“Make the dead speak”: about the uses of the archive and archaeological work in The human material

Abstract

The proposal of the article is to think about certain political forces condensed in the figure of the archive, both in its instrumentalization by the National Police of Guatemala, as well as in its historical rescue work and in its representation in The human material by Rodrigo Rey Rosa. From a Derridian critique we understand the archive as the place that designates the meeting of a conservation drive and a destruction drive; that is, the encounter between forces that try to forget and those that try to build a memory. The archive is then shown as a subversive figure due to its ability to destabilize any mandate. In addition, its displacement to spaces of art and literature also means a production of specific meaning, sometimes critical, sometimes pacifying. From this position, we will try to analyze both the repressive use of the archive and the representation made by Rey Rosa, thinking of his writing as a social practice and as an archaeological work concerned with the rescue of a forensic truth and in relation to a spectral justice. The final purpose is to make a critical review of the uses of the figure of the archive and its forms in the politics of oblivion, memory and justice.