The ANARCHIVE

In one of my other classes, we’re reading Jaques Derrida’s Archive Fever and it’s so relevant I just couldn’t resist posting about it. Derrida’s theory of “archive fever” (mal d’archive) holds that there is simultaneously a desire to preserve and add to the archive (indefinitely or for eternity) and to destroy it completely. (My own personal conception of the “archive” is that it is anything that contains information, so: a person, a blog, a movie, a historical tourist destination . . . )

Derrida introduces the idea of anarchive, which (as I understand it) is the inability to ever locate the “final truth” of the archive; it's the instability of the archive and the chaos of the archive all at once.

Derrida says: "We are en mal d’archive: In need of archives. Listening to the French idiom, and in it the attribute en mal de, to be en mal d’archive can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness, from a trouble or from what the noun mal might name. It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself" (91).

When something anarchives itself, it unclassifies itself, takes itself out of context, refuses to be integrated into the comprehensive “whole” of an argument or a conception. For example, the human hair that Lindenthal talks about would be a great example. The hair, although a legitimate part of the archive of the Holocaust, anarchives itself by virtue of its being human remains. It does not fit into the tidy narrative of the Holocaust created by the museum.

Anyway, this may be something to bear in mind as we travel on.

Derrida, Jaques. Archive Fever. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.