Volume 1 / Athens 1999 "History in the promised land of memory" by Yiannis Papatheodorou Review of Jacques Derrida, Mal d'Archive, Paris, Éd. Galilée, 1995 "These fragments I have shored against my ruins'' T.S. Eliot The new resources created by archives, during the last years, offer historical research new perspectives as well as wider historiographical fields. The access to new informative sources has brought the formation of memory back into the centre of historical thought, and special consideration has been given to the significant acts of classification, use, evaluation and interpretation of information. From this point of view, Jacques Derrida's book is an intriguing approach to the concept of the archive, as it positions the subject in an interdisciplinary dialogue concerning memory. Derrida's argument is based on two fudamental principles. The privileged relation of psychoanalysis and the dominant functions of the archive's techniques (impression, repression, suppression) turns the Freudian text into an exemplary model of understanding the structure of the archive. The intertextual references to the work of the American historian of Jewish memory, Yerusalmi, enrich the dialogue with an additional matter; insofar as psychoanalysis is recorded in Jewish identity, the accomplished and non-accomplished Judaism constitutes the metonymic enunciation of memory. Derrida declares that since the dominant power of the archive derives from the economy of knowledge, it also provides the institutional responsibility of the interpretation. The localisation of the information transforms the inscription, provided by the function of the archive, into the impression of a memory's trace, conscious or unconscious. The Freudian reading of the archive relies on its similarity to the psychical mechanism. The analytic categories of the impulses give to the archive the sense of the duplicity between the construction and the deconstruction of memory. Freud's archive enables us to realise the way he dealt with his inscription in the archive of the Jewish memory. The circumcision represents the symbolic return of the body to the imagined community. Yerusalmi's point of view gives new dimensions to the issue. The mechanism of repression is indicative of the way an archive activates a future historical temporality, while it deliberates itself from its violent origins .The archive of the "potent(i)al" inaugurates a new form of history's reception. What was impossible for the historical approach to conceive has now become the main subject of psychoanalysis. Derrida agrees that psychoanalysis remains a Jewish science, only under the assumption that Jewishness/Judaism is a constant idea of a promising future: a future that does not create just a self-referential memory but the infinite memory of the Other. The unconscious can preserve the archive's memory, given that the concept of the archive is a mortgage on/to the future, an affirmation of the future. The semantic shifting and repetition of the archive's concept opens for psychoanalysis as well as for history the road to a "future memory". Opening the future, believing in the spectral promise of a memory placed upon the trauma of its supression, is somehow what Derrida calls "mal d'archive". The conceptualisation of the archive by Derrida claims a historical formation which is different than the usual. Considered in various contexts, the concept of an archive brings out the multiplicity of its significance. The archive becomes a plural substantiation of historical knowledge, open to all future interpretations. Consequently, the concept of the archive relates to the classical terms and foundational rhetorical types of Jewish thought; the "experience of the promise", the "sacred secret" forms a new orientation for Jewish history. Derrida traces the genealogy of the archive's deconstruction back to Freud. Even though psychoanalysis has described the psychical functions of the conscious and the unconscious proportional to the functions of the archive, the epistemological metaphor of the model is inedequate for understanding the social structure of the archive. Archives are not just textual fabrications. They serve the political and cultural plan of organising information within a society. Their use is related to and therefore influenced by a series of institutional disciplines which certify the relations of power. The preservation of memory, the access to information, the "resources" of the sources and the working environment are not just the representation of a future memory. They are active practices and discourses that create hierarchies and exclusions. The archives are the languages of the past, activated however dialogically, according to scientific and social demands. The content of our choice is marked by the way we are seeking information. Far from being an abstract principle, our choice is an ideologically oriented negotiation closely related to the politics of interpretation. The chronotope of social memory is a meaningful field of history's palimpsest. The archive is a part of the respective series of memory; its voice sounds only to articulate the diversity of our questions' temporality. The heterogeneous representations of the past are a narration of cultural experience in a complex and contradictory historical era. The archive is not to be seen as the liberatory possibility of a future memory but as a countermonument of the social conflicts around memory's evaluations. What we call archival memory is a special materiality of the temporal traces situated in the intermediate space and time between the distant past and distant future. This chronotope of the distances provides a multi-leveled hierarchy of memory's practices and discourses which illustrates the socio-cultural interactions of making or inventing the past. The archive is a "territorial" sign of memory that could be both a promise of a liberation and a domination of historical understanding. The potential liberation of archival memory, according to the "Jewish example" of Derrida, does not avoid constituting a new domination: the heritage of the "sacred word" which is to be read by the "historians of the promise" engages the archive's concept with an authoritative discourse. Archival space and time should not just provoke a historical focus on the future meaning of cultural repressions; on the contrary, the function of the archive should be an indicative dialogical unity of the cultural negotiation of memory. Rewriting history and rethinking the concept of the archive is not only a celebration of the ironic deconstruction of the past; it is also a commitment to an alternative way of producing historical meaning which is plural but not infinitely postponable. As Derrida used to mention :"Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history". The fertile collaboration of history and psychoanalysis should not ignore the political and cultural determinations of archival formations. Otherwise, the promised land of memory must re-remember the violence of metaphysics. Return to Top