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Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
In Archive Fever , Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology—fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling.
"Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."— The Guardian
"[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."— Choice
"Beautifully written and clear."—Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review
"Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."— Library Journal
"Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."— The Guardian
"[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."— Choice
"Beautifully written and clear."—Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review
"Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."— Library Journal
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
100 people are currently reading
2445 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Derrida
652 books1,798 followersJacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews
January 9, 2009
Appropriately, I forgot what I learned from this book.
August 6, 2013
A lot of the reading I've been doing lately about archives has included a citation to this...especially some of the essays I really liked in Controlling the Past...which meant, of course, I *had* to read it.
It is a short book, so it's a quick read. I had some exposure to the technique of deconstruction back in my undergrad days, so I was passingly familiar with Derrida. But even with this background knowledge I must admit I had to let quite a bit of Archive Fever wash over me. The historical context for the writing was interesting, in that it was a lecture that Derrida gave at the Freud Museum in London. The topic was Freud's notion of the archive seen largely through the lens of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's book Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Yerushalmi was scheduled to be presenting at the same meeting, but couldn't attend due to illness. It is also seen through the lens of the translator Eric Prenowitz, since the original is in French.
I don't entirely know if it was intended, but the things I came away with from 10,000 feet up above (or should it be below) Archive Fever were:
1. The historic dimensions to the word archive are truly archaic: simultaneously bound up with the foundations of law while being very much about the present, or where things begin.
2. Freud had some thoughts about the archive and memory which he wrote up in his essay The Mystic Writing Pad, which is getting added to the ToRead pile.
3. The archive is as much (or more) about the future as it is the past. When an archive is collected it is done so very much in the hopes that it will get used in the future, if not the distant future then at least some short time from now.
4. The context of an archive is like an unraveling onion, which constantly reveals new dimensions as it is peeled back. Knowing where to draw the line when documenting the context of a collection seems to be terribly important if any practical work is going to get done.
Overall I'm glad I read Archive Fever, so when I run across a citation to it in the archivy canon I'll know (roughly) what it's about. But I'm not sure I learned much of practical interest here, that I didn't know already.
It is a short book, so it's a quick read. I had some exposure to the technique of deconstruction back in my undergrad days, so I was passingly familiar with Derrida. But even with this background knowledge I must admit I had to let quite a bit of Archive Fever wash over me. The historical context for the writing was interesting, in that it was a lecture that Derrida gave at the Freud Museum in London. The topic was Freud's notion of the archive seen largely through the lens of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's book Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Yerushalmi was scheduled to be presenting at the same meeting, but couldn't attend due to illness. It is also seen through the lens of the translator Eric Prenowitz, since the original is in French.
I don't entirely know if it was intended, but the things I came away with from 10,000 feet up above (or should it be below) Archive Fever were:
1. The historic dimensions to the word archive are truly archaic: simultaneously bound up with the foundations of law while being very much about the present, or where things begin.
2. Freud had some thoughts about the archive and memory which he wrote up in his essay The Mystic Writing Pad, which is getting added to the ToRead pile.
3. The archive is as much (or more) about the future as it is the past. When an archive is collected it is done so very much in the hopes that it will get used in the future, if not the distant future then at least some short time from now.
4. The context of an archive is like an unraveling onion, which constantly reveals new dimensions as it is peeled back. Knowing where to draw the line when documenting the context of a collection seems to be terribly important if any practical work is going to get done.
Overall I'm glad I read Archive Fever, so when I run across a citation to it in the archivy canon I'll know (roughly) what it's about. But I'm not sure I learned much of practical interest here, that I didn't know already.
September 3, 2015
c'mon dude, level with me here—you wrote all them post-Yale, post-deconstruction books on the can right? Freud's foreskin? Damn man; make me a ladyboy necklace amirite?!!?
the old dogs of metaphysics of presence is tight, etymology too [watch for Arkhonz!!!?], always. but all this quasi-Hebraic theology belongs back on that acid planet with Deleuze and Guattari, year ZERO faciality flying from the Pharaoh, Shiiit. not that Yerushalmi got it wrong or nothing with Moses and Monotheism but that foreskin bible man. GodDAMM.
seriously tho, not bad, but better to get that classic shit—Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Dissemination... sheeeeeiiiiit even Ltd inc if y'all can stomach all dem ad hominem bombs lobbed Searleways.
the old dogs of metaphysics of presence is tight, etymology too [watch for Arkhonz!!!?], always. but all this quasi-Hebraic theology belongs back on that acid planet with Deleuze and Guattari, year ZERO faciality flying from the Pharaoh, Shiiit. not that Yerushalmi got it wrong or nothing with Moses and Monotheism but that foreskin bible man. GodDAMM.
seriously tho, not bad, but better to get that classic shit—Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Dissemination... sheeeeeiiiiit even Ltd inc if y'all can stomach all dem ad hominem bombs lobbed Searleways.
September 27, 2014
Yup, that's right I finished the big D. Not nearly as much fun as Foucault, but still as rewarding when you realize you understood a whole sentence or two.
September 5, 2022
Pasaron quince años desde que leí este libro en la licenciatura, sin entender nada. Quince años, y en esta relectura sigo sin entender nada.
Miento. Algunas cosas sí, pocas: que el archivo es espectral y fantasmal, que se puede una acercar al concepto de archivo (como a cualquier archivo, como a cualquier concepto) mediante el uso de la deconstrucción; luego, la relación entre la represión y la archivación y la autoridad del archivo (el arconte). Como dije, pocas cosas. Todo lo demás, no, pero por fortuna ahora hay internet y acceso a un montón de interpretaciones y análisis, no como antes. Y por fortuna, también, hoy es Labor Day y no fui a la oficina, en vez de eso he dedicado la mañana a navegar por jstor y scielo.
Miento. Algunas cosas sí, pocas: que el archivo es espectral y fantasmal, que se puede una acercar al concepto de archivo (como a cualquier archivo, como a cualquier concepto) mediante el uso de la deconstrucción; luego, la relación entre la represión y la archivación y la autoridad del archivo (el arconte). Como dije, pocas cosas. Todo lo demás, no, pero por fortuna ahora hay internet y acceso a un montón de interpretaciones y análisis, no como antes. Y por fortuna, también, hoy es Labor Day y no fui a la oficina, en vez de eso he dedicado la mañana a navegar por jstor y scielo.
April 6, 2017
Lotsa preliminary outworks here, which is fitting, considering that this text concerns the significance of the arche.
Opening section with no subtitle
Arche—to commence and to order, an ontological principle and a nomological principle. Archive as derived from Greek arkheion, “initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” and whereat “the official documents are filed,” giving the archons “hermeneutic right and competence.” We therefore see the commingling of an “archontic dimension of domiciliation” with an “archic, in truth patriarchic, function.” What follows? “a politics of the archive is our permanent orientation […] there is no political power without control of the archive” (n. 1).
First subtitled section
The following section is an ‘exergue,’ which is described as “to cite before beginning is to give the key through the resonance of a few words,” “to prearchive a lexicon,” having “at once an institutive and a conservative function, as Benjamin has described the 'violence of power' in the ‘Critique of Violence,’" and which we might note bears some similarity to the agambenian state of exception. Two citations, i.e., “places of inscription,” here under analysis: printing and circumcision. There shall be no archive “without a place of consignation [sic], without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.” Be advised that the “archive is hypomnesic.”
Lotsa Freud stuff here; am accordingly yawning. (However, he recovers with cool observations: “What does ‘exterior’ mean? Is a circumcision, for example, an exterior mark? Is it an archive?”) Apparently “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 relief or economic exoneration assigned to him by the world of the Aryan ideal.”
Not only is the archive “as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique” a place for conserving the past, but the “technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content.” Identifies an “archive drive” to combat the death drive—“no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of forgetfulness,” “no archive fever without the threat.” Regarding circumcision: “it leaves a trace of an incision right on the skin”: “the foliaceous stratification, the pellicular superimposition of these cutaneous marks seems to defy analysis.” Alrighty then!
Second subtitled section
The next section is a ‘preamble,’ which lays out the significance of the term impression: “what is the moment proper to the archive”? I.e., “the instant of archivization” is when he “pushed a certain key to ‘save’ a text undamaged” on the computer machine, “to protect marks from being erased, so as thus to ensure salvation and indemnity”? Three meanings here (with attention also, again, (why?) to circumcision): first, “the scriptural or typographic,” with lotsa freudian stuff (inclusive of commingling of impression with repression and suppression (invokes refoulement in French); second, “the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion,” “an unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema”; and third, as to ‘Freudian impression,’ “the impression left by him.”
Third subtitled section
Thereafter comes a ‘forward,’ which imagines a “general archivology, a word that does not exist but that could designate a general and interdisciplinary science of the archive.” This science is paralyzed by a “preliminary aporia” wherein psychoanalysis is included and which always already wants to be the general science of the archive, “of everything that can happen to the economy of memory and its substrates” but also simultaneously wherein it is placed “under the critical authority (in the Kantian sense) of psychoanalysis.”
More Freud stuff (though the main interlocutor is one Yerushalmi), ergo, in this section; cool note that “though human evolution is Darwinian via the genes, it is Lamarckian via language” (n. 5). No archives “without titles [sic] (thus without names and without the archontic principle of legitimization, without laws, without criteria for classification and of hierarchization, without order and without order in the double sense of the word).” (Again, regarding “the singular archive named ‘circumcision.’”)
Some indication that the archive in a sense delimits the future: “An incompleteness of the archive and thus a certain determinability of the future.” Lots more: including passages that evoke focuauldian dissymmetry of vision, agambenian ‘survival,’ and so on. Plenty on spectres; more on Walter Benjamin. Notes that “repression is an archivization.”
The text presents quite a bit of meditation on Judaism, including the conclusion that “the most un-Jewish” is not “a lack of Judaism,” but rather “the nonbelief in the future—that is to say, in what constitutes Jewishness beyond all Judaism.”
We also find a parallel with Agamben’s third Homo Sacer text, insofar as the amnesty of the stasis is less a forgetting and more a declination to use a memory; here, by contrast: “is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering,’ but justice?” This of course summons other Derridean ruminations on ‘justice’ as found in “The Force of Law” and Specters of Marx, say. This text is pleased to solicit (Derridean term of art, recall) its author (who is “trembling before this sentence: ‘Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people’”).
Fourth subtitled section
Outworks done (which preliminaries constitute the vast majority of this text), the ‘theses’ follow: the point here seems to be a solicitation of the archive itself: “if Freud suffered from mal d’archive, if his case stems from a trouble de l’archive, he is not without his place, simultaneously, in the archive fever or disorder which we are experiencing today.” I.e., “nothing is more troubled and more troubling today than the concept archived in this word ‘archive.’”
Whatever do you mean, professor? With Freud, it is apparent, apparently, that “the psychic archive comes neither under mneme nor anamnesis.” Freud still wants to “maintain the primacy of live memory,” however. Similarly, though the archive is “made possible by the death, aggression, and destruction drive,” Freud nevertheless “claims not to believe in death.” (huh?) Further, though Freud illuminated “the archontic principle of the archive, which in itself presupposes not the originary arkhe but the nomological arkhe of the law, of institution, of domiciliation, of filiation,” he still as yet “repeated the patriarchal logic” therein. In-Sane!
And a concluding ‘postscript’— I don’t even know what.
Recommended for those reliant upon mnemotechnical supplements, persons who always hold a problem for translation, and readers caught in the bottomless thickness of this inscription en abyme, in the instant of the archio-nomological event.
Opening section with no subtitle
Arche—to commence and to order, an ontological principle and a nomological principle. Archive as derived from Greek arkheion, “initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” and whereat “the official documents are filed,” giving the archons “hermeneutic right and competence.” We therefore see the commingling of an “archontic dimension of domiciliation” with an “archic, in truth patriarchic, function.” What follows? “a politics of the archive is our permanent orientation […] there is no political power without control of the archive” (n. 1).
First subtitled section
The following section is an ‘exergue,’ which is described as “to cite before beginning is to give the key through the resonance of a few words,” “to prearchive a lexicon,” having “at once an institutive and a conservative function, as Benjamin has described the 'violence of power' in the ‘Critique of Violence,’" and which we might note bears some similarity to the agambenian state of exception. Two citations, i.e., “places of inscription,” here under analysis: printing and circumcision. There shall be no archive “without a place of consignation [sic], without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.” Be advised that the “archive is hypomnesic.”
Lotsa Freud stuff here; am accordingly yawning. (However, he recovers with cool observations: “What does ‘exterior’ mean? Is a circumcision, for example, an exterior mark? Is it an archive?”) Apparently “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 relief or economic exoneration assigned to him by the world of the Aryan ideal.”
Not only is the archive “as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique” a place for conserving the past, but the “technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content.” Identifies an “archive drive” to combat the death drive—“no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of forgetfulness,” “no archive fever without the threat.” Regarding circumcision: “it leaves a trace of an incision right on the skin”: “the foliaceous stratification, the pellicular superimposition of these cutaneous marks seems to defy analysis.” Alrighty then!
Second subtitled section
The next section is a ‘preamble,’ which lays out the significance of the term impression: “what is the moment proper to the archive”? I.e., “the instant of archivization” is when he “pushed a certain key to ‘save’ a text undamaged” on the computer machine, “to protect marks from being erased, so as thus to ensure salvation and indemnity”? Three meanings here (with attention also, again, (why?) to circumcision): first, “the scriptural or typographic,” with lotsa freudian stuff (inclusive of commingling of impression with repression and suppression (invokes refoulement in French); second, “the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion,” “an unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema”; and third, as to ‘Freudian impression,’ “the impression left by him.”
Third subtitled section
Thereafter comes a ‘forward,’ which imagines a “general archivology, a word that does not exist but that could designate a general and interdisciplinary science of the archive.” This science is paralyzed by a “preliminary aporia” wherein psychoanalysis is included and which always already wants to be the general science of the archive, “of everything that can happen to the economy of memory and its substrates” but also simultaneously wherein it is placed “under the critical authority (in the Kantian sense) of psychoanalysis.”
More Freud stuff (though the main interlocutor is one Yerushalmi), ergo, in this section; cool note that “though human evolution is Darwinian via the genes, it is Lamarckian via language” (n. 5). No archives “without titles [sic] (thus without names and without the archontic principle of legitimization, without laws, without criteria for classification and of hierarchization, without order and without order in the double sense of the word).” (Again, regarding “the singular archive named ‘circumcision.’”)
Some indication that the archive in a sense delimits the future: “An incompleteness of the archive and thus a certain determinability of the future.” Lots more: including passages that evoke focuauldian dissymmetry of vision, agambenian ‘survival,’ and so on. Plenty on spectres; more on Walter Benjamin. Notes that “repression is an archivization.”
The text presents quite a bit of meditation on Judaism, including the conclusion that “the most un-Jewish” is not “a lack of Judaism,” but rather “the nonbelief in the future—that is to say, in what constitutes Jewishness beyond all Judaism.”
We also find a parallel with Agamben’s third Homo Sacer text, insofar as the amnesty of the stasis is less a forgetting and more a declination to use a memory; here, by contrast: “is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering,’ but justice?” This of course summons other Derridean ruminations on ‘justice’ as found in “The Force of Law” and Specters of Marx, say. This text is pleased to solicit (Derridean term of art, recall) its author (who is “trembling before this sentence: ‘Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people’”).
Fourth subtitled section
Outworks done (which preliminaries constitute the vast majority of this text), the ‘theses’ follow: the point here seems to be a solicitation of the archive itself: “if Freud suffered from mal d’archive, if his case stems from a trouble de l’archive, he is not without his place, simultaneously, in the archive fever or disorder which we are experiencing today.” I.e., “nothing is more troubled and more troubling today than the concept archived in this word ‘archive.’”
Whatever do you mean, professor? With Freud, it is apparent, apparently, that “the psychic archive comes neither under mneme nor anamnesis.” Freud still wants to “maintain the primacy of live memory,” however. Similarly, though the archive is “made possible by the death, aggression, and destruction drive,” Freud nevertheless “claims not to believe in death.” (huh?) Further, though Freud illuminated “the archontic principle of the archive, which in itself presupposes not the originary arkhe but the nomological arkhe of the law, of institution, of domiciliation, of filiation,” he still as yet “repeated the patriarchal logic” therein. In-Sane!
And a concluding ‘postscript’— I don’t even know what.
Recommended for those reliant upon mnemotechnical supplements, persons who always hold a problem for translation, and readers caught in the bottomless thickness of this inscription en abyme, in the instant of the archio-nomological event.
Read
April 13, 2023When Derrida said that he had tried to re-read this book and could not do it, I felt that.
June 11, 2019
A few hours of my life I will unfortunately never get back.
May 25, 2018
It is important to go into this piece recognizing that it is based off of a lecture and therefore is a little disjointed and also that it is a later work of Derrida's and relies on some of his earlier writings and ideas. If you don't have a background in his work, I would recommend reading some summaries online before delving into this piece (Art History Unstuffed is a great website for this). These points aside, this is a very intriguing book which uses Freudian thought to provide a status of the archive. Includes a very useful discussion of the impact technology has on the archive, along with many thoughts about the relationship between memory and the archive. Useful to go into this piece with a theme or question in mind as Derrida's writing is very circular and non-direct, making it easy to get lost and frustrated.
March 8, 2017
Disclaimer: For this book, you must be well-versed in Freud as well as aware of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Jacques Derrida's previous works. I am not.
Initially, I spent my time flipping back and forth between pages, googling Freud, Yerushalmi and Derrida and reading extracts of their works. But I still found many passages of this book completely meaningless. It's a frustrating feeling when you just can't "get" at the meaning of a work which has been cited by so many others. There are moments of clarity but often they are repetitive or have already been elucidated more clearly elsewhere. I think it is telling that when I have seen Derrida quoted by others, it is the exact same sentence every time. "There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory" - perhaps a singular moment of clarity in a footnote on page 4.
Initially, I spent my time flipping back and forth between pages, googling Freud, Yerushalmi and Derrida and reading extracts of their works. But I still found many passages of this book completely meaningless. It's a frustrating feeling when you just can't "get" at the meaning of a work which has been cited by so many others. There are moments of clarity but often they are repetitive or have already been elucidated more clearly elsewhere. I think it is telling that when I have seen Derrida quoted by others, it is the exact same sentence every time. "There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory" - perhaps a singular moment of clarity in a footnote on page 4.
Read
May 23, 2023so warm coming back to papa jackie. as with all JD , this is going to get so much more difficult on the necessary reread & I love that. Archive fever is about the foreskin of sigmund freud
ok I am going to quote dump here my two favourite parts which I thought were worth remembering so feel free to disregard
"There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive. This threat is in-fimite, sweeps away the logic of finitude and the simple factual limits, the transcendental aesthetics, one might say, the spatiotemporal conditions of conservation. Let us rather say that it abuses them. Such an abuse opens the ethico-political dimension of the problem. There is not one archive fever, one limit or one suffering of memory among others: enlisting the in-finite, archive fever verges
on radical evil."
"Well, concerning the archive, Freud never managed to form anything that deserves to be called a concept. Neither have we, by the way. We have no concept, only an impression, a series of impressions associated with a word. To the rigor of the concept, I am opposing here the vagueness or the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion. "Archive" is only a notion, an impression associated with a word and for which, together with Freud, we do not have a concept. We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process. Unlike what a classical philosopher or scholar would be tempted to do, I do not consider this impression, or the notion of this impression, to be a subconcept, the feebleness of a blurred and subjective pre-knowledge, destined for I know not what sin of nominalism, but to the contrary, as I will explain later, I consider it to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very concept of the future, if there is such a thing and if, as I believe, the idea of the archive depends on it. This is one of the theses: there are essenrial reasons for which a concept in the process of being formed always remains inadequate relative to what it ought to be, divided, disjointed between two forces. And this disjointedness has a necessary relationship with the structure of archivization."
ok I am going to quote dump here my two favourite parts which I thought were worth remembering so feel free to disregard
"There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive. This threat is in-fimite, sweeps away the logic of finitude and the simple factual limits, the transcendental aesthetics, one might say, the spatiotemporal conditions of conservation. Let us rather say that it abuses them. Such an abuse opens the ethico-political dimension of the problem. There is not one archive fever, one limit or one suffering of memory among others: enlisting the in-finite, archive fever verges
on radical evil."
"Well, concerning the archive, Freud never managed to form anything that deserves to be called a concept. Neither have we, by the way. We have no concept, only an impression, a series of impressions associated with a word. To the rigor of the concept, I am opposing here the vagueness or the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion. "Archive" is only a notion, an impression associated with a word and for which, together with Freud, we do not have a concept. We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process. Unlike what a classical philosopher or scholar would be tempted to do, I do not consider this impression, or the notion of this impression, to be a subconcept, the feebleness of a blurred and subjective pre-knowledge, destined for I know not what sin of nominalism, but to the contrary, as I will explain later, I consider it to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very concept of the future, if there is such a thing and if, as I believe, the idea of the archive depends on it. This is one of the theses: there are essenrial reasons for which a concept in the process of being formed always remains inadequate relative to what it ought to be, divided, disjointed between two forces. And this disjointedness has a necessary relationship with the structure of archivization."
Read
August 29, 2025"Una respuesta espectral (así, pues, instruida por una tékhne e inscrita en un archivo) es siempre posible. No habría ni historia, ni tradición, ni cultura sin esta posibilidad. De esto es de lo hablamos aquí. Es de esto en verdad de lo que tenemos que responder".
July 3, 2010
Derrida occupies a paradoxical position for me: I like his conclusions but dislike his language-intensive methods. Few things seem as interesting but ultimately useless as etymology, and he (predictably) begins this book with an etymology (or "deconstruction" if you must) of the word "archive." Repeated puns and word tricks abound, it all feels very circular, and Derrida makes a habit of pointing out the things he won't have time to address, will address elsewhere, has addressed elsewhere, such that the text feels like an empty shell pointing off in a thousand directions, a print version of Google. I'm sorry, but I just do not like his style, nor do I understand almost anything he says, which I would like to think is not for lack of trying. There are a few interesting sentences, and Derrida actually is a great writer, but he never gets around to saying anything.
March 19, 2025
[...] nos perguntaremos sempre o que Freud (por exemplo) quis manter secreto. O que se dissimulou ou o que ele dissimulou ainda além da intenção de dissimular, de mentir ou de perjurar. Perguntar-nos-emos sempre o que foi possível queimar, o que queimou de suas paixões secretas, de sua correspondência, de sua "vida". Queimar sem ele, sem resto e sem saber. Sem resposta possível, espectral ou não, aquém ou além de uma repressão, na outra borda do recalque, o originário ou o secundário, sem um nome, sem o menor sintoma e nem mesmo uma cinza
Read
May 17, 2018Re-read po polsku. Jakimś cudem tłumaczenie jest mniej zrozumiałe, pewnie dlatego, że interpunkcja im leży i mam ochotę wysłać do Krytyki Politycznej kosz przecinkami, bo chyba im brakuje.
July 2, 2023
• Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive. But rather at the word "archive”
o It is both commencement and commandment
• The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters :which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.
• Archive comes to it from the Greek arkheion :initially a house, a domicile, an address the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. The citizens who thus held and signified political power were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law
• It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret. (It is what is happening, right here, when a house, the Freuds' last house, becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to another.
• Documents are kept and classified as archive by virtue of a PRIVELEGED TOPOLOGY
o They inhabit this unusual 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.
• His hypotheses
o The hypotheses have a common trait. They all concern the impression left, in my opinion, by the Freudian signature on its own archive, on the concept of the archive and of archivization, that is to say also, inversely and as an indirect consequence, on historiography.
o We are saying for the time being Freudian signature so as not to have to decide yet between Sigmund Freud, the proper name, on the one hand, and, on the other, the invention of psychoanalysis: project of knowledge, of practice and of institution, community, family, domiciliation, consignation, “house” or “museum,” in the present state of its archivization. What is in question is situated precisely between the two.
• Exergue
o 1. Printing
Freud admits his work is lot of ink and paper for nothing, an entire typographical volume, in short, a material substrate which is out of al proportion, in the last analysis, to “recount” (erzihlen) stories that everyone knows. He will have to have invented an original proposition which will make the investment profitable.
Here he stages archivization
But how feigned: he knows all long that what he has is not hypothesis, but rather an irresistible thesis, namely the possibility of a radical perversion, indeed, a diabolical death drive, an aggression or a destruction drive: a drive, thus, of loss.
The death drive is invincible necessity, irresistible and must be named
And yet It always operates in silence, never leaving an archive of its own. tworks fodestroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own “proper” traces—which consequently cannot properly be called “proper.” Itdevours iteven before producing it on the outside. This drive, from then on, seems not only to be anarchic, anarchontic (we must not forget that the death drive, originary though itmay be, isnot a principle, as are the pleasure and reality principles): the death drive is above al anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic. Itwill always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation.
Even when ittakes the form of an interior desire, the anarchy drive eludes perception, to be sure, save exception: that is, Freud says, except if it disguises itself, except if it tints itself, makes itself up or paints itself (gefdrbt ist) in some erotic color. This impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin. In other words, 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.
But, the point must be stressed, this archiviolithic force leaves nothing of its own behind. As the death drive is also, according to the most striking words of Freud himself, an aggression and a destruction (Destruktion) drive, it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnémé or anamnésis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mnéemé or to anamnésis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnéma, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum.
There isno archive without aplace ofconsignation, without atechnique ofrepetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.
Let us never forget this Greek distinction between mnémé or anamnésis on the one hand, and Aypomnéma onthe other. The archive is hypomnesic.
The archive always works against itself
The death drive threatens every principality, every archontic primacy, every archival desire. It is what we will call, later on, le mal d’archive, archive fever.
Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives.
o 2. Circumcision
If the archive demands memory be placed on some substrate and in some exterior place: is circumcision an archive?
Goes on to talk about the machine in memory
It accumulates so many sedimented archives, some of which are written right on the epidermis of a body proper, others on the substrate of an “exterior” body. Each layer here seems to gape slightly, as the lips of a wound, permitting glimpses of the abyssal possibility of another depth destined for archaeological excavation.
It has, in appearance, primarily to do with a private inscription. This is the title of a first problem concerning the question of its belonging to an archive: which archive? that of Sigmund Freud? that of the psychoanalytic institution or science? Where does one draw the limit?
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s handsome book Freud’s Moses. Judaism Terminable and Interminable.
To read, in this case, requires working at geological or archaeological excavations, on substrates or under surfaces, old or new skins, the hypermnesic and hypomnesic epidermises of books or penises
Analysis of the inscription written by Freud’s dad in his Bible. First sentence mentions circumcision.
• Def of impression
o 1. Scriptural or typographic: that of an inscription which leaves a mark at the surface or in the thickness of a substrate
o 2. To the rigor of the concept, I am opposing here the vagueness or the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion. “Archive” is only a notion, an impression associated with a word and for which, together with Freud, we do not have a concept. We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process.
o 3. “Freudian impression” also has a third meaning, unless this is the first: the impression left by Sigmund Freud, beginning with the impression left in him, inscribed in him, from his birth and his covenant, from his circumcision, through all the manifest or secret history of psychoanalysis, of the institution and of the works, by way of the public and private correspondence, including this letter from Jakob Shelomoh Freid to Shelomoh Sigmund Freud in memory of the signs or tokens of the covenant and to accompany the “new skin” of a Bible.
• The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. This is not the question of a concept dealing with the past which might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.
• Back to Yerushalmo’s Monologue with Freud
o We must come to the moment where Yerushalmi seems to suspend everything, in particular everything he has said and done up to this point, from the thread of a discrete sentence. One could be tempted to take this thread to be the umbilical cord of the book. Everything seems to be suspended from this umbilical cord—by the umbilical cord of the event which such a book as this represents. Because on the last page of a work which is entirely devoted to memory and to the archive, a sentence says the future. It says, in future tense: “Much will depend, of course, on how the very terms Jewish and science are to be defined”
o “Professor Freud, at this point I find it futile to ask whether, genetically or structurally, psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science; that we shall know, if it is at all knowable, only when much future work has been done. Much will depend, of course, on how the very terms Jewish and science are to be defined.”
o This is a dramatic turn, a stroke of theater, a coup de thédtre within a coup de thédtre. In an instant which dislocates the linear order of presents, a second coup de théitre illuminates the first. It is also the thunderbolt of a love at first sight, a coup de foudre (love and transference) which, in a flash, transfixes with light the memory of the first. With another light. One no longer knows very well what the time, what the tense of this theater will have been, the first stroke of theater, the first stroke, the first. The first period.
o The question of the archive remains the same: what comes first? Even better: Who comes first? And second?
o When a scholar addresses himself to a phantom, this recalls irresistibly the opening of Hamlet. At the spectral apparition of the dead father, Marcellus implores Horatio: “Thou art a Scholler, speake to it, Horatio.” I tried to show elsewhere that though the classical scholar did not believe in phantoms and would not in truth know how to speak to them, forbidding himself even, it is quite possible that Marcellus had anticipated the coming of a scholar of the future, of a scholar who, in the future and so as to conceive of the future, would dare to speak to the phantom. Of a scholar who would dare to admit that he knows how to speak fo the phantom, even claiming that not only does this neither contradict nor limit his scholarship, but will in truth have conditioned it, at the price of some still-inconceivable complication which may yet prove the other one, that is, the phantom, to be correct. And perhaps always the paternal phantom, that is, who is in a position to be correct, to be proven correct—and to have the last word.
o This monologue is heterogeneous to the book, in its status, in its project, in its form; this postscript of sorts retrospectively determines what precedes it.
o “In what is at issue here, indeed has been so all along, we both have, as Jews, an equal stake. Therefore in speaking of the Jews I shall not say ‘they.’ I shall say ‘we.’ The distinction is familiar to you”
By definition, because he is dead and thus incapable of responding, Freud can only acquiesce. He cannot refuse this community at once proposed and imposed. He can only say “yes” to this covenant into which he must enter one more time. Because he will have had to enter it, already, seven or eight days after his birth.
WITH PHANTOMS AND WITH NEWBORNS, ENTERING COVENANTS PRECLUDES RESPONSE, SIGN OR COUNTERSIGN.
In this deliberately filial scene which Yerushalmi has with the patriarch of psycho- analysis, the apostrophe is launched from the position of the father, of the father of the dead father. The other speaks. It is often thus in scenes the son has with the father.
Why call it a MONOLGUE WITH? MONOLOGUES CANNOT BE ‘WITH’…. Because more than one person speaks? Undoubtedly, but there is more than the number. There is the order. Because if the signatory of the monologue is not alone in signing, far from it, he is above all the first to do so. He speaks from the position of the other: he carries in himself, this mouthpiece, he bears the voice which could be that of Jakob Freud, namely the arch-patriarch of psychoanalysis.
He ends by asking Freud of Anna, in one letter, spoke from herself or in the name of her father
• As if he doubted that a daughter, above all the daughter of Freud, could speak in her own name, almost thirty years after the father’s death, and above all as if he wished, still secretly (a secret which he says he wants to keep, that is to say, to share with Freud, to be alone in sharing with Freud), that she had always spoken in the name of her father, in the name of the father:
It seems to me that Yerushalmi’s thesis advances here while withdrawing itself. But it is a thesis with a rather particular status—and a paradoxical movement: it posits not so much what is as what will have been and ought to or should be in the future, namely that psychoanalysis should in the future have been a Jewish science
It goes without saying, if one could put it this way, that Freud’s phantom does not respond. That is at least how things appear. But can this be trusted? In promising secrecy for a virtual response which keeps us waiting, which will always keep us waiting, the signatory of this monologue lets it be understood that Freud would never say in public, for example in a book and in what is destined to become public archive, what he thinks in truth secretly, like the monologist who says “we,” namely, that, yes, psychoanalysis is indeed a Jewish science. Is this not incidentally what he has already, in private, so often suggested? Is this not what he has already murmured in remarks, entrusted to letters, consigned in a thousand signs which Yerushalmi has inventoried, classed, put in order, interpreted with unprecedented vigilance and jubilation? But at the end of the book, the monologist who says “we” says he is ready to respect the secret, to keep for his personal archives the response which the phantom, with its own mouth, could murmur in his ear in private.
fictive and effective, taut, dramatic, as generous as it is implacable, this “Monologue” does not deprive the other of his right to speak. Not without injustice can one say that Freud has no chance to speak. He is the first to speak, in a certain sense, and the last word is offered to him. The right to speak is left, given or lent to him.
How can he claim to prove an absence of archive? How does one prove in general an absence of archive, if not in relying on classical norms (presence/ absence of literal and explicit reference to this or to that, to a this or to a that which one supposes to be identical to themselves, and simply absent, actually absent, if they are not simply present, actually present; how can one not, and why not take into account unconscious, and more generally virtual archives)?
o Is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering’, but justice?”
o Does one base one’s thinking of the future on an archived event—with or without substrate, with or without actuality—for example on a divine injunction or on a messianic covenant? Or else, on the contrary, can an experience, an existence, in general, only receive and record, only archive such an event to the extent that the structure of this existence and of its temporalization makes this archivization possible? In other words, does one need a first archive in order to conceive of originary archivability?
• It is known that Freud did everything possible to not neglect the experience of haunting, spectrality, phantoms, ghosts. He tried to account for them. Courageously, in as scientific, critical, and positive a fashion as possible. But in this way, he also tried to conjure them.
• THESIS 2:
o the archive is made possible by the death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation. But beyond finitude as limit, there is, as we said above, this properly in-finite movement of radical destruction without which no archive desire or fever would happen.
o It is both commencement and commandment
• The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters :which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.
• Archive comes to it from the Greek arkheion :initially a house, a domicile, an address the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. The citizens who thus held and signified political power were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law
• It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret. (It is what is happening, right here, when a house, the Freuds' last house, becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to another.
• Documents are kept and classified as archive by virtue of a PRIVELEGED TOPOLOGY
o They inhabit this unusual 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.
• His hypotheses
o The hypotheses have a common trait. They all concern the impression left, in my opinion, by the Freudian signature on its own archive, on the concept of the archive and of archivization, that is to say also, inversely and as an indirect consequence, on historiography.
o We are saying for the time being Freudian signature so as not to have to decide yet between Sigmund Freud, the proper name, on the one hand, and, on the other, the invention of psychoanalysis: project of knowledge, of practice and of institution, community, family, domiciliation, consignation, “house” or “museum,” in the present state of its archivization. What is in question is situated precisely between the two.
• Exergue
o 1. Printing
Freud admits his work is lot of ink and paper for nothing, an entire typographical volume, in short, a material substrate which is out of al proportion, in the last analysis, to “recount” (erzihlen) stories that everyone knows. He will have to have invented an original proposition which will make the investment profitable.
Here he stages archivization
But how feigned: he knows all long that what he has is not hypothesis, but rather an irresistible thesis, namely the possibility of a radical perversion, indeed, a diabolical death drive, an aggression or a destruction drive: a drive, thus, of loss.
The death drive is invincible necessity, irresistible and must be named
And yet It always operates in silence, never leaving an archive of its own. tworks fodestroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own “proper” traces—which consequently cannot properly be called “proper.” Itdevours iteven before producing it on the outside. This drive, from then on, seems not only to be anarchic, anarchontic (we must not forget that the death drive, originary though itmay be, isnot a principle, as are the pleasure and reality principles): the death drive is above al anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic. Itwill always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation.
Even when ittakes the form of an interior desire, the anarchy drive eludes perception, to be sure, save exception: that is, Freud says, except if it disguises itself, except if it tints itself, makes itself up or paints itself (gefdrbt ist) in some erotic color. This impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin. In other words, 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.
But, the point must be stressed, this archiviolithic force leaves nothing of its own behind. As the death drive is also, according to the most striking words of Freud himself, an aggression and a destruction (Destruktion) drive, it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnémé or anamnésis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mnéemé or to anamnésis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnéma, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum.
There isno archive without aplace ofconsignation, without atechnique ofrepetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.
Let us never forget this Greek distinction between mnémé or anamnésis on the one hand, and Aypomnéma onthe other. The archive is hypomnesic.
The archive always works against itself
The death drive threatens every principality, every archontic primacy, every archival desire. It is what we will call, later on, le mal d’archive, archive fever.
Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives.
o 2. Circumcision
If the archive demands memory be placed on some substrate and in some exterior place: is circumcision an archive?
Goes on to talk about the machine in memory
It accumulates so many sedimented archives, some of which are written right on the epidermis of a body proper, others on the substrate of an “exterior” body. Each layer here seems to gape slightly, as the lips of a wound, permitting glimpses of the abyssal possibility of another depth destined for archaeological excavation.
It has, in appearance, primarily to do with a private inscription. This is the title of a first problem concerning the question of its belonging to an archive: which archive? that of Sigmund Freud? that of the psychoanalytic institution or science? Where does one draw the limit?
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s handsome book Freud’s Moses. Judaism Terminable and Interminable.
To read, in this case, requires working at geological or archaeological excavations, on substrates or under surfaces, old or new skins, the hypermnesic and hypomnesic epidermises of books or penises
Analysis of the inscription written by Freud’s dad in his Bible. First sentence mentions circumcision.
• Def of impression
o 1. Scriptural or typographic: that of an inscription which leaves a mark at the surface or in the thickness of a substrate
o 2. To the rigor of the concept, I am opposing here the vagueness or the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion. “Archive” is only a notion, an impression associated with a word and for which, together with Freud, we do not have a concept. We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process.
o 3. “Freudian impression” also has a third meaning, unless this is the first: the impression left by Sigmund Freud, beginning with the impression left in him, inscribed in him, from his birth and his covenant, from his circumcision, through all the manifest or secret history of psychoanalysis, of the institution and of the works, by way of the public and private correspondence, including this letter from Jakob Shelomoh Freid to Shelomoh Sigmund Freud in memory of the signs or tokens of the covenant and to accompany the “new skin” of a Bible.
• The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. This is not the question of a concept dealing with the past which might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.
• Back to Yerushalmo’s Monologue with Freud
o We must come to the moment where Yerushalmi seems to suspend everything, in particular everything he has said and done up to this point, from the thread of a discrete sentence. One could be tempted to take this thread to be the umbilical cord of the book. Everything seems to be suspended from this umbilical cord—by the umbilical cord of the event which such a book as this represents. Because on the last page of a work which is entirely devoted to memory and to the archive, a sentence says the future. It says, in future tense: “Much will depend, of course, on how the very terms Jewish and science are to be defined”
o “Professor Freud, at this point I find it futile to ask whether, genetically or structurally, psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science; that we shall know, if it is at all knowable, only when much future work has been done. Much will depend, of course, on how the very terms Jewish and science are to be defined.”
o This is a dramatic turn, a stroke of theater, a coup de thédtre within a coup de thédtre. In an instant which dislocates the linear order of presents, a second coup de théitre illuminates the first. It is also the thunderbolt of a love at first sight, a coup de foudre (love and transference) which, in a flash, transfixes with light the memory of the first. With another light. One no longer knows very well what the time, what the tense of this theater will have been, the first stroke of theater, the first stroke, the first. The first period.
o The question of the archive remains the same: what comes first? Even better: Who comes first? And second?
o When a scholar addresses himself to a phantom, this recalls irresistibly the opening of Hamlet. At the spectral apparition of the dead father, Marcellus implores Horatio: “Thou art a Scholler, speake to it, Horatio.” I tried to show elsewhere that though the classical scholar did not believe in phantoms and would not in truth know how to speak to them, forbidding himself even, it is quite possible that Marcellus had anticipated the coming of a scholar of the future, of a scholar who, in the future and so as to conceive of the future, would dare to speak to the phantom. Of a scholar who would dare to admit that he knows how to speak fo the phantom, even claiming that not only does this neither contradict nor limit his scholarship, but will in truth have conditioned it, at the price of some still-inconceivable complication which may yet prove the other one, that is, the phantom, to be correct. And perhaps always the paternal phantom, that is, who is in a position to be correct, to be proven correct—and to have the last word.
o This monologue is heterogeneous to the book, in its status, in its project, in its form; this postscript of sorts retrospectively determines what precedes it.
o “In what is at issue here, indeed has been so all along, we both have, as Jews, an equal stake. Therefore in speaking of the Jews I shall not say ‘they.’ I shall say ‘we.’ The distinction is familiar to you”
By definition, because he is dead and thus incapable of responding, Freud can only acquiesce. He cannot refuse this community at once proposed and imposed. He can only say “yes” to this covenant into which he must enter one more time. Because he will have had to enter it, already, seven or eight days after his birth.
WITH PHANTOMS AND WITH NEWBORNS, ENTERING COVENANTS PRECLUDES RESPONSE, SIGN OR COUNTERSIGN.
In this deliberately filial scene which Yerushalmi has with the patriarch of psycho- analysis, the apostrophe is launched from the position of the father, of the father of the dead father. The other speaks. It is often thus in scenes the son has with the father.
Why call it a MONOLGUE WITH? MONOLOGUES CANNOT BE ‘WITH’…. Because more than one person speaks? Undoubtedly, but there is more than the number. There is the order. Because if the signatory of the monologue is not alone in signing, far from it, he is above all the first to do so. He speaks from the position of the other: he carries in himself, this mouthpiece, he bears the voice which could be that of Jakob Freud, namely the arch-patriarch of psychoanalysis.
He ends by asking Freud of Anna, in one letter, spoke from herself or in the name of her father
• As if he doubted that a daughter, above all the daughter of Freud, could speak in her own name, almost thirty years after the father’s death, and above all as if he wished, still secretly (a secret which he says he wants to keep, that is to say, to share with Freud, to be alone in sharing with Freud), that she had always spoken in the name of her father, in the name of the father:
It seems to me that Yerushalmi’s thesis advances here while withdrawing itself. But it is a thesis with a rather particular status—and a paradoxical movement: it posits not so much what is as what will have been and ought to or should be in the future, namely that psychoanalysis should in the future have been a Jewish science
It goes without saying, if one could put it this way, that Freud’s phantom does not respond. That is at least how things appear. But can this be trusted? In promising secrecy for a virtual response which keeps us waiting, which will always keep us waiting, the signatory of this monologue lets it be understood that Freud would never say in public, for example in a book and in what is destined to become public archive, what he thinks in truth secretly, like the monologist who says “we,” namely, that, yes, psychoanalysis is indeed a Jewish science. Is this not incidentally what he has already, in private, so often suggested? Is this not what he has already murmured in remarks, entrusted to letters, consigned in a thousand signs which Yerushalmi has inventoried, classed, put in order, interpreted with unprecedented vigilance and jubilation? But at the end of the book, the monologist who says “we” says he is ready to respect the secret, to keep for his personal archives the response which the phantom, with its own mouth, could murmur in his ear in private.
fictive and effective, taut, dramatic, as generous as it is implacable, this “Monologue” does not deprive the other of his right to speak. Not without injustice can one say that Freud has no chance to speak. He is the first to speak, in a certain sense, and the last word is offered to him. The right to speak is left, given or lent to him.
How can he claim to prove an absence of archive? How does one prove in general an absence of archive, if not in relying on classical norms (presence/ absence of literal and explicit reference to this or to that, to a this or to a that which one supposes to be identical to themselves, and simply absent, actually absent, if they are not simply present, actually present; how can one not, and why not take into account unconscious, and more generally virtual archives)?
o Is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering’, but justice?”
o Does one base one’s thinking of the future on an archived event—with or without substrate, with or without actuality—for example on a divine injunction or on a messianic covenant? Or else, on the contrary, can an experience, an existence, in general, only receive and record, only archive such an event to the extent that the structure of this existence and of its temporalization makes this archivization possible? In other words, does one need a first archive in order to conceive of originary archivability?
• It is known that Freud did everything possible to not neglect the experience of haunting, spectrality, phantoms, ghosts. He tried to account for them. Courageously, in as scientific, critical, and positive a fashion as possible. But in this way, he also tried to conjure them.
• THESIS 2:
o the archive is made possible by the death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation. But beyond finitude as limit, there is, as we said above, this properly in-finite movement of radical destruction without which no archive desire or fever would happen.
March 10, 2024
I thought this would be an interesting read on the creation of the archive but it is instead a discussion on how the nebulous concept of archive can cause suppression and repression when writing history and creating memory. This lecture (now printed) is a timely presentation on how Zionism developed and continues to remain unchecked. It ties into my own research on museums and archives’ role in creating “others” when collecting the memories of tragedy.
“Consignation is never without that excessive pressure of which repression and suppression are at least figures… the One guards against / keeps some of the other. It protects itself from the other, but, in the movement of this jealous violence, it compromises in itself, this guarding it, the self-otherness or self-difference which makes it One… it violates and does violence to itself but it also institutes itself as violence. (78).”
“Consignation is never without that excessive pressure of which repression and suppression are at least figures… the One guards against / keeps some of the other. It protects itself from the other, but, in the movement of this jealous violence, it compromises in itself, this guarding it, the self-otherness or self-difference which makes it One… it violates and does violence to itself but it also institutes itself as violence. (78).”
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March 11, 2025It’s not pretentious to read this if you have no clue what it’s about :)
August 17, 2017
Mi primer baile con Jacques Derrida y creo no haberle pisado (excesivamente) los pies.
En el proceso de deconstruir el concepto de archivo (de archivo freudiano, del archivo del psicoanálisis, particularmente) entrega varios focos de análisis útiles por fuera del corpus de su propio ejercicio ensayístico:
-el ejercicio de poder tras el archivo y la figura del arconte como personalización de ese poder (y, por tanto, como válido intérprete, como agente autorizado).
-la idea del cuerpo como documento con registros, y, en cierta medida, como archivo.
-la tendencia constante a la destrucción del archivo, de donde deriva, por vía inversa, la necesidad archivística que da título al libro.
-el archivo como espacio del pasado pero en función de rememoración de un porvenir (esto acá me gustó mucho, no sólo por el juego de palabras).
-el espectro como habitante del archivo, y sean lo que sean las consecuencias de lo que eso significa.
Además de esos caminos, el ejercicio que hace en el Prólogo funciona como guía de uso, pues permite, analizando sus procedimientos, imitar el manejo de sus conceptualizaciones previas y aplicarlas, entonces, a nuestros fines propios (guardando las proporciones y el decoro*, por supuesto).
No es una lectura difícil, y a quien le interese el tema del archivo le prestará luces desde perspectivas bien elaboradas.
*Al diablo el decoro. Las proporciones, sí, el decoro; ¡fuera del baile!
En el proceso de deconstruir el concepto de archivo (de archivo freudiano, del archivo del psicoanálisis, particularmente) entrega varios focos de análisis útiles por fuera del corpus de su propio ejercicio ensayístico:
-el ejercicio de poder tras el archivo y la figura del arconte como personalización de ese poder (y, por tanto, como válido intérprete, como agente autorizado).
-la idea del cuerpo como documento con registros, y, en cierta medida, como archivo.
-la tendencia constante a la destrucción del archivo, de donde deriva, por vía inversa, la necesidad archivística que da título al libro.
-el archivo como espacio del pasado pero en función de rememoración de un porvenir (esto acá me gustó mucho, no sólo por el juego de palabras).
-el espectro como habitante del archivo, y sean lo que sean las consecuencias de lo que eso significa.
Además de esos caminos, el ejercicio que hace en el Prólogo funciona como guía de uso, pues permite, analizando sus procedimientos, imitar el manejo de sus conceptualizaciones previas y aplicarlas, entonces, a nuestros fines propios (guardando las proporciones y el decoro*, por supuesto).
No es una lectura difícil, y a quien le interese el tema del archivo le prestará luces desde perspectivas bien elaboradas.
*Al diablo el decoro. Las proporciones, sí, el decoro; ¡fuera del baile!
March 3, 2017
"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. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed
no repetition compulsion, no "mal-de" can arise for a person who is not already, in one
way or another, en mal d'archive. Now the principle of the internal division of the
Freudian gesture, and thus of the Freudian concept of the archive, is that at the moment
when psychoanalysis formalizes the conditions of archive fever and of the archive itself,
it repeats the very thing it resists or which it makes its object. It raises the stakes."
Read this with Piazzolla's Concierto Para Quinteto and Rachmaninoff's Piano concerto no.2 in C Minor playing in the background; this text needs rhythm. Feverish and gorgeous.
desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic
place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed
no repetition compulsion, no "mal-de" can arise for a person who is not already, in one
way or another, en mal d'archive. Now the principle of the internal division of the
Freudian gesture, and thus of the Freudian concept of the archive, is that at the moment
when psychoanalysis formalizes the conditions of archive fever and of the archive itself,
it repeats the very thing it resists or which it makes its object. It raises the stakes."
Read this with Piazzolla's Concierto Para Quinteto and Rachmaninoff's Piano concerto no.2 in C Minor playing in the background; this text needs rhythm. Feverish and gorgeous.
April 17, 2016
I would have given this text more stars, if not for the fact that I study historical fiction. The majority of Derrida's main ideas on the archive resemble concepts already discussed by those who have written on the historical genre, and who present and state these concepts more clearly, without references to Freud or using phallocentric ideas and language.
October 9, 2024
Bij deze archiveer ik voor mijzelf, later, dus mijn andere zelf (zal hij het ooit herinneren om het te lezen, en wanneer, waarom?) die daarmee zich radicaal van mij scheidt (niet onder dezelfde essentie, categorie, grond/oorsprong valt)en "mij" niet is, deze zin, waarmee de noodzaak van de arbeid van herinnering ter sprake wordt gebracht:
"without the irrepressible, that is to say, only suppressible and repressible, force and authority of this transgenerational memory the problems of which we speak would be dissolved and resolved in advance. There would no longer be any essential history of culture, there would no longer be any question of memory and of archive, of patriarchive or of matriarchive, and one would no longer even understand how an ancestor can speak within us, nor what sense there might be in is to speak to him or her, to speak in such an "unheimlich," or "uncanny" fashion, to his or her ghost. With it."
Alleen omdat we ons eigenlijk niets essentieel of totaal kunnen herinneren - voor eens en altijd - zijn we bezig met een proces van herinnering. En omdat de toekomst nooit in het heden zal kunnen worden gearchiveerd, zijn we bezig met een anarchivisatie, in naam van de toekomst.
"without the irrepressible, that is to say, only suppressible and repressible, force and authority of this transgenerational memory the problems of which we speak would be dissolved and resolved in advance. There would no longer be any essential history of culture, there would no longer be any question of memory and of archive, of patriarchive or of matriarchive, and one would no longer even understand how an ancestor can speak within us, nor what sense there might be in is to speak to him or her, to speak in such an "unheimlich," or "uncanny" fashion, to his or her ghost. With it."
Alleen omdat we ons eigenlijk niets essentieel of totaal kunnen herinneren - voor eens en altijd - zijn we bezig met een proces van herinnering. En omdat de toekomst nooit in het heden zal kunnen worden gearchiveerd, zijn we bezig met een anarchivisatie, in naam van de toekomst.
September 1, 2025
“… without even an ash.”
March 13, 2024
A lecture on Freud’s strangest book (which I haven’t read), Moses and Monotheism, dwelling on questions of Jewishness and Science. Derrida thinks through the Archive as a giving-back of a previous gift (Freud’s circumcision commemorated with a bible that is re-gifted back to him years later by his father). I know it’s crazy but I really like unpacking Derrida’s thinking on this. How the archive is an inheritance that’s always virtual, hopeful even.
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January 27, 2025واقعن نمیتونم نمره بدم چون به جز یک کلیت از نظریه دریدا، بسیاری از ارجاعتت رو مطالعه نکرده بودم که درک را خیلی سخت میکرد اما دیگر آجر اول پروژه است
November 7, 2013
Deeply interested in archives, I enjoyed Derrida's decomposition of the "archive" into a collection of objects which is at once complete and incomplete- to find things within the the archive, we resort to titles. Titles represent bodies of knowledge, but are not full works in themselves (like citations upon which scholarly texts are built). At any given time one can know a full text, or know the archive (through a condensed representation of titles.) Derrida uses this organizational principle to discuss history as a positivist truth or constructivist categories.
He then moves into the main argument on Freud, focusing on impressions as 1) marks upon paper, 2) influences upon oneself, and 3) influences upon many selves. He balanced this with Freud's basic human drives--the genetic force, if you will, which influences many selves for food and reproduction (unconscious), the influence of personal experience (subconscious), and the impression made in ones life (conscious).
While this was tantalizing, I have little interest in Freud's familial religious background, or the impressions he had on his daughter, and I subsequently became disinterested in the argument for the second half of the book.
He then moves into the main argument on Freud, focusing on impressions as 1) marks upon paper, 2) influences upon oneself, and 3) influences upon many selves. He balanced this with Freud's basic human drives--the genetic force, if you will, which influences many selves for food and reproduction (unconscious), the influence of personal experience (subconscious), and the impression made in ones life (conscious).
While this was tantalizing, I have little interest in Freud's familial religious background, or the impressions he had on his daughter, and I subsequently became disinterested in the argument for the second half of the book.
November 18, 2014
Derrida poses many good ideas about the archive. I had to read this for a class about archiving a "queer" past and it was, of course, seminal to the class discussion. However, as is expected for Derrida, it was such a challenge to get through, willing myself to sit down and process all of the information was incredibly difficult; at some points I was convinced I wasn't reading in English. The content becomes even more impressive when one think about the fact that this was a lecture.
Derrida was undoubtedly an amazing thinker of our time and I'm convinced that I absolutely must read more of his work, but maybe this time with a glass of wine.
Derrida was undoubtedly an amazing thinker of our time and I'm convinced that I absolutely must read more of his work, but maybe this time with a glass of wine.
May 14, 2009
This is a dense but brilliant book. It's only 111 pages in my edition but you have to concentrate, as Derrida contemplates on archives, time, Judaism and Jewishness, Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis... There's a lot of meat and potatoes in this book!
July 8, 2009
the theses are cleft--big surprise!
September 22, 2010
i get a little tired of how derrida writes, looping around in his thoughts, but then at other times i find it nutritious. but man, what a subject, freud is endlessly fascinating, and scary.
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