Declining Derrida: Integrity, Tensegrity, and the Preservation of Archives from Deconstruction

Among philosophers, none has shown more interest in the concept of archives than deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. Yet archivists have virtually ignored his work. This essay offers three reasons for this neglect, and then proposes that the relationship between deconstruction and archival practice is best described as one of simultaneous tension and intimacy. There should be an implicit contract, a supposed affinity, as if a question should always be first authorized by a place, legitimated in advance by a determined space that makes it both rightful and meaningful, thus making it possible and by the same token necessary, both legitimate and inevitable.