Archive Fevers

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Archive Fevers offers a playful queer/feminist interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. 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. Utilizing the framework of experimental narrative fiction, Blake elucidates Derrida’s concept of archive fever, Freud’s seminal concept of the death drive, and Avital 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, with the ever-changing backdrop of a global pandemic adding yet another layer of relevance to current psychotherapy practice. The resulting narrative brings to the fore the bizarre, messy, disturbing, and sometimes gruesome aspects of archival and ethnographic research that are usually left out of formal accounts.