Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

ALEXIS RAMSEY

Dirtying Derrida: Girardian Desire and the Potential of the Archive 

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ABSTRACT

Building from the Derridian idea of the archive as a violent space that preserves the past in an unnatural and chaotic fashion, this paper examines the relationship between Girardian notions of desire as mimetic and the archive as an infinitely vulnerable institution that is constantly subject both to a future at which it will never arrive and a past it always replicates. The archive therefore embodies the very desiring activity discussed by Girard.

Desire, according to Girard, is an irresolvable, highly private activity, subject to the ongoing conflict between the individual and the other, who each are imitator and imitated.  Likewise, we can apply similar attributes to the functioning of the archive: the archive both creates and preserves the past, both speaks to and denies the future. Or to use Girardian terminology, the archive both mimics the past and future and is, cyclically, mimicked by these two temporalities. Thus, archives are in a constant state of potentiality, existing without an absolute origin or a conceivable end.  According to Derrida in Mal d’ Archive, the archive must be situated in the future perfect, understood as “What will the archive have meant?” This question means that it is through the researcher, the user of the archive, that archives are imbued with a purpose. Desire, therefore, is an anticipatory condition experienced by the researcher, who, through her desire, defines the archive, thereby temporarily stopping the mimetic cycle. 

Like Derrida, I argue that the archive must be understood as a dialogic and dynamic space, yet unlike Derrida, I believe that researchers should try, to a certain degree, to emulate archivists. Researchers should approach collections not as finished embodiments of complete narratives, but as archivists do, as amalgams of materials in need of sifting through.  Part of the researcher’s work is therefore placing disparate collections in conversation with each other, and in doing so, unearthing more questions that need answering.  Thus, the researcher must approach the archive ready to dirty her hands by digging into collections and must also be open to having her line of inquiry radically challenged and re-constituted by the very collections she went to in search of answers.  

To ground my discussion of the link between desire, researcher, and archival activity, I will draw upon my work processing a collection at a university archives and my work as a researcher at a local, county archives.