Archive Fevers

Archive Fevers offers a new generation of psychologically-engaged readers a playful queer/feminist interpretation of Jaques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995). Through its creative critical form, the book demonstrates the unconscious life of research while interrogating the often misunderstood, overlooked or misrepresented landscape of individual gender-queer experiences of therapy. Utilising the framework of experimental narrative fiction, Blake elucidates Derrida’s concept of archive fever, Freud’s seminal concept of the death drive and Avita Ronell’s concept of haunted writing. The relationship between anthropology, psychoanalysis and surrealism during the early 20th century is examined throughout. Surrealism, though shunned by anthropology and psychotherapy, asserts an urgent contemporary usefulness. The role of technology in psychotherapy comes under necessary scrutiny, the ever-chainging backdrop of a global pandemic adding yet another layer of relevance to current phsychotherapy practice. The resulting narrative brings to the fore the bizarre, messy, disturbing, sometimes gruesome aspects of archival and ethnographic research that are usually left out of formal accounts.