THE DON DE LANGUE AND THE ARCHIVAL PLEDGE: DADO’S LES OISEAUX D’IRENE AND NEMIROVSKY’S SUITE FRANÇAISE DAVID HOUSTON JONES This article considers the underlying archival poetics of the collaboration between the artist Dado (Miodrag Djuric) and the author Claude Louis-Combet. In Dado and Louis-Combet, I argue, the archival is the privileged medium of expression for traumatic experience. I take Derrida’s account of archival textuality in Mal d’archive (1995) and Genèses (2003) as a starting-point from which to consider the textual structures which characterize the Dado/Louis-Combet encounter, in particular the mediation of narrative and image via a series of manuscript traces. Those traces subtly rearticulate some of the recurrent preoccupations of Dado’s work, including the figure of the bird which is redeployed in startling fashion in the collaborative work Les Oiseaux d’Irène (2007). Here, the figure is mediated by a series of intertexts: an ornithological manual; Buffon’s Histoire naturelle; the music of Olivier Messiaen; and, most strikingly, Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française. The texts function as pretexts in a material, as well as a formal sense: they are not simply referred to, but provide textual surfaces which are literally written and drawn upon on in the course of the work’s composition. At stake here is the status of the archival document, suspended as it is between the imaginary and the real. As a result, the idea of the archival legacy is complicated by the ambivalent dynamics of textual and visual documents. The ‘real’ archives to which Némirovsky’s and Dado’s works belong are in dialogue with the way the archive is imagined by Dado, and enacted in the extraordinary history of the manuscript of Suite française. The manuscript functions as pledge and legacy before reappearing as a surface to be inscribed by Dado: in Les Oiseaux d’Irène Dado repeatedly overlays folios from the manuscript of