This course is a study of twentieth-century and contemporary art history that draws upon philosophies of the archive (as the formalization of knowledge in terms of origins and ends) and the formless (as a deconstructive force of these very same knowledge formations). Through close readings of key texts by Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben, an understanding of the complex interrelations between the archive and the formless, and their bearing upon twentieth-century and contemporary art history is developed.