Anthropocene Anarchives

The essay pursues Deleuze's reading of Foucault in order to elicit a fourfold of anarchival virtualities that trouble and destabilise the constitution of every archive. This thematisation of the anarchival is critical in an age that orders life relentlessly, arranging and controlling its every aspect and principally its material-informational conditions as a biological phenomenon. The essay thus affords a new understanding of the Anthropocene as the age of bioarchives. Through a close examination of plant archives such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and animal archives, such as the Frozen Ark, the essay explicates the speculative logic that governs the discursive statements of bioarchives as well as limits of their aspirations. At the intersection of power, knowledge and memory, Deleuze's reading of Foucault accordingly enables not only a critical engagement with the way the present attempts to preserve past life in order to govern its future but opens a space to imagine a future anarchive of life.