Infinite Archives

Jacques Derrida’s 1995 Mal d’archive is an essay with multiple resonances. One can speculate that after nearly a decade and a half of a trend that saw the development in French historical circles of critical thought and writing on the notions of memory and archive, represented most notably and emblematically by Pierre Nora’s massive project, Lieux de mémoire, originally published in seven volumes between 1984 and 1992, a certain fetishism of the archive needed to be analyzed. Deconstruction had supposedly shut the door on an old style philology as a viable manner for getting at the truth in its origins, but now another strategy seemed to have reared its head, suggesting that the truth of history could be found in documents, symbols, and objects, many of which were circumscribed in collections, repositories of knowledge about deep-seated belief systems. The Éditions Gallimard internet catalogue describes the project of Lieux de mémoire as follows:

Today the rapid disappearance of our national memory cries out for an inventory of the places where it was selectively incarnated: celebrations, emblems, monuments, and commemorations, but also speeches, archives, dictionaries, and museums. . . . More than an impossible exhaustiveness, what counts here are the types of subjects chosen, how they are exploited, the richness and variety of approaches, and, finally, the broad equilibrium of a vast corpus on which more than a hundred of the most qualified historians have agreed to collaborate. France as a subject is inexhaustible. Taken together, [this is] a history of France, not in the habitual sense of the term, but—between memory and history—the selective and scholarly exploration of our collective legacy.