Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

114effect of the drives that try to destroy it. Within the void of the archive the Thanatos protectsEros. As demonstrated by Fanti, there is no death anxiety; the only anxiety is the anxiety of thevoidan anxiety that defines nineteenth-century America’s anxiety about its national archive.As Thanatos takes over the world of Hawthorne, as terrathe American archiveiscrammed with dead bodies, as letters are rumbling the Symbolic, as signifiers fall part, I cannotbut pose the Kantian question “what is man?” What is the future of human subjectivity? Who isresponsible for the death of Eros? 39 As the Cartesian cogito ergo sum has imploded, 40 powerrelations has been remodeled. The archive, the real site of terror, is imbricated with violence, but alsodesire plays an important role in the construction of American Puritan subjectivity. What comes firstin the archive? Derrida argues that it is not only the question of the past that is at stake when wedig into the archive; the future plays an important role in determining the spectral nature of thearchive. He posits that: “it is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the questionof a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to knowwhat that will have meant, we will only know in times to come” (Archive Fever 36; italics mine).The archive, then, is a mere promise of coherence that unfolds only in the field of the futureanterior“will have meant.” It circles around a kind of repetition in order to be comprehensibleand comprehensive. Since there is no future without repetition, we cannot talk about the archivewithout invoking the specters or the ghosts of the dead. As a result, the meaning of the archive isalways deferred and the archive must replay the act of archivization endlessly. According toDerrida:the strange result of this performative repetition, the irrepressible effectuation of thisenactment, in any case what it unavoidably demonstrates is that the interpretation of the