The Signature of All Things

On Metbod
Giorgio Agamben

Translated

by Luca D'isanto

with Kevin Attell

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Contents
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From the Publisher.

What Is a Paradigm?
Originally published as Signatura editore. of America. rerum:

9 33 81

Sui metodo

2008 Bollati

Boringhieri States

II III

Theory

if

Signatures

Printed

in the United

Philosophical

ArchaeoloBY

Distributed Cambridge,

by The MlT Press, Massachusetts, and London, England

Notes
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Puhlication Data

113

Index
Agamben, Giorgio, '942English] on method / Giorgio Attcll. [Signatura rerum. The Signature Agamben ; translated of all things:

if

Names

123

by Luca D'Isanto

with Kevin

p.
Includes

em, bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-890951-98-6
I.

Methodology. Michel,

2.

Paradigm

(Theory

of knowledge)

3 Foucault,

'926-'984.

I. Title.

BD241.A3S '3 2009 19S-dc22 2009001976

Preface

Anyone familiar with research in the human sciences knows that, contrary to common opinion, a reflection thoughts, on method usually folit. It is a matter, only on to be discussed among be articulated my observations the concept lows practical application, rather than preceding

then, of ultimate or penultimate after extensive research. The three essays published three specific questions paradigm,

friends and colleagues, which can legitimately here contain method:

regarding

of the

the theory of signatures,

and the relation between hisappear to be investiga-

tory and archaeology. If these observations tions on the method methodological

of Michel Foucault, a scholar from whom I not discussed in the book-and that doctrine which be to

have learned a great deal in recent years, this is because one of the principles I owe to Walter Benjamin-is be able to determine may legitimately

exposed only in the form of interpretation.

The astute reader will

what in the three essays can be attributed

Foucault, to the author, or to both. Contrary to. common opinion, method shares with logic its inability to separate itself completely from its context. There is no method that would be valid for every domain, just as there is no logic that can set aside its objects. According philosophical to another methodological principlealso not discussed in this book-which I often make use of, the genuine it be a work of art,

element in every work, whether

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

of science,

or of thought,

is its capacity for elaboration, that the difference as it is difficult

which between to

CHAPTER

ONE

Ludwig Feuerbach defined as EntwicklungifCihigkeit. when one follows such a principle the interpreter becomes as essential

It is precisely

What

Is a Paradigm?

what belongs to the author of a work and what is attributable have therefore preferred to take the risk of attributing of others what began its elaboration the reverse risk of appropriating do not belong to me. Moreover, every inquiry in the human sciences-including present vigilance. reflection on methodIn other words, it must retrace its own trajectory that does not conceal its own unsaidthoughts or research

to grasp. I to the texts paths that the back

I

with them, rather than run

should entail an archaeological

In the course of my research, the concentration phenomena, was to constitute lematic context. understandings,

I have written

on certain

figures and

such as Homo sacer, the Muselmann, camp. While I nonetheless

the state of exception,

to the point where something Only a thought originality.

remains obscure and unthematized. but con-

these are all actual historical whose role a few misa broader historical-probin more or less

treated them as paradigms

santly takes it up and elaborates

it- may eventually lay claim to

and make intelligible

Because this approach has generated especially for those who thought,

good faith, that my intention cal theses or reconstructions, meaning and function the human sciences. Foucault frequently

was to offer merely historiographiI must pause here and reflect on the in philosophy and

of the use of paradigms

used the term "paradigm" and subsequent

in his writings, in The

even though he never defined

it precisely. Nonetheless,

Archaeology

if Knowledge

works, in order to disfrom those of the his tori '~apparatus," and,

tinguish the objects of his investigations cal disciplines, he designated "problematization," "discursive

them with terms like "positivity," formation," In a May 1978 lecture at the Societe thus: "The use

more generally, "knowledge." Francaise de Philosophie, of the word knowledge

he defines "knowledge"

(savoir) ... refers to all procedures and all effects of knowledge (connaissance) which are acceptable at a given
point in time and in a specific domain." necessary In order to clarify the to that of power, relation of the concept of knowledge

I)

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

WHAT

IS

PARADIGM?

Foucault added these comments: rules and constraints

"For nothing can exist as an elefor example, of a given type

a homonym

for that which, according

to Kuhn, marks the emer-

ment of knowledge if, on one hand, it does not conform to a set of characteristic, of scientific discourse in a given period, and if, on the other hand, it does not possess the effects of coercion or simply the incentives peculiar to what is scientifically validated or simply rational or simply generally accepted." As others have noted, these concepts are analogous to Thomas S. Kuhn's notion book, The Structure thematized of "scientific paradigms," introduced in his

gence of scientific revolutions.

Kuhn recognized two different ignates

that he had used the concept of "paradigm" of "paradigm," matrix,"

in des-

senses." The first meaning possessions

which

he proposes to replace with the term "disciplinary the common of the members scientific community, adhere. namely, the set of techniques, members

if Scientific

of a certain models, and within

Revolutions. Hubert Dreyfus and

Foucault never work clearly of discourse ana"his current a description

Paul Rabinow, for example, the function

argue that although

values to which the group The second meaning

more or less consciously

of paradigms, through

refers to a single element

follows a course that uses these insights, if not the words themselves. He is now proceeding as the historical description articulation lytics in a manner Yet Foucault, of a paradigm, and approaching

the set, such as Isaac Newton's that serves as a common of inquiry. and permits the formulation

Principia or Ptolemy's Almagest,

tradition

example and thus replaces explicit rules of a specific and coherent

that is heavily dependent who declared

on the isolation and

of social paradigms and their practical applications."? that he had read Kuhn's "admibook only after he had completed

When Kuhn elaborated on Ludwik Fleck's concept of "thought style" (Denkstil) is not pertinent sought, through and the distinction within a "thought the concept between collective" of a normal which problems what is and what

rable and definitive"

The Order

if Things,

(Denkkollektiv),
to examine science,

he

almost never refers to it, and even seems to distance to the American with a theoat most.

of the paradigm,

what

himself from Kuhn." In his 1978 introduction edition of Georges Canguilhem's Foucault writes: retical structure

makes possible the constitution science capable of determining community are scientific mean one governed On the contrary, paradigms

that is, a

The Normal and the Patholoqical,

within a specific system of rules. then

"This norm cannot be identified

or not. Normal

science does not then

or an actual paradigm because today's scientific us say provisional on a 'normal science' in T. S. Kuhn's sense to the past and validly trace its history: it is of which

by a precise and coherent

truth is itself only an episode of it-let It is not by depending that one can return rediscovering

if the rules are derived from paradigms, of the concept

can "determine

normal science" even in the absence of parais simply the of

of rules." This is the second meaning an example,

the 'norm' process, the actual knowledge necessary first of all to reflect methods strategies,

digm, which Kuhn considers "most novel:"? a paradigm a single case that by its repeatability of the rule, understood capacity to model tacitly the behavior and research scientists. scientificity, The empire is thus replaced by that of the paradigm;

is only one moment of it.?' It is therefore respond whether on whether does not corand is not merely the analogy between to different the "paradigm" these two different problems, of Foucault's

acquires practices

as the canon of the un iverIO!1i

and inquiries

archaeology

sal lozic of the law is replaced

by the specific and singular

10

I I

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

WHAT

IS

PARADIGM?

of the example. And when an old paradigm paradigm that is no longer compatible what Kuhn calls a scientific revolution

is replaced by a new one,

This statement acknowledge

is surprising,

to say the least, since Kuhn, who did

with the previous occurs.

in the preface to The Structure tions his debt to two French epistemologists, does not once mention prompted

if Scientific
Alexandre Canguilhem

RevoluKoyre in the

and Emile Meyerson,

book. Since Foucault must have meant what he said, perhaps his

3
Foucault constantly sought to abandon on juridical categories traditional analyses of power that were grounded as well as on universal of sovereignty). and institutional models

close relationship holding personal Kuhn.

to Canguilhem However, grudges,

him to repay Kuhn was not above explain his silence

for this discourtesy. concerning

even if Foucault

this alone cannot

(of law, the state, the theory mechanisms the very bodies of subjects and corroboration. Just as Kuhn that

He focused instead on the concrete

through which power penetrates

thereby governs their forms of life. Here the analogy with Kuhn's paradigms seems to find an important set aside the identification determine and examination of the rules constithe traditional

4
A closer reading of Foucault's naming the American writings shows that even without he did on more than one In "Truth and Fontana and the concerning epistemologist,

tuting a normal science in order to focus on the paradigms scientists' behavior, Foucault questioned primacy of the juridical

occasion grapple with Kuhn's notion of paradigm. Power," Foucault's Pasquale notion "discursive Pasquino, regime" 1976 interview with Alessandro a question opposed when answering he explicitly

models of the theory of power in order and political techniques the care of the life of individudistinpower,

to bring to the fore multiple disciplines through which the state integrates

of discontinuity,

his notion of the

to that of the paradigm:

als within its confines. And just as Kuhn separated normal science from the system of rules that define it, Foucault frequently guished "normalization," which characterizes disciplinary from the juridical system oflegal procedures. If the proximity of these two methods seems clear, then it is all the more enigmatic why Foucault remained silent when it came avoided using the to Kuhn's work and seems to have carefully

Thus, it is not a change of content (refutation of old errors, recovery of old truths), nor is it a change of theoretical form (renewal of a paradigm, modification of systematic ensembles). lt is a question of what governs statements, and the way in which they govern each other so as to constitute a set of propositions that are Scientifically acceptable and, hence, capable of being verified or falsified by scientific procedures. In short, there is a problem of the regime, the politics of the scientific statement. At this level, it's not so much a matter of knowing what external power imposes itself on science as of what effects of power circulate among scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime of power, and how and why at certain moments that regime undergoes a global
modification."

very term "paradigm" in the The Archaeology if Knowledge. To be sure, the reasons for Foucault's silence may have been personal. In his reply to George Steiner, who had reproached mentioning Kuhn by name, Foucault him for not explains that he had read

Kuhn's book only after he had completed The Order if Things and adds: "I therefore did not cite Kuhn, but the historian of science who molded and inspired his thought: Georges Canguilhem."B

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

WHAT

IS

PARADIGM?

A few lines later, when referring insists on the distance political phenomenon) between and a paradigm

to The Order (a criterion

if Thinas,

he

call "epistemological tion." Thus he writes: formation, (even unsuccessfully) when it exercises or a verification) sive formation epistemological criteria .... "'2

figures" "When

or "thresholds is articulated, function

of epistemologizaof a discursive claims to validate and coherence, and a critique, When the of formal

a discursive

regime

(a genuine of scientific

in the operation

a group of statements a dominant

truth): "What was lacking here was this problem sive regime,' ments. I confused form, or something but this proximity the movement regimes,

of the 'discurtheoretical then,

norms of verification

of the effects of power peculiar to the play of statethis too much with systematicity, like a paradigm.":" the proximity At some point,

(as a model,

over knowledge, figure thus outlined

we will say that the discur-

crosses a threshold

if epistemoloqization.
obeys a number

Foucault did indeed recognize result of a certain confusion.

to Kuhn's paradigm;

was not the effect of an actual affinity but the What was decisive for Foucault was from epistemology to politics, of theoretical of power," govern one and discursive

The change in terminology wholly consistent constitution members

is not merely formal: in a manner

of the paradigm

with- the premises of The Archaeoloay science with respect community) and "figures,"

if Knowl(the of "the

its shift onto the plane of a politics of statements where it was not so much the "change as the "internal form" that was in question which determines another to constitute explicitly

edae, Foucault diverts attention

of a normal of a scientific

from the criteria that permit the to subjects to the pure occurrence independently is articulated,"

regime

the way in which the statements an ensemble.

"groups of statements" erence to subjects epistemological

of any ref-

("a group of statements

From this perspective,

it is clear that even though he does not

figure thus outlined").

And when, a propos of

name them in The Archaeoloay For Foucault,

if Knowledae,
formations

Foucault do not

the different types of history of science, Foucault defines his own concept of the episteme, ing something the episteme period, imposes common it is once again not a matter of identifyor a structure of thought that and norms on the subject. Rather, set of relations that unite, at a given Unlike that give rise to epistemologisvstems.I'" like a worldview postulates is the "total

already wished to distinguish Kuhn's paradigms. define

the state of knowledge

the theme of his own research from discursive

at a given moment

in time: they do not draw to be

up a list of what, from that moment,

had been demonstrated acquired

the discursive

practices

true and had assumed the status of definitively and a list of what, on the other

knowledge, with-

cal figures, sciences, and possibly formalized Kuhn's paradigm,

hand, had been accepted

the episteme does not define what is knowable figure exists at all: "In the enigma of

out either proof or adequate accepted as a common

demonstration,

or of what had been by the power of

in a given period, but what is implicit in the fact that a given discourse or epistemological scientific discourse, what the analysis of the episteme questions is not its right to be a science, but the fact that it exists."!"

belief or a belief demanded positivities practice

the imagination.

To analyze

is to show in accordance may form groups of objects,

with which rules a discursive enunciations, concepts,

or theoretical

choices."

The Archaeoloay
historiographical correct certain

if Knowledae

has been read as a manifesto Whether this characterization of times), most interested it a number appears

of is it is in

discontinuity.

A little

further

down,

Foucault

describes

something

that

or not (Foucault

contested

seems to correspond

to Kuhn's paradigm

but that he prefers to

that in this book Foucault

1'1

"

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

WHAT

IS

PARADIGM?

that which permits contexts mological

the constitution of "figures"

of contexts

and groups, in episteand

of an "ensemble," detached

and the "panoptic

modality

of power."

As

the positive existence

and series. Only that these with those commonly

such, it is a "figure of political technology ing," but "the diagram of a mechanism

that may and must be of power reduced to its

emerge in accordance

with an entirely peculiar

from any specific use"; it is not merely a "dream buildas a paradigm in equally for of the group

model which coincides neither undertake

accepted in historical research nor with Kuhnian paradigms, which we must therefore to identify.

ideal forrn.?" In short, the panoptic on functions the strict sense: it is a singular

object that, standing

..all others of the same class, defines the intelligibility

of which it is a part and which, at the same time, it constitutes.

5
Consider the notion of panopticism, the third part of Discipline ticular historical phenomenon, which Foucault presents in and Punish. The panopticon an architectural the Idea is a par-

Anyone who has read Discipline the panopticon, pline, performs something disciplinary

and Punish knows not only how for the understandthe over

situated as it is at the end of the section on discia decisive strategic function modality of power, but also how it becomes figure that, in defining also marks the threshold

model published

ing of the disciplinary

by Jeremy Bentham in Dublin in 1791 under the title Patiopticon; or, The Inspection-House: Persons Cotitainino

like the epistemological universe of modernity,

cj' a

New Principle
in Which

cj' Construction, Applicable to Any Sort cj' Establishment, cj' A~ Description Are to Be Kept Under Inspection.

which it passes into the societies of control. This is not an isolated case in Foucault's characteristic gesture of Foucault's method. work. On the condefine the most the care that Fouhis specific establish and make the The great confinephenomena Paradigms trary, one could say that in this sense paradigms ment, the confession, the investigation, cault treats as paradigms, intervention intelligible. Daniel S. Milo has remarked relevance of contexts produced to those created only through ing the orientations Ernst Kantorowicz's lem that Foucault demonstrates by metaphorical chronological caesurae. fields in contrast
17

Foucault

recalls its basic features: We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres.
15

the examination,

of the self: these are all singular historical into the field of historiography.

and this is what constitutes

a broader problematic

context that they both constitute

Follow-

of such works as Marc Bloch's Royal Touch, King's Two Bodies, and Lucien Febvre's ProbCentury, Foucault is said to have of metonymic or southern to primacy. from the exclusive domain the eighteenth-century metaphorical contexts

cj'

Unbeliif

in the Sixteenth example,

freed historiography model of contexts-for France-in that is to say, the principle

Yet for Foucault, the panoptic on is both a "generalizable functioning," namely "panopticism,"

order to return

I "

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

WHAT

IS

PARADIGM?

This observation Foucault,

is correct

only if one keeps in mind that for not of metaphors but of paradigms obey not the logic of the

he writes, respect

"that the paradigm

does not function

as a part with

it is a question transfer

to the whole rhos meros pros holon], nor as a whole with are under the same but

in the sense noted above. Paradigms metaphorical to designate paradigm

respect to the part rhos holon pros meros], but as a part with respect to the part rhos meros pros meros], ifboth tion proceeds from the particular from the universal particular a third and paradoxical form of knowledge one is better known than the other.':" That is to say, while inducto the universal and deduction the paradigm is defined by a peculiar together which goes from the to the particular,

of meaning but the analogical logic of the phenomena by virtue of the same the

example. Here we are not dealing with a signifier that is extended heterogeneous semantic structure; more akin to allegory than to metaphor, its own singularity,

is a singular case that is isolated from its context only it makes intelligible That is it itself constitutes.

type of movement,

insofar as, by exhibiting

to the particular.

The example constitutes

a new ensemble, whose homogeneity the term functioning contrary,

that does not proceed by articulating treatment of the paradigm

to say, to give an example is a complex act which supposes that as a paradigm is deactivated from its normal context but, on the rule-of that use, which can use, not in order to be moved into another to present the canon-the not be shown in any other way. Sextus Pompeius Festus informs us that the Romans distinand refers to that which one The exemplum, (which is above is both of guished exemplar from exemplum. The exemplar can be observed by the senses (oeulis eonspieitur) must imitate on the other hand, demands is not merely sensible: all moral and intellectual. the constitution gathered

the universal and the particular, of the latter. Aristotle's ing within the particular does Aristotle particulars, beyond these brief observations,

but seems to dwell on the plane does not move Not only knowand the status of knowledge restany further. type exists before

is not examined

seem to hold that the common

but he leaves undefined

the status of "greater

ability" (anorimoteron) The epistemological if we understand-making it calls into question particular inseparable a singularity

that belongs to the example. status of the paradigm becomes clear only Aristotle's thesis more radicalopposition between that the the dichotomous

(exemplar est quod simile faeiamus). animo aestimatur);

The Foucauldian

a more complex evaluation its meaning paradigm

and the universal from procedures irreducible

which we are used to seeing as of knowing, and presents instead two terms.

these things: not only an exemplar of a normal

and model, which imposes and discursive practices to be

to any of the dichotomy's

science, but also and above all an ensemble and in a new problem-

The domain of his discourse of which was reconstructed particular nor general. it.

is not logic but analogy, the theory by Enzo Melandri in a book that has is neither

exemplum, which allows statements

into a new intelligible atic context.

by now become a classic. And the analoqoti it generates understanding

Hence its special value,. and our task of

6
The locus classicus of the epistemology tle's Prior Analyties. There, Aristotle by way of paradigms from induction of the example is in Aristodistinguishes and deduction. the procedure "It is clear,"

7
In La linea e i] circolo, Melandri the dichotomous shows that analogy is opposed to Western logic. Against the principle dominating

I I)

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

WHAT

IS

PARADIGM?

drastic alternative

"A or B," which excludes "neither in the dichotomies

the third, analogy A nor B." In other of logic (particular/ and so on) not them into But in what not as a

consequence of an objective law and signifies nothing other than that one absolutely (without a further aim) ought to act in a certain way. Rather, as a necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgment, it can only be called exemplary [exempJarisch], i.e., a necessity of the
19

imposes its tertium datur, its stubborn words, analogy intervenes universal; form/content; a force field traversed

lawfulness/exemplarity;

to take them up into a higher synthesis but to transform magnetic field) their substantial term homogeneous of dichotomy disidentification identities evaporate.

assent of all to a judgment that is regarded as an example [Beispiel] of a universal rule that one cannot produce [angeben]. As with the aesthetic presupposes probative judgment

by polar tensions, where (as in an electro-

sense and in what way is the third given here? Certainly

for Kant, a paradigm

actually

with the first two, the identity of which could appear as tertium compa-

the impossibility

of the rule; but if the rule is missing

in turn be defined by a binary logic. Only from the point of view can analogy (or paradigm) and neutralization rationis. The analogical third is attested here above all through the of the first two, which now and if one to clearly for one necessarily standing become indiscernible. The third is this indiscernibility, It is thus impossible character-its

or cannot be formulated, an unassignable digm implies rule?

from where will the example draw its

value? And how is it possible to supply the examples of that a para-

The aporia may be resolved only if we understand the total abandonment couple as the model of logical inference.

of the particular-general The rule (if it is still preexisting the resulta

tries to grasp it by means of bivalent caesurae, runs up against an undecidable. separate magnetic magnitudes an example's paradigmatic

possible to speak of rules here) is not a generality ing from the exhaustive is the exhibition enumeration

singular cases and applicable to them, nor is it something alone of the paradigmatic

all cases- from the fact that it is one case among others. As in a field, we are dealing not with extensive but with vectorial intensities. and scalable

of specific cases. Instead, it case that constitutes

rule, which as such cannot be applied or stated.

8
Nowhere, perhaps, is the paradoxical relation between paradigms and generality ment, where judgment state the rule: Now this necessity is of a special kind: not a theoretical objective necessity, where it can be cognized a priori that everyone will feel this satisfaction in the object called beautiful by me, nor a practical necessity, where by means of concepts of a pure will, serving as rules for freely acting beings, this satisfaction is a necessary as forcefully formulated Kant conceives as in The Critique

9
Anyone familiar with the history that, at least in regard understand most ancient testimonies, with the founder's is, as an example of the monastic orders knows to to the first centuries, it is difficult

cifjudg-

of the necessity

of the aesthetic

the status of what the documents

call regula. In the It is often identified as Jorma vitae- that life is in in the Gospels. orders, and the over them, the text, of a written

in the form of an example for which it is impossible to

regula simply means conversatioJratrum,

the monks' way of life in a given monastery. way of living envisaged to be followed.

And the founder's

turn the sequel to the life of Jesus as narrated With the gradual development Roman Curia's growing term regula increasingly of the monastic need to exercise control assumed the meaning

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

WHAT

IS

PARADIGM?

preserved

in the monastery,

which had to be read by the person life, consented contained to subject therein. and prohibitions

for the paradigm":

"A paradigm

is generated

when an entity, [diespasmenoi;

IS

who, having embraced

the monastic

which is found in something t he Gree k term means "" torn, judged cerning correctly

other and separated

himself to the prescriptions

"1acerate d"J In anot her entity, . ..

However, at least until Saint Benedict, the rule does not indicate a general norm but the living community tends at the limit to become paradigmaticitself asjorma vitae. say, joining Aristotle's observations with that goes from We can therefore singularity transforms (koinos bios, cenobio) that is, to constitute that results from an example and in which the life of each monk

and recognized generates

as the same, and having been a true and unique opinion conGoldschmidt shows that here In other words, the paradigm

reconnected

together

each and both.'?" on this definition, structure, at once sensible and

Commenting mental,

there seems to be a paradoxical even though it is a singular

which he calls the "element-form.'?'

those of Kant, that a paradigm entails a movement to singularity and, without

sensible phenomenon,

ever leaving singularity,

somehow contains the eidos, the very form that is to be defined. It is not a simple sensible element that is present in two different places, but something itself a relationship"). like a relation between the sensible and the element is - which a sensible it is a matter but of producis (paradeiqmaand "expos22

every singular case into an exemplar of a general rule

that can never be stated a priori.

mental, the element and the form ("the paradigmatic Just as in the case of recollection for knowledge-where
10

Plato often uses as a paradigm an author whom Foucault appears published Le patadiqme the examination dans la of an phenomenon and admired, historian thus re-cognized

In 1947, Victor Goldschmidt, to have known diolectique apparently of this brilliant dialogues-throws platonicienne. marginal

is placed into a nonsensible a certain

relation with itself, and

in the other, so in the paradigm sensible likeness and produced

As is often the case with the writings. of philosophy, the use of examples in Plato's

not of corroborating

ing it by means of an operation. tos ... aenesis; paradeiamata "conjoining ing" together," ... (paraballontas

For this reason, the paradigm

problem-

never already given, but is generated

new light on the entirety

of Plato's thought, expression. Georges in

... aianomena) ...

by "placing alongside,"

especially the relation between Rodier had already observed the dialogues as paradigms in the Euthypbro

ideas and the sensible, of which that sometimes ideas function

and above all by "showing" paratithemena The paradigmatic

the paradigm is revealed to be the technical

endeiknynai ... deicbthese objects and a (which thus

tliei ... deicbtbentai,"

occur between

relation does not merely a singularity

for sensible objects, whereas at other as the paradigms of ideas. If

sensible objects or between and its exposition

times sensible objects are presented digm in order to understand understanding knowledge, children

general rule; it occurs instead between becomes a paradigm)

the idea of piety is that which is used as a paracorresponding sensible objects, in leads to the of the syllables

(its intelligibility).

the Statesman a sensible paradigm-weaving-instead Plato introduces here the example in different

1I

of ideas. To explain how an example may produce Consider Grammar the relatively is constituted simple case of a grammatical example. the words as a "paradigm and may state its rules only through

are able to recognize

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

WHAT

IS

PARADIGM?

practice of paradigmatics, How is a grammatical paradigms nouns. Through

by exhibiting

linguistic

examples. But practice? of

makes knowledge (between

possible.

"The relation or as a relation

between

these two of likeness To to Gold-

what is the use of language

that defines grammatical

orders may be conceived copy and model) each of these conceptions

in two ways: as a relation there corresponds, procedure:

example produced? exhibition

Take the case of the

of proportion.':" according

that in Latin grammars its paradigmatic

account for the declensions

(rosa, ros-ae, ros-ae,

schmidt, a specific dialectical the paradigm, the Statesman. attempt paradigm understood distinguishes

to the first, recollection

ros-am ... ), the normal use as well as the denotative character of

the term "rose" is suspended. constitution and intelligibility the first declension," The term thus makes possible the of the group "feminine noun of and and a para-

(defined by Plato in the Meno and in the Theatetus); to the second, which is discussed Continuing above all in the Sophist and in analyses we must now and function of the of the diaGoldschmidt's

of which it is both a member

to understand

the specific meaning

digm. What is essential here is the suspension of performatives,

of reference

in dialectics., The whole thorny discussion as an exposition of the paradigmatic within as two continuous

normal use. If, in order to explain the rule that defines the class the linguist utters the example "I swear," it is as the uttering and nevertheless and suspension the rule can of clear that this syntagma is not to be understood must be suspended from its normal function, of this nonfunctioning

lectical method in book 6 of the Republic becomes clear when it is

method." Plato
the emergence of segments on a of "geom(this is "I lay

two stages or moments

a real oath. To be capable of acting as an example, the syntagma it is precisely by virtue

science, which are represented

straight line. The first, which defines the procedures grounds its investigations on hypotheses.

etry and calculus and those who practice these kinds of sciences," It presupposes the meaning of the Greek term hypothesis, from hypotithemi, it below as a base") givens that are treated the evidence first principles cal [anypotheton] this principle, second belongs to dialectics: of which does not need to be accounted

that it can show how the syntagma be applied to the example, to the normal belonging

works and can allow the

rule to be stated. If we now ask ourselves whether

the answer is not easy. In fact, the because it exhibits its oppois included through the exhibition to the etyitself"

as known principles, for. The as is, as step-

example is excluded from the rule not because it does not belong case but, on the contrary, to it. The example, the example However, then, is the symmetrical through

"it does not consider hypotheses

[archai] but truly as hypotheses-that

first principle without of everything.

site of the exception: its exclusion, mological constitutes. of its inclusion.

whereas the exception is excluded

ping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the unhypothetiHaving touched sensible at and keeping hold of what follows from it, it comes making use of anything moving on from ideas to ideas, (presuppositions) as that

in this way, according

meaning

of the Greek term, it shows "beside

down to a conclusion

(para-deiknymi)

both its own intelligibility

and that of the class it

all, but only of ideas themselves, and ending with ideas.":" hypotheses knowability the contrary

What does it mean to treat hypotheses

12

rather than as principles? but exposed operation of the paradigm its specific

What is a hypothesis

is not presupposed and the sensible order,

as such? If we recall that the and that on and consists in suspending

In Plato, the paradigm has its place in dialectics, which, by articulating the relation between the intelligible

is never presupposed,

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

WHAT

IS

PARADIGM?

deactivating intelligibility,

its empirical

givenness

in order to exhibit only an as hypotheses and modern of ideas-is means

the perspective Daniel

of the paradigmatic

method.

Before Friedrich Friedrich Ast had of

then treating

hypotheses

Ernst Schleiermacher,

Georg Anton knowledge

treating them as paradigms. Here the aporia that both Aristotle tors have observed-that idea is not another sensible and the sensible the paradigm

already observed that in the philological commentaof the resolved. The that (ex uses a single phenomenon vice versa, knowledge phenomena. ture, Martin difficulty Grounding Heidegger on pre-understanding presupposes

sciences, knowledge

of the whole and, that of single struc-

in Plato the idea is the paradigm

of the whole presupposes this hermeneutic as Dasein's anticipatory helped the human

circle in Beina and Time existential sciences out of this character

being that is presupposed

by the sensible or as a paradigm-

coincides with it: it is the sensible considered is, in the medium of its intelligibility.

This is why Plato is able to

and indeed guaranteed

the "more original"

state that even dialectics, like the arts, starts from hypotheses eses rather than principles. hypotheses as paradigms. To put it differently, dialectics

of their knowledge.

Since then, the motto "What is decisive is not to transform the

hypothesei5s iousa),27 but unlike them it takes hypotheses as hypothThe non-hypothetical, to which dialecuse of the the followas "doing that pro-

to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way" has become a magic formula that allows the inquirer vicious circle into a virtuous However, such a guarantee pated by a pre-understanding that it was a matter be presented but instead "working

one."
was less reassuring than it at first is always already anticisuggested to

tics has access, is above all opened by the paradigmatic sensible. It is in this sense that we should understand ing passage, where the dialectical away with hypothesis": "Dialectic method is defined is the only method

appeared. If the activity of the interpreter

that is elusive, what does it mean

"to come into [the circle] in the right way?" Heidegger

ceeds in this manner, doing away with hypotheses

[tas hypotheseis anairousa] and reaching to the first principle itself.'?" Anairei5, like its corresponding Latin term tollere (and the German a!ifheben,
which Hegel placed at the heart of his dialectic), signifies both "to take," "to raise," and "to take away," "to eliminate." noted, what operates as a paradigm is withdrawn As previously from its normal are "taken

of never allowing the pre-understanding or "popular conceptions,"

(l'oraeben) by "fancies"

[it] out in terms of the things themselves.'?" the circle then seems to become even must be able to recognize in of a pre-understanding that depends on

This can only mean-and phenomena the signature

more "vicious" - that the inquirer their own existential circle is in actuality here between the paradigmatic circularity, structure.

use and, at the same time, exposed as such. The non-hypothetical is what discloses itself at the point where hypotheses away," that is, raised and eliminated is the paradigmatic intelligibility at the same time. The intelli-

The aporia is resolved if we understand a paradigmatic "single phenomenon" exposition

that the hermeneutic as there from

circle. There is no duality and "the whole" the whole only results

gibility in which dialectics moves in its" descent toward the end" of the sensible.

was in Ast and Schleiermacher: as in Heidegger,

of individual between

cases. And there is no and an "after," In the paradigm, it stands, so to definition, the

a "before"

I3
The hermeneutic circle, which defines the procedures of knowledge in the human sciences, acquires its true meaning only from

between pre-understanding intelligibility

and interpretation. the phenomenon; to Aristotle's

does not precede

spca k, "beside" it (para). According

? l1

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

WHAT

IS

PARADIGM?

paradigmatic

gesture moves not from the particular exposed in the medium

to the whole of its knowWith regard as a

question "figure arranging,

is the origin

and history

of the iconographic

theme of

and from the whole to the particular singular. The phenomenon, to phenomena, "non-presupposed

but from the singular to the

of a woman in movement."

This would be a matter

as far as possible, the individual images in chronologiallow us to go back to the

ability, shows the whole of which it is the paradigm. this is not a presupposition principle,"

cal order by following the probable genetic relation that, binding one to the other, would eventually archetype, to the" formula of pathos" from which they all origi-

(a "hypothesis"):

it stands neither in the past nor in constellation.

the present but in their exemplary

nate. A slightly more careful reading of the plate shows that none of the images is the original, just as none of the images is simply a copy or repetition. Just as it is impossible to distinguish between at the basis

14
Between ofimages," erogeneous manuscripts,
1924- and 1929, Aby Warburg

creation and performance, was working on his "atlas a hetby laic" composition of the Homeric phenomenon, photograph which was to be called Mnemosyne. As is well-known, of plates or boards to which are attached cut out of newspapers series of images (reproductions photographs of works of art or or taken to a single theme that plate 4-6, in which we

original and execution,

in the "fonnu-

that Milman Parry had recognized poems and more generally

of any oral composi-

it is a collection

tions, so are Warburg's

Pathoiformeln hybrids of archetype and (ptimal'oltito) and repetition. Every is the original; every image constitutes the arche
first-timeness But the nymph herself is neither in regards to diaThis means that nymphs are the with the constiof she is undecidable of which individual

Warburg himself, and so on) often referring Warburg defined as Pathoiformel. Consider find the PathoifoTmel "Nymph," Chapel, Warburg nellbring, ment (when she appears in Ghirlandaio's "Miss Quick-Bring").

and is, in this sense, "archaic." archaic nor contemporary; chrony and synchrony, exemplars. the nymph is the paradigm tutive ambiguity the nymph.

the figure of a woman in movefresco in the Tornabuoni Fraulein Sch-

unicity and multiplicity.

gives her the familiar nickname

Or to be more precise, in accordance of Plato's dialectic,

The plate is made up of twentyfresco,

the nymph is the paradigm

seven images, each of which is somehow related to the theme that gives its name to the whole. In addition to Ghirlandaio's of Sessa Aurunca, Florentine a few miniatures one can identify a Roman ivory relief, a sibyl from the cathedral from a sixteenth-century frescos, taken manuscript, a detail from one of Botticelli's

of the single images, and the single images are the paradigms

In other words, the nymph is an Urphi:inomen, an "originary phenomenon" in Goethe's sense of the term. This technical investigations term, which is essential to Goethe's on nature from the eyen though it is intelligible only sense, thereby folwho traced his method rubrics, its orito that opinions

Fra Filippo Lippi's tondo of the Madonna and the birth of John the Baptist, a photo of a peasant woman from Settignano by Warburg What is the relation that holds together himself, and so on. How should we read this plate? the individual images? In

Theory Colors to The Metamorphosis never clearly defined by the author,

when understood lowing a suggestion by Elizabeth

if

if Plants,
becomes

in a decidedly paradigmatic Rotten, often juxtaposes

other words, where is the nymph? A mistaken way of reading the plate would be to see in it something like an iconographic repertory, where what is in

gin back to Plato. Goethe which proceeds and hypotheses.'?'

by "single cases and general

In the essay "The Experiment

as Mediator

II

WHAT THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS

IS

PARADIGM?

Between Object and Subject," he proposes a model of "experience of a higher type," where the unification does not occur "in hypothetical where instead each phenomenon of individual phenomena manner," but and systematic

15
At this point, let us try to put in the form of theses some of the features that, according
1.

"stands in relation with countHow such a singular is discussed nature

to our analysis, define a paradigm: that is neither inductive to

less others, in the way we say of a freely floating luminous point, that it emits its rays in every direction.T" relation among phenomena of the procedure It represents fragment, A paradigm singularity.
2.

is a form of knowledge but analogical. the dichotomy

ought to be understood

nor deductive By neutralizing particular, logical model.

It moves from singularity between

a few lines below in a passage where the paradigmatic

is stated beyond any doubt: "Such an experi-

the general and the

ence, which consists of many others, is clearly of a higher type. the formula in which countless single examples find "Every existent," he reiterates in another at the "is the analopon of every existent; for this reason, their expression.":"

it replaces a dichotomous

logic with a bipolar anaand, at the

3. The paradigmatic

case becomes such by suspending its belonging

same time, exposing 4. The paradigmatic 5. In the paradigm, 6. The historicity

to the group, so that it is from its singularity. by the para-

existence always appears to us as separated and connected same time. If one follows the analogy As a paradigm, generality the Urphdtiotuen becomes identical; if we avoid it, everything ogy lives in perfect equilibrium and particularity. phenomenon" in a continuous Riflexionen,

never possible to separate its exemplarity digms; rather, it is immanent in them.

too closely, everything scatters to infinity."!' between

group is never presupposed

is thus the place where analbeyond the opposition

there is no origin or archei every phenomof the paradigm lies neither in diachrony nor

enon is the origin, every image archaic. in synchrony but in a crossing of the two. At this point, I think it is clear what it means to work by way of paradigms centration more recently, not hypotheses On the contrary, intelligible for both me and Foucault. Homo sacer and the conand the state of exception, oikonomia and acclamations and, are the Trinitarian through camp, the Muselmann

Hence, Goethe writes of the "pure And in the Maximen und

that it can "never be isolated, since it shows itself series of appearances.'?' he sums up its nature with a definition "the originary that could

be equally valid for the paradigm:

phenomenon: with all cases.'?" of a hypothesis it is indeed in

ideal insofar as it is the last knowable/real,

insofar as it is known/

symbolic because it embraces all cases:/identical Even though it never crosses into the generality or law, the Urphiinomen the single phenomenon constitute is nevertheless

which I intended

to explain modernity origin. might have signaled, had eluded or and the

knowable;

by tracing it back to something each time it was a matter could elude the historian's phenomena

like a cause or historical

the last knowable element, its capacity to For this reason, a famous Gothean "they are theory."

as their very multiplicity of paradigms

itself as a paradigm.

whose aim was to make

dictum states that one should never look beyond the phenomena: insofar as they are paradigms,

series of phenomena

whose kinship

gaze. To be sure, my investigations, character,

like those of Foucault, have an archaeological

with which they deal unfold across time and therefore

(1

\ I

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

require an attention they reach-and

to documents

and diachrony that cannot but Nevertheless, the arche inquiry-is pres-

CHAPTER

TWO

follow the laws of historical not an origin presupposed ent intelligible

philology.

this perhaps holds for all historical

Theory

of Signatures

in time. Rather, locating itself at the

crossing of diachrony and synchrony, it makes the inquirer's ogy, then, is always a paradigmatology, ognize and articulate paradigms

as much as the past of his or her object. Archaeoland the capacity to recthe documents determines the Book 9 of Paracelsus's the Signature treatise De natura rerum (Of the Nature of rerum naturalium"
1

defines the rank of the inquirer

no less than does his or her ability to examine of an archive. In the final analysis, the paradigm very possibility archive-which of producing in itself is inert-the

in the midst of the chronological plans de clivaoe (as French

Things) is titled "De signatura of Natural

(Concerning

epistemologists call them) that alone make it legible. If one asks whether the paradigmatic character lies in things themselves or in the mind of the inquirer, my response must be in questhat the question itself makes no sense. The intelligibility tion in the paradigm has an ontological the cognitive ter definition relation between There is, then, a paradigmatic Stevens titled "Description ontology. character.

Things).

The original core of the Para"Nothing is without a

celsian episteme is the idea that all things bear a sign that manifests and reveals their invisible qualities. sign" (Nichts ist ohn ein Zeichen), he writes in Von den natuilicheti

It refers not to

Dingen, "since nature does not release anything in which it has not marked what is to be found within that thing."2 "There is nothing exterior that is not an announcement of the interior," reads the Libei de podapricis, and by means of signs man can know what

subject and object but to being. And I know of no betin a poem by Wallace

of it than the one contained Without

Place":

has been marked in each thing.3 And if, in this sense, "all things, herbs, seeds, stones, and roots reveal in their qualities, forms, and figures [Gestalt] that which is in them," if "they all become known through their signatum," then "siptiatuta is the science by which this art nothing like all so everything knowledge, that is hidden is found, and without is a consequence

It is possible that to seem - it is to be, As the sun is something seeming and it is. The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.

of any profundity

can be done." This science, however, (unbezeichnet),

of sin, insofar as Adam, in Eden, was and would have remained "De signatura of "signers." which leaves nothing unmarked. rerum natuis

absolutely unmarked

had he not "fallen into nature,"

Based on these presuppositions, into the nature and the number

ralium" is able to go right to the heart of the matter and inquire Here signatura no longer the name of a science but the very act and effect of

II

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

marking: losophise,

"In this book, our first business, as being about to phiis with the signature of things, as, for instance, to Paracelsus, to set exists, and how many there are three

In other words, Paracelsus complex, something

argues that the relation

expressed

by

the signature is not a causal relation. Rather, it is something which has a retroactive and which needs to be understood.

more

forth how they are signed, what signator signs are reckoned.?' According

effect on the sianator

sianators: man, the Archeus, and the stars (Astra). The signs of the
stars, which make prophecies and presages possible, manifest "the supernatural force and virtue" (iibernatiirliche Krcift und Tuaend) of sciences-for hydromancy, example, geomancy, pyromancy, necromancy, chiroand
2

things. The divinatory maney, physiognomy, astronomy-examine

Before moving to the analysis of the signatures imprints Signatory art (Kunst Sianata) that constitutes, adigm of every signature.

that the Archeus

on natural things, Paracelsus refers to the existence of a so to speak, the paris language, by This originary signature

these signs. The monsters treated by divinaand androgynous beings, are nothby the ascendant celestial bodies. And at all moments, rise and set just

tion, such as hermaphrodites ing but a sign imprinted Paracelsus

means of which "the first sianator," Adam, imposed on all things their "true and genuine names" (die tecate Nomen) in Hebrew." The signatory art teaches how to give true and genuine names to all things. All of these Adam the Protoplast truly and entirely understood. So it was that after the Creation he gave its own proper name to everything, to animals, trees, roots, stones, minerals, metals, waters, and the like, as well as to other fruits of the earth, of the water, of the air, and of the fire. Whatever names he imposed upon these were ratified and confirmed by God. Now these names were based upon a true and intimate foundation, not on mere opinion, and were derived from a predestinated knowledge, that is to say, the signatorial art. Adam is the first signator.'o Every name in Hebrew that left Adam's mouth had a correspondence in the specific nature and virtue of the named animal. "So when we say, 'This is a pig, a horse, a cow, a bear, a dog, a fox, a sheep, etc.,' the name of a pig indicates a foul a~d impure animal. A horse indicates a strong and patient animal; a cow, a voracious and insatiable one; a bear, a strong, victorious, mal; a fox, a crafty and cunning and untamed anianimal; a dog, one faithless in its no one."" and the signed is generally

argues that not only the stars in the sky but also the "perpetually or Imagination,

"stars of the human mind" -which with the Phantasy, Estimations, as in the firmament above"6-can happens with pregnant Similarly, have imprinted hands. However,

leave their mark on the body, as

women whose Fantasey draws on the flesh signs" (Monstrosische Zeichen).7 and chiromancy teach one how to

of the fetus its "monstrous physiognomy

decipher the secret of the "inner man" in the signs that the stars on men's faces and limbs or on the lines of their the relation between subjection. the stars and men is not Paracelsus writes:

merely one of unilateral

The wise man can dominate the stars, and is not subject to them. Nay, the stars are subject to the wise man, and are forced to obey him, not he the stars. The stars compel and coerce the animal man, so that where they lead he must follow, just as a thief does the gallows, a robber the wheel, a fisher the fishes, a fowler the birds, and a hunter the wild beasts. What other reason is there for this, save that man does not know or estimate himself or his own powers, or reflect that he is a lesser universe, and has the firmament with its powers hidden within himself?"

nature; a sheep, one that is placid and useful, hurting The relation between the signature

I,

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

understood

in terms of similarity, as in the case (to which we will

have markings

that look like snakes, is an antidote

to every type in this not and

turn in a moment) of the similarity between the spots in the shape of an ocellus on the Euphrasia's corolla and the eyes that it has the power to heal. Since language is the archetype the signatory art par excellence, this similarity analogical not as something model. and immaterial physical, similarities, of the signature, to an we are obligated to understand but according Language, then, which preis also the reliquary

of poisoning. Consider the specific structure case: the signature between, the marking relation,

that defines signatures therapeutic

in the Euphrasia,

is established virtue

as it might seem, the hidden

in the shape of an eye on the corolla but directly

between the Euphrasia and the eyes. Paracelsus writes: "Why does the Euphrasia cure the eyes? Because it has in itself the anatomiam oculorum; it has in itself the shape and image of the eyes, and hence it becomes entirely eye."" The signature puts the plant in relationship with the eye, displacing it into the eye, and only in this

serves the archive of immaterial of signatures.

3
The systematic medicine Signatures Paracelsus' core that determined the success of Paracelsian power of plants. a century after which God
rerum.

way does it reveal its hidden virtue. The relation is not between a signifier and a signified at least four terms; (signans and signatum). Instead, it entails which Paracelsus during the Renaissance are, as Henry death, "natural virtues and the Baroque period conalmost the figure in the plant,

cerned signatures

as ciphers of the therapeutic More wrote hieroglyphics,"

often calls signatum; the part of the human body; the therapeutic virtue; and the diseasea fifth term. Signatures, of the signified, to which one has to add the signato!" as which according to the theory of signs exchange roles and This sliding movewhere and writes, and a metal-ironalways already slide into the position

through

reveals medicinal more surprising

hidden in the vegetal world. All the Their is taken by deer and age or the number cords of can the mother

should appear as signifiers,

is their absence in De signatura

so that signum and signatum

place, as examples of the Archeus's signature, cow horns, whose shape reveals the animal's of calves it has delivered, newborns, which indicate

seem to enter into a zone of undecidability. ment can be observed Paracelsus establishes the identity between Nothing

in a passage from the Paraotatium,

or the knots in the umbilical how many children

a planet (Mars), which should be its signator. Paracelsus "What then is ferrum? Nothing Mars .... ferrum other thanferrum.

still have. Paracelsus's medical works, however, offer a wide array of examples. The satyrion is "formed and this signature passion.?" The Eupbtasia, like the male privy parts," a man's virility and shows that it can "restore

other than Mars. What is Mars? and he who knows

This means that both areferrum

He who knows Mars knows ferrum

which has a marking in the shape of an cures women's breasts, this is seeds and with

knows what Mars is.?"

eye, thus reveals its capacity to heal the diseases of the eye." If the plant called Specula pennarum because its shape recalls that of breasts. Pomegranate cases, the similarity is metaphorical: the thistle,

4
We have left for last the discussion lege in the De signatura that holds the place of priviwhose provides of rerum, namely, that of signatures

pine nuts, having the shape of teeth, alleviate their pain. In other fraught thorns, will alleviate sharp and acute pains; Syderica, whose leaves

signator is the human being. The example Paracelsus

I"

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

such signatures

is perhaps the most surprising episteme,

in the history

of

the confirmation The letters

of the letter which gives it authority among men a seal is dead, useless, empty."!" made by man as outside with only laboratories seeds, or the are also signatures

the concept of signatures, sionally resurrected understand Paracelsus,

even though for centuries it remained a before being proviTo correctly, writes

and in trials. A receipt without of the alphabet

sort of dead end in the Paracelsian natural and supernatural one needs to understand

in the thought of Foucault and Melandri. signatures

signatar: "By a few letters, names, or words, many things are designated, just as books which, though lettered inscribed ointments numbers on labels that in pharmacies "liquors, ... spirits, oils, phlegmata, one word, in that way signify their contents.V" Or the letters or alchemists' crocuses, allow one to recognize syrups, oils, powders, alkalis;"

above all else those signa-

tures whose signatar is the human being. The first example of this is the "small yellow patch" (ein Gelbs Flecklin) that the Jews wear on their jackets or coats: "What is this but a sign by which anybody who meets him may understand sign-the comparison that he is a Jew?"16 A similar a private soldier Just as couriers wear here is not ironic-makes

on rooms and dwellings,

which mark the year in which

they were built."

or a bailiff (Scherg ader Biittel) recognizable. insignia on their garments should be treated-

that identify them as messengers-and wear

also show where they come from, who sent them, and how they so does the soldier on the battlefield colored signs or bands making him recognizable by friends and

5
Let us try to develop and analyze the unique structure signatures. a painting Consider the signature (or monogram) of human the artisan or

enemies ("Hence it is known that one is on the side of Caesar, or of the kings; that one is an Italian, another a Gaul, etc."). 17 Still more interesting paradigm of signatures is another is further set of examples where the complicated. This group has to

artist uses to mark his own work. What happens when we observe in a museum and we realize that the phrase Titiatius on the lower edge? We are now so that we an implicit in the signature,

fecit is written

in a cartouche

used to looking for and receiving this type of information do not pay attention operation to the operation but trivial. that is anything

do with the "marks and signs" (Markt uncI Zeichen) with which the artisan marks his own works "so that everyone may understand who has produced is clear in languages, "signature" it." Here the signature shows its likely etywhich granted However, the value mological connection with the act of signing a document,

Let us assume that the painting represents to a religious are familiar tradition (though or iconographic we needn't

the Annunciation,

which may itself be seen both as sign and as image, harking back theme with which we that we have before meaning or the nothbe). What does the signature

like French and English, that use the word on a document).

(in canon law signaturae were the rescripts

by the pope by virtue of a signature cussed by Paracelsus pertains

Titian usfecit add to the sign "Annunciation"

our eyes? It tells us nothing ing about the properties The signature way in which the iconographic

in Latin signare also means "to coin," and another of coins: "It should be remembered worth."!" Like the seal impressed

example dis-

about its theological

to signs that indicate

theme has been treated, in relation

that every coin carries its

of the thing in its objective materiality. to the name who lived in

proof and sign by which it may be known how much that coin is on a letter, these serve not to identify the sender but to signify its "force" (Krcift): "The seal is

merely puts the painting century

of a man, whom we know to be a famous painter Venice in the sixteenth

(but it could also be a name that

I R

\ I)

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS THEORY OF SIGNATURES

we know nothing in its materiality signature

or almost nothing

about). If this information unchanged by the that is one

this sense, the yellow patch on a Jew's coat and the colored mark of the bailiff or of the courier referring this relation into the pragmatic instead how one must comport couriers (as well as the behavior Similarly, a signature are not merely neutral signifiers to the signified "J ew," "bailiff," or "courier." By shifting and political sphere, they express oneself before Jews, bailiffs, or that is expected from them). spot of

were missing, the painting would remain completely is so important in our culture radically Furthermore,

and quality. Yet the relation introduced could live in total anonymity) modifies if the artwork

(in others, this may not how we look

be the case, and the painting the reading of the cartouche in question. at the painting legal effects. Now consider which determines substantial

in the shape of an eye on a Euphrasia petal

which falls within the era of authorial copyright, the signature has the example of a signature stamped on a coin

is not a sign that signifies "eye." Rather, in the eye-shaped shows that the plant is an effective remedy the eye.

(which in itself is a sign that refers back to the eye), the signature against illnesses its value. In this case, too, the signature has no to it at all. Yet once

relation with the small circular metal object that we decisively changes our relation to the object in society. Just as the signature, of relations of "authority," without of Titian's painting inscribes it here it transit as money.

hold in our hands. It adds no real properties again, the signature as well as its function in the complex network

6
From the moment refers motifs-above signatures, of its title, Jakob Bohrne's De signatura rerum taking up a number of his themes and The theory of to Paracelsus,

altering in any way the materiality

all, the theme of Adam's language. however, is taken further

forms a piece of metal into a coin, producing

here, and shows the inadthe

And what about the letters of the alphabet which, according to Paracelsus, by being arranged into words allow us to designate books? Here it is probably not a matter expressions of the "signatory names to the creatures. guage that is constituted tials, and conventional of words understood as art" that allowed Adam to assign ini-

equacy of the concept of the sign to address the issue. A signature, first of all, is no longer understood simply as what manifests a relation between occult virtue of things by establishing differ-

ent domains. Instead, it is the decisive operator that which makes the world, mute and without intelligible. Bohrne writes: "All whatever taught of God, without the Knowledge is dumb and void of Understanding; an historical Conjecture, the Spirit without Knowledge

of all knowledge, reason in itself, or

Instead, it must refer to a use of a lannot by sentences but by paradigms, statements, titles, similar to those Foucault must have he wrote of the a it it In the statement

is spoken, written,

of the signature for it proceeds

[Signatur]
only from wherein

had in mind when, to define his enunciative that A, Z, E, R, T is, in a typing handbook, alphabetical semiotic In all these cases, a signature relation between a is what-insisting in a new network on this relation of pragmatic

from the Mouth of. another,

order adopted by French keyboards. does not merely without domain, coinciding express with it-

is dumb; but if the Spirit opens to the Speech of another; and how the spirit has manifested

e=

him the Signature, and further

then he understands

and a sigDatum; rather, thus positioning relations.

he understands

displaces and moves it into another

revealed itself (out of the Essence through the Principle) in the Sound with the Voice.?" For Bohrne, the process of revelation, whose parad igm is language, entails from the beginning a more

and hermeneutic

40

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

complex development calls Bezeichnung) effect knowledge, fundamental

of the semiotic model. The sign (which he and qualified in a signature of his thought). (and

itself is inert and mute, and must, in order to be animated terms one of the in what the

however its Operation character

[Fiaur] of the inward spriritual World; whatever is internally, and is [in der Wirkuna ist], so likewise it has its
externallv.?" of this "natural language" (NaturFor Bohme, the paradigm

to describe this process, he uses the word inqualiren, technical to argue: "So that in the Word may be understood Spirit has conceived,

Bohrne goes on

sprache) of signatures is not Paracelsus's signatory art but Christelogy. For him, "the Word of God is the Ground of aJl Substances, and the Beginning of all Properties, Word is God's speaking the Outspeaking through Trinity: effective expressive. Qualities, or Conditions. The

either in Good or Evil; and with this sign so that

[Bezeichnung] he enters into another Man's Form [Gestaltnis], and

awakens also in the other such a form in the Signature; both Forms mutually assimulate together

[das Sprechen], and remains in God; but or Expression [Aussprechen], viz. the Exit of the
itself into Separability, repeat those of the [is] Nature and Property.?" and give shape to all is what makes efficacious and

[miteinander

inqualione

Word wherein the abyssal Will introduces the Outspeaking,

ren] in one Form, and then there is one Comprehension,

Will, one Spirit, and also one Understanding.":" is the following that remains signature and is indeed Thus likewise artificially passage, where Bohrne compares

Even clearer signs to a lute

The aporias in the theory of the signature just as God was able to conceive instrument of creation,

silent as long as the player does not play it: "The a dumb Thing that is neither of Nature heard or under....

things by means of the Word alone, as both the model and the the signature the mute signs of creation, in which it dwells,

stands in the Essence, and is as a Lute that lies still,

stood; but if it be played upon, then its form is understood the sign [Bezeichnung] according dumb Essence .... and Man wants his instrument.I'" Despite the terminological The instrument hesitations, was prepared knowledge the signature

in its Form is a lies most

In the human Mind, the Signature

nothing but the wise Master

composed,

to the Essence of all Essences, that can strike here

7
Before disappearing teenth century, from Western science at the end of the eighexerted a decisive influand the aspects the theory of signatures

ence on science and magic in the age of the Renaissance Baroque, even to the degree of influencing of the work of Johannes theory of signatures non-marginal

clearly does not coincide sign intelligible. moment of creation,

with the sign, but is what makes the and marked at the only in a subsewhere "the

Kepler and G. W. Leibniz. However, the development came in the theoof

but produces

did not have its locus in medical science and

quent moment when it reveals itself in the signature, inward manifests a tradition "character" Mind's natural Knowledge

magic alone. Its most significant The medieval hermeneutic the sacraments raments within

itself in the Sound of the Word, for that is the of itself.'?' Using a term that refers to and magical, Bohme defines as when signification crosses over or Figure He writes: "The whole outward

logical realm, especially in the theory of the sacraments. tradition traced the inscription the doctrine the domain of signs back to Augustine, of sac-

that is both theological this active moment

insofar as his was the first effort to construct as a "sacred semiology." definition both the cursory of the sacrament

into "revelation"

(Olfenbarung).

Although we find in Augustine as a sacrum sianum

visible World with all its Being is a sign [Bezeichnuna],

.:

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

("A sacrifice as commonly sacrament

understood,

therefore,

is the visible by of

the most decisive problem of the theory of the sign sacrament: the question concerning the efficacy of the sign. In Hugh of St. VicChristian Faith, such efficacytogether with the difference and even The sign Furtherbut also tor's Sacraments its resemblance

of an invisible sacrifice: that is, it is a sacred symbol.") on the person who receives it, the construction of Tours and culminated the passage just mentioned

and the elusively stated idea of an indelible character imprinted the sacrament a proper theory of the sacrament later with Berengarius Summa theologiae. In
28

if the

to the Signified-grounds between

as sign began only six centuries in Saint Thomas's from The Ciry

the excess of the sacrament "What is the difference represents

with respect to the sign. He writes: sign and sacrament? [ex institutione); [ex similitudine). the sacrament

if
to

signifies by means of an institution

God, the term sacramentum

refers not to the sacraments

in a tech-

also by means of similarity

nical sense but more generally to "every work done in order that we may draw near to God in holy fellowship," the sacrifice of immolation the sacraments, to the biblical story." Before Augustine, the spiritual in opposition celebrated by the Hebrews, according in Ambrose's treatise on only desterm spiritale signacuJum

more, the sign may signify the thing, but not confer it [coiferre). In the sacrament, instead, there is not only signification efficacy, such that it signifies by means of institutions, by means of similarity, The anonymous rament to the sign: [The sacrament] is not only the sign of a sacred thing; it is also efficacy. This is the difference between sign and sacrament: for the sign to be, it is enough that it signify that of which it offers the sign, without conferring it. The sacrament, however, not only signifies but confers that of which it is sign or signification. In addition, there is a difference insofar as the sign exists only for signification, even if it lacks similarity, as, for example, the circle, which in the taverns signifies wine (circulus vinum) whereas the sacrament not only signifies by means of institution but also represents by means of similarity. 31 author of the Summa sententiarum represents stresses of the sac-

and confers by means of sanctification.Y" the irreducibility

ignated a moment within the process of baptism, which appears at this stage as an exorcism or initiation that in the texts where Augustine which is so important never mentions the sacraments. of the Scholastic theory as the convergence or of the mystery sacof the is usually described rite. And it is Significant and philosophy, he elaborates his theory of signs,

once again and without reservations

for medieval theology

The process that led to the formation of the sacraments succession rament medicine sacrament Scholastic of three doctrines: sacrament

the doctrine

(which has its paradigm

in Isidore), the doctrine and the doctrine canonical

(still present in Hugh of St. Victor as well as of the sign form to the

in Aquinas's Summa contra gentiles), doctrine

(which supplied the definitive of the sacraments). development,

A more subtle analysis testifying to a composite

shows that the three elements continue to be present throughout all stages of the theory's origin that has not yet been elucidated by historical investigations and that the theory of the sign sacrament bottom of. The inadequacy of the semiotic model for explaining the sacrament emerges when one tries to engage what is in every sense is unable to get to the

8
In the treatise on the sacraments from the Summa theologiae which is usually seen as the moment where Aquinas fully adheres to the paradigm of the sign sacrament, the inability of the theory of the efficacy emerges with sign to fully account for the sacrament's

I "

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

respect to the effects of the sacrament, is forced to distinguish tue of its warmth), between

namely, grace and characcause," which proup in vir-

depends on the good or evil dispositions operantis), operatum, actualizes instituted, but is an objective its efficacy. always signifies its meaning reality

of the minister that is produced

(ex opere ex opere that

ter. To explain how a sign may also be the cause of grace, Thomas a "principal duces its effects in virtue of its form (like fire warming and an "instrumental

the sign here is always the place of an operation

cause," which acts not in

In other words, the sacrament functions not as a sign that, once but as a signature whose effect depends on a signator, or in any case on a principle-occult virtue in Paracelsus, instrumental virtue in Thomaswhich each time animates it and makes it effective.

virtue of its form but only through a movement impressed on it by an acting principle (the hatchet being the cause of the bed only by means of the artisan's action). Whereas the principal cause cannot be the sign of its effect, the instrumental cause, writes Thomas, "can be called the sign of a hidden effect in virtue of the fact that it is not only a cause but in some sense an effect too, inasmuch as it receives its initial impetus from the principal is why the sacraments agent. And this of the New Law are causes and signs at the express [~fficiunt quod .figurant)."32 Howagent's action, cause understood as instrumental

9
The proximity "character" contrast Augustine polemics of the sign to the sphere of signatures confirmation, and ordination is even more (which, in only once). of his ev ident in the specific sacramental in baptism, developed to the other sacraments, against the Donatists, effect that takes the name of can be imparted especially

same time. Hence too it is that, as the usual formula puts it, they 1fect what they.figuratively ever, this means that as the effect of a principal namely Christ's, the sacrament needs an active principle agent, to have the intention does not act simply ex institutione

a theory of character The Donatists

in the context

like a sign; rather, each time it Christ as the principal at least customarily)

in the short treatise denied the validity of had been administered this raised an

in order to animate it. This is why it is (if not presently,

Contra epistolam Parmeniani. baptism (and ordination) by or to a heretic important question

necessary for the minister, who represents of carrying out the sacramental

if the sacrament

or schismatic.

For Augustine,

act. Thomas adds:

because he wanted

to affirm the validity of of the situation of the sub-

the sacrament not only independently Thus the act of washing with water, which takes place in baptism, can be aimed at physical Cleanliness or physical health, or be done in play, and there are many other reasons of this kind why this action should be performed. And because of this it is necessary to isolate and define the one purpose for which the action of washing is performed in baptism, and this is done through the intention of the minister. This intention in turn is expressed in the words pronounced in the sacraments, as when the minister says, "I baptise you in the name of the Father etc.,,33 Even if such intention is not something subjective, which jects receiving or administering municated

it but also outside the grace comspiritual grace, Augustine conferring

by the sacrament through the Spirit. For the Donatists, they were excluded from that is, a baptism

the sacraments of heretics could not communicate since according to the patristic tradition, participating that imprints affirms the possibility its corresponding

in the Holy Spirit. Against this thesis, of a baptisma sine spirituon the soul a character or nota, without

grace. The reasons for such a radical thesis are desire to ensure person and the priest beyond

probably ecclesial, and to be found in Augustine's the identity of both the Christian

I, ()

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

any personal

merit or unworthiness.

In any case, the status of He first cites the example authorization: (thesallris if

10

such a "character"

is so paradoxical that Augustine has to multiply The Scholastics, "sacramental signature who centuries later developed to give content the theory of the its aporetic character," could not have overlooked that it communicates

the paradigms that make it intelligible. regale, though illicitly, without caught, he will certainly and is incorporated conpeteuuv." as was customary

of someone who has stamped a gold or silver coin with a signum the sovereign's be punished, but the coin remains valid regalibus

origin. They thus attempted by affirming

to the Augustinian to the soul a habitus The

into the public treasury

(this is the thesis of Alexander of Hales) or a power (potenza). latter is the position of Thomas, even if it does not communicate upon the soul "a certain This, however, too, has recourse in antiquity recognition sacraments grace, nevertheless

The second example has to do with a soldier who, in the Roman army, has been marked on his has fled from clemency and is forgiven, christiana are less

who argues that the character, does bestow

body by the character militiae and out of cowardice battle. If he appeals to the emperor's it is not necessary possible," asks Augustine,

spiritual power ordered to those things Thomas, that in

which pertain to divine worship.'?" does not resolve all the difficulties. to Augustine's military paradigm, writing

to mark him again with a new character. "Is it "that the sacramenta

lasting than this bodily mark [corporalis nota ]7"35 On the basis of this example and aware of the aporias implicit in this notion, he draws by means of a doubtful argument of a "baptism without Spirit, then heretics have the Spiritthe inevitable conclusion but to destruction not to spirit": "If baptism cannot be without the

"it was usual for soldiers on enlistment

for military

service to be marked with some form of physical 'character' in the physical sphere. In the same way, therefore, men are deputed for some function sphere pertaining

of the fact that they were deputed for some function when in the in the spiritual

salvation, just as was the case with Saul. ... [But if] the covetous have not the Spirit of God, and yet have baptism, it is possible for baptism to exist without the Spirit of God."36 The idea of an indelible "sacramental character" from the need to explain how the sacrament munication supplement of the Spirit is impossible, of efficacy without tions that should have made it void or inefficacious. the character the excess of the sacrament over its effect, any content arises, then, If the comwill express like a

to the worship of God, it naturally follows that as on the soul imprinted signi] ... for

believers they are marked off by some form of spiritual character.?" Character, he argues, is an indelible sign imprinted by the sensible sign of the sacrament: "The character upon the soul has the force of a sign [habet rationem the character of baptism

survives in condi-

the way in which an individual is known to have been sealed with is that he has been washed by water produces not only the effect of in nature and cannot signature by a which is apparent to the senses.":" That is, in the case of baptism, the sensible sign of the sacrament grace but also another be erased. Consider the paradoxical nature of this special (qllaedam si8natio) sign, the character the sign: that defines character." A sign produced sign that is spiritual

something

other than the pure some disgraceor is a zero degree

fact of being marked. If the Christian person or priest has lost all the qualities that defined him, if he has committed priestly character. To put it differently: signature, and groundsin this eventcharacter ful act or even denied his faith, he still retains his Christian

which expresses the event of a sign without meaning a pure identity without content.

exceeds the relational nature that is proper to

III)

"8

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

With regard to the relation implied by the term "sign," there has to be some basis for this. Now the immediate basis for the relationship involved in this kind of sign, namely character, cannot be the essence of the soul. Otherwise it would belong connaturally to every soul. Hence we have to postulate some property in the soul which constitutes the basis for a relation of this kind, and this is the essence of character. Hence we shall not have to assign it to the genus of relation, as some have asserted." Character, then, is a sign that exceeds the sign, and a relation every relation. In the efficacious sign excess has the character is what marks the irreducible For this reason, "character

participation

of the subjects involved had emerged in a work that foundation of magic and De mysteriis. He writes: the symbols

is usually seen as the first philosophical theurgy: Iamblichus's

For even when we are not engaged in intellection, [synthemata]

themselves, by themselves, perform their appropriate

work, and the ineffable power of the gods, to whom these symbols relate, itself recognises the proper images [oikeias eikonas] of itself, not through being aroused by our thought. ... The things which properly arouse the divine will are the actual divine symbols [theia synthemata] .... I have labored this point at some length for this reason: that you not believe that all authority over activity [ener8eias] in the theurgic rites depends on us, or suppose that their genuine performance [alethes ... er8on] is assured by the true condition of our acts of thinking, or that they are made false by our deception.Y Marsilio Ficino was so convinced of the relation between De

that exceeds and grounds of the sacrament,

of efficacy over signification. imprinted, theory but considered

force of a sign in relation to the sensible sacrament The paradox of sacramental of signatures though it is legitimate

by which it is

in itself it has the force of a principle.':" theory, which makes it akin to the derives from it, even magical that is inseparable or signature that by is purely pragmatic. [charactere ... insigni-

(and which probably

to suppose for both a common us with something to it, a character of character

these texts and the Christian tradition mysteriis into Latin, together and the Corpus hermeticum, sacraments.

that when he translated

origin), is that it presents from the sign yet irreducible

with other Greek magical treatises of the efficacy of the the sacramento"divine sacra-

he slightly altered the passage in ques-

insisting on a sign makes it efficacious and capable of action. In both cases, the meaning Just as a coin is "imprinted with a character

tion to make it accord with the doctrine title (which is missing in the original) rum," he also translates signs," as "sacramenta ment: "When synthemata, the expression

Thus not only does he place before the paragraph "De virtute theta synthemata,

tur] ordaining it for use in commerce,

and soldiers are sealed with

a character inasmuch as they are deputed to military service" (both examples also appear in Paracelsus), so are the faithful marked by the character recipiendum in order to be able to perform aliis ea quae pertinent acts of worship (ad ad cultum Dei).43 vel tradendum

divina." And at the end of the passage, he refer to the Christian there are symbols and he

adds a few lines that unequivocally

in the course of sacrifice things in virtue

that is, signs and sacraments decorum;

[signacl!la et sacramenta], of whose ordination on the

the priest uses material realizes the external sacrament

but it is God who imprints of the sacramental in all likelihood tradition.

its efficacious force.?" doctrine character owe their of signatures

I I

Both the theological the idea that the efficacy of sacred of the condition and type of and the medical doctrine

A century before Augustine,

signs and practices was independent

origin to this kind of magical-theurgic

Among the texts

,; o

I; I

THEORY THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS

OF

SIGNATURES

translated

by Ficino, there is a short treatise titled De sacr!ficio et to Proclus, in which the basic concepts we have Here we find, once again, of things ("the the visible signatures so far are clearly present.

that the juridical fundamental

problem

posed by such a practice putting in question

touched

=e

attributed

element

of doctrine,

the very

examined

nature of the sacrament. and the conditions ment and therefore sacramental theologian

Since sacramental

efficacy immediately

the familiar idea regarding resembling influences:

depends on the signum and the character rather than on the aims of the subjects, the person who administers commits a crime of heresy, and not a simple between of the the baptism of images calls into question the essence of the sacracrime of sorcery. In other words, the close proximity and magical efficacy makes the intervention and the canonist necessary. answer given heretito faith that Enrico del Carretto, bishop of Lucca. Against with respect

stone called 'the eye of the sky' or 'eye of the sun' contains a figure the pupil of the eye from which emanates a ray") as ("The ancients, having recognized these things ... by well as the idea of efficacious likeness as the foundation of magical means of likeness transfer divine virtues onto the inferior world; in fact, likeness is the sufficient cause that allows individual things to be bound to one another")."

This is clear in the longer and more elaborate by the Franciscan

those who argued that it could not be a matter of afactum

12

cale, since magical purpose between sacraments and magic is evident enough in the sacrament, added something therefore

was accidental

The proximity in a
1320

he argued that baptism was a consecration to the consecrated

in the practice of the baptism of images and charms as reported consultation of Pope John XXII. The ritual baptism of in those years to worry the magical images, which serves to increase their efficacy, must have been a widespread enough practice pontiff to the point of inducing him to submit the following question to ten theologians and canon law experts:

thing by way of either form for magical purposes aim with respect [quedam conwhich the thing an external through

or sign. The baptism of images performed did not merely introduce to the sacrament

but was "a form of consecration to witchcraft,

secTOtiol and deputation

is affected by the act or is believed to be affected by such consecration.?" In other words, Enrico believes in the reality of the spell performed operation the performer malificiatum), through believed the baptism in the demon's of images. If the magical image, even if the ut dJabolus pungat with the ritual his power. so The image and that power and pierced

Do those who baptize with water, in accordance with church rituals, images, or any other object devoid of reason for the purpose of witchcraft commit the crime of heresy and should therefore be considered heretics, or should they be judged only as having committed sorcery? And how should they be punished in either case? And what is to be done with respect to those who have received such images even tough they knew that they had been baptized? And what to do with respect to those who did not know that the images had been baptized, but, knowing the power of these sorts of images, had received them for this purpose?" The pope, himself a scholar of canon law, had understood

were performed

on an unconsecrated

image for this reason (ad hoc pungit Jmaginem,

there would be sorcery rather than heresy." Howof the image produces a diaboli-

ever, if the image has been baptized in accordan~e (modo divino), "the consecration parallelism between cal image" where the devil effectively insinuates the efficacy of the baptized precisely of the sacrament consists

in the fact that both act by

means of a sign. Indeed, the devil is present in the image not as

I,' '\

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

a "principle

of movement"

(sicut motor in mobili) but as "somein signo). Just as it occurs

Saturni,

according

to Picatiix, is that of "a man who has a black

thing marked in the sign" (ut signatum in the sacrament, institutes,"

face and camel feet, who sits at the desk holding in his right hand a pole and in his left hand an arrow or javelin.?" What is the meaning recorded of these enigmatic illustrations? figures so precisely Unlike the constelof the zodiain the manuscripts'

in the magical image the devil "efficaciously whatever the performer's belief

through the priest, "a sign relation with respect to the contains the belief, and hereticale]."51 Magito each other term

spell." And, as in the sacrament, therefore

may be, "the simple fact of consecration cal and sacramental operations

lations, they in no way refer to the figures that the stars seem to draw in the sky, nor do they describe any properties cal signs to which they refer. Their function when we place them in the technical of charms or talismans reproductions . matter of which they are made, the of anything: context becomes clear only of the production Whatever through the signs nor which into In this

makes it a case of heresy IJactum correspond

for term, and the classification records this proximity.

of the crime as a type of heresy

that Picatrix calls ymagines. they are operations terrestrial

r=e= are neither

13
Astrology is a privileged site of signatures. Indeed, the magical

the forces of celestial bodies are gathered a point in order to influence examined so far has its roots in astrology.

and concentrated

bodies (ymago nihil aliud as a significator that gathers and

and medical tradition tise that was translated

est quam vis corporum celestium in cotpotibus irifluencium).54 role, the form or figure of the planet is defined or signator, or even "root" selves operations (radix), of the yma80

Consider the images and figures of the decans in the Arabic treainto Latin under the title Picatrix or in maius, which so fascinated Aby Warreproduced in the frescos at maius in regard to of mind; he wears his midriff with a In the Abu Ma'shar's /ntroductorium

directs the virtues of the stars. In this sense, the roots are themput in the service of the efficacy of images (iste and the form of the planet or operation: they are of the stars is realin mundo ut in radices erunt opus celi pro iffectibus ymaginum).55 Both the figure in the ymago de can find their meaning both signatures through ized (iste linee Significant Knowledge in this efficacious which the influence

burg when he saw them sumptuously

Schifanoia that he did not rest until he had traced their genealogy. "In this decan," we read in the Introductorium of powerful a voluminous stature, white courage, garment, and greatness tied around the first decan of Aries, "a black man arises with red eyes, a man

radios quos stelle proiciunt

cord; he is wrathful,

stands erect, guards, and observes.':"

centro; et ex hoc est opus et virtus ymaginum, of celestial signatures in a signature sense that producing and reproducing formula) the signature

et hoc modo operantur). 56 imagining or a

gloomy figure of this vir niger, as depicted by Francesco del Cossa in the median strip of the month of March in the hall of Palazzo Schifanoia, Warburg both the decansand ultimately saw a kind of "secret companion" like a cipher of his destiny. In Picatiix, (jonna) of this there as a the Jorma the planets have a "figure" of his life and something

is the magician's science, in the (which can also be a gesture

an ymago means sympathetically of the planet in question. themselves.

This is all the more true for the so-called "signs" of the zodiac as well as for the constellations natures expressing It is not properly a the matter of signs (what would they be signs of?) but a matter of siga relation of efficacious likeness between

kind. Thus, while the first decan of Aries is described "man with red eyes and a large beard, wrapped cloth, making impressive gestures while he walks,"

in a white linen

~ 4

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

constellation

and those who are born under its sign, or more genand the microcosm. And not only

produce his charms, so Mnemosyne is the atlas of signatures the artist-or the scholar-must or she wishes to understand is at issue in the tradition For this reason, Warburg, is, in truth, and perform the risky operation of the historical memory with para-scientific terminology

that that that

erally, between the macrocosm that has ever been written the profound

learn to know and handle if he of the West.

is it not a matter of signs, but it is not even a matter of anything down. Rather, in the sky, according to by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, men image proposed

learned perhaps for the first time "to read what was never written." However, this means that the signature enter into a zone of undecidability. ing, and writing is the place where the gesture of reading and that of writing invert their relation and Here reading becomes writ"The image is is wholly resolved into reading:

closer to that of magic than of science, can refer to

the Pathoiformeln as "disconnected dynamograms" (abgeschniirte Dynamogramme) that reacquire their efficacy every time they encounter uncertainties the artist (or the scholar). Despite the terminological that are undoubtedly influenced by the psychology

called image because the forces of the spirits are conjoined here: the operation of the imagination

of the time, from Friedrich Theodor Vischer to Richard Wolfgang Semon, the Pathoiformeln, the "engrams" seeks to grasp are neither the "nameless science" like an overcoming, instruments, he was unable of signatures. and the Bilde: Warburg and to found is something signs nor symbols but signatures;

[cogitacio1 is included in the thing

that contains the virtue of the planet.'?"

I4
These observations may supply the key to understanding what is at issue in the enigmatic appropriately photographs, the concept

an Atifhebung of magic by means of its own

an archaeology

Bildetotlas Mnemosyne- to which Warof Pathoiformel. The images (in fact, and printed in the art to they Haus) making up each of the seventyreproductions be referring. of works or objects On the contrary,

burg devoted the last years of his life- as well as to grasping more which were specially developed

15 In The Order episteme.

if

Things, Michel Foucault cites Paracelsus's treatise

the theory of signatures in the Renaissance the exegesis and by plays a decisive role, domicentury

when he situates

photo lab of the Warburg books) as photographic

In the latter, resemblance

nine plates of the atlas should not be seen (as with ordinary which we would ultimately

nating until the end of the sixteenth interpretation man and the universe. correspondences out signatures. However,

not only of texts but also of the relation between a world that is supported and sympathies, ~arks analogies and that teach with-

have value in themselves, since they themselves to reproduce

are ymaaines in

the thick weave of resemblances us how to recognize Signs," and knowledge ing and deciphering incessant doubling resemblances: them.

Picatrix's sense, in which the signature of the objects they appear has been affixed. In other words, the Pathoiformeln
the historian: the magician signatures they coincide with the images precisely recorded perusing its pages the catalog of the Jormae and and planets that will enable him to

stands in need of signatures, "There The world of similarity of resemblances

58

are no resemblances

are not found in works of art or in the mind of the artist or of in the atlas. Just as the Introductorium maius or Picatrix offers to of the decans

can only be a world of is based on identifyinto the system of

signatures.

Foucault realizes the curious, introduce

that signatures

'i

11

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

But what are these signs? How, amid all the aspects and so many interlacing faced at any given moment pause because form constitutes sign?-Resemblance it indicates forms, does one recognize

of the world that one is

"superimposed

hermeneutics

and semiology in the form of similithe way in which other than is nothing

tude .... The nature of things, their coexistence, they are linked together their resemblance. network and communicate the world And that resemblance and hermeneutics

with a character a secret and essential

that should give one resemblance? What

is visible only in the from one end to the do not perfectly coin-

a sign and endows it with its particular does. It signifies

value as a

of signs that crosses

exactly in so far as it resem.... But what it indias a signature

other.l"? Yet semiology where knowledge

Everything hermeneutics cided without

bles what it is indicating

(that is, a similitude) for its distinct

cide by means of resemblance; is produced:

between them there remains a gap,

cates is not the homology;

existence

would then be indistinguishable it is another resemblance,

from the face of which it is the sign; similitude, one of another

would

be manifest

and immediately

knowable of signatures

if the cointhat with

an adjacent

of resemblance

and the semiology

type which enables us to recognize in its turn by a third. this signature resemblance.

the first, and which is revealed receives a signature; but

the slightest parallax.

But because the similitudes

Every resemblance

form the graphics

of the world are one "cog" out of alignment knowledge and the infinite

is no more than an intermediate

form of the same

those that form its discourse,

labour it

As a result, the totality of these marks, sliding over the forms a second circle which would be an

involves find here the space that is proper to weave their way across this distance, course from resemblance

to them: it is their task an endless zigzag

great circle of similitudes, exact duplication

pursuing it."'

of the first, point by point, were it not for that tiny which causes the sign of sympathy to reside in

to what resembles

degree of displacement

in an analogy, that of an analogy in emulation, convenience, recognition. same nature; which in turn requires The signature

that of emulation

Although the site and nature of signatures in the passage just quoted, signatures gap and disconnection Enzo Melandri signatures provided between semiology

remain problematic and hermeneutics. of the concept of

the mark of sympathy

for its the

find their own locus in the

and what it denotes

are of exactly

it is merely that they obey a different

law of distribu59

an early definition

tion; the pattern

from which they are cut is the same.

in this context in a 1970 article on The Order ?!Thinas. of semiology and hermeneutics as what enables he went on to define the signature

Starting from the noncoincidence Nevertheless, celsus to Crollius, just like the authors he examines, from Paraof sigin Foucault, the transition Foucault does not define the concept of the Renaissance

from the one to the other: "A sianature is a sort of makes reference to a give!} interpretation. by

nature, which for him resolves into resemblance; is a motif in his definition needs to be elaborated signatures. At a certain _ the set of knowledges and what is notof knowledges

however, there of

sign within the sign; it is the index that in the context of a given serniology univocally A signature adheres to the sign in the sense that it indicates, episteme a signature

episterne that only semiology

to identify the proper site and function point Foucault distinguishes that allow us to recognize

means of the sign's making, the code with which it has to be deci-

what is a sign of signs,

phered.l'" If for the Renaissance

to the resemblance in modern between

thus refers thing,

from hermeneutics,

which consists of the set the meaning century, he suggests,

the sign and its designated

that allow us to discover

science it is no longer a character

of the individual

to "make the signs speak." The sixteenth

sign but of its relation

with other signs. In any case, "the type

I,' \)

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

of episteme depends on the type of signature,"

and this is "that by

language

solely as a system of signs is insufficient the interpretation of language

and does not as a system of

character of the sign, or of the system of signs, that announces

allow one to explain the passage from sign to speech. The semiology of language, signs, was thus "paradoxically blocked by the very instrument is presupposed as a

means of its making its own relation to the deSignated thing."63

that allowed for its creation: the sign."65 As Saussure had intuited 16 One of the final conclusions idea that the transition unbridgeable significance" of Emile Benveniste's semiology that between within work was the in notes published after his death, iflanguage between and hermeneutics the two there is an de la language "a double to two disare transformed into discourse: system of signs, then nothing allows us to explain how these signs "Various concepts are present in language (that is, clothed in linguistic form) such as beif, lake, sky, red, sad,five, to split, to see. At what moment, and by virtue of what operation, do these concepts however enriched what interplay between them, what conditions, of these words, form discourse? The sequence

is not to be taken for granted, gap. Consider langue." There Benveniste crete and juxtaposed

the 1969 essay "Semiologie identifies

(une double signifiance) that corresponds

He writes:

planes: on the one hand, the plane of semi-

it might be by the ideas it evokes, will never that another human being, by specific to him.'?"

otics; and on the other, that of semantics.

make any human being understand pronouncing Thus Benveniste sentence any other Melandri's

it, wishes to convey something

The semiotic denotes the mode of significance that belongs to the linguistic sign and constitutes it as a unity .... The only question raised by the sign relates to its existence, and this question is decided with a yes or no .... It exists when it is recognized as a Signifier by all the members of the linguistic community .... With the semantic, we enter into a specific mode of significance that is generated by discourse. The problems posed here are a function of language as a producer of messages. The message is not reduced to a succession of unities to be identified separately; it is not the sum of signs that produces sense. On the contrary, it is the sense, globally conceived, that is realized and divided in particular "signs," namely, words .... The semantic order is identical with the world of enunciation and the universe of discourse. It is possible to show that we are dealing with two distinct orders of concepts and two conceptual universes by pointing to the different criteria of validity that are required for the one and for the other. The semiotic (the sign) must be recognized; the semantic (discourse) must be understood.T" According to Benveniste, Saussure's attempt to conceive of

can conclude with the forceful affirmation: closed. From the sign to the by syntagmation nor by and neither

"The world of the sign is, in truth, there is no transition, means. A gap separates

them.?" In Foucault's

terms, this amounts to saying that there is no passage to hermeneutics and that we must situate sigthem. Signs do not in the "gap" that separates signification

from semiology natures precisely theory oflinguistic of signatures.

speak unless signatures

make them speak. But this means that the must be completed as an attempt

with a theory
to construct

The theory of enunciation

that Benveniste develops the passage between

in this same period can be considered the semiotic and the semantic.

a bridge over that gap, to render thinkable

17
In the same year that Benveniste published the essay "Semiologie de la langue," Foucault published

The Archaeology

if Knowledge.

i)

1'1

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

Even though Benveniste's

name does not appear in the book, and of Foucauldian epistemology and

The statement Instead,

cannot be identified as a sign or structure or syntactical and sentences in signs, phrases,

refer-

Foucault might not have known his most recent articles, a secret thread unifies the manifesto Benveniste's theses. The incomparable Now, statements novelty of The Archaeolare not merely reducible takes care to disas from the proposia kind of

ring to a series of logical, grammatical, it operates of their simple existence, the sentence is correct,
The statement

relations. at the level if

as a bearer of efficacy, which each time the act of language is efficacious, an aim is realized:
... it is a function of exis-

0ay if Knowledce is to explicitly take as its object what Foucault

calls "statements." to discourse tinguish sitional residual (the semantic), since Foucault

allows us to decide whether

or whether

them as much from the sentence structure element has been extracted of "irrelevant

is not therefore belongs

a structure

tion (the statement,

he writes, is "what is left when the propoand defined," raw material?"). Nor is it posto look for is

tence that properly

to signs and on the basis of which one whether or not they or are

may then decide, through "make sense," .according juxtaposed,

analysis or intuition,

to what rule they follow one another

sible to situate the statement thereby reducing the statement neither among unitary

entirely within the semiotic sphere, groups of signs. The statement

of what they are the sign, and what sort of act is car(oral or written) ... [I]t is not in itself of structures and

it to signs: "It is useless therefore nor a rule of construction, and permutation;

ried out by their formulation a unit, but a function possible unities, in time and space."

that cuts across a domain

a syntagma,

nor a canonic

and which reveals them,

with concrete

contents,

form of succession become manifest.?"

it is that which enables

such groups of signs to exist, and enables these rules or forms to Hence the difficulty "enunciative function," Foucault faces in his effort to define the as well as the stubbornness character with which he with of statements

To be sure, Foucault realized that it was not possible to define the statement as one level among others of linguistic to that of a disciplinary and repetitions, analysis and knowledge. its interrupthat the archaeology he sought after did not at all delimit in lan-

guage a sphere comparable tions and resumptions,

always insists on the heterogeneous

The whole book, with its hesitations not aim at the constitution witness to such difficulty. invested in sentences not coincide

respect to signs and to the objects they signify:

The statement exists therefore neither in the same way as a language

and finally its explicit admission that it did of a science in the proper sense, bears To the extent that it is always already to the extent that it does and that it or with signifieds, function

(Jan8ue) (although it is made of signs that are definable in their individuality only within a natural or artificial presented linguistic to perception system), nor in the same way as the objects it is always endowed situated statement in accordance (although

and propositions,

with the signifiers

with a certain

materiality,

and can always be coordinates) .... The

refers to "the very fact that they ate given, and the way in which they are given," the enunciative them and must be recognized ignation direction of something In other words, it is necessary is almost invisible in beyond or on this side of their desto "question language, not in the

with spatio-temporal

is not the same kind of unit as the sentence, therefore

the proposito the same object,

tion, or the speech act; it cannot be referred criteria; but neither

or their being deSignated by something." that gives it."73 the whole set of

is it the same kind of unit as a material

with its limits and independence."

to which it refers, but in the dimension of capturing

To grasp this, it is less a matter

(I

It

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

logical or grammatical lish the competence mous, historical geographical,

rules that order communication

or estab-

18
In The Archaeology purely existential "structure" object endowed

of the speaking subject than it is of pausing that is, "a body of anonyin the time and space

to reflect on the" discursive practices,"

if Knowledge,
character

Foucault

often emphasizes the statement

the

rules, always determined

of statements. of existence,"

Insofar as it is not a is not an the

that have defined a given period, and for a given social, econorr;ic, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the that the then, are not enunciative function."74 The whole argument acquires clarity if we hypothesize statements The Order in The Archaeology

but "a function

with real properties.

It is a pure existence,

sheer fact that a certain being-Ianguagement is the signature existence (darsi). to link the doctrine It concerned An attempt seventeenth trascendentalia) pertain

takes place. The state-

that marks language in the pure fact of its of signatures Edward the interpretation to ontology in the of those or they These

if Knowledge

take the place that in Statements,

if Things

belonged to signatures. between

situated on the threshold where signatures yet discourse

semiology and hermeneutics semiotic nor semantic, like signa-

was made by the English philosopher century.

Herbert

take place. Neither

and no longer mere sign, statements,

predicates that Scholastics called "transcendents" to every being through

(trascendentia

tures, do not institute semiotic relations or create new meanings; instead, they mark and "characterize" signs at the level of their existence, thus actualizing and displacing their efficacy. These are the signatures that signs receive from the sheer fact of existing and being used-namely, the indelible character that, in marking them orients and determines their interpretaon coins, Like signatures as signifying something,

insofar as, being the most general predicates, the very fact of existing.

are: res, verum, bonum, oliquid, unum. Every being, owing to the sheer fact of existing, is one, true, and good. For this reason, the Scholastics said that the meaning (reciptocatur of these predicates coincides a with pure existence cum ente), and they defined its

tion and efficacy in a certain context. like the figures of the constellations or the character

nature with the syntagma passiones entis; that is, the attributes being "suffers" or receives from the very fact of being. Herbert's predicates scendental signatura great achievement was to read these transcendent While analyzof the tranthat pertains and meaning (or at least one of them) as signatures. (1633), the nature bonum, he defines it as the signature interior [The goodness

and the decans in the sky of

astrology, like the eye-shaped spots on the corolla of the Eaphrasia that baptism imprints on the soul of the baptized, decided the destiny and life is able to exhaust. rectifies the they have always already pragmatically The theory abstract unmarked it carries pretation practices, of signatures

ing, in De veritate a thing through

of signs that neither semiology nor hermeneutics

to

(or of statements)

the very fact of being: "Bonitas ... in re est ejus of the thing lies in its internal

and fallacious idea that there are, as it were, pure and signs, that the signans neutrally signifies the signatum, a signature and precepts that necessarily predetermines its interto rules, In this

signature]."75 Bonum is a "passion of the being," which necessarily marks the thing and displays itself as much in its sensible appearance (the "pleasant," the "beautiful") (intellection as perception Let us attempt to broaden as in intellectual intuition, knowledge of the ultima bonitatis Herbert's signatura). which throws namely, the

univocally and once and for all. Instead, the sign signifies because and distributes its use and efficacy according that it is our task to recognize.

sense, archaeology

is the science of signatures.

new lioht on an essential chapter of first philosophy,

(1 ~

(.

I,

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

doctrine

of the transcendentals.

In itself, being is the most empty

relation between

En-Sof (God as simple and infinite

Being) and be admit-

and generic notion, which seems not to tolerate any determinations other than the "neither ... nor" of negative theology. Yet, if we instead posit that being, through that orient its comprehension tain hermeneutics, unum, verum, the very fact of existing, of giving itself in an entity, receives or suffers marks or signatures toward, a given sphere and a cerens est of then ontology is possible as the" discourse" every being presents the signature

the Sephiroth (the ten "words" or attributes in which God is manifested). How can multiple attributes and determinations ted if God is simple, one, and infinite? If the Sephiroth are in God, God's unity and simplicity are lost; if they are outside of God, they cannot be divine at all. "You will never escape from this alternative," states the philosopher in the dialogue The Philosopher and the Kabbalist, written by Padua's great Kabbalist Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto: "Either the Sephiroth can one think something signifies are in God or they are not and whose existence How 'God' is necesgeneration, divine derived from the divine?

of being, that is, of "the passions of being." "Quodlibet bonum": unity (which directs it toward mathematics

or the theory of singuand desirable).

larity), of truth (which orients it toward the theory of knowledge), and of the good (which makes it communicable ory of signatures. the objective dissemination statements Here we touch on the special relevance for ontology of the theIt is not only that in the syntagma passiones etitis meaning of the genitive is not clear; is a transcendental Signatures (like coincide. Existence or subjective

the one who is unique

sary .... So we must conceive God as one, having absolute uniqueness. How can one think God in terms of multiplicity, and origin of the lights from one another? ... We know that the holy one, blessed be He, is absolutely simple and no accident can be attributed to Him.H76 The same problem God's attributes. appears in Christian It is well-known that, of theology (as well as in Islamic and Jewish theology) in relation to the question concerning according to Harry A. Wolfson and Leo Strauss, the history regarding aporetic.

being and its passions

in passions, that is, in signatures.

with respect to language) are then that which marks

things at the level of their pure existence. is the archi-signator that imprints existent entities. The Kantian principle not "the concept of something ture. Hence, ontology archaeology that pertain predisposing

On haplos, "pure being,"

marks on according to which exis-

its transcendental

Western philosophy and theology from Plato to Spinoza coincides with the history of the doctrine And, as philosophers ing, this doctrine is intrinsically the divine attributes. God is the absolutely or genus and speand theologians alike do not tire of repeat-

tence is not a real predicate, reveals here its true meaning: being is that could be added to the concept knowledge but the of a thing," because in truth being is not a concept but a signais not a determinate of every knowledge, which explores the signatures of specific knowledges.

simple being, in whom not only are essence and existence indistinguishable, but not even essence and attributes, cies, can be distinguished. attributes Nevertheless, perfect being, He must somehow divided between if God is the absolutely Thus the field is the attributes

to beings by virtue of the very fact of existing, thus them to the interpretation

possess all perfections and all

insofar as they express perfections.

those who argue that in actuality

19 The theory of signatures allows us also to throw light on one of the problems that have engaged scholars of the Kabbala, namely, the

exist in God and those who maintain with equal firmness that the attributes exist only in the minds of human beings. interrupt this false alternative. The attributes (as for the Kabbalists) are neither the essence of God Signatures the Sephiroth

(l

(\

'/

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

nor something natures simplicity

foreign to the essence of God: they are the sigagainst the absoluteness and dispose it

the Sleeping

Venus, which until then had been exhibited of Dresden as a "copy by Sassoferrato method," The novelty of "Morelli's of Burckhardt

in the of a lost which of

that, by barely brushing and know ability.

Gemaldegalerie

of the being that is solely its own existing,

original by Titian.") earned the admiration nation

toward revelation

and Freud and the indig-

of some scholars

of art, lies in the fact that instead characteristics,

focusing attention,
20

as art historians

had until that point, on more Morelli exam-

visible stylistic and iconographic disappears from Western science with to the "Rapined insignificant

The concept of signature

details like ear lobes, the shape of fingers and

the advent of the Enlightenment. port ridicule des plantes

The two lines dedicated obituary:

term in the Encyclopedie amount to a mocking entre leur figure under different century. systeme extravagant

toes, and "even, horribi] dictu ... such an unpleasant subject as fingernails. 78 Precisely where stylistic control loosens up in the execution of secondary details, the more individual and unconscious traits of the artist can abruptly emerge, traits that "escaped without his being aware of it.'?" Following compares in the footsteps evidential of Enrico Castelnuovo, of attribution, method an art hisGinzburg more he on torian who had worked on the question Morelli's

et leurs effets. Ce in the

n'a que trop H~gne." Even more significant names starting In an essay that does not has traced a precise car-

is its gradual reemergence have to be described the Italian historian tography rate knowledges Mesopotamian of identification

second half of the nineteenth

in depth here since it is so well-known, Carlo Ginzburg which occurs in the most dispaGinzburg's essay spans from techniques to recall that he it from from forensic

to the one invented

of this reemergence, divination

or less in the same years by Arthur Conan Doyle for his detective Sherlock Holmes. ers the perpetrator Holmes's In Clues, Mytbs, and the Historical Metbod, writes: "The art connoisseur resembles the detective who discovto most people.'?" And of a shoe in or indeed the of the Card-

and techniques. to art history. (indiziario)

to Freud,

It should be sufficient paradigm in order to distinguish

of a crime (or the artist behind a painting) attention to the imprint

that Ginzburg reconstructs defines as "evidential" tative disciplines, cases, situations, speculative

an epistemological

the basis of evidence that is imperceptible almost maniacal the mud, the ashes of a cigarette board Box") undoubtedly for the marginal attention It is well known

the model of Galilean science, and that concerns and documents,

"highly quali-

on the pavement,

in which the object is the study of individual precisely because tbey are indi-

curve of an ear lobe (in the story "The Adventure details in the masters' that Morelli's that Morelli's paintings.

calls to mind that of Pseudolermolieff writings principle h~d drawn according Freud's Edgar to which to

vidual, and for this reason get results that have an unsuppressible margin."77 1874 (the Exemplary is the case of Giovanni Morelli, who between and 1876 published under the Russian pseudonym Lermolieff name was an anagram, eff., that is to say, iffinxit revolutionize or better an actual "signature": in painting.

years before he began to develop psychoanalysis.

Wind has observed the personality less intense, recalls

Morelli (We owe of

of the author must be found where the effort is that of modern psychology, according gestures that betray the secret

or iffecit) a series of articles that would of attribution to Giorgione

the techniques

which it is our small unconscious of our character.

to Morelli, among other things, the restitution

In the essay "The

Moses of Michelangelo,"

,) R

(j I)

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

Freud himself states without accustomed or unnoticed

reservations

that Morelli's method It, too, is things from despised as it were, of our

is "closely related to the technique features,

of psycho-analysis.

21

to divine secret and concealed

An actual philosophy fragments Walter

of the signature dedicated

is contained

in the two faculty.

from the rubbish-heap,

Benjamin

to the mimetic

observations."?' The nature of the clues on which the methods of Morelli, Holmes, Freud, Alphonse Bertillon, and Francis Galton are grounded comes to light in a particular tive of the theory Holmes investigates that, by exceeding identification way if we view it from the perspecThe details Morelli gathers of are drawn, the traces ashes, the denials are all signatures in the strict sense, of signatures.

Even though the term itself does not appear in them, what Benjamin calls the "mimetic rial similarity" The specifically he documents, signatures element"

(das Mimetische)

or "immatewhose

undoubtedly

refers to the sphere of signatures. similarities, and whose decline in our time so far. As with Paracelsus between microcosm and

human faculty of perceiving precisely

phylogeny he seeks to reconstruct that we have examined

the ways in which ear lobes or fingernails

coincides with the ability to recognize faculty consists not only in and macbut above Scholem, of of at some length), with Gershom languagewhich ground

in the mud or in cigarette the semiotic dimension

or lapses on which Freud focuses his attention,

Bohme, the sphere of the mimetic astrology and the correspondence rocosm (which Benjamin in question all in language the fragments language"). nonsensuous between examines

allow us to put a series of details into efficacious relation with the or characterization des Estampes of a certain individual or event. at Paris's Bibliotheque that reproduce Nationale and the objects The Cabinet clues gathered investigating

(in his correspondence

are presented

as a "new theory similarities, and articulate

holds a series of photographs

From this perspective, correspondences.l'"

as well as writ-

by the police in the garden of the accused while the crimes of Henri Landru (1919). It consists of a vials containwhich The

ing- appears as a sort of "archive of nonsensuous

series of small, sealed displays, similar to the frames of a painting, where pins, buttons, metal clips, bone fragments, ing dust, and other minutiae order. What is the meaning irresistibly remind captions that accompany traces, the fragments of this kind are classified in perfect of these small collections,

"the ties not only between what is said and what is meant but also what is written and what is meant, and equally between developed by Benelement of language offered can, like a flame, of words by tied signaas the spoken and the written.?" The definition jamin in regard to the magical and mimetic perfectly coincides with the definition element above: "The mimetic is the semiotic or sentences ity appears. him-is element. in language

us of the oneiric objects of surrealism?

of the signature

the cases leave no doubts: like clues or the exemplary object

of objects or bodies stand in a particular or nondescript

manifest itself only through a kind of bearer [Treiger]. This bearer Thus, the nexus of meaning by man-like is the bearer through For its production which, lik~ a flash, similarits perception the most important, between

relation to the crime. That is, the clue represents case of a signature that puts an insignificant in effective relation case, a traumatic the author

to an event (in this case, a crime, in Freud's The "good God" who, according to

event) or to subjects (the victim, the murderer, Ginzburg uses as an epigraph to

in many cases, and particularly

of a painting).

to its flashing up. It flits past [Sie huscht varbei]."84 As we have seen in regard to the relationship tures and signs, immaterial similarity functions in Benjamin

Warburg's famous motto-which

his essay- hides in the detail, is a signataJ.

()

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

an irreducible

complement

to the semiotic to discourse

element of language cannot be understood. it is precisely the

on the mimetic faculty used in regard to nonsensuous

similarity: of its

without which the transition Just as with Warburg's enables the overcoming

"The true image of the past flits by [huscht vorbei]. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment recognizability, and is never seen again."88 definitions signatures. of the dialectical It is well-known image become namely, the thethat Benjamin's and the avantto their proper context, These famous ory of historical research, gardes, privileges

astrological

signatures,

knowledge of the mythical and magical elements of language that of magic: "In this way, language may be similarity: production a medium into which the and comprehension have seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of nonsenuous earlier powers of mimetic

clearer when restored

following the examples of the surrealists

passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic."8s

objects that because they appear to be secondspeaks of the "rags" of history), or index that refers are their prototype). rather, it is always it as image out a sort of signature oneiric,

ary or even waste (Benjamin exhibit more forcefully

22

them to the present (the arcades, which already in the 1930S had become is the proper sphere of signatures. ("secret," Here as "diaobsolescent and almost The historical accompanied and temporally object is never given neutrally; by an index or signature determines and conditions

For Benjamin, especially from the time he begins to work on the Paris arcades, history they appear under the names of "indices" lectical." "historical,"

that constitutes

its legibility. The his-

"temporal ") or of "images" (Bilder), often characterized

torian does not randomly or arbitrarily and obscure thread of signatures

choose the documents

"The past," reads the second thesis "On the Concept As fragment
N3,1 of

of the inert and endless mass of the archive but follows the subtle that demand to be read here for Benjamin, signatures. and now. And the status of the scholar depends, precisely on the ability to read these ephemeral

of History," "carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redernption.?" clear: For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time .... Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each "now" [jetzt] is the now of a particular recognizability .... It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill." The fifth thesis reaffirms, once again, the flashing and precarious character of the image in the same terms that the fragment

The Arcades Project makes

23

Fashion is a privileged exhibit their genuinely that fashion continuously itself by means temporal

site of signatures. historical character.

It is where signatures For the currentness always constitutes cif references and

seeks to recognize network

of a never-ending

citations which define it as a "no longer" or an "again." into time a peculiar to its currency discontior outdated-

That is to say, fashion introduces nuity, which divides it according ness, its being or no-longer-being subtle, is nevertheless

in fashion. This caesura, albeit

clear insofar as those who must perceive

I I

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

it necessarily manner

either perceive it or miss it, and precisely

in this

himself ready to suffer the consequences derived, according literally, to the traditional

of the proceedings. from vim dicere: is

attest to their being in or out of fashion; however, if we time, it proves to be

Pierre Noailles has clarified the meaning of this last term. It is etymology, "to say or to show force." But what kind of "force"

try to objectify it or fix it in chronological ungraspable. The signature

of fashion tears the years (the 1920S, the 1960s, chronology, allowing them to have a spewho cites them to make Yet this

involved here? Among the scholars, observes Noailles, the greatest confusion prevails on this point: They incessantly oscillate between the two possible meanings of the word: force or violence, that is, force that is materially put in action. In actuality, they do not choose, but rather each time propose either one or the other meaning. The vindicationes of the sacramentum are presented at one time as manifestations of force, and at another as acts of symbolic or simulated violence. The confusion is even greater in regard to the vindex. In fact, it is not clear whether the force or violence expressed is his own, which he puts at the service of the law, or the violence of the adversary whom he denounces as contrary to [ustice ." Against such confusion, Noailles shows that the vis in ques-

the 1980s) out oflinear

cial relation with the designer's gesture, them appear in the incalculable present is in itself ungraspable, (not chronological!) entails a certain

"now" of the present.

since it lives only in kairological of the past. For this lag, in which up-tocondition that necessarily

relation to the signatures

reason, being in fashion is a paradoxical

ease or an imperceptible

dateness includes within itself a small part of its outside, a tinge of the demode. Like a historian, the signatures himself in the past or coinciding in their "constellation," the man of fashion is able to read wholly with the present, lingers of the time only if he instead of entirely placing that is, in the very place of signatures.

24
Indicium originally therefore, (clue) and index derive from the Latin verb dico, which means "to show" (to show by means of the word and, to say). Linguists and philologists bond that joins the lexical formula, the uttering have long observed family of dico to the operation of

tion cannot be a force or a material violence but must instead be only the force of ritual, namely, a "force that compels, but does not need to apply itself materially a simulated one."" in an act of violence, albeit On this point, Noailles cites a passage from

Aulus Gellius in which the "vis civilis ... quae verbo diceretur" (civil force ... which is said by means of words) is placed in opposition to the "vis quae manu fieret, cum vi bellica et cruenta." If we further hypothesis develop Noailles's thesis, it is possible to offer the that "the force said by means of the word" in question force of the law. That is to say, the sphere of law word, a "saying" declaration), that is always indicete solemn ius dicere (saying what is

the essential the juridical

sphere of law. "To show by words" tion necessary to produce a certain the term dix-which form's sake")-means authority

is the proper

of which realizes the condieffect. Thus, for Benveniste, verbally and with

survives only in the phrase diets causa ("for "the fact of showing

in the action of the vindex is the force of the efficacious formula, as the originary (proclamation, in conformity is that of an efficacious

what must be.'?" Index is "the one who shows or indi-

cates by means of the word," just as iudex is "the one who says the law." To the same group belongs the term vindex, which denotes the one who in a trial takes the place of the accused and declares

with the law), and vim dicere (saying the effica-

cious word). If this is true, then law is the sphere of signatures

7 '1

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

par excellence,

where the efficacy of the word is in excess of its belonging to the sphere of signatures. without which no sign would

was Blumenberg's secularization

thesis contra Lowith) was in question.

Rather,

meaning (or realizes it). At the same time, the whole oflanguage here shows its originary Before (or better, together be able to function. wit,h) being the place of signification,

was a strategic operator secularization as a signature,

that marked political conorigins. To systhe conceptual

cepts in order to make them refer to their theological put it differently: tem of modernity Just as, according the "secularized" as a signature. acts within

language is the place of signatures,

which refers it back to theology. to a secular sphere

And speech acts, in which language seems to

to canon law, the priest reduced

border on magic, are only the most visible relics of this archaic signatory nature of language.

status had to bear a sign of the order to which he had belonged, so concept shows its past in the theological Secularization, then, is a signature that marks or

25
All research in the human sciencesparticularly in a historical context-necessarily correctly, has to do with signatures. So for the scholar the success that a

exceeds a sign or concept in order to refer it to a specific interpretation or to a specific sphere without, to constitute a new concept stake in the (ultimately however, leaving it in order What is really at only if or new meaning.

political) debate that has engaged scholars of secularization. the referthat have as well practice Many of the doctrines philosophy

it is all the more important

to learn to recognize and handle them Gilles Deleuze once wrote

from Max Weber's time to the present can be understood we grasp the signatory character ence worked by the Signature. dominated as the human of signatures. What is decisive each time is the way we understand the debate in twentieth-century Indeed,

since in the final analysis they determine

of any scholar's investigation. philosophical

inquiry entails at least two elements: the identificait. It is necessary to add that concepts entail.

tion of the problem and the choice of concepts that are adequate for approaching signatures, without which they remain inert and unproductive.

sciences entail a more or less conscious it would not be wrong part of twentieth-century

to state that the thought presupthat is over

It may even happen that what at first appears to be a concept is later revealed to be a signature (or vice versa). Thus, we have seen that in first philosophy signatures the transcendentals are not concepts but and "passions" of the concept of "being." are signatures. One such concept is secularizaKarl Lowith,

basis of one important poses something to say, a doctrine signification. Consider

like the absolutizing of the constitutive

of the signature, primacy of signatures

In the human sciences, too, we may at times deal with concepts that in actuality tion, about which in the mid-196os in Germany there was a sharp debate that involved figures like Hans Blumenberg, and Carl Schmitt. was not a concept, theological discontinuity The discussion was vitiated none of the participants and political between by the fact that between (this

the concept of privative opposition

in Nikolai Tru-

betzkoy, which has exerted a determinant sciences of the twentieth

influence on the human

century. It implies that the non-marked is somehow equivalent to a

term is not opposed to the marked term as an absence is to a presence, but rather that non-presence zero degree of presence (that presence is lacking in its absence). character, functions

seemed to realize that "secularization" identity" conceptuality Christian (Schmitt's thesis) or the

in which the "structural theology

In the same sense, according to Roman Jakobson, the zero sign or phoneme, though not having any differential precisely to oppose itself to the simple absence of the phoneme.

and modernity

II

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

THEORY

OF

SIGNATURES

The philosophical

foundation

of these concepts development. Indeed,

lies in Aristoaccording to

every concept and every presence. every meaning

A signature,

separated

at the exceeds

tle's theory of "privation"

(steresis), of which Hegel's concept of

from simple "absence" (apou-

origin and from the origin in the position of supplement, in a pure auto-signification. must be absolutely "Therefore

Atifhebun8 is the consistent

in a ceaseless dif.ferance and erases its own trace the sign of this excess all possible presenceThe be; auto-signifiThe trace excessive as concerns

Aristotle, privation is distinguished

sia) insofar as it still entails a referral to the form of which it is a privation, which is somehow attested through its own lack."
At the end of the 1950S, Claude Levi-Strauss concepts in his theory of the constitutive over the signified. this gap translates matter of non-signs a sign marking the constitutive fied, continues According originally in excess over the signifieds that are in themselves to Levi-Strauss, elaborated these is excess of the signifier signification

absence ... and yet, in some manner it must still signify .... trace is produced as its own erasure.I'" A signature's rather, it is displaced and deferred is then a signature The strategy However, suspended of Foucault's that never knows its own pleroma. archaeology is entirely cation never grasps itself, nor does it let its own insignificance in its own gesture. and referred

that are able to fill it, and In other words, it is a symbolic conof

toward itself, a ketiosis different. signature, to an

into the existence of free or floating signifiers devoid of meaning. or signs having "zero symbolic value, that is, of a supplementary clear when read as a doctrine

It, too, starts with the signature

and its excess over signification.

the necessity

just as there is never a pure sign without

tent."?' This theory becomes

neither is it possible ever to separate and move the signature originary position (even as supplement). that in The Archaeolo8Y mass that is inscribed cant margin, the conditions one another

priority of the signature

over the sign. The zero

The archive of signatures gathers the non-semantic discourse and sur-

degree is not a sign but a signature tion that cannot be exhausted Once again, everything understand eral success of deconstruction suspends signatures words, deconstruction pure writing inexhaustibility-the

that, in the absence of a signi-

if Knowled8e

to operate as the exigency of an in finite significaby any Signified. depends on the way in which we

into every signifying

rounds and limits the acts of speech as an obscure and insignifialso defines the whole set of rules that determine of the existence and operation of signs, bow tbey archaeology never to one another, how they succeed As the 1971 essay "Nietzsche, to produce a geneal-

this primacy of Signatures over the sign. The ephemin the last thirty years of the twenpractice that In other as the

make sense and are juxtaposed seeks the origin ogy of knowledge ignoring that accompany of its history. own proper the aberrations characterizes

tieth century was intimately tied to an interpretative is never any access to the realized beyond every concept, infinite

in space and time. Foucauldian or its absence.

and makes them idle, in such a way that there event of meaning. is a way of thinking deferral-of about signatures signification. and "originary

Genealogy, History" never tires of repeating, as irrelevant or inaccessible

or of morals does not mean to seek its origin, the details and accidents every beginning, lingering or the episodes and accidents it means keeping events in their on the smallest deviations and that their meanthe event and

which thus guarantees

This is supple-

the sense of the notions nonconceptual

of "arch i-trace"

On the contrary, dispersal,

ment" as well as the insistence of concepts but of archi-signatures

with which Derrida affirms the it is a matter not at degree zero," with respect to or "signatures

character of these "undecidables":

that accompany them and determine and specifies it and in every signature

ing. In a word, it means seeking in every event the signature

which are always already posited as supplement

I)

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

the sign that carry and condition to express what one thinks.'?'

it. To put it in Foucault's words: other than

CHAPTER

THREE

"to show that to speak is to do something-something It goes without saying that deconstruction not exhaust the catalog of signatorial example, to imagine in pure signatures between Whether signatures coincides signature a practice or simply inquiring that without

Philosophical
and archaeology infinitely do strategies. It is possible, for dwelling

Archaeology

into their vital relations the semiotic and the

I

with signs and events of discourse reaches back beyond the split and sign and between semantic in order to lead signatures to their historical fulfillment. a philosophical inquiry is possible that reaches beyond that, according to Paracelsus, is, as state and final perfection toward the Non-marked with the paradisiacal

The idea of a "philosophical time in Kant. In his "jottings"

archaeology"

appears for the first

for the essay "What Real Progress of a "philosophizing history

Has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff," Kant explores the possibility of philosophy." i.e.,
0

they say, another story, for others to write.

A philosophical

history of philosophy, or empirically,

he writes,

"is itself possible, not historically borrow them from historical

but rationally,

priori. For although it establishes facts of reason, it does not

narrative, but draws them from the

nature of human reason, as philosophical archaeology [015philosophische Archao108ie].'' The paradox implicit in such an archaeology is that, since it cannot merely be a history of what philosophers have "been able to reason out concerning the origin, the goal, and the end of things in the world," that is, of "opinions ing a beginning not happened."! and putting forth a "history

[MeJnun8en]

that have chanced to arise here or there," it runs the risk of lackof the thing that has "One and and how and

Kant's notes return cannot write a history for which nothing raw materials."? philosophizing philosophizing

more than once to this paradox: of the thing that has not happened, as preparation recounts knowledge

has ever been provided He adds: "All historical presentation

is empiri-

cal. ... Thus a historical

of philosophy

has been done hitherto, is a gradual development

and in what order. But of human reason,

this cannot have set forth, or even have begun, upon the empirical

II n

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THINGS

PHILOSOPHICAL

ARCHAEOLOGY

path, and that by mere concepts."! Finally: "A history of philosophy is of such a special kind, that nothing what has happened, have happened, without knowing and also what can happen.?" character of this science archaeology." This science appears can be told therein of beforehand what should

it investigates is immediately

and factical

origin,

is at the basis of Foucault's History." The essay's strategy whose against any search of playing genealogy,

1971 essay "Nietzsche,

Genealogy,

clear: it is a matter

model Foucault reconstructs

from Nietzsche,

Let us pause on the rather peculiar that Kant calls "philosophical as a "history,"

for an origin. From this perspective, an alliance with history: "Genealogy tory ... on the contrary, of ideal significations by Nietzsche, for "origin," the true and indefinite

it may even be useful to seek does not oppose itself to hisdeployment teleologies. It opposes itself

and as such it cannot but question its own origin; that is, the development Further-

it rejects the metahistorical

however, since it is a, so to speak, a priori history, whose object coincides with the very end of humanity, with a chronological and exercise of reason, the arehe it seeks can never be identified datum; it can never be "archaic." more, since philosophy is concerned in a certain sense something For this reason, sophical thinker not only with what has been

to the search for 'origins.'''8

Thus, among the terms employed

Foucault distinguishes

Ursprunp, which he reserves

the bete nail' from which we must stay away, and

the two terms that "are more exact than Urspruna in recording object of genealogy": Herkurift, which he translates as "descent, "d E ntste }" .. an lUna, emergence, t he moment 0 f ansmg. "9 If Nietzsche refutes the pursuit of the origin it is because Urspruna names "the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, their carefully protected the existence of immobile of accident and succession. identities; forms that precede the external This search is directed and it necessitates and world because this search assumes to 'that which the removal

but also with what ought to or could have been, it ends up being that has not yet been given, just as its history is "the history of the thing that has not happened." Kant argues in the Loaie that "every philobuilds his own work, so to speak, on the ruins then, is a science a

[arif den Triimmern] of another," and that "one cannot learn philosophy, because it is not yet aiven."s Archaeology, of ruins, a "ruinology" transcendental principle given as an empirically the moment, whose object, though not constituting

was already there,'

the 'very same' of an image of a primordial disclose an original identity."!" this idea. It is not that the like a beginning. beginning Howof things" will never it will

in the proper sense, can never truly be present whole. The archei are what could of partial images.6

truth fully adequate to its nature, of every mask to ultimately Genealogy genealogist

or ought to have been given and perhaps one day might be; for though, they exist only in the condition or original objects or ruins. Like philosophers, An "archetype," adds Kant, "remains who do not exist in reality, such only if it can never be

goes to war against

does not look for something

ever, what he or she finds "at the historical is never the "inviolable ogy of values, morality, as inaccessible cultivate asceticism,

they are given on ly as Urbildei, archetypes reached. It must serve only as a guideline

identity of their origin." Thus "a genealand kno",;ledge will never neglect every begin-

[Riehtsehnur]."7

confuse itself with a quest for their 'origins,' the details and accidents

all the episodes of history. On the contrary, that accompany

The idea that every authentic essential dishomogeneity,

historical

practice

contains

an

ning .... The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin."!! The French term conjurer- translated here as dispelencompasses two opposite meanings: "to evoke" and "to

a constitutive

gap between

the arene

Ii

Ii \

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

-*LL

THINGS

PHILOSOPHICAL

ARCHAEOLOGY

expel." Or perhaps these two meanings are not opposites, for dispelling something-a and the historian expulsion." specter, a demon, a danger-first requires conjuring it. The fact is that the alliance between the genealogist finds its meaning precisely in this "evocationthe same gesture will Years later, in a 1977 interview,

when starting and history

from the essential difference Prehistory is in fact-and

between

prehistory

that one can explain

why prehistory

enjoys such a

special consideration. history of the Church. emergence

absolutely-more of arising or value for the phenomenon and Pre-

relevant and more decisive than any history, even outside of the The history of the moment [EntstehunBsBeschichte J is of incomparable

define the relation between genealogy and the subject: one has to account for the constitution of the subject within the weavings of subject, that is, of history to get rid of it once and for all: "It is necessary to get rid of the subject itself by getting rid of the constituting the subject in the historical to arrrive at an analysis that would account for the constitution alogy: to account for the constitution The operation up and eliminating threads stitution" of knowledge, consists

history of every living being and, more generally, of life."!' For Overbeck, necessarily therefore history and Geschichte), require this means that every historical splits itself into prehistory which are connected different and history (UrBeschichte but not homogeneous, and precautions.

plot. This is what I would call genediscourses, in conjuring the

methodologies

does not merely coincide

chronologically

with what is

spheres of objects, etc. without having to refer to a subject.l"? involved in genealogy the origin and the subject. But what comes like the moment when knowledge, Yet this "con-

most ancient: The fundamental character of prehistory is that it is the history and not, as its

to take their place? It is indeed always a matter of following back to something discourses, and spheres of objects are constituted.

of the moment of arising [Entstehun8s8eschichte),

name might lead one to believe, that it is the most ancient [uralt). Indeed, it may even be the most recent, and the fact of being recent or ancient in no way constitutes a quality that belongs to it in an original way. Such a quality is as difficult to perceive in it as any relation to time that belongs to history in general. Instead, the relation to time that belongs to history is attributed to the subjectivity of the observer. Like history in general, prehistory is not tied to any specific site in time."

takes place, so to speak, in the non-place of the origin. and "the moment of arising" (EntstelJUnB) located, if they are not and can never

Where then are" descent" (Herkurift) or "emergence" be in the position of the origin?

3
The idea that all historical inquiry involves the identification stratum that is not placed in other, the theoof a fringe or of a heterogeneous the position of a chronological

At first glance, the heterogeneous an objective foundation monuments testimonies prehistory." become intelligible Nevertheless,

character

of prehistory

has

insofar as "history begins only where the and where trustworthy written

origin but is qualitatively

are available. Behind and on this side of it, there lies the following passage clarifies beyond in historical inquiry itself, which

derives not from Nietzsche but from Franz Overbeck, friends. Overbeck calls "prehistory" engage. (UrBeschichte) Thus he writes:

logian who was perhaps the most faithful and lucid of Nietzsche's this dimen"It is only sion with which every historical history-must necessarily inquiryand not just Church

all doubt that at issue is not an objective given, but rather a constitutive heterogeneity "prehistory, inherent each time must confront a past of a, so to speak, special type:

too, has to do with the past, but with the past in a

Il t1

I,

THE

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THINGS

PHILOSOPHICAL

ARCHAEOLOGY

special sense," with respect to which "the veil that is suspended over every tradition distinguishes darkens to the point of impenetrability."!' Litetatut, Overbeck In his essay, Uber die ArifanBe der patristiscben and in a posthumous

unity, though it dissolves in the course of its effectivity, until in the end the book lives by itself, and no longer its author in it. This is the time of literary history, whose fundamental motif is the reflection on the author of books that are now the only things left alive .... At this stage, the book ... acts separately from its author, though a process is thereby introduced that in the end will exhaust every efficacy. IS

a cbiistlicbe Uiltterauu and an uichristliche Literatur; work he makes clear that "the past of an past or a past to

Utlitetatut is not a simple past, but a qualified the second power-more-than-past

[Mehr-als- VerBanBenheit] or

superpast [UberverBanBenheit]: there is nothing or almost nothing of the past in it."16 History and prehistory, originally unified, irrevocably sepa-

4Anyone who practices engage the constitutive or the critique Criticism historical inquiry must sooner or later

rate from each other at a certain point: In the history of every organism, there comes the moment when the limits dividing it from the world can no longer be shifted. In that instant, preh istor y or the history of the moment of arising [EntstehunBsBeschichte] tory-understood separates itself from history. Hence the similarity in the common sense of the term-appears as a between this moment and death and the ease with which every hishistory of decline [VeifollsBeschichte]. It loosens once again the bond

heterogeneity

inherent in his or her work. of tradition special care. of the past but into a

This can be done in the form of either the critique of sources, both of which demand concerns not just the ancient character

above all the mode in which the past has been constructed

tradition. Overbeck, having long worked on the patristic sources, is perfectly aware of this: There is no history without tradition - but if every history is thus accompanied by a tradition, this does not mean ... that what is called tradition is always the same thing .... The writer of history must approach its exposition by means of a tireless preliminary work: this is the critique of tradition. To the extent that historiography presupposes this critique and that criticism's claims to autonomy are justified, then the necessity of retracing every period back to its tradition is established and it is right to ask if the tradjtion of prehistory should not be described before the tradition of every other period." The critique historical inquiry. of tradition (and of sources as well) deals not of

among dements that prehistory has produced .... Therefore, if one has to distinguish, within the things that have a life and historical efficacy, between their prehistorical and historical epochs; it is prehistory that lays out the foundation of their historical efficacy.'? It is not only that prehistory with this distinction. In fact, in prehistory, to considering themselves prehistory, the elements coincide it that in history we are used immediately and manifest as separate and history are distinct, albeit conis bound up

nected. The very historical efficacy of a phenomenon

only in their living unity. Take the case of a book. In argues Overbeck,

with a meta-historical

beginning

but with the very structure

acts as a closed unity of itself and the author .... At this time, to take a book seriously means knowing of its author nothing else beyond the book. The historical efficacy of the book is grounded on such a

It is along these lines that one should reread dediof tradition" and where it is possible to

the pages of section 6 of BeinB and Time which Heidegger cates to the" destruction

H (,

THE

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TH1NGS

PHILOSOPHICAL

ARCHAEOLOGY

perceive echoes of Overbeck's between "history" elaborated opposition between

thought.

The famous distinction

prehistory-requires as the moment of the manuscript

a further operation. tradition,

The source, understood

(Historie) and "historicality"

(Geschichtlichkeit)
becomes

of arising, does not coincide with the documents even though clearly it is not possible without undertaking tradition a firsthand is not true: having The inverse, furthermore,

there is not metaphysical,

nor does it simply imply an

object and subject. The distinction

to gain access to the source analysis of that tradition.

intelligible as soon as it is referred to its context, namely, the distinction between tradition and source criticism. Heidegger writes: When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it "transmits" is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial "sources" from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand." The "destruction tradition of tradition" must confront this freezing of

it is possible to access the manuscript access to the source as moment current philological

without

of arising (anyone familiar with tradition to the Urgeof that

practice knows that this, in fact, is the rule,

whereas going back from the manuscript

schichte-which
tradition-is a critique

entails the capacity to renew knowledge the exception).

But what does the scholar seek to return of tradition is not merely philological, cal precautions

to when engaging in philologi-

and the canon? Clearly the problem here because even the necessary are complicated when dealing putting to gain

for such inquiry

with Urgeschichte and Entstehung. It is not possible to gain access in a new way, beyond tradition, in question paradigm the very historical of inquiry itself. we may call "archaeology" investigation of a phenomenon's that practice which but tradihas to do not with origins It cannot confront techniques, to the sources without subject who is supposed

in order to enable "the return

to the past" (Riickgong

zur Vergongenheit), which coincides with renewed access to the

sources. Overbeck calls "canonization" to the original Christian the mechanism by which tradiTo be sure, there are also defines the very and

access to them. What is in question, Provisionally, in any historical with the moment

then, is the epistemological

tion bars access to the sources, which is especially true in regard literature." other ways in which access to the sources is barred or controlled. In modern culture, and regulates the manuscript one of these occurs when knowledge criticism, thereby transforming textual

arising and must therefore and prac-

engage anew the sources and tradition. tion without deconstructing conditions

the paradigms,

tices through which tradition regulates the forms of transmission, access to sources, and in the final analysis determines subject. The moment between of arising is at the same time and is indeed situated object and subject. It is at the same time being on the on the subject. the very status of the knowing objective and subjective on a threshold the emergence never the emergence of undecidability

access to the sources into a special tradition, tradition. If philology healthy critique of such tradition, constitute

namely, the study of a necessary

performs

it cannot ipso facto give back to

the critical text that it produces its character as a source; it cannot it as a moment of arising. And in those cases where it but to the autois, its of a text-that is possible to go back not so far as the archetype graph, the access to the source character

of the fact without

of the knowing subject itself: the operation

origin is at the same time an operation

HH

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5
An important poses a unitary precaution must be taken whenever one presupstage (or in any case, more originary) prehistoric

6
In the 1973 introduction Georges Dumezil to the third volume of My the et epopee, methods, in a polemic against sought to define his own research prevalent at the time. to be or not

before a historical

split with which we are familiar. For example, characteristics appear to be

which he resolutely described as "historical," the structuralism

consider the division between the religious and the profane juridical spheres, each of whose distinctive well-defined, at least to a certain extent. If a more archaic stage is

I am not a structuralist;

I do not have the opportunity

reached in one of these spheres, we are often led to hypothesize that there was a previous stage beyond it in which the sacred and the profane spheres were not yet distinct. whose work concerns "pre-law" (pre-droit) were indiscernible. the most ancient Hence Louis Gernet, Greek law, has called

to be one. My effort is that not of a philosopher but of a historian, a historian of the oldest history and fringe of ultra-history [de 10 plus vieille bistoire et de 10 Jran8e d 'ultra-histoire

1 that

one can reasonably

attempt to reach; this is limited to the observation of primary data in spheres that are known to be genetically akin and then, through the comparison of some of these primary data, going back to the secondary data that constitute their common prototypes." As Dumezil readily acknowledges, the comparative sometimes bering grammar called 'Dumezil's theory' this method is derived from languages: existed "What is and to consists entirely in rememthat the comparison

an originary phase in which law and religion And Paolo Prodi, in his inquiry on the politiinstinct" in

cal history of the oath, similarly evokes a "primordial not yet begunY

which the process of separation between religion and politics had In such cases, one must take care not merely to "primordial instinct" the characproject upon the presupposed which are precisely compound sum of its elements, is not necessarily ments. Pre-law

of Indo-European

teristics defining the religious and political spheres known to us, the outcome of the split. Just as a chemical that cannot be reduced to the division defining its fragcould make has specific properties

that at a certain

point Indo-Europeans footsteps,

think, following

in the linguists'

of the most ancient traditions of their ideology."24 The consistency

of peoples who are at least in part

what stands prior to the historical that such a hypothesis

their heirs must allow us to catch a glimpse of the basic outlines of the "fringe of ultra-history" that the histo-

the sum of the characteristics (conceding

sense) cannot simply be a more archaic law, just as what stands before religion as we historically tive religion. and "law," and try instead every care in defining, that we commonly prehistory know it is n~t just a more primian x that we must take epoche of predicates of Rather, one should avoid the very terms "religion" to imagine practicing a kind of archaeological the attribution

rian attempts to reach here is therefore intimately tied to the existence of the Indo-European Indo-European tinguished language and of the people who spoke '~deiwos or t.'med, forms it. It exists in the same sense and in the same measure in which an form exists (for example, that are usually preceded by an asterisk so that they can be dis-

that suspends, at least provisionally, is not homogeneous

from the words belonging to the historical languages). that expresses a system of correspondences between

ascribe to religion and law. In this sense, too, with history and the moment

However, rigorously speaking, each of these forms is nothing but an algorithm existing forms in the historical languages, and, in Antoine Meillet's

arising is not identical with what comes to be through it.

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words, what we call Indo-European correspondences

is nothing but "a system of

in the preface contrast presented

to The Order

if

Things.

There

archaeology,

in

... that presupposes a language x spoken by people the monstrum documents language of a historical one can never events supposed mythology (priests, of war-

to history in the "traditional a sort of "historical of possibility.

meaning

of that word," is and parais "the envisaged value or but rather that it forma-

x at place x and at time x," where x merely stands for "unknown.":" Unless one wants to legitimze inquiry that produces its original extrapolate from the Indo-European advance

as an inquiry into an at once transcendental This dimension to its rational perfection,

digmatic dimension, epistemological its objective

a priori," where knowl-

edge finds its condition apart from all criteria

field, the episteme in which knowledge, having reference its positivity

to have taken place historically. made a significant ognized economy) the end of the nineteenth riors, shepherds, into an actual

This is why Dumezi i's method when, around

1950, he rec-

on the comparative

forms, grounds

and thereby manifests specifies

century,

a history which is not that of its growing that of its conditions of possibility.'?"

that the ideology of the three functions or, in modern tripartite terminology, translate, "did not necessarily

Foucault

religion,

war, and

is not so much a history of ideas or of sciences as it is an inquiry that, by going back upstream tions, knowledge, knowledge order knowledge and theory in the history of discursive possible; within and practices became was constituted; experience seeks to discover "on what basis what space of on the basis of what historical be reflected in philosophies,

in the life of a society, more

division

of this society, based on the

Indian model [of the three castes of an ideology, something a way of analyzing

1,"

but rather represented

like "an ideal and, at the same time, the forces that determined that archaein a . a meta-

and interpreting

a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards."28 Let us pause on the oxymoron the 1971 essay, it aims to underscore meta-historical determines cal practice, knowledge. "historical a priori." As in of a that it is not a matter

the course of the world and the life of men."26 The "oldest history," the" fringe of ultra-history," remote past, nor can it be localized historical aternporal structure ically, in the neuronal words, it represents languages, historical a present ology seeks to reach cannot be localized within chronology, beyond this within

(for example, as Dumezil said ironLike Indo-European tendency within and operative

system of a hominid). which conditions

origin, a kind of originary

gift that founds and is itself a historifig-

As Foucault made clear three years later the episteme

and makes intelligible into the

in The Archaeology the discursive ures, sciences, that conditions grasped simple existence,

if Knowledge,

their development

in time. It is an arche, but, as for Foucault and comprehensibility and coherence

"a total set of relations that unite, at a given period, practices that give rise to epistemological systems,":" of knowledge and possibly formalized the possibility the "brute The a priori level of its from the (or,

Nietzsche, it is an arcM that is not pushed diachronically past, but assures the synchronic of the system.

is its own history at a particular of arising"

at a specific

level. This is the ontological fact" of its existing fact of its "moment way; or, to use the terminology its prehistory).

7
The term "archaeology" is linked to Michel Foucault's investigadecisive-first appearance tions. It had made its discreet-though

time and in a certain Nietzsche in Overbeck's terms,

essay, the brute

Yet how can an a priori

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be given and exist historically? access to it? In all probability,

And how is it possible

to gain

almost nothing

of the past"). In his essay on deja vu, Henri Bergwith it, and can thus, as soon as relaxes, produce a "false recogniparadoxical expresSuch a memory, he writes, "is of

son put forth the thesis that memory does not follow perception, the idea of a "historical a priori" originates archaebut rather is contemporaneous the attention of consciousness

more from Marcel Mauss than from Kant's philosophical

ology. In his General Theory Magic (192-193), Mauss argues that mana is "the very condition of magical experimentation" and "exists, a priori, before all other experience. is not a magical representation magical representations as we have categories a significant suggesting of conscious nevertheless ing historical historical of an a priori Properly speaking, it It produces as in the same way as those represenof them. It functions

if

tion" that he defines with the only apparently sion "a memory of the present." if perception corresponds

the past in its form and of the present in its matter."!' Moreover, to the actual and the image of memory be in to the virtual, then the virtual will, for Bergson, necessarily contemporaneous with the real. In the same sense, the condition the historical immanent present. a priori that archaeology contemporaneous ologist pursuing or its moment accordance of possibility in question

tations of sympathy, demons, and magical properties. and is a condition

a kind of category, making magical ideas possible in the same way which make human ideas possible." With Mauss defines this historical category of understanding," be entirely homogeneous transcenimplicitly with that it is elaboration,

seeks to reach is not only the archae-

with the real and the present. It is and remains such an a priori retreats, of arising, every historical a history so to speak, toward the of archaeology split in and a insofar phenomenon of the sources of arising. similar in mind that in the

dental as "an unconscious for such knowledge

in them as well. With a singular gesture, It is as if, considered from the viewpoint

in this way that the epistemological cannot historical experience, condition

model required

kuowledge.l? But as with Foucault, is itself inscribed that is inscribed itself a posteriori

clear that for Mauss the a priori, though conditionwithin a determinate within a history and In other words, it realizes the paradox with respect to this

with the fault line separating and a history,

in it a before and an

after, a prehistory historical tradition Walter

constellation.

that are in actuality contemporaneous, must have had something footsteps, of the historical

as they coincide for an instant in the moment Benjamin when, following monadological in Overbeck's structure

that can only constitute discover it.

history in which inquiry-in

Foucault's case, archaeology-must

he wrote

object are contained

both its "prehistory"

and its "post-history" in a "historical

(VOT- und Nacbpepast must be (For realapocatastasis.?"

8
Foucault did not question the specific temporal structure that

sehiehte), or when he suggested

brought a priori. Yet the into the present Origen, apokatastasis

that the entire

is the restitution

of the origin that will take an eschatological

seems to be implied by the notion of a historical past in question here is, like Overbeck's "fringe of ultra-history," cedes the present chronologically to it (in this sense, in Overbeck's

place at the end of time; by characterizing

prehistory and Dumezil's

a special kind of past that neither preas origin nor is simply exterior words, it contains "nothing or

ity as "historical," Benjamin makes use of an image quite similar to Foucault's "historical a priori.")

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the psychoanalytic

interpretation

of culture: the strategy

"The

genius

of

9
Enzo Melandri deserves credit for grasping archaeology early on the philoand for seeking to by a expliwith the of sophical relevance of Foucault's

Freudianism principle,

is to have unmasked

of the pleasure of the of the are

the archaic form of the human, its sublimations.

under its rationaliza-

tions, its idealizations,

Here the function restoration

develop and clarify its structure. ally the basic codes and matrices cative power is attributed Foucault "archaeological procedure immanent

Melandri notes that while usuof a culture are explicated

analysis is to reduce apparent lost archaic object, derivatives

novelty by showing that it is actusatisfaction, from early fantasies-these the restoration

ally a revival of the old: substitute but various names to designate features of the new."36 Melandri's conception

recourse to a code of a higher order to which a mysterious (this is the model of the "origin"),

of the old in the

inquiry instead sets out to overturn This entails a sharp refutation

or better to make the explication in its description.l'P

of the phenomenon matrix, both

of archaeology

is entirely different. Just lies in Nietzschein parand this from the second essay renders

as for Foucault, the point of departure

metalanguage

and instead assumes a "paradigmatic

ticular, the concept of a "critical history"

concrete and transcendental, rule, and norm to a content" a priori").34 Melandri locating

that has the function of giving form, (this is the model of the "historical matrix by the conof the opposition between

in Untimely Meditations, that is to say, a history that criticizes destroys the past to make life possible.F Melandri

seeks to analyze this immanent

it vis-a-vis the Freudian

concept more general by connecting it, through an extraordinary tour de force, to Freud's concept of regression:
[Critical genealogy established history] must retrace in the opposite direction the actual

scious and the unconscious. Paul Ricoeur subject" had already spoken of an "archaeology to the primacy Freudian in regard of the past and the archaic
of events that it examines. between historiography The division that has been and

in Freud's thought.

analysis shows that the secondary The wish fulfillment scene, whose of

(historia rerum 8estarum)

and the unconscious.

process of consciousness

is always delayed with respect to the pri-

actual history

(res 8estae) is quite similar to the one that, for Freud,

the conscious Critof aimed at the recovery "repressed."

mary process of desire and the unconscious. eled on the "indestructible which dreams

has always existed between ical history

pursued by the dream is necessarily regressive insofar as it is moddesire" of an infantile writes Ricoeur: place it takes. For this reason, are the witness is unable to completely except in the inadequate making a late appearance the indestructible."35 cal writings "Regression,

thus has the role of a therapy understood

the unconscious, and Foucault, cal." It consists enon in question

as the historical

Ricoeur

as just mentioned, in tracking

call this procedure

"archaeologi-

and the model, shows that man effect this replacement repression is the to

genealogy

back to where the phenomand the unconscious.

and definitively

splits into the conscious in reaching

form of repression;

Only if one succeeds syndrome dynamic

that point does the pathological So it is a matter of a re8ression: not in the

ordinary rule or working condition

of a psychism condemned

reveal its real meaning. sense of repression."

and to being ever prey to the infantile,

to the unconscious

as such, but to what made it unconscious-

Ricoeur argues that next to this archaeology archaeology" as well, which concerns

in the strict sense of the word, there is in Freud's metapsychologia "generalized

While

the link between

archaeology

and regression

was

already established

in Ricoeur, Melandri radically inverts its sign

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in this dense passage. The pessimistic is incapable of overcoming of going back, regressively, conscious and unconscious. singular "archaeological the unconscious place to an almost soteriological

vision of regression,

which
10

the original infantile scene, cedes its vision of an archaeology capable this to the source of the split between But how are we to understand which does not seek to reach conscious and unconwas as

The image of a procession is, of course, familiar advances regression of history, with Valery's toward

in time that turns its back on the goal who must have been thesis, the angel of progress, "Dionysian" In the ninth

found as well in Benjamin, citation.

regression,"

whose wings are caught in the storm the future

or the forgotten in the past so much as to go back and history (and, more generally, between defining the logic of our culture), to consciousness, the repressed,

a reculons.

Melandri's

to the point where the dichotomy between scious, historiography produced? all the binary oppositions

is the inverse and complementary angel regresses

image of Benjamin's

angel. If the latter advances toward the future with a gaze fixed on the past, Melandri's ing at the future. neither into the past while lookthat they can Both proceed toward something

It is not merely a question of bringing

which comes back in the form of a symptom,

see nor know. The invisible goal of these two images of each other, when a future reached regression in the the in

the vulgate of the analytic model would have it. N or is it a matter of writing the history of the excluded and defeated, which would be completely homogeneous with the history of the victors, makes clear that archaeology as is the common and tedious paradigm of the history of the subaltern classes would have it. Melandri to be understood precisely opposite of rationalization. as a regression He writes: and as such it is the

the historical process is the present. It appears at the point where their gazes encounter What point between happens past and a past reached in the future for an instant coincide. when archaeological reaches where the split between conscious and unconscious,

historiography

and history that defines the condition the moment

which we find ourselves is produced? ous that our way of representing governed an original

It should by now be obvibefore the split is indeed such a "before"

For archaeology, the concept of regression is essential. Furthermore, the regressive operation is the exact reciprocal of rationalization. Rationalization and regression are inverse operations, just like the differential and the integral. ... To take up a very wellknown expression of Nietzsche's, which has nevertheless not yet been understood (and if what we are saying is true, then it is also true that it will unfortunately never be possible to understand it entirely), we may say at this point that archaeology requires a "Dionysian" regression. As Valery observes, nous entrans dans ]'avenir

by the split itself. To imagine condition

involves, following the logic inherent itself. In this case, this is expressed

in the split, presupposing point divided to represent

prior to it that at a certain by the tendency

the before or the beyond of the dichotomy a kind of golden age devoid of repressions repetition

as a state of happiness, and perfectly conscious manifestation its repreof

of and master of itself. Or, as in Freud and Ricoeur, as the in finite of the infantile scene, the indestructible of desire. On the contrary, of the categories of the phantasm sentation, before or beyond the governing

reculons .... To understand the past, we should equally traverse it

a reculons.

split, in the disappearance

39

there is nothing but the sudden, dazzling disclosure

the moment of arising, the revelation that we were not able to live or think.

of the present as something

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event is preserved and at the same time repressed the etymology that unites tradere and tradire). might be given in the form of a conof conto this conception, an actual inaccessibility - a train is bound up with Freud's conception According crash, an infantile a drive - is repressed character scene (generally or because latency is somehow constitutive the traumatic event is preserved only through its forgetting: of historical

(according

to

The idea that the present stitutive trauma and repression. experience cerning either sexuality), because

In her book Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth suggests that experience and that and and experienced precisely

into the unconscious it is for a or a The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never be fully known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself. The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is first experienced at all. ... For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occur rence.V Let us try to elaborate unexplained, with reference that not only memory, contemporaneous ceive something, these ideas, which the author leaves to archaeology. They imply above all are and the present. While we perremember and forget it. Every Indeed, it is, remains unexIt thus enters symptoms "What except [those

of its traumatic unacceptable

some reason

for consciousness.

stage of latency during which it seems as if it had, so to speak, never taken place. Yet during this stage neurotic oneiric content to the return reached of the repressed. begin to appear in the subject, bearing Thus Freud writes: and not understood witness

child has experienced in his dreams .... events] may break decide the choice

by the time he has

the age of two he may never again remember, At any time in later years, however, into his life with obsessive of his love-object

impulsiveness, that so

direct his actions, force him to like or dislike people, and often by a preference often cannot be rationally go beyond repressed the symptoms events. of the law by Moses was followed

as in Bergson, but also forgetfulness,

defended.?" Only analysis is able to

and compulsive actions, back to the

with perception we simultaneously

present thus contains a part of non-lived experience. its traumatic perienced Heidegger's character or its excessive proximity

In Moses and Monotheism, Freud applies this scheme to the history of the Jews. The imposition by a long period in which the Mosaic religion entered a stage of latency, only to appear later in the form of the Judaic monotheism with which we are familiar. Freud institutes parallelism between as 'unconscious" and historical tradition. in light of this a the "special state of memory that ... we class Thus he writes: "In this

at the limit, what remains non-lived in every life, that which, for in every experience (or, if you wish, in the terms of

history of being, it is what in the form of forgetting and to a history). This means that it is rather than just the experienced, that to the fabric of psychic personality and consisdesires, and a saying of

destines itself to a tradition above all the unexperienced, gives shape and consistency and historical tradition

feature we expect to find an analogy with the state of mind that we ascribe to tradition tradition functions when it is active in the mental emotional to its traditum, life of a people.':" In other words, with respect

and ensures their continuity

tency. And it does so in the form of the phantasms, ness (whether individual or collective). To paraphrase

obsessive drives that ceaselessly push at the threshold of conscious-

as a period of latency in which the traumatic

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Nietzsche's, one might say that whoever (an individual or a people) has not experienced something always has the same experience.

seek, as in Freud, to restore a previous stage, but to decompose, displace, content and ultimately bypass it in order to go back not to its circumstances, and moments in constituted it as origin. it does but to the modalities,

which the split, by means of repression,

12

Thus it is the exact reciprocal regression and psychoanalyof gaining and therefore transforming contrary,

face of the eternal return:

The analogy between archaeological

not will to repeat the past in order to consent to what has been, the "so it was" into "so I willed it to be." On the it wills to let it go, to free itself from it, in order to gain

sis now seems clearer. In both cases, it is a question access to a past that has not been lived through, that technically has remained cannot be defined present. In the Freudian

as "past," but that somehow scheme, such a non-past symptoms, thread to go back to by tradition than searching experience, is made for the to return side lived

access beyond or on this side of the past to what has never been, to what was never willed. Only at this point is the unlived past revealed for what it was: contemporary poraneity, with the present. It thus becomes accessible for the to one's own present, insofar as it entails of a forgetting, is going back to this first time, exhibiting itself as a "source." For this reason, contemco-presence the experience of an un lived and the memory constitutes

bears witness to its having been by means of neurotic which are used in analysis as an Ariadne's that has been covered over and repressed possible by the patient work that rather origin, focuses on the moment to gain access, once again, to a non-lived given? Archaeological regression,

the originary event. In genealogical inquiry, the access to the past

of arising. Yet how is it possible

rare and difficult; for this reason, archaeology, side of memory and forgetting, to the present.

the only path of access

to an event that somehow for the subject has not yet truly been going back to the hither and forgetting, of the dividing line between and non-lived experience the conscious and the unconscious, with and separate as in the dream, the

also reaches the fault line where memory both communicate from each other. It is not, however, a matter of realizing, "indestructible desire" of an infantile

13
The text where Foucault perhaps most precisely foresaw - the strategies essay he published, by Ludwig Binswanger. absent, "the movement the dream archaeology. and gestures described - or is the first

of archaeology

the long 1954 preface to Le Reve et l'existetice Even though the term itself is obviously of freedom" that Foucault attributes to shares the meanings and aims of

scene, nor, as in the pes-

simistic vision of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of infinitely repeating an original trauma. Nor, as in a successful analytical therapy, of bringing repressed inquiry, of conjuring back to consciousness in the unconscious. up its phantasm, all the content that had been it is a matter genealogical status. meticulous On the contrary, through

and imagination

From the beginning,

he refutes Freud's thesis of the

dream as vicarious fulfillment counter-desires is the burning

of an original wish. If the dream is

dream, rather than satisfied desire, this is because it "also fulfills that are opposed to desire itself. The oneiric fire satisfaction of sexual desire, though what makes of fire

in order to work on it, deconstruct regression

it, and detail it to is elusive: it does not

the point where it gradually In other words, archaeological

erodes, losing its originary

it possible for desire to take shape in the subtle substance

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is everything extinguish language

that denies such desire and incessantly

seeks to func-

moment occurs "existence

of arising and pure being-there, the transition from anthropology foundation.Y" itself ... in the fundamental represents

so in the dream "there to ontology," where of the imaginary the

it." Hence, the insufficiency of the dream is reduced

of Freudian analysis: the and syntactical structure," dimenhas never

solely to its "semantic

direction

tion," leaving aside its "morphological that is to say, the fact that it articulates sion of expression The movement restoration freedom," is entirely omitted,

indicates its own ontological the phantasm movement of regression,

And while for Freud goal orienting continu"when the in the is mea-

itself in images. For this "psychoanalysis

the indestructible

reason, insofar as the analysis of the properly imaginary succeeded in making images speak.''"

the dream and the imagination is generated

ally call into question every crystallization image or phantasm. Indeed, a phantasm subject finds the free movement presence of a quasi-perception it."? On the contrary, "all imagination, and 'poetic

of their impetus in an

of the dream can never exhaust itself in the scene or trauma because it goes well of of existence in the dream

of its existence annihilated that surrounds internal

of an original

and immobilizes

beyond them in order to reach back to the "first movements until it coincides with the "trajectory itself." For the subject, to follow such a trajectory means to put itself radically in question, of its own" derealization."

"the value of a poetic imagination

sured by the power of destruction art' has meaning

to the image."48 Thus must learn to dream; the its is

in order to be authentic,

above all taking the risk

only insofar as it teaches itself to truth,

break the spell of images in order to open to the imagination free path toward the dream, which offers, as absolute 'indestructible and phantasms directed kernel of night'." This dimension toward which the movement of existence

To imagine Pierre after one year of absence does not mean announcing him in the mode of unreality .... It means first of all that I derealize myself, absenting myself from this world where for me it is not possible to encounter Pierre. This does not mean that I "escape to another world," or that J walk along the possible margins of the real world. I ascend to the streets of the world of my presence; and then the lines of th is necessity from which Pierre is excluded become blurred, and my presence, as presence to this world, is
erased.:"

beyond images

of the imagination when "the originary

is not the obsessive repetition

of a trauma or of a primal

scene, but the initial moment constitution

of the world is accomplished.l'""

14
Let us elaborate the specific temporal structure implicit in a

Far from restoring

a previous

archaic stage, a phantasm,

or

philosophical be obtained

archaeology. by returning

What is at stake in it is not properly back to the point wh-ere it was covered (in Melandri's terms, to the and the of arisinquiry between the conscious The moment

a family history, the dream begins by destroying

and shattering

a past but a moment over and neutralized unconscious,

of arising; however, access to such can only by tradition

every real world while dragging itself as well into such destruction. If it goes back in time, it is in order to leap over the subjective and objective universes corresponding to it toward "the in the 1969 book at the level of their world on the daybreak of its first explosion, when it still coincided with its own existence."45 Just as archaeology is defined precisely by grasping phenomena

point where the split occurred historiography ing, the arche of archaeology

and history).

is what will take place, what will

become accessible and present, only when archaeological

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has completed

its operation.

It therefore

has the form of a past in of "an

the tight-knit

fabric of tradition

which block access to history. con-

the future, that is, afuture anterior. Here it is not merely a matter, appeal for the alternative as has been suggested, developments that had been condemned

Only in the form of this "will have been" can historical sciousness truly become possible.

in the first trial" nor of conjecturing possible alternatives to the actual state of things.50 Benjamin once wrote that "in remembrance we have an experience tory as fundamentally the realized less confirms archaeology indifference. Precisely for this reason, the space opening up here toward the past is projected into the future. In the introduction to Le Rive modifies the past, transforming into unrealized. that forbids us to conceive of hisbecause memory somehow the the unrealized 51 If memory into realized and atheological,"

15
Archaeology represent moves backward through the course of history, just neurosis, does as the imagination moves back through individual biography. Both origin but rather toward the or collective) becomes with the temporality and history and Jewish and cre-

a regressive force that, unlike traumatic (whether individual

thus constitutes

not retreat toward an indestructible point .where history

force that gives possibility back to what has been (and nevertheit as past), forgetting is what incessantly removes it (and yet somehow guards its presence). Instead, the point of for the first time, of their

accessible for the first time, in accordance of the future anterior. In this way, the relation becomes transparent. between

is to gain access to the present

archaeology

beyond memory and forgetting

or, rather, at the threshold

It corresponds

to the relation that in Islamic and joins redemption

theology (and, though in a different way, in Christian theology, too) at once distinguishes ation, the "imperative" angels. According to this doctrine, the prophets,

(am!') and "creation" (khalq), prophets and

there are two kinds of work and that of creation. To in the who serve as mediators

et l'existence, Foucault observes (contrary to Freud) the intimate

tension of the dream toward the future: "The essential point of the dream is not so much that it resuscitates announces the past as that it the moment in the heaviest burthe moment the future. It foretells and announces

or praxis in God: the work of redemption the former correspond

order to affirm the work of salvation; to the latter correspond angels, who mediate the work of creation. precedes prophets in rank that of creation, over the angels. (In Christian hence the superiority

which the patient will finally reveal to the analyst the secret [he or she] does not yet know, which is nevertheless of freedom. compelled It constitutes repetition a harbinger den of [his or her] present .... The dream anticipates of the traumatic past."52

The work of salvation of the the

theology, the two works, persons within Creator and the

of history, before being the

united in God, are assigned to two distinct Redeemer, precedes rather

Trinity: the Father and the Son, the all-powerful The decisive in truth anterior. aspect of this conception

Leaving aside the accent placed here, perhaps too ingenuously, on the future as the "first moment intertwined of freedom that frees itself," becomes It is the past that we must specify that the future at issue in archaeology with a past; it is a future anterior.

in whom God emptied himself of his force.) is that redemption but creation in rank, that the event that seems to follow is It is not a remedy for the fall of creatures, comprehensible, For this reason, that which

the imaginary)

will have been when the archaeologist's gesture (or the power of has cleared away the ghosts of the unconscious and

that which makes creation

gives it its meaning.

in Islam, the light of the

I II

Ii

I () "

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

PHILOSOPHICAL

ARCHAEOLOGY

Prophet is the first of all beings (just as in the Jewish tradition and in Christianity the Son, though he was generated

the

been put forth by Hermann tigation,

Usener at the end of the nineteenth (1896). At the outset of his investo find an for (Urkunde) However, gram-

name of the Messiah was created before the creation of the world, by the Father, is consubstantial and coeval with Him). It is instructive to a creature. This con-

century in his work Gotternamen been possible, and observed the history ofreligions than that originating

he asked himself how the creation of divine names had that in order to attempt

that in Islam and Judaism the work of salvation, while preceding in rank the work of creation, is entrusted firms the paradox, which should by now be familiar to us, that the two works are not simply separate but rather persist in a single place, where the work of salvation acts as a kind of a priori that is immanent in the work of creation and makes it possible. through the course of history, as the archaeTo go backward

answer to such a question - one that is absolutely fundamental - we have no other "evidence" from an analysis of language.
53

even before him, though with much less rigor, comparative mar had inspired the investigations Muller to Adalbert attempted century. reconstruct to provide a foundation Kuhn and Emile Burnouf, for comparative grammar,

of scholars ranging from Max all of whom had mythology and in its effort to

ologist does, amounts to going back through the work of creation in order to give it back to the salvation from which it originates. Similarly, Benjamin made redemption not only is archaeology but the gesture author's-or the immanent a fully historical category, And one opposed in every sense to the apologia of bad historians. of the archaeologist constitutes

the science of religions in the last thirty years of the nineteenth But just when comparative institutions" not only the "divine names" but the general outline themselves through the analysis the turn data, was reaching Indo-European model its apex (with the publiLanguage and Society), with linguistics'

of "Indo-European of purely linguistic project started

a priori of historiography, the paradigm his or her rank,

cation of Benveniste's toward a formalized

of every true human action. For it is not merely the work of an of anyone's-life that determines but the way in which he or she has been able to bring it back to the work of redemption, to mark it with the signature of salvation Only for those who will have known and to render it intelligible.

to decline in conjunction

a la Chomsky,

whose epistemological and future of once again is to be underand the

horizon made such an endeavor inadmissible. This is not the place to ask about the function the human sciences today. Instead, we are interested in how the arclle that is in question in archaeology stood. If it is indeed true that inquiry advance when it abandoned,

how to save it, will creation be possible.

had made a Significant

16 Before entering sciences a stage of decline, with linguistics the history of the human century, grammar a

in the fields of linguistics

history of cultures, the anchorage in a language that was supposed to be real and in the people who spoke it ("the academic IndoEuropean language spoken, so one thought, 'at the moment of the dispersiori'"!"), important and if scholars had understood an unverifiable the known languages, that it was not as as it was to it was Thus, cut off all the nonetheless to reconstruct prototype saw, during the first half of the twentieth and comparative

decisive acceleration,

assuming the roles of "pilot science" in the field. The idea that it might be possible, through a purely linguistic to more archaic stages (or ultra-historical take up Dumez ils expression) of the history analysis, to return of humanity had stages, to once again

explain comparatively links to the ontological

not possible within that perspective

to completely

support implicit in the hypothesis.

I II

I Ii Ij

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

PHILOSOPHICAL

ARCHAEOLOGY

when in 1969 Benveniste published his masterpiece, means clear how the epistemological tency of something understood. And it is quite probable

it was by no consiswas to be would not

comparative

grammar

(and for the disciplines

grounded

in it) is (and for in Yet

locus and historical that Benveniste

an originary historical

event and for generative grammar

like an "Indo- European institution"

the cognitive disciplines associated with it) is the neuronal system and genetic code of Homo sapiens. The current the human sciences of models originating predominance paradigm. from the cognitive sci-

have been able to suggest a solution in this regard, even if he had not been struck by a type of total and incurable aphasia. From the perspective posed here, the question be completely regresses in a chronology it is an operative words expressing revised. of the philosophical regarding ontological The arche toward archaeology anchoring promust

ences bears witness to this shift of epistemological temological threshold

the human sciences will be capable of reaching their decisive episonly after they have rethought, from the and thereby bottom up, the very idea of an ontological anchoring, envisaged being as a field of essentially historical

which archaeology instead,

is not to be understood force within

in any way as a given locatable history, like the Indo- European between historically exerting an

tensions.

(even with as large a frame as prehistory); a system of connections

accessible languages,

or the child of psychoanalysis

active force within the psychic life of the adult, or the big bang, which is supposed to have given rise to the universe continues to send toward us its fossil radiation. big bang, which astrophysicists in terms of million anthropogenesis becoming, anthropogenesis, but which the Yet unlike

claim to be able to date (albeit between

of years), the arche is not a given or a subthe moment of arising and And as 'With

stance, but a field of bipolar historical currents stretched and history, between an archi-past between and the present.

which is supposed to have taken place but which in a chronological event - the arche alone phenomena, the intelligibility of historical

cannot be hypostatized is able to guarantee

"saving" them archaeologically standing not of an unverifiable talizable history.

in a future anterior in the underorigin but of its finite and untowhat is at stake in gramgrammar which for

At this point, it is also possible to understand mar (an essentially (ultimately, the problem historical discipline) ontological

the paradigm shift in the human sciences from comparative to generative anchoring, a biological discipline). of the ultimate

In both cases, there remains

I I II

I I I

Notes

CHAPTER
1.

ONE: Foucault,

WHAT

IS A PARADIGM?

Michel Porter Hubert

The Politics

if

Truth, trans. Lysa I-Iochroth

2007), pp. 60-6l.

and Cath-

erine
2.

(Los Angeles: Dreyfus

Semiotexte,

and Paul Rabinow,

Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism

and Hermeneutics.
cago: University 3 Michel pp. 239-40. 4 Michel Georges

With an Afterword by and Interview with Michel Foucault (Chiof Chicago Press, '983), p. 199. Books, 1973),

Foucault,

The Order oj' Things (New York: Vintage

Foucault,

introduction trans. Caroline

to The Norma} and the Pathological, R. Fawcett (1978; New

by

Canguilhem,

York: Zone

Books, 1991),

P:

16.

s Thomas
sity of Chicago

S. Kuhn, Press,

The Structure ifScient!fic

'970), P: 182.

Revolutions (Chicago:

Univer-

6. lbid., p. 46.

7 lbid., p. 187.
8. Michel (Paris: Foucault, Dits et ecrits, ed. Daniel Defer and Fra ncois Ewald

GaJlimard,

1994), vol. 2, P: 240. "Truth and Power," in Power: Essential Works of Foucault trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press,

9 Michel

Foucault,

1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion, 2000), vol. 3, P: 114.

10.

lbid., Pl': 114-15. Foucault,

11. Michel Smith

The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans.

Books, 1972), P: 181.

A. M. Sheridan

(New York: Pantheon

12. lbid., pp. ,86-87.

1 1

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

NOTES

13. lbid., p. 191. 14. lbid., p. 192. 15. Michel Foucault, Sheridan

CHAPTER

TWO:

THEORY

OF SIGNATURES of Natural Edward Things," Waite in The HerJames

1. Paracelsus,

"Concerning

the Signature
1,

Discipline and Punish: the Birth

Books, 1995), P: 200.

rf the Prison, trans.

Alan

metic and Alchemical Writin8s: Vol.

Elliott, 1894).

ed. Arthur

(London:

(New York: Vintage

16. lbid., pp. 205, 220, 221. 17. Daniel S. Milo, Trahir le temps: Histoire (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, P236. 18. Aristotle, 19 Immanuel (Cambridge, 1991),

2. Paracelsus, Johannes p. 131. Huser

Von den noturlicben (1859; Hildesheim-New

Ditiqen,

in Biicher und Schriften,

ed.

York: Georg

Olms, 1972), vol. 3.7,

Prior Analytics 69aI3-15.

Kant,

3. Paracelsus,

Liber de podaqricis, in ibid., vol. 24, P: 259. Von den naturlichen

"Concerning Diiiqen, in ibid., vol. 37, P: 133. of Natural Things," p. 171.

Critique

rf the

Power

rf [udqment,

trans.

Paul Guyer

4 Paracelsus, 5. Paracelsus,

UK: Cambridge

University

Press, 2000),

p. 121.

the Signature

20. Plato, The Statesman 2]8c. 21. Victor Goldschmidt, Vrin, 1985), p. 53.
22.

6. lbid., p. 173.

Le paradi8me dans la dialeciioue platonicienne (Paris:

7. Ibid.
8.

iu, p.
Ibid.

174.

lbid., P: 77.

9. ibid., p. 188.
10.

23. Plato, The Statesman 278b-c. 24. Goldschmidt,

Le paradi8me dans la dialectique platonicietuie,

p. 84.

11. lbid., p. 189. 12. Paracelsus, Princeton

25. Plato, ReplIblic 6.509d-511e. 26. lbid., 6.511b2-CI. 27. lbid., 651Ob9.
28. Ibid., 7.533c6.

Selected Writin8s, trans. Norbert

Press, 1988), pp. 122-23.

Guterman

(Princeton,

NJ:

University

13. Paracelsus,

Biiclier und Schriften, vol. 1.2, p. 234.

14. lbid., vol. 2.4, p. 316.

29. Martin Robinson

Heidegger,

Bein8 and Time, trans. John Macquarrie

and Row, 2008), p. 195.

and Edward

15. lbid., vol. 1.2, p. 110. 16. Paracelsus, 17. Ibid. "Concerning the Signature of Natural Things,"

(New York: Harper

p. 172.

30. Ibid. 31. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,

Natunvissenschciftliche

Schr!ften, vol. 2,
(Zurich:

18. Ibid.
19.
20.

in Gedenkauspabe Artemis, 1949-52),

der Werke, Briefe, und Gesprdclie, cd , Ernst Beutler

vol. 17, p. 691. von Goethe, Naturwissenschoitliche

ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Works q}jacob Behmen: The Teutonic Philosopher:

2003), p. 9.'

32. Johann

Wolfgang

Schriften, vol. 1, in

21.

ibid., vol. 16, pp. 851-52.

33 lbid.,

22. Jakob Bohme, (Whitefish,

Vol. 4

P:

852 Noturwissensclioltlicbe

MT: Kessinger,

34. Goethe,

Schr!fteIl, vol. 2, in ibid., P: 706.

23 Bohrne,

Works rfjacob Behmen, P: 9.

35. lbid., vol. 1, P: 871. 36. Johann 2, P: 693. Wolfgang von Goethe,

24. lbid., p. 10

Maximen und Reflexionen,

in ibid., vol.

25. Ibid. 26. lbid.,

P: 59.

I I

1 1

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

NOTES

27. lbid., p. 239 28. Augustine, (Cambridge, 29 lbid.,

5l. Ibid. 52. Aby Warburg, Angeles: Getty Research Pingree,

The City rifGod against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson
University Press, 2007), P: 397.

The Renewal rif Pagan Antiquity,

Institute, 1999), P: 569.

trans.

David Britt (Los

UK: Cambridge

P:

399 Iidei, PL, 176,

53 David

ed., Picatrix: University

The Latin Version rif the CaJat al-hakim

of London, 1986), pp. 33 and 51.

30. Hugh of St. Victor, De sacrametitis cbrisuonae 3l. Anonymous, 32. Thomas

P:

35a.

(London:

Warburg

Institute,

Summa sententiarum,

PL, 176, p. 117b. David Bourke (London:

54 lbid., p. 51. 55 lbid., pp. 8-9

Aquinas,

Summa theolopiae, trans.

Blackfriars,

1975), vol. 56, p. 55.

56. lbid., P: 8.
57. lbid.,

33 lbid., p. 127. 34. Augustine, 35. Ibid. 36. Augustine, Chester On Baptism, Against the Donatists, 5.24, trans. J. R. King, rev. in A Select Library

P:

Ill.

Contra epistolam Parmeniani, PL, 43, p. 7

" p.26.

58. Michel Foucault,

The Order rifThings (New York: Vintage Books, 1966),

59. lbid., pp. 28-29. 60. lbid., p. 29.

61.

D. Hartranft,

rif the Nicene and Post-Nicetie Fathers rif

Literature

the Christian Church, Vol. 4, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian
Company,

ibid., P: 30.
Melandri, "Michel Foucault: L'epistemologia delle scienze

1887), p. 475. Summa theologiae, P: 83

62. Enzo

37. Aquinas, 38. Ibid.

umane,' Lingua e stile 2.1 (1967), 63. lbid., p. 148. 64. Emile Benveniste,

P:

147.

39 Ibid., p. 79 40. Ibid.

4l.

Problemes de linguistique generale (Paris: Gallimard,

1974), vol. 2, p. 64.

Ibid., P: 83

65. Ibid., pp. 65-66.

66. Jean Starobinski, CT: Yale University Press,

42. lbid., pp. 83-85. 43. Ibid., P: 87 44. lamblichus, Jackson P. Hershbell

Words upon Words, trans. Olivia Emmet (New Haven,

1979), pp. 3-4.

De mJsteriis, trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and

(Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), p. 115

67. Benveniste, 68. Foucault,

Problemes de linguistique 8eneraIe, p. 65. The Archaeolo8J rif Knowledge, trans.

Books, 1970), A. M. Sheridan Smith

45. Iamblichus de mysteriis AegJptiorum,

Cbaldoeorum, AssJriorum; Proclus ...

(New York: Pantheon 69. lbid., p. 88. 70. lbid., p. 86.

P:

84.

de sacr!ficio et magia ... MarsiJjo Ficinoj1orentino interprete (Venice: Aldi, 1516), P: 7.

46. lbid., p. 35. 47. Alain Boureau,

Le pape et les sorciers: Une consultation de Jean XXII sur

B.A.V. Borghese 348) (Rome: Ecole Francaise de

71.

lbid., pp. 86-87.

la magie en 1320 (manuscript

Rome, 2004), p. ix.

72. lbid., p. 111.

nlbid.
74. lbid., p. 117 75. Edward Arrowsmith, Herbert,

48. lbid., p. '5. 4.9. lbid., p.

)0. 2;1'

De veritate, trans. Meyrick

H. Carre

(Bristol:

J. W.

Ibid., p. 18.

1937), p. 191.

I I

j,

I I

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

NOTES

76. Moshe

Hayyim

Luzzatto,

Le phitosophe et le caba!iste: Exposition

Verdier, 1991), pp. 86-87.

d'un

CHAPTER 1. Immanuel (Cambridge,

2.

THREE: Kant,

PHILOSOPHICAL

ARCHAEOLOGY Gary Hatfield

debat, ed. Joelle Hansel (Lagrasse:

77. Carlo Ginzburg, Anne C. Tedeschi

Theoretical

Philosophy cifter 1781, trans.

Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), P: 106.

UK: Cambridge

University

Press, 2002), pp. 417 and 419.

(Baltimore:

lbid., p. 419.

78. Ibid., P: 101.

79. Ibid. 80. lbid., pp. 97-98. 81. Sigmund Freud, "The Moses of Michelangelo," in The Standard

3 lbid.,

p.

417.

4. Ibid., P: 419. 5. Immanuel Kant, Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz

Edi-

(New York: Dover, 1974), 6. Immanuel Akadeinie-Auscabe Kant, (Berlin:

P:

29.

tion

rf the

Complete Psyclioloqical Works

Hogarth Press,

rf Sigmund

Freud, trans. James Strachey

Philosophische
De Gruyter,

Enzyklopadie,
1973), vol. 29,

in Gesammeite

Schriften,

(London:

1953), vol. 13, P: 222. "On the Mimetic Faculty," in Selected WritinBs: VolMA: Belknap Press,

P: 7.
in Aesthetics,

82. Walter

Benjamin,

7. Ibid. 8. Michel Foucault, "Nietzche, Genealogy, History,"

ume 2, 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone

1999),

(Cambridge,

Method,

P:

722.

and Epistemolooy, trans. Robert

9 lbid., pp. 373, 376.
10.

Hurley

(New York: New Press,

1998), P: 370.

83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid.

86. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," (Cambridge, in Selected

lbid., p. 371. Ibtd., pp. 372, 373.

Foucau It, Dits et ecrits, ed. Dan iel Defer 1994), vol. 3, P: 147. and Prancois Ewald

11.

WritinBs:
Press,

12. Michel (Paris:

Volume 4, 1938-1940, trans. Edmund [ephcott

2003), p. 390. 87. Walter McLaughlin Benjamin,

MA: Belknap

Gallimard,

13. Franz Overbeck,

Kirchenlexicon

Materialen:

Cbristenuun Metzler,

und Kuluir, ed.

1996), P: 53.

The Arcades Project, trans. Howard

MA: Belknap

Eiland and Kevin

Barbara

von Reibnitz,

Werke unci Nachlass (Stuttgart:

(Cambridge,

Press, 1982), pp. 462-63.

14 lbid., p. 57. IS. Ibid., P: 5J. 16. lbid., p. 55.

17

88. Benjamin,

"On the Concept

of History,"

Pl':

390-91.

89. Emile Benveniste, Palmer (Coral

Indo-European

LanBuage and Society, trans. Elizabeth

Press, 1973), P: 336.

Gables, FL: University Noailles,

of Miami

lbid., p. 53

90. Pierre Lettres,

91.

Fas et

jlIS:

Etudes de droit romain (Paris:

Les Belles

18.Ibid., p. 54.
19

1948),

P:

57.

lbid., p. 52.
Heidegger,

lbid., P: 59. Metaphysics 1004a.16.

Levi-Straus,

20. Martin Robinson

Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie

Perennial, p. 56. 1962), p. 4-3.

and Edward

92. Aristotle, 93. Claude Felicity

(New York: Harper

Introduction

to the Work

rf Marcel

Mauss, trans.

21. Overbeck,

Kirchenlexicon,

Baker (London: Derrida, Press,

Routledge,

1987), P: 64. trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Uni-

22. Paolo Prodi, costiuiziona]e

J1 sacramento del potere: J1 giuramento

(Bologna: il Mulino,

politico nella storia

94. Jacques

MarBins rfPhilosophy,
1972), p. 65.

dell'Occidente

1992), P: 24. 1968), vol. 3, p. 14.

versity of Chicago 95 Foucault,

23 Georges p. 20.,. 24. Ibid.

Durnezi l, My the et epopee (Paris: Gallimard,

Archoeolosy

rf Knowledse,

I I

I I

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

NOTES

25 Antoine Champion,

Meillet,

Lin81/istic historique et lin8uistic 8enerale (1921; Paris:

46. lbid., P: 109.

(975),

p.

324.

47. Ibid., p. 116.

48. Ibid.

26. lbid., vol. 1, p. 15. 27 Michel Foucault,

The Order

if Things

(1994; New York: Vintage,

1970),

49. Ibid., pp. 118, 1'7.

50. Paolo Virno, "Un dedalo di parole: Per uri'analisi Ilardi (Genoa: Iinguistica delIa

p. xxii.
28.

Ibid., pp. xxi-xxii.

Foucault,

metropoli,"

in La citta senza luoqhi, ed. Massimo

Costa & Nolan,

29 Michel

The Archaeology

if Knowledpe,

trans.

A. M. Sheridan

1990). p. 74 51. Benjamin,

Smith (New York: Pantheon

Books, (972), p. 191.

The Arcades Project, P: 471. Dits et ecrits, vol.

Usener,
I,

30. Marcel Mauss, A General Theory Routledge and Kegan Paul, (972), P: Bergson,

if Magic,

trans. Robert

Brain (London:

52. Foucault, 53. Hermann

P: 99. Venuch einer Lehre von del' reliqiosen

2000),
I,

118.

Gotternanien: Klostermann,

31. Henri

Mind-Ener8Y,

trans.

H. Wilson

Carr

(New

York: Pal-

Begr!fFbildullg (Frankfurt:
54. Dumezil,

p. 5.

grave Macmillan, 32. Walter McLaughlin 33 Enzo umane,"

2007), p. 133.

My the et epopee, vol.

p. 9.

Benjamin,

The Arcades Project, trans. Howard

MA: Harvard "Michel University

Eiland and Kevin

(Cambridge, Melandri,

Press,1982),

P: 459.
delle scienze

Foucault:

L'espistemologia

Litiqua e stile 2.1 (1967), p. 78.

34 lbid., p. 96. 35 Paul Ricoeur,

Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation,

Press, (970), p. 445.

trans.

Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University 36. lbid., P: 446. 37 Friedrich (Cambridge, Nietzsche,

Untimely Meditations,
University

trans.

R.

J.

Hollingdale

UK: Cambridge

Press, 1997), P: 67.

38. Enzo Melandri, (Macerata: Quodlibet,

La linea e il circolo: Studio logicofilosrifico sull'aoaloqta

2004), pp. 65-66.

39 lbid., P: 67. 40. Sigmund York: Vintage Freud,

Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine

Jones

(New

Books, (937), p. 162.

41. lbid., p. 163. 42. Cathy (Baltimore: Caruth,

Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History

University Press, (996), pp. 17-18.

Johns Hopkins

43 Foucault, 44 lbid., p.

Dits et ecrits, vol. 1, pp. 69-70

Ill.

and 73.

45. lbtd., p.

100.

(I

121

Index

of Names

ABU

MA1SHAR,

50.

ENRICO 44-45, 47.

J1EDVRE,

DEL CARRETTO,
LUCIEN, 16.

49.

Augustine, Alexander Ambrose, Aristotle, Ast, Georg

Saint, 4.1.

40-41, 45.

of Hales,

Festus, Friedrich, 25. Ficino, Fleck, Fontana,

20.

Sextus Marsilio, Ludwik,

Pompeius, 7. 47-4.8.
II.

17.

17-18, 20, 24, 26, 72. Anton 70.

Feuerbach,

Ludwig,

Aulus Gellius,

Alessandro, Michel, 95, 98. del Cossa,

13.

BENEDICT,

SAINT,

Foucault, 88, 91, 97, 85-90,

7, 13,9-17,21,29,

Benjamin,
100.

Walter, Jeremy, Emile, I lend,

7, 65-68, 16. 55-57, 41. 93. 65. 95.

35,38,53-55,57-58,60,73,76-77, Francesco So. 89-90, 92-93,

Bentham, Benveniste, Berengarius Bergson, Bertillon, Binswanger, Bloch, Bohmc, Burnouf,

69, 101.

Freud,

Sigmund,

63-65,

01"Tours, 87-88, Alphonse, Ludwig, 16.

95, 97, 98. GALTON, Cernet, Ginzburg, 66. Giorgione, Goethe, Goldschmidt,
10,12.

FRANCIS, Louis, 83. Domenico Carlo, 63. Wolfgang, Victor,

65. Bigordi, 26.

Marc, Jakob,

Ghirlandaio,

Blumenberg, Burckhardt,

Hans, 71. 28, 38-40, 100. Jacob,

63-65. 27-28. 21, 23. FRIEDRICH, 81, 93.

Emile,

CANGUILHEM,

GEORGES,

HEGEL, 24,72. Heidegger, Herbert,

GEORG WILHELM Martin, Edward, Hugo 25-26, 60-61.

Caruth,

Cathy,

9,.
Enrico, 54. 70. 64. 87, 100. 64.

Castelnuovo,

Croll ius, Oswald, DELEUZE, Derrida, Doyle, Dreyfus, Durnezil,

Hofmannsthal, GILLES, 72. IAMBLlCHUS, Isidore Conan, 10. 84-85, Hugh Jacques, Arthur Hubert, Georges,

von, 52. 41.

of St. Victor, 47.

of Seville,

41.

123

THE

SIGNATURE

OF

ALL

THINGS

JOHN

XXII,

POPE,

48. 72. 19-20,75-76,87. 40. 12.

SASSOFERRATO,

64. de, 56. Daniel Ernst, Friedrich

Jakobson,

Roman,

Saussure,

Ferdinand

Schleiermacher,
KANT, IMMANUEL,

Kantorowicz, Kepler, Koyre, Kuhn, Kuhn,

Ernst, 16.

25 Schmitt, Scholem, Semon, Spinoza, Steiner, Stevens,

Carl, 71. Gershom, Richard Baruch, George, Wallace, Leo, 62. 41-42. 71. 62. 12. 30. 66. 53.

Johannes, Alexandre, Adalbert, Thomas

Wolfgang,

100. S., 10-IS.

LANDRU)

HENRI-DESIRE}

65.

Strauss,

Leibniz,

Gottfried

Willhelm 72.

von, 40,
THOMAS AQUINAS,

75 Levi-Strauss, Lippi, Filippo, Lowith, Luzzatto,

Claude, 26.

Titian,

37, 64. Nikolai,

Trubetzkoy, 62.

Karl, 71. Moshe Hayyim, 87. 85. 12.

USEN ER, l.-JERMANN,
i

oo ,

MAUSS,

MARCEL,

VALERY,

PAUL,

91. Theodor, 26-27, 53. 50, 52-53,

Meillet, Melandri, Meyerson, More, Morellli, Muller,

Antoine, Emile, 34.

Vischer,

Friedrich

Enzo, 18,35, 55, 57, 88-91, 97.

WARBURC, AllY,

Milo, Daniel Henry, Max,

S., 16. 63.

65-66. Weber, Wind, Wolfson

II.

Max, 71. Edgar, Harry 64. A., 62.

Giovanni, 100.

NEWTON,

ISAAC)

Noailles,
ORIGEN,

Pierre, 88. Franz,

69-70.

Overbeck,

78-82,

86-88.

PARACELSUS,

31-38,40,43,47,53-54, 27. 13. 27, 62.

66,74 Parry, Milman, Pasquino, Plato, Prodi, Ptolemy, 21-24, Pasquale,

Prod us, 48. Paolo, 83. II.

RAlllNQW,

PAUL,

10.

RicOClII', Paul, 89-90,

92.

Rodier,

n 0[[('

II ,

Goorg('s, 21. Jilizabcth, 17.

911~~1,llmll~~I,I~llllll