Derrida’s Archive Fever

(4 Credits)

What is an archive? Is it a library, a legacy, a school of thought? For that matter, what does each of these terms mean? Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995) has provoked intense conversations among archivists, philosophers, historians, psychoanalysts, and social scientists about the archive and its relation to questions of memory. In this seminar we will read Derrida’s Archive Fever, and the writing that underlies and is necessary to understand it: Freud’s controversial Moses and Monotheism; Freud's famous essay on the death drive, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”; Jensen’s novella Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy, and Freud’s response to it; and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Students will learn to read Derrida's famously difficult writing accurately and with pleasure, and will visit Derrida's own archive at Princeton University.