The Foucaultian archaeological method in Giorgo Agamben

Agamben has claimed to work inside the tradition inaugurated by the archaeological method of Michel Foucault but not to fully coincide with it. “My method is archaeological and paradigmatic in a sense which is very close to that of Foucault, but not completely coincident with it. The question is, facing the dichotomies that structuralize our culture, to go beyond the exceptions that have been producing the former, however, not to find a chronologically originary state, but to be able to understand the situation in which we are. Archaeology is, in this sense, the only way to access present” (interview to Flavia Costa, trad. Susana Scramim, in Revista do Departamento de Psicologia – Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, v. 18 - n. 1, 131-136, Jan./Jun. 2006, 132, translated by the author). However, the aspects in which Agamben follows Foucault's method and the ones he does not were never very clear. This situation seems to change with the edition of Agamben's most extensive and explicit texts on method, Signatura Rerum. Sul Metodo (2008, italian edition). The goal of this article is to identify the points of intersection between their methods and some points in which they differ

Study of the bilinear biquadratic Heisenberg model on a honeycomb lattice via Schwinger bosons

We analyze the biquadratic bilinear Heisenberg magnet on a honeycomb lattice via Schwinger boson formalism. Due to their vulnerability to quantum fluctuations, non conventional lattices (kagome, triangular and honeycomb for example) have been cited as candidates to support spin liquid states. Such states without long range order at zero temperature are known in one-dimensional spin models but their existence in higher dimensional systems is still under debate. Biquadratic interaction is responsible for various possibilities and phases as it is well-founded for one-dimensional systems. Here we have used a bosonic representation to study the properties at zero and finite low temperatures of the biquadratic term in the two-dimensional hexagonal honeycomb lattice. The results show a ordered state at zero temperature but much more fragile than that of a square lattice; the behavior at finite low temperatures is in accordance with expectations.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure