Shelf-Life Biopolitics, the New Media Archive, and Reading “Paperless” Persons

Shelf-Life: Biopolitics, the New Media Archive, and Reading “Paperless” Persons It is possible that I now know something that he did fear Let me say how I arrived at this assumption Well inside his wallet was a sheet of paper, folded long since, brittle and broken along the creases I read it before I burned it It was written in his finest hand, firmly and evenly; but I perceived right away that it was only a copy ‘Three hours before his death,’ it began It was about Christian IV I read it several times before I burned it … I now understand very well, by the way, that a man will carry, for many a year, deep inside his wallet, the account of a dying hour … Can we not imagine someone copying out, let us say, the manner of Felix Arver’s death? … He became perfectly lucid, and explained to her that the word was ‘corridor’ not ‘collidor’ Then he died Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs Half-read books once replaced among the splendid rows of books in our library will never be read to the end Indeed, it is enough for some sensitive souls to buy a book whose beginning they like, and then never pick it up again Robert Musil, “Monuments,” in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author My dear reader I pronounce the matchless prophecy that two-thirds of the book’s few readers will quit before they are halfway through, which can also be expressed in this way—out of boredom they will stop reading and throw the book away My dear reader but to whom am I speaking? Perhaps no one is left at all Alas, alas, alas! How fortunate that there is no reader who reads all the way through, and if there were any, the harm from being allowed to shift for oneself when it is the only thing he wishes, is, after all, like the punishment of the men of Molbo who threw the eel into the water Dixt [I have spoken] Soren Kierkegaard, "Letter to the Reader from frater Taciturnus” in Stages on Life's Way this was an administrative and no longer religious arrangement: a mechanism of registration, and no longer of pardon The objective aimed at was, however, the same But here the avowal does not play the same role that Christianity had reserved for it For the implosion of this grid, old, but previously localized procedures were systematically utilized; the denunciation, the indictment, the inquiry, the report, the use of informers, the interrogation And everything thus said is registered in writing, accumulates and constitutes dossiers and archives build themselves up through time as the endlessly growing memory of all the wrongs of the world.” Michel Foucault, “The Lives of Infamous Men” In Jacques Derrida’s later work one frequently encounters notable semantic shifts in terminology with regard to writing, storage devices, the archive, and paper as he addressed the effects of the shift from the era of paper to multimedia technologies of writing.1 In Archive Fever, Derrida returned to his essay on Sigmund Freud’s “Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” to ask what difference it would make to psychoanalysis had Freud sent faxes and email rather postal letters, and in Paper Machine, Derrida returns to his rereading of Freud in Archive Fever to ask what difference the shift from paper as a material support to virtual “paper” might make Moreover, in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” Derrida returned to his account of archive fever he had formulated “elsewhere” in Archive Fever.3 The writing machine and typewriter ribbons, the answering machine, word processor, tape recorder, and other storage devices, photography cameras, and the subjectile, the material support or “technical substrate,” all came to matter increasingly to Derrida in ways they did not in his earlier accounts of non-phenomenal arche-writing, the trace, and the supplement to which he contrasted phenomenal “writing in the general sense” (hieroglyphs, ideograms, alphabets, and so on).4 While rethinking the archive in relation to new media, Derrida was also rethinking, ona different channel, the relation between papers and persons, a biopolitical question relating to documents and the materiality versus virtually, the human and the machine, the human and the animal.5 The “paperless” person is an outlaw, a nonsubject legally, a noncitizen or the This essay is deeply debted to Julian Yates, whose fingerprints, handprints, footprints, voice-prints, and answering machine may be traced everywhere in this essay I would like also to thank John Archer for his many conversations, his trenchant comments on many drafts of the introductory section, and “John Archer’s answering machine” too Sigmund Freud, “Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, William Strachey (ed and trans.), London Hogarth Press, 1961, Vol 6, pp226-32; Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, Yale French Studies 48, (1972), pp74-117, republished in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Alan Bass (trans.) Chicago University Press, 1978, pp196-231; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp13-19; and Paper Machine, Rachel Bowlby (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, pp48-50 See also Derrida’s parallel comments on bank notes, checks, and credit cards in “Priceless,” Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001, Elizabeth Rottenberg (ed and trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp326-328 “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits,’)” in Tom Cohen et al (eds), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp 302-03, p359n11 This essay was published in Paper Machine, Paris: Galilée, 2001, 35-150 but was not included in Paper Machine, op cit “Fichus” was originally published as a book but is included as a chapter of Paper Machine, op cit On the “technical substrate,” see Archive Fever, op cit., p25; on the subjetctile, see Artaud le MOMA; on arche-writing and writing in the general sense, see Of Grammatology: Corrected Edition, Gayatri Spivak (trans), Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1997, pp6-26 Paper Machine, op cit citizen of a foreign country refused the right conferred, on paper, by a temporary or permanent visa, a rubber stamp The literal reference to the word papers, in the sense of legal justification certainly depends on the language and uses of particular national cultures (in France and Germany, for instance) But when in the United States, for example, the word undocumented is used to designate analogous cases, or undesireables, with similar problems involved, it is the same axioms that carry authority; the law is guaranteed by the holding of a “paper” or document, an identity card (ID), by the bearing or carrying [port] of a driving permit or a passport that you keep on your person, that can be shown and that guarantees the self, the juridical personality of “here I am.” We shouldn’t be dealing with these problems without asking what is happening today under international law, with the subject of “human rights and the citizen’s rights,” with the future or decline of nation-states.6 At the end of this long passage, Derrida concludes “we are all, already, ‘paperless’ people.”7 After having insisted that he and other supporters of the “paperless” people are not “calling for the disqualification of identity papers or of the link between documentation and legality” and having pointed out that “when we support them [paperless people] today in their struggle, we still demand that they be issued papers”, Derrida adds that what he metaphorically calls “the earthquake” of virtual, paperless media “touches nothing less than the essence of politics and its link with the culture of paper The history of politics is a history of paper, if not a paper history.” Op cit., pp60-1 (Derrida uses the earthquake metaphor in Archive Fever as well.) Clarifying the force of the final subordinate clause qualifying the meaning of a “history of paper” (not the same thing as “a paper history”), Derrida restates his earlier point that “although the authentication and identification of selves and others increasingly escapes the culture of paper the ultimate juridical resource still remains the signature done with the person’s ‘own hand’ on an irreplaceable paper support Ibid., p57 In this essay, I will ask what it means and for people to default to the condition of being paperlesss inside of the “earthquake” of new media, when the archive is no longer founded on paper supports, when files go virtual, when the state and paper are decoupled.8 Under the double heading of the archive and paper, I initiate up a critique of Jacques Derrida, 'Paper or Me, You Know… (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)' in Paper Machine, Rachel Bowlby (trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005, pp60-1 See also Derrida, 'Machines and the Undocumented Person', ibid, pp13; Derrida, 'Derelictions of the Right to Justice: (But What Are the "Sans Papier" Lacking?)' in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001, Elizabeth Rottenberg (ed and trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp133-46; and Jacques Derrida H.C for Life, That Is to Say Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p137 and p171n123 Ibid., p61 Derrida’s descriptions of papers as “literal” derives from a legal understanding of human rights in which papers have an officially approved and authentic and recognizable material support that authorized bearers carry on their persons Derrida presumably puts “paper” in scare quotes in order to indicate that the literal referent is materialized in Agamben’s biopolitics and German media theory, both of which are derived from Michel Foucault One of the problems with Agamben is that he has no account of media and no account of materiality either The camp in Agamben’s account is a political space, an indeterminate zone, indifferent to its various phenomenalizations, materializations, localizations, places, and its virtualization Agamben extends the category of homo sacer so far that it includes “virtually” everyone and can no longer be identified exclusively with victims of crimes (against humanity) but include “neomorts” as well If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri.”10 The virtualization of homines sacrii would not be possible without the virtualization of the archive It is through the virtualization of the archive (understood as its mediatization in electronic form) that makes this condition visible even in the so-called pre-histories of the archive and, say of the law not yet virtualized or only virtualized in relation to a specific medium (tape recorders, but not television; drawings, but not photographs) According to Agamben, there is no difference between a bare life “lived” in a hospital room, on death row, or in a detention center, and a bare life “lived” in a Nazi concentration camp; no does it matter to Agamben whether or not crimes are committed in a particular morphology of the political space of the camp I enlist Derrida to reconceptualize Agamben’s virtualized bare life, or biopolitics as biobibliopolitics: in modernity, persons are defined by their relation to paper.11 Entry various kinds of identification documents The state of exception and reference to the concentration camps –112—in the Time that Remains he gets to inoperatively, informulability of the law, this is where he finds himself at the moment of deconstruction but does not deconstruction Agmaben effectively turns the remnant into an aporia (space and time actually become substitutable variations of the same structure the same figure of the "contracted" remnant) and hence all reading can is to "render inoperative" certain kinds of misreadings (misreadings which have nevertheless clearly persisted, hence the need for him to write his book and correct past mistakes) There's also a way in which The Time That Remains reads as an ars moriendi, a saving of a time for the end, a fantasy that you can prepare yourself for your death “Operational time” is the time you have to think the end in the present, not think about the end (eschaton), and so is implicitly distinguished from what operational time renders inoperative Inoperativity (111) and impotential as opposed to operationability and potential 10 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (115) 11 Agamben’s accout of virtual, virtualemente in Itlian original, skips ovr the questions of paperlessness asked by Derrida The result is a philogical confusion over virtuality itself: What is included in the camp according to the etymological sense of the term “exception” (ex-capere), taken outside, included through its own exclusion But what is first of all taken into the juridical order is the state of exception itself Insofar as the state of exception is ‘willed,’ it inaugurates a new juridico-political paradigm in which the norm becomes indistinguishable from the exception The camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception—the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereign power—is realized normally The sovereign no longer limits himself, as he did in the spirit of the Weimar constitution, to into concentration camps and all other zones of exception always archive includes the camp s involves identity papers and paperwork; similarly, preserving memory always bears on media of archiving, including film, photography, and print Agamben’s account of the camp as the political space that is opened when the life becomes bare life and the state of exception becomes the norm, even though it is a delocalization and covers the planet as well as invades the interior of the city, it is still, in terns materialization a holding pen, a cage, temporary or not Agamben confinement model of biopolitics is unnecessarily reductive Even if all life is bare life and hence may be caged, bare life is still minimally “free” to range (with papers or without them; with genuine papers or forged papers) within the planetary space of the political as the archive, even when phenomenalized as camp or cage The archive is the nomos of the earth, the paradigm of the political space opened up in modernity when the state of exception becomes the norm and all life becomes virtually homines sacri, not the camp The political space of the archive includes the camp within it The camp is always already an event of archivalization Biopolitics is therefore not about confinement (only, or even primarily) but about various kinds of mediatized transmission, translation, transit or bio-biblioprocessing In order to translate the camp into the archive, I enlist Derrida’s accounts of the media archive and paper in a critique of attempts to positivize or literalize grammatology by introducing a seeming stable opposition between material and virtual kinds of media capturing paper (as opposed to textuality) by materialists and new media theorist of paper such as Markus Paper Machines (MIT) and the Foucault and Kittler default model of German media theory, which takes both as read, the problem of Foucault and life as read and the evasion of literature, the send off of Rilke as epigraph to this essay as my point of departure.12 In saying that the political space is the camp as archive, I retain the deciding on the exception on the basis of recognizing a given factual situation (danger to public safety): laying bare the inner structure of the ban that characterizes his power, he now de facto produces the situation as a consequence of his decision on the exception This is why in the camp the quaestio iuris is, if we look carefully, no longer strictly distinguishable from the quaestio facti, and in this sense every question concerning the legality or illegality of what happened there simply makes no sense The camp is a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable (HS 170) In Agamben’s terms, then the lack of mediation means that media disappear along with the question of the human and the machine; it means, moreover, that that question can only be posed in the same ay See The Open, as a question of rendering the machine operational On Rilke’s notebooks he kept while writing the Notebooks of Maltis Laurid Brigg, see Rainer Maria Rilke and Maurice Betz, Rilke in Paris Will Stone (trans) London Hesperus Press, 2012, pp21-26; 39-44; 71-78; 107-111 Vismann Files—returns to literature, even if literature is reduced to citations Files, Paper Machines Sven Spieker, The Big Archive Lothar Müller, Weisse Magie: Die Epoche des Papiers (Carl Hanser Verlag 2012) deals with canonical European literature throughout, and begins with a mention of paperless or undocumented persons, 11; Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2003) 12 cage aspect of Foucault carceral genealogical practice of historicism and the camp of Agamben while saying that within the paradigm of the archive, confinement is not primary: citizens and illegal immigrants live virtual bare lives regardless of whether they live as “free range” people or in cages and camps This move form biopolitics to a Derridean inflected bibliopolitics will reorient Foucault away from discipline, technologies of the self, governmentality, and toward the archive as a delivery system, a heavily dependency on literature to provide the hit of so-called real materiality 13 What is apprehended as the political value of Foucault’s work—discipline and punish, technologies, governmenentality, sovereignt ends up being a misunderstanding of what is really political about it, namely, allowing the archive to model what you with it Foucault looks a lot more grammatological in terms of what haunts him He is actually a historian, not a philosopher His job is telling stories about the past as opposed to interrupting the past And on dreams Biobibliopolitics relats tehnics to reading, about reading as a filing and shelving operation No longer inoperable, as it is for Agamben, but unreadable, a fetishism of reading which calls into question the limits of the readable, how to distinguish the readable from the unreadable Not just a question of memory and the archive either Nt just biological life and death but also survivance Having initiated this double critique of biopolitics and media theory as a misapprehension of the politics of the archive in Foucault’s work, we are now able to elaborate and examine in the remainder of this essay what I call various kinds of shelving operations in which reading both takes hold through them and is held off by them: the wallet; a youtube video about the U.S passport both as identification papers and as a kind of book; Alain Resnais’s parallel film documentaries Nuit et broulliard (Night and Fog, 1955), devoted to the Holocaust, and Toute la memoire du monde (All the Memory of the World, 1956), devoted to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France); and autobiographical essays by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno about shelving and shipping their books I Let me return to Derrida’s comments on the “paperless” person I quoted at length above Michel Foucault, "Part Five: Right of Death and Power Over Life," in The History of Sexuality Vol An IntroductionThe Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 by Michel Foucault, Michel Senellart, Arnold I Davidson, and Alessandro Fontana (2008) Agamben's problem lies the way he constructs Foucault's work: Agamben sees a line of thought about internment that should have ended with an account of the concentration camp Agamben then completes the line of thought He does connect this work to Foucualt's work on the archive in Remnants, but doesn't see a fissure within Foucault's own work between Foucault's account of the archive (Lives of Infamous Men; I, Pierre Riviere) and discipline through incarceration Foucault did not think through the connection between the prison and the archive, in short He was too invested in a politics that separated the body from biopolitics Giorgio Agamben "The Birth of the Camp," in Means Without Ends and "Archive andTestimony" in Remnants of Auschwitz For a very hars critique of Agamben, see Beast and the Sovereign, vol.1 Errol Morris, dir Mr Death 13 By saying that we are all “paperless” persons, Derrida means, I take it, that the substitution of a material paper support by a paperless electronic support has entailed a global network in which even those with papers are effectively reduced to those without them It might be tempting to appeal to Michel Foucault for the explanation of what Derrida is looking at the epiphenomena of, namely, paperlessness as a technology of surveillance.14 Derrida describes a “‘paperless’ setup” that that both covers the entire earth and extends beyond it: new powers delete or blur the frontier in unprecedented conditions, and at an unprecedented pace… These new threats on the frontiers are…phenomenal; they border on phenomenality itself, tending to phenomenalize, to render perceptible visible, or audible; to expose everything on the outside They not only affect the limit between the public and the private – between the political or cultural life of its citizens and their innermost secrets and indeed, secrets in general; they touch on actual frontiers – on frontiers in the narrow sense of the word: between the national and the global, and even between the earth and the extraterrestrial, the world and the universe – since satellites are part of this “paperless” setup.15 14 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge Some of French collegues of La Bastille ou : A travers les archives de la BastilleDanielle Muzerelle and Elise DutrayLecoin, eds; Bruno Racine (Préface) See contributions by Arlette Farge Selections from Arlette Farge's Subversive Words Jacques Ranỗiere chapter on paper and the writing desk, "The Dead King," in The Names of History I rather believe the idea came to me one day in the Bibliotheque Nationale when I was reading an internment register drawn up at the very beginning of the eighteenth century.” Foucault, "Lives of Infamous Men," The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other, books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, on the basis of a complex field of discourse Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, Trans A M Sheridan Smith New York:Patheon, 1972, 23 (on this page and 24, MF’s examples are almost all literary texts) 15 Ibid., p57 To these threatened frontiers, Derrida might have added life and death 16 Yet for Derrida, paperlessness is not only a moment of danger and a source of anxiety but also a moment in which certain kinds of things become possible Elsewhere in Paper Machine, Derrida defines philosophy as paperless, undocumented in the more literal sense To an interviewer asking “What does it mean to a French philosopher today?” Derrida responds that “in principle, a philosopher should be without a passport, even undocumented [sanspapier]; he should never be asked for his visa He should not represent a nationality, or even a national language.”17 Derrida transvalues the condition of being without papers in the literal sense from the negative meaning of being undesirable to the positive meaning of a principle of philosophical cosmopolitanism: philosophy today is defined by its being 16 See the wallet as tomb in Rilke’s example Similar examples in Farge Le bracelet de parchemin is all about autopsies—papers found on cadavers that helped identify them These are people who drowned or froze to death She uses the word “inscribes” in a Foucauldian manner enonce par l’inscription sur papier, tablettes ou parchemins 77 But survivance is not reducible to life and death Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death (130) Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment on, is a livingdead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, a bookstore, in cellars, in urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 131 A tout le moin peut-on preciser qu’il y a de minuscule carnets, des missives ou tablettes, des dessin, et ce que tout cela est inscrit sure des fueilles de papier aux formats mutliples, aux bords dechieres, aux forms incertaines parce que uses par le temps, griffes aussi par l’enfouissement sans precaution dans les poches Bien entendu se reconnaissent vite les imprimes (certificats, passeports, extraits de bapteme, etc.) ainsi ceux supportant une ectriture manuscrite 37 Archives nationals, Z2 41333 “Registre de levee de cadavres, 17 avirl 1783 Tous ce ecrits minuscule forment sans doute un livre, un livre unique ou se dirait par ecrit ce qui—de fait—ne pouvait jamais etre ecrit par ceux qui les portaient, puisqu’ils ne possedaient aucune des forms de la culture tradiotnelle Ces papiers ne sont pas lies au monde savant et, pourtant, ils s’y rattachent forcement Ce bruit peu audilble, ce livre difficile a dechiffrer eminent bien en partie du monde savant: quleques comptes sur un papier dechire font etat d’un unives marchand, meme s’il est pratique pratique sans emphase ou de facon embryonnaire: une adresse mal orthgrahiee or des mots de pei Les objets, les vetements, les petit billets sur soi aident a l’identification du corps 31 ne ecrits de crayon et de phonetique emprutent a la culture savant 35 17 “What Does It Mean to Be a French Philosopher Today?”, in Paper Machine, op cit, p112 outside geopolitical laws, if not an outlaw I think it would be a mistake to dismiss this transvaluation as a kind of weak exceptionalism Derrida claims for philosophy II How is a “paperless” person, someone whose support takes the form of identification papers, caught up in new kinds of virtual biometrics and bioprocessing? What kind of virtual life supports might international law offer to replace paper supports? I want to address these questions by turning to Derrida’s account of the thing that holds papers together, namely, the portefeuille, or wallet Taking this turn means that we begin to grasp what I call the “hold” of reading, or in this case the holdover of readings to be continued Derrida’s account of the wallet is textually deferred and placed in the storage unit of an endnote.18 However, this endnote does not follow Derrida’s first mention of the wallet at the end of a very long parenthetical comment regarding paper: “(Indeed a reflection on paper ought in the first place to be a reflection on the sheet or leaf [feuille] … We should also, if we don’t forget to later, speak about the semantics of the portefeuille, at least in French).”19 Derrida’s endnote begins as if taking up where his parenteheical remarks left off: “I had forgotten to come back to the French word portefueille [wallet].” A note does follow the parenthesis that defines the meaning of Portefeuille.20 Yet this note has been added by the translator, who seems to forget that Derrida remembers he forgot in endnote 29.21 (Dear reader: please hold on while I hold up my essay by attending to the holds in Derrida’s interview The translator’s arguably unnecessary note is not merely an uncaught error; rather, it echoes perhaps even mimics Derrida’s own textual repetitions For example, the phrase “we are all, already, undocumented, paperless” occurs in the first chapter of Paper Machine and Derrida rewrites it almost verbatim, dropping “undocumented in “Paper or Me, You Know.”22 Similarly, Derrida has an endnote on endnote “biblion” in “Paper or Me, You Know,” that similarly repeats much a passage in the body of the of “The Book to Come.” 23 Endnoting allows for Derrida to put certain issues into storage or take them out, often marking his discussion in the body of the text as a lapse: for example, in “Typewriter Ribbon, Limited Ink”, he says “I don’t know why I am telling you this” in the middle of an rhetorically unmarked digression on the amber vampire insects and then ends the three page digression by apparently recalling his purpose: “I didn’t know, a moment ago, why I was telling you these stories of an archive: archives of a vampire insect.”24 Yet a clear distinction between an unmarked lapse and a lapse rhetorically marked as a “hold on” moment of interruption is very difficult, probably impossible, to draw in Derrida’s work Moreover, these “hold on” both “hold up” moments may mean both delay or stopping and support, as in holding a place Derrida’s many returns to Freud’s “Notes on the Mystic Writing Pad” mentioned above 18 Ibid., 188-9n29 Ibid., 14 20 Op cit., p186n14 21 Op cit 22 Op cit., p61 23 Op cit., pp6-8 and pp187-8n27 24 “Typewriter Ribbon,” op cit., p331, p333 19 may be construed as placeholders that enabled him to hold up reading by folding it up, unfolding it, and refolding In Archive Fever, Derrida writes: “an exergue serves to stock in anticipation and prearchives a lexicon, which out to lay down the law and give the order In this way, the exergue has at once an institutive and conservative function It is thus the first figure of an archive.” 25 The “exergue,” “preamble,” “foreword,” and “postscript” of Archive Fever paratexutally mark a series of hold ups that auto-immunize the already auto-infected archive fever Derrida has already caught Derrida’s thought remains unfinished not just because he died but because the hold of reading means that no reading can ever be finished or complete: reading is always unfolding, leaving on as living-on, or survivance).26 Let me now cite Derrida’s endnote on the wallet so we may understand how actuvirtual life supports in variously virtual and material forms relate to the “hold of reading” more concretely: I had forgotten to come back to the French word portefeuille [wallet] Which says just about everything on what is invested in paper, in the leaf or the feuille of paper Current usage: when its “figure” does not designate a set of documents authenticating an official power, a force of law (the ministerial portfolio), portefeuille names this pocket within a pocket, the invisible pocket you carry [porte] as close as possible to yourself, carry on your person, almost against the body itself Clothing under clothing, an effect among other effects This pocket is often made of leather, like the skin of a parchment or the binding of a book More masculine than feminine a wallet gathers together all the “papers,” the most precious papers, keeping them safe, hidden as close as possible to oneself They attest to our goods and our property We protect them because they protect us (the closest possible protection: ‘This is my body, my papers, it’s me…’)” 27 Derrida proceeds to account for the partially paperless contents of wallets They take the place, they are the place, of that on which everything else, law and force, force of law, seems to depend: our “papers,” in cards or notebooks: the identity card, the driving permit, the business or address book; then paper money – banknotes – if one has any Nowadays, those who can also put credit or debit cards in there These fulfill a function analogous to that of other papers, maintaining the comparable dimensions of a card – something that can be handled, stored away, and carried on the person – but they also signal the end of paper or the sheet of paper, its withdrawal or reduction, in a wallet whose future is metaphorical … One effect among others: the majority of the “rich” often have less cash, less paper money, in their wallets, than some of the poor Op cit., p7 Parages, Beast and the Sovreign 27 Op cit., p188n29 25 26 10 Like so many of Alain Renais’s films, Nuit et broulliard (Night and Fog, 1955) and Toute la memoire du monde (All the Memory of the World, 1957) are concerned with memory, media, and the archive Whereas Night and Fog shows archival material about bioprocessing – passports stripped of prisoners or records kept by prisoners with the names of the recently dead crossed out – All the Memory of the World addresses an almost inverse kind of biblioprocessing of books as prisoners Much as the Nazis tattooed numbers on the arms to be used to identify the victim’s corpse, sewed symbols of different colors and shapes on their prison clothing (figure 1) and stripped prisoners of their passports and identification cards (figure 2) in Night and Fog, so books enter the national library as prisoners and are immediately issued identification cards, then subject to inspection, labeling, “inoculation,” classification, card catalogued, and shelving in All the Memory of the World (figures and 4) In an extended high angle tracking shot, we see an inspector walking up and down between the reading tables One of the first overheads shows a man who pushes a cart with book requests stop at a desk and then give them to a woman librarian who gets up to check them out After she sits back down, the film cuts to a second overhead shot of the man pushing the cart as the narrator refers to the books passing into circulation as going through the looking glass A kind of biblio-border control operates here, paper check for the books, which are given identification cards and those shelved on a cart readied for the reading room to have their request slips in them (figures and 6) Both films amp up the constructed aspects of what make up the paper world that autoarchives people: the obliteration of the concentration camps poses a threat of loss (of the camps) in Night and Fog and the obliteration of books by readers who “crunch them like insects” poses a threat of loss (of the books and yet to be archived materials) in All the Memory of the World.39 (Figure 6) All the Memory of the World is arguably haunted by Night and Fog, particularly by the way it eventalizes the archive as an unreadable place What were then contemporary shots of the ruins of Nazi concentration camps are haunted by the absence of archivists in particular and of humans in general The camps are always shot totally lacking in humans There are no guides, no tourists, no schoolchildren: only the camera visits the blocks now (Figure 7)