ABSTRACT
Explicit references to the archive, or archivalness, are scarce in Jean-Francois Lyotard's work. When speaking about a Lyotardian archive, an archive both by and after 'Lyotard', and one will not be able to avoid relying on the authority of Jacques Derrida's reflection on archivalness. At work in both Lyotard's rewriting and Derrida's archive is a theatrical compromise formation that, while still representational, produces each time new dispositions, where 'the past itself is the actor or agent that provides the mind with the elements with which the scene will be built'. In both cases, there is not merely the repetition of writing nor the accumulation of things past but something born out of necessity, always unstable, an economy or archive on the verge of an economy or anarchivalness. With the most basic memory-effect informed by habit and custom, Lyotard equates the digitizing and synthesizing of data, such as information, colours or sounds.
