Never had I before thought to think through the word “archive.” Every time it has been mentioned I usually would just assume someone was referring to old documents or public records hidden away in the depths of an ancient, giant library. However, after reading the beginning of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, I am slowly beginning to understand Derrida’s meaning of the term archive. To Derrida, archive is not just something historical, but rather a commencement in time where things have taken place as well as a thing that is ordered and has an authoritarian aspect to it. He also described an archive as a “place of shelter” which I am still curious exactly what that means. Could he mean that an archive is shielded away from the present?
Derrida also touches on the death drive to archive; however, he describes the death drive as destructive, something we do in order to return to either the place in which we live or to return nature back to how it once was before we were born which then leads us to archive. I feel as though today the death drive we have to archive is not so much destructive but rather just an act of desperation to have something left of us for those that come, so that we could remain immortal in a sense. I believe this is one of the places where our discussion of the picture not taken fits in because it leads us to question, how do we decide what to archive and what not to archive? Should we document a moment to archive so that it is out there in the public forever, or should we put away our cameras and experience the moment, good or bad, so that the moment is simply a personal archive imprinted in our mind where it will die with us unless passed down to someone else?
When Derrida began discussing the impact of technology on archives, I once again became slightly confused as to what exactly he was trying to get across but I assumed it had something to do with the fact that technology would indeed alter an archive. He brings up the archives of Freud and explains just how different they would be if he had used email. I am assuming he means that there will always be a new way to archive as more and more materials and technologies are introduced. I would guess that as our resources expand, our archives may become less formal then they once were when the only option was a piece of paper and pen. Derrida also mentioned how archives anticipate the future but does that mean that we build upon our older archives or that we destroy the old ones as Derrida mentioned when talking about the death drive so that we can start over simply using the new materials around us?
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