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Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Archive fever’ (1995) takes Freud’s house/museum to pieces. In Derrida’s museum of words we occasionally glimpse a connection between archaeology and psychoanalysis, as a disinterment of the present which, in terms of the latter, can only mean that whatever has been uncovered attests to the abiding authority of the past over the present and its problems with cohering in the future. Derrida recognised, despite his detour into deconstruction and the openness of the term ‘archive’ to its sense of establishing a place of permanence while unleashing its instability, the destructive aspect of the term.

Derrida’s deconstruction of Freud’s archive/museum and Freud’s own writing as archiving emerges from his typical interrogation of the roots of the word,

which has the double meaning of commencement and commandment.

Derrida’s etymology is also the definition of a secure foundation with this sense of arche: the secure gathering together of signs in a place, as a consignation. His attention to the archive as writing permits his characteristic slippage and linkage between the archive as a collection of documents, a place (the Freud museum), a home, a law, a ‘school’ and an institution.

This poststructuralist positing of the archive as unstable text is clear enough. However, another narrative percolates through this grammatology:

viewed from a certain angle, the archive of the psychoanalyst exists at the intersection of media technology, archaeology and science fiction.

Themes of destruction, loss and discovery emerge at this meeting point.

In Derrida’s discourse the threat of the archive’s dissolution is never far away. His recognition that archaeology is close to psychoanalysis in its work (and closer to Freud still) enables him to make a bridge between the two by drawing on Freud’s death drive and its destructive capacity. Despite Freud’s laborious investment of paper, ink and printing in his archive, the death instinct – the very issue he commits to paper – has a silent vocation

‘aiming to ruin the archive as accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’ (p. 14). The death drive destroys even its own archive, its own principle. The archive as memory (anamnesis) is threatened by its existence as hypomnesis (its extension in media as weakened memory – books and other prostheses for storing memory):

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

(p. 14). Further: ‘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’ (p. 14).

Derrida’s scene of writing segues into a version of fiction: the archive as a time capsule, reconfiguring a reconstitution of Freud’s archive of psychoanalysis, and the archiving of Freud’s house. The archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stockpiling and conserving an archivable content of the past, but a technical determination of the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and relationship to the future. The archivization produces the event as much as it records it.

Only when lost or buried are archives truly safe. As Derrida recognises, with reference to Freud, such hidden archives are like the unconscious. Once dug up, they begin to disintegrate. Freud states:

I then made some short observations upon the psychological differences between the conscious and the unconscious, and upon the fact that everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing-away, while what was unconscious was relatively unchangeable; and I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antiques standing about in my room.

They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation; the destruction of Pompeii was

only beginning now that it had been dug up. (Freud, 1974[1953]: 176, emphasis in original)

Less explicit is Derrida’s turn to technology and its impact on the archive.

This obvious metaphorical device links the archive, the archaeologist and psychoanalysis. Oddly and surprisingly, science fiction is at the centre (or margin) of Derrida’s strange essay and his attempts to wrest from the doctor’s life and work an unsettlingly discursive account of the work of the archive, and its porous character. Derrida (1995: 17) asks the reader or listener to permit him an excursus:

One can dream or speculate about the geo-technological shocks which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, Freud, his contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had had access to MCI or ATT telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail. I would have liked to devote my whole lecture to this retrospective science fiction. I would have liked to imagine with you the scene of that other archive after the earthquake and after the

‘apres-coups’ of its aftershocks.

This aspect of Derrida’s text momentarily casts the moment of the archive into an anachronistic context, where technology is sent back to suggest another parallel world for Freud. Derrida asks what Freud’s past and future would be like if he had been able to use later media technologies. Derrida considered Freud as speculative fiction and alternative history. His excursus puts forward an impossible question, implanting recent and current media technologies post-Freud into his time: setting up a form of destruction of the archive no less effective than Freud’s sense of the death drive at the heart of his work.

Derrida did not act on his idea of treating the archive like technological time-travel, choosing instead to bury himself in his deconstruction of Freud’s museum, amongst the collapsed remains of material, writing, discourse and the ‘school’ of Freud to invoke in a poststructuralist form of ‘archive fever’.

So instead, his text asks ‘what is an archive?’

However, he admits frustration in not being allowed more latitude to introduce at least three times the amount of material he was constrained to speak about in the paper. Here, Derrida is aware of how one medium, the spoken word, and another, the written paper, conflict with each other:

As I am not able to do this, on account of the ever archaic organization of our colloquia, of the time and the space at our disposal, I will limit myself to a mechanical remark: this archival earthquake would not have limited its effects to the secondary recording, to the printing and

to the conservation of the history of psychoanalysis. It would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events. (p. 17)

There are moments when Derrida puts aside his tools to make a few excursive remarks. For instance, he thinks of the archive as a kind of machine that drove Freudian science forward (the archive inventing or demarcating the concepts rather than the other way round – classic post-structuralism). He reverts to a language befitting Foucault or Kittler, the discourse as network or regime.

Here, our interest in the archive lies in the collapse of the technological present with an archived past, suggesting another phantom history, and leading to an alternative world. Following Derrida’s throwback sci-fi, he states at the outset that he does not want to ‘begin at the beginning’ nor even start with the archive, but embark from the word ‘archive’. Putting the lexical aspect aside, and leaving behind those consignations of the archive as law and place, we can also consider the end of the archive, and establish it as homeless and lawless not within its language, but in its history. Derrida chose not to consider the implications of transposing alien media technology onto the scene of Freud’s writing. While his digression enabled him to consider how different the archive of Freud would have been he does not dwell on the other outcome: the contradiction of one media technology by another. New media put older ones to death. Derrida signals the destructive character of the archive through Freud’s comment that the overwhelming factuality and obviousness of the death drive means it is scarcely worth archiving it as a hypothesis in ink and paper (yet he does so anyway). For Derrida, the archive cannot accommodate the destruction drive: the death drive is above all archivic, or archiviolithic. It will always have been archive-destroying. Archives are susceptible to destruction. This drama is the province of archaeology, which does its reconstructive job, and cultural production, which is a doubling of the archive, in which depictions of the past are projected into the future through science fiction and its media.

How might this connect with a cultural and visual, rather than literary and scientific way of apprehension; a gathering together of signs not constitutive of an archive in themselves, but available as a means of sensing the archive through other media? The archive might be secured through its mobilisation in visual culture in order to capture its movement as a chiasmus between past and future. Our present history is split between the archive as restitution of the past and construction of the future: the archive as a destiny, or destination, rather than law or origin.

Ballard Unfinished: The Archive between Technology