Playing with citations

Exergue means literally the place on a coin beneath the design where the date and location of it’s making occurred.

For Derrida, this section of the letter “plays with citation.” In his book about Fever of Archives, Derrida begins by explaining how archives are both “traditional and revolutionary; at once institutive and conservative.” The crux of this for him is “archival violence.” He then explains how the inscription of the archives occur, through printing and circumcision. Derrida argues that in order for an archive to exist it must be constructed to live in an external space,

“there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression,”

and then he associates this with the Freudian death drive. For as Derrida writes, “There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression.”

Derrida connects the printing of documents or inscription with circumcision, “it leaves a trace of an incision right on the skin: more than one skin, at more than one age.”

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-Jean-Philippe Pastor