Underskog

Knut Ebeling: On Wild Archaeologies – from Kant to Kittler.

The lecture will focus on the phenomenon of “Wild Archaeologies” – that is, on archaeologies that have appeared in the history of knowledge outside of Classical Archaeology: Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, Freud’s archaeology of the soul, Benjamin’s archaeology of modernity, Kittler’s archaeology of media – and even Kant’s archaeology of metaphysics. All of these various projects experimented with a material reflexion of temporality and presented alternatives to the conventional historical thinking of the past. What do these various projects have in common? What is their – historical, philosophical and epistemological – relation to Classical Archaeology? And how are we to understand Giorgio Agamben’s recent claim, that “the archaeologist’s gesture is the paradigm of every human activity”?

Knut Ebeling is Professor of media theory at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and Lecturer at Stanford University Berlin. Recent publications include: Die Aktualität des Archäologischen – in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten, Frankfurt am Main 2004; Das Archiv brennt (with Georges Didi-Huberman), Berlin 2007; Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Philosophie, Medien und Künsten (Mithg.), Berlin 2009; Wilde Archäologien 1. Theorien der materiellen Kultur, Berlin/Zürich 2011.