Archaism and the Potencies of the Past

Considers the potency of the past by examining, on the one hand, the difference between the philosophical (Anaximanderian) and poetic (Hesiodian) perspectives on the archaic and, on the other, the consequences of the differentiation of the archaic from the origin.

In this book, Benjamin Hutchens explores three themes: 1) the identification of an archaic state prior to the origin which challenges the very structure of time and history implying that origin (i.e. Hegel’s undeveloped notion of prehistory); 2) the epoch between a beginning and an origin as the site of a unique impulse or flow from an indeterminate source (i.e. the work of Vico and Schelling); and 3) the archaic has become buried beneath layers of accumulated residue of historical processes and is often exhibited poetically as ruins or graves (i.e. Piranesi, Lovecraft, Heany, G. Hill). By focusing on these themes, the book offers the opportunity to consider the dimensions of the archaic. The representation of the potencies of myth, as recognized by Herodotus and Aeschylus, and explored later by Vico and Schelling, presage much later efforts to identify a plurality of “radical” origins, such as in post-Nietzschean thought.