Richard Burt
Sabbatical Proposal 2011-2012
This is my first sabbatical request since I arrived at UF as a Full Professor in Fall 2003.
The high probability that I will complete my proposed research project may be deduced
from my publication track record at UF: My third book was published in 2008; a two
volume encyclopedia I edited was published in 2006; and over twenty peer-reviewed
articles and book chapters I wrote have been published. A year’s sabbatical in Fall 2011
and Spring 2012 (or a semester long sabbatical in Fall 2011) would enable me to finish
researching and writing my fourth book, Shelf-Life: The Biopolitics of the Archive. My
research thus far has helped me develop two new courses I taught in Spring 2010,
“Shelf-Life: Media Histories and the Project of Self-Storage” and “Unintelligible:
Scratching the Surfaces of Death on Film, Photography, and Storage Media.” I will teach
two more related courses in 2011, “Posthumography” and “A Splice of Life: Biopolitics
and Biomedics.” My research on the history of the archive has already helped me
provide my students with a framework for understanding major changes in research
technologies now being used both online and on site for analyses of manuscripts, books,
photographs, paintings, and films. I have served twice on the English Department Merit
Pay Committee and once on the Graduate Admissions and Awards Committee. Although
I have already drafted much of Shelf-Life: The Biopolitics of the Archive, I will able to
complete key areas of my research only by consulting the Aby Warburg Library in
London, the Paris Bibliotheque Nationale, the Paris Cinematheque archives, and the
Walter Benjamin archives in Paris, Malberg, Germany, and Port Bou in Spain.
Abstract of Fourth Book
Shelf-Life:
The Biopolitics of the Archive
In the introduction to my book, I maintain that the archive is the paradigmatic space of
modernity. I address Giorgio Agamben‘s influential study, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, in which modernity is defined by a paradox: the temporary “state
of exception” to the rule of law has become the permanent political norm. Any space can
be turned into a detention center in which persons are stripped indefinitely of their rights
as citizens and returned to the category of what Agamben calls “bare life,“ life that may
not be murdered or sacrificed. The concentration camp is thus “the hidden paradigm of
political space of modernity” (123). I widen Agamben’s narrow focus on the law to
include a wide range of texts and media related to the archivalization of bare life:
manuscripts, books, paintings, and film. I show that the history of biopolitics cannot
properly be understood apart from the history of the archive. Whereas Agamben wants to
recognize potential reconfigurations of the camp (the hospital room with a comatose
patient on life-support, for example), I maintain that the universalization of sacred life
[homo sacer] would not be possible without the virtualization, or mediatization of the
archive and that allow for need kinds of storage space, from memory sticks to selfstorage units. My theoretical model of the archive draws on Cornelia Vismann’s Files:
Law and Media Technology (2007), Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian
Impression (1995) and Paper Machine (2005), Sven Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art from
Bureaucracy (2008), and Andre Nusselder’s Interface Fantasy (2009).
In the first two chapters, I reconceptualize Agamben’s bare life, or “biopolitics” as
biobibliopolitics: in modernity, persons are defined by their relation to paper. Entry into
concentration camps and all other zones of exception always involves identity papers and
paperwork; similarly, preserving memory always bears on media of archiving, including
film, photography, and print. I historicize the increasingly virtualized passport (from
description to photograph to embedded memory chip) and reread Michel Foucault’s work
on biopolitics in relation to his work on the archive, comparing it to Arlette Farge’s
Subversive Words and Jacques Rançiere’s The Names of History.
In the third chapter, I examine the ways in which Alain Resnais’ Statues Also Die
(1953), Night and Fog (1955), All the Memories of the World (1956), and Hiroshima,
Mon Amour concern people as paper and paper as people. In relation to discussing
Resnais’s interest in archives and reconstructing the past, I discuss the forging of papers,
paintings, and related criminal activities in the paintings by attending not only to the
artist’s signature but to the provenance of paintings established on their reverse sides. I
discuss a forgery case related in Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of
Vermeer and the Nazis, Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts, and a recent
German museum exhibition that made both sides of paintings visible entitled Spectres of
Provenance. The archive involves a paradoxical play of reversal as concealing and
revealing rather than a belated recognition of the newest “hidden” camp Agamben urges
us to find.
In the fourth chapter, I discuss a number of autobiographical essays on the
boundaries of posthumous publication by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Aby
Warburg, and Derrida to show that the archive paradoxically becomes readable insofar as
it is resistant or “closed”: reading is more about various kinds of reshelving, refiling, and
storage of persons on paper, the passport being perhaps the best example of the paper
person. Walter Benjamin concludes his essay, “Books by the Mentally Ill,” with a
cryptic reference to a “manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever,” despite these
enlightened times, “to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house.” In the course
of his championing of this un-named manuscript, Benjamin equates publication with
obtaining a passport:
The mere existence of such works has something disconcerting about it, so long
as we habitually regard writing as—despite everything—part of a higher, safer
realm, the appearance of insanity, especially when it enters less noisily form
elsewhere, is all the more terrifying. How could this happen? How did it manage
to slip past the passport control of the city of books, this Thebes with a hundred
doors? The writings of the insane would have no trouble obtaining a valid
passport today. Yet I know of a manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever to
obtain the approval of a respected publishing house. (Selected Writing 2: 1, 13)
Some books get left behind in manuscript, even if passports become less restrictive.
Benjamin records the loss by failing to give the author or title of the unpublished
manuscript that is not yet a book, instead tabling its contents as if he were hoping it and
others like it might thereby slip by the passport controls of the biblio-polis. The archive
allows for self-storage (reading yourself in what you and how you store and are stored):
reading as refiling / reshelving becomes a way of living bare life virtually.
In the fifth and sixth chapters I connect the biopolitical archive to a number of films
related to WWII and concentration camps The Train (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1964),
Mr. Klein (dir. Joseph Losey, 1976), Lifeboat (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1944), Lucien
Lacombe (dir. Louis Malle, 1974), Army of Shadows (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969),
and The Counterfeiters (dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007). I show how biopolitics is lived
through various kinds of filing and archivalization by putting these films in dialogue with
Derrida’s commentary on Maurice Blanchot’s autobiographical short story “The Instant
of My Death” (set during WWII) in Demeures: Fiction and Testimony. I elaborate on
Derrida’s insight that “no truthful testimony would be possible” were it not for the
“fragmentation of truth” and the “spectral virtuality of life.” The archive resists reading
not because it is incomplete, but because it is in some crucial ways yet to be read.
Archiving involves philosophical questions about the book, the work of art, and visual
media that tend to get bypassed in linear, historicist narratives of a book’s or film’s
storage, publication, and republication. Instead of recognizing hidden variations of
concentration camps after the fact, as Agamben does, I show that the camps themselves
are biopolitical archives: the history of biopolitics constitues a problem not only of
reading the past in the archive but of future possible readings yet to come.