I've Got a Fever, and the Only Prescription Is More Archiving

I’ve previously written about a notional archival illness, Verknüpfungszwang - the compulsion to find connections. This was first described a century ago, only half-jokingly, by art historian and note-making obsessive Aby Warburg.

More recently, in his 1994 lecture Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression¹, literary theorist Jacques Derrida diagnosed a different but equally peculiar modern ailment: an insatiable drive to archive.

This was more than just a scholarly tendency to hoard footnotes or to lovingly alphabetise newspaper clippings. Derrida’s mal d’archive was more deeply affecting than that.

According to the controversial French academic it was a fever, a pathology. A yearning to capture and preserve everything, paired paradoxically with an anxiety that you will never preserve enough. At its heart, Derrida’s archive fever is about the tension between memory and forgetting, order and chaos, permanence and loss…

📚 Don’t let your note-making system infect you with Archive Fever

I’ve had this in my queue to post about, but each time I reopen the original post I realize that I want to quote the entire thing. (Writing Slowly is frequently this good.) It’s a meta-symptom! I’ve compromised by copying the entire thing into my personal notes and quoting just the first portion above.

Pairs well with: 🎙️ Future of Coding 77 – As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

See also: 📦 ArchiveBox – see 🎙️ Let’s archive the web for discussion of ArchiveBox and Internet archivists in general.