Derrida, Jacques - Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression

Notes

I found the text to be largely about how the archive is an attempt to control a subject. In Greece, the subject was the people: 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 also. The archons (the 'superior magistrates'), for example, are awarded the 'power to interpret the archives.' (2)

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 psychoanalysising why we archive. -dennis