Abstract

One of the central points of Derrida’sArchive Fever is that the nature of the “archive” affects not only what is archived, but also how we relate to and access it. The archive also conditions the process of archiving itself and, indeed, the very nature of what is archivable. Derrida's comments, however, were made in 1995, when the full extent of the Internet boom was only beginning to become evident. The intervening years have reshaped the archive in ways that Derrida could scarcely have foreseen in 1995. Although many of the changes bear out his fundamental theses, the power that the Internet has come to exert over public and private discourse demands that we re-examine the archive in order to begin to assess what these changes portend