Conjuring the Phantasm

The Signature of All Things is an epistemological procession through three dimensions of the “third area” that Giorgio Agamben, in his now thirty-three-year-old seminal work on the phantasm, identified as the site where “a science of man truly freed of every eighteenth-century prejudice should focus its study.”¹ The three essays conjoined in this volume—“Philosophical Archaeology,” “Theory of Signatures,” and “What Is a Paradigm?”—are at once a fulfillment of and a reflection upon the practice of this study, a methodological excursus ordered toward its unfinishable end: the historical freeing of the human via a creative-critical “science without object.”² As announced in the Preface, reflection on method in the human sciences “follows practical application, rather than preceding it” and “is a matter … of ultimate or penultimate thoughts” (7).

The book thus pursues reflection on method, not as retrospection about, but as the proper fruition of practice, as the mode of its arrival. Such revelation of a how as what becomes intelligible only in its having been experienced, only by being pursued and passed through, participates in the essential lesson formulated near the volume’s end, namely, that historical consciousness, which is constituted by “access to the present for the first time, beyond memory and forgetting, or rather, at the threshold of their indifference,” is achievable only in the archaeological mode of a future anterior or ‘will have been’ (106–7). Like the phantasmal topology mapped in Stanzas, a khoral place “more original than space” providing the where of poetico-philosophic realization, the site of such historically redemptive knowledge (the archē of this logos) belongs to a level of reality that exceeds the terms of modern experimental science which “has its origins in a unprecedented mistrust of experience as it was traditionally understood.”³ Renewing his Infancy and History’s concluding call for “a new and more primary experience of time and history,” one produced via philological destruction of “the identification of history with a vulgar concept of time as a continuous linear and infinite process,” Agamben’s Signature finishes with an explicit articulation of the ontological imperative of his work:⁴

The archē toward which archaeology regresses is not to be understood in any way as a given locatable in a chronology … instead, it is an operative force within history. […] Yet unlike the big bang, which astrophysicists claim to be able to date … the archē is not a given or a substance, but a field of bipolar historical currents stretched between anthropogenesis and history, between the moment of arising and becoming, between an archi-past and the present. And as with anthropogenesis, which is supposed to have taken place but which cannot be hypostasized in a chronological event—the archē alone is able to guarantee the intelligibility of historical phenomena, “saving” them archaeologically in a future anterior in the understanding not of an unverifiable origin but of its finite and untotalizable history … the human sciences will be capable of reaching their decisive epistemological threshold only after they have rethought, from the bottom up, the very idea of ontological anchoring, and thereby envisaged being as a field of essentially historical tensions

(110–1).

What is ultimately and continually at stake within the book’s thinking on method is thus not simply the question of how human science grounds itself, whether through this paradigm or that, but that it does, the question of its grounding in the first place. In other words: the problem of the alienation of language from its own event, the word from its factical being. An anarchic rethinking of the very idea of ontological anchoring might seek (i.e. wait for) the supposedly ahistorical for itself of its own pleasure.⁵ By contrast, Agamben’s archic project is ordered toward realizing the deeper historicity defined by the co-presence of past and present in the moment of their simultaneous intelligibility:

… the archē [my investigations] reach … is not an origin presupposed in time...