Abstract

This paper argues that Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995) is not merely about historiography or the recording of the past: rather, by showing how the notion of the archive depends on an internal contradiction, Archive Fever offers a theory of time as precondition to selfhood. The internal contradiction in question concerns the death drive. I turn to the death drive's role in the functioning of unconscious memory to posit this claim about the archive and, subsequently, its temporalisation as implied in the faculty of forgetfulness, i.e., the positive force of selfhood. This analysis of Archive Fever is overlooked due to insufficient consideration of the death drive, part of Derrida’s approaches to Consciousness and the psychic apparatus in his interpretation of Freud. In particular, I retrieve how Derrida uses the death drive to juxtapose Freud’s theory of time in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and in ‘Notes Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad’ (1925).