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lizawall's review against another edition
I love this book even though sometimes I like to lie and pretend like I don't. Maybe genuine mixed feelings?
breadandmushrooms's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
casparb's review against another edition
so warm coming back to papa jackie. as with all JD , this is going to get so much more difficult on the necessary reread & I love that. Archive fever is about the foreskin of sigmund freud
ok I am going to quote dump here my two favourite parts which I thought were worth remembering so feel free to disregard
"There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive. This threat is in-fimite, sweeps away the logic of finitude and the simple factual limits, the transcendental aesthetics, one might say, the spatiotemporal conditions of conservation. Let us rather say that it abuses them. Such an abuse opens the ethico-political dimension of the problem. There is not one archive fever, one limit or one suffering of memory among others: enlisting the in-finite, archive fever verges
on radical evil."
"Well, concerning the archive, Freud never managed to form anything that deserves to be called a concept. Neither have we, by the way. We have no concept, only an impression, a series of impressions associated with a word. To the rigor of the concept, I am opposing here the vagueness or the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion. "Archive" is only a notion, an impression associated with a word and for which, together with Freud, we do not have a concept. We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process. Unlike what a classical philosopher or scholar would be tempted to do, I do not consider this impression, or the notion of this impression, to be a subconcept, the feebleness of a blurred and subjective pre-knowledge, destined for I know not what sin of nominalism, but to the contrary, as I will explain later, I consider it to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very concept of the future, if there is such a thing and if, as I believe, the idea of the archive depends on it. This is one of the theses: there are essenrial reasons for which a concept in the process of being formed always remains inadequate relative to what it ought to be, divided, disjointed between two forces. And this disjointedness has a necessary relationship with the structure of archivization."
ok I am going to quote dump here my two favourite parts which I thought were worth remembering so feel free to disregard
"There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive. This threat is in-fimite, sweeps away the logic of finitude and the simple factual limits, the transcendental aesthetics, one might say, the spatiotemporal conditions of conservation. Let us rather say that it abuses them. Such an abuse opens the ethico-political dimension of the problem. There is not one archive fever, one limit or one suffering of memory among others: enlisting the in-finite, archive fever verges
on radical evil."
"Well, concerning the archive, Freud never managed to form anything that deserves to be called a concept. Neither have we, by the way. We have no concept, only an impression, a series of impressions associated with a word. To the rigor of the concept, I am opposing here the vagueness or the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion. "Archive" is only a notion, an impression associated with a word and for which, together with Freud, we do not have a concept. We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process. Unlike what a classical philosopher or scholar would be tempted to do, I do not consider this impression, or the notion of this impression, to be a subconcept, the feebleness of a blurred and subjective pre-knowledge, destined for I know not what sin of nominalism, but to the contrary, as I will explain later, I consider it to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very concept of the future, if there is such a thing and if, as I believe, the idea of the archive depends on it. This is one of the theses: there are essenrial reasons for which a concept in the process of being formed always remains inadequate relative to what it ought to be, divided, disjointed between two forces. And this disjointedness has a necessary relationship with the structure of archivization."
centralandremote's review against another edition
3.0
Similar to other readings I've done of Derrida this text is more a utility than anything else, a means to an end, a help. My rating is based on how it compliments my research and not so much on the quality of the writing.
peach__tree's review against another edition
5.0
Derrida the only good man in continental poststructural theory tbh.
gabbutm's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
this was the most circular and info-dumpy book i have read. what i understood was insightful and interesting, but it was immensely difficult to reach that point. but maybe that was derrida's intention all along...?
will_meringue's review against another edition
mad respect for anyone who can understand this. not me though