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The Power of Arch-Violence Inherent in Archives: Focusing on Derrida’s “Archive Fever”

  • The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
  • Abbr : JASA
  • 2023, 70(), pp.34-51
  • DOI : 10.17527/JASA.70.0.02
  • Publisher : 한국미학예술학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Other Arts and Kinesiology
  • Received : August 15, 2023
  • Accepted : September 12, 2023
  • Published : October 31, 2023

Seul-Bi Lee 1

1홍익대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to analyze archives, focusing on Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995). “Archive fever” is a desire to obsessively return to the source or origin of memory. However, for Derrida, origin does not exist from the beginning, it exists only as a trace. As with memory, the original memory does not exist. Therefore, the duality inherent in archives is revealed from the role of forgetting in memory. According to Derrida, the duality of the archive is inherent from the beginning as the power of arch-violence. This is the energy to destroy the archive at the beginning, just like Freud called the death drive. The death drive of the archive, or the power of arch-violence, is a kind of “ability” and becomes a condition for the establishment of the archive. This archive-ability is a movement toward destruction and division at the same time as the institutional establishment of the archive. Along with this, it is also the basis for the archive to remain in the future. This article basically deals with the archive itself based on Derrida’s ideas. We will see that archives and archivists, the place of archives, and the archives to come are all based on the arch-violence power of archives. Thus, it shows that the archive is open to the future as a possibility.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.