Genres of the trace: memory, archives and trouble¹

Harris offers a brief preliminary deconstructive reading of archives–memory nexuses. The reading is positioned in relation to what he sees as a paucity of engagement between archivy and the emerging memory industry. While, at one level, the essay is simply a reading of Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur within archives–memory nexuses, at another, it is an attempt to demonstrate how troubled, and troubling, these nexuses are. Harris ranges from theoretical to anecdotal, conceptual to political, and argues that archives and memory are best understood as genres of the trace.