Photograph, size 45 x 30.5 cm (21.5 x 15 cm) Edition of 7
Archive – a collction of works
For Sigmund Freud himself, the destruction drive is no longer a debatable hypothesis. Even if this speculation never takes the form of a fixed thesis, even if it is never posited, it is another name for Ananke, invincible necessity. It is as if Freud could no longer resist, henceforth, the irreducible and originary perversity of this drive which he names here sometimes death drive, sometimes aggression drive, sometimes destruction drive, as if these three words were in this case synonyms. Second, this three-named drive is mute (stumm). It is at work, but since it always operates in silence, it never leaves any archives of its own. It destroys in advance its own archive, as if that were in truth the very motivation of its most proper movement. It works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing it but also with a view to effacing its own “proper” traces – which consequently cannot properly be called “proper”. It devours it even before producing it on the outside. This drive, from then on, seems not only to be anarchic, anarchontic (we must not forget that the death drive, originary though it may be, is not a principle, as are the pleasure and reality principles): the death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic. It will always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation.1
1 Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1998, 10
The photograph of Juliette Brungs was taken on 23.8.2010 at the “Cologne hole”, where the former Historical City Archives in Germany stood and collapsed on 3.3.2009. The graffiti on a safety barrier reads: “Wo ist die Verantwortung für diesen Pfusch! 03.03.2009 – im Abgrund!” (Who is responsible for this botch-up! 03.03.2009 – into the abyss!”
With the collapse of the City Archives, due to mistakes made in the construction work of a new underground line in the vicinity, Tanya Ury literally lost the family archive that the Ury family had donated to the City of Cologne, in 1999.
Juliette Brungs has written an article “Written Into the Body – the Performance Video Art of Tanya Ury” (which will later be developed as a book on Esther Dischereit and Tanya Ury), in which she refers to the archive of “Archive Fever — A Freudian Impression” by Jacques Derrida.
