Archives as the Doors to the Future

Archives are a city filled with darkness and a mysterious dust-covered past. Carefully selected, the past slumbers in seclusion, waiting to spill over the threshold and pass into the future. Jacques Derrida covers the vast expanses of archives and their position in humanity’s individual and above all collective consciousness in his Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression (published by the Slovenian Cinématheque under the Slovene title Arhivska mrzlica: freudovski odtis, 2014). The work is a written record of Derrida’s lecture given at the Memory: The Question of Archives symposium in London on 5 June 1994. Derrida reflects on archives and their functions, focusing mainly on Sigmund Freud and the question of what differentiates Judaism and Jewishness.

The integral (Slovenian) version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!