The Archival Unconscious: a brief review of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever
Kylie Thomas
NRF Post-doctoral Research Fellow
Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative
University of Cape Town
Under discussion here: Archive Fever, psychoanalysis and the archive, Archives and Justice by Verne Harris
The Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town co-ordinates a reading group
that meets weekly to discuss key texts in the field of archive studies and theory. This week the group focused on
Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995). In this important text Derrida thinks about the
concept of the archive in relation to the work of Sigmund Freud and in particular, to Freud’s theory of the
unconscious and to the death drive. And in fact Derrida asserts that we don’t have anything as concrete as a
‘concept’ of the archive but rather a series of shifting impressions that perpetually eludes our desires for
conceptual fixing. The archive, Derrida writes, is never fixed. One way of understanding this is to think about how
the meanings of archival collections shift over the course of time. Just when we think we have established the
limit of a particular archive, just when we think we know what it is an archive contains, when we have shut the lid
on the last box of objects or documents, our interpretations in the present unsettle again and again our record(s)
of the past.
Derrida’s book argues for the importance of Freud’s work when we think about archives and when we seek to
understand what motivates the desire to archive. Derrida argues that Freud’s theory of the unconscious
fundamentally alters (or at least should fundamentally alter) any attempt, from within any discipline, to think about
the past. And importantly, not only in our ways of thinking about the past but also about how we think of the
future. Derrida makes a critical point about the importance of archives when he observes that archives are a way
of imagining the future. The notion of the future-oriented archive as an ethical archive is one that is taken up by
South African archivist and writer, Verne Harris, in his book Archives and Justice. Clearly inspired by Derrida’s
writings and approach, Harris’ book provides a way to think about how theory relates to practice and how a
philosophical text like Derrida’s Archive Fever can transform approaches to archive. For those who are
wondering what the relevance of Derrida might be for thinking about (post)colonial or (post)apartheid archives,
Harris’ book is worth reading for the Derridean traces it bears throughout.
Derrida’s text engages in an extended discussion of the relation between the archive and death within which the
the space of the archive is figured as a kind of tomb. “Because the archive”, Derrida argues, “if this word or figure
can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous,
alive and internal experience” (11). Derrida’s text asks the question of what it is that motivates the desire for/to
archive and contrary to what we might expect the answer does not lie in the preservation of the past but in its
“eradication” (11). In his reading of the psychic dimension to archive, the death drive or what Derrida terms an
“archiviolithic force” (11), plays a central part.
Derrida is one of the most oft-cited philosophers of our time but his texts are also often singled out as difficult to
read and understand. As with any complex philosophical text one’s reading is enhanced by a text’s own archival
sources – the other texts that inform the text at hand. A cursory knowledge of the work of Freud and of key
psychoanalytic concepts as well as some knowledge of Derrida’s method of reading texts would be helpful in
approaching Archive Fever. That said, the text, originally written as a lecture given at the Freud Museum, may
take some time to read but is surprisingly easy to follow. And just as Derrida claims that “it is impossible and
illegitimate” to speak and write of memory and archive “without having integrated, well or badly, in an important
way or not, recognizing it or denying it, what is here called the Freudian impression (1995:30), so too it is not
possible to think of archive in the same way after Derrida.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1995.
Harris, Verne. Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective. Chicago: The Society of American Archivists