The Haunted Archive

In reading Retracings I came upon a number of passages that seemed to speak of the archive as being “haunted”. Most of the writings deal with a hard reality of what has been lost in the archive through outright repression for political use. There seems to be a terminology used in some of the works, however, that speaks a different language. A language dealing with a terminology more of a Freudian unconscious than a political one.
Charles Merewether in his Archives of the Fallen presents several artists work dealing with restoring an erased past. The words used to describe their methods and results is interesting however. Dittborn’s work is an “exhumation” that recovers “body of Chilean memory and history and places it back into circulation. In Milagros de la Torre’s work “death haunts the photographs” Merewether concludes with “photographs become a memorial, a site where memory and forgetfulness can face each other”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak also makes use of term “haunted”. “I pray to be haunted by her slight ghost”. Spivak explored and modifies and the idea of transference as the past displaced into the future to restore a past buried reality.The Kujundzic article also uses Derrida’s quote about the archive “haunts the archive from its origin”.
In retracing each of these artists seem to want to reclaim the lives or experiences contained within the “buried” archive and include a desire to move forward without forgetting the past.