Archaeology and Hauntology: An Ongoing, Stalled Conversation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authos,

Attached please find my comments.

Kind Regards,

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Many thanks for all of your helpful suggestions, all of which I have taken into account in the revised version of my essay. As the suggestions were numerous, I will not be replying to every single one (e.g. asking to see page numbers added, or minor asks to clarify remarks that can be noted directly in the revised version now). I have made distinctions between archaeological methods and deconstructive ones that I believe address a number of comments, and I have added more examples to clarify concerns noted. One major such example includes mention of those places where Derrida himself accuses Agamben and Foucault of being archaeologists who succumb to 'archive fever', as this was his diagnosis that I was merely noting, not a claim that I myself was making. Hence, your suggestions that Foucault or Agamben don't seem to be doing what Derrida is accusing them of doing are ones that I agree with (and which is the thesis of my essay basically); nonetheless, Derrida does accuse them. Additionally, I did not fully address a possible distinction between mythology and theology (which you claim sacralizes a particular myth), as I believe such a claim goes beyond the claim I am making. Again, thanks for all of the suggestions, which were very helpful. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Review Report for Archaeology and Hauntology: An Ongoing, Stalled Conversation

Overall, I think this is an interesting essay on an important topic that does a good job of collecting texts and authors in this methodological tradition. I think it’s relation to political theology is an important angle that adds to the literature, if it could be refined a bit. Sometimes your citations need to be made more specific with pagination. Sometimes I think you could give the reader an example before moving on that helps open the critiques you are explaining, especially in the Derrida section. The opening of the essay does a good job of justifying critique of the notion of the self from a basic level up. I like that you explicitly turn toward our collective imagination shortly afterward. That is where archaeology and genealogy tend to make their claims, based on the archives that exist apart from any person’s or author’s sense of self. I think you would do well also near the beginning to set Foucauldian and Agambenian archaeology from earlier projects in political theology. This will help you later in the paper when the nuances between the different between political theology and archaeology-genealogy are at issue.

I would accept this essay with minor revisions as outlined below.

Pg 2 Lines 59-63: “Because all of these attempts to be sovereign are implicated in a long history of western metaphysical claims to absolute (divine) power, there are often theological stakes at play in the various formulations of the self that often seek to legitimate themselves in relation to something else over which the self dominates—animals, our planet, other races or women, one’s own body, and so forth.”

·      Can you give a citation or example? This claim is true, but it is broad and could be taken different ways if the reader must fill in her own examples.

Lines 72-74: “Archaeology, in its essence, looks for an origin that was never actually, historically present, but which dwells as a specter haunting our present nonetheless, indeed dictating the terms by which we configure our realities and relations.”

·      I thin the first part of this claim is right, but why move to talk about specters here exactly? I know this is Derridean language, but open it up a bit. One could mistake you for talking about personal, metaphysical presences. How does specters here reside on the same methodological level as archives and ruins?

Pg 3 Lines 78-81: “Foucault, for his part, criticized any alleged origins for fixed subjects because the selves we know ourselves to be are far more mutable than we often want to recognize. For him, archaeology was not a science, but a willingness to locate the disruptions, dissociations and failures to connect that lay between various discourses.”

·      Please provide a specific page citation for note 9, Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge.

Lines 84-87: Archaeology, like deconstruction, was about decentering or destabilizing the subject so that another representation might be able to appear, though what that representation was to be was impossible to say and certainly not a fixed, sovereign self.

·      This resonance seem to be troubled for you later when given Derrida’s critiques. But, those critiques seem to imply that archaeology does not do what you say it does here.

Lines 91-99: “Archaeological regression, as Agamben phrases the process, is an attempt to go back to a spot within ourselves prior to the split between the conscious and the unconscious in order to experience ‘the sudden, dazzling disclosure of the moment of arising, the revelation of the present as something that we were not able to live or think’.13 This does not mean that we escape positing any sovereign claims through such gestures; rather it indicates that our sense of self and of our subjectivity is dependent upon our ability to call forth a present based upon our access to such a space. Our ‘access to the present’ is only made possible through an archaeological regression that begins to explore, and rethink, our relations to ourselves.”

·      How is it that we do not necessarily escape sovereign claims through such gestures. Can you give an example of a text that fails to escape sovereignty in this way?

Lines 100-102: “The ‘anonymous’ sovereignty that is made possible through such tactics, as he describes this contrasting figure in his writings, is distinct from those sovereign claims that underlie the long history of political theology.”

·      This is your previous work I understand. Can you say what anonymous sovereignty is for the readers of this piece? The distinction needs to be clearer for your argument.

Lines 110-112: “In this, Foucault and Agamben share with Derrida in espousing positions that do not seek to re- store a particular metaphysical, sovereign claim.”

·      Right. It seems everyone is on the same team here, but later it seems as though Derrida’s critique, in your reading is being waged at them for failing to see this. Please clarify.

 Pg 4, Lines 116-122: “Every political theology, and the sovereign claims legitimated therein, necessarily starts by defining its relationship to particular origins and ruins, accessed through specific archaeological means. This is the case for justifying the sovereign claims of religious scriptures no less than national-ethnic mythologies. Seeking to monumentalize the sacred origins of a particular community will always be subject to an archaeological inversion—or profanation, as Agamben calls it—that seeks to lessen the dominant, sacralized hold that a particular myth has upon its subjects.”

·      I think it is good that you mention political theology here given the context of the issue, but I think you need to distinguish it somewhat from Foucauldian archaeology and genealogy, which are distinct from political theology. Could it be that political theology is a kind of proto-archaeology that nonetheless falls for the sovereign claims?

Lines 123-125: “After an archaeological investigation ‘unearths’ alternative readings of history as new possibilities for the liberation of alternative subjectivities, what we are left with is something like a sense of freedom in the ruins of history.”

·      Note 19: please provide specific page citations for Benjamin and Agamben here.

Line 133: note 20

·      Please provide a specific page citation for Anti-Oedipus

Lines 136-137: “There are, he maintained, and as Heidegger followed, other possibilities for sacrality present in our world.”

·      Please give a specific citation for Heidegger here.

Pg 5 Lines 61-64: “Religion, especially in the Judaic-Christian strand he analyzes directly in his Specters of Marx, emphasizes a messianic logic embedded within every history or historical form that undid each and every representation in a bid for more justice to appear upon the face of this earth.”

·      Yes, true for much religious theology, but this does not seem to implicate Foucault and Agamben in the ways you describe them above. Can you distinguish them here?

Lines 171-179: “Theology, from this point of view, would seem to be little more than a long history of humanity trying to establish the boundaries of what is and what is not an acceptable (re)presentation of realities we ultimately do not know how to express.

Archive fever—as the name for his diagnosis of the archaeologist’s madness in believing their methods might reveal a previously concealed presence within history—takes over, he argued, when we believe that we can locate once and for all a presence beyond all the copies, an ‘original’ presence that is nothing more, and nothing less, than a metaphysical claim to sovereign power.”

·      Perhaps this is true for early historical critics of religious texts, like Spinoza or Lessing, and maybe even for Goethe, Moritz, and Hölderlin in the Greek register, but again the critique does not seem apt for Foucault and Agamben.]

Lines 181-185: “Freud, who was the central aim of his critique, was haunted by his own ghosts, as Derrida notes, the same as we are all haunted by ours, all of us given over to a bit of ‘archive fever’ in trying to dislodge their hold upon us if we could only but name them and exorcise them once and for all.”

·      Perhaps a helpful citation here would come from Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud talks about the psych as a layered archaeological phenomenon, like the “Eternal city” of Rome, which has been built continuously on the ruins of its previous versions. I mention this because you want the connection between the literal archeological examples you use throughout and the ones involved in constructing a sense of self. See for example: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25080867  

·      The tie to Archive Fever, however, is not exact, so you might consider adding this citation elsewhere in the paper.

 

Pg 6 Lines 186-190: “The one suffering from archive fever believes that somehow, by sifting through the documents and narratives that constitute an ‘official’ record of the subject of history, they might be able to locate once and for all its point of origin. Thus, if they might, they would be able to possess the subject in some sense, to be master of it, to be sovereign over it, even if that subject is one’s own self .”

 

·      Again, this critique does not seem to apply to Foucault, at least, and likely not Agamben either, given the way you have presented them above. When Agamben talks about Overbeck’s moment of Arising in the Philosophical Archaeology essay, perhaps we could say this applies to Overbeck’s notion, but I think Agamben is too sensitive the to structures of sovereignty to be claiming this. Please clarify or give an example of one who is overtaken with textual archive fever?

 

Line 196-200: “Derrida was rightly concerned about, and critical of, those archaeologists whom he believed suffered from ‘archive fever’, such as Freud, Foucault and Agamben, who, he argued, sought to dig through the dirt of history in the hopes of uncovering an overlooked object or presence of some sort that they might then utilize in order to construct a sovereign narrative of their own.”

 

·      I understand you discuss this elsewhere. Could you connect the dots here a bit more, since you explicitly relate the critique to Foucault and Agamben, but I don’t see that from the characterization of their projects given above.

 

Lines 203-205: “Archaeology, he claimed, searches the ruins for other configurations, possibilities and potentialities, though it is also possibly a way to cement a specific sovereign claim, to legitimate a present identity through recourse to an alleged, mythological past.”

 

·      Right, but I think this applies mainly to theological political projects, given religion’s tendency to sacrilize the mythological. This, however, is not the only possible form of relationship between originary narratives and present-day knowledge acquisition. One can, for instance, deal with the encounter with the mythological apart from the theological. That is one of the possibilities. One can deal with minor tradition in mythology to critique the way current structures have been founded upon certain mythological memes and not others, etc.

 

Line 208: note 30

 

·      Please provide a page number for the Said text.

 

Pg 7, Lines 227-228: “though he made clear on occasion that he did endorse their

Existence and not just their deconstruction.”

 

·      This seems to be an important distinction that you could flesh out more. In what ways does he endorse their existence? The admission seems to point back at the deconstructive method and its limits rather than the canons themselves, since surely Derrida ought to acknowledge their existence and effects. Also, are you saying that deconstruction aims primarily at the messianic elements of archeological projects? Are you saying that archaeology cannot be done without embedding such a logic? I don’t think that is exactly correct, if so.

 

Lines 235-236: “A true archaeology needs to be a hauntology at the same time, a point that both Agamben and Derrida routinely failed to suggest in their various debates with one another.”

 

·      Say more please. I’m not sure why either of them would suggest specifically a hauntology. Perhaps you can say a bit more what you mean by complementary method specifically here at the end. Sum it up. What does hauntology add to archaeology and genealogy proper. Does it simply weaken the tendency of some forms to become overweening and totalitarian? Again, how does Foucault and Agamben fall to this tendency exactly?

 

Lines 242-243: “Communicating with the spirits that reside in such locations, as with our ancestors, is a significant part of our humanity that we are reminded of when in such places.”

 

·      This is the only time this notion of communication with spirits arises (besides in the abstract). It does not exactly map onto the processes of self-construction/deconstruction or literal archaeological cityscape, as you rely on throughout. The spirits and communication with them seem to be a new thing here. If it is the essence of hauntology, please say so above before now. This language, while not asking for literal communication with the dead, perhaps adds some metaphysical baggage to your methodological claims that would best be explained on the level of method, too.

 

Author Response

Many thanks for helpful comments upon my essay, all of which I took into consideration when revising the manuscript. I clarified a good deal of my essay in ways that I believe address your inquiries, though responding directly here to the 'big picture' questions that were asked in your review would entail me mainly restating what the essay itself now says more clearly. I will note directly, however, as I do in the essay, that both archaeological and deconstructive approaches do not attempt to eliminate the sovereign subject (or canonical norms) but only to critique them so that they might be reformulated. This is the major thesis of the essay that I state directly. The essay deals directly with deconstructing sovereign configurations and I added some clarifications to indicate what exactly sovereign constructs entail (e.g. the narratives that we build for ourselves about ourselves in order to have a sense of self at all). I added a number of clarifications about what exactly the sovereign self is and I hope that these additions make clearer what is at stake in the essay as a whole. Again, many thanks for your helpful suggestions.