There is no christening the archive. It neither starts nor ends, existing instead in a continuous state of creative destruction. History, Derrida argues, is happening at the same time as we are, giving us the potential to reconfigure “before” and thus transform the future. This, however, comes at a steep cost: that the archive is ever-changing means that history will never be complete. We can examine the archive through what Foucault terms “archaeology,” a sort of historical palmistry in which we follow the traces inscribed by our past in order to better understand our present.
Our own unwitting archaeologists, trans people are tasked with tracking our myriad crossings, marking the moments that imbued us with gender. We are not selves, exactly, but accumulations of meaning: when I tell you to call me “they,” I am always speaking in plural: me, and them, and her, and all my ghosts. We are told that if we work together, we can unearth the source of me, discover the creation myth that will make the life I live today true. Yet even amid the compulsion to retrieve our selves from history and make sense of them, we charge toward futility. We dig and dent our skin, only to return and widen the scabs.
A dent is a type of haunting. So is regret. Renee haunts me in the moments when I least expect it; my archive regenerates as if through divine intervention. A debt is a type of haunting. The debt I carry is unpayable, even as my creditor, my lineage, walks beside me. I am followed by a cascade of critical memories that hardly feel my own. They return to me at random moments, demanding collection.
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