Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust

Abstract

IN THE SUMMER OF 1994, Jacques Derrida presented a paper to a conference London, delivering the English-language version of what was to become Mal d'archive: Une impression freudienne the North London Freud House, Maresfield Gardens.1 In the opening passages of Archive Fever, Derrida presented his audience with the image of the arkhe, as a place where things begin, where power originates, its workings inextricably bound up with the authority of beginnings. In the brief account of the operation of the Greek city-state that he gave on that occasion (and the various printed versions that followed), he pointed to its official documents, stored the arkheion, the superior magistrate's residence. There, the archon himself, the magistrate, exercised the power of procedure and precedent, his right to interpret them for the operation of a system of law. In Derrida's description, the arkhe-the archive-appears to represent the now of whatever kind of power is being exercised, anywhere, any place or time. It represents a principle that, Derrida's words, is in the order of commencement as well as the order of commandment. The mal (the fever, the sickness) of the archive is to do with its very establishment, which is the establishment of state power and authority.2 And then there is the feverish desire-a kind of sickness unto death-that Derrida indicatedfor the archive: the fever not so much to enter it and use it as to have it. For those historians who heard or read Archive Fever, it raised the puzzling question of what on earth an archive was doing there the first place, at the beginning of a long description of another text (someone else's text, not Derrida's), which dealt, as he himself would go on to do at length, with Sigmund Freud and the topic of psychoanalysis.3 For the main part, Archive Fever is a sustained