Derrida, Jacques - Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression

Notes

In simple terms, I found the text to describe how the archive is essentially an attempt to control a subject. In Greece, the subject were the subjects - the people that lived within the hierarchical greek society: for them, the archive had a 'sequential' and 'jussive' function - it placed events and objects in a temporal space ("commencement"), but also within a legal space of power and control ("commandment"). So the archive has a dual function: to record, but to record in such a way as to control. The archons (the 'superior magistrates'), for example, are awarded the 'power to interpret the archives.' (2) The control comes from the archons' ability to omit, and their ability to include. As a result, the archive could be understood to be a tool to maintain a hegemonic structure.

Derrida also notes Freud's remarks about the human 'instinct of destruction' - the 'death drive'. (5) Derrida states that the consequence of this drive: "what permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than what exposes to destruction, in truth what menaces with destruction introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument." (6) I am slightly unclear on this point - does he mean to archive is a destructive act? Or is it to try to reclaim control over an instinct of self-destruction? If the former, in which way is it destructive? He clarifies at the end of section 1 of the introduction that the 'archive fever', the obsessive act of archiving, is created by the death drive: "There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. [...] There is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive." (7)

One point that particularly caught my attention is the 'interface' of the archive - the methods with which the archivist creates the documentary artifacts. Derrida states: "This should above all remind us that the said archival technology no longer determines, will never have determined, merely the moment of the conservational recording, but rather the very institution of the archivable event." (6) He continues, discussing the "pressure of the printing, the impression", and how the tactile features of documentary medium inherently changes the processes and power-relationships within the act of archiving itself. -dave

Interesting is that Derrida is psychoanalysing why we archive. It does have a negative tone though, how archive dictates culture. In that way it would not be very open to the new and unexpected. An unfortunate set of rules that would sort of go against the development of culture by learning about other cultures? -dennis

I think the part about Freud's death drive is more about the reasons to archive. Like you (Dave) quoted: "There is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive". Archiving seems to be a way of trying to stop from finite things from disappearing and to remember them. It seems to deal with making decisions, such as when something becomes worth archiving. According to Derrida, Freud writes in his Civilization and Its Discontents (1929-30) he is afraid that what he is writing is common knowledge and that he is "using up paper, ink(...) the compositor's and printer's work and material". He seems to feel as if what he is writing has to contribute to the/an archive. He has to overcome the human death-drive, the drive to destroy and leave no trace.

What I find interesting (though is not discussed at great length in this text) is how archives are related to their place in time. "(...) what no longer is archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way." Archives change and are dependent on the current morals and ethics, which determine what is archived, and techniques, which determines both how things are archived and which things (new techniques == new archives (audio, video, etc.)). Also the different forms archives can take (Derrida even talks about circumcision as an archive of Judaism). - Jasper