Obligations Towards ‘Re-Housing’ ‘Memory-In-Exile’ and ‘Persons and Heritage-In-Extremis’: From Archons to Besieged Subjects and Beyond

Abstract

‘To suffer from a sickness ... Is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching from the archive right where it slips away... It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’ [4]. This paper, a thought piece, is a quest for, and critical reconfiguration of, the ‘archive’. Our journey begins in the footsteps of Derrida and his own ‘search for the archive’ and subsequently opens-up into an odyssey across time and space that takes us from the domiciles of the ‘archons’ of ancient Greece, and, via the paradigmatic legendary archive – the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and its ‘myth of return and redemption’-, to critically engage with the contemporary strain of ‘Palestine archive fever’ authored by the ‘besieged subject’. Our itinerary is to critically return to these salient formative archival ‘moments’ to uncover insights into the repetitious desires, passions, and fevers that pervade ‘old’ and ‘new’ ‘diagnoses’ of ‘archive fever’ across North and South. Writ wider still, my interest is in exploring what is at stake in these aspirational quests, synonymous with broader ‘heritage fevers’ and ‘origin fevers’-, and in the tensions and conflict that accompany both imaginative and literal acts of possession.