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… in the Hegelian system (that is in all systems), death is constantly in operation, and
nothing dies, nothing can die. –Maurice Blanchot1
Georges Bataille explores a strange and particularly disturbing event that took place
during the Haussmannization of Paris.2 In the grand gesture of razing much of the city,
the Popincourt slaughterhouse was removed from the center of town and in its place
Parmintier square, a public park intended to structure the time of the burgeoning urban
proletariat through edifying activities, was erected. Bataille takes this incarcerated
to structure the leisure time of the working class in a productive manner, but also because
it is only with the exclusion of death, the removal of the slaughterhouse from the purview
of vision, that the modern city can be built. At the same time, Bataille argues, death is
implicitly present in the modern city, the trace of the slaughterhouse imbuing the life of
1
p. 45 Writing of the Disaster
2
Thank you to Laura Zebuhr and John Conley who have, though their generous intellectual friendship,
helped in editing this essay.
1
the city.
historians have called it, as a key historical shift that signals the emergence of what he
coins “biopolitics.” In a very Bataillian gesture, Foucault tracks this distinctive feature of
from one power to another, ” a transition that marks the advent of biopolitics(Foucault
2003, 247). The transition of which Foucault speaks is precisely the shift from the pre-
modern sovereign’s ability to “take life and let live,” to, “the right of the social body to
ensure, maintain, or develop its life”(Foucault 1978, 136). Though we are familiar with
facilitation of the life of the social corpus in the era of biopolitics is predicated on both
the expulsion concealment of the death. Thus, modernity is marked with removal of
actual death into hiding, while the currents of blood and war fully permeate the whole of
society. Death becomes something that eats away at life through mortality rates and
degenerate endemics, while the precise instant when it captures life is outside the realm
of power, the moment where the individual body is no longer useful or productive for the
race.
While the rise of the biopolitical regulation of life, as Foucault defines it, is not
the primary topic of my inquiry, its political exigencies are the implicit stakes of my
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modernity in what might be termed the “philosophical disqualification of death.” A
evident at every level of its form. Investing in what he terms the “labor of the negative,”
However, Hegel must, in the end, always sublate this labor into life, thus never letting
negativity die. The Phenomenology, then, is marked by the perpetual operation of death
that cannot die, and life, as such, that is facilitated through death’s “inclusive exclusion,”
a concept barrowed from Giorgio Agamben. That is, as Blanchot might refer to it, life
I would argue, then, that the production of life, in an explicitly biopolitical sense,
must be understood through the configuration of death. Hegel’s text both enacts and
constitutes what I would like to term an emergent biopolitics, and my essay intends to
generate life itself. I would like to illustrate, however, that the stability of life is always
called into question by the excess that is produced by death it cannot contain. Though
figures in Hegel such as text, the bone, and finally the archè, a relationship between life
‘He [Hegel] did not know to what extent he was right.’ -Georges Bataille
(Derrida 1978, 251).
Spirit altered the terms though which life and death are construed in modern thought.
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Hegel generates this fissure through the radical reconceptualization of negativity.
external to life, Hegel conceives of negation as a force that is internal to each thing. In
the Ethics, Spinoza states that nothing has, “in itself something by which it could be
destroyed, but on the contrary it is opposed to everything which can negate its existence,
and so it endeavors, as far as it can in itself, to persevere in its being”(171). In Hegel, the
struggle between negation and preservation becomes an internal conflict in that each
thing must combat the deathward tendencies within itself through the externalization and
sublation of negativity. The following passage from the “The Truth of the
[Man’s] individuality has also its beyond within it, can go beyond itself
and destroy itself. To counter this, Reason is for him a useful instrument
for keeping excess within bounds, or rather for preserving himself when
he oversteps his limit; for this is the power of consciousness (Hegel, 342).
preservation and duration of the self in time is possible. The operation of the
what Hegel refers to as “restless infinity”(106). Thus, Hegel’s thought can be conceived
capture of its own degeneration. Negativity must be put to work, sublated, in order for
the system of meaning to maintain itself. Thus the ground of knowledge, for Hegel, is
always in flux and instable in that it is conditioned upon the capture of its own death.
its own degeneration by allowing negativity to occupy such a privileged role in the
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movement of thought. In his essay on Georges Bataille’s radical reading of Hegel, “From
the radical kernel though which Bataille’s re-reading of Hegel opens his text to reason’s
vulnerability. Implied Bataille’s reading of Hegel is the notion that there is excess in
Hegel’s text that cannot be bound within Hegel’s preservation of life or positing of
absolute knowing. It is only, then, through an “opening” of the text that we can read it
critically. Thus, Bataille’s thought can neither be described as Hegelian nor anti-
Hegelian, but as a practice that enters and accentuates the degeneration and excesses
Bataille asks the question, why must Hegel’s logic always move? Why cannot the
perpetual labor of the negative be arrested? Within Hegel’s text arises the answer to
Utilitarianism, one of the main objects of Bataille’s critique, and the restricted economy
in which all excess is put to use. As illustrated throughout the Phenomenology of Spirit,
the labor of the negative is put to use as a necessary force for the progress of history and
the elevation of culture. Bataille, occupying a very unstable historical and political
moment asks, what if this negativity were to stop working, what if it were literally
“unemployed”? During the inter-war period in Europe when the “Great War” had
ravaged much of the landscape and Fascism was on the rise, many intellectuals seemed to
be asking this question, albeit in different ways. The un-questioned allegiance to ideals
of progress, culture, freedom, etc, was disrupted by the bloodshed, political instability,
and further acceleration of industrialization occurring in the first third of the twentieth
century. Though obvious, it is important to situate Bataille and the critique of Hegelian
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Utilitarianism within its historical context. The labor of the negative, for Bataille, must
cease being “put to use” for a “civilization” which lies in ruins both culturally and
literally.
In a letter written to Alexander Kojève, Bataille offers a vital concept for a non-
utilitarian reading of Hegel: “unemployed negativity.” In this letter, Bataille goes onto
The implications of action and “nothing more to do” have great stakes for intellectual
labor itself. Bataille sees the trajectory of his “work” in a very different manner than
Hegel. For Bataille, no longer is the intellectual the producer of thought meant to act as a
kind of useful guide or to create productive knowledge for the betterment of culture.
Instead, Bataille sees himself as unproductive loss wandering in the refuse and decay of
civilization. For Bataille, the “nothing more to do” of society is precisely the condition
of possibility for radical politics. With concepts of unemployment, loss, and death,
Bataille seeks to define a form of negativity that can be conceived of outside Hegel’s
restricted economy. To do this, negativity must resist being “put to work,” thus
Hegelianism through fleshing out the excesses in Hegel’s text itself. One of the instances
of this excess occurs within the notion of “abstract negativity” in the section on
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“Revealed Religion” in the Phenomenology. By introducing “abstract negativity,” Hegel
points to the possibility of destruction and death within the movement of the dialectic, yet
fails to reserve or recover this possibility. Derrida confirms as much in accordance with
Bataille when he states: “Hegel called mute and unproductive death, this death pure and
which cancels in such a way that it preserves and maintains what is sublated […]
an unthinkable state of negativity. It is precisely this unthinkability that both Derrida and
Bataille want to emphasize. “Mute and unproductive death,” is in excess to reason, thus
without return and without reserves”(Derrida 1978, 257). Laughter is the figure that
Derrida identifies in Bataille as negativity that cannot be put to use. A general economy
of language, then, produces only laughter as pure loss, death that does not labor.
What is most at stake in this reading of Hegel, for Derrida, in defining the terms
meaning:
from the system of knowledge, the moment it is allowed to die. It only through wresting
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this category away, precipitating it, that Derrida claims Hegel can stabilize his discourse.
To “blind himself” through this operation, then, is to blind himself to the very instability
possibility of mute death, Hegel confronts the limit of non-knowledge; yet, to Derrida,
this precipitate weighs heavily on Hegelian discourse. However, it is only through the
loss of resources that the “Bataillian-Hegelianism” can emerge. Only through the
“A negativity that never takes place, that never presents itself, because in doing so it
would start to work again. A laughter that literally never appears, because it exceeds
Thus, excess is not present to the system of meaning. Thus, “absolute” or “unemployed”
negativity is the necessary condition for philosophy’s rethinking not only a radical
practice of reading, but also a radical practice of writing. Writing within the terms of
“abstract negativity” then is writing that does not “present” itself to meaning in the way
that speech does. This is why Hegel describes, “abstract negativity” as “mute death” is a
important problem within Hegel’s work: writing’s relation to death. The foundations for
Hegel’s relationship to death and writing are laid in a much earlier in the text, in the
the “now:” “We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written
down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it. If now, this noon, we
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look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale”(Hegel, 60).
In a rather jocular aside (perhaps laughing to himself), “a truth cannot lose anything by
being written down,” Hegel reveals his anxiety about the nature of writing itself. When
we say, “Now is Night,” the self-evidence of this statement is clear to us due to its
presence. It is only in writing a said truth down that it becomes evident that meaning is
contingent on this presence. It is only in preserving this night in the universal “Now”
that meaning is stabilized. By preserving the night the universal “Now” can become a
stable, communicable form. Shown in the above passage, writing is a threat to truth, it
makes it become “stale,” and meaning, approaching death, and can only be stabilized,
preserved, through sublation. “Abstract negativity,” then, is a form of writing that cannot
be preserved that cannot stabilize meaning. The possibility of the “loss,” then, is not an
“reserved” form. Thus emerges from Bataille’s reading of Hegel an affirmation of death
through text itself. The abyss opened by the unpreserved night, “abstract negativity” is
2. Text, Death, and the Bone: How Hegel Builds the Archive
Of the many oblique and direct references to bones in the Old Testament, the
book of Ezekiel particularly stands out as both illuminating and uncanny in interpreting
3
p. 30, Thousand Plateaus
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the operation of the figure bone in Hegel. In Ezekiel, a section that has been referred to
as “The Valley of Dry Bones,” the manner in which the dead are brought to life through
the figure of the bone mimics the operation of death in Hegel. In this section, the Lord
sets the prophet Ezekiel down, “in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,” and
Ezekiel notes, “there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry”(Ez.
37 v.3, KJV). The lord then commands Ezekiel to “prophesize onto the bones” so that
they may live. Ezekiel does so, and the bones come together and flesh is laid upon them
producing an “exceeding great army”(Ez. 37 v.10, KJV). The Lord then says to Ezekiel,
Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel […] Behold, O my
people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your
graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am
the Lord , when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you
up out of your graves, And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live,
and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord
have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord (Ez. 37 v.11-14, KJV).
Not only does this passage from the book of Ezekiel signal the ability of the sovereign
god to bring the dead to life, to “open their graves” and make them live, parallels the
movement from the figure of the bones as a multiplicity to the instantiation of a single
body, an army of one. The graves of the dead must be opened and the many dry bones
must be made into a vital corpus for the “house of Israel” to be erected. The bones of the
dead, many and scattered, must be re-membered, invested with presence and given
If we allow this excerpt from Ezekiel to act as an allegory for the operation of
death in Hegel’s text, than we can more clearly see that it is only through the revival of
the dead bones that the many dead become put to use in the operation of unification that
is Aufhebung. The bone emerges as an exemplary figure through which to understand the
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operation of death in Hegel’s text in that it provides a corporal metaphor for the
“preserved night,” the loss that must be infused by presence. I would argue that the bone
Phenomenology, are infused with a similar status: figures through which Hegel attempts
to contain negativity. The bone marks that same form of loss as the written text does,
though even more explicitly. The bone then, is a textual remnant of life that must be
Throughout the Phenomenology, it is clear that Hegel has contempt for all things
dead. However, his text seems to be openly haunted by the dead through his relationship
to the ossified, the bone. In an argument with the phrenologists in the section “Observing
Reason,” Hegel’s discussion of the figure of the bone, specifically the skull, indexes a
[…] externality it the outer and immediate reality of the Spirit, not as an
organ, and not as a language or a sign, but as a dead Thing. Of course, the
intention here is not to state that Spirit, which is represented by a skull, is
a Thing; there is not meant to be any materialism, as it is called, this idea;
rather Spirit must be something more and other than these bones… Spirit
is, therefore, the same kind of being that a bone is… the being of Spirit is
a bone (Hegel 1977, 208).
Often this passage is read misleadingly, specifically by Zizek in The Sublime Object of
Ideology, to literally mean that “Spirit is a bone.” However, it seems clear that Hegel is
not arguing that “Spirit is a bone,” but rather that the “Spirit must be something more and
other than these bones.” In order to ward off death, to trap its ominous and ever-present
threat, Hegel states, “the being of spirit is a bone.” To say that the being, sein, of Spirit is
a bone signifies, in the Hegelian lexicon, that the most reductive, immediate appearance
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is associated with a bone only at the most base level of knowledge for Hegel, immediacy.
This being of Spirit as a dead, inert thing is what must absolutely be superceded. In this
way, the bone is a figure that Hegel confronts and subsumes in order to encapsulate the
dead into the being of Spirit while always-already making this death live on in the
movement of Spirit itself. Spirit becomes the sublation of death into life by taking on the
I will argue that the bone in the Phenomenology can be read as an exemplary
figure of the manner in which the life of Spirit is generated through a capture and
disqualification of death. I disagree with Zizek’s insistence that the skull in Hegel marks
a presence that “fills out the void, the impossibility of the signifying representation of the
subject” and thus aligns itself with aesthetic ideology, or the subject’s desire to coincide
with itself (Zizek, 208). In this case, Zizek seems too quick to read the skull as simple
corporeality. The skull or the bone in Hegel is more in line with his general notion of
death if it is read not as a simple presence, but rather, as a Thing that signals an absent
presence. Also, as Deleuze and Guittari have so helpfully noted, bones are a multiplicity.
Thus, we must conceive of the figure of the skull as dispersion of self-same identity
rather than a covering of its internal void though the operation of fantasy. If we stop at
the Lacanian notion of fantasy the conceptual tool through which to understand the bone
in Hegel, as Zizek encourages us to do, we are given little help to understand paragraph
808, the last paragraph of the Phenomenology, in which the bone returns in a cryptic, yet
highly revealing form. Hegel here argues that “comprehended history,” or Absolute
Knowing, comes essentially from the rational supercession of the Schädelstätte, that
being of the spirit that is the bone itself. Schädelstätte, which has been translated into
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English as both Golgotha, a charnel house, and as Calvary, literally means in German, “a
historic or sacred site of skulls.” Schädelstätte, then, signifies in this context both the
bones and their site of containment. The Schädelstätte is both the dead and their
domestification within a structure. Comprehending and knowing these bones assures the
Absolute Spirit’s life and endurance, as well as his sovereignty: “[…] the actuality, truth
and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone”(Hegel, 493).
The Schädelstätte, then, becomes the figure that represents both the dead and their
preservation and monumentalization. The archived dead, a concept I will return to later,
that can be put to use and add duration and life to the Spirit itself only if preserved and
brought into the realm of the living. Thus, as is the story of Ezekiel and the valley of the
history, is conditioned upon both the entombing of the bones and the ability of the Spirit
to open the graves of the dead in order to bring them to life in the service of teleological
progress. Appearing within the last few lines of the text, the Schädelstätte point not only
to haunting and degenerative quality of the dead in Hegel’s text, but also to their ultimate
preservation.
offered by Bataille and expanded by Denis Hollier in his text Against Architecture. In
Hollier’s reading of Bataille, the structure of Hegel’s discourse, along with its allegiance
to life and progress, functions through implicit and explicit architectural metaphors. That
is, Hegel’s text, through its utilitarian relationship to death, is always-already caught
within a process of building an edifice to cover and distract from that which it cannot
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account for, its absent center: death. Following Bataille, Hollier suggests that the primary
instance of architecture, that force which must cover and thus mark the dead, is the
in the place of death, to point out its presence and to cover it up […] This allows it to be
simultaneously the first of all arts […] and their tomb—in its major and sublimated form:
the Hegelian edifice”(Hollier, 6). The “Hegelian edifice,” then, is a tomb, which marks
the dead while declaring victory over them. By covering and enclosing the many bones
into a tomb, the “originary” moment of Aufhebung is enacted. Again, the architectural
metaphor does not mark an exacting historical foundation for dialectical practices, but,
rather, gives a set of figures—the bones, the tomb, and the builder—through which to
text. The etymological root of architecture, archè, insinuates both beginnings and the
instantiation of the law, and is the formative feature of Hegel’s discourse, a point I will
return to later. Remember that it is only through its relationship to the Schädelstätte that
the Absolute Spirit knows itself; only though its ability to instantiate and open the site of
skulls and to bring it to life, that the Spirit can “take its throne” in the position of both the
law and the state moreover, the state. As Hollier notes, “the Aufhebung insures the return
of the archè and its liberation into the telos”(Hollier, 6). By liberating the dead—not as
many and uncontained bones, but rather entombed by the archè—into the telos, the
Hegelian edifice is built by forcing the dead into duration, the sphere of the living.
It is important to note in this context that the “liberation,” of the dead is also a
violent act. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the verb to liberate means not
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only, “to set free, set at liberty; to free, release from (something). Chem. To set free from
combination,” but also “to free (an occupied territory) of the enemy; also ironically, to
subject to a new tyranny.” Thus, liberation of the dead into the telos within Hegel’s text, I
produces a new, and perhaps harsher subjugation. To “release” death into the telos is to
force it into a regime of movement where it must act as an empty center, always
propelling progress and the construction of life itself and its duration in history. It seems
then, if one is to follow the implications of the problem of the “liberation” of death into
the telos, one must not take for granted the implications of this problem for life itself.
Life, as that which is cultivated within the Hegelian system, is the edifice of the tomb
itself. This is why Hollier can argue, following Bataille that within Hegel’s discourse,
masks to cover death, as a tomb that is always being reinforced”(Hollier 1989, 54).
History, conceived of as a “reinforced tomb” that attempts to cover what disrupts it, while
all the time being structured by a vacant center. Thus, for Bataille, this history-as-tomb,
architecture, is erected to conceal its center that is both multiple and dead. Bataille’s
thought thus desires to arrest the bildung of history itself, and thus “overrun the defenses
of history”(Hollier 1989, 54). Bataille sees teleological History, much like Hegel’s
reason, as forever exposing itself to its own vulnerability and seizure in that it is erected
on an absent ground, negativity and death. In his essay Différance, calls internal
difference a “mute mark,” thus noting, “the a of différance is not heard, it remains as
secret and discrete as a tomb”(Derrida 1982, 4). Inverting Derrida’s claim, I would insist
that the tomb itself is always marked by an internal différance, the dead. Thus linking the
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form of the tomb and its internal difference of the death that it entombs. Thus, Hegel’s
discourse operates like a tomb that is forever attempting to over-coat its internal
The fragility of what I have been calling the “Hegelian edifice” is what I would
like to now explore more explicitly through the figure of the archive. The archè of the
architectural metaphor, the tomb that releases the dead into the telos through a
preservation via covering, is the same archè that molds and instantiates the archive, the
preserver of history itself. Here I would like to make connection, between the archè of
Hegel’s edifice, the forever re-enforced tomb that both allows for the containment of the
multiple bones of the dead within one structure, and allows for their preservation and
duration in the telos and the archè that constitutes the archive. This connection is tenable
in that the function given to the archive mimics the desire of the archè itself to preserve
and contain that which is fleeting. Hegel insists in later works that the archive is that
which gives duration to the state though memory, and without these spaces of
preservation, there can be no state as such; as Hegel reminds us in his lectures on Reason
in History, “the state is impelled into duration by remembrance”(Hegel 1953, 76). The
Schädelstätte and its preservation which gives life to the spirit becomes structurally
similar to the archive, whose preservation gives life and endurance to the state.
into English as Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida points to the significance of the
etymological root of archive, archè, which gives form to the problem that the archive
itself presents. Derrida insists on the importance of the dual significance of archè, as
both commencement and commandment: “This name [archè] apparently coordinates two
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principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things
commence—[…] but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods
command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from where
illuminates the problem of the archè of the tomb that was mentioned earlier. Namely,
that the archè can signify, for us, the dual problematic of the Hegelian edifice as always-
already producing a commencement, the Aufhebung that puts into motion the negative,
and the law, the nomos, that principle of reason that is instituted to maintain the stability
of the system of meaning through the instantiation of a structure in which all death,
negativity, and loss, can be captured and made productive for the reason, thought,
Absolute Knowing, the State, etc. We may say then, that Hegel’s text is forever
archiving death by both preserving it and putting it into motion, making it useful for life
itself.
For Derrida, the site of the archive and the process of archivization, that the
archive as giver of nomos and also as the process of commencement, always denotes a
kind of violence (Derrida 1995, 7). This violence is of a form similar to that which is
inherent in the process of preservation in Hegelian logic. By what Derrida has termed
the “archival economy,” the process of preservation, enacted by the law, forever makes
the dead living in both a restricted site and within a restricted economy. Derrida argues
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should not be any absolute dislocation, any heterogeneity or secret which
could separate, or partition in an absolute manner (3).
Here we can return to the figure of Hegel’s bone. To consign the bone to the archè is not
only to preserve and contain it within definite spatial boundaries, it is also to bring the
bones together within a single body of knowledge, to make that which is many, one. The
marked by the trace of own death, its own malarchivability. Derrida likens this
“anarchivic” problem to the Freudian death drive which signifies, for him, the eternal
unworking of the archive which is always “mute”(Derrida 1995, 10). Though the
Freudian death drive and the Hegelian notion of “abstract negativity,” as it is discussed
by Bataille, are not interchangeable concepts, I think that it is plausible connection can be
made between the “mute death” of abstract negativity and the mute nature of the death
drive that always an internal to the archive as an “anarchivic” tendency. This tendency
disrupts and undermines the very work of the archè: “right on that which permits and
conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to
destruction […] a priori, forgetfulness and the archivolithic into the heart of the
monument”(Derrida 1995, 12). Thus, for Derrida, the very structure of the archive
indexes “le mal d’archive,” the internal force thought which “the archive always works,
and a priori, against itself”(Derrida 1995, 12). By working against itself, the process of
death, forgetfulness, and unworking is always operative within the archive. The
instantiation of the archè of Hegel’s discourse eventually gives rise to its own
untenability in that its instantiation is given by what Derrida terms the “exergue’ that
which lies ahead of and outside of work, negativity. The internal difference of the
archive which can be likened to the mute différance of the tomb, indexes, like a fever, its
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illness. By extricating death and preserving history as a corpus, the archive attempts to
ensure the corpus’s duration within the telos. It is, however, always internally
degenerative, gnawing away at itself. Thus, in producing itself, the archive, “produces
the event”(Derrida 1995, 17). The event, via the archiving structure, is given form
through its preservation. By the process of consignation the archive adds presence to that
which is temporally absent, the text, and in so doing, imbues its form with movement.
Yet Derrida does not deny that though we suffer from “le mal d’archive,” that we
are forever “en mal d’archive,” in need of archives. To be “en mal d’archive” is to,
burn with passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the
archive right where it slips away […] It is to have a compulsive, repetitive,
and nostalgic desire for the archive, and irrepressible desire to return to the
origin, the homesickness, a nostalgia to return to the most archaic place of
absolute commencement (Derrida 1995, 91).
The desire for origins, which drives the archiving desire, is one that informs and speaks
to the impossibility of the archive, yet our eternal indebtedness to it. Though the archive
need to overcome this instability, to perpetually re-invest the archive itself with an
impossible presence. Thus, as the bone is the spectral figure within Hegel’s discourse, “it
is spectral a priori: neither present nor absent ‘in the flesh,’ neither visible nor invisible, a
trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met”(Derrida 1995, 90). This
other whose eyes can never be met is the other who is dead, the other who haunts the
archive, who produces its a priori difference. The mal d’archive will present trouble for
the archive, “even concerning its lightest symptoms to the great holocaustic tragedies of
our modern history and historiography: concerning all the detestable revisionisms, as well
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90). Thus, there is no history that can escape the problem of the archive, or the archè,
Agamben, to attempt at thinking the internal problems of the archive as they are related to
the status of dead. In the Remnants of Auschwitz: Witness and Archive, Agamben
presents a different notion of the archive than does Derrida; however, the stakes of his
argument bring together the underlying questions of this essay. The pressing question
that Agamben’s work seems to pose is the following: what is an ethical relation to the
dead, history, and the archive that can emerge from a tragedy such as the holocaust? For
degenerative space, then what does a rethinking of its form offer us in terms of thinking a
threshold” between the said and the unsaid that always seeks to embody the limits of the
subject of speech (Agamben, 156). In this sense, he brings to bear what seems to be the
most pressing problem that the archive, as I have mapped it in terms of Hegel, poses: the
question of the biopolitical. With the figure of the survivor, Agamben finds the most apt
expression of the biopolitical within the twentieth century: “The decisive activity of
biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or death, but rather of a
relation to life and death as I have attempted to explore them within Hegelian discourse
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offers a liminal term. Recalling the “restless infinity” of which Hegel spoke, the survivor
is a figure that occupies the grey-zone between the living and the dead. Being the
quintessential figure of the post-holocaust biopolitical, the survivor indexes the crisis that
we now face: all life takes its form. This crisis is that death’s “inclusive exclusion”
within life itself comes to weigh too heavily on life, to burden it to the point of its
absolute indecipherability from death. By not allowing death to die, by excluding and
sublating its force within life, we have produced a “mutable and virtually infinite”
survivor who cannot die, but also, cannot fully live. In the wake of twentieth century
biopolitics, the camp, and the production of bare life, it seems that for Agamben, the
that, we must be able to bear witness to the unarchivable, “mute death,” the Musselmann:
To approach the history of the unachievable is to seek out the remnants of the dead,
rather than their preservation in the form of archè. The “dark shadows” of language
cannot be consigned within a corpus, archived and thus made accessible to life itself.
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Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York:
Zone Books, 1999.
--. Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1985.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1995.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guittari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Press, 1978.
--. “Society Must be Defended:” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976. New
York: Picador Press, 2003.
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