Morgan Adamson

University of Minnesota

Prepared for “Thinking the Present” Conference

University of California, Berkeley
May 27-28 2005

Archiving the Present: Death and History in the Wake of Hegel

… in the Hegelian system (that is in all systems), death is constantly in operation, and
nothing dies, nothing can die. –Maurice Blanchot1

In a short essay, which appeared in the French Journal Documents in 1929,

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

environment to be emblematic of modernity itself not only because it is a space intended

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.

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the city.

In a lecture series titled “Society Must be Defended,” given at the Collège de

France between 1976-1976, Michel Foucault takes up “the disqualification of death,” as

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

modernity in which death is both externalized and generalized. The disqualification of

death, for Foucault, is significant because it embodies “the manifestation of a transition

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

Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, it is important for my argument to note that the

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

discussion of death in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The operation of death in Hegel

is both indicative and formative of epistemological, political, and economic structures in

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modernity in what might be termed the “philosophical disqualification of death.” A

structuring character of the Phenomenology, Hegel’s problematic relationship to death is

evident at every level of its form. Investing in what he terms the “labor of the negative,”

a concept which I will return to later, he unleashes a powerful destructive principle.

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

that is always and forever “dying.”

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

explore the implications of Hegel’s relation to the figure of death as it is employed 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

and death comes to explicitly embody history.

1. Hegel’s Disqualification of Death: Excess, Negativity, and Loss

‘He [Hegel] did not know to what extent he was right.’ -Georges Bataille
(Derrida 1978, 251).

Constituting a major event in the history of philosophy, the Phenomenology of

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.

Departing from the Spinozist system in which negation is considered to be a force

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

Enlightenment” section of the Phenomenology is emblematic of the internal force of

negation that must be regulated by consciousness:

[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).

By what Hegel terms the process of “self-sundering,” the externalization of negativity,

preservation and duration of the self in time is possible. The operation of the

externalization of negativity coupled by the work of Aufhebung, or sublation, produces

what Hegel refers to as “restless infinity”(106). Thus, Hegel’s thought can be conceived

of as a kind of perpetual motion machine, an internally agitated mechanism fueled by the

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.

However, as Georges Bataille noticed so astutely, Hegel’s system opens itself to

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

Restricted to General Economy, a Hegelianism without Reserve,” Jacques Derrida traces

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

already operative within Hegel’s work.

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

these questions: Aufhebung always expresses an implicit allegiance to the ideology of

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

5
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

question the foundations of action in the Hegelian dialectic:

If action (“doing”) is—as Hegel says—negativity, the question arises as to

whether negativity of one who has ‘nothing more to do.’ Personally, I can
only decide in one way, being myself precisely this ‘unemployed
negativity’ (I would not be able to define myself more precisely)(Bataille
1988, 90).

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

unavailable for sublation. Negativity must be construed as an workable form.

It is important to always note that, for Bataille, a radical conception of death is

already at work within Hegelian discourse. Bataille seeks to create a non-utilitarian

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

simple, abstract negativity in opposition to, ‘the negation characteristic of consciousness,

which cancels in such a way that it preserves and maintains what is sublated […]

’”(Derrida 1978, 255). “Abstract negativity” constitutes the unconstitutable as it signifies

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

to conscious knowledge: “Absolute comicalness is the anguish experienced when

confronted by expenditure on lost funds, by the absolute sacrifice of meaning: a sacrifice

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

of abstract negativity is the operation of knowledge, intelligibility, and, most importantly,

meaning:

In his [Hegel’s] discourse he must make the point of no return of

destruction, the instance of an expenditure without reserve which no
longer leaves us the resources with which to think of this expenditure as
negativity. For negativity is a resource. In naming the without reserve of
absolute expenditure “abstract negativity,” Hegel, through precipitation,
blinded himself to that which he had laid bare under the rubric of
negativity. And did so through the precipitation toward the seriousness of
meaning and the security of knowledge (Derrida 1978, 259).

Negativity, conceived of as a resource, ceases to labor at the moment of its abstraction

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

of meaning itself. To precipitate “abstract negativity” is to contain it within a form that is

knowable, conceivable, and external to the operation of reason. By externalizing this

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

unworkability of the negative is laughter, as an ephemeral practice, possible:

“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

phenomenology in general, the absolute possibility of meaning”(Derrida 1978, 256).

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

death that destroys the possibility of presence.

Derrida and Bataille’s isolation of the concept of “abstract negativity” points to an

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

chapter on “Sense-Certainty” with Hegel’s explanation of the function of universality in

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

8
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

anti-Hegelian concept; rather, it is already at work within Hegel’s text, through in a

“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

not workable or productive for life.

2. Text, Death, and the Bone: How Hegel Builds the Archive

A bone or a skull is never alone. Bones are a multiplicity.3

--Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari

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

meaning for the living.

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

and the written text, as it is discussed in the “Sense-Certainty” chapter of the

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

forever preserved, entombed, and archived.

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

certain anxiety about death itself:

[…] 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

of Spirit is a bone. In contrast to ontological categories such as essence or concept, Spirit

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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

immediate form of a dead thing, a bone.

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

dry bones, the sovereignty of Hegel’s notion of Absolute Knowing, or comprehended

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.

Returning again to Georges Bataille, I would like to explore further the

implications of Hegel’s relation to death through an architectural metaphor of the tomb

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

building of the tomb. By way of Hegel’s text, we discover “a certain relationship to

death [that] is translated into constructive practices. Architecture is something appearing

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

metaphorize Hegel’s relationship to the ultimate figure—the figure of death—within his

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

am suggesting, is closer to this second definition of liberation, that is a liberation that

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,

“history, which is in this sense unfailingly teleological, develops as an accumulation of

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

15
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

difference, its “mute death.”

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.

Returning to the question archè, in the beginning of Mal d’Archive, translated

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

order is given—nomological principle”(Derrida 1995, 1). The dual significance of archè

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

that the process of archivization is always-already a process of “consignation:”

By consignation we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word,

the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to
consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of
consigning through the gathering together of signs. Consignation aims to
coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the
elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there

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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

“single corpus” produced by the “consignation” of the archive, however, is forever

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

is constructed on an impossibility that imbues it with instability, it also is driven by our

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

as the most legitimate, necessary, and courageous rewritings of history”(Derrida 1995,

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90). Thus, there is no history that can escape the problem of the archive, or the archè,

preserving and remembering that which is dead.

3. Life of the Survivor: the Unarchivable

To conclude, I will turn to another contemporary thinker of the archive, Giorgio

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

the purposes of my argument, I might add, if the archive is always, in itself, a

degenerative space, then what does a rethinking of its form offer us in terms of thinking a

non-utilitarian relationship to the dead? Agamben deems the archive a “mobile

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

mutable and virtually infinite survival”(Agamben, 155). To think of the survivor in

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

archive as preservation becomes an almost reactionary figure. Agamben insists instead

that, we must be able to bear witness to the unarchivable, “mute death,” the Musselmann:

What cannot be stated, what cannot be archived is the language in which

the author succeeds in bearing witness to his inability to speak. In this
language, a language that survives the subjects who spoke it coincides
with a speaker who remains beyond it. This is the language of the “dark
shadows” that Levi heard growing in Celan’s poetry, like a “background
noise”; this is Huebinek’s non-language that has no place in the libraries
of what has been said or in the archive of statements”(Agamben, 162).

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.

Bataille, Georges. “Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel…” from The College of Sociology

1937-39. Hollier, Denis, ed. University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

--. 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.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1995.

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.

--. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

--. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

--. Reason in History. London: Prentice Hall, 1953.

Hollier, Denis, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1993.

Spinoza. Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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