Derrida’s Archive Fever

From January 18 to March 4 2008, Okwui Enwezor organized the exhibition Archive Fever at the International Center of Photography in New York. According to Enwezor himself, the aim of the exhibition was “to show the ways in which archival documents, information gathering, data-driven visual analysis, the contradictions of master narratives, the invention of counter-archives and thus counter-narratives, the projection of the social imagination into sites of testimony, witnessing, and much more inform and infuse the practices of contemporary artists.”[1] ‘Archive Fever’, however, is a term derived from Jacques Derrida‘s book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (1996) in which Derrida analyzes “the science of the archive as a system of laws through which statements acquire their privileged evidentiary status.”[2] In this work, Derrida gives an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology – all occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. He states that the archive can only exists and survive by ‘external intervention’ in which the construction of the archive should always be deconstructed, decomposed and rebuild in order to forever question the truth value of the archival document while also pointing out the problematics of taxonomy: “A science of the archive must include the theory of its institutionalization, that is to say, the theory both of the law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes it. (…) There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory (…). What comes under theory or under private correspondence, for example? What comes under system? Under biography or autobiography? Under personal or intellectual anamnesis? In works said to be theoretical, what is worthy of this name and what is not? (…) In each of these cases, the limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured.”[3]

From January 18 to March 4 2008, Okwui Enwezor organized the exhibition Archive Fever at the International Center of Photography in New York. According to Enwezor himself, the aim of the exhibition was “to show the ways in which archival documents, information gathering, data-driven visual analysis, the contradictions of master narratives, the invention of counter-archives and thus counter-narratives, the projection of the social imagination into sites of testimony, witnessing, and much more inform and infuse the practices of contemporary artists.”[1] ‘Archive Fever’, however, is a term derived from Jacques Derrida‘s book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (1996) in which Derrida analyzes “the science of the archive as a system of laws through which statements acquire their privileged evidentiary status.”[2] In this work, Derrida gives an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology – all occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. He states that the archive can only exists and survive by ‘external intervention’ in which the construction of the archive should always be deconstructed, decomposed and rebuild in order to forever question the truth value of the archival document while also pointing out the problematics of taxonomy: “A science of the archive must include the theory of its institutionalization, that is to say, the theory both of the law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes it. (…) There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory (…). What comes under theory or under private correspondence, for example? What comes under system? Under biography or autobiography? Under personal or intellectual anamnesis? In works said to be theoretical, what is worthy of this name and what is not? (…) In each of these cases, the limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured.”[3]