It was first published in 1995 by Éditions Galilée, based on a lecture Derrida gave at a conference, Memory: The Question of the Archives, organised by the Freud Museum in 1994.

[1][2] An English translation by Eric Prenowitz was first published as an article in the academic journal Diacritics in 1995[2] and then as a book by University of Chicago Press in 1996.

Derrida quotes Yerushalmi: Professor Freud, at this point I find it futile to ask whether, genetically or structurally, psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science; that we shall know, if it is at all knowable, only when much future work has been done.

Much will depend, of course, on how the very terms Jewish and science are to be defined.Derrida explores how Yerushalmi disrupts this "linear order of presents", how in writing in future tense, he sets the archive of Freud as a continually changing structure; what was discussed and recorded of Freud is no longer set in stone, but is now subject to change depending on any "future work" that is done.

Derrida's theory of "archive fever" is referenced in Rodrigo Lazo's chapter in the book, Teaching and Studying the Americas.

He uses specifically the example of Mis Memorias, a memoir published by Luis G. Gómez in 1935, to apply Derrida's "archive fever".