This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media.
Discourse analysis practices a ‘joyful positivism.’ It accords not even a relative autonomy to philosophical discourse. It does not deal with the one Urschrift which every metaphysics of presence has supposedly forgotten, but rather with the many forgotten techniques which were invented to counteract forgetting.
“[Walter] Benjamin is where Derrida himself picked up the trope of weakness. By a weak messianic Benjamin means that instead of waiting for a (strong) Messiah who will bail us out, weare the messianic age. Weare the ones who have all along been expected—by the dead. Weoccupy the messianic position—to make right the wrongs that have been done to them. But our messianic powers are weak. We cannot make the dead live again. We cannot alter the past and restore them to a life in which they will not have suffered these wrongs or will have been compensated for them. So we can at best remember them, recall them, mourn them with an impossible mourning, by righting the unjust conditions now from which they suffered then, by seeing to it that, as Abraham Lincoln said, their death will not have been in vain. The unconditional call of justice resonates not only with the promise of the justice-to-come but also with the promise of the past which sounds like a very foolish hope. The present is haunted not only by the ones to come (les arrivants) and but also by the "returned” (les revenants) who have come back to spook us, spectral figures both, both lacking bodily force, to be sure, but not, for all that, any less unnerving, and maybe more.“
Democracy, for Derrida, is always a democracy to-come. No actual existing democracy is adequate to the pressure that is put on it by what is calling upon us, by what is recalled, and by what is being called for in and under the spooky, spectral, inspiring name of democracy. Democracy is never here, even in the existing democracies. Democracy is always coming, like a Messiah who never shows up but who keeps on disturbing us in the middle of the night with the promise/threat of his coming. Democracy is a memory and a promise, something we are dreaming of, something we are haunted by, something we desire with a desire beyond desire, hoping against hope. Might we even say something we are praying for?
/ Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Conditional
