Status Updates From Mal de archivo

The first, the arch-example, shows us the desire of an admirable historian who wants in sum to be the first archivist, the first to discover the archive, the archaeologist and perhaps the archon of the archive. The first archivist institutes the archive as it should be, that is to say, not only in exhibiting the document but in establishing it. He reads it, interprets it, classes it.

It is what I called earlier, and in view of this internal contradiction, archive fever. There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression.

Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive.

över till annat..

What a strange and charming little book this is. As a first impression of Derrida, it tells me what his deal is. He is certainly an acquired taste. Auto-reflexive polysemic (never polemic) meta-discourse seems to be his shtick, which, for something like "the archive", is literary and cute. Which is altogether what I was looking for, really. The Judaic and psychoanalytic lenses in particular tickle my fancy, too.