Niklas Luhmann's system theory is one of the most commonly applied methodologies, next to Derrida's deconstruction, at the moment in the philologies in Germany — with, however, an important difference. Luhmann's concept of 'system,' in contrast to Derrida's concept of 'text,' returns, it seems, to a hermeneutic theory of analysis which shuts something out.

Of course he shuts something out: the observer's blind spot. He can't take that into account. He has to constantly change his position so that he can see yesterday's blind spot. The problem is that he naturally can't spot the new blind spot which has allowed him to spot yesterday's blind spot and so on. He takes all that into consideration, but he doesn't make a philosophical mountain out of a molehill, unlike Derrida who wants to have his cake and eat it with every sentence he writes.

Is Luhmann's blind spot the old blind spot within the philologies — that they don't reflect upon their own medium? Is this the spot or site cultural studies takes up as its theme? I am thinking of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin as a prime example of a 'blind' science at work. Schliemann's excavations are the dark side of nineteenth-century colonial politics. You have described your project as an "archaeology of the present." How does cultural studies avoid the blind spot of past archaeologies?

We all, Derrida, Luhmann and myself, work using varying methodologies, which in turn stem from different fascinations. Luhmann, in contrast to Derrida and myself, is less interested in crises, catastrophes and violent upheavals. Although he thinks in terms of contingency, certainty plays a more important role for him. Derrida and myself are more interested in the eruption of an event into apparent structures or the foundation-less foundation of something which afterwards functions as a structure. The artifacts in a museum, for example, are first acquired, then the museum stands there without revealing the fact that what it houses is in fact the trail of a campaign. Luhmann would probably celebrate the reduction and attenuation of contingency, the reduction of white noise, in the finished museum, whereas the moment of violent endowment, the ur-scene of inscription, would be of more interest to me.

These two theoretical tendencies are also evident as archaeological tendencies in the Pergamon. First, there is the fragmented ruin of the Pergamon temple which glorifies history as a process capable of integrating ruptures and breaks. Second, you have the immaculate, fully reconstructed Ishtar Gate from Babylon which is an attempt, brick by brick, to reconstruct a totality at the site of a ruin or diaspora. The result is a simulacrum of knowledge. Those are for me two examples of an archaeology which hasn't managed to escape the shadow of its paranoid origins: culture hides in theory's blind spot.

I can't really say. I haven't been inside. I can't imagine it.

You would definitely enjoy it. Another interesting and slightly disconcerting thing about the Pergamon is that the majority of the museum's visitors are on the voice-guided headphone tour. They wander through the museum like zombies. Walkmen. You can say what you like, they can't hear you. We'll return later to the zombie-critique and what Andreas Huyssen has called the "museum-phobia" of the avant-garde. I wonder, however, if you wouldn't mind saying a few words about your intellectual history. How did you come into contact with French post-structuralism?

Well, Freiburg is almost part of France, and I spent a lot of time in Strasbourg where we read Lacan in seminars with French psychiatrists. Lacan visited us once, and that was wonderful in itself, that he spent the entire day with us.

Derrida wanted to visit Freiburg because he wanted to see where Heidegger had lived, where Heidegger had eaten, and where Heidegger had fallen in love, and that's why he liked coming to Freiburg. He never stopped asking about Heidegger.