Flânerie is a movement through space; the archive is a deposit in time. The flâneur follows his / her passing impulse; the archivist's avocation is a methodical and classificatory one. Flâneurs may or may not leave a trace of their own; archivists preserve and memorialize the traces of others. For Edmund White, following Walter Benjamin, ‘the flâneur is in search of experience, not knowledge’; for Jacques Derrida, the archive ‘ne sera jamais la mémoire ni l'anamnèse en leur expérience spontanée, vivante et intérieure’ / ‘will never be memory nor anamnesis in their spontaneous, living, interior experience’. Flânerie, to reprise a distinction famously deconstructed by Derrida, might appear to correspond to the supposed spontaneity and immediacy of speech, while the archive is the quintessential domain of the written. This opposition, however, rests on a view of the archive as sedentary, as unproblematically ‘there’, which Derrida's deployment of the notion undercuts, notably when he speaks of the ‘mal d'archive’ / ‘archive fever’ as ‘n'avoir de cesse, interminablement, de chercher l'archive là où elle se dérobe’ / ‘endlessly and incessantly searching for the archive where it hides from sight’. That ‘unsearching search’ is what flânerie, for all its apparent disavowal of anything remotely task-orientated, may be described as doing, which is why it may be regarded not as the opposite of the archive but as its complement.