Abstract
This article focuses on the original conception of the archive that emerges from Walter Benjamin’s writings, particularly from his correspondence with Gershom Scholem in the 1930s. It appears that Benjamin announces an approach to the publication of his works that seeks to divert the purpose of their circulation for the purpose of constituting a personal archive. I propose to read the subversive dimension of this “anarchic” strategy (Benjamin W, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910–1940. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p 385) in the light of Jacques Derrida’s reflections in Archive Fever (1996). By then examining the fate of Benjamin’s archive during his exile, I will highlight the duality – centripetal and centrifugal, conservative and destructive – of the forces at work within his writings, drawing an anarchival economy that ultimately questions our own relationship to the contemporary institution of Benjamin’s archive.
There are perhaps only two manners, or rather two greatnesses, in this madness of writing by which whoever writes effaces himself, leaving, only to abandon it, the archive of his own effacement.
Two greatnesses to measure that act of writing by which whoever writes pretends to efface himself, leaving us caught in this archive as in a spider’s web. Jacques Derrida, Two Words for Joyce
Wir ordnens. Es zerfällt. Wir ordnens wieder und zerfallen selbst. R. M. Rilke, Duineser Elegien
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank Levon Pedrazzini for his careful proofreading and valuable assistance in the preparation of the English version of this text.
- 2.
For a more detailed discussion of these aspects, see the interview with Ursula Marx by Fernando Bee in this volume.
- 3.
Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.
- 4.
They are also the subject of specific and valuable insight in Fernando Bee’s contribution to this volume.
- 5.
We recognize here one of the possible parent figures of what Derrida (1994) names the “visor effect,” by which the specter of the king in armor presents itself to Hamlet, looking at him without being recognized by him. “A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us. Even though in his ghost the King looks like himself (‘As thou art to thy selfe,’ says Horatio), that does not prevent him from looking without being seen: his apparition makes him appear still invisible beneath his armor” (p. 6). In the public sphere, Benjamin’s corpus is a spectral apparition that shows itself while veiling itself. By disarticulating the time of the presentation and its recognition, of its recollection in presence, the anarchival dissymmetry becomes an anachrony.
- 6.
A doubt that is reinforced by the almost systematic use of the name Detlef Holz to sign the private correspondence with Felicitas, without any considerations of censorship and security. I will come back to this in another work in progress.
- 7.
We know from the few pages published in 1932 that the philosophical-poetic record of the effects of the drug taken by the author in Marseilles in the summer of 1928 archive a state of the subject that is both outside of itself and paradoxically very close to itself. The text opens with a quotation from an article by Ernst Joel and Fritz Fränkel on hashish intoxication, where we read: “Images and chains of images, long-submerged memories appear; whole scenes and situations are experienced” (Benjamin 1999c, p. 673). Thus, the drug operates like an archivist diving into the depths of memory to retrieve the forgotten treasures. It is by withdrawing from oneself that memories suddenly become available.
- 8.
These letters, however, would be published in 1936 in Lucerne, under the title Deutsche Menschen.
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Wiser, A. (2023). Benjamin Anarchivist. In: Aubert, I., Nobre, M. (eds) The Archives of Critical Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36585-0_4
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