The imaginary of intellectual knowledge in reading gestures and authorial gestures of archives: Memory, digital archives and metallic memory

Abstract

This article aims at discussing the notion of archive in relation to the notions of memory and metallic memory. The materialist Discourse Analysis is the theoretical framework for this reflection. The discussion proposes the shift from the traditional assumption of archive to the notion that is conceived discursively, in other words, archive in its infinity and incompleteness, and memory in its hole-making process. Reading archives is to come across symptoms of an era: archive as a material record of hegemonic gestures of interpretation, either contradictory or silenced. Currently, with the advent of the digital medium, electronic archives create the illusion that it would be possible to find and read everything. The concept of metallic memory (Orlandi, 1996) is crucial to understand the effects that these archives produce, especially in the academic environment.