Fever Dreams

Kate Orazem on the spectre haunting archival syllabi

Image collage using photograph of Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and other digital image collages by Jennie Freeburg for Acid Free.

In the summer of 2004, three months before he died, Jacques Derrida wrote a letter to the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, where he had been teaching and to whom he had donated a large portion of his personal archives.

In it, he threatened to cease his relationship with the university and to fulfill only the bare minimum of his donor agreement if the administration sanctioned Dragan Kujundzic, a UCI professor who had been accused by a graduate student of sexual assault in the spring of 2003. Kujundzic was a Derrida protegee who had organized a large conference in Derrida’s honor to be held at UCI in October 2004; one of Derrida’s threats was to withdraw from participation in this conference. “Everybody knows,” Derrida writes, that while sexual harassment laws are valid in principle, “in practice, they can give rise to applications that are abusive, capricious, or even perverse and deceitful—often devastating for the person, reputation, and career of those who are unjustly victimized by frequently malevolent maneuvers…” Malevolent maneuvers by whom he does not specify. But everybody knows that students and other subordinates, particularly women, who bring allegations of harmful behavior against their bosses and betters are (forgive me, and blame Derrida, for the usage) always already lying.

The case had a long afterlife. Following Derrida’s death, his widow refused to turn over aspects of the archival donation to UCI, which resulted in a lawsuit. While all of this was widely discussed at the time in literary and academic circles, it has remained curiously absent from the archival studies discourse surrounding Derrida’s well-known lecture-cum-monograph on archival theory, Mal d’Archive or Archive Fever.

That discourse is alive and well, and it tends to frame Derrida’s work on archives as seminal. Eric Ketelaar wrote, in the 2017 archival theory compendium Research In the Archival Multiverse, that “many [writers and disciplines] ‘discovered’ the archives-as-subject rather than archives-as-sources only at the behest of Derrida.” Only! Well, it certainly could be the case that if a Great Man never thinks the idea he was destined to think, no one else will ever come up with it. But I digress (as Derrideans tend to do).

What is perhaps most interesting to me about this reading and re-reading of Archive Fever within the archival community is the absence of any discussion of it in light of what Derrida’s allies, in an online archive of materials related to the case, have dubbed “the UCI affair.” Derrida’s actions in the case mark the intersection of many different forms of power: economic, patriarchal, hierarchical, pedagogical, canonical, the powers wielded by celebrities, by donors, by institutions, by the state. It would thus seem to be a rich addendum to Archive Fever’s diagnosis of the archival impulse as self-negating and of archivy as a form of maintenance for the status quo. Yet whenever I tell other archivists about this incident, they are usually surprised. That we, as a profession, continue to teach and write about Derrida’s thinking on archives, desire, power, and the law, without ever grappling with the ways he actually leveraged his archives to intervene in a legal proceeding centered on an alleged sexual abuse of power (on behalf of the alleged abuser), marks a fascinating and disturbing archival silence of its own. What purpose does that silence serve?

Don’t worry; I’m not trying to cancel Derrida. I doubt I would have any success even if I were. Insisting that everyone stop reading Archive Fever forever is not important to me (not that most supposed "cancellations" are anything close). It’s an interesting enough piece; nobody does oh-shit etymology like Derrida, and as ever his language (in translation; I don’t speak French) is dense and inviting and difficult to parse, like a bathtub full of honey. Still, its prominence on archival studies syllabi in particular has always puzzled me. After all, the essay is barely about archives. It’s a little bit about the Archive, sure, but mostly it deals with Freud, the history of psychoanalysis, and Jewish identity. For a renowned text of archival studies, the actual archival theory is notably thin—evocative, certainly, but hardly a thorough consideration of the topic. The most oft-quoted line, “there is no political power without control of the archive,” comes in a footnote and is only lightly sketched as an argument (which strikes me as a consequence of writers citing the quotation from its appearance in another source without returning to the original).

There is a question here too of style. Archive Fever, for all its pleasures, is desultory and hard to follow, much given to postponement of the point. Verne Harris, in Refiguring the Archive, uses an extended sexual metaphor to describe its structure as “foreplay,” and indeed it proceeds in structure from an exergue to a preamble to a foreward, finally entering the “theses” section in its final ten pages (I can’t be the only one who does not find this charming). There are two consequences of the Derridean rhetoric that I want to note here: first, in my experience of being taught this text (in multiple classes), almost no one is actually reading it. (Generally, in graduate school, I got the overriding impression that no one was really reading much of anything, myself included; not because we didn’t want to or weren’t capable, but because there was no time to do the schooling we were supposedly there to complete in between the hours we spent working as teachers and administrators for the schools failing to teach us.) Second, the gulf between the tone of this text and the experience of master’s students in archival studies programs is wide. Graduate school for future archivists is generally focused on acquiring professional skills and experience, not interrogating the deep questions at the heart of the field, and these days it is an especially grim affair, overshadowed by a fear of joblessness akin to humanities Ph.D. students (who, if committed for longer, are more often funded while in school). The world from which Derrida writes—a world of honoraria, academic celebrity, and a professional life centered on reading and re-reading Aristotle, rather than skimming the book one agreed to review six months ago while frantically prepping to teach a book one has half-read to students who have also half-read it—seems remote. As Yerushalmi invokes Freud’s ghost, I found myself, in writing this, invoking Derrida as a kind of ghost of universities past: what was it like, Papa Jacques, to live the life of an echt intellectual? Did you really, in your final year, fly to Jerusalem, then Rio, then Santa Barbara, then Portugal, to be honored in each place as a gentleman and a scholar? Wow! Neat!

As Cifor and Lee have noted in applying analyses of neoliberalism in the academy to archival studies, most students in archival programs are being trained for a job, not taught liberal arts. Why then, Derrida’s continuing salience in archival syllabi? I would hazard a few guesses. First, as Michelle Caswell has discussed in “‘The Archive’ Is Not an Archives,” the “archival turn” in the humanities at large was marked by disinterest in the work of archival studies scholars, in part because that field “has been construed as predominantly female, professional (that is, not academic), and service-oriented”—that is, as the handmaidens of history and the helpmeets of better-regarded academics. This dynamic, I think, generates a desire within archival studies to demonstrate one’s humanities bona fides via citation of theorists seen as difficult, of whom Derrida seems to be one. Indeed, that desire has been diagnosed within the broader American academy in works like Francois Cusset’s French Theory, which describes how academics in the U.S., pushed by the neoliberalization of the university, made utilitarian use of the work of French theorists like Derrida and Foucault to lend a prestige to pop cultural studies, which burgeoned in part because of the the student-customer model and facilitated the voluminous publishing that could support a tenure application in an ever-tightening market.

What these reflections suggest about the overrepresentation of Archive Fever in archivy is that we keep reading Derrida, in part, to prove we can, to show we are just as smart (as white? male? and French?) as he is, goddammit! And we’re not alone—didn’t Obama just go viral for admitting he only read Marcuse in college to get girls? Still, it's a troublesome reason to assign his work to students who are hoping (against hope) to become archivists, particularly not when there are other theorists whose work on archives, power, and desire has much more immediate relevance to the questions that confront practitioners. Saidiya Hartman comes immediately to mind, and if I had my druthers “Venus in Two Acts” would enjoy the prominence Archive Fever has been granted in the field. Participants in the #citeblackwomen movement would have some thoughts on why it is Derrida and not Hartman who enjoys such pride of place. The canon, as it is designed to do, abides.

Both canonicity and archival description engage in transformation of the traces of a human life into a list of key words; both serve functions that facilitate intellectual labor and allow for collaboration and standardization of training. But what happens with the hollowing out of higher education is that we are almost never engaging with ~canonical~ theorists (or their archives) in full. We are often reading excerpts, not books, and rarely delving into biography, certainly not deeply enough to uncover contradictions like the UCI affair. We functionalize theorists and divorce them of their context, rendering our understanding of their work shallow and our ability to adequately critique its bases hindered, sometimes fatally. Canonizing Derrida—that is, treating his work as a value-neutral widget to be plugged into one’s writing to invoke, roughly, literary deconstruction and a Freudian account of the psychology of archival activity— does little to engage with or preserve what may remain interesting in his ideas as time passes. The point of de-canonizing Derrida in archival theory is not to forbid his citation, but to push back against Eurocentric assumptions of the universality of his ideas, and to expose the motivated economic incentives that underlie the circulation of theory in the academy more generally.

The Archive is not an archives; but Derrida’s deployment of the power represented by his archives (many of them presumably regarding the Archive) have generated a number of archives of their own. The UCI affair was widely discussed on blogs and in academic magazines (just not within archival studies), and Geoff Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, two of Derrida’s supporters, created a website to preserve and disseminate key documents, including Derrida’s letter of demand to the chancellor. It has not, I would say, aged well. He writes:

“When there has been neither any coercion or violence brought to bear on her, nor any attack (moreover very improbable!) on the presumed ‘innocence’ of a 27- or 28-year-old woman, where does she find the grounds, how can she claim to have the right to initiate such a serious procedure and to put in motion such a weighty juridico-academic bureaucracy against a respectable and universally respected professor?”

Where indeed. In many ways this case serves as an object lesson in struggles over interpretation of the record. While clearly Bennington and Kamuf’s intent was to exonerate Derrida, 15 years on it is far from clear that that is the primary purpose served by their archival activities. Texts and objects exceed the curatorial framings we attempt to contain them within; the reading we imagine for our collections is not the only reading possible. Wasn’t that what we were all supposed to learn from him anyway?

The other archive (in the humanities sense of “genre” or “set of sources”) evoked by the case is that of the letters tenured faculty tend to write in support of other tenured faculty accused of sexual misconduct. Judith Butler seems to specialize in these; they wrote not only for Kujundzic but also, in 2017, for Avital Ronnell, another protegee of Derrida’s who was also accused of misconduct with graduate students, though hers was in the line of bizarre emotional demands rather than sexual harassment of supervisees. Gayatri Spivak (who studied with Derrida) signed Ronnell’s letter, too. Butler and Spivak are both cited by Cusset as the next (and likely last) generation of superstar professors who built their careers on the model of Derrida’s. Notably for literary scholars, in most of these letters the signatories freely admit that they have reviewed no documents about the cases, that they know nothing other than the character of the accused, and that this is enough evidence to make a public assertion of the truth of the matter. (In this regard they pattern themselves on Derrida, who declared Kujundzic “absolutely incapable of using or abusing his power with students” based on...their personal relationship, which was not that of a student and a supervisor. Ah, the rigor!)

It is these patterns and networks, the genealogies of power and its abuse that can be discerned within these archives, that interest me, most especially in their utter lack of distinction from the patterns and networks of abuse that occur in every industry. The academy, particularly the rapidly dwindling humanities sector of it, is so insistent on its own specialness, but the way its middle managers handle complaints of sexual misconduct belies such delusions of exception. When the tenured stand together in these letters, they articulate a coherent and familiar analysis of power, albeit one very different from that present in much of their writing: that the disempowered are sneaky and self-serving, the empowered deserving and above reproach; that if an empowered person is seduced into breaking the rules that protect the disempowered, the disempowered is probably to blame for what is really nothing more sinister than a salacious entanglement. Such, as ever, (as Hartman reminds us) are the ruses of power.

This type of critique is itself, by now, almost a cliche. Scholars are not exempted from the structures of power they study, and the labor crisis that has been brewing in the academy for decades intensifies the power dynamics of the pedagogical relation and disproportionately harms those who sit at intersections of oppressive structures. But the familiarity is part of my point. The actions of sophisticated scholars are themselves commonplace and easy to read even when their theories are dense and difficult. Power tends toward abuse. The powerful support one another. The stories of those abused by the powerful tend to dissolve and disappear within the discourses that grow up around their abusers. Justice is hard and never guaranteed.

That is, in part, why I find Derrida’s actions with respect to his archive more instructive than reading Archive Fever. If archives are troubled by the unconscious forces that shape our subjectivity, then that insight is important to understanding ourselves as individual scholars and archivists. But archives are also, demonstrably, troubled by the conscious forces of power relations that shape our collectivity, and that is crucial to understanding ourselves as a profession and as historical actors. What the UCI incident demonstrates most urgently is the need for radical humility about our own deployments of power and desire. Maybe, had Derrida considered his letter in light of his writing on archives, he would have acted differently. Probably not. But the incident does demonstrate the irony of scholarly erudition that operates without immanence, and absent an ethics of care.

This case also makes me think about impossible archives, archives that will never and could never be. As Derrida says, “no archive without outside.” 

I wasn’t going to say anything about the sexual assault case in question, although Kujundzic’s accuser has spoken publicly about her experiences (perhaps in part because she left the academy to become a civil rights attorney in the wake of them). But something has stuck with me these many years as I pitched this piece to a bunch of journals and conferences and was never, ever accepted: that she says she cried. That investigators ruled the encounter consensual, even though she told them that during it she was weeping. I guess I know why that remained with me, a trace of traces, as I wrote and unwrote and failed to write what I have to say about this case.

Derrida wrote a lot about tears. In Memoirs of the Blind he describes how in the Western canon, sight is privileged over the other senses, how seeing is made synonymous with knowing, and how that slippage is foundational to Enlightenment rationalism and its many bastard children. But he also notes what he sees as a paradox: that eyes are also for crying, that they are as destined to weep as they are to see. And tears blind us. Shortly after he wrote his letter in support of Kujundzic to UCI, Derrida revised an interview he had given earlier in the year to Le Monde, a text which was published posthumously as Learning to Live Finally. In it, he wrote, “I am never more haunted by the necessity of dying than in moments of happiness and joy. To feel joy and to weep over the death that awaits are for me the same thing.” 

Tears were, for Derrida, I think, an expression of what is unutterably complex and contradictory about human experience; that we desire and are fulfilled; that we destroy and are destroyed; that we endlessly strive to understand and master our passage between those genres of experience. That’s interesting, certainly. Personally I am more interested in what Kujundzic’s accuser has to say about her tears. To write, in one’s own name, in public, that one cried while one was raped, is, to my very ordinary mind, an act of inscription far more daring than anything Derrida ever accomplished. She said so because that was her evidence, which the investigators were not convinced by. Tears are a kind of ephemeral proof that does not admit the possibility (or the pretensions) of the archive. I have my own pieces of evidence that no one will ever be able to archive, no matter what recorded testimonial traces I may leave about them: pieces of gravel in the meat of my hands, or the small scream I make when someone comes up behind me. Most of my friends carry these proofs as well. Part of the function of the (patri)archive and the archontic power relation (a function Derrida never named nor I think conceived) is the denial and the discipline of just these forms of evidence. They lie outside the place of consignation; they are ruled inadmissible; they remain groundless, without right, and far from “universally respected.”

***

I find myself at this juncture of history, grown very tired of cleverness, of brilliance that exists to be burnished, of incisiveness deployed primarily to engrave a man’s name as deep into the archive as it will go. These days what I find serious is the thinking-together of collective action, of strategy and tactics. Until all the workers of the university can come together, none will succeed in transforming the labor relations that keep them all ensnared; until the labor relation is transformed, abuse of students by faculty (sexual and otherwise) will continue. Faculty can unite and think and act in concert with students and staff to force institutional changes via direct action; or they can continue to expound art-for-art’s-sake humanism while whistling past the graveyard, enjoying “doing what they love” until someday the scythe of austerity comes for them too. “The beauty of the beautiful is but a memory of death.” To open this piece I asked whom does the silence surrounding this incident serve; I hope to have suggested some answers. In ending it, my question is: who do we serve, as archivists and scholars? Who benefits from our labor, and whose labor do we benefit from? Such questions are the seeds of solidarity; and we need some, desperately, if we are to have any hope of preserving what we love.

*

REFERENCES & FURTHER READING

“After Nimrod Reitman’s case, some are critiquing power imbalances in the application of Title IX,” Amanda Morris. The Rational Creature 9/19/2018 [https://www.therationalcreature.com/single-post/2018/09/19/After-Nimrod-Reitman%E2%80%99s-case-some-are-critiquing-power-imbalances-in-the-application-of-Title-IX]

Documents on the UCI Archive Affair. [http://www.jacques-derrida.org/UCI%20Affair.html]

“On Power and Aporia in the Academy: A Response in Three Parts,” Amy Elizabeth Robinson. Medium 8/18/2018 [https://medium.com/@amyelizabethrobinson/on-power-and-aporia-in-the-academy-a-response-in-three-parts-f7387c346ffa]

“In Life and in Death: 2003-2004,” in Derrida: A Biography. Benoit Peeters, Polity Press, 2013

“Derrida’s Archives,” Michael Leddy. Orange Crate Art 2/26/2007 [https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2007/02/derridas-archives.html]

Kate Orazem is originally from Iowa and currently lives in Cottage Grove, Oregon, where she works as the archivist and administrative deputy for the Rural Organizing Project. You can follow her on Twitter @kateorazem.