Blogpost #3
In this respect, Jacques Derrida’s influential essay “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” undeniably takes us to task. Derrida argues therein that the death drive—i.e., what Freud (in the simplest of terms) calls our impulse to repeat, and to thereby resituate ourselves at the inflection points that cleave before from after—powers the mechanics of archivism, writing: “There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside” (78). Derrida’s proposition that the archive is hypomnesic ipso facto is compelling as a matter of general principle, but becomes even more interesting when applied to another text assigned to us for this unit: excerpts from Lida Yusupova’s “Verdicts.”
The very premise of verbatim poetry makes complicated the ‘technique of repetition’ Derrida argues is central to archive: Married to repetition and reliant on subversion, antithesis is the crux of its aspiration to be at once both explicitly, unabashedly mimetic (in the clearest possible sense of the term, no less) and transformative. In my view, Yusupova’s work brings into sharp focus the wrinkles in Derrida’s junctures, and the finality of consignation, re-enactment, and exteriority. I found this to be especially true whilst reading her poem “he took a wooden stick and thrust it with force into her vagina,” which is drawn from a court case centred on the rape and murder of a pregnant woman. The text identifies three distinct places of consignation: the reshaping of the story into Yusupova’s poetry, the entry of the case into the public record, and the surrender of the incident itself to the court system. Interestingly, though the account her poetry gives of consent and violation pertains specifically to the case in question, her appropriation—in the most neutral possible sense—of the victims’ (and perpetrators’) stories for the purposes of cultural commentary raises questions to me about the consent of the document to be archived. Though her work is representative and defensive of them, the characters central to these court cases—especially and most obviously those whose deaths are described therein—did not consent to being used this way. Nor does the document consent to be wrested from its original context and reinserted into an archive, one which could arguably be called revisionist.
I do not say this to criticise by any means. Yusupova’s poetry is beautiful; the care she feels for the victims whose stories she reframes, and for whom her work seeks retroactive justice, is clear. So, too, is the value and beauty of the archive. In juxtaposing verbatim poetry against Derrida’s commentary on the archive, I point out only that documentation is inherently decontextualising—and that, for better or for worse, that which is documented is at the whims of the documentarian.