Philosophical Archaeology |
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Authors: | Giorgio Agamben |
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Institution: | (1) School of Law, Birkbeck, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, UK; |
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Abstract: | In the perspective of the philosophical archaeology proposed, here, the arkhé towards which archaeology regresses must not be understood in any way as an element that can be situated in chronology (not
even one with a large grid, of the sort used in prehistory); it is, rather, a force that operates in history—much in the same
way in which Indoeuropean words express a system of connections among historically accessible languages, in which the child
in psychoanalysis expresses an active force in the psychic life of the adult, in which the big bang, which is supposed to
have originated the universe, continues to send towards us its fossil radiation. But the arkhé is not a datum or a substance.
It is much rather a field of bipolar historical currents within the tension of anthropogenesis and history, between point
of emergence and becoming, between arch-past and present. And as such—that is to say, to the extent to which it is something
that it is necessarily supposed to have factually happened, and which yet cannot be hypostatized in any chronologically identifiable
event—it is solely capable of guaranteeing the intelligibility of historical phenomena, of ‘saving’ them archaeologically
within a future perfect, yet not grasping its (in any case unverifiable) origin, but rather its history, at once finite and
untotalizable. |
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