20 Years of Archive Fever
A reconvening of the 1994 conference at which Jacques Derrida delivered his lecture Archive Fever.
Freud Museum, London
2014
Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco in London in 1994
“It is what is happening, right here, when a house, the Freuds’ last house, becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to another.”
“Derrida sees in Freud’s writing the very desire that is Archive Fever: the desire to recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings.”
Presented as a gift to the Freud Museum in London, Derrida's lecture Archive Fever remains an important work for scholars and artists interested in the relationship between archives, memory, and technology.
Originally titled The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression, Derrida's deconstruction of the act of archiving opens up the contradictory nature of archives: how they are simultaneously public and private spaces, institutive and conservative, traditional and revolutionary.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the lecture, 20 Years of Archive Fever invited academics who attended the original lecture to offer their interpretations of the work and to explore its continued relevance today.
The panel included Riccardo Steiner (Psychoanalyst and speaker at the original conference), Prof. Sarah Wilson (Courtauld Institute, where the conference was held), Prof. Dany Nobus (Brunel University), Dr. Forbes Morlock (Syracuse University), Julia Borossa (Middlesex University) and Michael Molnar (former Director of the Freud Museum and the principal conference organiser).
In addition to the panel discussion, experts from different academic disciplines considered the importance of 'Archive Fever' to their work.
Contributions included talks by Prof. Carolyn Steedman (Emeritus Professor of History at Warwick University, and author of Dust: The Archive and Cultural History), Dr. Beverley Butler (Senior Lecturer at UCL's Institute of Archaeology), and Professor Jérôme Lèbre (Paris)
Recordings from the event can be found here.
Credits
Guy Atkins
Artist-researcher
Ivan Ward
Deputy Director, Freud Museum
James Bulley
Sound artist