Archeology and Magic

Abstract

Nature leaves nothing without signing. Such gesture of emitting signals sounds like an ethical purpose that cannot be understood in the light of the human sciences. From a different perspective of the contemporary scientific discourse, the general purpose of this paper will be to describe the game of shadows by which Michel Foucault's archeology approaches the paradigm of magic. Magic is a spiritual practice with oneself, with one another, and with the world, which cannot be reduced to the representation and the meaning. My hypothesis tries to investigate to what extent the paradigm of magic is present in the archaeological writings, even though Michel Foucault scarcely refers directly to it, a task that implies an excavation of the tracks left between the lines of his thought, as did his contemporary Giorgio Agamben. To this end, I will focus on the resonance between the concepts of (a) statement and signature and (b) historical a priori and mana. We acknowledge that statement and historical a priori are two central operators to the archaeological thought. My task will be to show that they are intimate with signature and mana, both notions from the field of magic. It will not be difficult to realize that archeology drinks like a fish the paradigm of magic. Such interpretation allows us to think how knowledge and practices have been eclipsed since secularized thinking and Enlightenment. Thus, archeology is signalized as a kind of anti-science of signatures, a kind of an ethos which is unveiled so far.