Nonplaces: An Anecdoted Topography of Contemporary French TheoryAuthor(s): Bruno BosteelsSource: Diacritics, Vol. 33, No. 3/4, New Coordinates: Spatial Mappings, National Trajectories(Autumn - Winter, 2003), pp. 117-139Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805807Accessed: 08/09/2010 12:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toDiacritics.

http://www.jstor.org

NONPLACES

AN ANECDOTED TOPOGRAPHY OF

CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THEORY

BRUNO BOSTEELS

In its juridical sense, a non-lieu is ajudgment that suspends, annuls, or

withdraws a case without bringing it to trial. It is thus ajudgment that an-

nounces or enunciates that there will be no judgment as to guilt or innocence,

afinding that there is no place tojudge. It therefore renders justice by refusing to render it under the law, which it does when it pronounces or enunciates the

non-lieu.

?Peggy Kamuf, "Beance"1

Inside the Spatial Turn

If modernity will always be remembered as an era dominated by questions of time

and history, then perhaps the steady waning of modern ideals invites us to think of

the entry into something called the postmodern as a passage dominated by questions of space and geography. As Michel Foucault once famously observed in a 1967 con-

ference paper, first published two decades ago: "Perhaps we might say that some of

the ideological conflicts that animate today's polemics oppose the pious descendants

of time and the willful inhabitants of space" ["Of Other Spaces" 22]. This conflict

over time and space presupposes a much larger argument that is not only historical

but also methodological in nature. What is at stake is both a question of the passage, or transition, from modernity to postmodernity, if that is indeed what we decide to

name modernity's aftermath, and a question of the theoretical consequences that fol-

low from giving precedence to space over time in treating this very transition. With

regard to this second question, too, Foucault's work stands as exemplary insofar as he

was able to show the degree to which a vital emphasis on space, geography, and ter-

7. In these lines [50], Peggy Kamuf is commenting on a text by Jean-Luc Nancy in which the

opening ofthe mouth is described asfollows: "This place is not a place and yet it is not outside

of all place. It forms within the place, within the extension ofa face, the gaping 7beance7 of a

non-place 7non-lieu7- In this nonplace, the figure (extension, measure) and the without-figure (thought without measure) are joined and distinguished, joined by their distinction. The place of enunciation [de l'enoncer7 isformed by the internal dis-location ofthis reunion" [Ego sum 767/ See also Jacques Derrida's similar comments in a text on Maurice Blanchot: "La Chose takes

place without taking place 7a lieu sans avoir lieu7: a non-lieu in the proceedings, a non-lieu at the 'end' ofthe proceedings beyond even acquittal, debt, the symbolic, the judicial. (The nonlieu is the strange judgment in French law that is worth more than an acquittal: it fictively annuls the very proceedings of indictment, arraignment, detention, and trial 7'cause'7, even though the

proceedings have taken place; the transcript of them remains, and the certification ofthe non-

lieu)" ["Living On" 137-38]. Finally, speaking of anecdotes, the mostfamous case ofa non-lieu related to French theory is of course that ofLouis Althusser's murder trial. Cf. the latter's au-

tobiography, which is partly meant to lift the silence granted by the juridical decision that there were "no grounds for prosecution" or "no case to answer" TL'avenir dure longtemps 31].

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 diacritics 33.3-4: 117-39 117

ritoriality forces us to take leave of the modern paradigm of consciousness?typically associated with the category of time and its unfolding in the mind or spirit?in favor

of a situated understanding of knowledge, subjectivity, and power. "Metaphorizing the

transformations of discourse in a vocabulary of time necessarily leads to the utilisa-

tion of the model of individual consciousness with its intrinsic temporality," Foucault

observes in an interview with the editors of the French journal of geography Herodote, and he continues: "Endeavouring on the other hand to decipher discourse through the

use of spatial, strategic metaphors enables one to grasp precisely the points at which

discourses are transformed in, through and on the basis of relations of power" ["Ques? tions on Geography" 69-70]. Whether real or metaphorical, a willful displacement of

our categorial apparatus from time to space thus might enable one to avoid the idealist

temptation inherent in a strictly discursive or textual model, by inscribing all discourses

and practices in the geopolitics of power relations.

My aim in the following pages is not to go over the much-discussed shift from

time to space once more, even as I take advantage of several of its methodological

principles along the way. Instead, I want to map out a momentous change of perspec? tive that has been taking place over the past few decades within the parameters of the

so-called spatial turn itself. In fact, if and when modernity is coming to an end, both in

the sense of completing itself and of revealing its character as a finite historical entity, not only does whatever shape critical thought takes in the face of this turnabout need to

be securely fastened onto specific places and spaces but, if we are to believe a growing number of authors, particularly but by no means exclusively in France, the study of art,

literature, politics, philosophy, and even anthropology would also require a thorough consideration of so-called "nonplaces" as a rigorous category for critical thinking to?

day [for a brief discussion of the use of "nonplace" in Anglo-American anthropology,

including Melvin M. Webber's notion of "nonplace urban realm" from the mid-1960s, see Weiner]. In the end, these proponents of the nonplace confront us with one disarm-

ingly simple question: how can critical thinking in the present time respond to the task

of having to work through whatever lies outside of the order that is actually in place?

The Exhaustion of Modernity

In one form or another, rangingfrom the misery of refugee camps to the cos-

seted luxury offive-star hotels, some experience of non-place (indissociable

from a more or less clear perception ofthe acceleration of history and the

contraction ofthe planet) is today an essential component of all social exis?

tence.

?Marc Auge, Non-Places (the French original mentions neither refugee

camps nor five-star hotels, only "from its modest modalities to its luxury ex-

pressions")

For many readers, the principal point of reference, if not the only one, in the recent dis?

cussion on nonplaces is the small volume Non-Places: Introduction to An Anthropol?

ogy of Supermodernity, published little over a decade ago by the French anthropologist and ethnologist Marc Auge. Taking several of his clues by way of a counterpoint from

Charles Baudelaire's essay "The Painter of Modern Life," Auge begins by defining

modernity as an epoch of overlapping temporal modes and multiple historical rhythms: an era in which the old and the new, the past and the present, the ephemeral and the

eternal, coexist in a condition of relative autonomy even if not, or no longer, in a dialec?

tical struggle. In stark contrast, the present time would then be super- or hypermodern,

118

rather than postmodern (Auge's original term, surmodernite, at least indirectly seems

to evoke some of what Georges Bataille had to say in 1968 about the prefix sur- in the

context of surrealism as much as in the case of Nietzsche's philosophy of the Ueber-

mensch, in French surhomme, or "overman"), insofar as it can be characterized by an

excess, or overabundance, of those same features considered to be distinctive of the

modern. Among these characteristics, which in a sense both fulfill and empty out the

ideals of modernity, Auge mentions above all the acceleration of historical events, the

shrinking of spatial distances, and the renewed status of the ego or self as a primordial

point of reference?three features the overall result of which would be the emergence of an unprecedented type of nonplace.

Auge proposes the following as his working hypothesis: "Supermodernity (which stems simultaneously from the three figures of excess: overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references) naturally finds its full expres- sion in non-places" [109; 136]. Examples of these would be airport terminals, service

stations, supermarkets, malls, hotel chains, and so on: all places where individuals,

typically as passengers or as customers or as both at once, immerse themselves in the

chance anonymity of an empty space without history, as if trapped and immobilized in

a time without events. What people usually do in such places according to this interpre? tation would seem to involve little more than waiting, remembering, or shopping while

passing through. Nonplaces thus must be contrasted with traditional sociological and

anthropological notions of constructed spaces and places. About the latter Auge writes, "These places have at least three characteristics in common. They want to be?people want them to be?places of identity, of relations and of history" [52; 69], whereas the

exact opposite can be said about the nonplace:

If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined accordingly will be a non-place. The

hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, mean?

ing spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike

Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are

listed, classified, promoted to the status of "places of memory," and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position. [78; 100, the reference is to Pierre

Nora's famous project, Lieux de memoire]

Thus, the place of post- or supermodernity?as a project that is at least finite if not also

finished?would in fact be a nonplace.

Nonplaces, however, figure much more prominently in contemporary French

thought than even a careful reader would be able to surmise from Auge's small contri-

bution to what he proposes to call, in contrast to the anthropologist's preferential treat-

ment of the primitive and faraway, "the anthropology of the near" [Non-Places 7, cf.

also Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains]. In fact, almost all contem?

porary French thinkers whom English-language commentaries associate with so-called

poststructuralism and the critique or deconstruction of humanism, at one point or an?

other in their trajectories, assign a central role to a certain notion ofthe nonplace. More

so than as a concrete, geographical, or architectural site, the nonplace in such cases

serves as a compelling conceptual tool, especially around the events of May 1968, to

draw the contours of new modes of critical philosophical thinking. What is more, the

fate of poststructuralism itself, including the still unsolved mystery of its exact separa? tion from structuralism, is intimately bound up with the history and topography of this

concept, which in many ways marks the limit where structural thinking meets with its

point of inner excess. Before returning to Auge's reappropriation of the concept of the

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 119

nonplace and to the question of its political use, then, in the following pages I propose to revisit a few stations along this extended trajectory. Borrowing an expression from

the conceptual artist Daniel Spoerri, I call this an "anecdoted topography," not so much

of chance in and of itself but rather of those nonplaces, nonsites or nonloci where vari?

ous forms of thinking in terms of structure come to grips with an element of irreducible

contingency, that is, with the need to think the haphazard nature of an event without

losing track of its structural overdetermination.

A Tombstone for Humanism

It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man's

disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not consti?

tute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the

unfolding ofa space in which it is once more possible to think.

?Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

While Auge briefly mentions Michel de Certeau's use of the nonplace, and even then

only to distance himself immediately from it, among contemporary French thinkers it

is no doubt Michel Foucault who has given the concept its strongest and most sustained

methodological underpinnings?redefining the field of history, first as archaeology and

then as genealogy, by working out of the nonplaces of traditional, humanist perspec- tives. For the author of The Order of Things: An Archaeology ofthe Human Sciences, first published in 1966, the nonplace is first and foremost the vacancy or blank left gap-

ing at the heart of modern anthropologism with the announced "death of man." Both his

archaeological and his genealogical work are written from the impossible point of view

of such a void or empty center in the midst of the well-entrenched fields of the human

sciences. In the absence of a stable universal subject, capable of taking its own speak?

ing, living, and exchanging as its very object of reflection, the humanities are literally left without a ground to stand on. Foucault's strength in other words derives from his

capacity to reveal the extent to which a truly an-archic stance, one that is ungrounded or nonfoundational, emerges as the logical outcome of the trajectory of modern hu?

manism itself. Starting out from the constitutive yet historically changing nonplace in an existing state of affairs, the genealogist or archaeologist always seeks to bring forth a number of "counter-sciences"?modeled upon ethnology, psychoanalysis, and

the study of language and literature?in opposition to the anthropological order that is

actually in place. Such critical leverage, finally, provides the historian with a peculiar

standpoint from where to write a critique of modernity derived from an immanent yet

disturbing relation to the here and now, a perspective for which Foucault coined the

term "heterotopia," as opposed to the "not-here" of utopia. As far as the archaeological work is concerned, Foucault's systematic reliance on

the nonplace is best understood with reference to the preface to The Order of Things, which opens with a now-famous mention of an apocryphal Chinese encyclopaedia found in an essay by Jorge Luis Borges:

This book first arose out ofa passage in Borges, out ofthe laughter that shat-

tered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought?our

thought, the thought (that bears the stamp) of our age and our geography?

breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are

accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long

afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction be?

tween the Same and the Other. [xv]

120

In the original French version, Borges's text is literally said to be the "birthplace," or

lieu de naissance, of Foucault's book [Les mots et les choses 1]. What nobody seems

to have pointed out, though, is the link between this "birthplace" and the "nonplace" found at the heart of Borges's text. For Foucault, what is most hilarious about the list of

animals in this text is not the addition of new fantastic or monstrous beings but rather

the fact that nothing holds the arrangement of animals together except the arbitrary order of the alphabet. "Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of

language?" Foucault wonders, before adding an answer to his own rhetorical question:

"Borges adds no figure to the atlas ofthe impossible; nowhere does he strike the spark of poetic confrontation; he simply dispenses with the least obvious, but most compel?

ling of necessities; he does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is pos? sible for entities to be juxtaposed" [xvi-xvii; 9]. Borges announces a new and as yet

unimaginable episteme beyond the modern one, insofar as he offers us a classification

or table of living beings devoid of all references to a stable center. Above all, there is

no reference to "man" as the "common locus" of the modern human sciences of which, in a characteristic redoubling, he is supposed to be both and at the same time the object and the subject.

Curiously, Borges is only one of Foucault's key references to the Hispanic world

in The Order of Things. The other two, Velazquez and Cervantes, are equally pivotal to the overall trajectory from the medieval to the classical baroque to the modern. In

fact, each of these three figures stands at a threshold from one episteme to another, with

the order in which they appear in the book being directly inverse to the historical order

in which the epistemic configurations actually succeed one another. The point is that, if the figure of Don Quixote, split to the point of madness between words and things, marks the breakdown of the medieval order of analogy, and if Las meninas offers us a

complete table of representation ordered around an empty or vacant center, the space of which would come to be filled by "man and his doubles" in the modern frame, then

Borges's Chinese encyclopaedia and the laughter it provokes in Foucault, by render-

ing the anthropological reference null and void, give us a glimpse of what might lie

beyond the threshold of the modern. In this sense, the nonplace of language, with its

almost monstrous arbitrariness, not only marks the birthplace of The Order of Things but also gives Foucault indispensable leverage in the attempt, throughout all of his so-

called archaeological works, to awaken "us moderns" from our "anthropological sleep" [340-43; 351-54].

Foucault's genealogical work, though, is no less centrally indebted to the concept of the nonplace than his archaeology of the human sciences. For sure, between The

Order of Things and Discipline and Punish: Birth ofthe Prison, a decisive shift takes

place which, following Gilles Deleuze's breathtaking analysis, we could describe as

the shift not just from discourse to practice, or from knowledge to power, but also and

more precisely from the archive to the map or diagram, or from the forms and strata of

the sayable and the visible to the latter's imbrication with a whole network of relations

among forces and strategies. Even within this overarching displacement, however, the

reliance on the blank or interstitial space of a certain nonplace remains as forceful and

pivotal as ever.

Few texts are more explicit about the genealogical function of the nonplace than

Foucault's programmatic 1971 essay "Nietzsche, History, Genealogy." One ofthe aims

of this essay, as is well known, is to define the concepts of a genealogical method

as opposed not only to the tradition of humanist intellectual history but also to those

postmetaphy sical histories of Western thought written in the vein of Martin Heidegger. Thus, to the latter's fixation on the oblivion and return of the origin (Ursprung), Fou?

cault by way of Nietzsche opposes the study of history in terms of descent (Herkunft)

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 121

and emergence (Entstehung). These would then be the terms for a properly materialist

historical sense. Much less known, however, is the fact that the place or site of such

emergence is yet again defined in terms of a nonplace. In Foucault's words:

As descent qualifies the strength or weakness ofan instinct and its inscription on a body, emergence designates a place of confrontation but not as a closed

field offering the spectacle of a struggle among equals. Rather, it is a unon?

place, "

a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not belong to a common space. Consequently, no one is responsible for an emergence; no one can glory in it, since it always occurs in the interstice. ["Nietzsche"

150; 144]

The genealogist's refusal to become entangled in the metaphysical search for ori?

gins, in other words, forces a situated reconsideration of both novelty and the condi?

tions for its emergence; both the event's unexpected appearance and the site of its

actual inscription must enter into the new historical sense. But, unless we fall back

upon the moralizing dualisms of freedom and necessity, or man and nature, the site

of an emergence cannot but be a blank space, the place of a gap in between continuity and discontinuity: a pure nonplace. Whence also the refusal of heroism as much as of

humanism.

A brief text from 1968, This Is Not a Pipe, on Rene Magritte's eponymous paint?

ing, may serve both as a landmark in the transition from archaeology to genealogy and

as the most succinct version of the logic of the nonplace in Foucault's overall work as

a historian and a philosopher. Magritte's surrealist sense of humor, in this analysis, is

read as an endless pun on the incommensurability between language and visibility, be?

tween what can be said and what can be seen. Henceforth, words and images, the figure and the text, the drawing and its legend, are no longer bound by the age-old principle of resemblance. "No longer do they have a common ground nor a place where they can

meet," Foucault observes: "Still it is too much to claim that there is a blank or lacuna; instead it is an absence of space, an effacement of the 'common place' between the

signs of writing and the lines of the image," to which he adds: "The 'pipe' can break.

The common space?banal work of art or everyday lesson?has disappeared" [28-29; "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" 642^3]. This disturbing occurrence, which brings out the

nonrelation between language and sight, not only breaks up the fundamental grounds of

representation but also takes away the commonplaces of modern humanist philosophy. So when the painter in some of his other works presents a coffin or a stone instead of

a human figure, we might say that the void at the heart of modern anthropologism in a

sense becomes itself visible. "Magritte allows the old space of representation to rule, but only at the surface, no more than a polished stone, bearing words and shapes: be-

neath, nothing. It is a gravestone. The incisions that drew figures and those that marked

letters communicate only by void, the non-place hidden beneath marble solidity," Fou?

cault writes, only to conclude with a pun ofhis own, one that is grammatical rather than

verbal-visual: "The 'non-place' emerges 'in person'?in place of persons and where no

one is present any longer" [41; 646]. Foucault's archaeology, as I suggested above, studies the regimes of the visible

and the sayable, for instance with regard to the birth of the human sciences, not in

reference to a free or founding subject but from within a constitutive yet historically

shifting outside of modern humanism. "Seeing is thinking, and speaking is thinking, but thinking occurs in the interstice, or the disjunction between seeing and speaking," as Deleuze also summarizes: "Thinking does not depend on a beautiful interiority that

would reunite the visible and the articulable elements, but is carried under the intrusion

122

of an outside that hollows out the interval and forces or dismembers the interior" [87, trans. corrected; 93]. Ablank interstitial space, though, not only determines the recipro- cal play between the forms and strata of knowledge that define what can be said or seen

in the archaeological work of Foucault. On the contrary, already the example of This

Is Not a Pipe, with its strict pedagogical setting, reveals the fierce strategic battles and

somber relations of force that in any given situation surround and overdetermine the

articulation of the visible and the sayable. In a second version of his painting, Magritte indeed situates the image of the pipe

and its legend within a series of embedded frames: the actual frame of the painting, the easel on which the painting is placed, and the larger frame formed by the slats on

the floor that suggest the space in front of a blackboard in elementary school. What

Magritte's verbal-visual pun unravels, in other words, is the entire pedagogical ar-

rangement in which a lecon de choses ("show") is meant to correspond fittingly to a

lecon de mots ("tell"). Anticipating his much later Discipline and Punish, Foucault

himself describes the framework for this second version of This Is Not a Pipe even

more concisely: "A stable prison" [17; 637]. The debate over language and visibility is indeed decided in the conflicts of power that the genealogist would come to study in schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on. As he asks in another of his rhetorical ques? tions, in the chapter on "Panopticism" from Discipline and Punish: "Is it surprising that

prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" [228; Surveiller etpunir 264]. Thus, the fact that it is always in such a struggle of power that the relation between the visible and the sayable, which is actually a nonrelation, comes to be decided is established as early as in This Is Not a Pipe: "We must therefore

admit between the figure and the text a whole series of intersections?or rather attacks

launched by one against the other, arrows shot at the enemy target, enterprises of sub-

version and destruction, lance blows and wounds, a battle" [26]. Even if Foucault adds

these last words only after the fact, in the expanded 1973 edition of "Ceci n'est pas une

pipe," how can we not be reminded that the original analysis that lies at their source is

written just months before the events of May 1968 in France, when barricades would be

thrown up in Paris to contest the very same power relations surrounding, among others, the pedagogical apparatus?

Again, the point is not to fuss over the exact periodization of Foucault's work

but to understand the role of the nonplace in his theoretical proposals as they stand at

the crossover both historically between modernity and its postmodern endgame and

methodologically between archaeology and genealogy. On both levels, the logic ofthe

nonplace is quite literally pivotal to Foucault's work. To rely on Deleuze's summary one last time: "Between the visible and the sayable, a gap or disjunction opens up, but

this disjunction of forms is the place?or 'non-place,' as Foucault puts it?where the

informal diagram is swallowed up in an abyss and becomes embodied instead into two

different directions that are necessarily divergent and irreducible" [Foucault 38, trans.

modified; 46]. In turn, the diagram or map of society, far from closing this gap, contin-

ues to revolve around it as a place where the new and the unheard-of may eventually

emerge: "It follows that the diagram, insofar as it exposes a set of relations between

forces, is not a place but rather a 'non-place': it is the place only for mutations" [85, trans. modified; 91]. Ultimately, it is the event of such mutations that always seems

to lurk beyond the horizon. Indeed, more so than a historian of ideas such as man or

madness, more so than a sociologist of institutions such as the prison or the hospital, Foucault should be considered a philosopher of the event, or of events in the plural.

Foucault of course shares this interest in the event with nearly all of his contem-

poraries in so-called "1968 thought" (lapensee '68) in France, including not only De?

leuze but also Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Jean-Franeois Lyotard, Alain Badiou,

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 123

Jacques Ranciere, Michel de Certeau, and Francoise Proust, to name but a few. "The

theme of the event lies at the center of philosophical preoccupations today, it animates

the most daring and original attempts," as Fran^ois Zourabichvili rightly observes:

"But the spirit of the time in itself does not provide a philosophy and it should not

mask irreconcilable differences" [21, my trans.]. To avoid losing the event itself in a

general state of homonymy, therefore, we must specify the peculiar inflection given to

the concept in Foucault's work.

A final example, drawn from Maurice Blanchot's homage to his friend, may suf-

fice to illustrate the difficult task of thinking the event in line with Foucault's particular orientation. Referring to the interpretation, in Madness and Civilization, of the strate-

gic refunctionalization of the spaces once reserved for lepers in order to put away the

mentally ill, Blanchot tries to pull off a precarious balancing act between continuity and rupture. This balancing act, he remarks, is also characteristic of Foucault's divided

loyalty to both philosophy and the social sciences:

Thus, starting with his first book, Foucault tackled problems which have al?

ways belonged to philosophy (reason, unreason), but he treated them from the

angle of history and sociology, even as he gave particular importance within

history to a certain discontinuity (a small event changing a lot), without mak?

ing of that discontinuity a break (because before the mad, there were lepers, and it was in the sites, simultaneously physical and spiritual, left empty by the lepers, who had disappeared, that shelters for the newly excluded were

set up, even as that imperative to exclude persisted behind the amazing forms that would alternately reveal and conceal it). [Blanchot, Michel Foucault

as I Imagine Him 66, trans. modified; Michel Foucault tel que je Vimagine

13-14]

The subtle play between places and nonplaces along these lines could be seen as

a battle on two fronts, or as a struggle against two forms of extremism: strict continu?

ity, on one hand, and utter discontinuity, on the other. If the nonplace marks the site

of an event, it is because, in this view at least, the event is not without a horizon of

expectation: it is not mystical or messianic. But, we should hasten to add, the event

also cannot be reduced to its material and discursive conditions of existence, which

become apparent only after the event has happened anyway: in this sense, the event is

not positivistic either, the site of its emergence always marking an interval, or a gap, to

be located precisely in the order of assigned places that sociology or history might want

to reconstruct.

For Foucault, in sum, the nonplace as the point of articulation between continuity and rupture, between history and novelty, is the only space from where he can speak in

a critical manner, including about himself, without presupposing a utopian or mystical

beyond. As he affirms in 1968 in an important interview with members of the Cercle

d'Epistemologie of the Ecole Normale Superieure, editors of the famous journal Ca-

hiers pour I'analyse:

I am analyzing the space in which I speak. I am laying myself open to undo?

ing and recomposing that space which indicates to me the first indices ofmy discourse. I am seeking to disassociate its visible coordinates andshake up its

surface immobility. I thus risk raising, in each instant and beneath each ofmy resolutions, the question of knowing whence it can arise, for everything I say could well have the effect of displacing the place from which I am saying it.

["On the Archaeology of the Sciences" 404; "Sur l'archeologie des sciences"

710; cf. also The Archaeology of Knowledge 16-17]

124

All that Foucault seems to have wanted to do throughout his life as a thinker, and the

principal reason why he had recourse to the figure of the nonplace, is ever so slightly to

displace the place from which he was writing and, in so doing, to break the ground on

which we moderns too, whether in questions of language and literature, of power, or of

sexuality, are still standing.

The Task of Deconstruction

My central question is: from what site or non-site (non-lieu) can philosophy as

such appear to itself as other than itself, so that it can interrogate and reflect

upon itself in an original manner?

?Jacques Derrida, "Deconstruction and the Other"

More generally, we might say that what in the English-language tradition is called

"poststructuralism" starts precisely with a disruptive awareness of the central void or

nonplace without which no structure holds up to begin with. Foucault's use of the non?

place, in this sense, cannot fail to recall one of the most often quoted and anthologized texts by Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sci?

ences," a text that whole generations of students furthermore have learned to associate

precisely with the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. In his reading of Claude Levi-Strauss, which we should not forget stands as part

criticism and part rejoinder, Derrida points out that a major "event" or "disruption" in

the history of the concept of structure pushed away the presupposition of a stable center,

just as the reassurance of a fundamental "ground" gave in to a notion of "play" devoid

of all presence. "Henceforth," Derrida writes, "it was necessary to begin thinking that

there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of

nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play" [280; 411].

Today, what is still worth stressing in this well-known argument is not just the notion

that language, or discourse, has come to invade and transcode all the human sciences, a

notion which itself has become commonplace thanks to the relative success of decon?

struction, so much as the idea that what constitutes the structurality of the structure is a

pure absence: not exactly a lacuna to be filled or a loss to be recouped but a void that, in a sense, is the absent cause of all subsequent displacements and substitutions.

Years later, Derrida would actually come to define the whole task of deconstruc?

tion itself in terms of finding the nonplace or nonsite of philosophical discourse:

It is simply that our belonging to, and inherence in, the language of metaphys? ics is something that can only be rigorously and adequately thought about

from another topos or space where our problematic rapport with the bound?

ary of metaphysics can be seen in a more radical light. Hence my attempts to

discover the non-place or non-lieu which would be the "other" of philosophy. This is the task of deconstruction. ["Deconstruction and the Other" 112]

Aside from the usual questions pertaining to time and difference, the spatial logic be?

hind deconstruction thus corresponds to what has also already become an inevitable

reference point in critical commentaries on contemporary French thought. I mean the

logic of an outside within, or of an inside that indiscernibly turns into its own outside,

following the single twist of a Mobius strip. "Deconstruction tends to what is neither

inside nor outside, what does not 'take place' (n'a pas lieu), is not an 'event,' or is an

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 125

event (evenemeni) whose advent (avenemenf) is to come (a-venir)" as Robert S. Gall

remarks: "In other words, it seeks in its writing to inhabit and enact a u-topia, a 'non?

place' of alterity and otherness that marks the end of history, the closure of the history of meaning and being" [171]. Here, too, the nonplace marks the point of articulation

between a system's closure and its openness to alterity. It is the point of immanent

excess within the structure which is at the same time the site where an event, perhaps, can take place.

From a deconstructive point of view, as opposed to an archaeological or genealogi- cal one, the event is always yet to come, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that it comes to us?outside of any horizon of expectations?from the future. Derrida's

way of thinking the event in this sense invites a messianic, if not outright mystical read?

ing. And yet, even in this case, the space of such a messianic promise as encapsulated in the openness to radical alterity, which for the late Derrida of Spectres of Marx or

Acts of Religion would come to define the space of politics, remains a nonplace foreign to all attempts, particularly coming from political philosophers, to reinscribe it in a

familiar topology. "How can we not relate this alterity to the other of all the topological

figures that politics, the tradition of the political, or still yet politics according to the

regime imposed on it by political philosophy, historically have determined?" Gerard

Bensussan asks in a recent analysis of Derrida's final writings, and he continues: "In?

deed, conforming with etymology itself, the non-place, the non-locatable, seems to me

closely associated with Derrida's messianism, with 'messianicity without messianism,' insofar as it would be the very resource of the promise that always must carry itself

beyond all possible programmes. The only 'places' ofthe messianic are non-places."2 The messianic, in other words, entails a notion of politics that refuses to be rooted in

a given space, territory, or community. Like deconstruction, it can be said to consist in

exploiting the full aporetic potential concentrated in the logic of the nonplace. Derrida can thus be said to be an atopian thinker through and through, a thinker

not just of spacing but of the nonplace. In the words of Sarah Kofman: "Like writing, J. Derrida's text is atopian, beyond categories, outside of the law, bastardly" [18]; or

again: "Fragmented body, atopian, decentered, turning traditional logos upside down, such would be the Derridean text" [25, my trans.]. Now the fact that in Derrida's early text, "Structure, Sign, and Play . . . ," the argument for what would soon thereafter be

called poststructuralism or deconstruction actually relies on the work of key thinkers

traditionally defined as structuralists such Levi-Strauss, even if it is with an eye on their

immanent displacement, should warn us about the possibility of an altogether different

genealogy of this moment in French theory and philosophy. By the end of the 1960s, a whole group of young thinkers in fact seeks to redefine the object of structuralism

itself, not just as a purely formal network of constraints but in terms of the paradoxical element that alone holds this network together: an element that in itself is nothing, pure void or unpresentable absence, the effects of which nonetheless constitute the struc-

turality of the structure of all that is present. In other words, the fundamental insight which many theorists in the English-speaking world would tend to associate with the

advent of poststructuralism, according to this retroactive interpretation, already defines

the high point?which is also a vanishing point?of structuralism itself.

2. Following Derrida, Bensussan also speaks of "aporetical places," that is, "with no way out or any assured path, without itinerary or point of arrival, without an exterior with apredict- able map and a calculable programme

" [Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge

" 47; Foi et savoir 16].

Among such places, Derrida himself mentions the island, the Promised Land, and the desert. For a more detailed discussion ofthe case ofthe island as a nonplace for fiction, see Simone Pinet's contribution in this special issue.

126

How Do We Recognize Poststructuralism?

Absurd /atopos, literally hors-lieu, or "out-of-place"] that the point would be

void.

?Aristotle, Physics

At the beginning, there is the place?where there is nothing.

?Jacques-Alain Miller, "Matrice"

We are thus confronted with a strange temporal loop. Poststructuralism does not come

after structuralism. We are not dealing with a linear progress from blindness to insight but with the recovery of an insight into the necessary blindness of the structure?an

insight that was always already there from the beginning, at the origin of structuralism, albeit insufficiently highlighted. In this sense I can only agree with Etienne Balibar's

recent assessment when he argues that "there is, in fact, no such thing as poststructur? alism, or rather that poststructuralism (which acquired this name in the course of its

international 'exportation,' 'reception,' or 'translation') is always still structuralism, and structuralism in its strongest sense is already poststructuralism" [11]?except that

Balibar's discussion of these two tendencies, which he calls a "structuralism of struc?

tures" (geared toward the discovery of invariants) on the one hand and a "structuralism

without structures" (aimed at their indeterminacy) on the other, hides to some extent

the rich genealogy of texts that, in the late sixties, already performed a similar reassess-

ment of structuralism to begin with.

Thus, in a number of short programmatic interventions and critical review articles, all published between 1966 and 1968, thinkers as diverse as Deleuze, Badiou, and

Jacques-Alain Miller, among others, for a brief while at least seem to be in complete

agreement when it comes to articulating the categories of structure, void, and subject into a cohesive summary of the structuralist doctrine. In this context, some notion or

other of the nonplace, even if the expression does not always appear literally, will time

and again prove to be unavoidable.

It is of course true that structuralism sets out from a combinatory of places, regard- less of the variety and specificity of the elements?sounds, letters, individuals, and

so on?capable of occupying these places. "Structuralism cannot be separated from a

new transcendental philosophy, in which the sites prevail over whatever fills them," as

Deleuze remarks in "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?" (written in 1967, though not published until 1973): "In short, places in a purely structural space are primary in

relation to the things and real beings that come to occupy them, primary also in rela?

tion to the always somewhat imaginary roles and events that necessarily appear when

they are occupied" [262-63; "A quoi" 299]. This topological ambition thus seems to

confirm a common but also rather banal suspicion according to which the structuralist

mode of thought would be inherently reductive and static.

One important aspect in the reassessment of structuralism that we need to consider,

however, also entails an overarching change of perspective in this regard. That is, from

the network of structural places the attention shifts dramatically toward the gap or void

that, through its placeholder, both sustains and disturbs the structure as a whole. De?

leuze thus goes on to underscore one of the fundamental criteria needed to recognize structuralism as such, namely, the presence of the empty or vacant square, la case vide, the function of which is similar to that of le non-lieu, or nonplace, that is to be found

at the center of the structure according to Foucault and Derrida. "Games require the

empty square, without which nothing would move forward or function," and the same

is true for the concept of structure: "Distributing the differences through the entire

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 127

structure, making the differential relations vary with its displacements, the object = x

constitutes the differentiating element of difference itself [275; 318]. What is more, it

is only through the structural-metonymic causality of this elusive element or nonele-

ment (the empty square, the blind spot, the dummy hand, the zero phoneme, and so on) that we can begin to understand the articulation both among the different orders of a

given structure and between various types of structure (linguistic, familiar, economic, and so on). "Between structures, causality can only be a type of structural causality," Deleuze insists: "As a result, for each order of structure the object = x is the empty or

perforated site that permits this order to be articulated with the others, in a space that

entails as many directions as orders. The orders of the structure do not communicate

in a common site, but they all communicate through their empty place or respective

object = x" [278; 322-23]. In any structure whatsoever, there is not only a grid of

places and relations that needs to be mapped out but also a pivotal lack or absence of

place. Structuralism itself, from this vantage point, undercuts the twin presuppositions of totality and continuity by ruining the idea that a common place lies at the origin of

structure.

Without being able to pinpoint the exact source of this deformation, there always is something that is either missing or in excess, the effects of which cause every other

element of the structure to fall into its place. Whether as excess or as lack, something

paradoxically enables and disables the structure at the same time. As Deleuze writes in

The Logic of Sense: "It appears in one ofthe series as an excess, but only on the condi?

tion that it would appear at the same time in the other as a lack. But if it is in excess in

the one, it is so only as an empty square; and if it is lacking in the other, it is so only as a

supernumerary pawn or an occupant without a compartment" [51; Logique du sens 66]. This does not mean that disruption emerges as a purely exterior force, which would in

and of itself still be foreign to the stable order of the structure. Instead, there virtually is

no structure at all without the intervention of such a lack or excess of placements point-

ing to the nonplace as its vanishing cause, even if its effects are most often flattened out

and rendered invisible to the naked eye, in the way they are inapparent for example in

the grids and diagrams that our textbooks commonly identify with structuralist theory. A supplementary operation is needed, therefore, to expose the nonplace of the struc?

ture: at the very least a slight change of perspective, or anamorphic shift, by which what

normally appears as a well-ordered system turns out to hover around a central absence

or lack of being. Thus, in "Action de la structure," dated 1964 but published in 1968

in Cahiers pour I'analyse, Jacques-Alain Miller gives us his condensed version of the

structural causality of lack:

The lack in question is not a silenced word that it would suffice to bring to

light, it is not an inability ofthe word nor a ruse ofthe author. It is the silence, the defect that organizes the stated word, it is the retracted place /le lieu

derobe/ that could not be illuminated because it is on the basis ofits absence

that the text was possible and that discourses were pronounced: Other scene

where the eclipsed subject is situated, from where he speaks, for which he

speaks. The exteriority of discourse is central, this distance is interior. [76,

my trans.]

Miller further argues that there is always an element in the structure that does not quite fit in, an element or point which he does not call "heterotopian" but rather, and again more traditionally, "utopian," and which can give leverage for the necessary change of

perspective:

128

A conversion of perspective imposes itself to apprehend it. This place that is

impossible to occupy then announces itself by its singular and contradictory allure, which sticks out or is off-level; the element that masks it now signals,

by a certain bend ofits configuration, that its presence is undue, that it should

not be there. But it is upon this point, exactly there where the spread-out space

of the structured and the "transcendental" space ofthe structuring intersect

and are articulated, that we should direct our gaze, and take the placeholder

itself as organizing principle: soon we will see the space pivot on its axis and,

by a complete rotation that accomplishes its division, discover the inner rule

ofits law and the order that secretly adjusts whatever is offered up to the gaze: the translation of the structure then opens it to a diagonal reading. [66, my

trans.]

Finally, such a diagonal reading could also be called an analysis, both in a gen? eral sense and more strictly speaking as psychoanalysis. For Miller, in any case, this

understanding of analysis remains anchored in the logic of structuralism, even though it presupposes a crucial step beyond. "'Structuralism' on the level of the enunciated

should only be a moment for a reading that through its placeholder seeks out the spe? cific lack that supports the structuring function," he concludes. "For this transgressive

reading which traverses the enunciated toward the enunciation, the name of analysis has seemed convenient to me" [76, my trans.].

For someone like Badiou, by contrast, even the traversing of the structure toward

its causal lack remains a necessary but insufficient move. In his 1967 review of Louis

Althusser's canonical works, For Marx and the collective Reading Capital, to be sure, Badiou starts out by embracing the fundamental principle of the structuralist method, in the way we have found it to be reassessed by Miller or Deleuze. To be a structural?

ist, then, means above all to come to grips with the twofold nature of the paradoxical element or term that determines the structurality of the structure, even while being excluded from it. "Pinpoint the place occupied by the term indicating the specific ex-

clusion, the pertinent lack, i.e., the determination or 'structurality' of the structure," Badiou says ofthe task of a structuralist analysis which many critics today would rather

associate with poststructuralism. Referring not only to Levi-Strauss but also to another

of Miller's texts in Cahiers pour Tanalyse, "La suture: Elements de la logique du sig- nifiant" from 1966, he sums up much ofthis argument:

The fundamental problem ofall structuralism is that ofthe term with the dou?

ble function, inasmuch as it determines the belonging ofall other terms to the

structure, while itself being excluded from it by the specific operation through which it figures in the structure only under the guise of its placeholder (its

lieu-tenant, to use a concept from Lacan). It is Levi-Strauss's enormous merit, in the still-mixed form ofthe zero signifier, to have recognized the true impor? tance ofthis question. ["Le (re)commencement" 457n23, my trans.]

In his later work, however, Badiou will come to revise and expand his remarks on the

logic of lack. This expansion eventually brings him, in his famously obscure Theorie

du sujet, to supplement the notion of lack with that of excess. For the interests of our

ongoing topography, this will involve a decisive shift from the sheer recognition of

the nonplace, now called horlieu with a neologism that literally means "outplace," to

the torsion of the existing order of places, now named esplace or "splace," into a new

one.

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 129

Based on the play between esplace and horlieu, Badiou's Theorie du sujet further-

more distinguishes between a structural and a dialectical logic. The first, which would

be exemplified not only in the psychoanalytical work of Lacan but also in the poetry of

Mallarme even if, as I would guess, the implied addressee is actually Althusser, serves

to map out a given order of things according to the specificity and relative autonomy of various places, levels, or instances?all the way to include the pivotal lack, symp-

tomatically averred as nonplace or outplace, which operates as its absent cause. The

second, properly dialectical logic, by contrast, hinges on the subjective forces capable of disrupting this structure by working their way through the impasse of the order that

is actually in place. A certain labor ofthe affirmative is therefore necessary in addition to the process

by which critics or analysts tirelessly scan the surface of a given order, text, or social

formation so as to render or expose its intrinsic nonplace as a lack of space or as the

space of lack. Badiou also describes this further process in terms of a certain mastery of loss which exceeds the tendency toward repetition and automatism by way of an

interruption or a minimal distance. Ultimately, this is nothing less, and nothing more, than the work of the subject. Indeed, subjectivation from this point of view consists

precisely in tying together the two strands, lack and excess, which in the end are as?

sociated with the notion of the nonplace or horlieu in Badiou. "Every subject is at the

crossing between a lack of being and a destruction, between a repetition and an inter?

ruption, between a placement and an excess," he writes in Theorie du sujet [157], or

again, even more forcefully later in the same book: "The theory of the subject is com?

plete when it manages to think of the structural law of the empty place as the anchoring

point ofthe excess over its place" [277, my trans.]. Taken together, the structural logic of places with its inherent nonplace and the dialectical logic of forces allow one both

exhaustively to describe a given situation and faithfully to mark out the site of a pos? sible event.

In short, we can begin to see how the notion of horlieu in Theorie du sujet an?

ticipates much of what would eventually come to be defined as the site of an event

in Badiou's UEtre et Vevenement [cf. "Sites evenementiels et situations historiques" 193-98] and in Logiques des Mondes [cf. the fragment on the site, translated and pre-

published exclusively in this issue]. What is more, this trajectory from nonplace to site, which touches upon all the major points of articulation between structure, void, event, and subject, may serve as a summary of the entire poststructuralist doctrine that results

from the collective reassessment of structuralism described above.

Thinking the Events ofMay 1968

The place of the political subject is an interval or afissure: a being-together as being-in-between: between names, identities, or cultures.

?Jacques Ranciere, Aux bords du politique

Rather than continue to define the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of the non?

place, however, I want to turn to some of its practical implications. In particular, if we

wish to study how the nonplace allows us to think through specific events, two venues

almost immediately seem to impose themselves: art and politics. Of these two, I will

limit myself to the second domain, but not without first insisting that in both cases 1968

truly stands as a watershed year. Thus, in the realm of art beyond the confines of French

theoretical writing, we could have studied how the non-site becomes crucial in this

very same year for the conceptual art of Robert Smithson [cf. also Dubuffet's work and

130

more recent artists discussed by Didi-Huberman and Cauquelin as well as the recent

exhibit with Steven Wright et al.]. Or, again, stretching the chronology to include the

prequel and aftermath ofthe May '68 revolt in France, we could study the literary uses

of the nonplace, from Foucault's own study of Raymond Roussel to Derrida's reading of Blanchot in "Living On" to the quasi-ethnographic experiments with both non-lieux

and lieux communs in the writings of Georges Perec and Jean Duvignaud [for further

studies, cf. Schilling, Obergoker, and Ouellet]. My final comments, though, will be

restricted to matters of practice pertaining to politics and, to a lesser extent, to ethics.

Michel de Certeau's eloquent and witty analysis of May 1968 in The Capture of

Speech, originally written just weeks after the events, confronts us immediately with

the double nature of the task at hand. The question is not only: what happened? but

also: how can we understand what it means to ask what happened? "We have to force

ourselves to grasp the meaning of what happened in the event itself," Certeau tells us, but this also requires a thorough revision of the link between the event and thought itself; each interpretation of the events in fact "offers a more or less developed solu?

tion to the problem put before everyone: with what kind of intellectual grid, through what perspective can be grasped (or, which finally amounts to the same thing, causes

to be grasped) that which resists both a mental order and a social order, namely, 'the

events'?" [43^4; La prise de parole 80]. In Certeau's own case, the solution to this

problem involves a peculiar understanding of the speech act by which the students and

workers on the barricades momentarily succeeded in opening up a contestatory gap or

fissure in the midst ofthe existing order of representation, in both the linguistic and the

political senses of the term.

Highly reminiscent of Foucault's reading of Magritte in This Is Not a Pipe, the

logic of change implied in the capture of speech thus depends on the capacity for a

political subject first to reveal and then actively to put to work the fact that words and

things, what is said and what is done, do not agree any more than governors and gov- erned, teachers and students. In this context, while never mentioned as such, the non-

lieu nevertheless makes an appearance, this time as a lieu symbolique best illustrated in

the figure ofthe barricades themselves:

Speech now turned a "symbolic place" designates the space created through the distance that separates the represented from their representations, the

members of a society and the modalities of their association. It is at once

everything and nothing because it announces an unhinging in the density of

exchanges and a void, a disagreement, exactly where the mechanisms ought to be built upon what they claim to express. It escapes outside of structures, but in order to indicate what is lacking in them, namely, solidarity and the

participation of those who are subjected to them. [Capture 9-10, trans. modi?

fied; Prise 38]

Two aspects are worth stressing in this analysis. The first is that the events of May 1968, like any event, whether it occurs in politics or elsewhere, cannot be reduced to

the discovery of a structural lack at the heart of representation. "By denouncing a lack,

speech refers to a labor," Certeau insists: "To believe it effective on its own would be

to take it for granted and, as if by magic, to claim to control forces with words, to sub-

stitute words for work" [10; 38]. But then, through this labor, another aspect that I want

to underline is the fact that the capture of speech, as a symbolic or exemplary action, must give place to new possibilities; or, rather, it must profoundly reshuffle the criteria

for judging the possible and the impossible, the sayable and the unsaid, the legitimate and the illegitimate. In terms of our topography, this means that the symbolic place, as

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 131

the place of lack, must also give place to a new space: "The event cannot be dissociated

from the options to which it gave place" [3; 29]. For Certeau, in sum, the nonplace stands at the intersection between two aspects of the change produced by an event such

as the student revolt; the revealed impasse of the old rule of power and the forced pas?

sage into a profoundly transformed one.

Aside from uncovering the latent impasse where French society abruptly risked

running aground, the events of May '68 for a brief while at least, that is, before they were massively recuperated by the restoration of order in June, enabled new subjec? tive forces?the students and workers joined on the barricades?to pass through the

impasse.

Many years later, but writing with an obvious sense of loyalty to the events of

May '68 and their aftermath, in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, published in

1995, Jacques Ranciere would elaborate a similar interplay between the nonplace and

the new place into a model for understanding the logic of political invention. For Ran?

ciere, in fact, all political acts consist in inventing arguments and statements?no mat?

ter how absurd they may well appear from the point of view of conventional standards

of logic?with which to treat a concrete situation of inequality in terms of the strictest

equality. To illustrate this procedure, he invites us to consider among others the follow-

ing examples from the time of the French Revolution:

When French workers, at the time of the bourgeois monarchy, ask the ques? tion, "Are French workers French citizens?" (in other words, "Do they have

the attributes recognized by Royal Charter as those of Frenchmen equal be?

fore the law?"), or when their feminist usisters," at the time ofthe Republic, ask the question, "Are Frenchwomen included in the 'Frenchmen' who hold

universal sujfrage?," both workers and women are starting with the gap be?

tween the egalitarian inscription of the law and the spaces where inequality rules. But they in no way conclude from this that the case for the egalitarian text has been dismissed /11s ne concluent nullement de la au non-lieu du texte

egalitaire/. On the contrary, they invent a new place for it /un nouveau lieu/: the polemical space of a demonstration that holds equality and its absence

together. [Disagreement 89; La mesentente 127-28]

Like Certeau and Foucault before him, Ranciere too in other words privileges the po? tential gap between names or classes and the subjects they are supposed to name, po? lice, or classify. The whole purpose of reasoning in terms of such a gap or distance,

though, lies in the capacity for a political subject to find a foothold in the void so as

to move beyond, instead of merely denouncing an otherwise undeniable lack of legiti?

macy as revealed in this distance.

As Ranciere also writes in On the Shores of Politics:

The interesting thing about this way of reasoning is that it no longer opposes word to deed or form to reality. It opposes word to word and deed to deed.

Taking what is usually thought of as something to be dismissed [literally, as

a gap, ecart/, or a groundless claim /non-lieu/, it transforms it into its oppo? site?into the groundsfor a claim /un lieu/, into a space open to dispute /un

espace polemique/. The stating of equality is thus not nothing. A statement

has the power we give it. This power is in the first place the power to create a

place where equality can state its own claim: equality exists somewhere; it is

spoken of and written about. It must therefore be verifiable. Here is the basis

for a practice that sets itself the task ofverifying this equality. [On the Shores

of Politics 47, trans. corrected; Aux bords dupolitique 65]

132

Even patently absurd statements, in this sense, may be productive in enabling a process of political subjectivation: "They allow not only the manifestation of a logical fissure

which itself uncovers the tricks of social inequality. But they also allow the articulation

of this fissure as a relation, by transforming the logical non-place into the place of a

polemical demonstration" [Aux bords du politique 87, my trans.; text not included in

the English translation]. Such is, long after the storm of the student revolt has calmed

down, one of the principal lessons to be drawn from the events of May '68 according to Ranciere.

Textual Pleasure and the Other's Demand

The task is to conceive of the possibility ofa break out of essence. To go where? To stay on what ontological plane? But the extraction /arrachement/

from essence contests the unconditional privilege ofthe question "where?"; it

signifies a null-site /non-lieuy. ?Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being

Even if, in the years immediately following the main period under consideration in

this limited survey, the nonplace no longer finds a new place of inscription in a radical

project of emancipatory politics, the notion in and of itself nevertheless is still able to

conjure up the promise of a special ethical or critical relation?whether to the literary text or to the place of the other facing one's self.

Thus, in The Pleasure ofthe Text, first published in 1973, Roland Barthes proposes the idea of an "atopia" based on his mock-serious suggestion for forming a "Society of

Friends of the Text." Such a project, he argues, would have nowhere to go, precisely because the regime of textuality and the pleasure produced in the reader by definition

escape all assigned places. "Aruthless topic rules the life of language; language always comes from some place, it is a warrior topos^ Barthes states [27; Le plaisir du texte

47], before establishing a clear distinction between language or speech, on the one

hand, and writing or textuality, on the other: "The text itself is atopic, if not in its eon-

sumption than at least in its production" [29; 49]. Textuality takes place in a no-man's-

land, a neutral zone foreign to all topological fixations. The writer certainly is caught in

language, but not without taking pleasure in opposing a devilish resistance to its rule.

Using the same examples that, from Levi-Strauss to Deleuze to Badiou, define

the structuralist or poststructuralist obsession with mana, the empty square, the zero

degree, and so on, Barthes thus explicitly defines the place ofthe writer as hors-lieu, or

"outside-of-place":

As a creature of language, the writer is always caught up in the war offictions

(jargons), but he is never anything but a play thing in it, since the language that

constitutes him (writing) is always outside-of-place (atopic); by the simple ef-

fect of polysemy (rudimentary stage of writing), the warrior commitment of a literary dialect is dubiousfrom its origin. The writer is always on the blind

spot of systems, adrift; he is thejoker in the pack, a mana, a zero degree, the

dummy in the bridge game: necessary to the meaning (the battle), but himself

deprived of fixed meaning; his place, his (exchange) value, varies according to the movements of history, the tactical blows ofthe struggle: he is asked all

and/or nothing. [Pleasure 34-35; Plaisir 57]

One year later, finally, it is Emmanuel Levinas who defines the nonplace as the

place of the ethical, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. In Levinas's by now

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 133

widely known understanding, this ethical dimension derives from the absolute claim

the other has upon me?prior even to my being able to identify myself as an indepen- dent and self-reliant human being.

Faced with such an impossible and infinite demand, I am necessarily pulled away from the comfort of familiar identifications and mandates. Before identity and beneath

or beyond essence, the subject's responsibility toward the other is a responsibility to?

ward one's own original out-of-placeness, which is the non-lieu or "nonplace" of sub?

jectivity:

The responsibility for the other is the locus in which is situated the null-site

/non-lieu/ of subjectivity, where the privilege of the question "Where?" no

longer holds. The time of the said and of essence there lets the pre-original

saying be heard, answers to transcendence, to a dia-chrony, to the irreducible

divergence that opens /l'irreductible ecart qui bee/ here between the non-

presence and every representable divergency, which in its own way?a way to be clarified?makes a sign to the responsible one. [Otherwise than Being

10-11; Autrement qu yetre 24-25]

In fact, already in 1972, in Humanism of the Other, Levinas had succinctly an-

ticipated this idea: "The otherness of the fellow man is this hollow of no-place where,

face, he already takes leave [s'absente], without promise of return and resurrection" [7; Humanisme de Vautre homme 12].

Mortal and suffering, the human body in this regard is neither an obstacle nor a

prison but, rather, the very incarnation of the possibility of an ethical rapport?or of a

responsible substitution?between self and other: "The oneself [soi-meme] is on this

side ofthe zero of inertia and nothingness, in deficit of being, in itself and not in being, without a place to lay its head, in the no-grounds [non-lieu], and thus without condi?

tions. As such it will be shown to be the bearer of the world, bearing it, suffering it,

blocking rest and lacking a fatherland. It is the correlate of a persecution, a substitution

for the other" [Otherwise 195nl2; Autrement 172n2]. Despite the subtlety of Levinas's

famous phenomenological readings of the face, of the body's caress, or of language as

a transcendent saying beyond what is said, however, how this notion of the nonplace as

the place for the ethical would work out in actual fact is not always equally clear.

When, for example, in a talk from 1969 in which the events from the previous

year still draw much reflection, Levinas discusses as pedestrian an environment as the

Parisian cafe, his tone rather quickly and surprisingly turns deprecatory:

The cafe holds open house, at street level. It is a place ofcasual social inter-

course, without mutual responsibility. One goes in without needing to. One

sits down without being tired. One drinks without being thirsty. All because

one does not want to stay in one's room. You know that all the evils in the

world occur as a result ofour incapacity to stay alone in our room. The cafe is not a place. It is a non-place for a non-society, for a society without solidar-

ity, without tomorrow, without commitment, without common interests, a game

society. ["Judaism and Revolution" 111]

In passages such as these, we can begin to see some of the limitations inherent in the

theory of the nonplace.3 These limitations have to do with the difficulty there is in ar-

3. Simon Critchley, in a recent article, comments on and finally rejects the peculiarity of Levinas's description ofthe cafe as a nonplace:

134

ticulating the philosophico-conceptual uses of the nonplace, as the space of language,

textuality, politics, or ethics, with the existence of actual, physical or geographical

places such as the prison, the mental hospital, the museum, or the cafe-bistro. Even the

juxtaposition of such heterogeneous places makes the difficulty in question painfully obvious.

Perhaps even more important, however, is the fact that in these last two attempts to theorize the notion of the nonplace, whether in terms of textuality or of ethical re?

sponsibility, we become witness to a larger trend to rob the nonplace of any committed

extension into a new place. Itself part of the waning of the emancipatory ideals from

1968 that still resonate in the writing of many of the contemporary thinkers studied

above, this trend comes full circle in the work of Marc Auge.

Epilogue: Politics in Times ofNihilism

The stumbling block to the coexistence of places and non-places will always be political.

?Marc Auge, Non-Places

Compared to the vast role of the nonplace in French theory and philosophy since the

late 1960s, we can now see that Auge's short book certainly has the merit of bringing us back to the study of concrete spaces such as airport terminals, leisure parks, refugee

camps, or large retail outlets. However, even regardless of the dubious eclecticism of

these examples, this positive contribution to the concrete analysis of concrete situations, so to speak, is quickly overshadowed by two major drawbacks, namely, an unwitting

complicity in the liquidation of the whole genealogy of the concept of the nonplace, as retraced in the itinerary above, and a rather nihilistic attempt to give the concept a

political valence after all, in the guise of a reluctant plea for liberty and democracy.

Except for Certeau and a secondhand quote from Foucault, Auge does not refer?

ence any of the authors included in the overview above. In The Practice of Everyday

Life, the reader may recall, Certeau had used the category of the nonplace in talking,

among other examples, about the rich indetermination opened up in our official geog-

raphies by the act of walking in the city. Like certain speech acts, random footsteps too

can empty out and wear away the primary role of established places. "They insinuate

other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement," he wrote, and

"they create in the place itself that erosion or non-place [non-lieu] that the law of the

other carves out within it" [105, trans. modified; Uinvention du quotidien 158-59]. For

Auge, however, nonplaces mean the exact opposite. "Certain places exist only through

This is an extremely odd and wrongheaded passage. Levinas describes the cafe as a

non-lieu, a non-place, which is peculiar as it is precisely in these terms that he describes the structure of ethical subjectivity in Otherwise than Being. . . . Also, the allusion to Pascal's dictum that all the evils in the world come from our inability to sit quietly in a

room, can at least be given another gloss, which would suggest that it is precisely the

inconstancy, anxiety and boredom of the human condition and our addiction to habit that makes us what we are, that is, beings that can be claimed by the other. And a cafe is as good a (non)place as any to experience such a claim. On the contrary, rather than

seeing the cafe or pub as a place of wanton irresponsibility, I see the space of the pub as a space o/responsibility, o/solidarity, even of resistance to the commodifying forces that threaten to devour the life-world.

Other critics, such as Bettina Bergo and Charmaine Coyle, also attack Levinas'spolitical weak- nesses by drawing negatively on the concept ofthe nonplace.

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 135

the words that evoke them, and in this sense they are non-places, or rather, imaginary

places: banal utopias, cliches," he observes: "They are the opposite of Michel de Cer?

teau's non-place. Here the word does not create a gap between everyday functionality and lost myth: it creates the image, produces the myth and at the same stroke makes it

work" [95; 120]. Nonplaces, in Auge's sense, seem to place the subject squarely back

in the midst of the most banal of commonplaces. Gone are the days when art or politics could expose the nonplace as an illuminating pun or a critique of humanist ideology.

Reincorporated into the discourse of anthropology which it once had the task of decon-

structing, the nonplace also no longer seems to be the site of a possible event; it marks,

rather, a space completely emptied out of eventfulness or, which is but the other side of

the same coin, a world saturated by an overabundance of utterly meaningless events.

Does this mean that the nonplace is also devoid of all political significance for

Auge? Not quite, as the question of politics by the end of the book turns out to be a ma-

jor stumbling block. Auge, as a matter of fact, ends his reflections with the hypothesis that the nonplace, in contrast to the resurgence of territorial ambitions, may actually hold the promise of a new and unheard-of experience of freedom. Thus, considering the fact that the anonymity and solitary contractuality typical of nonplaces frequently became the target, in the 1970s and 1980s, of terrorist attacks carried out in the name

of new socializations and localizations, the author ventures the idea that perhaps an an?

thropology ofthe nonplace, or what he also calls an ethnology of solitude, may teach us

one day to live without the passion, whether revolutionary or totalitarian, for an alterna?

tive community. "Returning after an hour or so to the non-place of space, escaping from

the totalitarian constraints of place, will be just like a return to something resembling freedom," he writes in the epilogue [116; 145], after mentioning?long before 9/11 in

the USA?an international flight that crosses Saudi Arabia: "What is significant in the

experience of non-place is its power of attraction, inversely proportional to territorial

attraction, to the gravitational pull of place and tradition" [118; 147]. Clearly, this is the

ideal of freedom and democracy as lesser evils or, to be more precise, as default options that would guarantee the avoidance of the worst. In the words of Auge's earlier ethno-

graphic work on the Parisian subway, "the existence of an intersection without gods, without passions, and without battles these days represents the most advanced stage of society and prefigures the ideal of all democracy" [In the Metro 66; Un ethnologue dans le metro 112]. Once again, instead of pursuing the illusion of some good, we are

asked to embrace the absence of evil. Nothing, though, could be more opposed to the

logic of the nonplace as displayed in the preceding reconstruction than such nihilistic

ideals. In fact, Auge's use of the term, even if unwittingly, signals the precise moment

when the nonplace has ceased to be the site from where to proclaim the affirmative

power of events in French theory, philosophy, and the critique of anthropologism.

WORKS CITED

Auge, Marc. In the Metro. Trans., intro., and afterword by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Trans. of Un ethnologue dans le metro. Paris: Hachette, 1986.

-. Non-places: Introduction to An Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John

Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Trans. of Non-lieux: Introduction a une anthropolo-

gie de la surmodernite. Paris: Seuil, 1992. -. Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion,

1994.

Althusser, Louis. Uavenir dure longtemps suivi de Les faits. Ed. Olivier Corpet and

Yann Moulier Boutang. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1992.

136

Badiou, Alain. UEtre et Vevenement. Paris: Seuil, 1988.

-. Logiques des mondes. Paris: Seuil, 2006.

-. "Le (re)commencement du materialisme dialectique." Critique 240 (1967): 438-67.

-. Theorie du sujet. Paris: Seuil, 1982.

Balibar, Etienne. "Structuralism: A Destitution ofthe Subject?" Trans. James Swenson.

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.1 (2003): 1-21.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure ofthe Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and

Wang, 1975. Trans. of Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973.

Bataille, Georges. "La vieille taupe et la prefixe 'sur' dans les mots 'surhomme' et 'sur-

realisme."' Tel Quel 34 (1968): 5-17.

Bensussan, Gerard. "La politique et le temps. Autour de Derrida et du messianisme."

http://www.parlement-des-philosophes.org/actuelmarxintervenciones.pdf

Bergo, Bettina. "What Is Levinas Doing? Phenomenology and the Rhetoric of an Ethi?

cal Un-Conscious." Philosophy and Rhetoric 38.2 (2005): 122-44.

Blanchot, Maurice. Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. New

York: Zone Books, 1987. Trans. of Michel Foucault tel queje Vimagine. Montpel- lier: FataMorgana, 1986.

Cauquelin, Anne. "Le site et le hors site, la question du lieu." Petit traite d'art contem-

porain. Paris: Seuil, 1996. 32-40.

Coyle, Charmaine. "Otherwise than Guilt? Challenging Strands of Levinas's Politics."

Parallax 8. 3 (2002): 59-70.

Critchley, Simon. "Persecution Before Exploitation?A Non-Jewish Israel?" Theory and Event 3.4 (2000). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/

De Certeau, Michel. The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings. Trans. Tom

Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Trans. of La prise de parole et au-

tres ecrits politiques. Ed. Luce Giard. Paris: Seuil, 1994.

-. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: U of California

P, 1984. Trans. ofUinvention du quotidien. 1. Arts defaire. Ed. Luce Giard. Paris:

Gallimard, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?" Trans. Melissa McMahon

and Charles J. Stivale. The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari. By Charles

J. Stivale. New York: Guilford, 1998. 251-82. Trans. of "A quoi reconnait-on le

structuralisme?" La philosophie au XXe siecle. Ed. Francois Chatelet. Paris: Ha-

chette, 1973; Brussels: Marabout, 1979. 293-329.

-. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Trans. of

Foucault. Paris: Minuit, 1986.

-. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V.

Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Trans. ofLogique du sens. Paris: Minuit,

1969.

Derrida, Jacques. "Deconstruction and the Other." Dialogues with Contemporary Con-

tinental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage. By Richard Kearney. Man?

chester: Manchester UP, 1984. 107-26.

-. "Faith and Knowledge. The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Reason

Alone." Trans. Samuel Weber. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Rout?

ledge, 2002. 42-101. Trans. of Foi et savoir. Paris: Seuil, 2000.

-. "Living On: Borderlines." Trans. James Hulbert. Deconstruction and Criticism.

New York: Continuum, 1979. 75-176.

-. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse ofthe Human Sciences." Writing and

Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 278-93. Trans. of

"La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines." Vecriture

et la difference. Paris: Seuil, 1967. 409-28.

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 137

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Genie du non-lieu: Air, poussiere, empreinte, hantise. Paris:

Minuit, 2001.

Dubuffet, Jean. Non-lieux. Paris: Galerie Jeanne-Bucher, 1987.

-. Non-lieux. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musee national d'art moderne, 1985.

Duvignaud, Jean. Lieux et non-lieux. Paris: Galilee, 1977.

-. "Le miroir, lieu et non-lieu du 'moi.'" Lieux et non-lieux de Timaginaire. Paris:

Maison des cultures du monde, 1994. 111-18.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.

-. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New

York: Random House, 1979. Trans. of Surveiller etpunir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

-. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Se-

lected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

139-64. Trans. of "Nietzsche, la genealogie, l'histoire." Hommage a Jean Hyp-

polite. Paris: PUF, 1971. 145-72. Reprinted in Dits et ecrits. Ed. Daniel Defert and

Francois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 2: 136-56.

-. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.

-. "On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle."

The Essential Foucault. Ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New York: New

Press, 2003. 392-^-04. Trans. of "Sur l'archeologie des sciences. Reponse au

Cercle d'Epistemologie." Cahiers pour Vanalyse 9 (1968): 9^40. Reprinted in

Dits et ecrits. Ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 1:

696-731.

-. The Order of Things: An Archaeology ofthe Human Sciences. New York: Ran?

dom House, 1970. Trans. of Les mots et les choses: Une archeologie des sciences

humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. -. "Questions on Geography." Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other

Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. 63-77.

-. Raymond Roussel. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. -. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans. James Harkness. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.

Trans. of "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Les cahiers du chemin 2 (1968): 79-105. Re?

printed in Dits et ecrits. Ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 1:635-50.

Gall, Robert S. "Living On (Happily) Ever After: Derrida, Philosophy and the Comic."

Philosophy Today 38 (1994): 167-80.

Kamuf, Peggy. "Beance." CR: The New Centennial Review 2.3 (2002): 37-56.

Kofman, Sarah. Lectures de Derrida. Paris: Galilee, 1984.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Humanism of the Other. Trans. Nidra Poller. Urbana: U of Illi-

nois P, 2003. Trans. of Humanisme de Vautre homme. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972.

-. "Judaism and Revolution." Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Nine Talmudic Readings.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 94-119.

-. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:

Duquesne UP, 1998. Trans. of Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de V essence. Dordre-

cht: Martinus Nijhof, 1974.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. "Action de la structure." Cahiers pour Vanalyse 9 (1968). Re?

printed in Miller, Un debut dans la vie 57-85. -. Un debut dans la vie. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. -. "Matrice." Ornicar? 4 (1975). Reprinted in Miller, Un debut dans la vie 135-

44.

138

-. "La suture: Elements de la logique du signifiant." Cahiers pour Vanalyse 1

(1966). Reprinted in Miller, Un debut dans la vie 94-115.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Ego sum. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1979.

Nora, Pierre, ed. Les lieux de memoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984-92.

Obergoker, Timo. Ecritures du non-lieu: Topographies d'une impossible quete identi-

taire: Romain Gary, Patrick Modiano et Georges Perec. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2004.

Ouellet, Pierre. "Le lieu et le non-lieu: La structuration spatiale des images de soi et

de l'autre dans les contextes interculturels." Les entre-lieux de la culture. Ed. Lau-

rier Turgeon. Paris: L'Harmattan; Quebec: Presses de l'Universite Laval, 1998.

357-71.

Ranciere, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minne-

apolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Trans. of La Mesentente: Politique et philosophie. Paris: Galilee, 1995

-. On the Shores of Politics. Trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1995.Trans. of Aux

bords du politique. Paris: La Fabrique, 1998.

Schilling, Derek G. "Memoire du quotidien: Les lieux de Perec." Doctoral dissertation.

University of Pennsylvania, 1997.

Smithson, Robert. "A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites (1968)." Robert Smithson: The

Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. 364.

Spoerri, Daniel. An Anecdoted Topography ofChance (Re-anecdoted Version). Trans.

Emmet Williams. New York: Something Else, 1966.

Weiner, James. "Between a Rock and a Non-Place: Towards a Contemporary Anthro?

pology of Place." Reviews in Anthropology 31.1 (2002): 21-27.

Wright, Steven, Alain Charre, Eric Corne, and Fabrice Hergott. Non-lieu. Brussels: La

Lettre volee, 2004.

Zourabichvili, Francois. Deleuze: Une philosophie de Vevenement. Paris: PUF, 1994.

diacritics / fall-winter 2003 139