Archive Fever

Photo­graph, size 4530.5 cm (21.515 cm) Edition of 7


Archive – a collction of works

For Sigmund Freud himself, the destruc­tion drive is no longer a debat­able hypoth­esis. Even if this spec­u­la­tion never takes the form of a fixed thesis, even if it is never posited, it is another name for Ananke, invin­cible neces­sity. It is as if Freud could no longer resist, hence­forth, the irre­ducible and orig­i­nary perver­sity of this drive which he names here some­times death drive, some­times aggres­sion drive, some­times destruc­tion drive, as if these three words were in this case synonyms. Second, this three-named drive is mute (stumm). It is at work, but since it always oper­ates in silence, it never leaves any archives of its own. It destroys in advance its own archive, as if that were in truth the very moti­va­tion of its most proper move­ment. It works to destroy the archive: on the condi­tion of effacing it but also with a view to effacing its own proper” traces – which conse­quently cannot prop­erly be called proper”. It devours it even before producing it on the outside. This drive, from then on, seems not only to be anar­chic, anar­chontic (we must not forget that the death drive, orig­i­nary though it may be, is not a prin­ciple, as are the plea­sure and reality prin­ci­ples): the death drive is above all anar­chivic, one could say, or archiv­i­o­lithic. It will always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation.1

1 Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impres­sion. Chicago and London: Univer­sity of Chicago Press 199810

The photo­graph of Juli­ette Brungs was taken on 23.8.2010 at the Cologne hole”, where the former Histor­ical City Archives in Germany stood and collapsed on 3.3.2009. The graf­fiti on a safety barrier reads: Wo ist die Verant­wor­tung für diesen Pfusch! 03.03.2009 – im Abgrund!” (Who is respon­sible for this botch-up! 03.03.2009 – into the abyss!”

With the collapse of the City Archives, due to mistakes made in the construc­tion work of a new under­ground line in the vicinity, Tanya Ury liter­ally lost the family archive that the Ury family had donated to the City of Cologne, in 1999.

Juli­ette Brungs has written an article Written Into the Body – the Perfor­mance Video Art of Tanya Ury” (which will later be devel­oped as a book on Esther Dischereit and Tanya Ury), in which she refers to the archive of Archive Fever — A Freudian Impres­sion” by Jacques Derrida.


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