Archive Fever

*Archive Fever*, by Jacques Derrida (1995)

## Quick Summary

*Archive Fever* describes a type of compulsive, repetitive desire to return to the origin by saving traces, "hypomnema" which are different from actual memories--they are material "prosthetics." The archive, then, in its consigning, is violent because as it marks or imprints it forgets others, and it is always produced and managed by a higher power which dictates what is consigned. Archive Fever = death drive in its compulsion, its repetition. It verges on radical evil. "suffering of memory among others: enlisting the in-finite, archive fever verges on radical evil." Its "aporetic and terrible limit."

**The aporia of the archive**: the word *arkhe* is at once the command to remember/archive/keep, and the commencement of an institute of archivization. So the task both says *you need to remember*, and also the need to give it up, "to face up to an impossible pressure to forget the archive in order to remember."

That impossible pressure is because any archiving practice has to "announce" its own desire for the unique, singular space and memory--the "archival jealousy of its own memory"--its command to remember its own name and place. *There is no archive without this jealous and self-preserving order.*

***It may be the death drive itself: an injunction to remember, to file and archive, only the one, the one and only. Only one.***\*\*\*

*The memory is made impossible by the very imperative of archivization!*

Why should such an aporia be the first impulse of any archivization? Because without this injunction of the one, the first inscription of the singular event and its passing, no archive, no memory traces, no traces would have been possible. *But what makes the tracing and archivization possible also threatens the archive at its very origin.* This drive, in Derrida's words, "works to *destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing* but also with a view of *effacing its own* 'proper traces--which consequently cannot be called proper."

The archive would not be possible without this originary re-pression, the *Verdraengung,* at the site of its own induction or production. The archival principle serves the death drive.

## *Note*

For Derrida, “archive” starts with the word *Arkhe*, that “names at once *commencement* and the *commandment*.” Commencement according to
nature or according to history, and commanding, ie., gods, history, authority,
social order exercised. Then, archive comes from the Greek *arkheion*: a house or domicile of those who commanded. “They do not
only esure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate.
They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the
power to interpret the archives.”

The dwelling is where archives take place, marks this
institutional passage from the private to the public (which doesn’t always mean
from what secret to the nonsecret). Kept by virtue of a privileged topology.
“They inhabit this uncommon place, this place of election where law and
singularity intersect in *privilege*.
At the intersection of the topological and the nomological, of the place and
the law, of the substrate and the authority, a scene of domiciliation becomes
at once visible and invisible.”

Archic, patriarchic, function—to shelter itself and,
sheltered, to conceal itself. *The nature*
of the archive is to be both authoritarianly transparent and authoritatively
concealed.

The “archontic power, which also gathers the fucntion of
unification, of identification, of classification, must be paired with what we
will call the power of *consignation*.
–not only the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into
reserve, but here the act of *con*signing
through *gathering together signs*.”

Cosignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system
of synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal
configuration. In an archive, there shuold not be any absolute dissociation,
any heterogeneity or *secret* which
could separate or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of
the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering
together.

“There is no political power without control of the archive,
if not of memory. Effective democratiszatio can always be measured by this
essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its
constituion, and its interpretation.”

## Exergue

“the exergue plays
with citation. To cite before beginning is to give the tone through the resonance
of a few words, the meaning or form of which ought to set the stage. *In other words, the exergue consists in*
capitalizing on an ellipsis. In acumulating capital in advance and in preparing
the surplus value of an archive*.”*

serves to stock in anticipation and to prearchive a lexicon
which ought to lay down the law and give the order

Institutive and a conservative fuction: the violence of
power which at once posits and conserves the law

What is at issue here, starting with the exergue, is the
violence of the archive itself, *as*
archive, as archival violence*. It is thus the first figure of an arhive,*
because *every* archive is at once
institutive and conservative.

Two Citations will exercise such a function of archival
economy. Two places of inscription: *printing*
and circumcision.

#### 1. (Printing)

Typographical. The archive conforms better to its concept,
because it is entrusted to the outside, to an external substrate (as opposed to
as the sign of the covenant in circumcision, to an intimate mark, right on the
so-called body proper.)

Freud does a theatricalizing of archivization. “Why archive
this? Why these investments in paper, ink?”

Diabolical death drive, an aggression or a destruction
drive: a drive, thus, of loss.

Death drive, aggression drive, destruction drive. Is mute.
It is at work, but since it always operates in silence, it never leaves any
archives of its own. It destroys in advance its own archive, as if that were in
truth the very motivation of its most proper movement. It works *to destroy the archive: on the condition of*
effacing but also with a view to effacing its own “proper” traces.

This drive, from then on, seems not only to be anarchic,
anarchontic: the death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say, or
archiviolithic. It will always have been archive-destroying, by silent
vocation.

*Hypomneme—*reminder,
raw material (trace)

“The archiviolithic drive is never present in person,
neither in itself nor in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no
document of its own. As inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its
pseudonym in painting, its sexual idols, its masks of seduction: lovely
impressions. These impressions are perhaps the very origin of what is so
obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. As memories of death. “

Leaves nothing of its own behind. It not only incites
forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, but also commands the
radical effacement, eradication, of that which can never be reduced to *mneme* or *anamnesis*, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or
monumental apparatus as *hypomnema*,
mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. Because
the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a
signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive
and internal experience. On the contrary, *the*
archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the
said memory*.*

***There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a***
technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without
outside.

mneme/anamnesis vs. hypomnema

The archive is hypomnemic.

*If there is no archive*
without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of
memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression, then we must
also remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the
repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the
death drive. And thus destruction.

(because archives are always bound by an external sign, and
that sign is what makes it possible to remember, to repeat, to reproduce, etc.,
then we need to remember that repetition itself is no different than the death
drive, and thus destruction)

“Consequence: right on that which permits and conditions
archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to
destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction, introducing, *a priori*, forgetfulness and the
archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. Into the “by heart” itself. The
archive always works, and *a priori*,
against itself.”

The death drive tends thus to destroy the hypomnesic
archive, except if it can be disguised, made up, painted, printed, represented
as the idol of its truth in painting. Another economy is thus at work, the
transaction between this death drive and the pleasure principle (the death
drive is not a principle, it threatens every principality). *ARCHIVE FEVER.*

“Such is the scene, at once within and beyond all staging:
Freud can only justify the apparently useless expenditure of paper, ink, and
typographic printing, in other words, the laborious investment in the archive,
by putting forward the noelty of discoveryàthe
very one which provokes so much resistance, and first of all in himself, and
precisely because its silent vocation is to burn the archive and to incite
amnesia, thus refuting the economic principle of the archive, aiming to ruin
the archive as accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and
in an exterior place.”

The radical destruction can again be *reinvested* in another logic, in the inexhaustible *economistic* resource of an archive which
capitalizes everything, even that which ruins it or radically contests its
power: *radical evil can be of service,*
infinite destruction can be reinvested in a theodicy, the deveil can also serve
to justify—such is the destination of the Jew in the Aryan ideal*. (the*
devil can also exculpate God, the existence of the Devil can serve as an excuse
for God, because exterior to him, anarchic angel and dissident, in rebellion
against him, just as, and this is the polemical trait of analogy, the Jew can
play the analogous role of economic relief or exoneration assigned to him by
the world of the Aryan ideal.

Mystic Pad: the technical model of the machine tool,
intended, in Freud’s eyes, to represent on the outside memory as internal
archivization—

thinking about the printer? Computer?

(“Freudian concept of the hereditary mnemic trace”—*Writing and Difference*, Derrida)

The Mystic pad still participates in Cartesian space. Freud
does not explicitly examine the status of the “materialized” supplement which
is necessary to the alleged spontaneity of memory, even if that spontaneity
were differentiated in itself, thwarted by a censorship or repression which,
moreover, could not act on a perfectly spontaneous memory.

Far from the machine being a pure absence of spontaneity,
its *resemblance* to the physical
apparatus, its existence and its necessity bear witness to the finitude of the
mnemic spontaneity which is thus supplemented. The machine—and consequently,
representation—is death and finitude *within*
the psyche.

Nor does Freud examine the possibility of this machine,
which, in the world, has at least begun to *resemble*
memory, and increasingly resembles it more closely. Its resemblance to memory
is closer than that of the innocent Mystic Pad: the latter is no doubt
infinitely more complex than slate or paper, less archaic than a palimpsest;
but, compared to other machines for storing archives, it is a child’s toy.

Techno-science, in its very movement, can only consist in a
transformation of the techniques of archivization, of printing, of inscription,
of reproduction, of formalization, of ciphering, and of translating marks.

Questions: