Would you agree that part of the future-oriented application of a hauntological style analysis would explore the tension between the future anterior (the future past of a presentness) and the to-come of a given event?

Is there a term in Derrida’s philosophy to describe the element/passage of an event that is already happening (being actualised) but which from at least a human perspective hasn’t yet happened? A good example is from romantic relations (on my mind!) where one could be in a friendship with someone, which over time develops into something else, that development is happening on one level but hasn’t yet reached consciousness and is often amidst much confusion.

My understanding is that the to-come describes something in the works, but is partially derived from an appreciation of the present. I am after a term to describe the contemporary state of a ‘future’ event that has already started happening without knowledge or conscious awareness of it happening, which I guess can only be identified in retrospect.

Absolutely it can, glen. That’s what the to-come, the a-venir, is all about. Likewise, the time of the ghost is undecidable, which is as much as to say that it can’t be confined to the past any more than it can be contained within a form of the present.

Indeed, any hauntology worthy of the name is undertaken in the name of opening a path to a future that is otherwise than a continuation of the present. Hauntology is itself haunted by a future-to-come that is irreducible to the form of the the future-present.

i think you are partly right on what you say about Bourdieu. Though i guess that it should be also attended that the main conceptualization that preoccupied Bourdieu was centered in the notion of the field. This means that he would see in further way the case of Brooker, maybe arguing that Brooker was not equipped to contemplate the broken pot, neither with embodied skills or with the specific symbolic capital that circulates inside the field of archeology: that would mean for him nothing to accuse or to regret there, since Brooker is in fact a TV journalist, so it would be just a question of what is expected from a TV journalist. Since Bourdieu was interested in the logic of the practices and their respectively fields of action, he would address his explanation instead to the specialized occupants of the positions and their trajectory stakes that ‘play’ in such disciplinary field. If Brooker would be an archeologist and would still hold such a ironic views, then it would be a socioanalytical case to consider for Bourdieu. Anyway i have to accept that Bourdieu´s its not the panacea, but his concepts are helpful.

oh well but i am not here to argue against your point, which is a good one. instead i want to underline the beauty implied in the broken pot example. What makes a broken pot to be a broken pot? to be broken or being a pot? The fractured object and its event, what would an archeological expert see through the fracture? is there an event previous to the fracture that is already subjected in the object? if so, what history does that object is telling us? Just to say that the broken pot example is really a good one