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.”

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

-Jean-Philippe Pastor

Realm of ephemera

Over the centuries, print literature has developed mechanisms for its preservation and archiving, including libraries and librarians, conservators, and preservationists. Unfortunately, no such mechanisms exist for electronic literature.

The situation is exacerbated by the fluid nature of digital media; whereas books printed on good quality paper can endure for centuries, electronic literature routinely becomes unplayable (and hence unreadable) after a decade or even less. The problem exists at both the software and hardware levels. Commercial programs can become obsolete or migrate to new versions incompatible with older ones, and new operating systems (or altogether new machines) can appear on which older works will not play.

With a foreshortened canon limited to a few years and without the opportunity to build the kinds of traditions associated with print literature, electronic literature would be doomed to the realm of ephemera, severely hampered in its development and the influence it can wield.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts.