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More than a theoretical account of the figure and concept of the archive in general, Derrida's Archive Fever (1995) closely reads Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's "Monologue with Freud" chapter in the scholar's Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991). To the unacquainted, this is the missing third term, between Archive Fever and the relevant texts of the Freudian corpus.1 The triangulation rests on the Moses of Michelangelo, which in turnrests on the Moses of the Old Testament. The investigation of archive as a conceptual concern-Derrida's original title was "The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression"-was delivered at the Freud Museum in London on the 5th of June 1994.2 Yerushalmi's absence on this particular occasion seems to be all the more fortuitous, given Derrida's lengthy discussion of "Monologue with Freud" as an address toan absent listener, a ghost. Yet the title of the work changed, from presentation to publication, to "archive fever," or mal d'archive.
To what does this enigmatic heading refer? It enjoys multiple referents: in one sense, it refers to "death drive." Later it also comes to name the need for, desire for, and sickness of desire for the archive, that is, homesickness or nostalgia for the archive. It thus entails an always situated or embeddedness in a Janus-faced relation to time and space: both looking backward and toward the future, as well as with interior consignation depending on its exteriority to some other thing. To be en mal de signifies to be amidst an already temporalized relationship to the past and future, that is, to history and memory but also the future and the virtual. This retrospection and looking toward the futurelinks to the complicated temporality of the psychoanalytic concept of Nacthräglikeit ("afterwardness") or Nachträglichegehorsam ("deferred obedience"), which conditions the form of the differing rhetorical manifestations of temporal structure in Derrida's text, as demonstrated below. Yet there are two means by which death drive is implicated by the archive, the first of which is perhaps given or explicit. The second, however, relies on the account of writing and memory posited in Derrida's early work, including "Plato's Pharmacy", "The Rhetoric of Drugs," and "Signature Event Context," and clarifies the connection between the death drive as/and mal d'archive in Archive Fever. The two means of...