When we encounter an object from the distant historical past – say, a medieval tool – what makes it “past” is not age as such but the fact that it is the trace of a world (of a historical mode of the disclosure of being, of an interconnected texture of significations and social practices) that is no longer directly “ours”. (Zizek)
Whilst reading Marlowe's Dr Faustus, the following thought -
What is sometimes forgotten about literary texts – poems, novels, or whatever – is that they too are “traces” in the sense of remains of a world that is no longer “ours”. Typically, literary criticism emphasises, quite blindly and covetously, the ways in which these things (texts) are “ours” – their universal relevance etc. What is more interesting is the activity of putting under the microscope these artefacts from another life-world/ fragments from a world which is no longer “ours”. The poem before us discloses something, but this is not simply the vacant repetition of a “universal truth”, rather it alerts us to a possibility of being which is outside our own. (This is not to say, of course, that the literary object is essentially the same as a 'medieval tool' or an antique.) Those who cry for a text to be 'relevant' , as in 'Why read Marlowe today' should be answered that it is 'relevant' to the present precisely by being different from it, and enabling us to see and interrogate that present.