Savannah Eklund holds an MA in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Columbia University, where she also completed a BA in Medical Humanities in 2023.
It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest,
interminably, from searching for the archive
right where it slips away. It is to run after the
archive, even if there's too much of it, right
where something in it anarchives itself.
—Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever”
How can we escape from mal d’archive (archive fever) when the archive disappears in front of our eyes? What else besides archive fever can arise when we are an en mal d’archive (in need of an archive), as Jacques Derrida phrases it?
Derrida asserted that archive fever only arises when we are in need of an archive, and indeed, when it comes to Russian queer archives, the sources are slipping away from us. When I revisited research I had previously initiated on narratives from the HIV/AIDS crisis in Russia and the former Soviet Union, I found that sources I cited only two years ago have slipped through my fingers—their very existence expunged by the Kremlin.
Where narratives of queer existence and living with HIV once resided, now-dead links lead to error messages or reroute to heterosexual pornography sites. In early 2018, Roskomnadzor blocked the site gay.ru, the National Server for Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals, despite ruling just a few years earlier that the site’s contents did not violate the nation’s law against “homosexual propaganda.” Though the site was blocked within Russia, it remained visible in other countries until recently, when it disappeared worldwide.
Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995) was prescient with regards to the fragility of internet archiving. For the philosopher, the archive—regardless of format—necessarily engages in a transgression of the private-public binary. As a medium, the internet raises the concern that materials never intended for archival inscription would instead be preserved in public view. At the same time, the internet democratizes the archive. Since its advent, the online setting has allowed the archive to circumvent authoritative gatekeepers of the type that historically controlled archival content. Voices and experiences that would not have found representation in the traditional conception of an archive suddenly had a place in the annals of history, their words inscribed in both the past and the promise of the future.
Censorship, however, rears its head and threatens to override the democratic and open potentials of online archives. While the modern internet troubles the boundary between private and public by its very design, intrusive governments can capitalize on this effect by using proprietary archiving techniques to monitor civilians and enact control over their speech.
The Russian surveillance apparatus is incredibly totalizing in its data capture. All telecommunications providers must have state surveillance technologies installed to operate in Russia, which allows the authorities to intercept any form of communication at any time without notifying the provider. All social media and messaging platforms must archive communications and metadata and provide the information to the authorities upon request without a court order. Ever the avid readers, those working within Russia’s security apparatus eschewed literary degrees to instead analyze the writings of ordinary people. The result is an immense archive inconceivable before the internet.
Russia’s attempts to countermand the democracy of the virtual archive has not gone unresisted. Web archiving tools have allowed scholars, governments, organizations, and private individuals to counteract at least some of the effects of censorship by preserving screen captures of webpages at a particular moment in time. Some of the sources I previously cited in my research were preserved by such efforts, while others were not saved in time from the Kremlin’s anarchiving attempts.
The censorship striking at the democratic aspirations of the internet-as-archive has particularly affected queer sources through repressive legislation. The publication of LGBTQ+ materials, for example, is subject to fines under laws against “homosexual propaganda,” as well as prison sentences under newly revised laws against “extremism,” with punishments of up to 4 years imprisonment or 3 years in forced labor colonies. The archive in the internet age thus becomes not only a place of historic preservation, but also a source of potential persecution.
These laws further complicate attempts to proactively preserve relevant materials before they are anarchived by the authorities. Indeed, the very attempt to consign certain sources to web archives threatens to make them a target for authorities. This situation puts would-be archivists before an impossible choice. On the one hand, it is unbearable that these sources would be left to disappear quietly under threat of censorship. On the other, the government’s digital censors might use digital repositories to locate materials and their authors for punishment.
Russia’s policy of media and internet censorship has created a trepidatious dichotomy in which the remaining options are to allow crucial materials to disappear without a trace—or to effectively assist the authorities in targeting the authors of these materials. In short, we are trapped between the Derridean “archive need” and “archive fever” (between en mal d’archive and mal d’archive).
The archive, as the philosopher argued, is not only an inscription on the past, but an inscription upon the future. The archive dictates what voices are constitutive in shaping the future, while the heavy weight of censorship threatens what could have been a purely democratic incarnation of the archive, again placing controls over which voices can inscribe themselves both now and in perpetuity. Derrida described archive fever as never resting “from searching for the archive right where it slips away,” but one must ask how we can keep ourselves from chasing after the archive at the point where it is taken from us. What is to be done when censorship threatens to steal from us queer voices that were only just beginning to be heard?
