“The Need to Be Recorded”: Gabriel Preil’s Archival Prosthesis in the American Diaspora

Abstract

“A poetics of the archive” has been preliminarily defined by critics as a poetics of re-collection and re-membering, a poetics in which the so-called proofs are subject to re-vision. The aim of this essay is to elaborate this definition and to argue, referring to Derrida’s conceptualization of the archive, that the poetics of the archive is in fact a “process of recording,” a poetic mechanism of consigning repeated memory impressions to a mnemotechnical supplement—a recording device. Focusing on the Diasporic Hebrew and Yiddish poet Gabriel Preil, this essay suggests that the process of archivization can be understood in his verse as a metaphor for his Diasporic ruptured self. The recording device in Preil’s verse functions as an “interior prosthesis” of memory that allows him to “record” and bring closer voices from distant spaces and different times, to collect impressions of the “ancient,” to re-member, to re-arrange the past as well as institute the future in order to re-create and re-produce an inherent structural Diasporic “loss.” This essay endeavors to show how this mechanism of the poetics of the archive works, indicating Preil’s Diasporic condition and recorded state of affairs: lacking a spontaneous memory or source of identity, existing and writing always already in the second degree.