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.Now, the function of enunciative analysis is not to awaken texts from their present sleep, and, by reciting the marksstill legible on their surface, to rediscover the flash of their birth; on the contrary, its function is to follow them throughtheir sleep, or rather to take up the related themes of sleep, oblivion, and lost origin, and to discover what mode ofexistence may characterize statements, independently of their enunciation, in the density of time in which they arepreserved, in which they are reactivated, and used, in which they are also but this was not their original destiny forgotten, and possibly even destroyed. This analysis presupposes that statements are considered in the remanence (remanence) that is proper to them, andwhich is not that of an ever-realizable reference back to the past event of the formulation.To say that statements areresidual (remanent) is not to say that they remain in the field of memory, or that it is possible to rediscover what theymeant; but it means that they are preserved by virtue of a number of supports and material techniques (of which the bookis, of course, only one example), in accordance with certain types of institutions (of which the library is one), and withcertain statutory modalities (which are not the same in the case of a religious text, a law, or a scientific truth).This alsomeans that they are invested in techniques that put them into operation, in practices that derive from them, in the socialrelations that they form, or, through those relations, modify.Lastly, it means that things do not have quite the same modeof existence, the((140))same system of relations with their environment, the same schemata of use, the same possibilities of transformationonce they have been said.This survival in time is far from being the accidental or fortunate prolongation of anexistence originally intended only for the moment; on the contrary, this remanence is of the nature of the statement;oblivion and destruction are in a sense only the zero degree of this remanence.And against the background that itconstitutes, the operations of memory can be deployed. This analysis also presupposes that statements are treated in the form of additivity that is specific to them.Infact, the types of grouping between successive statements are not always the same, and they never proceed by asimple piling-up or juxtaposition of successive elements.Mathematical statements are not added to one another inthe same way as religious texts or laws (they each have their own way of merging together, annulling one another,excluding one another, complement-ing one another, forming groups that are in varying degrees indissociable andendowed with unique properties).Moreover, these forms of additivity are not given once and for all, and for aparticular category of statements: medical case-history today forms a corpus of knowledge that does not obey thesame laws of composition as medical case-history in the eighteenth century; modern mathematics does notaccumulate its statements according to the same model as Euclidean geometry. Lastly, enunciative analysis presupposes that one takes phenomena of recurrence into account.Every statementinvolves a field of antecedent elements in relation to which it is situated, but which it is able to reorganize andredistribute according to new relations.It constitutes its own past, defines, in what precedes it, its own filiation,redefines what makes it possible or necessary, excludes what cannot be compatible with it.And it poses thisenunciative past as an acquired truth, as an event that has occurred, as a form that can be modified, as material to betransformed, or as an object that can be spoken about, etc.In relation to all these possibilities of recurrence,memory and oblivion, the rediscovery of meaning or its repression, far from being fundamental, are merely uniquefigures.((141))The description of statements and discursive formations must there-fore free itself from the widespread and persistentimage of return
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