A questão do livro enquanto arquivo biológico

Abstract

At the dawn of the century. XXI Christian Bök, a Canadian experimental poet, begins what he calls the “Xenotext Experiment”, a hybrid between poetry and bioengineering. The “Experiment” orchestrates a network of agencies that are generally not explicit when it comes to literary work, since Bök intends to insert an artificial gene into an extremophile bacterium (Deinococcus Radioduras) with the intention of producing a non-human organism that is the a single time capable of storing and producing a poem. In this article, I would like to outline a specific aspect of the project: one that relates to the very notion of archiving. Now, if, as Derrida states, the archiving structure determines the very quality and matter of the archive, of what a text would be, and of the game of meanings and temporalities that it establishes, when inserted into a bacteria that will probably survive (literally) all human readers who never come into contact with it? What would remain, therefore, of the idea of reading itself (and of an entire related system, such as writing and authorship)? It is from the Xenotext, and the conceptual peculiarities that it proposes in relation to the idea of archive itself, that I believe we would be faced with a type of Xenowriting.