ABSTRACT
In Derrida’s Paper Machine, the archivable deposit—the book, for instance— takes its place, or its slot, only by dint of a metonymic series which runs from thesis or book, to library and institution, to law and statute, to state deposit and nation-state. 1 Yet this metonymic chain, which represents a powerful system that ties together knowledge, the academy, and legal, political, and social structures, is the site of constitutive slippage as much as stable linkage. For Derrida, the place or slot of the archive opens on the strength of a margin of difference which is also an unencloseable opening to the other. In one sense, the archive takes place in a situation of ‘domiciliation’ or ‘house arrest’ (2), abiding in a more or less permanent dwelling which, however, marks the ‘institutional passage’ or movement from the private to the public, though not necessarily from the secret to the non-secret. This is because, for Derrida, the archived text may—indeed, cannot but—always keep in reserve what in its attestation can never be reduced or exposed to mere ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’. The archive is formed through acts of consignation which therefore entail not only ‘assigning residence or […] entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate’, but also ‘the act of con signing through gathering together signs’ (3), about which more will be said later. Although it is undoubtedly the aim of consignation to ‘coordinate a single corpus, in a system of synchrony in which all elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration’ (3), nevertheless, this very same feature of the archive renders it ‘eco-nomic’ in a ‘double sense’: ‘it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion’. Thus, every archive is at once ‘conservative’ and ‘institutive’, at once highly traditional and, in making its own form and law, radically inventive or revolutionary (7). The archive is not merely the passive receptacle and, thus, external substrate or support of what comes to be archived. Rather, it constructs its own law in a situation which is neither simply autonomous or auto-foundational (for how can law found itself in a lawful fashion?) nor crudely heteronomous (the archive can never simply found its own law, to be sure, yet, nonetheless, Derrida ask us to think of the archive as not merely the inactive recipient of another’s desires, strategies, or interests).
