The [Other] archives

Abstract

"The archive always works, and a priori, against itself."
Jacques Derrida

What is not archived does not exist. This extreme adaptation of the classic aphorism could summarize the last few decades of growing multidisciplinary fascination with the archive; a phenomenon that has been legitimized through the oft-used tandem of "turn" and its corresponding epithet. Following this "archival impulse," various theoretical and methodological proposals have sought to transcend the archive as a source, redefining it as an object of study in itself. Their rhetoric collectively whispers that no archive is innocent, as memory and oblivion converge within them, both determined by the selective power of those who construct, guard, and disseminate them.

"There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism," Walter Benjamin warned early on. "And just as it is not free from barbarism, neither is the process of transmission in which it passes from one to another." Indeed, the epistemic skepticism of postmodernism, driven by the linguistic turn, led this constitutive 'other' to accept the challenge of reading history 'against the grain'; consequently, also the archives, identified by Foucault's archaeology of knowledge as the origin and destination of that unavoidable expedition.