8Archive Fever revisited
Algorithmic archons and the ordering of social media
When attempting to understand contemporary media and the power of data, Jacques Derrida’s book Archive Fever (1996) may not seem like an obvious place to turn. Originally delivered as a lecture on the June 5, 1994,1 he was largely concerned with returning to Freud and responding to the contemporaneous work of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. As a result, Archive Fever is largely occupied with important political questions about remembrance. On top of this, Derrida’s lecture also predates many of the developments that we have come to associate with contemporary media. We might also be surprised of the utility of the lecture when we consider that Derrida used a typewriter ...
