French philosopher whose 1995 Archive Fever (Mal d'archive) gives this episode its keyword. Cameron stops mid-conversation to look up the essay's date, treating it as a likely source for the "archiving mania" Kroker and Bob have been circling — the point at which the archive stopped being a place and became a fever.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the name behind the episode's master figure — his Archive Fever supplies the term for the condition Bob calls the Android Meme, and Cameron reaches for it to date when "archive" became everyone's problem
Cameron reaches for Derrida to locate the archive theme historically — Archive Fever is the philosophical marker for the "archiving mania" the two have been describing without naming.
"I'm going to look up when Derrida's essay on archive fever was published, because that probably played a role in all this."
Cameron dates Archive Fever to 1995/96 — after Bob's Nevitt papers of the early 80s, so Bob's archivist theme runs ahead of Derrida's, with Kroker perhaps carrying it between them.
"It was published in 1995 in French and English 1996."
Returns as the episode's launch text — Archive Fever read as dispersing rather than defining the archive, "foreseen by Innis and McLuhan," and Derrida himself placed under the sign of "ecstasy"
Bob's reading of Archive Fever's method — Derrida does not define the archive but disperses it, scattering the word's meaning the way Joyce scatters sense in the Wake, so the essay enacts the archive it is about.
"The meaning of archive scatters it,"
Bob's framing of Derrida for the series — Archive Fever is treated as belated confirmation, its insight "foreseen by Innis and McLuhan" decades earlier, so Derrida marks a destination the Toronto line reached first.
"Stunning how much of it was foreseen by Innis and McLuhan 50 years before for Innis and 30 to 40 years before for McLuhan."
Cameron's one-word placement of Derrida — "ecstasy," aligning him with Bob's ecstasy quadrant and Baudrillard's "ecstasy of communication," the dispersal read as a kind of electric standing-outside.
"Ecstasy is a good way of talking about Jacques Derrida."