Archive Fever, a term coined by Jacques Derrida

original recordings of the theorists at that 1966 structuralism conference.“For years, everyone had said ‘there’s got to be recordings of those lectures.’ Well, we finally found the recordings of those lectures. They were hidden in a cabinet behind a bookshelf behind a couch,” said Liz Mengel, associate director of collections and academic services for the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins.

The collector’s fallacy should be channeled, not squashed. Cherish your inner “archive fever”[12] — it is your engine — but channel it to productivity. Use strategic procrastination.

It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement (Derrida, Archive Fever 1995, 57)

eutsch suggestedthat personal memory was untrustworthy and admitted it was no match for the writtenword, and his index enabled him to store information in a way recalling Derrida’sdiscussion of archives as prostheses of memory (Derrida, 1995).

We have to endlessly scroll and parse a ton of images and headlines before we can find something interesting to read.

As Derrida writes ofthe computer, ‘I don’t feel the interposition of the machine as a sortof progress in transparency, univocity, or easiness. Rather, we areparticipating in a partly new plot’ (2005: 21). H

, as a key historical technology ofinvention. I intend this last term in the precise sense in which Derrida(1989) understands it, that is, as an oscillation between theperformative and the constative, with the former working to disruptitself (the performative) and the latter (the constative) – or whatmight be termed the unsettling operation of invention.

I’d fallen into the trap that the philosopher Jacques Derrida identified in an interview from the mid-nineties. “With the computer, everything is rapid and so easy,” he complained. “An interminable revision, an infinite analysis is already on the horizon.”

Three years ago, I began reading and annotating the work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida

Baudrillard

German continues to be my most important language, the only language that is mine

As with justice and the law what becomes crucial within this conception of self and identity is the willingness to deconstruct or interpet. Damaging essentialization based on shoring-up (sure-ing up?) well worn binaries such as real/virtual, authentic/fake falls away as the ‘work’ of identity becomes interpretation, questioning and negotiation.

Derrida'sGtas

He focuses on writing, as opposed to speech, as the exemplary form of language use, exemplary because it exists apart from the context of utterance or reception and thereby reveals, under the form of scrutiny Derrida calls "deconstruction," its dis-tance from its apparent reference.

Michel Foucault raised another problem in his lecture: that ofecriture. I think it is better to give this discussion a name, since Iexpect that we have all been thinking of Derrida and his system.We know that Derrida is attempting (a gamble which I find para-doxical) to elaborate a philosophy of writing, while at the sametime denying the existence of the subject. This is all the morecurious since this concept of writing is otherwise very close to thedialectical concept of practice. To quote but one example amongothers: I can only agree with him when he tells us that writingleaves traces which eventually efface themselves; it is the propertyof every practice, be it the construction of a temple, which dis-appears after several centuries or millenia, the opening of a road,the altering of its course or, more prosaically, the manufacture of acouple of sausages which are then eaten

Derrida: a documantary