Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression

Overview
Jacques Derrida stages a diagnostic meditation on archives, memory, and the impulses that animate institutional preservation. He borrows Freud's categories to show that the archive is not a neutral repository of facts but a structured formation that produces and regulates what counts as the past. The phrase "archive fever" names a compulsion: a desire to secure traces and origins that is simultaneously productive and pathological.

Archive as Structure and Origin
Derrida argues that the archive organizes a community's relation to its own origin by instituting rules about what may be kept, who may keep it, and how it is to be read. The archive is therefore a scene of power: to establish an archive is to establish authority, to found what will stand as evidence and precedent. That founding is always ambiguous, marked by an absence or caesura where origins are presumed but never fully present.

Freudian Resonances: Drive, Memory, and Repetition
Invoking Freud allows Derrida to think of archiving in terms of drives rather than mere utility. The archive manifests a libidinal economy in which desire for preservation ties up with repetition compulsion and the death drive. The act of saving can be both life-affirming and destructive: to fix a trace is to retroactively determine meaning, to immobilize a living past and make of it an object subject to control. This simultaneity explains why archival desire can be feverish, obsessive, and at times pathological.

Authority, Secrecy, and Institutional Violence
The power to archive is also a power to exclude, to classify, and to render certain voices legible while others remain outside the regime of documentation. Derrida stresses that archives institutionalize secrecy as much as they promise disclosure. The archivist, the legal apparatus, and the archive's material technologies participate in a politics of naming and not-naming, of legitimizing certain histories and marginalizing others. The archive thus bears on questions of responsibility, culpability, and the law's relation to memory.

Prosthesis, Postmemory, and the Ethics of Deletion
Archives function as prostheses for memory, external supports that extend human recollection but also transform it. Derrida shows that technologies and practices of preservation reconfigure identity and history by making the past accessible on demand, while raising ethical dilemmas about erasure, ownership, and the right to oblivion. The fever to keep can work against forgetting in ways that ossify the social relation to time, yet forgetting is also involved in the very constitution of any archive.

Legacy and Critical Stakes
"Archive Fever" reframes debates about heritage, testimony, and historical truth by insisting that archives are active agents in producing the past rather than passive receptacles. The essay has influenced scholarship in archival theory, memory studies, and political philosophy by exposing the juridical and psychical stakes of preservation. It closes not with tidy judgment but with a persistent question about how to live responsibly with traces: how to care for the past without allowing the archive to become an instrument of monopoly, secrecy, or necropolitical control.