Signatura rerum: Sul metodo:
Agamben’s recently-published methodological treatise, the collection of three lectures and
essays on method he had given over the prior years, indicates an unmistakable indebtedness
to the work of Michel Foucault in terms of the development and practice of Agamben’s me-
thod. While he also points out that Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin have been deeply
influential on his thought and his method, it is Foucault who accounts for the deepest
influence, and to whom Agamben constantly returns when elaborating his own project. As
mentioned previously, the three essays of the book, ‛What is a Paradigm?‛, the ‛Theory of the
Signature,‛ and ‛Philosophical Archaeology,‛ all draw upon significant methodological con-
cepts from Foucault. Outside of the political appropriations of Foucault by Agamben which
some have found controversial (themselves interpreted differently in light of newer works in
this review), here he demonstrates a deep and meticulous attentiveness to Foucault, and a
particular allegiance to some of Foucault’s methods of analysis. Although the strict attestation
of the Latin title Signatura rerum would be ‛the signature of things (or of the thing)‛ the Eng-
lish version was rendered as The Signature of All Things in keeping with the translation of the
book by Jakob Böhme named De Signatura rerum, which is also an important source for Agam-
ben.
Agamben says that the three essays bear on three specific methodological problems.
He highlights the relationship between archaeology and history at hand in the third essay.
While he notes that all three essays show clearly the influence of Foucault, this is in part
because a methodological idea of Benjamin’s is not explicitly discussed here, though it is
applied in the analyses: namely that this form of work can be legitimately expressed only in
127
Ibid., 97.
128
Ibid., 98.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
132
the form of interpretation.129 He points out that reflection on method in the human sciences
frequently comes after, rather than preceding, empirical research. Like Foucault, he seems to
be interested in devoting serious attention to methods of inquiry that is not simply a poste-
riori, but integrally related to the conduct of research itself.
He says that there is no single,
universally-valid method, and that the method of inquiry cannot be separated from the con-
text in which it operates.
In this respect he follows Foucault’s ‛Rule of Immanence‛ that he
describes in the ‛Dispositive of Sexuality‛ chapter of Histoire de la sexualité I: La volonté de savoir
{History of Sexuality I: The Will to Knowledge}.130 Although he is deeply indebted to Foucault
here, Agamben also follows the strategy he borrows from Feuerbach of the Entwicklungs-
fähigkeit, that is, of drawing especially on those aspects with the capacity to be developed
further in the work of other thinkers.131 As such, his interpretations of Foucault, like those of
Benjamin, Arendt, Benveniste, and others, demonstrate both a fealty and a departure—or a
development—which may disgruntle some commentators.
Paradigm
Agamben indicates that he has studied a number of paradigms in his work, such as the homo
sacer, the Muslim, the state of exception, and the concentration camp. He says that a certain
amount of confusion has arisen among critics because he does not treat these as positive
historical phenomena, but as paradigms, ‛the function of which was to build or to render
intelligible an entire, more vast historical-problematic context.‛132 While he has found the use
of these paradigms to be illuminating for deciphering certain problems, he also believes that
they can be elucidated further by treating some aspects of the philosophical function of the
paradigm. Although Foucault frequently used the term, Agamben says that he never fully or
systematically defined it. He did, however, use a number of other terms to distinguish the
objects of his research from those of the historical discipline, traditionally defined. Among
these other terms are: ‛‘positivity,’ ‘problematization,’ ‘dispositives,’ ‘discursive formations,’
and more generally ‘knowledges’.‛133 To define these ‛knowledges‛ he indicates that they
‛indicate all the procedures and all the effects of understanding/awareness that a specific field
is disposed to accept at a certain time.‛134 Thus these are contingent relations, subject to con-
tinual change and perpetual inventiveness over time, but which produce tangible material
effects—in the forms of subjectivation and in terms of specific modes of construction (of buil-
dings, etc.) and treatment (of people, environment, etc.).
It is frequently observed that there is an analogy between Foucault’s concept and that
of Thomas Kuhn. Noting Kuhn’s development of Fleck’s Denkstil and emphasis on prac-
129
Agamben, Signatura, 7.
130
See the discussion of this in the ‘Foucault’s Usage,’ section (especially the parts on History and Power) of
the essay ‛What is a Dispositive?‛ in this issue.
131
See the discussion of this concept and its application in the essay by Anke Snoek in this issue.
132
Agamben, Signatura, 11.
133
Ibid.
134
Ibid., 11-2.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
133
tices,135 Agamben illustrates some points of similarity between Kuhn and Foucault. However,
ultimately he thinks that the comparison is based on a confusion, with important differences
existing between the paradigm concepts of the respective thinkers. Foucault explicitly op-
poses the paradigm to ‛discursive regimes‛ in a 1976 interview.136 Agamben says that the
decisive thing for Foucault is, ‛the movement from the epistemological paradigm to the politi-
cal one, its dislocation on the basis of a politics of propositions and discursive regimes.‛137
One of the most constant features of Foucault’s research is the setting aside of the traditional
analysis of power in terms of institutions and universals (law, the State, the theory of sove-
reignty) in favor of ‛an analysis of concrete dispositives through which power penetrates the
bodies of subjects, and governs their forms of life.
‛138 Agamben says that Foucault’s attention
especially was on ‛the multiple disciplines and political technologies through which the State
integrates in itself the care of the lives of individuals.‛139 Thus it seems that it is this dimen-
sion of bio-political analysis that makes Foucault’s concept of the paradigm distinct.
In seeking to elaborate a concept able to accommodate this particular view of power
and of politics, Agamben says that Foucault used terms such as ‛epistemological figure‛ and
‛threshold of epistemologization‛ resonant with his concept of the episteme. Defining the epi-
steme in L’Archéologie du savoir {The Archaeology of Knowledge} Foucault calls it a ‛set of relations
able to bring together, in a given epoch, the discursive practices which give place to
epistemological figures, to sciences, at times to formalized systems.‛140 Within the horizon of
analysis of power in terms of multiple forces and changing application in different configura-
tions, Agamben observes that Foucault seems to be interested above all in ‛the positive exis-
tence of ‘figures’ and series.”141
Agamben takes the Panopticon as a concrete example of this. Recalling Foucault’s
description from the third part of Surveiller et punir {Discipline and Punish} and quoting from it
at length, Agamben says that the Panopticon is ‛a singular historic phenomenon,‛ and that it
is, ‛also, a ‘generalizable model of function,’ ‘panoptism,’ ‘principle of a set,’ and ‘panoptic
modality of power’.‛142 Quoting Foucault to show that the Panopticon is a figure of techno-
logical power and a diagram of a mechanism of power in its ideal form, he then observes that
‛it functions in brief as a paradigm in the strict sense: a single object which, together with all
the others of the same class, define the intelligibility of the set of which they are part of and, at
the same time, create.‛143
The paradigm is a concept to give methodological and theoretical purchase in the
research of Foucault. But it also follows his ‛Rule of Immanence‛ in terms of relating to cer-
135
For more on this point see Babette Babich, ‚From Fleck’s Denkstil to Kuhn's paradigm: conceptual schemes
and incommensurability,‛ International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 17, no. 1, 2003, 75-92.
136
Ibid., 15-6.
137
Ibid., 16.
138
Ibid., 14.
139
Ibid.
140
Ibid., 17.
141
Ibid., 18.
142
Ibid.
143
Ibid., 19.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
134
tain determinate contexts. Despite their specificity, Agamben says that paradigms are not iso-
lated instances in Foucault, and that ‛on the contrary that the paradigm defines, in this sense,
the Foucauldian method in its most characteristic gesture. The great confinement, confession,
the inquest, the examination, the care of the self(...). Paradigms which shape a vaster proble-
matic context that they also constitute and render intelligible.‛144 Agamben maintains that the
epistemological status of the paradigm will be made more incisive through radicalizing Aris-
totle’s notion of the paradigm and realizing that it calls into question the dichotomy between
the particular and the universal.145
As illustrative of this concept Agamben takes up the example of the ‛rule.‛ From a
form of life or example to follow in monastic settings, it becomes more formalized as a written
text, such that the life of each monk becomes paradigmatic, constituted as a form of life. No-
ting the methodological implications of this, he notes:
This signifies that, uniting the considerations of Aristotle and of Kant, we can say that the
paradigm involves a movement which goes from singularity to singularity and which, with-
out exiting from this, transforms each single case into an exemplar of a general rule which it
is never possible to formulate a priori.146
Drawing on Victor Goldschmitt’s interpretation of the paradigm, and the ‛paradigm of para-
digms,‛ in Plato, Agamben points out that the paradigm is a relation between the sensible and
the mental, and that the ‛paradigmatic relationship‛ runs between a singularity and its expo-
sition.147
Agamben maintains that only the concept of the paradigm properly treated can yield
the correct understanding of Book VI of Plato’s Republic, where Plato indicates that the para-
digm has its place in dialectics, and that dialectics is where hypotheses are treated properly as
hypotheses. Agamben says that, following Plato’s explanation, this means they are treated as
paradigms. He emphasizes the aspect of intelligibility that Foucault noted in relation to the
paradigm.148 Similarly, he holds that the method of the human sciences, the hermeneutic cir-
cle, can only be properly understood as a paradigmatic one against this philosophical back-
drop. He says that the hermeneutic circle is in fact a paradigmatic circle, and that intelligi-
bility does not precede the phenomenon, but that they are nearby or contiguous with one
another.149 He also considers the nymph as a kind or paradigm, or ur-phenomenon.150
Agamben draws the main lines of his inquiry on the paradigm into a series of theses
that define the paradigm. First, the paradigm is neither inductive nor deductive as know-
ledge, but moves from singularity to singularity. Second, it suspends the dichotomy between
general and particular and substitutes an analogical bipolar model. Third, it is never possible
144
Ibid.
145
Ibid., 21.
146
Ibid., 24.
147
Ibid., 25.
148
Ibid., 26-7.
149
Ibid., 28-9.
150
Ibid., 30-1.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
135
to separate exemplarity and singularity in the paradigm. Fourth, Foucault’s ‛Rule of Imma-
nence‛ is to be applied to paradigms in terms of their cohesion and form. Five, there is not an
origin or arché to the paradigm. And six, the historicity of the paradigm is based upon a
crossing of the diachronic and the synchronic.151 In these ways he thinks that the sense of wor-
king through paradigms, for him and Foucault, becomes clearer. It is important because of its
capacity to ‛render intelligible a series of phenomena, the relationship of which has slipped or
could slip from the view of the historian.‛152
Noting that the use of the paradigm is an ontological method, a paradigmatic ontology,
Agamben leaves this as a concept which is best summed up in a poem from Wallace Stevens:
It is possible that to seem — it is to be,
As the sun is something seeming and it is.
The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.153
Theory of the Signature
In Paracelsus’ episteme everything carries a sign that points to its invisible qualities, and
‛nothing is without a sign.‛154 According to him the signatura is the science of deciphering and
interpreting them. The science of these signs can reveal valuable knowledge, but like all
knowledge, it is ‛a consequence of sin, since Adam in Eden was absolutely ‘non-signed’ and
would have remained so if not for the ‘fall into nature,’ which ‘leaves nothing unsigned.‛155
Paracelsus speaks of three ‛signifiers:‛ humans, the Archeus, and the stars.
156 He also names
a Kunst Signatura which Agamben describes as a paradigm for every signature—a first signa-
ture.
This first signature is language, which Adam used to give things their right names.
The relationship between signature and signified should be seen as one of similarity. This
similarity is not physical but ‛analogical and immaterial. Language, which is the custodian of
the archive of immaterial similarities, is also the case (frame) of the signatures.‛157
Agamben
makes a fascinating exposition of Paracelsus’ medicine, in which plants, via a signature, could
be read to indicate their effect on the body—such as the image of an eye on a leaf indicating
that the plant could be used to treat maladies of the eyes.
Agamben says that Paracelsus contributed a major aspect to the concept of the
signature, a decisive place for humans as signifiers, that had gone largely unnoticed until
some discussion by Foucault and by Melandri.
158 Agamben cites two examples of human sig-
natures: the signing of works of art by artists and the stamping of metal to make coins. One
151
Ibid., 33.
152
Ibid.
153
Ibid., 34.
154
Ibid., 35.
155
Ibid.
156
Ibid., 36.
157
Ibid., 38.
158
Ibid., 39.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
136
serves to put a painting into relation with the name of a person, and the other determines the
value of the coin.159 He also notes that the knowledge of the inadequacy of the sign to take
account of the situation has long been evident in the study of the signature, and that it is no
longer just that which points to hidden qualities, but ‛the decisive operator of every
consciousness, that which renders the world intelligible, that is, in itself, silent and without
reason.‛160 For some thinkers such as Böhme, the signature was essential to animating and
qualifying the signs. He even describes it musically as that which must be played like a lute.161
Agamben notes that the aporia of the theory of the signature echoes that of the trinity—just as
god could shape everything through the word, which is an instrument of creation, the
signatura is that which, staying in itself, makes silent signs speak.
The theory of the signature was so widespread and persistent that it figures pro-
minently in the work of Leibniz and Kepler, for instance. Agamben argues that the concept
has its locus not in medicine or magic, but in theology, in terms of the theory of the sacraments,
which were early conceived of in general as those things in us that can unite us with god or
the divine.162
Here again the sign is inadequate to explain the experience or issue at hand.
Thomas Aquinas considers this lack of fit in his Summa Theologica. The sign by itself cannot
transmit or cause grace or character: for these the operation of another operator, a signifier, is
necessary in order to animate the signs and make the dynamic into a signature.163 Sacrament
for him thus functions as a signature.
The considerations in Aquinas give rise to a fascinating debate in the semiotics of the
sacrament according to whether a sacrament can be legitimately performed or passed on by
someone who is lacking grace (a heretic). While one side maintained that it could not be, the
sacrament would be invalidated by the impurity of the performer, another strain held that the
sacrament held its own type of signification, and that it would mark the soul of the recipient
regardless of the purity of the performer of the sacrament.
__________________
__________________
Elena: The way signature is being talked about here is similar to how Cirlot speaks of the Symbol. This last part on whether the sacrament is invalidated by the lack of being of the performer is extremely interesting because it tells us about the “form”. Does the form have an impact if it is perfomed by people without the being? What cults and modern politics prove is that they do, that they do of course! But what they also prove is that the effect they have on the people is a destructive, involuting process. The guru stands over the people and controls them through the same methods used by the sage but instead of freeing the individual from bonds, he or she enslaves them even more deeply into tighter bonds to his own persona. The dictator does likewise with the people: instead of providing for democracy and more responsibility from the people, he instills conditioned forms within which the selected few can perform establishing the hierarchic order that will sustain his reign.
The ‘form’, the ‘Act’ itself is powerful and that is why what people actually do, is so dangerous to their inner self: because that doing will sculpt their inner world. THAT is why brainwashing is possible and so very quickly effective: because the form plays on the inner structure of the human being.
The real problem is that we cannot rest in the comfort that an individual without the “law”, the ‘being’, can perform the rite without having an effect. The interest of the individual performing the rite unlawfully must always be taken into consideration because it determines the outcome as powerfully as it would were it coming from a lawful source. If we can agree on the fact that lawfulness is always empowering and liberating as much as an ‘evolving’ force for the individuals under its umbrella, then we can acknowledge the fact that unlawfulness is always disempowering and constraining as much as an involuting force for the individuals under its shadow.
In as much as religious and political power in our times is unlawful, it can only have the effect of creating an unlawful status quo in which the people are induced into acting against their own self and that of others. The religious and political powers of our times are unlawful in as much as neither one of them is connected to the consciousness of the Whole. The Church as much as Governments have become the commanders of the army at the service of the economic interests, against the people. That is a ‘cosmos’ in a self-destructive process.
The people, induced by the status quo into believing that the false government represents the ‘Nation’ and therefore the interests of the Whole, of the People, are conned into acting against each other for the well being of the whole. That is the main and most destructive aspect of the military institution itself. Young, innocent, capable and willing human beings are conned into serving to kill their own people or innocent human beings in other nations. They are conned by inducing them to believe that they are doing it for the well being of mankind or their Nation and of course, their Nation represents the well being of mankind. The military is the most obvious example of this phenomenon but we are living exactly the same phenomenon in all our institutions and the only difference is the degree to which people are submitted because of their actual instinctive necessity to survive or their willingness to participate so as to form a part of the hierarchy holding the status quo.
In relation to that it’s revealing to note that in fact, people who participate in the status quo as “submitted workers” in a ‘surviving’ category are not nearly as ‘brainwashed’ as those who submit to it because they want to belong to the hierarchy within the status quo. The status quo reproduces itself in these people who first become its enablers and then replace the figures in power. Interesting to note is also the fact that ‘everyone’ is to a certain extent participating because participation implies survival. In as much as participation is connected to an income and is part of the economic process, it is totally or partially connected with the instinctive realm and when THAT becomes the determining factor in human beings, it begins to behave like animal clans: stratified hierarchies with a dictator or guru at the head of which the rest of the people are emotionally and intellectually bound to as much as physically dependent on for their survival. What is most interesting is that the actual ‘people’ in the lower eschelon of society are the ones who ‘escape’ its influence most powerfully and maintain a connection with themselves as free human beings that keeps the humaneness alive. The ‘spontaneity’ with which they continue to express themselves is in fact ‘free’ of the ‘form’ that the rest have assimilated.
________________________________
Like the signs awaiting their ani-
mation by the signature, these marks on the soul would be laid down and could be later acted
upon, sounded, or activated, by the spirit.
This led to the fascinating notion of the ‛zero
signature,‛ which was ‛a pure identity without content,‛ and which ‛expressed the event of a
sign without meaning.
_____
Elena: nothing could better define ‘being’ as I’ve been using it as this ‘notion’.
‛_____
This relates to a line of interpretation in Aquinas and others about
the ‛special signature,‛ a sign which exceeds the sign and a relation that exceeds and founds
every relation.
______
Elena: What ‘founds’ every relation is The Whole: Being: Consciousness.
______
165 Resonances to Roland Barthes and a whole set of semiotic analysis are pre-
sent here.
Agamben notes that this idea of the effect of practices and signs independent of the
subjects involved predates Augustine. He cites Iamblichus’ De mysteriis as a clear example of
this, and indicates that theological doctrine of the sacramental character and the medical
159
Ibid., 41-2.
160
Ibid., 43.
161
Ibid., 44.
162
Ibid., 45.
163
Ibid., 47-8.
164
Ibid., 50.
165
Ibid., 50-2.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
137
doctrine of signatures both likely owe their origin to a magical-
theurgical tradition.
_______
Elena: How could all of life not owe its origin to The Origin? The Whole?
_______
166 This
proximity is indicated in the history of baptismal rites. Magical images and talismans were
baptized in order to increase their potency. This posed a threat structurally similar to that of
perjury or blasphemy vis-à-vis the oath; while breaking the oath ruptures the performative
linkage of words and things in it, baptizing idols profanes the sacrament and produces demo-
nic power.
________
Elena: There can be demonic powers and sacred powers. The Shaman uses talismans and idols to heal. In black magic, they are used to harm.
But the cults and the governments today seem more in line with the tradition of black magic, enslaving people physically and psychologicall than with while magic, meant to connect life with the spiritual.
________
167
In noting that astrology has been an important place for the signature, he notes that the
ymagines described in the Picatrix article act as signatures—the forces of the heavenly bodies
are aligned and concentrated in such a way as to act on terrestrial bodies.168 Just as the signa-
ture that makes the signs sing, here the celestial forces make earthly ones speak. Agamben
points out that ‛this means that the signature is the place where the gesture of reading and
that of writing invert their relationship and enter into a zone of undecideability.‛169 High-
lighting Aby Warburg’s work Bilderatlas Mnemosyne and his associated concept of Pathosformel,
Agamben says that it functions as a signature which is the object of a ‛science without name‛
and an ‛archaeology of the signature.‛170
Referring to Foucault’s citation of Paracelsus in Les Mots et les choses, Agamben notes
that it occurs when he is describing the theory of the signature in the Renaissance episteme. He
recalls how Foucault looks in particular at the role of similarity, observing that ‛there is no
similarity without a signature. The world of the similar cannot but be a signed world.‛171
Foucualt speaks of a hermeneutics of similarity and a semiology of the signature, and of the
oscillation between them—if they were to coincide perfectly all would be evident, but as they
oscillate we are in a perpetual zigzag between them.172 Melandri picked up on this discon-
nection between hermeneutics and semiology and related it to the signature: ‛The signature is
a kind of sign of the sign; it is that index that, in the context of a given semiology, refers univo-
cally to a given interpretation.‛173 While the Renaissance episteme emphasized similarity be-
tween sign and signified, modern science is more interested in its relation to other signs. But,
in ‛each case ‘the type of episteme depends on that of the signature,’‛ and that ‛this is ‘that
character of the sign, or of the system of signs, which gives away, by means of its crafting, the
relation that it holds to the signified.’‛174 Agamben notes that Benveniste also pointed out this
disconnection between hermeneutics and semiology—he called it that between the semiotic
and the semantic.175 On this basis he argued against Saussure that the interpretation of lan-
guage only in terms of signs couldn’t account for the passage from sign to word (language).
166
Ibid., 52-3.
167
Ibid., 54-5.
168
Ibid., 55-7.
169
Ibid., 57.
170
Ibid., 58-9.
171
Ibid., 59.
172
Ibid., 60.
173
Ibid., 61.
174
Ibid.
175
Ibid., 61-2.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
138
Agamben holds that the incomparable novelty of Foucault’s L’Archéologie du savoir is to
have taken ‛statements‛ explicitly as its objects of inquiry. Foucault described the statement
in terms reminiscent of the dispositive or the paradigm, as heterogeneous assemblages:
The statement does not exist either in the form of a language (though it is made up of signs
which, in their individuality, are not definable except inside a system of a natural or artificial
language), nor in the form of objects given to perception (though always given to a certain
materiality and always able to be situated according to spatio-temporal coordinates) ...the
statement is not a unity of the same type as sentences, propositions, or the linguistic act; it is
not definable with the same criteria, but nonetheless it is something like a material object
with its limits and its independence.176
Echoing the analysis of the signature in Paracelsus as making the signs sing, Foucault de-
scribes the statement as ‛making sense‛ of the sign according to a certain field of inter-
pretation.
Given that the statement is difficult to recognize, Foucault indicates that it should be
investigated where signification takes place and that it is necessary to ‛interrogate language
not in the direction that it points, but in terms of its givenness.‛177 He looks for a certain con-
tingent configuration, line of force, or heterogeneous network that is constituted of that ‛set of
anonymous rules, histories, always determinate in time and space, which define, in a certain
epoch and a certain social, economic, geographical and linguistic environment, the conditions
of exercise of the enunciative function.‛178 This is designed to remedy the insufficiency of a
purely semiotic analysis. The signs themselves can’t be accounted for, in terms of their sense,
sounds, and meaning, without the signature. It is as such that Foucault insists upon the exis-
tential character of the statement. He says that it is not a structure, but a ‛function of exis-
tence.‛179 Agamben says that the ‛statement is the signature that marks language by the pure
fact of its givenness.‛180
Agamben notes other attempts to link the doctrine of the signature to ontology, such as
in Herbert of Cherbury, and prominent strands of theology in several religions.
He also points
out the dispersion and influence of the concept of the signature, explicitly or implicitly, in
locations as diverse as the Morelli method, the techniques of Sherlock Holmes, the methods of
Freud, and the notions of Galton and Bertillon.181 All of them in one way or another focused
on a signature that exceeded the semiotic frame in order to make sense of a determinate phe-
nomenon.
Agamben argues that a philosophy of the signature is contained in the two brief pieces
of Benjamin’s on the mimetic function. That which Benjamin calls the ‛mimetic element‛ or
the ‛immaterial similarity,‛ refers explicitly to the sphere of the signature.182 This immaterial
176
Ibid., 64.
177
Ibid., 65.
178
Ibid.
179
Ibid., 66.
180
Ibid.
181
Ibid., 71.
182
Ibid., 72.
Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben
139
similarity, reminiscent of the considerations in Paracelsus, is important for Benjamin because
for him ‛it functions like an irreducible complement to the semiotic element of language, with-
out which the passage to discourse would be incomprehensible.‛183 However for Benjamin, he
says, at least from starting upon his arcades project, the proper locus for the signature is his-
tory. He speaks of ‛‘indices’ (‘secret,’ ‘historic,’ or ‘temporal’) or of ‘images’ (Bilder), often
qualified as ‘dialectical’.‛184 Benjamin’s description of the dialectical images is consonant with
the fluid ontology of Foucault’s description of the episteme:
‛It is not that the past casts light
on the present nor that the present its light on the past, but the image is that in which that
which was unites as if in a flash of lightning with the now in a constellation.
In other words:
image is the dialectic in a stalled position.‛185
A consequence of this is that a historical object is
never given neutrally, but always accompanied by a signature, which forms it as an image and
determines its intelligibility in time.
Benjamin believes that it takes a certain practice, or being,
as a researcher to read these ephemeral phenomena.
In an interesting observation, Agamben writes
that fashion is an important site for the
signature, and that we can understand its genuinely historical nature in that way. He says
that fashion is devoted to a certain type of innovation—or perpetual production and manage-
ment of the new—so that it introduces a peculiar discontinuity in time.
This division has to do
with that which is, or is not, in fashion, and whether it is ‛now.‛186 Within each quasi-determi-
nate frame (the twenties, the seventies, the eighties) there is a certain signature, or set of signa-
tures, that permits the meaning of certain signs and gestures to seem to belong to the present.
Agamben points out that ‛index‛ derives from the Latin dico which means ‛to show,‛
and that it has frequently been noted that this is part of the same lexical family as diritto, law
or right.187
He refers to other related concepts such as iudex, vindex, and vim dicere, and, in an
analysis that parallels part of his Sacramento book, he draws on Pierre Noailles who pointed
out that these had to do especially with showing or demonstrating force. Noailles specified
that this was not any force or simple violence, but that it referred to the force of the rite, that is,
the force of the effective word and the ability for words to refer to things.
Agamben says that
this shows the law to be the place of the signature par excellence (in which the efficacy of
words prompts action) and that all of language shows its relation to the signature.188 He says,
too, that all of the human sciences—especially those dealing with history—have to do with the
signature. Noting that Deleuze wrote that philosophical research involves the elements of
identifying a problem and choosing which concepts are appropriate to it, Agamben adds that
concepts imply signature, without which they’d remain inert.
Agamben points out so many uses and aspects of the theory of the signature in the 20th
century that he says that ‛we might even be able to speak of something like an absolutization
of the signature.‛189 Among a number of approaches that recognize and depart from the ex-
183
Ibid., 73.
184
Ibid., 73.
185
Ibid., 73-4.
186
Ibid., 75.
187
Ibid.
188
Ibid., 77.
189
Ibid., 79.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
140
cess of the signifier over the signified, he returns to Foucault’s archaeology, where, as there is
never a pure sign without a signature, it is also never possible to extract the signature and put
it in an originary position. It concerns the historical conditions of veridiction that enable cer-
tain signs to become animated and to make sense. It concerns ‛the non-semantic inscribed in
every signifying discourse and surrounds and limits acts of language like an obscure and
unsignifying margin. It defines, however, also the set of rules which decide the conditions of
existence and exercise for signs.‛190 Referring to Foucault’s essay ‛Nietzsche, Genealogy, His-
tory‛ and to Nietzsche’s own genealogy, Agamben repeats that this archaeology is not con-
cerned with seeking out an origin, but in ‛maintaining events in their dispersion.‛191 For him
this is intimately tied to the theory, the study, of the signature, since archeology looks in any
event for the signature that determines it and in the signature for the events that condition it.
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