The Future of the Body as Archive. A Theory of the Creative Act

Abstract

The heritage of the so-called Archival Turn was mainly focused on the body as an ensemble of traces and documents which can be read by the researcher. While the notion of the body as archive have been deeply explored by Performance and Reenactment Studies, its reception within literary theory stays controversial. This article aims at using the Sartrian conception of subjectivity as a dialectical mechanism capable of reenacting on an individual scale a socio-cultural archive to underline the central role played by the body and its memories within the creative process of authors.