The Frozen Archive, or Defrosting Derrida

Warwick Anderson

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2015, vol. 8, issue 3, 379-387

Abstract: What does freezing human tissue and fluids, or human remains, do to the mobility, temporality, and value of such objects? While Jacques Derrida toward the end of his life considered the consequences for the remainder of burial and cremation, he did not consider freezing, the production of latent or interrupted life. Here I invoke Derrida in discussion of how in the investigation of the fatal brain disease kuru, the partible tissues of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea became frozen spectral commodities in the exchange regimes of modern biomedical science - and how they gained, or retained, value as they were objectified. I follow these Fore - or kuru - valuables into the frozen archive, asking what has become of the remainder, whether it now amounts to anything more than defrosting debris among the postcolonial ruins. I ask what is the value of latent life? Or, rather, who is the value of latent life? This essay therefore serves as a supplement to more economistic estimates of biovalue.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2014.890637

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