Letter to a dead playwright : daily grind, Vicki Reynolds and archive fever, part 2

'Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word "archive",' observed Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever, a Freudian Impression (1996). This paper reflects on the unsettling process of establishing (or commencing) the Melbourne Workers Theatre archive, which is part of the ARC funded AusStage project. It does so with reference to Derrida's account of archive fever, which he characterises as an 'irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement' (91). In short, the paper uses Derrida's commentary on questions of memory, authority, inscription, hauntology and heritage to identify some of the philosophical and ethical aporias I have enountered while working on the AusStage project. The paper pays particular attention to what Derrida calls the spectral structure of the archive, and stages a conversation with the ghosts that haunt the digitised Melbourne Workers Theatre documents. It also unpacks the logic of Derrida's so-called messianic account of the archive, which 'opens out of the future' thereby affirming the future-to-come, and unsettling the normative notion of the archive as a repository for what has passed.