Azoulay: Archive

Talks about Derrida - Archive Fever
- says that Derrida’s archons prevented the outbreak of the archive frezy that engulf us today
- It’s possible to enter an archive too early, before materials become history
Asks “Why an archive?” and “What do we look for in an archive?”
Anat Kam: Young Israeli woman who collected digital documents about the targeting of Palestinians, eventually giving it ot a Haaretz journalist
Keeping documents for yourself deprives the public dimension of the archive
- But what about archives constructed for a specific reason?
Archive fever is individuals creating new archives and claiming the right to rearrange and use existing ones
- Purely extractive, we do not take the archive as a whole, and lose the context in which the documents were prepared, violating the laws of french archival science
“Collecting becomes grouping, extracting beomces sharing, and catalouging is replaced by indexing and tagging” - pg 197
Photography is not capturing the moment
- Photography does not say “this is X”
- But actually says “X was there” - pg 205
  - Identifies one by his or her name
  - Or describes the photographed person by a family name
  - But it can also violenty constitute the photographed person through a category that shapes her or him in its image, fusing together image, concept, and reference - pg 206
- Similar to Zaatari: History and Photographic Memory