What momentarily shines through

these laconic statements are not

the biographical events of

personal histories, as suggested

by the pathos-laden emphasis of

a certain oral history, bur rather

the luminous trail of a different

history.  What suddenly comes to

light is not the memory of an

oppressed existence, but rather

the disjunction between the living

being and the being that marks

its empty place.  Here life

subsists only in the infamy in

which it existed; here a name

lives solely in the disgrace that

covered it. And something in this

disgrace bears witness to life

beyond all biography."

Michel Foucault, “The Lives of

Infamous Men,” 143

At the center of this book, we will

hear echoing, for instance, in

more than one register, literal and

figurative, of the question of the

person with no papers, crushed

by so many machines, when we

are all, already, undocumented,

“paperless.”

--Jacques Derrida, “Paper Or

Me . . . You Know,” Paper

Machine (2).

Even personal documents, which

are extremely important in

wartime, must be handed over.

Nothing must remain in your

possession; not even a document

attesting to your identity and

place of origin is necessary here.”

--Zalman Gradowski, September 6, 1944, Letter 40, Scrolls of Auschwitz, 197.

de Certeau here as away of rethinking his notion of reading as sovereignty in order to

make our book intelligible to history of the book people. frame the reading of de

Certeau as a double reading and then extend that double reading to Foucault. In

terms of Foucault we want to preserve the doubleness of the archive, it offers

potentialities even as even if it seems reduced to state’s auto-archiving.

We should try to rediscover the movements of this reading within the body itself,

which seems to stay docile and silent but mines the reading in its own way: from

the nooks of all sorts of “reading rooms” (including lavatories) emerge

subconscious gestures, grumblings, tics, stretchings, rustlings, unexpected

noises, in short wild orchestrations of the body. But elsewhere, at its most

elementary level, reading has become, over the last three centuries, a visual

poem.  It is no longer accompanied, as it used to be, by the murmur of a vocal

articulation nor by the movement of a muscular manducation.  To read without

uttering the words aloud or at least mumbling them is a “modern” experience,

unknown for millennia. In earlier times, the reader interiorized the text; he made

his voice the body of the other; he was an actor.  Today, the text no longer

imposes its own rhythm on the subject, it no longer manifests itself through the

reader’s voice.  This withdrawal of the body, which is the condition of its

autonomy, is a distancing of the text. It is the reader’s habeas corpus (175-176).

It is therefore a special reading

which exculpates itself as a

reading by posing every guilty

reading the very question that

unmasks its innocence, the mere

question of its innocence: what is

it to read?

--Louis Althusser, Lire le

capital, (15)i]

To see European literature as a whole is possible only after one has acquired

citizenship in every period from Homer to Goethe. This cannot be got from a

textbook, even if such a textbook existed. One acquires the rights of citizenship

in the country of European literature only when one has spent many years in

each of its provinces and has frequently moved about from one to another. One

is a European when one has been a civis Romanus. E.R. Curtius, European

Literature and the Latin Middle Middles Ages, 1952, p. 12

America’s Great Passport Divideby Richard FloridaWed Mar 16th 2011 http://www.creativeclass.com/creative_class/2011/03/16/america’s-great-passport-divide/Historians of the book already assume a theory of reading, which they reduce to

a functionalist pragmatics book use, and this unarticulated and untheorized

default of use (in place of reading) determines how these same historians “read"

the physicality of the physical / so-called material book.  Putting the text apart

from the book, the paratextual "parts" of the book go missing as such or are

understood only as functional. Book production is subdivided into the books parts

(as an assemblage process) but the assumption is that (a) the text is whole

i Althusser’s deconstructive impulse in the ISA essay in Lenin and Philosophy

and Other Essays, the “continuous reading process” as the repressed part of the

essay no one ever acknowledges.

(whether or not it contains fragments or not is irrelevant; the form of the text

becomes irrelevant--hence to the no need to read practice).  They operate like

file clerks who did not read what they filed.  They offer up an anatomy lesson of

the material text even as they misrecognize the corpus (things like glue, for

example, or seals), reducing all of its life functions to a kind of EKG

biobibliofeedback model.  They (don't) read the book. They just flatline it.

(Pun on flatline means that book history as a field reverts to what Vismann calls

the earliest model of filing, continuous recording, on automatic--a continuous loop

of a line.

Extracts (and some comments) from the General Introduction of The Practices of

Everyday Life

In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the

characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the

metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the

reader the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from

a few words leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance. But

since he is incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records),

the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while

reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless

he buys the object (book; image) which is no more than a substitute

(the spoor or promise) of moments “lost” in reading. (xxi)ii

ii Pierre Bayard takes this idea further (even if you buy the works, you still forget the) in How to talk About Books You Haven’t Read. (The chapter on Montaigne is the best one.)

Part 1 Preliminaries: Posthumography and Biopolitics

Five related moves on this account of biopolitics I state directly to save time, at

the risk of seeming peremptory if not dogmatic.

1. From Bare Life to Shelf-Life: FromBiopolitics to bibliopolitics. an analysis

of bioplitics necessarily concerns the archive, files, papers, photographed,

sorted, stored, decayed, destroyed, misplaced or lost. and so on. iii The

problem with Agamben’s account of homo sacer is the way he makes the

camp the political space of modernity, not the archive. Vismann, Foucault

and Kittler, links the modern office to the Nazis and the Stasi. iv

iii When turning to Vismann, come back ot the camp—importance of 1933 (same

as Agamben) and Foucuadian orientation, but the archive as office space. But

the office is the nomos, not the camp for her. The Stasi Files. Office Space

rather than the camp as space.

Agamben extended in The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford

UP, 2004). Folds homo sacer into homo sapiens. Again ‘‘virtually“ is used: ‘like

a ‚missing link‘ which is always lacking because it is already virtually present“

(37):

And it is enough to move our field of research ahead a few decades, and instead

of the innocuous ontological find [of Homo alalus, or the ape-man] we will find we

will have the Jew, that is, the non-man produced within the man, or the neomort

and overcomatose person, that is, the animal separated within the human body

itself. . . . What be thus obtained . . . is neither an animal life nor a human life,

but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself—only a bare life.(37-38)

“The Anthrological Machine,“ 37-38

in its origin Western poltitics is also biopolitics (80)

The stakes are now highen and different [from nationalism and imperialism], for it

is a question of taking on as a task the very factical existence of peple, that is, in

the last analysis, their bare life. (76)

2. With the archive comes the question of reading—recovery-a philological

impasse. But not just empirical data missing. The filing system too

changes. To stick what material as physical evidence model means one is

stuck with positive history chanelled through neoFoucauldian grand and

and anecdotes or a legal discourse of life and death and of habeas

Genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces

of htisprocess in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own

physiology ats its last, impolitical mandate. (77)

Derrida on the genome.

Agamben replaces soveregnty with what he calls the ‘‘anthropological machine“

which functions, as Agamben puts in one of his typically chiasmatic and

paradoxical formulations by eventually totally humanizing the animal and

animalizing the human: The total humanization of the animal coincides with a

total animalization of man.“ (77) (Agamben’s account depend ona a coinciding, a

repeitin that arrives at a coincidence. „In the man these two animals live together,

but they do not coincide“ (15). After mentioning concentration camps, Agamben

effectively rewrites the zone of exception in Homo Sacer as ‘‘zones of

indifference“ (24) in The Open, the liminal Homo Sacer into the indeterminate

Homo sapiens:

„The anthropological „machine necessarily functions aby meansof an exclsuion

(which is also always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always

already an exclusion). Indeed, precisely because the human is alrady

presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a state of exception, a

zone of intdeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the inclusion of an

corpus. Whereas the archive throws not only recover but readability on

doubt. One remains caught within binary opposition of Idealism and

empiricism, as opposed to reading critically through a radical empiricism

and compilation practice that puts deconstructive pressure on form and

matter (in Restitutions), or idea and matter, and so on as writing and

reading (silently and out loud), pre and post, stasis and motion. Derrida

inisde and the inside isin turn only the inclusion of an outside.“ (37)

Writes himself into Foucault

And as Foucault has shown, when the Modern State, starting in the

sevnenteenth century, began to include the care of the population as one of its

tasks, thus transofrming politics into biopolitics., it was primarily by means of the

concept of vegetative life . . . And still today, the defintion of ex lege of the criteria

for clinical death, is a further identification of this bare life“ (15)

„So-called human rights and values“ (16)

man (or the State for him) inmodernity begns to care for his own life, andby what

natural life becomes the stakes in what foucault called biopower.“ 12)

„virtually“ (12)

Perhaps concentration camps and extermination camps are also an experiment

of this sort, an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human

and the inhuman, which has ended up dragging the veryposibility of the

distinction to its ruin. (22)

begins with a footnote anchoring his book in a neoFoucauldian account of

the archive. Derrid questions the limits of the law in Negotiations and

Echographies.

3. Machine versus technology (derrida and Heidegger). Materialism versus

The main difference is that it is unclear how the machine decides, as opposed ot

the sovereign, and that Agamben begins and ends with the work of art. Mentions

Heideger’s essay (71)

The zone now approaches something like a zoo as a shelter (Ellenberger)

althoguh Agamben does not say so. (For Elelnberger, everything is alradya

camp, including the zoo. But the zoo becomes a paradisal exception at the end

of his essay.

In some ways, The Open is Homo Sacer II: it repeats and completes and revises

Homo Sacer almost like Auerbach‘‘s figura-HS is the Ot and TO is the New

Testament. Agamben writes the former into the altter and viceversa—it is the

figural commentary on the Homo Scaer Ii dthat does not actually exist. Agamben

routes his rewrite through the rhetorical use of he areesting image: Agamben

begins and ends his book with the miniatures in the Ambrosian Library ina

Hebrew Bible that georges Bataille discussed in an essay in published in 1930,

and a chapter on two Titan paintings, the latter a repudiationof the earlier, serve

to hold together what are otherwie a very loosely strung together series of

discrete fragments. The work of art disappears through the allregorizaiton

oftheimage (Titian’s second, more disenchanted painting, is also more utopian in

offering an image of the „blessed life“

materiality and inscription.v

4. Agamben writes, “The correct question to pose concerning the horrors

committed in the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how

crimes of atrocity could be committed against human beings. It would be

Paleo-zoo-onto-graph-ology—cite the Pergament book to show that this is not

new. Turnig of hseep into vellum—cite Sarah Kay.

The document from the of life returns as a work of art—see Visman; see also Spieker.iv Sign(ed)Post: From Bare Life to Shelf Life

Dead Matters

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic

Imagination. MIT Press. 2008.

Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford University Press;

(2008)

Krajewski, Markus. 2002. Zettwelwirtschaft: Die Geburt der Kartei aus dem

Geiste der Bibliothek. Berlin: Kadmo). Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs,

1548-1929. Trans. Peter Krapp. MIT 2011.

No overlap between cards in library and office files, but the former interested in

1930, the latter in 1933.

But Lives of Infamous is essentially a pharmacy of the archive. Delivery hit

system of the real, power, but not reducible to biography.

more honest and, above all, more useful to investigate carefully the

juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings

could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no

act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime” (171).

That can be transition from Resnais to Agamben. Reorient Agamben in relation

to Foucault as first thinker of biopolitics. Foucault “Questions of Method” in

Graham Burchell (Editor), Colin Gordon (Editor), Peter Miller (Editor) The

Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. University Of Chicago Press, 1991,

73-86. “A provision in Foucault’s will has been interpreted by his literary

executors as precluding posthumous publication of the complete lecture series.”

Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” p. 1 The lecture

series to which Gordon refers has since been published and translated as

Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977—1978.

Picador; 2009). A related series has been published and translated as The

Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France, 1982-1983

Picador. (2010)

v Le ruban de machine a ecrire / French version of "Typewriter Ribbon, Ink"

versus English

I happened to be looking at Papier Machine the other day and saw a note at the

bottom of the first page (33) of TPI (2) about the French version being a revision

that Derrida gave at the Bibliotechque Nationale in 2001. Amusingly, perhaps,

the note mistakenly says that the earlier version was given at UC Davis, not, as it

5. Bare Life and Shelf life. virtualization of homo sacer as question of media

—virtualmente—not potentially—but media-wise. Writing not just a matter

of writing in the ordinary sense. Writing as instrument of rationalization.

Media traces all over Archive Fever. Ditto for the word virtual. Or

actuvirutality.

actually was , at UC Irvine.

There's a new intro on pp. 33-34 of the French before it matches the English intro

(p. 277)

Then pp. 34-42 of the French are a revision of pp. 277-85 of the English after the

first paragraph on p. 277 up to "there is a memory. . " on p. 285 of the English.

Some of the Irvine version is kept, but all references to that occasionare cut.

Footnote 1 on p. 118 begins Au moment d'ecrire cette conference, j'ignorais, je

l'avoue, que Owen de Graef avait . . . . This is endnote 20 n p. 360 of the Irvine

version. published three years earlier!

Derrida has added a second note on the same page (118) about Lacan's

"Subversion of the Subject"; a new footnote to Hamlet on 53; new quotations

from de man pp. 86 n2 and p. 91n3; anew footnote to De Man's COncept of

IRony pn p. 102; and he has expanded endnote 24 into a longer footnote on p.

126 and a new footnote on Kamuf's Signatures / Addresses book on p. 124 (a

kind of thank you, I suppose)

There's a new, brief footnote on p. 140.

All the other endnotes except 3 (on de Man R of R) have been cut, and all other

footnotes simply give the page numbers of the texts he is citing.

The text itself looks otherwise unchanged.

6. Storage—the library, rooms in homes of friends, office space. Archive

activates document as person metaphor: document did not “survive.”

7. Zone of Exception model based on organic model of life and death—limbo

at beginning and end points of indeterminacy—but basic contrast between

organic matter and inorganic matter. No reading of the Genome. Cite Life

and Death book.

8. The person equated with the body (see Ed Cohen) and habeas corpus.vi

But the book calls up the habeas corpus of the reader for de Certeau.

9. Traumission and transmisison. Unconscious. Topoogy of the mind—not

reducible to topology of the archive (Speiker). Better reading of Freud

required.

10. Thanto-biblio-politics Death certificates. Cryonic criticism--the archive as

a storage unit—document preservation analogous to cryonic preservation

of dead people.

From bios to genome—and Derrida’s grammatology, genome, trace, and

autoimmunity. Book of Life? citations of Derrida. Not just materiality of paper.

vi The Habeas Corpus and the history of the book (Chartier and Lefebvre) like the

move on Foucault and the archive there as well-- go back to biopolitics via

Governmentality and Lives of Infamous Men and then show how Agamben

misses this dimension of Foucault entirely in Remnants of Auschwitz, how he

does not get the camp as an archive.  From go to the passport as opposed to

lettres de cachet perhaps). So end up with habeas corpus--in effect, the missing

body that has to be presented, rather than the docile body subject to discipline

and the passport as "paper machine."  Does the body have to missing before it

can be disciplined, interned? Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, “Part Five:

Right of Death and Power Over Life” For the first time in history, no doubt,

biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no

longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the

randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of

control and power’s sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be dealing

simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with

living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have

to be applied at the level of life of life itself it was the taking charge of life, more

than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. If one can

apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life

After.Life (dir. )

“Effective exorcism pretends to declare the death only in order to put to death. As

a coroner might do, it certifies the death but here it is in order to inflict it. This is

a familiar tactic. The constative form tends to reassure. The certification is

effective. It wants to be and must be in effect. It is effectively a performative. This

is a familiar tactic. But here effectivity phantomalizes itself. It is in fact [en effet]

a matter of a performative that seeks to reassure to but first of all to reassure itself,

for nothing is less sure, that what one would like to see dead is indeed dead. It

speaks in the name of life, it claims to know what that is. Who knows better than

someone who is alive? it seems to say with a straight face. It seeks to convince

itself there where it makes (itself) afraid: now, it says (to itself), what used to be

living is no longer alive, it does not remain effective in death itself, don’t worry.

(What is going on here is a way of not wanting to know what everyone alive

knows without learning and without knowing, namely, that that the dead can often

be more powerful than the living; and that is why to interpret a philosophy as

philosophy or ontology of life is never a simple matter, which that it is always too

simple, incontestable, like what goes without saying, but finally so unconvincing,

as unconvincing as a rather heterological tauto-ontology, that of Marx or

whomever, which relates everything back to life only on the condition of

and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak

of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of

explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of

human life. It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that

govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them. (143)

including there death and the alterity of its other without which it would not be

what it is.) In short, it is often a matter of pretending to certify death there where

the death certificate is still the performative of an act of war or the impotent

gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution.”

-- Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of

Mourning, and the New International trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge,

1994), 48.

1. Agamben misses what is political about Foucualt’s account of the archive.vii I

subsume the camp within the archive as the paradigm of modernity in part

because Agamben’s reading of Foucault misses the importance of the archive in

Foucault, something that Foucault tried to theorize in his own totally theoretical

book.viii Agamben’s account of the state of the exception becoming of the norm is

also an account its “essential function” (8), its becoming immediate in modernity.

Politics becomes biopolitics, classical politics becomes modern politics, when

there is no longer any mediation between politics and life: “The camp was also

the most political space ever to be realized, in which power confronts nothing but

pure life, without any mediation” (171).ix By making the paradigm of modernity

into a hidden essential structure, Agamben’s conception of the camp remains

“imprisoned within the paradox” (40) of sovereignty, to use Agamben’s own

words, confined within a Foucauldian genealogy of internment. x In the first

chapter, I reconceptualize Agamben’s virutalized bare life, or “biopolitics” as

biobibliopolitics: in modernity, persons are defined by their relation to paper. Entry into

concentration camps and all other zones of exception always involves identity papers and

paperwork; similarly, preserving memory always bears on media of archiving, including

film, photography, and print. As Vismann points out, the archived document may have

an ambiguous material status: a calligraphic style may become obsolete under different

regimes and stored as a work of art after it no longer has any use value. If all life is now

virtually “bare life,” as Agamben maintains, it follows that we must attend archival

practices including surveilliance, data strorage, retention, retrieval and documents that

allow people to be processed as the cross various kinds of national and international

borders. I historicize the increasingly virtualized passport (from written description to

photograph to embedded memory chip) and reread Michel Foucault’s account of

biopolitics as an account of the archive, comparing Foucault’s central works on power to

Arlette Farge’s Subversive Words and Jacques Rançiere’s The Names of History.xi

2. By starting from the “essence of the camp,” Agamben uncritically equates the

materialization of the camp’s essence with its virtualization:

If we admit that essence of the camp consists in the materialization

of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space

in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of

indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in

the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created,

independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and

whatever its denomination and specific topography (174).

Similarly, Agamben conflates instances of homo sacer and instances of virtual homo

sacer, concluding that “we are all virtually homines sacri” (114), by assigning the camp a

metaphysical essence.xii By “virtually,” he seems to mean potentially: we are all

potentially homo sacri because it is possible we, even citizens, could all be sent to Gitmo

or we could all get in a car accident and become “brain dead” like Karen Quinlan.xiii

xii “In the ‘politicization’ of bare life—the metaphysical task par excellence—the

humanity of living man is decided” (8). On the last page of Homo Sacer,

Agamben writes that “attention will have to be given to the analogies between

politics and the ephochal situation of metaphysics” (188), but his account of the

immediacy and hidden essence of modern biopolitics is metaphysical from the

start. See his mentions of the “ontological structure of sovereignty” (60) and the

“ontological structure of abandonment” (58) discussion differentiating Martin’s

Heidegger’s existential “Dasein” from Nazi biopolitics (150-53).

xiii Agamben does use the word “virtualemente” in the original Italian edition of

Homo Sacer, 127, just before section three. The precise meaning of “virtual” in

Homo Sacer must remain unsettled since Agamben does not define it and even

uses it loosely, speaking both of the “virtual state of exception” (57) and “the

state of virtual exception” (65) as well as the “virtual exception” (55). He seems

to think of “virtual” as being different from potential in devoting a chapter to the

“Potentiality of the Law,” (39-48) following Aristotle in keeping in place an

ontological sense of potentiality as “autonomous existence” with its own

“consistency” and its failure to “disappear immediately into actuality” (45).

Potentiality both destroys and preserves (like the law in Ancient Greece that

destroys and preserves justice) and is for Agamben the “paradigm of

I regard the camp as mediatized.xiv Agamben’s camp appears to have blinded him from

taking into account the virtuality of living life “virtually” (111, 114, 171, 174) as homo

sacer.xv What is missing in his account in Agamben’s account of bare life as the potential

fate of any “human” life is the global (not only Western) mediatization of biopolitics the

processing of “virtually” bare life (for citizens and for foreigners) through various

sovereignty” in “Western philosophy” (46): potentiality is a “suspension; it is

capable of the act in not realizing it . . . sovereign power as such can also

maintain itself indefinitely, without ever passing over into actuality” (45; 47). The

virtual and real would seem to be a parallel opposition, does not bother to say so.

viii The archive subsumes the camp since the camp is a political space of

biobiblioprocessing. Germans have to show their papers after capture in 1945

footage in The Memory of the Camp. The archive has a much more complex

topology than Agamben realizes and is less abput repetition than Agamben

(finding the same thing—the camp--in a new and different form that may be

difficult to recognize as such) that it is in rereading as reshelving—reading and

resistance have to be theorized, again following Derrida and de Man around

Freud, as reshelving. talking about the archive as a reread as retraced

mediatized contact zone, about formal materiality, not materiality as if it were the

same thing as physical, empirical, etc. We are following out media specificity

argument. Subsume the camp with the archive, the political structure with the

political deconstruction of writing (not equal to language, langue and parole in

Agamben). bring Derrida in to theorize the archive and biopolitics (while using

Agamben to unsettle right and left and focus on biopolitics as mediatized rather

than immediately political) in order to engage more fully Agamben’s decentering

biometrics and various kinds of invasive data-veillance, auto-archiving technologies (data

mining and stored for an indeterminate period without a warrant, security cameras, and so

on; these technologies do not ask for permission to record).xvi By subsuming the camp to

the archive, our central concern necessarily becomes reading. Once we realize the Homo

Sacer is always already virtual / or has been virtualized in modernity (1930s), then we

of the Jewish victim (also repeated in The Time That Remains). The controversy

over his book lies not only in secularizing homo sacer (so it is not sacred life) but

in repeatedly using the Nazis as examples to make them parallel to other war

crimes or problems(U.S.). Not moral equivalence, but equivalence through

structure. But the body disappears in his virtualization—crimes committed or not

don’t matter.

vii Also, bring in Visman: the office as the political space of modernity (123), but

really the office is one phenomenalizaiton of the archive—and Vismann can’t

explain how Germany got from the Chancery to the modern office. She just

asserts it in the first sentence of one of her chapters.

ix Agamben uses “immediate” in the temporal sense of “instantaneous”

interchangeably with “immediate” in the philosophical sense of “unmediated”:

“the sovereign decision . . . refers immediately to the life . . . of the citizens” (109,

emphasis in the original); “immediate law” (142)“the biological given is as such

immediately political, and the political as such is immediately given” (148,

emphasis in the original); “this immediate unity of politics and bare life” (150);

“the camp was immediately entrusted to the SS” (169); “being ‘an immediate

effect’” (169); “immediate coincidence of fact and law” (172); “the immediate

necessarily have to see bios and biopolitics as a question of unread -ability, of reading as

what remains.  We think of reading primarily as the resistance to reading, reading as the

not yet read, reading as comfort through destruction (WB on book burning of the

storyteller); on the read as a medium (not reducible to physical materials).  But all of

these ways of thinking about reading have to routing for us through the archive--reading

production” (184); “the office of the Fuehrer is . . . something that springs forth

without mediation” (184); “immediately political character” (184); “immediately

into law” (187). Compounding this confusion of the meaning of “immediate,”

Agamben sometimes describes a convergence or coinciding of analogous

structures as a temporal process with a beginning (“starting to coincide,” 38;

“begin to become one,” 148) or that has almost happened and that has

happened gradually and analogous structures that are co-instantaneous.

Similarly, he describes an “originary” (110) problem of sovereignty but uses

temporal metaphors to describe the global extension of biopolitics:”the production

of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty” (83); “originally this sphere was

the one produced” (86); “more original” [than Schmitt’s friend and

enemy] . . .”more intimate” *110), “more internal . . and more external. . . (111);

”darker and more uncertain” (36).

x Agamben is much more Foucauldian than he knows. Even though Agamben

begins Homo Sacer by saying that the camp is not a space of “internment” (6), as

in Foucault’s history of the prison, when he describes the “complex topology” of

the camp (19), or when later describes the topology camp as a “dislocating

localization,” 175, emphasis in the original). See also his description of the state

of exception as “a complex topological figure” (37). It is not a coincidence that

as refiling, and even more crucially as reshelving.  Reading as refiling / reshelving

becomes a way of living biopolitics virtually, a biobiblioprocessing and

thanatobiblioprocessing.  The archive, storage unit, as a temporary space for damaged

life, not only of preservation and safe-guarding--like a museum--or destruction--like a

crematorium), but of bare life lived virtually.  When and where you begin and where and

Agamben makes almost the exact same critique of Foucault on p. 4 and p. 119,

nor is it a coincidence that Agamben ends his book by implicitly claiming to have

“out-Foucaulted,” as it were, Foucault (187) by situating the biopolitics of the

body in relation to the camp rather than sexuality. As early as the sixth page of

Homo Sacer, Agamben maps his account of the camp as the “concealed nucleus

of sovereign power” onto the “vanishing point” of Foucault’s work, namely, the

camp. Agamben presents his book as a kind of large footnote to Foucault’s

genealogical analysis of power.

xi They imagine the archive as a problem of reading, as a scene of annotation, of Philip II as a microhistorian in Braudel’s case. The future is not a disaster that could happen, a then and now, or immediate consequence (hisotircla and ahistorical) but the Hiedeggerian temporality of the late which is actually earlier, of reading the future withoutht a nationalism attached. See Derrida,Lacoue-Labarthe on Heidegger.Artlettee Lefarge does not cite ranciere’s Names of Hisotry in her Subversie Words, but The Names of Hisotry is in many ways about the archive even htough the archive is an opertational figure. The scene of the death of the kiing in Barudel becomes a wayof rading a shift in sovreigntyfrom the King to the historian. The king’s death no longer calibrates time; theKing, a microreader, who never gets the big picture of geopgrhay, the Mediarrean, in view—instead he is a conductor, a silent reader (who speaks only ina very low voice).. He is a”paper king.”Your power is only as good as your paper (your subjectile.

Paper has a double valence—both denigrating (paper tiger) and consisutitve. PII is a paper king, but there’sa slippage in which paper corsses over nto speech 9writing and speech are the same). Ranciere is pointing out the wayhistorians can only go so far indeconstructing speech and writing, paper and persons, in order to remain soverign and write narratives. But Ranicere himself deconstructs the indeterminacy of narrative and symbolic in braudel. He focuses on the scene of writing and and reading (in detail0 at thewriting ddesk, the worktable. “Mass of papers” refers to what Pii reads, but also the speech of the people who are not allowed to sepeak.

As a reader and annotator (and corrector)of details, PII rules in silence and his life (ailence

when you stop reading become instances where the reader becomes sovereign--moments

of decision, moments of danger (especially to the reader, who may have completely miss

something). In this sense, sovereignty and homo sacer collapse into each other in new

ways (in ways other than the Schmitt or WB had thought, since homo sacer becomes

sovereign only over his own homo sacerness by decamping to the archive). We go from

already death before death) is not what biographical criticism actually sees, the mass of papers itself, their production, as with tAcitus and Precinneiu, is the bibliobio of the sovereign, already subject to a strange temporality and restrictedvision even though he is the only ne who sees the balance sheet (itselfa metaphor for braudel).not as

An excess of speech is language.

As tecnhcians of the new sovereignty (calibrating time), historians have to manage this excess.

Orgnaic death is less the issue than the silence of rading that begins before death, for Ranciere. So paper is like Derrida’s pharmakon.

But Ranciere does not talk about where PII goes when he becomes readable as annotationson a massof papers, namely, the archive or htelration between this closing quasihallucinegenic scene and Braudel’s “Sources.”.

Braudel does have a section called “Soruces” in which he does give an account of his visits to the archive and a section before that on “Unpubblished Sources.” An autobriography of the archive returns in the parartext as an appendix as assort of supplement to the symloic / narrative ifnal scene with PII as his writing desk..

Ranicere’s question at the end of “Excess of Words” is how to igve the king a good, sinentific death.But what does htat mean? Good deathis a moralcategory. Good funeral? A good killing off, or ex-ecution.xiv My view of media follows out a philosophical trajectory that begins with

Heidegger, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, and de Man as retraced by Friedrich

Kittler, Jacques Derrida, Avital Ronell and Laurence Rickels. Steigert, Stiegler, 

For Heidegger (technology is not what is instrumentalizable, a prosthesis,

external hard drive, exterior, inorganic as opposed to organic life, secondary

record keeping, recording machines).  Being is hard-wired.

xv Agamben uses the word “virtuality” once in Homo Sacer (35) during a

discussion of Hobbes that has nothing to do with the meaning of “virtuality” in

bare life and the camp to the archive and bibiblioprocessing, paper persons versus

paperless persons.

Foucault really about the archive, in any case. What is apprehended as the political value of F’s work ends up being a misunderstanding of what is really political about it, namely, allowing the archive to model what you do with it. lives of Infamous men is that the History of Sexuality emerges out of the question of how to handle the documents in the archive.xvii Add Le Farge’s book as problem

relation to digital media. Agamben’s inability to think through the meaning of

virtuality may also account in part for the confusing or seemingly contradictory

statements about the necessity of thinking politics in terms of ontology, (44)

abandonment as “the ontological root of every political power”; 48) and his

reverse conclusion “here the metaphysical shows its political nature” (48). With

this last line of the chapter, Agamben stops at the abyss of his own aporia. He

returns to in the last section of the book by engaging what he calls the destiny of

the West: “it may be that only if we are able to decipher the political meaning of

pure Being will we be able to master our subjection to political power, just as it

may be, inversely that only if we understand the theoretical implications of bare

life will we be able to solve the enigma of ontology. Brought to the limit of pure

Being, metaphysics (thought) passes over into politics(reality),just as on the

threshold of bare life, politics steps beyond itself into theory” (182).

xvi Agamben comments on Jaques Rançiere’s notion of “processing” in

Rançiere’s book Dis-agreement: “if . . . the wrong for whom the people are not

the cipher is not ‘absolute’ (as t still was for Marx), but, by definition, can be

processed (Rançiere, 39), then the line between democracy and its consensual,

or postdemocratic, counterfeit (which Rançiere goes so far as to overtly critique)

tends to dissolve” The Time That Remains (58). There's a difference between

as well as the film on I, Pierre Rieveire.xviii In the first chapter, I reconceptualize Agamben’s virutalized bare life, or “biopolitics” as biobibliopolitics: in modernity, persons are defined by their relation to paper. Entry into concentration camps and all other zones of exception always involves identity papers and paperwork; similarly, preserving memory always bears on media of archiving, including film, photography, and print. As Vismann points out, the archived document may have an ambiguous material status: a calligraphic style make become obsolete under different regimes and stored as a work of art. If all life is now virtually “bare life,” as Agamben maintains, it follows that we must attend archival practices including surveilliance, data strorage, retention, retrieval and documents that allow people tp be processed as the cross various kinds of national and international borders. I historicize the increasingly virtualized passport (from written description to photograph to embedded memory chip) and reread Michel Foucault’s account of biopolitics as an account of the archive, comparing Foucault’s central works on power to Arlette Farge’s Subversive Words and Jacques Rançiere’s The Names of History. They imagine the archive as a problem of reading, as a scene of annotation, of Philip II as a microhistorian in Braudel’s case. The future is not a disaster that could happen, a then and now, or immediate consequence (hisotircla and ahistorical) but the Hiedeggerian temporality of the late which is actually earlier, of reading the future withoutht a nationalism attached. See Derrida,Lacoue-Labarthe on Heidegger.Artlettee Lefarge does not cite ranciere’s Names of Hisotry in her Subversie Words, but The Names of Hisotry is in many ways about the archive even htough the archive is an opertational figure.xix The scene of the death of the kiing in Barudel becomes a wayof rading a shift in sovreigntyfrom the King to the historian. The king’s death no longer calibrates time; theKing, a microreader, who never gets the big picture of geopgrhay, the Mediarrean, in view—instead he is a conductor, a silent reader (who speaks only ina very low voice).. He is a”paper king.”Your power is only as good as your paper (your subjectile.

Paper has a double valence—both denigrating (paper tiger) and consisutitve. PII is a paper king, but there’sa slippage in which paper corsses over nto speech 9writing and speech are the same). Ranciere is pointing out the wayhistorians can only go so far indeconstructing speech and writing, paper and persons, in order to remain soverign and write narratives. But Ranicere himself deconstructs the indeterminacy of narrative and symbolic in braudel. He focuses on the scene of writing and and reading (in detail0 at thewriting ddesk, the worktable. “Mass of papers” refers to what Pii reads, but also the speech of the people who are not allowed to sepeak.

As a reader and annotator (and corrector)of details, PII rules in silence and his life (ailence already death before death) is not what biographical criticism actually sees, the mass of papers itself, their production, as with tAcitus and Precinneiu, is the bibliobio of the sovereign, already subject to a strange temporality and restrictedvision even though he is the only ne who sees the balance sheet (itselfa metaphor for braudel).not as

inoperative reading and inoperable reading. Agamben's conception of biopolitics

leave him unable to operate, leaving democracy effectively an overcomatose

patient he cannot declare living or dead. See his comments on Jean-Luc

Nancy’s Inoperative Community in Homo Sacer, 61-62.

An excess of speech is language.

As tecnhcians of the new sovereignty (calibrating time), historians have to manage this excess.

Orgnaic death is less the issue than the silence of rading that begins before death, for Ranciere. So paper is like Derrida’s pharmakon.

But Ranciere does not talk about where PII goes when he becomes readable as annotationson a massof papers, namely, the archive or htelration between this closing quasihallucinegenic scene and Braudel’s “Sources.”.

Braudel does have a section called “Soruces” in which he does give an account of his visits to the archive and a section before that on “Unpubblished Sources.” An autobriography of the archive returns in the parartext as an appendix as assort of supplement to the symloic / narrative ifnal scene with PII as his writing desk..

Ranicere’s question at the end of “Excess of Words” is how to igve the king a good, sinentific death.But what does htat mean? Good deathis a moralcategory. Good funeral? A good killing

off, or ex-ecution.

Agamben views the archive as exterior to testimony, as a conceptual, discursive

space housing documents. Testimony thus guarantees not the factual truth of

the statement safeguarded in the archive, but rather its unarchivability, its

exteriority with respect to the archive” (158). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s

Archaeology of Knowledge, Agamben regards the archive as a recording device

for the unrecordable, defining the archive is "the system of relations between the

said and the unsaid" (145) located in opposition to langue as parole is opposed

to parole (144): between the obsessive memory of tradition, which knows only

what has been said, and the exaggerated thoughtlessness of oblivion, the

archive is the unsaid or sayable inscribed in everything that is always forgotten in

the act of saying" (140).xx

Agamben’s neoFoucauldian conception of the archive misses, however, the

way in which the camp is also a future archive / museum to be read but how the

musealization and archivalization of the camp also involves an archivology of

storage and shelving. xxi Rather than being exterior, the archive

produces an exteriority within in which that which is to be read is continually

subject to redivisions between life and bare life, between bare and barer life. xxii

Following Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever, xxiii I regard the archivexxiv as both a

literal and metaphorical contact zone. xxv

xxii Agamben wants to stop division within the camp in order to arrive at a core of bare

life, the barest of bare life, as it were: Agamben divides the victims of the camp into

increasingly fine distinctions until he reaches the limit case, the Musselman or the witness

who cannot witness, being the weakest of the weak, hence representing the central

paradox of homo sacer. According to Agamben, “the empty space at the center of the

camp that, in separating all life from itself, marks the point at which the citizen passes

into the Staatsangegehoringe of non-Aryan descent, the on-Aryan into the Jew, the Jew

into the deportee and, finally, the deported Jew beyond himself into the Musselman, that

is, into a “bare, unassignable and unwitnessable life” (156-57), the barest of bare life, as

it were. The remnants of Auschwitz are a matter of testimonials to what cannot be

testified to: “The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak solely in the

name of an incapacity to speak—that is, in her or her being a subject. In our perspective,

bare life is defined in part by the endless divisibility of life and bare life.” Contrast the

figure of the Marranos for Derrida and the ash of the archive. Maranno in Aporias and on

Marx as a Maranno in Ghostlier Demarcations). Derrida Archive Fever From retracing,

the footprint in the ash, to WBIndeed, he destroys, swallows up the material as a fire

devours logs in the fireplace.  The suspense which permeates the novel is very much like

the draft of the air which fans the flame in the fireplace and enlivens its play . . . The

novel is significant . . . because this stranger's fate, by virtue of the flame which

Documents—under what condiitons, if any, may they be destroyed?

„Error: Memory Overflow pp. 55-61 in Markus Krajewski, Zettelwirtschaft: Die

Geburt der Karte us dem Geiste der Bibiothek

Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know.

consumes it, yields to us the warmth which we may never draw from out fate. What

draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads

about. (p. 156) The not yet read as book burning (WB in the Storyteller) a secret that

cannot be narrated (the ash of the archive). The not yet read as what goes missing,

gets missed (Theodor Adorno on his books as cats, as missing when you want to

find them).

xxiii

xxiv

xxv

Freud made possible the idea of an archive properly speaking, of a hypomnesis or technical archive, of the substrate or the subjectile (material or virtual) which, in what is already a psychic spacing, cannot be reduced to memory: neither to memory as conscious reserve, not to memory as rememoration, as act of recalling. The psychic drive comes neither under mneme nor under anamnesis. (91-92)

“the dead person can be put to death again,” Archive Fever (63).

xvii Discipline and Punish performs an answer raised in Archaeology of

Knowledge, that slough off a number of problems which requires another book.

Foucault's "Lives of Infamous Men," is another preface to a book never written  

„Death“ is written below the punched, black hole of the card on the top half of the

front cover a blank „Sample card from the Library Bureau Makers of card

system“

It reads really strangely because he keeps referring to "this book," starting with the very first sentence "This is no way a history book." But he never put the anthology to which his essay is supposed to be the introduction together. 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. Arch of Know the only method book. The others are interested in method but producing positive histories.xviii Compare Agamben’s Musselman (Remnants of Auschwitz) as the camp within the camp versus Derrida’s maranos (Aporias) as a figure of undecidability of identity but say that the discussion of the camps themselves will be deferred here. I begin with them because they are so central to Agamben’s account of biopolitics. For Agamben, this way of redefining and modeling the camp in the context of modern biopolitics provides an important rubric for future work on the holocaust. As he writes, “The correct question to pose concerning the horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how crimes of atrocity could be committed against human beings. It would be more honest and, above all, more useful to investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime” (171). In framing the concept of bare life through a cultural graphology of the storage unit and archive, however, we have indirectly called into question Agamben’s claim that the camp is the matrix for the modern universalization of homo sacralization—“we are all homines sacrii”—as the central figure for modernity: “If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacrii” (115). I reframe Agamben’s universalization of the camp (which leads him to make a controversial equation between the victims of the holocaust and people killed in car accidents) as a question of its “archive -ability.”xix Hisotiricsm islittle more thana taxonomy, a classification or filing system that

allows one to sort through papers. And unsorted papers. That is always the limit

point. The papers yet to be archived. The books yet to be shelved. Historicism

depends on not confronting this limit, on assuming that eventually the papers will

be sorted properly, the retievability dependent entirely on external factors (the

adequacy of budgets for document preservation).

One will be limited to ontology, but hanutology. No paoretography or

aperotology , no anarchivology.

xx Agamben wants to relocate Foucault's distinction in Archeology of

Knowledge between langue and acts of speech "in the difference between

language (langue) and archive: that is, not between discourse and its

taking place, between what is said and the enunciation that exerts

itself in it, but rather between langue and its taking place, between

a pure possibility of speaking and its existence as such. (144)

The Archaeology of Knowledge is Agamben on Foucualt's Lives of Infamous

Men:

What momentarily shines through these laconic statements are not the

biographical events of personal histories, as suggested by the

pathos-laden emphasis of a certain oral history, bur rather the

luminous trail of a different history.  What suddenly comes to light

is not the memory of an oppressed existence, but rather the

Most of the information requested on the card is like that requested on for a

person’s identificaiton card: certificate no. (birth and death) name, occuptation,

father’s and mother’s names, age, birthdate, sex, cause, and Death.Library

Burean and six diit number in smallestfont size in lower right corner.

Certificate No., Vol. and Page are the only bibliogrpahical categories.

disjunction between the living being and the being that marks

its empty place.  Here life subsists only in the infamy in which it

existed; here a name lives solely in the disgrace that covered it. And

something in this disgrace bears witness to life beyond all

biography." 143 “On the Lives of infamous Men,”

xxi

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7634744.stm

Analysis: The first ID cards

By Dominic Casciani

BBC News Home Affairs reporter Biometric technology uses computerised

methods to identify a person by

their unique physical or behavioural characteristics.

Developments and uses have increased with demand to match concerns

over international, business and personal security.

Biometrics is more personal than a passport photo or Pin, using traits

such as fingerprints, face or eye "maps" as key identifying features.

Uses range from building access and laptop security to identity cards

and passports.

However, there are concerns about the storing of biometric data and

Catalogues required boxes, tied with strings, and the folders were made to look

like bound books. (see p. 56 of Zettelwirtschaft.

“Unread –ability” involves a parasitical process of inhabiting an inhabitable

space that makes possible reading as a figurative re(self-)shelving not the

cultural studies sense of political resistance or opposition to a state norm but is

rather.xxvi

“For me, the interwar years fall

naturally into two periods,

before and after 1933.”

"Curriculum Vitae (VI):  Dr.

Walter Benjamin" Selected

Writings, Vol 4, 381-85, to 382.

“In the final analysis, it is a

matter, for both of us (tell me if I

am mistaken), of thinking the

1930s . . .at the heart of which

is an attempt to think Nazism as

a politics . . . .”

--Alan Badiou, Letter to Philippe

Lacoue-Labarthe, cited in the

its possible misuse.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/guides/456900/456993/html/

“Postscript” to Philippe Lacoue-

Labarthe, Heidegger and the

Politics of Poetry, 81

xxvi To be sure, the self-storage unit as archive includes the victim, as the units may be

used by (displaced) persons, who have become homeless. The storage unit also offers a

shelter, even an illegal and temporary one, for all kinds of refugees and internal exiles,

the camp itself taking a wide variety of forms, as Charlie Hailey has demonstrated. David

Streitfeld, “Losing a Home, Then Losing All Out of Storage” May 11, 2008 New

York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/business/11storage.html . See

Charlie Hailey, Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space (MIT, 2009). Hailey

devotes only two pages to Nazi concentration camps.