Can one speak of what one must pass over in silence? The analysis of the notion of “archive” as a figure of power in the Michel Foucault’s works

Abstract

The article discusses Michel Foucault’s notion of “archive” which for the philosopher should be understood in the broader sense, not only as a place of gathering and of preserving documents but also as a discursive machine which forms and constructs a subject identity. The prefix “arche” suggests that every archive is implicated in mechanisms of power which high-handedly demarcates the archive, defines its status and decides what should be excluded outside. The archive establishes a field of the utterance possibility and decides, in other words, what one can speak of and what one must pass over in silence. Is it then possible to stand up to this archival diktat, i.e. is it then possible to express that which has not been included in the archive or that which has been excluded and condemned to dumbness? If history was written only by the winners, it means that the voice of the oppressed could appear only in the writing of oppressors who thereby become paradoxical representatives of their victims. Referring to Jacques Derrida’s and Pascal Quignard’s works, I try to prove that archival diktat, however authoritarian it can be, doesn’t incapacitate the subject entirely. In their opinion (and from the point of Foucault’s view) the place where one can expresses that which can’t be expressed (and which is absent in the archive) is literature which becomes thereby an an-archival or even an-archic place par excellence. Literature becomes a place of an ethical gesture toward a bruised past, it takes the side of those who have been deprived of voice. One should, according to Walter Benjamin’s famous statement, “account for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history”. Against dominative power we should oppose with the apologia of the harassed, inappreciable and defeated existence.