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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/3805807 .
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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 thenon-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 questionsof 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 ofthe 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 ofenunciation [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 atthe 'end' ofthe proceedings beyond even acquittal, debt, the symbolic, the judicial. (The nonlieuis the strange judgment in French law that is worth more than an acquittal: it fictively annulsthe 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-lieurelated 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 therewere 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
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ritoriality forces us to take leave of the modern paradigm of consciousness?typicallyassociated 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:
Endeavouringon the other hand to
decipherdiscourse
throughthe
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 placeover the
pastfew decades within the
parametersof 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 growingnumber of authors, particularly but by no means exclusively in France, the study of art,
literature, politics, philosophy, and even anthropology would also require a thoroughconsideration 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 anthropologistand 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,
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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 ofmodernity, 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 emergenceof an unprecedented type of nonplace.
Auge proposes the following as his working hypothesis: Supermodernity (whichstems simultaneously from the three figures of excess: overabundance of events, spatialoverabundance 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 assignedto 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
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nonplace and to the question of its political use, then, in the following pages I proposeto 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
losingtrack 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 literallyleft 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 ungroundedor nonfoundational, emerges as the logical outcome of the trajectory of modern hu?
manism itself. Starting out from the constitutive yet historically changing nonplacein an existing state of affairs, the genealogist or archaeologist always seeks to bringforth 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 encyclopaediafound 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]
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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 nonplacefound 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 ofthe
alphabet.Where else could
theybe
juxtaposed exceptin
the non-place oflanguage? 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 sparkof 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 objectand 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 pivotalto 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 spaceof 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 Thingsbut 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 conceptof 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)
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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 inscriptionon a body, emergence designates a place of confrontation but not as a closed
field offeringthe
spectacle ofa
struggle among equals. Rather,it is a unon?
place, a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not belongto 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
uponthe
moralizingdualisms 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 continuityand 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 figureand the text, the drawing and its legend, are no longer bound by the age-old principleof 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
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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 thesayable.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 visibilityis indeed decided in the conflicts of
powerthat the
genealogistwould 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 powerthat 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 summaryone 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
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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
theconcept
in Foucault'swork.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 particularorientation. 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 continuityand 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 belongedto
philosophy (reason, unreason),but he treated them
fromthe
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 bythe lepers, who had disappeared, that shelters for the newly excluded were
set up, even as that imperative to exclude persisted behind the amazing formsthat 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 continuityand 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 ofmydiscourse. I am seeking to disassociate its visible coordinates andshake up its
surface immobility. I thus risk raising, in each instant and beneath each ofmyresolutions, the question of knowing whence it can arise, for everything I saycould 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]
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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 holdsup
tobegin
with. Foucault's use of the non?
place, in this sense, cannot fail to recall one of the most often quoted and anthologizedtexts 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
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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 historyof 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 saythat 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 encapsulatedin 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 foreignto 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
figuresthat
politics,the tradition of the
political,or still
yet politics accordingto 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. 2The 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 earlytext, 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 paradoxicalelement that alone holds this network together: an element that in itself is nothing, purevoid 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 insightwhich 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 wayout 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. Fora more detailed discussion ofthe case ofthe island as a nonplace for fiction, see Simone Pinet'scontribution in this special issue.
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How Do We Recognize Poststructuralism?
Absurd /atopos, literally hors-lieu, or out-of-place ] that the point would be
void.
?Aristotle, Physics
At thebeginning,
there is theplace?where
there isnothing.
?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 insightbut 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 subjectinto 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, thoughnot 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 recognizestructuralism 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 foundat 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
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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, causalitycan
onlybe a
typeof 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 presuppositionsof totality and continuity by ruining the idea that a common place lies at the origin of
structure.
Withoutbeing
able topinpoint
the exact source of this deformation, therealwaysis 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 quitefit in, an element or point which he does not call heterotopian but rather, and againmore traditionally, utopian, and which can give leverage for the necessary change of
perspective:
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A conversion of perspective imposes itself to apprehend it. This place that is
impossible to occupy then announces itself by its singular and contradictoryallure, 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 arearticulated,
that we should direct ourgaze,
and take theplaceholder
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 thoughit 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 analysishas 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 paradoxicalelement or term that determines the structurality of the structure, even while beingexcluded 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 throughwhich 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, tothe torsion of the existing order of places, now named esplace or splace, into a new
one.
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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 autonomyof various places, levels, or instances?all the way to include the pivotal lack, symp-
tomaticallyaverred as
nonplaceor
outplace,which
operatesas its absent cause. The
second, properly dialectical logic, by contrast, hinges on the subjective forces capableof 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 masteryof 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,
subjectivationfrom this
pointof 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 logicof 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 historiques193-98] 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-togetheras 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
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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 readingof 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,
andOuellet]. 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 thoughtitself; 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, throughwhat 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 throughthe 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 oughtto 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 May1968, 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 legitimateand the illegitimate. In terms of our topography, this means that the symbolic place, as
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Even patently absurd statements, in this sense, may be productive in enabling a processof 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 theprincipal
lessons to be drawn from the events ofMay
'68accordingto Ranciere.
Textual Pleasure and the Other's Demand
The task is to conceive of the possibility ofa break out of essence. To gowhere? 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 literarytext or to the place of the other facing one's self.
Thus, in The Pleasure ofthe Text, first published in 1973, Roland Barthes proposesthe 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, preciselybecause 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 alwayscomes 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 ofa 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 accordingto the movements of history, the tactical blows ofthe struggle: he is asked alland/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
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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 awayfrom 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 ownoriginal out-of-placeness,
which is the non-lieu ornonplace
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 wayto be clarified?makes a sign to the responsible one. [Otherwise than Being
10-11; Autrementqu
yetre24-25]
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 cafeis 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 ofLevinas's description ofthe cafe as a nonplace:
134
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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 painfullyobvious.
Perhaps even more important, however, is the fact that in these last two attemptsto theorize the notion of the
nonplace,whether in terms of
textualityor 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 alwaysbe 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 bringingus 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 describesthe structure of ethical subjectivity in Otherwise than Being. . . . Also, the allusion toPascal'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 habitthat makes us what we are, that is, beings that can be claimed by the other. And a cafeis 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 forcesthat 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
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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 functionalityand 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 politicscould
exposethe
nonplaceas an
illuminating punor a
critiqueof 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 hypothesisthat the nonplace, in contrast to the resurgence of territorial ambitions, may actuallyhold the promise of a new and unheard-of experience of freedom. Thus, consideringthe fact that the
anonymityand
solitary contractuality typicalof
nonplaces frequentlybecame 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 resemblingfreedom, 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 optionsthat 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 stageof society and prefigures the ideal of all democracy [In the Metro 66; Un ethnologuedans 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.
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