Jacques Derrida, Gorączka archiwum. Impresja Freudowska, Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, Warszawa 2016, ss. 148

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa 2016, p. 148.In 2017, as part of the “New Humanities” series (vol. 23), the first ever Polish translation of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression was published. Jacques Derrida was one of the few contemporary philosophers interested in the concept of the archive (while to a large extent ignoring archivists themselves). For Derrida, archivisation, which grants one the power to name and grant identity to all things (and also to share their meaning) gives rise to a number of ethical, intellectual and political issues. As a result, the concept of the archive constitutes an important part of his philosophy, raising archives to a rank which they hardly ever achieve outside of the field of archival studies. Regardless of one’s opinion on deconstructivism, whether one considers it to be an “intellectual fad” or a genuine method of research, the critical power of this approach enables us to look at various archive-related issues from an unorthodox point of view. The term archive is omnipresent in Derrida’s body of work, but it is only in Archive Fever that the author explicitly targets a group of topics which limit the issue of archives to the role of writing in society. Derrida treats “archivisation” and “writing” as metaphors communicating with each other, associated with the concepts of memory and the subconscious.