아감벤의 철학적 고고학, 그리고 푸코와 벤야민의 그림자

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the philosophical archaeology of George Agamben, and to see how Foucault’s and Benjamin’s idea of historical a priori affect or intercommunicate with Agamben’s philosophical archaeology. Agamben mentions that Kant first named “philosophical archaeology” for his study of philosophical history of philosophy, and its main ideas such as the historical apriori is at the basis of Nietzsche and Foucault. Philosophical archaeology differs from the traditional meaning of archaeology in that it concerns not with the chronological development of history but with the concept of the historical apriori. And the meaning of origin, “arche,” which philosophical archaeology searches for, is nothing to do with the chronologically most ancient, the archaic origin. Historical apriori and the arche are inscribed within a history and that can only constitute itself a posteriori with respect to this history and what it searches for is not the origin but the moment of rising, or emergence. Walter Benjamin also shows something similar in his concept of history, in the monadological structure of the historical object, and in the idea of “historical apocatastasis.” We also see that the paradoxical nature of the concept of the historical apriori is found in Agamben’s main studies on ‘homo sacre’ and ‘potentiality.’