Archive Beyond Files: A Brief Note on a Personal Experience in the Marcuse Archive

Abstract

This text aims to present some hypotheses that emerged during my work on the Herbert Marcuse Archive. I will discuss aspects of my concrete experience in the work of the philosopher – insofar as a philosophical and conceptual approach linked to practice, i. e. the methodology of archival work, involves necessarily making contact with those who work in the archive and in the environment that constitutes it. In this sense, I comment in detail on how the work in the Marcuse Archive goes beyond the documented and files sources. The necessity for close contact with the researchers and institutions responsible for the archive and the context of interactions and discourses that permeate them will be highlighted. Therefore, I hypothesize that this approach may allow a better understanding of the documented sources themselves and the philosophical concepts in question, at least in the case of Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory.