This essay argues that the archive is the central trope of Don DeLillo's Libra (1988). The novel's contemporary protagonist, a retired CIA analyst named Nicholas Branch, pores over the Kennedy assassination's voluminous archive in an attempt to mitigate the political and epistemological chaos precipitated by the president's death. However, the desire to locate within this archive a controlling, meta-historical vantage point on the assassination proves untenable. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's theorizing of both the archive and the event, this essay contends that Branch's project of archivization produces as much as it records the event (Archive 17). In depicting the conspiracy against the president as itself a protracted exercise in the production and management of documents, DeLillo demonstrates that the destructive effects of the assassination can only be augmented, carried down into the future, by reiterative acts of archival violence.
