Abstract

The article focuses on the phenomenon of “Wild Archaeologies” – that is, on “archaeologies” that have appeared in the history of knowledge outside of Classical Archaeology: The first of these projects one thinks of, is of course Foucault’s L’archéologie du savoir, but there has also been Freud’s archaeology of the soul, Benjamin’s archaeology of modernity as well as Kittler’s archaeology of media – and even Kant’s archaeology of metaphysics. All of these various projects experimented with a material reflection 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 contemporary archive theory as well as to Classical Archaeology? And which consequences has this “archaeological method” or thinking for art history? And finally, what does Giorgio Agamben’s recent claim mean: that “the archaeologist’s gesture is the paradigm of every human activity”?