“Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”
A classic text by the French intellectual Jacques Derrida. The “archive” is always incomplete and in a process of becoming, which is in tension with those official archives, constituted by a physical place, that are concerned with representational totality and institutional integrity. In the latter, institutionalised “archive fever” is connected to repetition-compulsion and a death drive. As there may be ideological biases or scotoma in official archives with reference to particular art works and/or documentation, the Left is often driven to archive its own practices and histories — for example Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D), founded by Lucy Lippard in 1979 — to alleviate the “blind spots” in official archives. However, in doing so these “alternative” archives are beset by their own archive fever demonstrating that the “archive” is both a necessary entity and an impossible project.