ABSTRACT
In his 1995 text Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida interrupts his discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis and the archive to briey imagine the eects, or shocks, late-twentiethcentury communications technologies would have introduced into the young discipline. Enjoying a speculative detour into the electronic terrain of email and word processing, Derrida concludes that a dierent set of writing technologies would have reformatted the explanatory frameworks of psychoanalysis, which were predicated on analog models of inscription and archival memory, and therefore would have rewritten the history of the eld. He notes that the archive does not neutrally conserve archivable materials, “No, the technological structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content.” He continues, “The archivization produces as much as it records the event” (Derrida 16-17, original emphasis). Archival technologies have a profound, even deterministic eect on what can be preserved, and therefore on the possibilities of documentation, memory, and transmission. Derrida stresses the impact the structure of the archive has on what can be archived or what is considered archivable content, and further suggests that the process of archivization not only serves a recording function, but perhaps in a more signicant way, produces the events it is charged with memorializing.
