On the concept of axial space

Abstract

The problem of Orientalism as a system of classification that maps out the cultural and political boundaries between East and West has been widely discussed within the humanities and social sciences, but it has been less overtly prominent as an issue in the specific field of archaeology. This absence is peculiar, given the legitimating role of classical archaeology as an account of the primitive occupation of space. We can initially explore the question of archaeological Orientalism in terms of Karl Jaspers’s notion of axial ages. This concept is useful in the analysis of what we might call the construction of a ‘privileged space’ in European philosophy. This article examines the European debate about the authority of cultural origins through a commentary on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and, following the Lacanian notion of the imaginary, describes the issue of authentic beginnings as the problem of ‘the originary’. In postmodern social theory, Heidegger has been a dominant influence in the deconstruction of metaphysical assumptions about a universal subject, but Heidegger’s notion of the origins of western culture was itself deeply Orientalist. My argument attempts to deconstruct Heidegger’s map of philosophy that simultaneously privileged pre-Socratic philosophy and the German language as the carrier of Greek thought. This commentary on western thought concludes with the theme of the decline of the West as a decadent version of originary spaces. Throughout this article, I trade on the metaphor of an archaeology of knowledge(s) in the work of Michel Foucault.