Embodied Knowledges: Synesthesia and the Archive in Monique Truong's Bitter in the Mouth

Abstract

Subjects of twentieth-century Western modernity are “in need of archives,” Jacques Derrida writes in Archive Fever (1995). The characteristics of archive fever are numerous: “It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive. . . . It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). In other words, symptoms of archive fever include the desire for that which is elusive (“right where it slips away”), as well as nostalgia not for the past in general but for the moment of origination and beginnings. Archive fever seeks knowledge that might secure us ontologically and epistemologically through an encounter with a primary self. But why are we in need of archives—defined for the purposes of this study not as specific places of documentation but as general “meaning-making system[s] that [allow] for some statements to be enunciated and others to lack intelligibility” (Ferguson)? Certainly, archives are intimately intertwined with our desire to locate ourselves, to make visible the residue of the past as it informs the present, and to make sense of legacies (historical, intellectual, and affective) that intimately inform our sense of ourselves as subjects. Yet archives have been called into question over the past several decades in discourses as wide-ranging as performance, queer, feminist, and postcolonial studies. Such critical work identifies the archive as a formulation by which the ephemeral and the personal are erased in favor of the enduring and the state-sanctioned. Nevertheless, despite our legitimate suspicions of the way the archive inevitably facilitates the consolidation of authority and the erasure of difference, we cannot leave the archive behind. As Derrida argues, “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its