No Archive Will Restore You
Julietta Singh
Published on November 13, 2018 by punctum books
- Pages
- 118 pages
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 5⤫8 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-1-947447-85-1 (Paperback)
- ISBN (PDF)
- ISBN: 978-1-947447-86-8 (PDF)
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: BIO026000, SOC064000
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: DNC, JBSJ
At once memoir, theory, poetic prose, and fragment, No Archive Will Restore You is a feverish meditation on the body. Departing from Antonio Gramsci’s summons to compile an inventory of the historical traces left in each of us, Singh engages with both the impossibility and urgent necessity of crafting an archive of the body. Through reveries on the enduring legacies of pain, desire, sexuality, race, and identity, she asks us to sense and feel what we have been trained to disavow, to re-member the body as more than itself.
Why this desire for a body archive, for an assembly of history’s traces deposited in me? (I worry over how to describe it, how to frame it without sounding banal or bafflingly idiosyncratic.) The body archive is an attunement, a hopeful gathering, an act of love against the foreclosures of reason. It is a way of knowing the body-self as a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter, of turning toward rather than against oneself. And vitally, it is a way of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies.
I begin then to compile an archive of my body, an activity that from the start feels discomfortingly intimate. Too intimate and too bewildering an undertaking, because like all other bodies mine has become so many things over time, has changed dramatically through forces both natural and social. I am also, it must be noted, a person whose body has been broken and maimed many times over—a fact that I cannot yet entirely account for.
Biographies
Julietta Singh is Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Richmond. She is the author of Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism & Decolonial Entanglements (Duke University Press, 2018).
Endorsements
Meggie Nelson
author of The Argonauts
I am in love with this book. It is so smart, so lucid, so necessary, so honest, so compelling, so edifying, so terrifying, so poignant, so wise. No archive may restore us, but Julietta Singh is exactly the kind of company I want for the ride, to bear witness to the pains and pleasures of our being here, in these bodies, in these times.
Barbara Browning
author of The Gift
If Gramsci proposes the task of archiving – and analyzing – the detritus that history has deposited in us, Julietta Singh has a counter-proposition for what to do with that depository. What to call her method: Anarchivist? Gynarchivist? Though steeped in theory, it’s adamantly corporeal, and deeply moving. Returning to various crime scenes, she examines the traces left upon her body by ravages historical, political, physical and sentimental. But she also courageously accounts for the shit she herself produces: ‘I want to be responsible to and for my body, for everything it yields.’ Attending carefully, even lovingly, to all that’s come into and out of her body – food, pain, flesh, life, feces, feral moans, poetry – she invites you, reader, to take stock of the fecundity of your own dis-ordered archive.
Reviews
The best art books to dive into this summer—as recommended by artists(opens in new tab)
Jasleen Kaur
The book merges academic theory with the personal, considering the body as an archive and jumping off from Antonio Gramsci’s comment that history leaves in us an infinity of traces.
Hurt and Words: On Language and Pain in Public(opens in new tab)
Khariani Barokka
Awards
Additional resources
In a wide-ranging conversation about her new book, "No Archive Will Restore You," Julietta Singh and LARB hosts touch on gender, sexuality, parenting, and navigating the world in and as a body.
Artists’ Library: 1989–2021 is a
three-dimensional bibliography, an exhibition project of the
BIBLIOGRAPHIC OFFICE section, where the audience can come across and
delve into the ways of thinking, writing, collecting and creating of a
series of artists: Noah Barker, Éric Baudelaire, Pauline Curnier Jardin,
Claudia de la Torre, Maria Eichhorn, Simone Fattal, Aaron Flint
Jamison, David Horvitz, Tobias Kaspar, Giulio Paolini, Walid Raad,
Georgia Sagri, Luca Trevisani. Each one has been asked to select three
books by other authors in any literary genre, published since 1989,
which are particularly important to their own artistic paths. A book by
each of the invited artists will also be added to the selection.
German translation
Interview with the author
Usage metrics
Genres
- Autotheory
- Cultural Studies+Critical Theory
- Thought Experiments
Keywords
- archives
- bulimia
- literary memoir
- motherhood
- sexuality