Archive Fever

A Freudian Impression

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by Jacques Derrida

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published October 1998, 114 pages, paper

ISBN 0226143678

New in Paper!

Derrida presents an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology through an analysis of the notion of archiving. As a depository of civic record and social history yet stocked with the personal, even intimate artifacts of private lives, the archive and its inherent tension between public and private occasions, for Derrida, and inquiry to preserve, through technology as well as tradition, both a historical and psychic past. What emerges is a work that engages Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism in a reflection on the real, the unreal, and the virtual. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which stands to transform the entire public and private space of humanity.

Review

Derrida's newest is an interweaving of Freud, the past, structures of memory, storage places and inscription. Beyond the mystic pad and email however, we also get "impressions" of Moses and Malachi. Part of an emerging revelation of presence, heretofore remarkable mostly by its absence.