Religion uden Religion

Fear and Trembling explores an exceptional faith that goes beyond realm of human understanding, knowledge, and law. The story of Genesis serves as a narrative foundation through which S0ren Kierkegaard examines absurd ethics of a father's willingness to sacrifice his only child to an invisible God. Although scandalized and outraged by story, he is nevertheless still inspired by a father who chooses to sacrifice public morality for an intangible, private ethics. In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida too trembles at thought of Abraham's sacrifice and is also scandalized enough to contemplate unconventional ethics of his decision. Derrida's interpretation of story not only preserves spirit of Fear and Trembling but also takes it a step further in that invisible is not bound to religious belief or existence of God. Through making a comparative study of Fear and Trembling and The Gift of Death this essay will put into question ethics and subjectivity of an absolute faith and decision that is so wholly other that it escapes from earthly mediations of language, community, and law. The Genesis Story The story of Genesis is an unadorned parable of faith that tells of a father's willingness to sacrifice his only legitimate son because God asked: 'Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into land of Moriah: and offer him there for a burnt offering.1 The Almighty's words are teasing and vindictive in their repetition and focus on precious life of Isaac. Wordlessly showing obedience, rises early next morning, takes Isaac to mount of Moriah, prepares a woodpile, binds him and then raises his knife with intention to kill. At this crucial moment in story, an angel from Lord intervenes and stops him from going through with sacrifice. Through pseudonym of Johannes de silentio, a poetice et eleganter2 Kierkegaard breathes spirit and meaning into silences and secrets that structure and trouble this story of faith. He inhabits character of in order to preserve ethics of his decision. As Gillian Rose observes in The Broken Middle, Abraham is 'incommensurable,' which is why de silentio is so voluble.3 In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida too is keen to retain ethical dimension of Abraham's decision. Abraham's faith elevates him beyond sphere of ordinary human reason, morality, and law. Both Kierkegaard and Derrida assert that chooses to do what is most difficult and painful because in this particular case the temptation is ethical itself.4 It is understandable and morally reasonable that a loving father would want to save his only son but of course does not do this and what is more, he seeks neither justification nor external counsel in making such a decision. In both Fear and Trembling and The Gift of Death, privacy of his decision is central to preserving ethics of his sacrifice. The torment and pain of giving up what is most precious in world is intensified by isolation and secrecy of his sacrifice. At heart of each defense is a belief in Abraham's unfathomable interiority. In Fear and Trembling, Abraham's individual existence is integral to supporting supreme existence of God. Kierkegaard's motives are clear - he believes in Abraham's subjectivity because it upholds and parallels ultimate subjectivity of God. By contrast, Derrida's motives are not so obvious. Derrida is neither impassioned by religious crisis nor is he driven by need to affirm God's existence, and yet he still retains idea of ineffable in form of Abraham's incommensurable interiority. Kierkegaard's external creator is internalized as a wholly other who is so secret and inaccessible that he is even more intimate with me than myself''5 In The Gift of Death, contemplative dimension of Fear and Trembling is intensified in idea that it is neither limited by religious belief nor tied down by figure of God. …

In the sixteenth century, observes Margaret Aston, ‘England acquired a whole suite of ruins’.1 The widespread destruction of monastery buildings and church fabric – the sheer ubiquity of the destru...

35 Constructing the Archive and the Nation in “Italy! world’s Italy!”,“My Last Duchess,” Aurora Leigh, and an Unpublished Manuscript by Elizabeth Barrett Browning M a rjor ie Ston e • What isn’t an archive these days? . . . In these memoryobsessed times—haunted by the demands of history, overwhelmed by the dizzying possibilities of new technologies —the archive presents itself as the ultimate horizon of experience. Ethically charged, politically saturated, such a horizon would seem to be all the more inescapable for remaining undefined.Where to draw the limits of the archive? How to define its basic terms? . . . — Rebecca Comay, Lost in the Archives The death drive is not a principle. It even threatens every principality, every archonic primary, every archival desire. It is what we will call, later on, le mal d’archive,“archive fever.” — Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever “In its simplest terms, the purpose of the archive, any archive, like the unconscious itself, is to serve as an operating system for remembering and forgetting,” Christopher Faulkner comments in a 2001 essay on the Federal Bureau of Investigation as “a paradigm of all archives” (1). Like Rebecca Comay’s, Faulkner’s approach bears the imprint of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1996): in particular, Derrida’s introductory excavation of “archive” as a word whose Greek root arkhe names “at once the commencement and the commandment ” (1).1 In Dust:The Archive and Cultural History (2002), Carolyn Steedman explains the extraordinary purchase of Derrida’s brief prolegomenon on the archive by situating it within the “1990s battle between the ancients and the post-moderns—between the old social history and the new cultural history” (2). While traditional “social historians” claimed the archive as “their very victorian review • Volume 33 Number 1 36 own place” and took it into“protective custody” (2–3), cultural historians and theorists found in Derrida’s symbolic expansion of“the archive” a“powerful metaphor for the processes of collecting traces of the past, and for the forgetting of them” (Steedman 4). More than a metaphor, in fact,“archive”is an example of what Mieke Bal terms a “travelling concept.” Never “simply descriptive,” travelling concepts move toward “conceptualized, condensed theories.”They have “ramifications, traditions, and histories,” as well as the “foundational capacity” to produce “new emphases, and a new ordering . . . within the complex objects that constitute the cultural field” (Bal 16–17, 21). Shuttling between“archive” in its literal sense and its figurative senses as a migrating, foundational concept, part one of this essay charts some examples of contemporary archive theory, notes its paradoxically low profile within Victorian studies, and argues that a productive terrain for theorizing the archive can be found in the manuscript remains of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (or EBB, as I will henceforth refer to her, in keeping with the signature practices reflected by her own self-archiving).2 Part two presents a transcription of one of EBB’s more substantial unpublished manuscripts—a fragment on Italy of ninety lines or more—using it to explore the mediations connecting archives as repositories of documentary facts to the archive as signifier for cultural memory and forgetting. Part three situates this fragment within the cultural and personal contexts of EBB’s evolving constructions of Italy, addressing the manuscript’s connections with Browning’s“My Last Duchess,” as well as with Casa GuidiWindows,Aurora Leigh, and “Italy and the World,” a seldom discussed work in Poems before Congress. Evidently intended as the opening to a projected long poem, the fragment begins with the exuberantly possessive exclamation “Italy! world’s Italy!” Echoed in the textual palimpsests of EBB’s later representations of Italy, the aborted poem dramatically underscores how she turned away from early constructions of Italy as an anglicized and aestheticized space to representing it as an emerging nation-state.Another unpublished fragment beginning “Italy—Italy—is it but a name” marks the turning point itself, as well as the germ of Casa GuidiWindows. a rchi v e theory, v ictor ia n st u dies, a n d the ch a llenges of the EBB a rchi v es The archival turn of recent decades arises from earlier catalysts than Derrida’s Archive Fever, most notably...

Taking its cue from Jacques Derrida's reflections in The Gift of Death, this article explores the fantasy of dying “in place of the other” as it informs the life and works of T. I. Horsley Curties ...

This practice-research thesis is a response to two related calls: the call of deceased figures from the archive to the living, and the call for the living to produce archives, to (never) become deceased. These calls are understood through, respectively, Avital Ronell’s conceptualization of haunted writing and Jacques Derrida’s notion of archive fever. Ronell’s concept, coined in Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986), emerges in tracing the enduring posthumous power of Goethe who, after his death, continued to speak to and through other writers. In Archive Fever (1995) Derrida introduces the term via the relationship of the historian, Yerushalmi’s, relationship to Freud’s work, arguing that archive fever is a compulsion to return to the place of commencement; a homesickness that is constituted by a competing anarchivic destructive drive. The response draws on ethnography, post-structuralism, experimental literature and historiography in what can be termed a work of creative-critical writing or ficto-criticism. The three main archival collections that the thesis engages with are The Wistrand Collection at the Screen Archive South East, The Margaret Mead Collection and Pacific Ethnographic Archives at the Library of Congress, and the informal archives of the recently deceased mother and grandmother of the candidate (who writes about herself in the third person under the pseudonym ‘Scarlet’). The method is one of written assemblage akin to found-footage filmmaking. By creatively connecting these three archives, along with the personal lives of the theorists used to examine them, new perspectives and understandings are produced, in particular on ethnography and the avant-garde during the inter-war period, as well as previously unexplored literal and figurative links between Jacques Derrida, Kathy Acker, Maya Deren and Margaret Mead. More broadly, the thesis aims to build on Ronell and Derrida’s ideas by putting them in empirical motion, and to set out a new creative-critical model for approaching archival collections.

Speech Is Dead; Long Live Speech

There were no papers, the ostensible reason for my visit, and of course, no trace of the Rani. Again, a reaching and an un-grasping. —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason1 The past few decades of scholarship have witnessed a rich outpouring of critical thought on the colonial archive and its varied instantiations. For better or for worse, the turn to the archive is no longer the sacrosanct domain of the discipline of history. Rather, it has emerged as the register of epistemic arrangements, recording in its proliferating avatars the shifting tenor of academic debates about the production and institutionalization of knowledge. As Foucault observed, the idea of the archive animates all knowledge formations and is the structure that makes meaning manifest.2 Jacques Derrida has termed the quest for such a meaning-making network "le mal d'archive," or "archive fever." The literal and figural site of the archive both permits the "commencement" of and provides the "commandment" for intellectual labor. "Archive fever" expresses the craving for this archive, the desire to enter it and to procure it, even unto death.3 [End Page 10] Such a deconstructive reading of the archive as a necessary and precarious repository of meaning has been embraced as well as resisted by historians and anthropologists. Social historian Carolyn Steedman reminds us that the material deposits of the past (dust, in her case), whose affective reach exceeds all forms of theorizations, are the "real" drama in archive fever: "You think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in."4 Even as the concept of a fixed and finite archive has come under siege, there has been an explosion of multiple/alternate archives that seek to remedy the erasures of the past. Scholarship in South Asia, in particular, has recast the colonial archive as a site of endless promise, where new records emerge daily and where accepted wisdom is both entrenched and challenged. In some ways, these archival expansions resemble the contours of the earlier canon wars in literary studies, as they question received notions of proof, evidence, and argumentation, particularly in fields involving historical inquiry. Like other fields of inquiry, sexuality studies has turned to the colonial archive for legitimacy. Queer texts, topics, and themes have been discovered in the archive and examined exuberantly. The process of "queering" pasts has been realized through corrective reformulations of "suppressed" or misread colonial materials.5 These reformulations have intervened decisively in colonial historiography, not only decentering the idea of a coherent and desirable imperial archive but also forcing us to rethink colonial methodologies. Implicit in this rethinking, however, is the assumption that the archive, in all its multiple articulations, is still the source of knowledge about the colonial past. The inclusion of oral histories, ethnographic data, popular culture, and performances may have fractured traditional definitions of the archive (and for the better), but the telos of knowledge production is still deemed approachable through what one finds, if only one can think of more capacious ways to look. I am not suggesting here that such archival modes are facilely flawed or merely enact a different order of archival truth claims. The new material on homosexuality does not purport simply to "correct" and/or reveal the truth about the history of sexuality in the colonial period. While there might be a certain evangelical flavor to some of the scholarship, most of the work indicates that the authors are keenly aware of the shifting parameters of space, time, and knowledge and of the role of the archive in such entanglements. [End Page 11] David Halperin, for example, has often made a case for historicism in the study of sexuality, a historicism that would acknowledge the alterity of the past as well as the irreducible cultural and historical particularities of the present. The recent turn to geopolitics in sexuality studies has also highlighted historical...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Karl Freund was born in Bohemia in 1890 and worked in Germany at UFA Studios during the innovative 1920s, working with Murnau and Lang. He shot The Golem (1920) and Metropolis (1927). He emigrated to the United States in 1929 and was the cinematographer of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Working for Universal Studios he shot Dracula (1931) and Murders on the Rue Morgue (1932) before being given his first directorial project, The Mummy. In the film he created a pool which when scattered with tana leaves opens onto memory and some critics suggest it as a visual metaphor for the unconscious. The film curiously belongs in a sub‐genre of psycho‐analytically inflected experiments that rely on psychological ‘strangeness’ rather than horrific special effects. The strangeness is created by the use of the camera itself. 2. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays [Der Mann Moses and die Monotheistische Religion: Drei Abhandlungen] (Amsterdam: Verlag Albert de Lange, 1939); (London: Hogarth Press and Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1939); trans. Katharine Jones (New York: Knopf, 1939). In the Standard Edition Vol. 23, pp.1–137, the translation is by James Strachey. The first two essays were published in Imago, 23:1, pp.5–13 and 23:4, pp.387–419, translations of which appeared in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 19:3 (1938), pp.291–98 and 20:1 (1939), pp.1–32. Part of the second essay was read by Anna Freud on her father's behalf at the Paris International Psycho‐Analytical Congress on 2 August 1938 and it was separately published as ‘Der Fortschritt der Geistigkeit’. The first draft of the book was completed in 1934. The prefaces explain the conditions of his hesitation in bringing it into public view. Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991); Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression [Mal D'Archive: une impression freudienne] trans. Eric Prenowitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) and (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Ilse Grubrich‐Simitis, Early Freud and Late Freud Reading Anew Studies on Hysteria and Moses and Monotheism, trans. Philip Slotkin (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3. Griselda Pollock, ‘The Image in Psychoanalysis and the Archaeological Metaphor’, in Psychoanalysis and the Image, ed. Griselda Pollock (Boston and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp.1–29. 4. Scholarly interest in Freud's collecting and collection took over with an exhibition in 1989, Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells, Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989). See also Excavations and their Objects: Freud's Collection of Antiquity, ed. Stephen Barker (New York: SUNY, 1996) which is a collection of papers responding to that exhibition when shown in the Art Gallery of the University of California, Irvine. 5. George Dimock, ‘The Pictures Over Freud's Couch’, in The Point of Theory: The Practices of Cultural Analysis, ed. Mieke Bal (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 1993). 6. See also Griselda Pollock ‘Freud and the Object's Gaze’, forthcoming in Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Object (London: Routledge, 2007). 7. Exemplary of this project is Egyptomania: L'Egypte dans l'art occidental 1730–1930, ed. Jean‐Marcel Humbert et al (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux and Spadem ADAGP, 1994). See also The Napoleonic survey of Egypt: Description de l'Égypte: the monuments and customs of Egypt: selected engravings and texts, ed. Terence M. Russell (Aldershot: Ashgate, c2001). 8. Sigmund Freud, ‘Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays’, in Penguin Freud Library Vol. 13: The Origins of Religion (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p.243. 9. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.25. 10. Barbara Watterson, Amarna: Ancient Egypt's Age of Revolution (Charleston, SC: Tempus Press, 1999), p.133. 11. Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Margaret Olin, The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 12. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, p.3. 13. Erik Hornung, Akhenaten and the Religion of Light [1995], trans. David Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 14. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, p.9. 15. Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Genealogy of a Category Mistake: a Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor’, Rethinking History, 8:2 (2004), pp.193–223. 16. Recent research by geneticists interested in historical and social impacts on genetic codes have found evidence of ‘switches’ in DNA that are transmitted forwards to generations – resulting from traumas such as famine. 17. Theodor Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ [1951], in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebbhardt (New York: Urizen Book, 1978), pp.118–37. 18. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 19. So the temporality of trauma is about to become clearer: ‘It may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the post where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms, which can only be ascribed to his shock or whatever else happened at the time of the accident. He has developed a “traumatic neurosis”. This appears quite incomprehensible and is therefore a novel fact. The time that elapsed between the accident and the first appearance of the symptoms is called the “incubation period”, a transparent allusion to the pathology of infectious disease. As an afterthought we observe, that in spite of the fundamental difference between the two cases – the problem of traumatic neurosis and that of Jewish monotheism – there is a correspondence in one point. It is the feature we might term latency.’ Sigmund Freud, ‘Moses and Monotheism’, p.309. 20. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.215. 21. Ilse Grubrich‐Simitis, Early Freud and Late Freud, p.10. 22. Ilse Grubrich‐Simitis, Early Freud and Late Freud, p.63. 23. Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) and Isaac Deutscher, The Non‐Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). 24. My reading of Freud's purposes in this book have been inspired by Richard J. Bernstein's brilliant reading, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). He makes the strongest case against the accusation of Lamarkianism in Freud's notion of culture and tradition, p.46 ff. 25. Numbers 14:10. For a discussion of the textual evidence, see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p.65. From a psychoanalytical point of view, there is little difference between the intention to murder and the actual murder. ‘The unconscious does not know the difference here between the virtual and the actual’, pp.65–66. 26. Cathérine Clément and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p.57. 27. Having tracked these movements myself, I was delighted to find Louis Rose, The Survival of Images: Art Historians, Psychoanalysts, and the Ancients (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). 28. Peter Gay, ‘Freud's Antiquities Collection’, in Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, ed. Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p.29.

If one of the tasks of both postcolonialism and subaltern studies has been to challenge colonial historiography and reclaim history for the other, then it stands to reason that the archive ought to have a central place in both of these disciplines. Indeed, according to Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy’s article “Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever (2000),” the task of subaltern studies is not, as Gayatri Spivak originally suggested, the recovery of lost voices, but the recovery of lost texts. But which texts are actually lost? And to whom? Shetty and Bellamy’s essay uncovers two texts that one might not habitually think of as lost, yet have, in large part, consistently been the victims of “nonreading” (32): Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Readers of both essays have seemed disinclined to “do anything more than skim” their “‘?prejudices’—as if dismissing them as further examples of deconstruction’s arcane, hermetic indulgences” (Shetty and Bellamy 33). Despite their compelling interpretation of these two texts, Shetty and Bellamy also engage in what I contend is a comparable instance of nonreading. Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1996) is among the most preeminent theoretical statements on the archive and is one of the primary source texts for Shetty and Bellamy’s article.

The article explores and formulates the applied functions of the archive. In addition to its function as a resource for understanding the past, the archive has important applied functions in the present. The task of defining the functions of the archive also requires defining the concept of the archive. For this aim, the concept of “archive” in the works of philosophers Alyda Assman, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, as well as Ukrainian researchers – Vitaly Turenko, Volodymyr Prykhodko, Serhii Rudenko, Maryna Palienko, was considered and studied. These philosophers have found a methodological connection with regard to the etymology of the ancient Greek term “Αρχη”. Detailed studies of the semantics of the concept of Αρχη allow to investigate the understanding of the origin of the functions of the archive. The French philosopher Michel Foucault considered the concept of the archive as a component of his ontological system, “Archaeology of Knowledge”, which explains the functioning of human knowledge, memory and power. So, Foucault explained the epistemological function of the archive. Another French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, focuses on the human desire to take hold of the past, which he calls “archive fever,” and develops this concept in his famous work “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”. Among the general concepts of the archive, Derrida focuses on the main and important political function of the archive, the embodiment of the archive in the body. The way the archive functioning is an important factor in the political regime, but at the same time it ensures the successful operation of the education system. In its various forms, the archive transmits to posterity information that appears as a warning and instruction based on the experience of the past. Based on these conditions, the archive acquires an important educational function in the modern world and forms the key ideological conditions for the functioning of society.

No longer will we turn our pain into elegies. We will no longer capitalize on our losses. (Jean-Luc Nancy)1 For whom or as whom does Nancy speak here? On the face of it he is speaking in the plaint...

Swift Entanglement:renovations of memory in the realization of "you" Nicholas Regiacorte (bio) Day and night, at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and must love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably. —Jacques Derrida, "Whom to Give to," in The Gift of Death In late August of 2001, Muhammad Atta was seen buying bread in Micucci's Grocery on East India Street in Portland, Maine. Prior to the attacks a few weeks later, "there were sightings all over," according to Chief of Police Mike Chitwood. Micucci's is only a few blocks inland from Songo Shoe, the old factory where my father got his first job in this country. It's only two blocks and a half east of St. Peter's Church, where my sister, my brother, and I were all baptized by Fr. Romani—and I was imprinted with the mysteries of my faith. Micucci's was a church of another sort. When I was eight or nine (before extensive renovations in the '90s), it was one large and musty room, nearly windowless except for the two that were high up and never cracked. There was a table with the old register, to the left of the deli case full of cheeses and antipasti, and up behind this, a loft with sliding window, where Leo Micucci did the accounts. This may never have happened, but I remember the old man sliding that glass open to shout orders and jokes down at his wife and nearly grown children, or to reach a long arm down to point at a cheese. "Give him that one," he said to my father or whoever was next in our imagined line (as this was before they discovered the ticket dispenser). [End Page 53] Twenty years later, say Atta is next in line. It never happens, but I imagine the old man, from his loft, noticing the quiet Egyptian and befriending him. This may be true. I am recently back in the country from a year in Italy. I get all of my stuff out of storage in Iowa City, cram it into my truck, deposit most of it in Galesburg, Illinois (where I'll begin teaching in the fall), and start out on a road trip to reacclimate to "ordinary life" and see all of my people along the East Coast, from Maine to Florida. I drive up to Maine first, to see my sister and nieces in Waterboro. Inevitably, after a few days of hide-and-seek and little chores around the house, I go spend an afternoon in the Old Port, browsing the music and bookshops. Maybe I take the ferry out into Casco Bay. I could make an afternoon of it, out on the bay, riding as far as Cranberry Island and back. But before this, I decide to get lunch at Micucci's, to carry along with me. The old store now exists within a new one. At least I can summon it up, darkening the clean aisles, replacing the barrel of vacuum-packed salamis with dried cod by the door, remembering the sliding window, of course. A quiet man, around my height, gets a ticket right after mine, no. 25. Hair like my father, I think, from his passport photo in 1960. I have a panino that I want made into a sandwich with mortadella and scamorza. No. 25 has a bag of pita bread, which I didn't know they sold. He sees me looking and doesn't smile to excuse it. We watch other people make their orders. Both irked by the widow just ahead of me who buys a whole five minutes' worth of thinly sliced capocollo. Later in the week, when I take the girls to Two Lights, I spot No. 25 sitting on the rocks, with a friend. They are sharing a large fried clams and looking out at the Atlantic. I stop and nod at them. I can still see the girls, inspecting a tidal pool a few feet a way. "Ah, yes," he says. "From the store." I smile, "Those are the best...

Previous articleNext article No AccessEuropean Memories: Jan Patočka and Jacques Derrida on ResponsibilityRodolphe GaschéRodolphe Gasché Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 33, Number 2Winter 2007 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/511505 Views: 123Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref © 2007 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Claire Colebrook The Play of the World: The End, the Great Outdoors, the Outside, Alterity and the Real, Derrida Today 9, no.11 (May 2016): 21–35.https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2016.0117, Anna Ilyina Deconstructive Turn in Transcendental Thinking, Sententiae 33, no.22 (Dec 2015): 125–148.https://doi.org/10.22240/sent33.02.125Jeffrey Hanson Returning (to) the gift of death: violence and history in Derrida and Levinas, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 67, no.11 (May 2009): 1–15.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-009-9206-0Kazuya Fukuoka, Barry Schwartz Responsibility, Regret and Nationalism in Japanese Memory, (Jan 2010): 71–97.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277427_4

This article aims to understand what is at stake conceptually in Watt's complex play with its own archive and textual materiality. In doing so, the article deploys categories developed by Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. The article examines the work of the archive drive and of the destruction drive in Beckett's novel and shows that Watt suffers from an archive fever that is also, ultimately, a fictional and farcical affliction as well as a creative process.

This chapter examines the idea of recollection by focusing on Theo Angelopoulos' 1995 film Ulysses' Gaze, arguing that cultural memory creates virtual spaces in which ‘different temporalities’ are brought together and ‘experienced simultaneously’. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘archive fever’, it considers this aspect of cultural memory in Ulysses' Gaze and shows that the film compulsively returns to its historical antecedents, but in doing so it confronts the countervailing logic: that ‘the archive never fully yields its secrets’. Through the aesthetic tropes and complex ideological vision that have become the trademarks of Angelopoulos' cinematography, Ulysses' Gaze dramatises not only that the history embodied in cultural archives must be heard in the plural but also that the imperative to remember and who — as well as how one — remembers must be seen as the result of complex discursive forces.