hand testimony, of the genocide. Once on the stand, the witness, who called himself katzetnik, the one recognized by number only, showed the number tattooed on his arm, and proceeded to tell how in the concentration camp they were all reduced to numbers. To the insistence of the prosecutor to tell more, to tell what he saw, the katzetnik could only respond, reiterate, that they were all numbers, that in Auschwitz there are no names, their names were their numbers. After repeated insistence by the prosecutor to tell what he saw, the katzetnik, who was not particularly old, or ill, fell prostrate on the ground and almost died of stroke in the court. His inability to testify actually testied, better than any words, to the Holocaust, particularly in the very inability to testify, to produce a narrative which would have meaning. To the repeated questions by the prosecutor, the katzetnik could only show the number and go numb, offering his bare life, in a moment of second death, as a testimony of what was taken from those killed by numbers and as numbers in the Holocaust. Again Agamben: The political system of the holocaust corresponds to a localization without order (the camp as a permanent state of exception). The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical rules in a determinate space but instead contains at its very center a dislocating localization that exceeds it and into which every form of life and every rule can be virtually taken (Homo 175). From this perspective, continues Agamben, the camps have, in a certain sense, in an even more extreme form reappeared in the territories of the former Yugoslavia. At issue in the former Yugoslavia is, rather, an incurable rupture of the old nomos and a dislocation of the population and human lives along entirely new lines of ight. Hence the decisive importance of ethnic rape camps (Homo 176). And the importance, I add, to commemorate the nineteen women and female children exterminated on April 4, 1999, in Djakovica. While the Hague may not be the proper horizon for mourning, it will open a space for justice, maybe, to appear. The Hague marks an innovation in international politics, particularly as it pertains to the issue of sovereignty. What appears singular and new today is the project of making States, or at least head of states in title (Pinochet), and even of current head of state (Milosevic), appear before universal authorities. It has to do only with projects or hypotheses, but this possibility sufces to announce a transformation: it constitutes in itself a major event. The sovereignty of the State, the immunity of the head of state are no

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longer, in principle, in law, untouchable, writes Jacques Derrida in his book on On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (57). The dry enumeration of the indictment, and the dry, objective ofcial narrative that tells so little about the crime of extermination, without witnesses and testimony and with no possible meaningful narrative about it, speaks, as Agamben would say in his Remnants of Auschwitz, The Witness and the Archive, only on the basis of an impossibility of speaking, and it is in that impossibility of testifying that the testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitzthat to which it is impossible to bear witnessby that very means is absolutely and irrefutably proven (164). In the Hague, before the judges, the rereading of the indictment, this witnessing without testimony, may at least for a moment reopen the space in which these bare lives will again receive their dignity, their individuation, their death. That horizon in which the face of the other reappears in its individuation and in its mortality, which holds us hostage is, maybe, the slim and minimal, but nevertheless bare hope, for the appearance of justice.

The Future of Testimony, of the Archive to Come . . . . . . And yet, and yet, there is a future for the archive, perhaps, and there is, perhaps, an archive for the future. And that hope would belong, equally, to Freuds notion of the archive which, while producing the erasure of itself in the name of the one and the same, also delegates itself to the traces that carry the promise of the future. Those archigraphic traces open the archive to the Other, to the memory of the other and to every other other. That hope may also, paradoxically, belong to the archiving machine known as the computer. To the capacity to produce the worst also belongs the capacity of the promise and a future. A reviewer of Archive Fever noted that the substrate of ash is not remote from computer technology. What causes ash is re, a spark, like electricity, which burns right through the silicon. That electronic capacity, writing right on the ashes, works faster than any other medium. Pulsing like a heartbeat, it can communicate that evil is imminent, that a person is in danger, that a life needs to be saved. Electronic mail elects (Lawlor 798). Using the computer chip, the silicon chip, returns us back to Egypt, to the desert, every time we testify to something or deposit something into memory. Every act of computerized archivization is also an ethical act, a racing against catastrophe, an act of crossing the desert where no assurance is given. Archivization is an act where the desert comes to

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haunt us. What is to-come, the a-venir of archivization, will have been marked by this passage and will have led through the Silicon Valley, through Egypt and through the desert. Such a division between the two possibilities of archivization (we could call this the exemplary space of political and ethical decision between devastation and preservation), Derrida says, haunts the archive from its origin (Archive 100). The trace left on the ash in Pompeii observed by the archeologist, or the trace left on the ickering silicon screen burnt by the re, belong and testify to the order of the spectral. These traces, divided at the origin, haunt the archive and archivization, from the very beginning to the end. Without end, innitely, they open the archive to the to-come, they give hope and promise to return. Save. Print.

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Rozen. New York: Zone Books, 1999. . Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel HellerRozen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Angelopoulos, Theo. Ulysses Gaze. New York: Fox Lorber Studio, Video Release Date 1997. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. New York: Routledge, 2001. . Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995. . Violence and Metaphysics. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine Jones. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Kofman, Sarah. Smothered Words. Trans. Madeleine Dobie. Chicago: Northwestern UP, 1998. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Case No. It9937-I, The Prosecutor Of The Tribunal Against Slobodan Milosevic, Milan Milutinovic, Nikola Sainovic, Dragoljub Ojdanic, Vlajko Stojiljkovic. Available at http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/mil-ii990524e .htm

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Lawlor, Leonard. Memory Becomes Electra. Review of Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. The Review of Politics 60 (Fall 1998): 796798. Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987. Polin B. Daniel and Kenneth Mandel, Producers. The Trial of Adolf Eichmann. New York: PBS Home Video, Video Release Date 1997. Prenowitz, Eric. Translators Note. Right on [a meme]. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995. 103112. Yerushalmi, Yosef Haim. Freuds Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991. . Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. New York: Shocken, 1989.

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twentieth-century Latin American and 17th-century Hispanic baroque literature. Gillian Harkins is an assistant professor of English at the University of Washington, where she teaches late twentieth century United States literature and culture. Her research explores the intersections of gender, sexuality and violence in narratives of national belonging at the end of the twentieth century, focusing on the political relation between legal and literary representations of incest. Dragan Kujundzic teaches Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine. His publications include Critical Exercises (1983), The Returns of History: Russian Nietzscheans After Modernity (1997), Tongue in Heat (2003) and essays on deconstruction, psychoanalysis and lm. Susanna Lee is an assistant professor of French at Georgetown University, where she teaches nineteenth-century narrative and literary theory. She has published diverse articles on religion and narrative and on twentieth-century French and American hardboiled crime ction. She is currently at work on a book project entitled A World Abandoned by God: Narrative and the Move to Secularism. Brett Levinson is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of Secondary Moderns (Bucknell University Press, 1996), The Ends of Literature (Stanford University Press, 2001), and Market and Thought (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). Claire Nouvet is an associate professor in the French and Italian department at Emory University where she teaches Medieval French Literature. She is also a research fellow at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. The text presented in this issue is part of her new research, sponsored by the Institute, on the inarticulate affect in analytic treatment and in analytic writing. Dominic Rainsford is an associate professor and head of the Department of English at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he teaches literature and critical theory. His publications include Authorship, Ethics and the Reader: Blake, Dickens, Joyce (1997); Literature, Identity and the English Channel: Narrow Seas Expanded (2002); The Ethics of Literature (1999) and, as co-editor, Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility (1999), all published by Palgrave. He is currently writing a book on literature, ethics and inanimate objects, and another on literature, ethics and quantication.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.