The last week of June was intense, not only because it was my birthday 😉 but because everything centered on a double deadline set by the European Union: submitting a project summary of my collaboration with Nil and presenting the book’s corpus. That meant finalizing the structure (in my case three chapters), the editorial logic, and all the planned visual materials to send off to the committee. As you can imagine, time was tight.
In the middle of that rush, I felt the need to pause and go back to the texts, to reconnect with the theoretical foundations but also to rethink my own gestures and choices through the lens of what we formally call “the archive.” I reread, or rather revisited, an article[1] from 2024: Quelques réflexions sur la question des archives/de l’archive by Hervé Le Corre, a professor of contemporary Latin American literature and civilization.
It’s a short text, written in a lively style, that I find quite useful for reflecting on the political act of “making” an archive. Le Corre offers a critical rereading of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995), tracing Derrida’s grounding in early twentieth century Freudian theory. He reminds us that the archive is much more than just a container for memory. It’s a space of authority and institution. From the very origin of the word, there’s a weight to it. Arkhé means both “beginning” and “command.” The arkhēion in ancient Greece was where the archons, high magistrates holding official documents, lived. So the archive isn’t just about preservation, it’s about selection, interpretation, and lawmaking.
By now, it’s clear to me that this “authoritarian” nature of the archive is no secret in our project. From the very start, I’ve been faced with the political gestures involved in archiving Nil’s work, what it means to select, to censor, to deny, and to forget.
For Derrida, as Le Corre highlights, the archive is fundamentally political, a view that resonates with Foucault’s take in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). For Foucault, the archive governs what statements can emerge but also stops them from becoming a shapeless mass or unfolding as a continuous line. He writes:
“The archive is not that which preserves the event of the statement […]; it is that which, at the root of the statement-event and in the body in which it is uttered, defines from the outset the system of its enunciability.”
Indeed, the archive is inseparable from power, power that orders, classifies, and excludes. It’s a space full of tension between memory and forgetting, institution and resistance. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to acknowledge that tension in Nil’s archive itself, maybe by adding a kind of reader’s notice or “préambule” that informs users about what was intentionally left out and why. Mmh…I’ll definitely keep that idea in mind.
Also, through Freud’s theoretical framework, Derrida points to a deep ambivalence at the heart of the archive. An archive is there to preserve but it’s always haunted by a death drive – a dialectic much like the one at play in museum conservation, where technicians and conservators constantly battle against the object’s destruction. And that’s exactly what Derrida calls the archive fever, the paradox that the archive, by its very nature, allows forgetting. It doesn’t guarantee memory, it threatens it.
And here’s the most interesting part: the archive isn’t really about the past. It’s oriented toward the future. It carries a promise, a responsibility, a call to what’s coming.
This shift has big implications for the humanities, especially history, as Le Corre reminds us. If the archive is a constructed space shaped by exclusion and power, it can’t be read as a neutral trace. Every narrative involves framing, perspective, and language. The archive is already a form of writing, and reading it is always an interpretation.
Derrida puts it clearly:
“The archive is not a question of the past […] but rather a question of the future, the question of a response, of a promise and a responsibility for tomorrow.”
And again:
“The archive never closes. It opens out of the future.”
Le Corre’s main point is worth dwelling on. The archive is never simply given. It’s always in the making, negotiated, shaped, and open to change.
Once again, this perspective deeply resonates with what we’re doing with Archivorum Ark. Our project was never about producing a fixed or definitive archive. From the start, the goal has been to stay close to the very gestures of archiving, to highlight the process, its contingencies, and tensions. I appreciate how this article encourages us to think more carefully about transmission, not as the transfer of stable content but as a commitment to openness, ambiguity, and the possibility of multiple readings.
All citations are from the article.
[1] If you can’t access the article, send me an email (anais@archivorum.org ) and I’ll be pleased to send it to you in PDF format!