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The Late Natufian at Raqefet Cave: The 2006 Excavation Season
A long season of excavation took place at Raqefet cave during the summer of 2006. In the
first chamber we exposed an area rich with Natufian human burials (Locus 1), a large bedrock
basin with a burial and two boulder mortars (Locus 2), an in situ Natufian layer (Locus 3),
and two areas with rich cemented sediments (tufa) covering the cave floor (Loci 4, 5). The
latter indicate that at the time of occupation the Natufian layers covered the entire floor of
the first chamber. During the ensuing millennia, these were washed away and/or removed
by later visitors to the cave. We found in the cave and the terrace almost 80 human-made
bedrock holes (most of which are commonly but somewhat erroneously termed mortars
and cupmarks). Several contained in situ Natufian remains, and at the top of one a human
skeleton was unearthed. The variety of the HBHs, in terms of shape and dimensions indicates
that they were used in many ways, some of which could not have been for food or mineral
processing. The paper provides results of on-going studies regarding the burials, the HBHs,
the flint assemblage, the faunal remains, the ground stone industry, the bone tools and the
beads. It also presents aspects of geoarchaeology and ground penetrating radar analyses.
Some of the detailed plans and sections were prepared by the use of photogrammetry
The Poststructuralist Broom of Wallaceās System: A Conversation Between Wittgenstein and Derrida
David Foster Wallace famously characterized his first novel, The Broom of the System, as āa conversation between [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and [Jacques] Derrida.ā This comes as little surprise, given the ubiquity of the question of language in the works of these two thinkers, and given the novelās constant reflections on the relation between language and world. Broomās protagonist, Lenore Beadsmen ā in search of her eponymous great-grandmother ā is preoccupied with the dread that āall that really exists of [her] life is what can be said about it,ā that is to say, that reality is entirely coextensive with language. If, as Wittgenstein says, āThe limits of my language mean the limits of my world,ā and, āI am my world,ā then it stands to reason that āthe limits of my language mean the limits of myself.ā This is the fearful hypothesis that drives The Broom of the System.
Much of the scholarship surrounding the novel has interpreted Wallaceās remark as an assertion that the novel constitutes a debate between Wittgenstein and Derrida, and has, more often than not, assumed that Wittgenstein āwinsā that debate for Wallace. In his groundbreaking work, Understanding David Foster Wallace, Marshall Boswell writes that for Wallace, āthe job of the post-Barth [i.e., John Barth, with whom Boswell lumps Derrida] novelist is to āā¦ overturn the related insistence that texts are āclosed systemsā that produce their own meaning through endless self-reference.ā The āself-conscious meta-fictional novel,ā he writes, āin David Foster Wallaceās hands, becomes an open system of communicationāan elaborate and entertaining gameābetween author and reader,ā and Boswell credits Wittgenstein as the inspiration for this thought of the open system. Alternatively, some scholars have left Derrida out of the discussion entirely. Despite the oft-cited quotation from Lipskyās book, it remains the case, as Bradley Fest has noted, that Derridaās āinfluence on Wallaceās work still remains largely unexplored.ā
There are a number of likely explanations for this privileging of Wittgenstein. The most obvious is the fact that Wallace himself addresses Wittgenstein far more frequently and directly than he does Derrida. Wallace famously wrote a review of David Marksonās Wittgensteinās Mistress, which includes a fair amount of broader commentary on Wittgensteinās project. While Derridaās name does not appear in The Broom of the System, Wittgensteinās name is mentioned multiple times, as the āmad crackpot geniusā who had been the inspiration for Gramma Lenoreās philosophy, which is the source of Lenoreās aforementioned dread. Wittgenstein was the author of the Philosophical Investigations and of an apparently esoteric green book without which Gramma Lenore never left her home at the Shaker Heights nursing facility. Indeed Wittgenstein, represented by the ever-elusive Gramma Lenore herself, wafts like a specter through the entirety of the novel. However, any simple valorization of Wittgenstein in the thinking of Wallace risks overlooking what Wallace characterizes as the āhorrorā that Wittgenstein leaves us with. In the famous interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace cites Wittgenstein as āthe real architect of the postmodern trap,ā the worry, indoctrinated into Lenore by her great-grandmother, that āa life is words and nothing else,ā that there is no āextra-linguistic anything.ā The dread that burdens Lenore also burdens Wallace, and it is this dread for which Wallace seeks a solution in his writing, both in The Broom of the System and beyond. As Wallace says to McCaffery, āIf the world is itself a linguistic construct, thereās nothing āoutsideā language for language to have to picture or refer to. This ā¦ leads right to the postmodern, poststructural dilemma of having to deny yourself an existence independent of language.ā If the novel is indeed a āconversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida,ā and if it is Wittgenstein, and not Derrida, whose thinking points toward the āpostmodern trap,ā then perhaps we should consider that Derrida may have been a source of hope for Wallace.
In this essay, I therefore invite Derrida into this conversation, arguing that, contrary to popular intuitions, Derrida might just be the thinker who points the way in Wallaceās system beyond the āpostmodern trap.ā As noted, Wallace grapples with the āhorrorā of language with no āoutsideā. We can think of this āanxiety of the outsideā in two ways: (1) that my language belongs only to me, and so if there is no outside of language, there is no outside of myself ā the problem of solipsism from the early Wittgenstein, about which Wallace worried extensively; (2) that the world itself is nothing more than language, and hence there is no outside of language that would constitute myself, nothing more to me than the language that is used to describe me ā I am not truly a self at all. As Lenoreās significant other ā Rick Vigorous ā says of Lenore, āshe simply felt ā¦ as if she had no real existenceā¦ā It is Derrida ā the silent interlocutor in the book ā and not Wittgenstein, who disrupts this double bind, with his famous ānon-conceptā known as diffĆ©rance, the differential play of force at the heart of all language (and life). DiffĆ©rance points toward an essential exteriority at the heart of the self, thereby avoiding the solipsistic danger of the self-enclosed world. Moreover, diffĆ©rance also points toward an essential outside to language, according to Derrida, and in so doing, it points toward dimensions of human life ā intensity, desire, affect, force ā that elude the grasp of language, precisely because they too are part of the differential play. Before addressing these characteristics of diffĆ©rance, I shall first discuss Wallaceās anxiety of the outside through the ādouble bindā he sees in Wittgenstein
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